Outlaws Inc. (31 page)

Beside the narrow highway that winds down through the first half of the Urals and into the grasslands is a mirage of bustling roadside activity: thin, whining dogs on rope tethers, buyers and sellers, brightly colored stalls, the spiced gray smoke of kebabs grilling on an open breeze-block fire. Except it's not a mirage. Here are Oriental faces, Uzbek-registered cars coated in primer and hitched to wagons; sick chickens and luminous plastic footballs, toys, bootleg goods, jarred honey and battered tanks full of petrol. My traveling companions and I stop at the informal Central Asian bazaar in need of a stretch and hungry, but hungrier still for human interaction, for the sound and sight and smell of someone other than ourselves; for a bit of up-close and a break from distance and uncertainty.

Suddenly, and without knowing how, I'm talking bad Russian to Zayna—for reasons that will become clear, she asks me not to use her real name—a girl from Uzbekistan who travels as part of this impromptu caravanserai through the empty heart of Russia in summer, and for whom we are items of outlandish, absurd exotica. She ushers me to the shaded back of the tent and opens a drawer. It is full of replica and blank-templated Russian driver's licenses, along with laminate and a small camera. She looks up from the samples pegged along the top: one for fugitive oligarch Boris Berezovsky, “Godfather of the Kremlin,” now living in London; one for President Putin himself; one for Osama bin Laden (patronymic middle name: Terroristovich). One for Lenin, too, now apparently a resident of Moscow and with no points accumulated. ID costs five dollars. I return to the Russian rental car with five new, utterly different Russian driving licenses and ID cards: just like Bout and Minin.

I decide to back myself up in case they're found, adding a couple of cheeky celebrity names so I've got dumb-tourist-with-a-novelty-souvenir room to maneuver with the cops if it comes to it—I'm O. bin Laden on one of them, a Moscow resident. I flash one to the receptionist at my crummy hotel that night when she asks for it. To my astonishment, it passes. Not a flicker. Though to this day I'm unsure if she was fooled or saw through it but genuinely couldn't give less of a fuck who I was. The number gets noted down, entered into the guest registration system, and I can't help but think of Iain Clark's defense of Russian operators in Africa: “They'll go with what documents they're given, and if they're fake, so be it.”

This is just a five-dollar cheapie; if it was part of my business plan, I'd invest much, much more time and money in getting the best. Besides, your ID is only ever as good as the willingness of the person checking it to accept it. For Tatyana, just like Mickey, with only the paperwork and underpaid officials in third world countries to negotiate, slipping through that door is a daily thing. The rules say someone's name has to go here, here, and here? Of course I've got a name—why not take two or three?

Charter agent John MacDonald laughs when we talk about Mickey's can-do approach to paperwork. “Get him to tell you about the invoices!” he hoots. “If you want phantom paperwork, that'll put the wind up you!”

I finally catch up with Mickey over an early vodka breakfast in the center of town, where he's back with some stuff for his mother and sister. The canteen is cheerless, Formica benches and fast-food chairs ill-suited for his golem frame, but he knows it and thought even I might find it. He's a little grayer in the face than I remember but in fine fettle, relaxed and even talkative. I show him my new Russian driver's licenses, and we talk about why they're no good, and why in most parts of the world, in most situations, nothing has to be any good anyway. Then, ordering another drink, he explains his invoicing practice.

“You want me to bring you ten thousand dollars of cargo. We talk and agree a price of twenty thousand dollars. I will invoice you for twenty thousand. Your company receives the invoice and pays. You and I stand on the runway, or we sit on a chair under a tree or in a hut, have a beer and a cigarette. We relax, chat about business, and then I give you five thousand and put the other five thousand cash into my own pocket. Then we drink to success.”

You need to spread it around a little, naturally, he says—you need to keep your colleagues sweet—and so everybody wins except the official buyer you work for. But then, that might be an oil-type company, the UN, some government or aid organization, at any rate someone with big, deep pockets who's got so used to being ripped off and paying over the going rate that they actually think it
is
the going rate. The names on the invoices can change, of course, says Mickey. They might be paying the outfit he flies for, or any one of several companies owned by either him or that parent company. Depends what it is, who it's for, and who needs to know.

We talk about Ekaterinburg, the nightlife, his mother's illness; about the ghost factories and how it was back then when it seemed everybody worked for a different highly classified military facility. With a slow, rheumatic roll of the shoulders as he twists his lanky frame around on the fixed plastic chair, he tells me that just like the jobs he flies now, the whole secrecy thing is overdone. “It was normal,” he shrugs, “like London or anywhere, people who work for the military would tell you something different if you asked what they do in their job. Secrets were part of life. But still, you know what they do. People talk.”

