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.

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.

Still, the picture even she paints of that generation’s progress across the continents after the motherland set them free without a paycheck or a pension is a sobering one. She talks me through a lineup of her family friends and what’s happened to them since they first came out here to fly cargo. There they were, young and strong, smart cookies and crack aviators, mechanics, loadies, and navigators. And then, like Iggy Pop’s Dum Dum Boys, they begin to fall in a grim roll call of casualties. Bad luck, bad calls, and the wrong plane.

“There’s this guy, he died in the Antonov crash in Luxor a couple of years ago. He’s one of the guys at the bottom of Lake Victoria—yeah, that was one of Evgeny’s crews. Some got kidnapped in the DRC, nobody ever paid the ransom. Another one’s dead, another just disappeared, I don’t know what happened to him …”

The crews all know one another from way back, she says. From the same towns, they’ve all been colleagues, and friends, flying the same planes for years all over the world. Then they came to Africa and worked as hired hands—different planes, different crews. A huge number are dead or missing.

I’m stunned for a moment, recalling Mickey’s first conversation with me, the way he counted these devils down on his fingers, like a man biding his time here in this world before bowing to the inevitable and heading off into the water, the fire, and the hereafter with one of them. Here they are, his brothers gone before. It’s like a family tree in horrible, inverted negative, in which instead of one common ancestor multiplying to produce generations of offspring, the logic is reversed and a whole generation of men produces a single heir, the sole survivor of twenty years of flying these foreign skies.

It pisses Katya off, she says, that all this work can be done and all these sacrifices made by good men in the name of getting their job done, and at the end of it, “all people want to talk about is gunrunning, like that’s the only thing they’re carrying.”

She reminds me that nobody ever wants to investigate these air operations, or the crews’ fifteen tons of cash cargo, when they’re using them to take more food to more starving refugees than any other crews, aviation outfits, or airlines, big or small, could ever hope to match; or that without their constant flights here and there, on- or off-record, much of places like East Africa would simply grind to a halt.

This is not just a figure of speech. In 1960, when Belgium granted it independence, the Democratic Republic of Congo (then called Zaire) boasted ninety thousand miles of navigable roads. By 1980, independent for two decades and with the highway-maintenance budget having quadrupled, there were only six thousand miles. By 2006, Kemal Saiki, a UN spokesman briefing the media on a passenger plane crash, said that the Democratic Republic of Congo did not even have two thousand miles of roads and that for many people, traveling around the country by aircraft, using small, wildcat aviation outfits, is the only option. Today, with just a few hundred kilometers of road left outside of the capital Kinshasa, people and goods find themselves back where they were in the late 1800s, chugging slowly down overgrown rivers in perilously overloaded barges straight from Conrad’s Lord Jim.

In Uganda, the most stable, most developed country in the region, there used to be trains. Today, following a disastrous attempt at privatization, the service is suspended indefinitely, tracks now overgrown with weeds and covered with mud, and even having become home to expanding market squares and auto-repair shacks.

Even when you can travel by land, you’re hostage—often literally—to thieves and bandits. Here, transport companies build in a margin of 33 percent of their goods that they assume will be stolen before the cargo reaches the recipient at the other end. That, of course, means higher prices for the surviving merchandise—both to compensate for these losses and to pay higher insurance premiums. And often that means the produce is priced out of the market. Simply nobody at the other end—in an area in which poverty is legion—can afford to pay a whole third higher than the market price. So they either go without or they steal and buy on the black market. The whole cycle begins again.

American reporter Denis Boyles came out here in the 1980s and interviewed one of the last of the Air America generation, an American bush pilot named George Pappas, tooling his beat-up DC-6 from conflict to conflict, chasing the sweet deal at the end of the rainbow. One of Pappas’s clients, a Zairean businessman, told him, “The pilots here are like sharks. They make excuses and wait until we need them very badly, and then they raise their rates. It is very difficult, very expensive.” Boyles claims to have been informed by one of these pilots that “ninety percent of the cargo he carries is, one way or another, contraband.” The real number, he says, was even higher.

In Africa, whatever you’re carrying, you skip a whole lot of trouble, paperwork, and danger—as well as bandits, bribes, police, and military roadblocks—if you take it by air. As one small ad for a reputable Ugandan plane operator in Kampala’s local freebie the Eye says: “You’ve a meeting in Arua. It’s a 7-hour drive at least [and] you’ll get home at night, exhausted. If you arrive home. Because 2,334 people died and 12,076 were injured on our roads in 2008. So charter a plane and keep your accountant happy. After all, how much is your life worth?”

Even in Russia itself, according to assassinated FSB whistleblower Aleksander Litvinenko, the secret police favored private-enterprise pilots with military experience for the really sensitive jobs, like moving explosives around the country from air base to air base. So prone to theft, prying, and graft were the road and rail networks that the chance of some small-time crooks nicking their consignment from a lay-by, only to stumble across the whole plot, was a chance they were unwilling to take.

But still, to many the idea of a connection between the business of states—wars, insurgencies, government policy—and these chaotic rogue cargo men seemed casual at best. They were hustlers, after all; man-with-van enterprises, nothing more. But suddenly, one afternoon in a luxury hotel in Bangkok, all that seemed to change.

