Outlaws Inc. (24 page)

For his part, when I coaxed him on it, Mickey was cynical about both sides. He said: He's a businessman, what do you expect? Just how big the gulf is between what we in the West mean by that word and what Mickey's generation understand by it became clear late one muggy and oddly silent Saturday afternoon in June 2010 at a small, godless garrison town turned municipal dump in Central Africa with one muddy track leading through it. I'd hooked up with Mickey once again en route to another meeting for a quick beer on the understanding that I'd “lend” him fifty dollars in exchange for his time. I soon began to wish I'd left it. We got into quite a heated exchange about it all at a makeshift table (cupboard door, two oilcans, skinny dog in its shade) beside a dust runway stalked by giant, reeking crane birds while we waited for Sergei to finish cajoling, bargaining, and pacing back and forth with the local officials (the “official” uniform round these parts apparently being Manchester United replica shirts and no shoes).

We'd been talking business. Mickey told me the same line I've heard from countless ex-Soviets scarred by the West's robber-capitalist plundering of Russia in the early 1990s. You don't get big in business by being nice—look at the West's magnates. Henry Ford. J. D. Rockefeller. Fritz Thyssen. Robert Maxwell. Take your pick. Hard to argue—and the fact that I'm only naming the dead ones we threw about just goes to show how rough my publishers' lawyers think the live ones can be. Well, I used the Klebnikov defense: Sure, these guys were robber capitalists, but look at what they built! They weren't just bastards, carpetbaggers, exploiters, and wheeler-dealers—they created industries, changed nations, built
empires
.

Mickey pointed out that Bout has done both these things one way or another, and as for empires, he took over swaths of airport land in the South African veldt as his global base.

I pointed out that changing nations could mean a lot of things, but I wasn't sure that illicit arms flights were quite within the spirit of the phrase.

Well, at this point I believe I was sort of shouting, and Mickey was sort of shouting back, if I recall, that he knew exactly what Western businessmen were like, because he and his friends and family had seen their work up close as they stripped Russia bare. It was unbearably hot suddenly, and people were looking, but I do remember him saying “
Biznesman
is
mafiya.”
Then that the problem of a lot of people, not just in the West but back home too nowadays, is they just can't stand to see a hardworking Russian make good.

That, in a paragraph, in one overstressed and pissed-off little exchange, is the whole schism, really. And whatever Bout's done or hasn't done, however much in the way of blood diamonds, illicit arms, and black-market cargo he has or hasn't trafficked, smuggled, and brokered, the air-freight industry never, ever had a rock star before. At which point Wayne Rooney (number 10) and David Beckham (number 7) emerged from the hut with rifles and wished us a safe onward journey.

 

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Just Drop the Cash out of the Plane

Uganda, 2009

THE HIGHWAY that runs between Uganda's Entebbe airport and the capital, Kampala, is nicknamed Smoke Street for the acres of semisecret cannabis farm-and-wholesale operations, shielded from passing motorists by simple rows of palms and creepers. The location of these plantations is not a coincidence, as Smoke Street serves both the local and export markets.

Compact, bright, and home to garrisoned African Union troops, UN men, and almost everyone involved in aviation in East Africa, Entebbe town itself is where the exporters and consumers of this exceptionally potent weed—and much else besides—meet and mix in a number of very rough bars with rougher reputations.

The Four Turkeys bar is quasi-legendary among airmen, dealers, and whores, arguably the sleaziest pilot pit in the whole of Entebbe, which certainly puts it in contention for all of Africa; a twenty-four-hour bar-cum-pickup-joint conveniently placed for the air base, just in case any off-duty aircrew fancy loading up before they load up. It's said that this was where the Lake Victoria crash's doomed Il-76 crew was last seen alive, reportedly just an hour before they made their way across the early-morning runway to a plane that would never make it farther than the bed of the lake opposite. A beer before a flight is not considered particularly unusual by many crews like Mickey's, and after one recent crash, one Russian official even told Ernest Mezak, in exasperation: “So they were drunk, so what? The plane does everything by itself. The worst that could happen is the pilot trips over the bulkhead.”

It's a hot wet night at the end of another rainy season. Across the way is the heavily patrolled perimeter of the combined military/UN/cargo air base. And in the fuggy night, Mickey is so face-meltingly stoned on a bag full of Smoke Street's finest that he can barely stand. I am here with five very loaded mercs—and all their languages appear to have mystically melded with mine into a series of half-finished gibberish, canny smiles of absolute recognition, and shouted exhortations to drink.

Scanning the dark, narrow room, I spot Ugandan hookers and a handful of tattooed South Africans with terrible teeth. (I read later that SA Special Forces operating in Angola found that local guerrilla scouts could smell the menthol of their toothpaste at fifty paces. They promptly stopped using it for the duration of their deployment—often upward of three months—and have teeth so bad they wear them as a badge of honor.) A team of migrant road diggers from the former Yugoslavia roll in. One character at the door offers to sell us loose Viagra. There's enough pungent skunk-weed aroma sweating through enough pockets to make my eyes sting.

