Outlaws Inc. (20 page)

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 Afghanistan 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 crews, 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.

The expat network is wide and enduring. “I've got a lot of [aviator] friends in Africa,” remembered Sergei Ivanov— a technician who worked at an Angolan base known as Volga, after the Russian river, throughout the freewheeling, conflict-torn late 1990s and early 2000s—when he was tracked down by a Russian newspaper after another crew plummeted to their deaths. “There are literally masses of airplanes from the Soviet Union out there. On a single airfield in Angola I once counted thirty An-12s, plus a lot more Il-76s, An-72s, and other aircraft.

“[My bosses] had this great plan,” said Ivanov, “to create a fleet of aircraft across Africa operating from Namibia, with technical bases elsewhere—officially authorized by the Russian authorities. They brought equipment: ladders, lifts, and so on. Parts were bought, experts were hired from Ekaterinburg and Kirov. All just to serve the Angolan aircraft.”

These surreally located Slav-speaking communities and dozens like them from Iraq to Uganda became, for many technicians, pilots, and crew, homes from home, with crews, technicians, admin guys, and security living and working together for companies with good old Russian names like Volga-Atlantic and Troika-Link. Roll up at any air base's gates, or the network of warehouses, shops, and houses that form around them, and you'd be as likely to hear a Russian- or Ukrainian-league football match blasting through the thin walls of the prefab huts as the engines of an approaching Candid.

Like the Englishmen dressing for dinner and sitting down at mahogany tables in jungle clearings in Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
, these men transplanted their unit, their skills, their hardware, even their culture out to sub-Saharan Africa, Arabia, South Asia, and the Far East.

And though it seemed Sergei Ivanov was keen to point out that his bosses, of which Evgeny Zakharov was one, refused to take sketchy cargo or even servicemen, not all of them were quite as fussy.

“Sometimes you'd see six aircraft from the former Soviet Union a month come down,” said Ivanov to the Komi, Russia–based reporter who tracked him down. “It was mostly Ukrainian crews who crashed. They were shot down, basically. We used to call them
bezpredelschik
—‘the lawless ones.' The devil only knows what made them carry the kind of stuff they used to carry.

“Militants from UNITA used to put us under pressure too, when they wanted to fly,” he said. “They knew us quite well, but we would never take military. We never took weapons either. It got to the point, when they threatened us with handguns and tried to force us to take some general on board, that we actually used to pretend we'd ‘broken' our plane! And the difference is, we lost only one plane over Angola.”

These lawless, doomed Ukrainians Ivanov used to watch fall flaming to earth across Angola were Mickey's old
Afghantsy
comrades—war tested and steely nerved. Like the Air America boys from whom they'd inherited the mantle of winged white devils, they lived by the credo, “Anything, anywhere, anytime, professionally.” They were also crack flyboys, airmen who, as the Kazakh president used to say about his personal pilot, “could land upside down in a cave.” They came, they played fast and loose, they took money to fly whatever you have, and having come through the hell of Afghanistan, they thought they were immortal.

But here, out over the savannahs, the forests, and the mountains of an Africa dissolving into a dozen different wars, the rich rewards to be gained from flying arms and even members of different fighting groups made them targets. The paydays were potentially massive, but so was the cost as these Icaruses burst into flames from Luanda to Kinshasa. Dozens were shot down, blown up, or killed by Mickey's old demons, bad luck, bad timing, bad weather, tiredness, and “the life.”