Outlaws Inc.

by Matt Potter

  Then there’s selling on what they’ve got. The smaller and more shady the client, the harder it is to shake money out of them. Cash flow is a constant headache—hence the value placed on regulars, from the Taliban to charities, Dow Jones 100 companies, and the UN. Because if Mickey’s loose network of clients, charterers, airlines, and contacts don’t pay their invoices on time, they don’t get credit. And if they don’t have credit, fuel, parking, maintenance, and overflight, permissions suddenly become unavailable. A twenty-five-year-old Il-76 drinks fuel like nobody’s business—and without it, you’re left with a useless metal sculpture in the shape of a plane at the end of some Central Asian or African runway, costing you thousands of dollars for every hour it sits there. Eventually, they just come and push you off it into the sand. Like the remote Afghan outpost where the crew dumped their crocked Candid, the dusty runways of sub-Saharan Africa and Eurasia are lined with rusting Soviet tin—some of it charred and twisted, but most of it just out of the cash it needs to stay airworthy and refueled.

  It’s this insatiable appetite for avgas combined with the pressure on costs that often leads airline bosses to skimp on maintenance and to “encourage” crews to fly with planes that shouldn’t leave the ground. But the temptation to make savings they can trade, to make extra diversions for a little private business, and to fill up on unlisted consignments of their own can also tempt crews themselves to skirt the very edges of the possible when they fly.

  The case of the Antonov-12 crew who simply ran out of fuel in midair on a run from Georgia to Turkmenistan because they forgot to factor into their knife-edge calculations the amount needed to start the engines on the runway at Yerevan has become legendary among these men, but only partly for its gallows humor. The sober truth is that it’s a cautionary tale, one drummed into newbies: about how much fuel restarting your engines a couple of times will cost you (close to a ton); about how to eke the last bit of vapor from your tanks (raise the landing gear while you circle for landing); about talking to ATC so they don’t keep you circling even when you divert to Baku for an emergency belly flop; and about keeping your eye on the money.

  With the flights and their activities often shrouded in mystery, superstition develops. Among the crews, some tell me they believe there’s a mysterious sky-drunkenness, a narcosis that affects judgment and invites deadly errors, just as it does for scuba divers and the World War II bomber pilots who regularly saw “gremlins” on the wings at fifteen thousand feet, sabotaging their engines and giggling. In their accident-attrition log, Russian aviation experts Dmitriy Kommisarov and Yefim Gordon reported on one An-12 crew who, running low on fuel high over Siberia, collectively and mysteriously “changed their mind” about stopping to refuel. “The available fuel was not enough for a non-stop flight to Irkutsk, and the captain soon had misgivings. However, inexplicably, he pressed on, wasting several opportunities [to land and refuel en route]. The result was as predictable as it was deplorable: 120 km from their destination, the outer engines quit, followed one minute later by the inboard ones with the aircraft at 5,250 feet.”

  Other reports tell of pilots, among them old comrades of Mickey’s, who crashed into clearly visible hills or treetops despite clear and repeated warnings from crewmembers, ground control, and warning systems; or of sudden, extreme behavior that survivors find impossible to explain. In the crash reports, just as in the whispered gossip among survivors, it’s a pattern that repeats itself again and again. Nobody really knows whether it’s sky narcosis or just business that makes men go mad.

  As we sit talking in the cool shadow of the giant plane while Sergei clumps about inside, the oral history gets another footnote: News comes down the grapevine that another crew has perished in an incident so far unexplained. Unexplained to everyone, that is, but men like Mickey who know how seductive the chances you take for the sake of getting the job done can be.

