Outlaws Inc. (22 page)

There's a sense of things closing in on the old networks of former Soviet air force guys, for sure. You can feel it everywhere. Every week, news feeds come through to Entebbe, reporting on yet another aviation authority somewhere that's banned yet another kind of Antonov plane, or another company, or another whole country of registration. Currently there's not a single airline registered in the DRC that you can even think about flying anywhere over Europe without scrambling God knows what forces intent on keeping you and your noisy, teetering agglomeration of metal away from their lovely expensive buildings, roads, and people.

For the first time, there's competition out here now, too. South Africans are moving in. “They're the only pilots who can do anything like the things that your ex–Soviet-Afghan war guys can do with these planes,” she laughs. “Those pilots are just as crazy.” She likens the sudden competition to the frontier-style atmosphere among aircrews and their old comrades on the ground way back in the 1990s, when her dad came over.

The world she describes is in many ways similar to the one Mickey encountered when he washed up first in the Balkans and Central Asia, then the Emirates, all dirty-nailed and dusty-mouthed, and ordered his first freelance beer in an air-conditioned hotel next to the hangars. Only like everything in Africa, it's both instantly familiar yet essentially different, too.

Before Uganda, her family had moved around with the flying work her cargo-pilot father could pick up, she says. She'd lived in Cyprus, among other places. But in the mid-to-late 1990s, Russia was still seen as a dead end for many émigrés. And over in Africa, business was really picking up. There was plenty of flying to go round, plenty of cargo to shift, and a fair bit of money to be made. And while pilots like Katya's father were relentlessly law-abiding and aboveboard, like any wild frontier, East Africa had its attractions for those who were prepared, like Mickey and the boys, to take things just a little further.

Just as it had in the 1990s, what the locals called the “Russian rain” kept falling over the resource-rich, rebel-patrolled Congo, with another Antonov listed as carrying aid equipment simply falling from the sky, presumed shot down, over occupied, diamond-rich, rebel-encircled Kisangani.

Then in May 2003, some 120 people were sucked to their deaths in an unexplained incident when the giant loading-bay door of an Il-76 owned by Hermes, a small Russian-operated outfit contracted to the Congolese military, mysteriously opened forty-five minutes into its flight at ten thousand feet over Kinshasa, loaded with soldiers and their families. After the pilot's successful landing of the stricken, depressurized, and unbalanced plane, he and the other surviving crew members were immediately visited by the equivalent of the Men in Black, sequestered by Russian authorities in a room at the Grand Hotel, Kinshasa, and ordered not to discuss the incident.

Something was clearly very secret, in any case: Later that year in October, a tense face-off ensued when a crashed An-28, just eight hundred meters from the runway at Kamina airstrip, was immediately surrounded by Congolese military, who refused to allow UN military observers access to the wreck or the cleanup.

January 2005 saw a cargo flight for a French NGO crash outside Kongolo, injuring all ten occupants, seven of them unlisted: The flight was not authorized to carry people. It later emerged that the plane had been grounded twice before for infractions, but cleared immediately on both occasions to continue flying humanitarian missions.

In October 2005, two passengers—Congolese army soldiers en route from Kisangani to Bunia—were turned into soup by an An-12's still-spinning turboprops when a crash landing on a dirt strip caused the wheels to smash their way into the cabin and, in the panic, all one hundred passengers burst through the doors and ran blindly in all directions—including right through the props. (Seeing the first two becoming human smoothies and the limbs of the next three flying off in many different directions apparently slowed the rest down somewhat; the evacuation proceeded in a more orderly fashion after that. An interesting idea for passenger airline safety drills, perhaps.)

Weeks later, an An-12 broke up in the air for no reason. Then in January 2006, yet another “just fell apart” on the ground, got struck off the aviation register, and was towed away for scrap. It was spotted again a few months later, back from the dead and in the air, blithely sporting a new paint job and a recent Kyrgyz registration.

