Outlaws Inc. (33 page)

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 heard 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 thing, 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.

There's the UN man in Uganda, watching as the plunder comes and goes. Richard Chichakli is somewhere just out of view, drawing the blinds and talking to his webcam about how he's being persecuted by huge, shadowy forces. And here's his old stomping ground below: Sharjah airport, glittering with money and promise, just as it always used to. And like stars spread out below, I can make out the constellations of Baku, Dubai, Kabul, and Rangoon; Tripoli, Mogadishu, Entebbe, Kinshasa shining brightly.

And that's when it hits me. And it's not just beautiful: It's
perfect.

The Il-76 is packed like a flying skip and it's handling like one. Gravity toys with us like a killer whale with a seal in its jaws; it comes and goes, then suddenly grips us and sucks us down before tossing us back up, and I swear the wings are shaking so hard they're flapping. The whole plane's wobbling about like a seasick sailor, everyone's gone tense and quiet until we get through this, and even Sergei's hanging on to his canvas strap. It's always the same. We all feel it. Maybe this time it'll be our turn to make crash-report headlines.

But not me, not this flight. I've got a strange opiumlike chill rising over the skin. The hairs on my arms are standing on end, the stupidest grin is building up inside me, and I know from the palms of my hands to the soles of my boots that we'll be fine. Like Mickey would say,
zhizn harasho
.

Because I know the secret now, the last secret, the trick behind the greatest, most ambitious, most devilishly simple and brilliantly effective illusion that anyone's ever pulled off.

Me. Out of all the millions who've witnessed it, who fell for it, who became its stooges, its victims, its assistants, its marks, its technicians, its master illusionists, all over the world. I know what they did, and I know how they did it. And if we're
not
fine, and our number's being called, then you'll hear no complaints from me. Because now that I've seen it, I can fall through six miles of sky and die happy.

HOW CLOSE THE mafia, big business, and military intelligence got in the white heat of an imploding Soviet Union surprised everybody—even, at first, the mafiosi, the FSB agents, and the oligarchs themselves. All except, of course, the blue-collar types who did their dirty work.

They came from the returning military—the
Afghantsy
, of course, but also the hundred-thousand-plus soldiers who found, upon returning from their stations across Eastern Europe, that they were now homeless as well as penniless, around a million of them without pensions.

But they also came from the ranks of the workers; the factory floors that howled and hammered through the night, a corridor of yellow light, iron, concrete, and chemical smoke that lit up the giant, smog-clad industrial suburbs of Ekaterinburg and Tankograd. These were the men who made the machines: Mickey's classmates, his land-bound counterparts, without the wings to fly or his aerial view. They too were desperate. And like him, they had had just about enough.

Today, two unusually well-kept graveyards, one on either side of Ekaterinburg, tell the story. In the roaring official silence, they are all that now testifies to the cataclysmic levels of gang-related violence, murder, intimidation, opportunism, and sheer commercial flair the 1990s brought to Mickey's hometown. Russia's former mob-crime capital boasts not one but two dedicated
mafiya
cemeteries—lovingly tended by relatives and surviving buddies, popular with tourists seeking a little of the city's badass thrill at a safe historical distance.