by Matt Potter
They smoke way too much, just like they drink, just like Sergei loved his government-issue East African reefer—to unwind, to find common ground with strangers and with each other after twenty years of flying a sitting-duck target. Talk radio jabbers through the night, and all those off-the-leash nights in Entebbe and Sharjah start to make sense. The trashing of the same restaurants week after week and the wads of cash good-naturedly handed over; the “local wife”; the drinking; the drugs; the hijinks in six-to-a-room company doss-houses all cover a gaping absence of real family.
It’s a gap otherwise filled only by Mickey’s crumpled, cardboard-framed picture of his two daughters and his worries about his elderly mother back in western Siberia; regular barbs about Dmitry’s Ukrainian ex-wife; and a mischievous look from Sergei when I ask if Lev’s Ugandan “wife” was really his wife.
Sergei told me once with a weary smile that of course they all have families, but they became used to being away; life in the armed forces wasn’t great for partners, what with all the deployment, and “coming back from something like the Afghan war is worse.” Not everyone’s divorced, he says. But like oil-rig workers, they’re forced to base even enduring relationships on absence and paychecks.
“It’s a different life,” he nods. “If you are stationed somewhere for a period of months, they sometimes move over. But then they’re all alone, with no job or families around them, and for the kids, well …” He shakes his head and winces. Mickey agrees—this is no life for kids.
The crew sleeps like this, on the plane, “sometimes, maybe too much,” whenever they’re away and there’s an option to keep the money they’re given for accommodation; when they’re in the arse end of nowhere, when they fall behind and the whole damn airfield is shut, locked, and dark by the time they arrive, when it’s too dangerous, too expensive, or just too much hassle to find a room; or when whoever they’re flying for doesn’t lay anything else on.
“We get expenses for every payload,” says Alex the Ukrainian. “Seventy-five or a hundred dollars for a hotel, some extra for food. But it’s better to have the money.”
Fuck ’em, snarls Lev: For more or less anyone but the pilot and navigator of the hour, it’s “perfectly possible” to sleep on the wing through RPG fire and storms too, once you get used to it. Besides, stocking up on the hours like that means the loadmaster and a couple of other crewmen get more time out and about at destination turnaround, which in this case they use “looking for more business,” he laughs, “or on ladies missions.”
Brian Johnson-Thomas’s eyes light up with admiration as he remembers one crew who, even when paid to sleep in a nice hotel in the Emirates, preferred to spend it on something more worthwhile and see the dawn in shopping instead. Flight managing an International Red Cross relief run from Sharjah into Mogadishu back in 1993, he’d just paid one recently privatized Candid crew their money plus the seventy-five dollars per diem. “We were in Sharjah, having returned from a relief cargo run into Mogadishu, and I’d paid them their five days’ subsistence each on landing in Sharjah. So we parted and I went off to my hotel for a shower. I was lying in my bed draped in a towel, enjoying the air-con and thinking of home, when the concierge called. She said, ‘Shall I put the lorry on your room bill, sir?’
“I said, ‘Lorry? What the hell? What lorry?’ So I got dressed and came down on the double, and it turned out that instead of checking into a hotel, relaxing, sleeping, having a meal, or freshening up, the crew had immediately gone down to the duty-free shops and spent all their per diems—their hotel expenses, subsistence money, everything—on washing machines, TVs, microwaves, and luxury consumer kit they thought they could sell on somewhere else at a profit. They’d had to hire a truck to get it all to the plane and started stuffing it into the belly—charging the truck to me, of course. Then they were going to sleep on the plane. I mean, there was this whole convoy of brand-new goods in there.
“I said, ‘How the hell are you going to get all that into that plane as well as the cargo?’ It’s only a small belly space on the Il-76, and it just wasn’t going to fit. It was impossible! So I just laughed, y’know, ‘Good luck with that.’ But sure enough, two of the loadies went down there in the very early hours of the morning, and by takeoff time the whole lot had miraculously vanished as usual.”
