by Matt Potter
It’s just the start of another lazy, sun-kissed day on Ambergris, one of the tiny, sandspit-and-swamp cayes—pronounced keys, like the Florida archipelago they resemble—off the mainland of this Mayan-Caribbean state. Belize is a tiny coastal country nestled between Guatemala and Mexico on the Central American coastline. Accordingly, the former British Honduras is part coastal paradise, part Mayan hill-and-jungle backwater, and projects the kind of quaint, slow-paced charm we all remember from childhood visits to elderly aunts by the seaside. The waters this side of a long coastal reef glow bright blue, and farther out, where the peasant fishermen ply their trade and the occasional launch zips by on its way up the Central American seaboard toward Florida, they are calm and reassuringly hushed. It genuinely is the last place I’d ever expected, quite literally, to fall over the slit and dissolving remains of a twelve-kilo sack of uncut cocaine someone had left lying on the sandspit beach of the long caye during a dawn walk.
If I’d been able to read the local papers for the couple of months before my arrival in March 2003, I might have had an inkling. On a cloudy Wednesday morning in February 2003, Belizean drug-enforcement agents on a tip-off stormed a field on the Mexico-Belize border and stumbled upon a still-smoldering torched aircraft. But if that was genuinely their first clue that all was not entirely as it should be on the sunny shores of this tiny Central American paradise, perhaps it shouldn’t have been. For years, fishermen and farmers up and down the Mosquito Coast have been doubling up as cocaine salvage men, pushing out early in the morning to see what they can rescue from the fields and waters of Belize and neighboring countries like Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras. Locals here earn a matter of pennies a day—yet a handful of those industrious or well informed enough have long been living a Central American rewrite of Whisky Galore (Compton Mackenzie’s book and subsequent film about a small Scottish island community onto whose beach fifty thousand cases of scotch from a wrecked World War II cargo vessel are washed). Only here, the flotsam comes in the form of shrink-wrapped bales of 100 percent pure cocaine, not bottles of booze.
On a sandy, shark-encircled caye a few kilometers along the Costa Coca just weeks later, I was a passenger on a local fishing boat whose skipper explained to me as he sped right past his fishing waters and into the deeper ocean that it was always worth his while scouting around for the “taped-up plastic sacks of cocaine that the narcotraficantes drop into the water at night.” Sometimes, he explains, the narcos whose job it is to deliver the drugs to the planes come round the coast at night and attempt to rendezvous with the plane’s crew. If they are disturbed, chased by law enforcement, or just paranoid, the easiest thing for them to do is push the cargo over the side, carefully wrapped so that it floats discreetly, in the hope of doubling back and retrieving it when the danger has passed—the big-money equivalent of throwing your joint from the car window. The air trapped in the sacks makes them float, semi-submerged or just below the surface, glinting as the light bounces off the plastic. Often they do return and retrieve their cargo, but there are often stragglers, bales washed away from the rest. These are, says the skipper, “the bales the fishing boats find, mostly. Sometimes from a plane too, though, I think.”
By now it was late morning and my skipper and I were no longer alone: A handful of small dinghies could be seen combing the reef waters and the deeper sea beyond, packed with fishermen hoping to land their own twelve-kilo, plastic-wrapped golden ticket. Up and down the beach, meanwhile, were the sacks that hadn’t made it—punctured on impact with the ground, swept out, torn, and washed up again, their precious contents either a dissolving bubbly residue or gone forever.
Back on land, the caye is awash with the stuff, young teenagers selling cocaine—or a hurriedly home-cut version of what the boats or 4 x 4s brought in—for as little as ten dollars a gram on jetties, beach bars, and up and down the sand in a way you’d normally be offered cheap souvenir beach towels or hair braids. One can’t help but notice how, among the rows of hovels, rusting pickups, and wooden boats, the occasional spanking-new, tinted-glass Humvee sits incongruously; or the odd rococo home extension with pool among a cluster of poor-but-proud shacks at the end of a dirt road. This is just one of the bizarre local economic glitches—along with a series of microbooms to the cash economy whenever a shipment falls—that attends this particular delivery method to the local arms-for-drugs traders.