Before we part, he wants to take me round town, but I've got more leads to chase up and I tell him I'll see him on the road, thinking Kazakhstan, his next stop. As it turns out, it'll be another three years, hundreds of fruitless phone calls, and thousands of miles farther south, but that's how it is with people like Mickey. Mark Galeotti believes this identity-hopping quality, this ability to slip seamlessly off the radar and into different roles and identities, goes deeper for Mickey, Tatyana, even Bout, than a calculated wish to deceive.

“It's not actually a situational thing,” he says. “It's a reflex. You've got to remember that this is one of the glories of the old Soviet system. On paper it was hierarchical, ordered, rational, and everything had its place. In practice, it was everything but. And if Russians have a genius, it's to screw over those people who try to rule them, and at every occasion.

“So for a lot of people, it did become second nature—a habit, where you automatically do it. You know that you don't trust the system, and you are constantly looking at ways of screwing the system—not because you're a rebel, but because that's the only way you get anything. Everyone plays the black market. Everyone looks for how they can get away with minor infractions. It doesn't matter if you're a Communist Party official or whoever you are, everyone operates
na levo
—on the left. And after a certain point, certain instincts get ingrained. Now add to that the professional instincts of people who operate in a very gray area.

“You don't trust the powers that be—it doesn't matter who they are or what they are, that's just the instinct that you've got. And therefore you will automatically do everything that you can to be as amorphous, as invisible, as possible. From a legal point of view it means that when push comes to shove, no one can ever really prove you're anywhere. You can always claim there's ambiguity.”

Their ghost selves accompany these men through their lives, but often they are only exposed when they crash and suddenly things get binary: definitive identification, established causes, and insurance assessments and payouts that want black or white, alive or dead, name, date of birth, dental records. But sometimes it seems the men have disappeared and the ghosts are all that's left. I find myself thinking of another crew, friends of Katya's killed when their Antonov-12 crashed in Uganda in 2005. Even the black-box flight recorder was empty, its layer of magnetic tape having faded to nothing.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Death and Taxes

Entebbe to Ekaterinburg, 2010

THE BREEZE IS PICKING UP, carrying whirls of sand and grass husks on its warm jets. And on the foggy, overgrown hook end of this disused upcountry air base deep in the West African bush, among rusting helicopters and a cement-mixer graveyard, the 250-square-meter iron bird is popping and blinking as it cools down. Night sounds drift in through the plane's iron skin: motorbikes, wire-mesh gates being clanked, a rifle firing, dogs. Somewhere farther off, a televised football match and the unsettling human-voice-in-distress cries of the night birds wander in and out with the direction of the wind. A fuel truck backs up in the distance, and once or twice another plane crosses the sky.

Inside, the pungent smell of dope is everywhere. Everywhere is full so it's piss in a tin, crap outside with the little red malaria-carrying mosquitoes sucking you dry, or don't do either. And there aren't any showers, but that's immaterial because I haven't changed clothing or even taken my shoes off for at least twenty-four hours, and now I'm not sure I want to. No one else has either, as far as I know, with the exception of the late-substitution loadmaster I haven't met before, a young, even slightly hip, shaven-headed Ukrainian with an iPod, named Alex, defiantly slipping into Jesus creepers whenever he comes “indoors”—something Sergei always used to do. He's added a dressing gown over his tracksuit bottoms and jumper and looks like a mental patient, grunting and swearing at bulging, tumbling cargo and struggling with canvas straps. Here he is now, bug-eyed, pale, and sweating, on his way past with a bundle of rags, his unplugged headphones dangling loose from his ears.

He points at the towering mass of loose cartons. “I think we can do it.” Then he licks his lips. “Yes. We can do it.” Seeing my frown, he sticks out his hand. “A hundred dollars?” But neither of us has a hundred dollars.

They say nothing's certain in life but death and taxes. And with his cash business, at least, Mickey's got tax pretty well licked. But the older he gets, the more I fear for him. The planes are aging, the loads creeping up and up past even the physics-defying abilities of men like him. Still, spectacular escapes and close shaves always stick in the mind longer than the bodies by the road, and like all of them, Mickey is convinced he's lucky. Perhaps a part of him has started to believe the myth, I think. That larger-than-life creation, the schizoid comic-book caricature that jumps from the pages of the trafficking reports and the mouths of other bush-jockey pilots is so dazzling—a sort of Bond villain/Scarlet Pimpernel combo—it's pretty much all that I saw at first, back in Belgrade and wherever else I looked. Until I met Mickey. Then, when the layers come away, you're left with a bunch of blue-collar guys and the muggy, canvas-packed shadows inside an Ilyushin-76 at night, and things look different. Less glamorous.

