Outlaws Inc. (21 page)

But even more aircrews from places like Siberia, Ukraine, and Byelorussia who came flooding into the world's tropical chaos zones fell victim to their new environments.

“I knew one An-26 crew that was virtually wiped out on one assignment because most of the crewmembers got malaria,” says one veteran cargo pilot. “This crew lived together on the plane, ate together, did everything in close confinement, in their bubble, and the malaria just swept through them. Quite a few of them got killed because of lack of proper understanding of the illness and lack of treatment in time. It wiped out more than fifty percent of the crew.”

But even that won't stop the plane flying the next job “the very next day,” he says. Then he adds something that startles me, something that echoes Viktor Bout's dark warning about the nameless people who will “give him the red dot right there” if he says too much: “There are forces who bring other people to the aircraft, and it flies again.”

WHEREVER THE PILOTS and their crews flew, in their wake there grew whole cottage industries of Slavic émigrés, Afghan war vets, technicians, trainers, fixers, import-export agents, charter guys, middlemen. Because while the Soviet air force and army had been wound down, the intelligence services and secret police weren't immune to the pinch either.

Suddenly, the “gray men” began appearing—former KGB agents with phones full of numbers, lines on plentiful cash, and heads full of questions about the local rebels and their diamond mines. It was straight from a Graham Greene novella as these exotic colonial outposts became the haunts of wealthy businessmen with no CVs and well-connected émigrés with vague pasts in intelligence. For some company pilots, they represented a chance to grab a piece of the pie, to go into business.

“Just think,” they said in dirt-floored bars and makeshift offices all across the continent, “with your cash and connections, and my flying ability, we could clean up.”

Cash appeared, planes were registered, and that's exactly what they did. Where did the cash come from? What strings were attached? It was anybody's guess. Those who knew weren't telling, and the flyboys weren't about to look any gift horses in the mouth.

Africa was Viktor Bout's stomping ground too. He bought up a small aviation outfit in the DRC called Okapi Air and renamed it Odessa. Leonid Minin, meanwhile, was building his African import-export empire, holding court with Liberia's Charles Taylor, and putting his crews up at the infamous Hotel Africa in Liberia—also a favored stopover for smugglers and traders, including one who reportedly used it as a convenient place to rest on Pakistan-Netherlands hashish runs.

Those were high times indeed. But now those men are gone and the skies over Africa are ruled by others—some good, some bad, and not one of them doing anything that anyone will arrest them for.

“There are all kinds of people out there, from Tajikistan to Angola,” laughs Mark Galeotti, whose work for the British Foreign Office saw him become persona non grata in the CIS for a while, “and a lot of them are former intelligence professionals. In the 1990s there was a massive running down of the intelligence networks. Under Putin a lot of it crawled back, but a lot of people by this point had already cut their connections and, frankly, were making a lot more money outside. So in plenty of places, you've got your former local military-intelligence resident, the sort of chief officer in a country, who's married a local, settled down, and is now the go-to fixer for Russians wanting to do any kind of business.”

The result, a network of consular teams, businessmen, and expats—many left there by the receding tide of Cold War politics, others heading out to the furthest reaches of the old sphere of influence in search of work—means wherever you are in the world, and whatever you, your crew, and your mammoth Ilyushin aircraft need, you're never too far from a friend of a friend of Mickey's.

And nowhere was the so-called gray area dividing Russian and Ukrainian commercial pilots and mercenary activity grayer than at these far-off, disease-riddled outposts in the sun.

Even Mickey's old commanders from the air force were in on the action: While Mickey had left the military and gone into business, his former comrades had been marketing their own services pretty energetically, too. Through the mid-1990s, Mickey's old commander in chief Marshal Evgeny Shaposhnikov had become Boris Yeltsin's personal representative on the board of a firm called Rosvooruzhenie, a wholly state-owned arms-sales and export company set up by the Russian state itself to bring in cash.

By the early 2000s, the business of arming, supplying, and transporting to East Africa was booming, literally, with men and hardware flying off the shelves once more—this time
above
the counter.

Sales of attack helicopters and MiG fighter jets to disreputable regimes like Sudan, where they were just as likely to end up in the hands of the Janjaweed militia's “Devils on Horseback” troops as responsible COs, put Russia in the firing line of international peace monitors, but they had the happy effect of giving the country semiofficial on-the-ground military presence in some of the world's least stable trouble spots: Every regime's air force across Africa, Asia, and the Near East equipped with Russian planes suddenly also found it needed the men to maintain them, repair them, oversee their use, and train the country's own airmen (indigenous air force pilots in places like Sudan are chosen primarily for their loyalty to the regime, not their skill, and are legendarily, tragicomically inept).