Even Mickey laughs at that one: a short, wheezing shake, then a lick of the cigarette paper. I look at him from the corner of my eye while we smoke. The great first generation of ex-Soviet airmen are nearing retirement age, but as Evgeny Zakharov says, there are few enough left who can train the next generation on these Antonovs and Ilyushins. Pilots like Mickey can still make good money instructing, if they want to—better and better as their numbers dwindle. But the numbers are dwindling fast, and the worry is that there’ll be a shortage of apprentices for sorcerers like him. Of course, the old Soviet-Afghan warplanes may be falling apart, but the Ilyushin factory has just announced a new model. Even so, I can’t shake the idea that I’m looking at something passing, and that we’ll never see men like this again.
The plastic around a cardboard tray of Heineken is torn open. Cigarettes, horrible oversugared Ugandan cake, and rolling papers are thrown around, but nobody says much, and after a quick walk round the plane with Mickey in a futile attempt to get him into conversation while he distractedly checks the look of nothing in particular and kicks some grass, we head back “indoors.” There’s a radio somewhere, playing an Arabic-language talk-radio station.
“It helps with sleep,” says Dmitry with a disarming half smile. It is the first time I’ve seen his face do anything but glower. “We always just hear work talk and each other. Not so interesting.” One of the other guys he used to fly with would put the TV on in his hotel all night. That drove them all crazy.
The radio chatters to itself until someone turns it down, but not off. It’s unexpectedly touching to see them flattening out their mattresses and unrolling pajamas. I haven’t brought any of that, so I just shift my bag under my head and stare at the insides of our giant tin can. My thoughts are going at a thousand miles per hour and there’s nothing I can do to slow them down. It’s said that Sudan is the latest country, even down here, to join Angola, Iran, and much of Europe in banning these old planes, the Antonovs and Ilyushins that have worked their skies for two decades. Rumor on the avialegionery grapevine says Sharjah, the very bosom on which the business was suckled, will be next.
I put my arm over my face and turn, trying to stop the galloping sense of it all closing in, and suddenly I understand how lonely it can feel to wander the skies, even with comrades, and why they drink, and why, in the face of all that, they carry on. Out of the blue—perhaps just to hear the comforting, familiar sound of my own suburban voice out here—I tell Mickey in English that they remind me of cosmonauts on a space station. “We cover more kilometers,” he says, smiling back. In the stark yellowish light, he looks every one of his years.
I’m tired too—too tired to keep trying to communicate in our awkward mix of pidgin languages, their halting Hollywood English against my feeble, rusting Russian. As I try to settle back down, home seems like a very long way away indeed, and deep in my chest I start to get a small inkling of why Starikov, Matveenko, Sharpatov, and all those other airmen took one last leap into the sky. After a while, the other reasons you’re flying fade, and there’s only one thing left. And like them, I really, really want to go back home.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Gathering Darkness
Russia, 2010
A PIECE OF FILM SURFACED on the Internet in 2009. Taken from behind the glass of the conning tower, it shows what looks like a heavily overloaded Il-76 rolling onto the grass verge at the edge of the runway in a bid to get as long a run-up as possible. On the film, you can hear the voices of the Australian observers becoming more and more concerned that the plane won’t make it. When it does finally lift off—having left the runway and begin to touch grass with its tires—the cameraman is he
ard to lament the fact that “I’m running out of film—gee, I hope I’ve got enough to film the crash.” In another clip taken by planespotters, one voice remarks that “it’s only the curvature of the earth that got that one off the ground!”
But while it looks to outsiders like a miracle every time a plane like this gets airborne, in fact there’s a specific trick to getting a suicidally overloaded ex-Soviet warhorse like this off the ground in time. And, says Mickey without a hint of humor, “It usually works.”