Back in London I get a call from my anonymous pilot-informer who's haunted the hangars of Sharjah with these men and seen them push the make-do-and-mend cult as far as it'll go—and further. “I've been in crews where we didn't have any contracts for technical support in most places, but still we had no problem,” he shrugs. “When there's a new wheel change, there's always a local guy who can change a wheel, and a number of crews have that knack and like sorting their own problems. It's not for everybody, but if you're driving a '61 Ford Escort to work every day and you get a technical problem? Well, you know your way under the hood—you know its workings inside out. After a couple of years, and it's the same for these airplanes.

“With modern aircraft, with all the electronics it's a lot harder. But the Il-76 and the An-12 are very rugged—they can take a lot of punishment. There's still scope to use high-speed tape, like duct tape, and they won't be taking any real risks where they see they're putting their lives in danger. With these old Russian aircraft, it's mostly mechanical, and something you can fix if you have a flexible mind. It's like the pioneering early years of aviation, you know, the de Havilland flying into the Arctic and something happens, and they have to fix up a propeller by hand. It's not pretty but it will get you home. It's the same with these guys—they still have the pioneering spirit of the early days of aviation. You make temporary repairs and you get home the best way you can.”

After I put the phone down, for the first time in weeks I think back to Starikov and Barsenov, talked into taking off for the final leg of their journey to Malta with a pay bonus and faulty electrics. Then to Mickey's words that day we first talked: “The lifestyle kills as many of us as the planes.”

No wonder Evgeny Zakharov bemoans the shortage of veteran pilots to train the younger generation out there: They're the least publicized of all Africa's endangered species. Another pilot puts it on a community forum, half jokingly: “I'm always surprised when another one of these planes crashes. Surprised that there are any still left to crash, that is.”

There's something unutterably sad about it all, as if in some way the risks are part of some divine plan for these men; as if the business they're in and their demise—the death and the taxes—all amount to the same thing, the same shadow following them and snapping at their tails until they run out of luck, stamina, or speed tape. Or until, one clear morning on a shelled runway somewhere, they look at their leaking fuel tank and flashing warning light and just decide that, flashing lights notwithstanding, they finally want to go home.

For the first time, I realize how tiring it must get to be torn between the thrilling, often lucrative independence of their own businesses and their paper status as expendable cheap labor with a life expectancy measured in flying hours. It's a curious double life: both master of their own destiny and servant of others' demands. The two businesses can coexist quite comfortably and for many years: Mickey Inc., independent shuttle trader, shares a two-hundred-ton airborne office with Mickey the employee. On the one hand, they're just the messengers, the gofers; on the other, the kings whose fifteen tons or more they make every flight are their own import-export business and nobody else's. Since I've known him, albeit intermittently, I've often caught myself on the verge of asking him whether he ever wishes he'd chosen the other path; a different, more stable life; settled down and become a …

But to my shame (or maybe it should be my pride), every time they pop into my head the words sound oafish and stupid and I duck the chance. Does he ever wish he'd become a what … an accountant? A doctor? An advertising copywriter? Had he ever thought about insurance? Jesus. I know what I saw in 1992, and it wasn't a nation full of people taking the time to ponder the stability of future career choices. How fucking crass. If I were Mickey and someone like me asked about the wisdom of my professional path, I'd throw him out of my plane over the Arabian Peninsula without a parachute.

You see, for me that's the funny thing about the whole business, about Bout, Minin, all of them. We want answers. Is Viktor clean or dirty? Is he the Merchant of Death or, as he contends, “the ideal modern businessman”? Entrepreneur, criminal, misunderstood visionary, or puppet? Innocent, cunning, or in denial? Or maybe something altogether truer, if less certain: maybe something in between. Something right there in the wide gray expanse between black and white, just like the arms business he followed.

Viktor Anatolyevich Bout, born in 1967, now a bony shadow of the flash, somewhat corpulent young mover and shaker who was arrested in that Thai hotel room in 2008, languishes in a U.S. jail awaiting trial. He wears a boilersuit, endures solitary confinement, and listens to Voice of Russia to hear “a familiar voice.” The vegetarian suffers, he says, from a lack of fruit and vegetables and tea—only warm water is available in prison. He looks old and worried and shaggy and stooping in his prison chains, which has started to give him a demeanor and posture not unlike Mickey's. Away from the political grandstanding, some who met him, even those on the “other side,” have their doubts whether he was ever more than a schmuck, someone else's chess piece. “Viktor Bout was not the great Merchant of Death, as the government and the reports and the Americans claim,” says investigator Brian Johnson-Thomas. “Though admittedly he may be
a
merchant of
some
death, of course. But to call him that, to label him the Merchant of Death as Peter Hain did, is absurd.”

Another insider who, during an off-the-record phone conversation, echoes Bout's own statements and those of the Russian government, says, simply: “The CIA, Interpol, MI5—they've spent that much time investigating him, and this is the best they can do?”