“The main point, it's not that Russian pilots are replacing American pilots,” says Evgeny Zakharov. “The reason is more to do with Russian planes—Antonovs, Ilyushins—are better for Africa. These Russian aircraft, the Ilyushins and Antonovs, have replaced American aircraft. That is the reason. And so there's a lot of demand for pilots. For example, there's a very, very big shortage of pilots for Antonovs. I tell you, these Russian pilots are really in demand because it's easy to find somewhere to train to fly a Boeing, but there is no place you can train to fly an Antonov-12.”

The humans followed the hardware wherever it was the only thing that could do the job—the Candid's twenty giant wheels made it perfect for rough airstrips; the Antonov-12 could land anywhere; and in the empty spaces of the third world, they could all fly well past their official airworthiness had expired—until, and in some cases
after
, they simply began to fade away. The result was the spread through the third world of de facto Russian, Ukrainian, and Byelorussian air bases, compounds, and communities. Just like the old days, the businesses had branches everywhere: trained air force men, instructors, military intelligence, technicians. Only this time someone else was paying and none of it cost the exchequer, the armed forces, or the people back home a single cent.

The existences of any state-sponsored arms-running operations are shrouded in secrecy, but tantalizing glimpses into their workings show just how blurred the lines between instructing another country's pilots (legal under international law), maintaining their aircraft (also legal), and fighting for their air force as mercenary forces (very illegal) can become.

In May 2008, a Russian fighter pilot was reported “killed in action” in Sudan—a country in which, despite the trade links, there was no Russian military involvement, let alone action. Both the Sudanese and Russian authorities first denied all knowledge, then that any such incident had taken place. Then, in the now-familiar routine I first saw at work on Belgrade airport's molten tarmac, they ordered an immediate media blackout: Sudanese government troops raided local radio stations who reported the incident, shutting one down; Russian state media censored the story.

But pictures leaked out via the Internet, and finally Russia—having denied that “any Russians whatsoever were in Sudan at the time”—claimed the pilot was an instructor at a MiG fighter air base outside Khartoum.

Just one problem. The “instructor” happened to be flying his MiG-29 into battle against a two-hundred-vehicle assault force of over twelve hundred heavily armed Islamic Justice and Equality Movement rebels from Darfur, marching on the capital. As the armored column headed toward the presidential palace, the MiG came in for the kill, only to be hit by 12.7mm and 14.5mm machine-gun fire. And when the pilot's parachute failed to open on ejection, his secret mission as a mercenary pilot almost died in the dust with him.

And it wasn't just “decommissioned stockpiles” of pilots and aircrews who ended up putting deals together in the sub-Saharan sun, but former Soviet secret agents too—those ex- KGB and FSB men who'd opened up shop here for whatever services they were in a position to provide. Indeed, even today much of the South African secret police is made up of Mickey's old compatriots.

Andrei Soldatov remembers how former KGB men in South Africa met with Nelson Mandela's newly installed ANC government in the mid-1990s to discuss the provision of a ready-made secret service for South Africa—one that was not tainted by having worked for the previous apartheid regime. “Mandela's people asked this one former KGB officer to organize the transfer of thousands of [former Russian KGB] people from Moscow to South Africa. So that's what happened. And now the former KGB guy who arranged it, he's quite comfortably off, and he's come back to Moscow. His son's still out there working on it.”

This fact makes all the more intriguing a March 1998 daylight housebreak and assassination attempt at Viktor Bout's $3 million Johannesburg mansion by phenomenally well-armed, masked paramilitary raiders who have—incredibly, given the audacity of the crime—never been caught or identified. Bout's mansion, in the exclusive Sandhurst district, was so heavily fortified some locals mistook it for a VIP detention center: walls five meters high were crowned with high-voltage wire fencing, while heavily armed security guards and attack dogs kept up a twenty-four-hour patrol of the grounds. On paper, the house itself, not to mention its two swimming pools, fountains, tropical garden, and separate accommodation for guests, should have been impregnable. It also provided Bout with a very comfortable lifestyle. Yet one March afternoon, as his elderly Russian housemaid was chopping fruit in the kitchen, the door was kicked in by masked paramilitary-style raiders who knocked her unconscious, beat her son, and stormed through the house, making off with $6 million in ready cash but, oddly, leaving all other valuables—including paintings and antiques—where they stood.