The idea of spiriting large quantities of Colombian-grown drugs out of rural Belize by cargo plane is not new. In July 2000, British paratrooper Ken Lukowiak wrote a best-selling account of a successful marijuana-smuggling operation he masterminded from his British garrison in Belize in 1983, using military-transport aircraft to spirit large quantities of grass to Europe. Successful until he was caught by the army and jailed, that is.
Yet the Belizean police do seem incredibly unlucky to keep narrowly missing an arrest despite the tip-offs they receive from local witnesses. Just months later in August 2003, enforcement authorities in Blue Creek, a mile and a half from Quintana Roo, Mexico, arrived just too late once more and found another ditched Antonov. This time the gun was smoking: On landing, the An-12’s wheels had become stuck in the thick mud of the field, crippling it. Just like the Candid team who left their junk plane to rust in Afghanistan after having dropped their generator for the U.S. military, this crew knew what to do. The plane itself had cost just $1.5 million; it was expendable. The cargo wasn’t. Witnesses reported seeing men arrive at the plane by car, pick up the crew and a suspected ten bales of cocaine, and speed off in the direction of the Mexican border … where they vanished forever.
And then it all went quiet.
Still, for all the lack of visible activity along these shores—and the smart money was on the smugglers keeping a low profile after two delivery SNAFUs in one summer—the world seemed to be under a blizzard of cocaine. Even as I walked along the sandy Belize beach looking for ripped sacks, a German laboratory was discovering that nearly nine out of ten euro notes tested positive for cocaine traces. When disposable incomes began rising again on the back of an oil and gas boom, Russia itself began to catch, then incredibly to eclipse even the U.S. as the primary market for Colombia’s most famous export. According to a contemporary report from the Russian Embassy in Bogota, cocaine profits from the Russian market alone exceeded $600 million a year in the early 2000s, with a kilo of cocaine costing three times as much in Moscow as in New York.
It was all coming from somewhere. But these were pieces of a puzzle, still too few and too scattered to make sense. There were no more stranded planes seized in Belize after that summer, nor were any reported the following year. Aside from a few isolated cliques of plane trackers, the Latin American connection seemed to have slipped back off the international radar. In retrospect, perhaps some of the traffickers should have been alerted by just how quiet it had gone. Because someone, it turned out, was watching very closely indeed.
The day was perfect. The Caribbean sun shone, the radio played, and I shuffled through the sand past the ripped sacks on the shoreline and the police station with its public telephone hanging off the hook, toward my hotel. I passed a large sign facing out to sea, and glanced up. It read: DUE TO PREVIOUS INCIDENTS AND MISINFORMATION, WE FIND IT NECESSARY TO RESTATE THAT DRUGS ARE ILLEGAL IN THE ENTIRE COUNTRY OF BELIZE. I stopped, took a photograph, walked on. And all the while, the bales of carefully packed cocaine kept falling from the skies and over the sides of rendezvous boats into the coastal waters of Central America for the occasional enrichment of local fishermen and farmworkers.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Welcome to Little Minsk
Africa, 2003
THE AFRICA IN WHICH MICKEY—NOW SPORTING a permanent “Gulf tan” that ended at the neck and wrists—touched down sometime in late 2003 was a far cry from even the Wild East of Central Asia and the Balkans, or the organized chaos of South Asia. Even in the late 1990s, before the Balkans went quiet for once and while the really big contracts were to be won in Af
ghanistan and Iraq, Africa was once again a reliable place to make good money.
A series of conflicts had left swaths of Uganda, the DRC, Somalia, and Sudan lawless but naturally rich no-man’s-lands, while unrest continued across West African states like Sierra Leone, Angola, and Liberia. These conflicts had also destroyed much of the continent’s transport infrastructure. So by the time Afghanistan and Iraq ops came under the spotlight, Mickey was back, striding through the rainy-season downpour and across the treacherous Entebbe tarmac. Things were heating up for pilots with time on their hands, bills to pay, and an Il-76 to fly. Soon the skies shook again with the roar of former Soviet giants, overloaded with cargo.