One Russian crew landed their cargo plane only to have the wings literally fall off as they touched down. One simply flew into a hill outside Goma in July 2006; days later, another hit the side of a mountain in Bukavu in thick fog. Someone else's Antonov smashed into a parked 727 on the runway when his brakes failed. One Ukrainian Il-76 crew's plane “just exploded” at Pointe Noire, Congo, in May 2007. Then, at the same spot on the same runway in September, so did an An-12. On August 26, 2007, an An-32B carrying nine tons of freshly mined cassiterite, or tin oxide, experienced engine problems, hit tall jungle trees, and crashed. On September 7, 2007, two Georgians, two Ukrainians, and a Congolese crewman died when their junk-status An-12 carrying palm oil crash-landed in a Goma volcano field and caught fire. Another was shot down over jungle on the Rwandan border.

Then there was the showstopper, the one everyone talked about—that is, October 4, when a 1979-vintage, Ukrainian-operated An-26 crashed shortly after takeoff from N'djili Airport, Kinshasha, fireballing at high speed into a packed market square just after half past ten in the morning, spinning turboprop blades simply atomizing everything in their path. In addition to between nineteen and twenty-two fatalities among passengers and crew, a further twenty-eight to thirty-seven bystanders on the ground were literally mown down. Reports circulated soon after that one Congolese occupant had survived the initial impact, but that enraged locals had dragged him from the wreckage and beaten him to death—without, of course, waiting for the crash report to find for or against human error as one of the causes. Not that there would have been any point in waiting for the crash report: Some claimed the “black box” flight recorder was either one of the items looted from the wreckage, or had already been removed before the flight.

As I wrote this chapter, the news came in that an An-24 (NATO codename: Coke) had inexplicably nosedived into Nganga Lingolo cemetery on its final approach into Brazzaville, Congo. All five Ukrainian crew and one Congolese passenger killed. I'm no conspiracy theorist, but that sounds like a run of terribly bad luck for anyone.

It does get better away from the Congo, and away from the gaffer-taped planes themselves, but not much. Because while East and Central Africa have a great many things going for them, they aren't always world leaders in health and safety. So instead of asking how these things happen and trying to protect the poor Joes they tended to happen to (and usually at altitude) by, say, going after whoever wanted to hide a conscription of cluster bombs aboard a civilian aircraft, people started taking aim at the messengers.

The way Mickey tells it, and we're translating roughly here, “It's always the same, just with a different visa.” Coming back from the Afghan war in the eighties was just the same, he says; like America's Vietnam vets, the Soviet Union's grunts got back from their unwinnable, sun-parched, booby-trapped, guerrilla-war hell only to find they were the whipping boys. “It was, ‘We don't know what you were doing out there anyway,' ” he recalls. “And, ‘We heard you did some bad things, plus you did not win, and it was all a big mistake, so you will get nothing from us.' ” And now, twenty years on, he's still wearing the mark of Cain: uprooted, demobbed, he tries to steer a course through the daily, hourly drip-drip of compromises his new third world homes test him with, and to stay alive. But even down here, the term “mercenary pilots”—shortened to
mercs
by the locals—has become the buzzword favored by firebrand politicians wanting to be seen as cleaning house and African nationalists who believe the continent would be just fine if they could get rid of white troublemakers. The mercs are everybody's favorite whipping boys.

Meanwhile, in New York, Stockholm, London, and Ostend, governments and arms monitors rage against “dirty airlines,” “dirty planes,” and “traffickers.”

Some powerful voices are beginning to speak up, though, including the former World Bank chairman. “Note how, in our narrative, the criminals and the deviants are always the suppliers,” sighs Moisés Naím. “It's never the consumers, even when it's the consumers who are creating the profit opportunities, and who are behind the market that creates the people we now call criminals and deviants.”

Naím suspects looking to scapegoat the deliverymen is a more attractive option for many within the business and political spheres than tackling root causes. “The EU, the U.S., Russia, China—we can all keep on churning out weapons systems and land mines, snorting cleaner, meaner drugs, buying our way into brands on the cheap and DVDs in the pub; this way, when people get hurt it's not our fault, it's the guy at the other end.