  Overloading is blamed for the overwhelming majority of unexplained fatalities among men like these, though rumblings persist of aircraft falling apart midair simply because they have become death traps, unserviced since the day they left the air force. Mickey says he’s careful, but admits that the pressures, financial and otherwise, to take unofficial, cash-in-hand extra tons—both by overloading the stated cargo for tax-free bonuses from shippers and bosses in the know, or concealing their own shuttle-trade goods in the belly and in the escape holes—are constant. It is, he says, exasperated, part of the package. The fifteen tons is only a rule of thumb, so all sorts of things could affect that, especially weather conditions—Entebbe in Uganda is notorious for its slippery runway surface, a result of the way it was built and its position right next to Lake Victoria, for example. Bald tires and a ton too many on that and you’ll end up underwater or in the terminal. Then there’s how you plan and execute your takeoff. The more you have on board, the farther back you want to start—even if it means you get rolling on the grass fields before the tarmac runway. If you’re in any doubt how fine Mickey can cut it, type “Il-76 takeoff” into your search engine and watch some of the home movies taken by stunned air-traffic workers.

  Mickey’s spooky ability to judge down to the last kilogram what he can take off with is illustrated by an anecdote I hear several times on my travels, from different sources and in different forms. Most swear it happened during a plane they were on, some tell it as a joke; that either means it’s an urban myth or it happens quite a lot. It usually takes place in Africa or South Asia. The Il-76 is ready for takeoff: The crew have loaded both official cargo and their cash jobs, and the plane is stuffed to the rafters with exotic fruit and vegetables for export. The pilot begins taxiing for takeoff, and the plane gathers speed, but with only five hundred meters to go, they have no lift. Three hundred meters to the perimeter fence, and the plane still won’t lift. One hundred meters, they’re hurtling toward certain death. Fifty meters, and the front wheel finally lifts, as they just clear the fence. The pilot is furious. He turns to the loadmaster and shouts: “Idiot! I told you we could easily have loaded another punnet of cherries.”

  That’s why Sergei’s job as a loadmaster is so vital. He’s not just some roadie, the guy with the trucks and the receipts, but the de facto physicist and safety engineer on every flight. With an Il-76, as with any of the Antonovs, he explains, you have plenty of room to maneuver if an engine fails or something—bad wind, or a rocket—knocks you. They’re built to withstand that; it’s what they do. Only when you’re overweight and knocking right on the margin of being able to get airborne or not are you vulnerable. “Then you are like a man carrying a piano up stairs,” points Sergei, marking a crazy angle with his arm. “It won’t take much to put you right on your ass.”

  This is why, just as much as the pilot and navigator, loadmasters like Sergei are the ones they all have to trust. Together, their decisions about what extra tonnage fits where, and how much of it they can possibly manage this time, in these conditions, over these war zones, will see them make good money—and hopefully see them make it safely over the next set of mountains and with enough fuel, too—but only if Sergei gets the placements, the loading, and the numbers spot-on. More than one former Soviet source calls it “Russian roulette,” with the loadmaster as the man placed in the insane, hugely pressurized position of having to try and stack the odds in the crew’s favor with his sleight of hand and ingenuity before the trigger is pulled.

  “Of course,” smiles Mickey, though it’s not much of a smile, “if he gets them wrong, we just have to be lucky.”

  But in the mid-1990s, Mickey’s business antennae were already quivering again, looking for the next break. While the series of wars in the disintegrating Yugoslavia and borderlands of the Soviet Union were easy money, and Cyprus, Central Asia, and the Middle East were profitable strategic bases, the lure of Africa was harder and harder to resist for expert pilots and their ground crews. Word spread in the terminals and bars of the rich pickings to be made farther south, both on official business contracts an
d the potential for cash “extras” off the manifest. A strategic base like Sharjah was great, but sub-Saharan Africa had so much work going, there was almost no point being based anywhere but there for the moment.

  Lke Starikov, Damnjanovic, Bout, and Hubert Sauper’s weapons-toting kamarads, Mickey was about to find out just how well a little equatorial sun suited him. And the tricks and dodges he would learn there would be as vital for his survival as any military service.

  CHAPTER NINE

  This Is How You Disappear

  West Africa, 1995–1999

  AFRICA HAD BEEN A REMOTE PLAYGROUND for the superpowers throughout the Cold War. But as the face-off ended, Russian, American, and Cuban troops and supply lines to regimes and factions in places like Angola melted away too. Suddenly, power was up for grabs, and the spoils rich. U.S. commentator Karl Maier wrote of Angola: “Ideology is being replaced by the bottom line, as security and selling expertise in weaponry have become a very profitable business. With its wealth in oil and diamonds, Angola is like a big swollen carcass and the vultures are swirling overhead … lured by the aroma of hard currency.”