That was the first “warning,” according to Richard Chichakli. He claimed the message was clear: “You're vulnerable. Get out.” When just days later Bout's car was peppered with bullets by a gunman on a motorbike, then a henchman was beaten on the street, he took the hint. As with the KGB/FSB's masked-raider bust of East Wing, and the subsequent claims of involvement by a secret society, rumors of South African secret-police involvement in the Bout raids persisted. This was partly because, by this time, the discreet influence of former Soviet secret service men, and particularly those from the GRU, the old counterintelligence networks abroad, had become so pervasive—with Africa a particularly popular haunt.

“The sort of people who were abroad anyway tended to be the smart guys or the ones who had skills,” confirms Galeotti. “And until the late Gorbachev years, they tended to be those who played the game in the Communist Party and everything else—not because they actually
believed
in it, but because they wanted the cushy job. The number of KGB I've spoken to who say, ‘Why did I join the KGB? To get a cushy job! Joining the party was the only way I was ever going to get to live abroad!' So now you have these very smart, amoral people out there, still working off the same skills and knowledge base.”

They work on the legitimate side, mostly—businessmen whose networks from the old days are useful for contacts and suppliers. These people, says Mickey, will know the outfit he flies for, and will often know him personally; they'll know he can get a job done. They might even request him by name. It is, he says, no different than belonging to a football club.

It's a small, tight-knit community, all right, just like any pioneer group. And when a crew is lost, which is often, everybody knows at least someone connected with the disaster. Which makes me wonder how they can be so fatalistic; how even when it's so close to home—the same kind of plane, the same airport, the same client, a friend—men like Mickey can accept the same fuzziness around the crash as they accept in their business dealings.

So I make up my mind to find out. And that means getting deeper inside the minds, and the remaining outpost communities, of this exotic and increasingly endangered airborne species.

 

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Russian Rain Keeps Falling

The Congo, 2005–2009

IT'S BEEN AN ODDLY COLD, dark midsummer 2010 in East Africa, chasing Mickey's crew, friends, and contacts around, catching the odd flight, and keeping up with Sergei's drinking. I'm getting over a fever, fed up, and, more than anything, increasingly claustrophobic—I'll never know how it is Mickey and company still haven't tried to dice each other up. I've got so much Nile beer coming out of my pores that nowadays even the mosquitoes look the other way when they see me coming. This is, Mickey tells me, what you get from the Life—though I can never get to the bottom of whether he just means “from life” and he's adding the definite article because that's what Russians (who don't have them) think you do when you speak English. Or if he really means something called
the
Life—the way you live when you're in the gang.

We make a motley handful about town in Africa: an ever-fluctuating number of giant, spindly, gangly, fat, tanned and pale, old and young Slavs dressed to the nines, trailed by one incongruously scruffy little Brit. And here, as dollar-spending
mzungu
and airmen to boot, we are a target market. Like sailors' dens in a port town, the local economy, from restaurants and bars to tattoo dens, hotels turned bordellos, and casinos, is geared up for these crews and their dollars. Hassan, the stocky, flashy boss of the Simba Casino in the belly of a giant mall in Central Kampala, has even started hiring Kazakh girls as dancers. “We had a lot of old Soviet airmen in when we got the dancers last time,” he says. Another pilot says there's recently been a whirlwind romance between a Ukrainian airman and just such a dancer. “This time next month, they'll have their own cargo airline,” he laughs. “And guess who he'll have doing sales.”

Then Mickey and I split—partly because they were flying somewhere I'd actually need a visa for rather than the standard fifty-dollar bill at immigration, but mostly because I'd had a bellyful. I spent a couple of days sobering up and chasing leads across the country. Then one afternoon I went to a place called Kampala Casino to meet with some off-duty Moldovans who never showed, and instead got talking to the manager, Peter. Once he was absolutely sure I wasn't a crooked revenue man trying to shake him down, he summoned a slender-legged waitress to pour me a cold Club on the house and slipped me the number of someone who—if I didn't know her already, which he clearly couldn't believe—I should speak to.

This contact would, he said, give me a deeper understanding of the curious communities of displaced ex-Soviet aviators in Africa. Having seen only Mickey's rootless drifting, I could use it. The woman was, he said, pretty much the social organizer of that community in East Africa, known for sorting out any aviators who got into trouble out here. I said she sounded like a Slavic Lara Croft with a pilot's license and laughed. Peter didn't laugh; he just nodded. “Call her. She knows everyone,” he smiled, and left to tend the tables.

And that's how I met Katya, Aviation Queen of the Jungle.

Katya Stepanova can fly a plane herself, and after talking to her for just a few minutes, you realize she knows her way around not only an Il-76 but more aircraft than the designers know they've made. These days she runs her own highly successful Kampala-based travel firm, taking tourists, dignitaries, and businesspeople over the country's hills, cities, and jungles by light aircraft for safaris, nature trails, hiking, sightseeing, meetings, and kicks.