“It's estimated that eight percent of China's GDP is associated with export and production of counterfeit goods, from car brakes to Prada bags,” he says. “And when you have eight percent of an economy like China's involved in that, it means that literally millions of people wake up every day and can only make a living and bring food to the table because they are involved in what
we
, here in the West, call ‘illicit'—and
they
call a normal way of making a living.

“To use a more cruel analogy: For us consumers in the West, we are told by our governments that these are all ‘illicit acts.' They are ‘criminals.' ‘Underground.' ‘Deviants.' There's a lot of deviancy in the conversation. Now, you go tell that to the Afghan farmer whose only way of making a living for his family is to plant poppies for export. And you know that he's not getting a lot of money. The big money is never at the beginning or end of the chain—the big money is in the
middle
of the chain. But we call him a criminal, right? He's a ‘drug grower.' Or the woman who leaves her family in Guatemala and is beaten all the way and is an illegal worker, and ends up working as the nanny of an investment banker. Blame them? No. The consumer creates the market—every time.”

“Our businessmen are at fault, not the crews,” nods former pilot Andrei Lovtsev. “They have gone there to Africa, and to be truthful they're working there for kopecks compared to the foreigners. I speak to the Americans and they say, the Russians—even though it is more Ukrainians, Kazakhs, and so on—in the business rent out the planes for kopecks, and the crew get even less. For an An-12, they only charge around $1,000, $1,200 an hour whilst an American Hercules will cost $6,500. The crew get $5,000 or $6,000 a month. It is very low, yet they fly to difficult places in difficult conditions and are met by Kalashnikovs and taken away, and they don't know if they will be shot or not.”

Indeed, the airmen themselves are now often more valuable to local thieves and warlords than the cargo they carry. In August 2010, three Latvian-Russian pilots flying food in for international peacekeepers in Sudan were heading from Darfur's Nyala airstrip to their rented villa downtown. Suddenly, several 4x4s swerved into their route, blocking the road, and gunmen forced them to the floor, kidnapping them. It was the second such incident in Sudan in a month: In July 2010, the “horseback devils” of the Janjaweed militia had abducted and beaten a Russian pilot shipping supplies to UN/African Union peacekeepers in Darfur, having forced his aircraft down at gunpoint during takeoff and dragged out and pistol-whipped the three rebel commanders he was also secretly transporting. From being expendable, among rebel groups airmen like Mickey are now highly prized both for their ransoms and the bargaining power they represent.

Unusually, in both these instances the airmen were recovered swiftly, before any public ransom demands had been made; and though news reports are vague as to how or why the men were released, a deal with the militias seems likely. The flight boycott of Somalia that followed the deaths of an entire Byelorussian crew in 2007 meant a lot of cargo never got carried and a lot of money never got made. And in Darfur right now, there is simply too much cash at stake to risk a kidnap turning into a murder.

There is, however, another possibility. Viktor Bout hinted that “huge forces” were behind the recovery of his gunrunning Il-76 crew captured by the Taliban in the mid-1990s; indeed, it's widely believed that a quid pro quo deal was struck to begin supplying the Taliban with arms in return for their release. And with Russia supplying arms and mercenaries to the Janjaweed's backers in the Sudanese government, it would be all too easy to see both incidents as simply ways of hurrying up the next delivery or putting pressure on price. They certainly wouldn't be the first Islamist militia to wrap cash and kidnapping up into an offer that ex-Soviet cargo operators just couldn't refuse.

If you're wondering why airmen would take the risk with jobs like these, whoever's prepared to fly over Africa gets fat bonus commissions, and Mickey admits with a shrug that the rewards from government contracts, humanitarian aid, raw-material transport, and ad hoc business make even the risk of kidnap and violence worth taking. And meanwhile, the men and the metal and the extra tons of overloaded cargo just keep falling from the sky and disappearing into the bush at gunpoint.

IN A LOT of ways, Katya Stepanova is Mickey's opposite—a live wire, a respectable businesswoman running a successful business according to the rules. She pays her taxes and has a landline and a postal address; she's great, runs a transparently honest company; and most of all, she's full of infectious lust for life where Mickey is often downbeat, obscure, vague, and comfortable with his silence and his worst-case scenarios.