Mickey is letting off some steam, shouting over the televised African football match, downing Club beers with vodka chasers so fast they don't touch the sides, and looking forward to a night on expenses in a collection of huts with towels just down the track. He's heard me on the phone telling someone sadly it was “a hell of a way to live” and keeps repeating the phrase with a proud smile. We've been talking, shouting, and communicating in a mixture of my comically decrepit Russian and his haphazard English—a mixture that regularly leads to chaos for crews like his in Africa, where air-traffic control often speak French as their second language and only have enough English, the international language of air travel, to ask Mickey in a panicked cry, “Are you speaking English?”

We sit and chat, swap tales about Uganda, Afghanistan, Russia, Germany, the DRC, Sudan, and Somalia, about his Soviet air force days and how Kabul is suddenly neck-deep in Chinese prostitutes. And before the booze takes over completely, I try to tell Mickey about the phone call I got today from someone who clearly doesn't much care for my snooping around things at Entebbe airport and the army/UN base Mickey flies from, but frustratingly, he's not getting what I'm saying at all.

As far as warnings go, it was actually rather good-natured, nothing like the rough stuff that researchers like Brian Johnson-Thomas have endured. The well-spoken, African-accented voice was so disarmingly civil I genuinely thought it was one of the hotel staff at first. As far as I can recollect, because I wasn't writing it down, it went like this.

“Hello, Mr. Potter. How are you? Are you well, Mr. Potter? Because you know, we just want you to know we are concerned with your welfare. We want you to have a pleasant stay, not, you know, having any difficulties.”

What kind of difficulties?

“Oh, don't worry, I am sure you will keep out of any dangerous situations. We're concerned for you to have an enjoyable stay in our country. Now, have a wonderful day, Mr. Potter, and we'll see you at Entebbe airport on your departure, but not before then, I'm sure.”

Friendly chap, polite, and nobody I knew. Which intrigued me. Someone's interested. And I will find out who it is as soon as I can stand up and straighten out a little. But with the deadly timing of a low-level firebombing run, a bottle of African Nile beer is plonked down hard in front of me by Sergei's filthy, almost nailless hand. I lift it toward parched and buzzing lips. I realize, even as I tip my head back and drink it straight down, that I've switched off as I've relaxed into Mickey's world again; just like him and Sergei, I've stopped thinking too much about cause and effect.

Still, dealing with blue-chip companies and major governments on one side of the equation, and the cargo operators, plane owners, and crews like Mickey's on the other, these agents see the big picture better than most. And it's a big picture that shows just how few degrees of separation really exist between Mickey, out there amid the missiles and warlords, and our own daily lives.

A boyish, muscular, sandy-haired South African, Iain Clark looks more like a tournament tennis coach than an essential cog in the execution of global cargo contracts for a highly respected firm. His smart office is discreetly tucked away beyond a maze of empty corridors and dilapidated, abandoned offices in an unvisited corner of Entebbe airport's main building—so discreetly, in fact, that on the day I visit him, airport security either doesn't know of its existence or isn't telling. But a good twenty minutes after they frisk me and x-ray my bag, he's sitting at his desk, talking me through arrivals of the one São Tomé–registered Il-76 and the three banned white Antonov-12s permanently grounded outside.

As the Africa director of a respected and highly legitimate global air-charter agent, he's the man who calls up the guys with the planes, from Il-76s and Antonovs to Hercules or whatever it takes, when a job comes in from private clients, the military, or anybody else. But he's also got his nose to the ground and sees everything that happens out here and where it goes next.

Clark explains how one flight in spring 2010—arranged by a contact of his, Russian pilot turned Soviet Air Charter owner Evgeny Zakharov—underlines the anytime, anywhere, no-job-too-tough capabilities of outfits like Mickey's for clandestine missions.

“That very aircraft there, that Antonov-12, did a ransom drop recently for some pirates,” he smiles, pointing to a photo of a Soviet-era plane with an Air Armenia logo on the side. “It flew from Entebbe, and they flew the money in—it was twenty million dollars—about three months ago. In fact, I don't know who the insurer [who commissioned the plane] was because it was all kept so secret, everybody kept everything separate.”

The crew's mission, following orders from the Somali pirates by phone as they flew, is pure James Bond. The arrangements, dictated by the pirates through a chain of gofers, insurers, and cargo middlemen, recall the classic kidnappers' ploy of leading the ransom dropper to a succession of ringing phone boxes at different locations in order to hold off revealing their whereabouts until the last second.

The Russian-speaking crew was briefed on their mission, just like always. Only this time, one thing was different: They weren't to know their destination. Instead they were simply given a set of GPS coordinates—at a glance, they could tell it was somewhere over the waters off the Somali coast—and handed a cheap cell phone.