  He was right. Only the dark shapes circling overhead and scenting the rich pickings weren’t vultures.

  For a West that had been brought up to believe that any minute now the Russians were coming, the sight of a tidal wave of contraband-carrying, bar-destroying, free-market Soviet air force veterans screaming into the erstwhile “Free World” through the 1990s on giant army transport planes was a shock, to say the least. Indeed, it’s difficult today to appreciate just how deeply spooked pilots and those few observers from Stockholm, New York, London, and Brussels who were watching must have been by the sudden arrival and proliferation of this new breed of crumpled Han Solos and loadmastering Chewbaccas in their deafening, battered, soot-pouring, low-flying Millennium Falcons.

  Even to the former Air America pilots whose barnstorming solo cargo operations they were quickly displacing over Africa and to a lesser extent Asia, the methods of the “flying legionnaires”—avialegionery, as they became known in Russia—appeared both insane and inscrutable. These established bush pilots throughout Africa, Central America, and Asia had reputations of their own as “anywhere-anything-anytime” DC-10, DC-6, and Hercules operators on God’s own mission for the CIA. They were semimythical characters themselves, immortalized in Christopher Robbins’s Air America, with names like Earthquake McGoon and Showershoes Wilson.

  Seasoned charter agent John MacDonald, now only in his early thirties, remembers a family friend his mother and father would simply call Non-Sched Fred. “They called him that,” laughs MacDonald, “because in all his years in aviation throughout the world, he’d never once set foot on a scheduled flight. He used to scare the pants off you for laughs, flying fully laden into tight canyons and trying to go under waterfalls. You’d look out of the cockpit window and all you’d see would be a wall of water, right up until the last second, when he’d just make it over.”

  These men, and therefore the CIA, had pretty much held the logistics of the developing world in their palms for years. But suddenly they had fearless, highly skilled competitors who were cheaper to boot. And within a couple of years, the old guard was on the ropes.

  Russian émigré Evgeny Zakharov is a former pilot himself who left his home in Russia with a business partner named Yuri Sidorov in the heady mid-1990s and opened Volga-Atlantic, a cargo outfit in South Africa with a technical base in Namibia, chartering planes all over the continent for the UN and private clients alike. The operation is said to have had official blessing from the Russian authorities and set the standard for professionally run operations amid the chaos of a warring continent. Indeed, Zakharov is one of the aviabiznesmeny with a reputation among crews and technicians alike for successfully resisting the pressures to cut corners and push for overload.

  Zakharov and Sidorov had different plans and split the company into two, with Sidorov going on to found his own start-up operating in the skies over Africa, and the employees choosing to either stay or leave with him. For his part, Zakharov now runs a leading, and highly respected, Johannesburg-based Il-76 and Antonov cargo outfit called, with a typical nostalgic flourish, Soviet Air Charter. We talk on the phone and I can feel his excitement as he remembers the men who flew for him in those first years. “This first generation were all ex–air force crews,” he nods. “That meant they thought like a military crew, too—the order comes, they’ll carry it out. Whatever it takes. No problem.” Indeed, that military mind-set would soon prove crucial in landing big— and often highly dangerous—UN routes for companies like Zakharov’s.

  Still, these were early days, and to their chagrin, even these on-the-level fliers found themselves tarred with the same brush as their wilder comrades by a West struggling to come to terms with a culture, and with practices, with which it had had no dealings for three generations. And while Mickey shrugs it off today, in plenty of towns the pitchforks were most definitely out for these high-cheekboned, freewheeling, apparently anything-goes strangers.