But that's only half her story. For a whole generation of honest, hardworking aircrews from the former Soviet lands who've washed up in Africa and, unlike Mickey, have decided to linger, to try and put down roots and carve out a life for their families, she's something between a social hub and an oracle, and her insider status gives her a unique perspective on the pressures, dangers, and temptations many of these crews of
Afghantsy
Lost Boys face.

With her long red hair, ready laugh, action-girl past, and one-of-the-boys wit, it's not hard to see how she's become the center of a whole social group and support network for marooned ex-Soviet flyboys zooming back and forth across the dark, radarless expanses of sub-Saharan Africa. Now in her early thirties, Katya is the aviator daughter of a Russian Il-76 pilot who'd moved from his base near Moscow to the Congo when the opportunities for honest, skilled, and hardworking ex–air force men like him dried up back home. She grew up in and around her father's Candid, flying with him on missions across Africa and further afield.

“Nowadays they're not so young anymore,” she says, “but when we arrived out here the youngest pilot was thirty-four, thirty-five.” She remembers that 1990s generation of newly arrived jungle pilots, bound together by common experience and mutual respect.

This was, she says, back before “the UN began controlling it all,” when a pilot and his Il-76 was the closest thing many shelled, roadless areas had to a local bus, and military, ministers, civilians, and crates would jostle and bid for space on board. “At the beginning, all the crews here were nice, and everyone helped each other.” She confesses she yearns for those times now. Times when the business of flying your Il-76 or your Antonov around Africa was, she says, “just a lot simpler.” Still, even then they found themselves being scapegoated, hustled, and worse. “But it's always been risky. Crews kept getting arrested in the Congo in those days—they arrested crewmen, not the airline bosses. I remember one crew I knew, they got arrested and had to disappear pretty quickly. I had the Russian Embassy asking me if I knew what had happened with them, but I didn't.”

It only takes the mention of my connection to Mickey and the others for Katya's memories of life among the first tidal wave of ex-Soviet aircrews in Africa to pour out. There were the times she and the crew had to deal with amphetamine-fueled child soldiers whenever they landed in jungle airstrips controlled by some of the wilder Congolese rebel warlords. “You hope nothing will happen,” she says, “because it's just a ten-year-old. But then, you know, a ten-year-old with a gun, anything could happen. Those child soldiers are totally fucked-up, they don't really know any better. They're scared little kids, really, trying to be tough.”

Once, a girlfriend of hers, an Eastern European crewman's daughter, pestered a crew to take her on a mission over rebel-controlled DRC territory. She got her wish, and the girl spent half the trip flattened, terrified, against the fuselage as rebels in the Congolese uplands loosed a hail of machine-gun fire without any warning, bullets smashing through the glass and ripping into the cockpit, missing her by inches and smashing the plane up inside and out. She got back okay, says Katya, and shrugs. Technically, “they probably shouldn't have done it. With me it was different: The crews never took me on military flights, just commercial runs. They looked after me, they made sure I was safe, and I wasn't really scared; [as a teenager] it was a case of, Nothing to do today, so I'll go up. It was interesting. The guys would never have let anything happen to me. Seriously, they all looked after me. I went with them on missions back then; they're my family.”

Such are the bonds of expat language, culture, and common interest that the ex-USSR aviator “family” extends to pretty much everyone in the beat-up Soviet cargo-plane business over Africa. “They all come through Uganda at the moment,” she says. “I've met most of them, I think.” Russian aviation magnate Evgeny Zakharov is an acquaintance too. He is, she says, not just one of the few genuinely well-known post-Soviet movers and shakers in these parts, but one who's “not full of shit” either—the highest compliment.

I grab my chance—I'm interested to hear the view of the wider expat “family” on the shadier side of the cargo industry, people like Mickey and that thorn in the side of investigators Viktor B. So I ask her about Viktor Bout, just because he's been on the news today. She weighs up my question before exhaling a jet-powered plume of cigarette smoke into the night air. “He wasn't doing anything that everybody didn't know about at the time. It's all politics.”

Also counted as extended family are the casualties. “A few months ago, an Il-76 went down in the lake here,” Katya says. “All crew were killed. And I knew them.” The community was already in mourning at the time of the lake crash for men it had lost the month before. In February 2009, a Ukrainian Antonov-12 en route from Kisangani, DRC, to Ukraine, with Entebbe and Luxor as refueling stops, crashed on takeoff from Luxor, coming down half a kilometer from the runway, catching fire, and killing all five occupants: two Ukrainian citizens, two Byelorussians, and a Russian.