Fleets of buccaneering Il-76 crews flew in from Byelorussia, in clear breach of the international Lusaka Accord, which now qualified any technical aid to Angola as military. Belarus News reported in 2001:
The invitation, issued by the Angolan Ministry of Defense clearly shows what role the Belarusian aviators will play there. Ahead of the looming presidential elections in Angola, the state army badly needs additional reinforcement of their capital. The only way to get the military contingent there real quick is by air. The pilots run great risk, but, due to the lack of job at home, they usually accede to the offer. Remarkably, all 18 pilots and technicians have first to resign from [their current employment] and sign individual contracts … All contracts used to pass through a special exercise in the Belarusian Foreign Ministry. So if some emergency happened, the government was responsible for bringing back the jet crew or locating them abroad if they are unaccounted for. However, with the private contract everything is different—the inviting side bears no responsibility for tragic occurrences that might take place. Nobody seems to care about human casualties.
With nobody watching their backs, more than ever the airmen, the technicians, and their network fell back on each other for support. In many cases, they carried out their own maintenance, hustled spares and extras, and paid with an apparently basic but in fact very sophisticated system of favors through contacts. What went around came around, even when the company couldn’t back them up.
In fact, everything I discover about Mickey’s journey from his Siberian and Byelorussian homes to Afghanistan, the Emirates, Africa, and beyond seems to illustrate how nothing happens in a bubble—the ripples felt by even the most seemingly unrelated incident back in Russia or Sharjah can be felt in Uganda years later. How else to explain the way tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of jet fuel can appear in the middle of a third world field at night, seemingly unbidden, on a tanker that just rolls up to our plane, parked on an abandoned runway?
It happens at night, in 2009. We’re standing in near-total darkness on an airfield in the middle of a small African country that I’ve promised under threat of retribution, legal and otherwise, never to name. The fuselage pings and pops quietly and clattering echoes from the hold. Leg-stretch time, and it’s freezing outside. There’s a pair of headlights in the blue misted distance as dawn creeps in—a long way off, but you can hear the rattle of a motor, faintly, approaching and then fading. On a dirt road, with nobody else for miles. Mickey passes me his coffee. It’s disgusting. Standing behind me, Sergei’s hand is reaching for his jacket pocket, digging and twisting deep in the misshapen cloth.
The engine noise is back, and louder now. A truck lurches upward from the ground and rattles and bounces and squeaks toward us over the waste. It is followed by another covered tanker, headlights yellow-filtered but still bright enough in the beam to dazzle us momentarily and send Giacometti shadows splashing back across plane and runway as the vehicles stop and five fair-skinned men jump out. At least two have little rifles and are wearing casual fatigues. Wordlessly, they begin pumping fuel. Less than twenty yards away, the nozzle sloppily feeds the giant plane, splashing fuel on the floor and down the side. The night is thick with the heady scent. I give it a couple of full-nostril breaths, and the flammable air is cold in the nostrils.
Sergei, cigarette in his teeth, has stopped pulling at his pockets, has found his lighter, and is attempting, one-handed, to flip it open and spark a flame without spilling beer from his can onto his cigarette. The panic propels me far into the darkness until I’m aware that there’s been no explosion. The sound of laughter carries through the gloom, and I guess I’m chicken. Still, I think I’ll hover on the edge for the rest of the stop-off.
“Very good feeling for survival,” frowns Sergei later, having explained for the umpteenth time to me that he’s smoked around fuel before, and how safe it is so long as you’re experienced and judge it right and keep the beer can handy for your butt and ash. “But maybe you worry too much.”