Even as the trial approaches, the man seems somehow smaller than the monstrous Merchant of Death glowering from the UN reports, articles, and indictments. Indeed, there are even moments of dark comedy, as the Mr. Big image built up over the years meets with altogether more mundane realities. Bout watcher and blogger Alexander Harrowell recently wondered whether the plane that disappeared en route to the plinth in Smolensk might finally have turned up. His research had led him to a particularly battered old Candid, grounded where else but in the Arabian desert. A photograph on his Web site is captioned: “TL-ACN, serial no. 53403072; ex-Centrafrican Airlines, now rotting in Umm Alquwain.” In the tiny, sparsely inhabited Emirate, the plane has become a sand-spattered ad for the Palma Beach Hotel—its fuselage now exhorting passers-by to call 06-766-7090, should they wish to sample what the hotel calls its “classy facilities and amenities that give pleasure.”

Bout himself has turned his Web site into an archive of documents that he claims prove his innocence, clips of his accusers, and UN reports in which he either appears or is, he contends, tellingly absent, to back up his claims of a frame-up. At the time of writing it's still active, although he appears to have caught the post-Wikileaks zeitgeist with claims the U.S. government has “ordered Google to take it down”—and indeed, it's interesting to wonder whether, as Bout goes to trial having entered a plea of not guilty in the U.S., his testimony will become another test of how transparent the U.S. government and others
really
want their statecraft to be. If he gets to tell it, Bout's story may yet turn out to be more of a Pandora's box than the controlled release of incriminating evidence his accusers are hoping for.

Meanwhile, Bout's wife, Alla, languishes in Russia, championing her husband's cause and experiencing, it seems, a distinctly Cold War welcome from America when she attempts to visit him in jail. Elsewhere, the underground chatter grows. Will there be a deal? A swap—perhaps at Vienna airport, both sides' preferred venue for the last exchange of spies? Or will Viktor Bout stand up and attempt his biggest trick yet—to remain fuzzy and insubstantial in front of prosecutors and TV cameras?

Whatever the result of his trial, there are questions about his degree of influence that remain. And about those “huge forces,” too. Like Ilya Neretin said, if Viktor Bout is a prince, let's ask who the kings are.

Bout's business partner, Richard Chichakli, remains in hiding as I write this, probably still in Russia, posting occasional video diary pieces on the Internet about his predicament, his innocence, and mysterious break-ins to his apartment. Like Bout, he has a Web site on which he energetically protests not just his innocence but his insignificance. “Victor is just a person, and I am pretty much a nobody,” he tells me in summer 2010 while awaiting the result of the extradition hearing that saw Bout sent to America for trial. I get the feeling he'd like to disentangle himself from Bout, the legal process in which he finds himself, the whole situation. He's clearly a shaken, frightened man who no longer trusts anybody; first claiming Viktor Bout's guilt or innocence will be “determined at trial,” then that no trial he will receive at the hands of the U.S. can possibly be fair. He's just written a letter to Barack Obama protesting his treatment and lamenting what he sees as a continuation of the persecution he received at the hands of the Bush-Cheney administration. His assets have been frozen, and a new U.S. Government indictment has just been issued against him, this time for alleged violation of a sanction placed upon him in 2005. Yet despite the endless investigations, charges, and accusations ranged against him, this former accountant, real-estate man, U.S. soldier, and airport manager whose life was “dismantled and destroyed” by the armed, masked government agents who leaped from black armored trucks and surrounded his suburban home in Richardson, Texas, just after breakfast on the morning of April 26, 2005, has not been convicted of any crime. No wonder he's cautious.

My approach to him for an interview elicited written answers on an e-mail—and an attached PDF file containing those same answers as a sealed record, should I try to edit or misrepresent the e-mail's in-line content. He ends with the sigh of what seems like a disillusioned man—or at least one who has realized late in the game that he and Bout are not kings, perhaps not even princes, but tradable pawns. “Politics is always politics, and today's fugitives could be tomorrow's heroes and the opposite is true,” he says. I remember Peter Danssaert's sardonic laugh when he told me about traffickers “being hired by the same governments to do the same thing legally that they're doing illegally.”

As Chichakli signs off, there's another tantalizing hint that things are more than they seem. “As we speak,” he finishes cryptically, “there is a horse trading going on in connection with this matter, and we just have to wait to see which horse was made to go.” And with that, he's gone. I mail him again, but the silence has descended.

I've seen guilty men wriggling on hooks, and innocent ones too. And for the first time, I find myself thinking how much worse it would be to wriggle on a hook when you're neither black nor white but gray, eternally convinced that the man they're describing might have your name and life story but really isn't the true you at all. It sounds like purgatory, and perhaps for Bout and Chichakli it is.