I’ve spent whole flights tensed and petrified, hunched in a full-body rictus in the absolute certainty of my impending fiery demise. I’ve waddled across asphalt afterward like a seasick sailor and waved my arms upward inside the cabin as we cleared a fuel bowser with inches to spare. But I’m still here, so maybe he’s as good as everyone says. And what he says is it’s just like swimming instead of running: Everything takes a little bit longer, is all, which is where experience pays off. You get to know what’s coming up and start avoiding it a good ten minutes before you see it. That way you can do whatever you like—10, maybe even 20 percent overweight. Except he’s wearing a half smile as he says it, though, and in a split second of dreadful clarity I know he’s wondering whether 21 percent might be feasible. Under certain conditions, of course.
In any case, it explains why knowing the Afghan, Central Asian, and Caucasian terrain served him so well; and why Evgeny Zakharov is so keen for his pilots to have their ten thousand hours in Angola or wherever else specifically. When you’re pushing your plane to the limit and beyond, there’s no substitute for knowing what you’re flying into.
It also explains Mickey’s habitual full and free use not just of the runway, or the perimeter track, but of the grass, bare earth, warehouse courtyards, and any other flat surface around the air base he can access to get as big a run-up as possible for takeoff. As one air traffic guy in Entebbe told me, hooting with laughter: “You hear about all these fences and telegraph poles being clipped by wings on takeoff, streetlamps ripped out of the ground—there was another one recently. What you don’t hear is that half the time they were only backing the damn plane up when it happened!”
We’re all right, though. Like Mickey says, “First thing. Know your plane.” And after three decades, he’s more or less married to the Candid and knows exactly what he can get away with.
Still, something’s been bothering me. Listen to Mickey and he’ll tell you it’s his bird; he decides what goes on or doesn’t. But I’m increasingly aware that Mickey’s founding myth about “liberating” an Il-76 and flying it down to Kazakhstan and setting up in business, while undoubtedly true, is some way from being the whole truth. You get used to that, of course—though when even the infamous, exhaustively investigated Viktor Bout himself can answer the question by simply spreading his arms and declaring mysteriously that as a twentysomething air force man, although “I never had a single investor … finding the money was never a problem,” this something that isn’t adding up starts looking like something very, very big indeed. And I’m naturally curious. So after my last try at broaching the subject last night it was made clear to me that there was no way I could realistically push the issue without blowing our comfy-but-tenuous relationship and landing up on the concrete with one bag and no ride, I decided to do some digging.
“Looking at it from a commercial aspect, it’s impossible to survive as an airline without a network of commercial contracts,” says one cargo pilot who’s followed Viktor Bout’s loose network of planes and crews around the world for over a decade, and knows the hangars of Sharjah and their planes and crews well. “The crew often see themselves as independent because—it’s quite common—one aircraft will have a full crew with lots of people, plenty of pilots, more loadmasters than you have fingers on your hand. And they work, fly, and stay together with the aircraft, so it is their plane—they go everywhere in it. They live on their own plane, they live from their own contracts. But they’re all part of a bigger thing somehow.”
“It’s more complicated than everybody realizes,” laughs Peter Danssaert. “Okay, you’d think, it clearly belongs to somebody—but to give you an example from another actual Il-76 crew, the fuselage belongs to one person, but the engines belong to somebody else. So they ‘rent’ the engines from the other party to actually fly this Il-76!”
“Not only do your crew not own their planes,” says Johnson-Thomas, “but nor do their partners, or their employers, or people above them. Almost every single Il-76 in the world is ultimately controlled by one of three people, and they are all very, very high up in countries of the former Soviet Union. And they are powerful men whose names you will never hear.”
This view is echoed by another source who goes further, suggesting that these three men ultimately correspond to three countries—Ukraine, Russia, and Byelorussia—and that they are more or less the same level of men who would have controlled them before the breakup. It seems fantastical until I remember Russia’s wholly state-owned commercial arms business, Rosvooruzhenie, now called Rosoboronexport, in which none other than Marshal Evgeny Shaposhnikov took an advisory role in later life; and how one of the biggest Il-76 operators on UN preferred supplier lists is Byelorussian outfit TransaviaExport (based, ironically, on Zakharov Street in Minsk); state-owned but out there in the cutthroat African, Asian, and Middle Eastern marketplaces with the rest. It was their pair of Il-76s that got shot down over Mogadishu.