The refuel rendezvous is a regular assignation, and it’s just one way of getting tax-free petrol from someone else who’s in a position to write off a percentage of their own stock as spilled, lost, stolen, or damaged and collect on the insurance or the favors. That’s the way business gets done out here. Because for all the wonderment, frustration, fear, and sheer dumbfoundedness they engender in other aviators, wherever they are found, these men are a tight, organized community of contacts. Still, it’s a surprise to learn just how much sway their Soviet military past still holds over their apparently mysterious movements, if not how much it accounts for their seemingly uncanny abilities both in the air and on the ground.
“With a lot of these guys from countries like Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus, it’s the old squadrons at work again,” says Hugh Griffiths. “The logistics, air defense, and surveillance squadrons based in places like Vitebsk, well, that was a massive air force town, and a big base for them during the Soviet-Afghan war. And those connections have endured. The smarter guys, from GRU, military intelligence, the pilots, they all set up their own operations in the UAE and just attracted and recruited all their ex-colleagues who gravitated to them. There are plenty of colonies of them now—UAE is one, South Africa is another, Equatorial Guinea. They’re like these Soviet outposts, frozen in time.”
By the middle of the decade, many prodigiously talented Russian, Ukrainian, and Byelorussian airmen—often survivors from the first wave of aviators who arrived in the early 1990s—had, by and large, settled. Many now had families, often relocating loved ones from back home. They lived regular lives, grateful for the stability and the paycheck-price differential. Others put in six-month shifts, or just flew here and stayed until they got a job flying out, the same way as they flew anywhere. Some continued to live as they would have in the army. They were the ones noticed, and treated cautiously, by locals: barnstorming, smoking, smuggling, laughing, brawling, wheeling, dealing, boozing, and romancing their way across the continent.
From Somalia to Angola, South Africa to Sierra Leone and all points in between, they continued to roll into air base towns like tropical storms, whipping up mini–economic tornadoes of cash, carousing, contraband, and chaos wherever they landed.
Everyone has a story to tell. For every jilted boyfriend whose girl has fallen for these work-hard-play-hard mavericks of the skies, there’s a bar owner like the one I meet in Kampala who recalls the night the roaring-drunk Il-76 crew got into an argument, started cracking each other’s heads on his restaurant’s fittings, plates, bottles, and furniture, completely wrecked the joint, and then, when the police arrived, saw the funny side and freely dispensed more cash than the owner had ever seen “to pay for the damage, plus a bit extra for you, for giving us a great night out.”
The headlines in these cargo-outpost towns are full of aviator-related incidents like the 2009 heart attack during a bout of postmission coitus—enhanced, says the local tabloid press, by fake Nigerian Viagra. Iain Clark, Africa director of global charter agents Chapman Freeborn, remembers the time a few years back when “one former Soviet republic actually banned its cargo crews from flying in direct from Mwanza in Tanzania.” This infamous “party” stopover for Russian airmen that filmmaker Hubert Sauper had witnessed was becoming overrun with prostitutes catering to cargo c
rews, and the republic—Clark will only say it was in Central Asia—choked off the direct flight route back home in order to prevent cases of HIV and AIDS flying in by Il-76.
But for all the stories of dissolute lifestyles, there’s a side that gets reported less regularly: touching acts of generosity toward an “adoptive” local family, or lifelong business partnerships struck up. For every incident like the one in 2009 in which Entebbe police were called when a local woman was ejected from an airman’s rental apartment the morning after in an unedifying full-volume argument over “whether she was still a hooker or now a pilot’s fiancée,” there’s been a genuine love affair and a future together away from the business—after just one more big-paying trip, of course. Half-Russian, half-African children aren’t unknown, and across Africa wives, official or common-law, can be seen waving crews off on another flight, to another part of the world. And sometimes they wave as they come back, too.
The guys were popular; every time these boys were back in town, from Angola to Kenya, they were flush with cash, dressed to the nines, and looking up old friends and new, sweating off the life with good times and cold booze.
They stay six-deep in rented company houses, sleep on their planes and in off-season hotel rooms; one “Little Russia” is a smart suburb of Entebbe town just uphill from the lake known by locals as Virus, partly because of the research institute there, partly because of the sexual shenanigans that soon made its shared crew huts legendary.