“They had to fly to certain coordinates given by the pirate ship,” says Clark, turning to look out over the runway, his eyes gleaming. “The plan was, once they got those coordinates, they had to come in low at one thousand feet or whatever. At that point, one of the pirates would send them to a text message with new coordinates they had to go to.”

The pilot and his crew shrugged. No problem. And if making a dash for it ever crossed their minds up there, flying over the world's biggest radar blind spot with a full load of fuel and twenty million dollars in small denominations in a box, then the thought passed quickly. The plane steered its course toward the GPS coordinates steadily: rising eastward, passing over Kenya and the wild borderlands of Ethiopia, then out over Somalia and low over the pirate-patrolled sea.

As they roared onto their destination coordinates, the phone in the navigator's hand buzzed. The SMS message was blank but for a new set of numbers. The pilot turned his plane in a wide arc and followed this new instruction. Keeping low, the crew's eyes scanned the water for boats, flares, RPG fire, anything. At this point, they could only trust it was not a trap.

The ritual was repeated. Then, at their next set of coordinates, they made visual contact with two small, fast boats in the water below, hundreds of meters apart. The navigator's hand phone rang, and an accented, English-speaking voice said simply: “Don't stop. Just drop the fucking money.”

That was the signal the loadmaster had been waiting for. The strongbox and its attached parachute were already positioned, the loading ramp open, affording him a spectacular, dizzying view. He cut the lines and twenty million dollars vanished into the sky; he watched it sail down. The last thing he saw as the pilot turned the plane for home was a surge in the bright blue water as the pirate boats pulled back their throttles with a loud
Vrrrrmmm!
, speeding in to converge on the strongbox.

“And that was it,” smiles Clark. “They picked up the cash and off they went.”

Because the whole operation was carried out on such a need-to-know basis, nobody—even Clark—sees more of the picture than what takes place in their stretch of the pipeline. But the aircraft's operator, Johannesburg-based Russian aviator and businessman Evgeny Zakharov, tells me the ransom was dropped on behalf of none other than world-famous insurance underwriters Lloyd's of London. “Rather than paying out on the insurance from the lost ship, Lloyd's preferred to give a percentage of the new-for-old cost of that insurance payout direct to the pirates and get the ship back,” he explains. “It sounds James Bond, but it's not. For a Russian pilot in Africa, it's normal, just a day's work. You know something? We've done many of these ransom drops for Somali pirates, and for an ex-Soviet air force pilot used to dropping tanks from his plane, believe me, opening the door and pushing a one-hundred-kilogram box of money out is easy.”

It's an intriguing counterpoint, and one that highlights the way big Western shipping businesses and former Soviet pilots, legitimate blue-chip multinationals and Somali pirates, coexist, if not happily, then in a way that keeps the wheels of everybody's business oiled and rolling. In my naïveté, I'd always believed that when governments proclaimed, “We never pay ransoms to kidnappers,” they actually meant no ransom would be paid to the kidnappers. Instead, they mean that of course a ransom will be paid—but they'll leave it to the private sector. And while a spokesperson for Lloyd's of London told me they could not confirm whether they'd financed that specific drop without more details on the ship and its policy, these ransom drops to Somali pirates are fast becoming routine for the insurance industry.

It's also a fascinating snapshot of the realities of global business, the weird force field of mutually repellent opposites that keeps Mickey flying in the middle. When transactions are regularly called for between perhaps the world's most august, venerable finance institution and AK-47-toting cutthroats in speedboats off the Somali coast, there's only one mutually acceptable, universally adaptable, ready, willing, and able group of middlemen. And it sure as hell isn't UPS.

The shift toward private contractors that has private security outfits like Blackwater and DynCorp playing soldiers in Iraq has given small, unaccountable, and hard-to-trace outfits like Mickey's an increasingly important role in international policing, hostage-release, and peacekeeping efforts, just as they do in humanitarian relief. Between 2005 and 2006, with recruitment targets regularly being missed, the U.S. military began to loosen its rules in an effort to remain viable. Top recruitment bonuses were doubled to forty thousand dollars; the age limit was raised from thirty-five to forty-two; medical standards and rules on past criminal records were loosened; and still they found themselves needing to outsource more “noncore” duties. The delivery of military equipment, cash, construction materials, anything and everything to Afghanistan and Iraq was already up for tender from private companies; now it was spreading like wildfire to anywhere a job needed doing without the risk of what the U.S. State Department termed “entanglement.”

Open your eyes to it, and Mickey's world is the one we all inhabit: a world where Blackwater, Halliburton, DynCorp, ArmorGroup, and the other private military companies are making hay in Africa and the Middle East by doing the things national armed forces would normally do. January 2011 saw the news break that Saracen, a private security firm linked to Erik Prince of the private military-contractor outfit formerly known as Blackwater, was training private armies in Somalia. (Saracen International is based in South Africa, with an offshoot headquarters in where else but Uganda; intriguingly, Prince's spokesman denied he had “a financial role” but was, like Mickey, mainly involved in “humanitarian efforts” and fighting pirates off the Somali coast.)