Indeed, the extent to which these state operations compete or cooperate with the smaller fish—and, for example, their relationship to men like Mickey or even heavily tracked celebrities like Viktor Bout—is unclear, even to relative insiders. Russian mafia expert Mark Galeotti has tried to follow the paper trail, too. And it’s led him to some very grand, heavily guarded, and firmly shut doors indeed.
“I’ve come across a pattern where, for a bigger business concern, it’s handy to have a ‘tame’ independent out there,” he says, “so when somebody comes in and for business or political reasons their cargo is not something you really ought to be carrying yourself, you also don’t want to say no to the customer. So having these tame associate ‘independent’ operators means you can say, ‘Well, we can’t touch it—but we know someone who can.’ And therefore there’s a deal. It may be that they own it, or sometimes there’s just a relationship there, and the big boys will pass on their business to a small stable of semi-independent operators.
“The most malign ownership pattern, though, is where these so-called independents’ metaphorical mortgages are owned by organized crime. Most of the time they’ll ply very ordinary trade, but then sometimes the cell phone rings and it’s, “We’ve got someone we want to fly out of somewhere very quickly,” or, “There’s a consignment we want to make sure reaches Tashkent.”
Galeotti pauses, mulling something over as a New York siren wails in through his apartment window. “And then, like I say, a lot of these crews are, frankly, deniable arms of military intelligence.”
He stops. I whistle down the line, stunned at the list of potential silent partners in Mickey’s business. The usual suspects indeed: oligarchs, the mafiya, high-ranking commanders in any one of the new armies that rose from the ashes of the Soviet military; the former KGB and now the Russian, Ukrainian, Byelorussian secret service. Quite a networking event for any small-time entrepreneur.
So which one did Mickey choose? Or, to put it another way, who chose him?
THINKING TOO MUCH about that kind of question can give a man a dose of fear wherever he is. I’d advise against it in the strongest terms when in the cannabis-filled cabin of an ancient, jam-packed Il-76 of indeterminate ownership with a long record of home repairs and close shaves. It’s especially not the sort of thing to focus on with a head full of last night’s alcohol and a printout of the Aviation Safety Network’s Il-76 crash-report database in your pocket, as the plane takes off nothing like steeply enough, juddering and swaying all over the sky.
Clearing truck height is one t
hing, but the hot air rising from the road creates an updraft that, at this altitude, feels like someone’s grabbed both wings in his giant fists and is shaking us to see what happens. Mickey told me always to look forward, through the same glass he sees. But against my will, I do look down. And when I do, something unexpected happens.
As we climb through billowing clouds and level off in the evening sun at twenty-two thousand feet, I get a flash of something else. Call it Mickey’s aerial view—it’s either that or everything I’ve experienced in the past few years flashing before me, and I know which one I’d prefer. Call it what you want; it’s okay with me. Because the noise of the engines in my ears has stopped and suddenly everything’s gone very, very calm.
Here’s what I see down there, scattered among the clouds and rivers and deserts and smeared Perspex.
There’s Andrei Soldatov, over there in Moscow, looking into who’s “protecting” crews like Mickey’s on their flights in and out of Afghanistan and the Caucasus, and wondering aloud whether the government might not secretly want some of that heroin to get through; with him is former Duma minister Anatoly Chubais, trapped in his own small purgatory, forever explaining to anyone who’ll listen that he had no choice: It was either a criminal transition to the free market or no transition at all.
Over here on the left, just above London, is Brian Johnson-Thomas, sharing a beer with Viktor Bout, making father-in-law jokes and talking about how “all the Candids in the world are ultimately owned by three men who are so high up, you and I will never know their names.”
I can see Mark Galeotti, too, way over there in New York. He’s explaining the way the mafia and the state work together, and off each other, and how one or another of them is usually fronting the cash for the pilots. There’s Leonid Minin—acquitted of arms trafficking by an Italian court despite admitting his involvement—complaining to the courts about how much his business has suffered, before he too falls silent.