  Xenophobia played a part—how could it not, when their most closed of societies opened its gates and they marauded forth? These post-Soviet flyboys, suddenly everywhere and dealing with everyone, whether they were in line with U.S. interests or not, were the Oriental Other—fathomless, fascinating, sinister, and semimythical men at one with their aircraft, descendants of the fearsomely skilled steppe horsemen mistaken for centaurs by the ancient Greeks. And the long-ingrained Soviet-style vagueness and aversion to transparency didn’t help. Anyone looking to pin them down to definite answers about cargo, arrival times, place of registration, anything at all, was going to be disappointed.

  “This smoke-screening instinct runs deep in the less official side of Russian business,” says Mark Galeotti. “It was the Russian mafia who invented the so-called vampire phone at about the same time: a very fancy piece of kit, where every time you rang a number on this mobile, it would scan any nearby phones and clone one of their numbers. So that every time you phoned, you’d seem to be someone else’s mobile. And that was particularly malign, because it was almost impossible to tap it, for the authorities. But for me that really encapsulates the modus operandi. If in doubt, your default is just to be a bit confusing. And I have a great fondness, bless them, for these well-meaning Westerners who think you can work in these terms and understand what the hell is going on. It’s absolutely second nature.”

  In some ways, Mickey freely admits, war-torn Africa “seemed like home” to his crew for a while. The huge rewards on offer were hard to refuse, not just from armies like Angola’s UNITA rebels but from the region’s guerrilla presidents: men like Liberia’s American-educated Charles Taylor, president from 1997 until 2003, when he was forced to resign and was indicted on a number of counts including his use of child soldiers during the conflict in neighboring Sierra Leone, campaigns of destruction and mutilation against civilians, and the use of slave labor to mine “blood” diamonds. Or the DRC’s megalomaniacal Mobutu Sese Seko and his successor, Laurent Kabila. (The Congo’s great hope, a former Marxist guerrilla who’d been friendly with Che Guevara, took power after the despotic Mobutu’s overthrow.) Everyone, it seemed, had cash—often the plunder from territorial raids against their neighbors—to throw around. Together with the fat contracts on offer from humanitarian organizations, it meant the perfect storm of cash and conflict.

  This was a prime stomping ground for some of the bigger beasts, too. Viktor Bout bought up a small aviation outfit in the DRC called Okapi Air and renamed it Odessa, coincidentally, after Leonid Minin’s key home turf in Ukraine. In a move to give himself a measure of official cover, not to mention the protection of a “sponsor” on the continent, Bout then completed a masterstroke, forming a partnership with the wife of a lieutenant general in the Ugandan army who obligingly filed the flight plans for the ex-Soviet crews Bout sourced, just to make doubly sure they weren’t scrutinized.

  The move was typical, not o
f the aviabiznesmeny, but of the local authorities, who realized that these air outfits could be the answer to their prayers. Corrupt, covetous, and keen on keeping favor with strategic allies, they quickly became key partners, making up the bulk of any “secret” cargo shipments.

  For businessmen, aid organizations, air-transport outfits, and mercenaries alike, it was every man for himself and follow the money. And while the world looked on and saw aid, people, explosives, ammo, and guns flooding in, money and diamonds flooding out, and Russian-made planes at every airport, joining the dots and trying to keep tabs on exactly who was flying what to where was impossible. This was a land in which the words mercenary, aid transporter, trafficker, and businessman were dangerously interchangeable.

  For the pilots and crews, the money to be made flying between these newly privatized Soviet outposts was good. But the cost was often higher—between ten and twelve of these crews were shot down by rebels every year in Angola alone. Unfamiliar terrain and conditions took out just as many of that first wave.

  “I’ve got many, many stories of very experienced pilots who have a lot of experience, but no experience in Africa,” Evgeny Zakharov tells me in summer 2010. The former pilot from Volgograd saw and employed large numbers of these migratory airmen at the helm of his own series of companies operating Antonovs and Il-76s over Africa from his base in Johannesburg. “They come into Africa and crash because they don’t know their job. Now all the captains are fifty-three years old because they’re very experienced, they’re from the Afghan war. But … you can build an operation, and you can have your ten thousand hours—some pilots think this is good experience. But that’s nothing compared to ten thousand hours in Angola.”