“The pilot was a friend of ours from back in South Africa in 2002,” she says. “He was called Yuri Matveenko: a good guy, and a fucking great pilot. I dunno what he was thinking—the plane was junk. Shit condition. And the pilot was one of the best, most well-known pilots. When he stopped in Entebbe he stayed with my dad. He knew the condition, why the hell did he fly it? Probably he thought he could just make it for that last leg of the journey home, even though his plane was junk.” She shrugs. “Well, he made it halfway home.”

The reason for the An-12's dive could be incorrect loading of the aircraft or pilot error, according to an interview on local TV given by Egyptian civil aviation minister Ahmed Shafiq almost immediately after the accident. Yet according to subsequent crash reports, the plane was indeed less than airworthy. Even Luxor airport's technical ground staff had warned the crew not to take off because the plane had a fuel leak. But this was no mysterious lapse of judgment, no hallucinating narcosis: The killer, she says, echoing almost everybody connected with the business out here, is money—as usual. It's what encourages risks like that, encourages overloading, encourages crews to take invisible cash cargoes unknown to their paymasters. “The pay is not bad, but if you are making money, you wanna make more money; you're thinking, ‘Okay, well, if I can make more money, why not?' You know the problem is: You don't know how long your contract is going to last. That's the problem. So you are trying to make as much money as you can, because you don't really know how long you are going to be making
any
money for.”

In the days that followed, Russian aviation forums were no less affecting. Messages from fellow
avialegionery
and former comrades paying tribute and offering help, witnesses describing the event, aviators appalled at the waste of life and looking for answers, and loved ones across the world in their hour of grief all served as a reminder that these are not just pilots and loadmasters but men: “Half my heart burned together with Dad on that plane,” read one. “And what to live with survives, I would not wish on my worst enemy.”

Another spoke of the psychotherapy she'd had to undergo to get over the loss of her father years before; the wives, brothers, and children of other fallen
avialegionery
joined the condolences. Meanwhile, the Russian Orthodox Church in Johannesburg held a memorial service to mark the forty days of mourning. Everywhere, messages ended with the words, “Come in to land now, crew.”

It's a reminder that in some ways, Katya is not unique—there are hundreds of crewmen's daughters propping up communities like this one from Afghanistan to Angola, as well as back home in Russia; family members who travel in their dads' planes across continents, living action-packed teenage years and young adulthoods their counterparts back home can only dream of—or else wait, anxious for news from cities they'll never see.

Yet the remarkable combination of Katya's junior Il-76 aviatrix experience and her connections among crews, air industry, and locals here in East Africa have made her something of a go-to among old hands and new arrivals in Africa from back home. Only recently, her mobile phone rang with a number she didn't recognize: It was one of two Russian pilots on a mission in the eastern DRC who'd apparently been passed her details as a contact who could help them out of any tight spots, and he was in one. He told her he and his comrade had fallen very ill. They'd noticed their skin was turning yellow, and as they'd heard she knew people, and his English was almost nonexistent, could she help?

“Hepatitis,” says Katya. “We got them out of the bush and over to Kampala, and got them seen by an English doctor. Don't ask me how they got my number.”

She got to know people really fast when she arrived, she says. The daughters, wives, and girlfriends who wanted to come out and tag along while their men disappeared for weeks on end “all had time on their hands and didn't know anyone either, and the guys were never there, so they formed quite a big community in the end, everyone helping each other out.” Nowadays she plays unofficial human SatNav for new arrivals, too. “I get a lot of new arrivals, you know, pilots asking me about runways, and fortunately I can usually tell them, ‘This one you've got to watch for the holes on the left-hand side,' or, ‘They bombed the hell out of the end of that, so stop short.' ”

Just for the hell of it, I test her. I tell her I'd expected Rumbek airfield in Southern Sudan to be better, what with it being the biggest city in the southern half of Africa's biggest country. “Ooh! That's bad,” she says. “There's hardly anything, it's still all dirt and bushes.” Which is spot-on.

She reminisces about her days as a twenty-year-old at the end of the 1990s, when the skies were so full of Soviet-made metal you could grab a ride in an Ilyushin or Antonov like getting on a bus; then she recalls lying on her front watching the warlord-held jungle of the Congolese frontier whooshing past below in an endless, cinematic kaleidoscope of greens and browns, and says she appreciates how lucky she was. Only now, like everything, thrills like that are sort of drying up. It's getting more ordered. The rules are getting tighter. The UN is in town now, calling the shots for all the cargo ops. It all goes through the UN, over at the military base.