On March 6, 2008, more than two dozen Royal Thai Police, in a sting operation orchestrated by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, swooped down on a conference room on the twenty-seventh floor of a gleaming, steel-and-glass Sofitel hotel in the Thai capital and promptly arrested Viktor Bout, handcuffing him at gunpoint and holding him in one of the suites before taking him off to jail. In its indictment, the DEA charges that during a well-planned sting, Bout incriminated himself in a plot “to sell millions of dollars’ worth of weapons [rumored to be Russian SA-model shoulder-mounted surface-to-air missile launchers and attendant ammo] to the Colombian narco-terrorists … the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) to be used to kill Americans in Colombia.”

Russian diplomats were livid, calling his detention politically motivated. The Americans were jubilant. But there would be more twists to come than either could possibly have realized.

The indictment, which charged Vikter Bout with nine offenses including money-laundering conspiracy and wire fraud as well as trafficking, continued: “An international weapons trafficker since the 1990s, has carried out a massive weapons-trafficking business by assembling a fleet of cargo airplanes capable of transporting weapons and military equipment to various parts of the world, including Africa, South America, and the Middle East. The arms that Bout has sold or brokered have fueled conflicts and supported regimes in Afghanistan, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Sudan.”

Perhaps someone had been watching the skies over Latin America quite closely through the 2000s after all.

Then, just three months later, in July of that year, the Africa–Latin America connection was blown wide open, hitting headlines across the world when a Soviet-crewed Antonov seized in Sierra Leone as a result of an American investigation was found to contain a staggering six hundred kilos of cocaine belonging to a Venezuelan narcotraficante group using Africa as its distribution hub. At fifty thousand dollars a kilo, there’s silly money for anyone with a rusty cargo plane and who knows the value of discretion.

Ironically, it seems the narcos know what the world’s NGOs, governments, and international peacekeeping organizations have been slow to realize: that if you want a job done professionally and with no conflict of interest, it never pays to squeeze your suppliers. Crewmen seem to have been paid well for such journeys: The captured leader of Venezuela’s infamous mob, the Valencia-Arbelaez organization, which was smashed by undercover U.S. DEA agents after it purchased a $2 million plane to run monthly flights between Venezuela and Guinea, claimed he was “paying my pilots $200,000 to $300,000 per trip.” He could afford to: The cost of ex-Soviet cargo aircraft for sale and charter had, according to the Moscow Times, “plummeted because of the financial crisis.” Reporting the bust, the Moscow Times discovered that “The [narcotraficante] gang hired a Russian crew to move the newly purchased plane from Moldova to Romania, and then to Guinea. Fuel and pilots were paid for through wire transfers, suitcases filled with cash and, in one case, a bag with $356,000 in euros, left at a hotel bar.” No wonder men like Mickey can be talked into making a few extracurricular no-questions trips.

Again, the Russian Foreign Ministry thundered that it considered the pilot to have been “kidnapped,” not arrested by the United States. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin himself weighed in, telling the U.S. it had “overstepped its mark.”

But between the lines, maneuvering of a more subtle kind was taking place. One operation down, one plane impounded. For investigators, prosecutors, and politicians, it must have felt like nailing jelly to a wall. Worse for the growing number of agents and monitors bent on proving and shutting down men like Bout, in their eagerness or frustration, the failures and lapses in their methods that Peter Danssaert had warned about began cropping up again. Ironically, this time it was the aviators who were edgy about shadowy conspiracies.

What Bout’s associates, and indeed the Russian government, claim is a politically motivated U.S.-led smear campaign against him has resulted in a bizarre situation in which both sides are crying foul and alleging dirty tricks on the part of the other. In a message from his hideout, where he’s taking refuge from CIA interest in him on what he claims is a trumped-up case, Bout’s close associate and “brother” in business Richard Chichakli, who oversaw Sharjah’s open-door boom time—tells me: “Victor Bout is just a person who may or may not have done wrong. That can be put to a trial in a court of law—and the U.S. will not have, nor will ever provide a ground for, an impartial trial. They have already spent more than $400 million on [hunting him down] and they cannot, just cannot, come up empty-handed. The politics says Victor should go to jail or die, and that will justify the action, make the great American experts look good, and give credibility to the U.S. and its stories. The evidence I have says exactly the opposite, and the U.S. government knows that.”

Indeed, Chichakli—who, despite being the subject of many and varied allegations, has yet to be convicted of a single crime, and who points out on his Web site that the presumption in his case appears to be “innocent until proven guilty investigated”—claims the same covert political forces who’d like to see Bout behind bars or dead are playing some very dark games with him. He points to the fact that his apartment was broken into in 2009.

“The attack on my apartment in Moscow was the strangest thing, given that computers and documents were the primary target,” he says. “Who took it and why? Possibly the U.S. intelligence; could be the Russian intelligence, or [maybe] the Easter bunny.” Then he drops a hint that there’s more to the game than anyone yet knows: “Whoever took the things knew that I have a backup; they just wanted to know what I have available, and who should be worried about getting exposed. The funny thing is that they will never know, because what I have is what is keeping me alive at either side of the equation.”

The plot thickened further in 2010 when a public-relations and lobbying company in New York and D.C. called Mercury LLC appeared to have issued a press release linking Bout to trafficking operations from the UAE.

Entitled “Ras Al Khaimah: A Rogue State Within the UAE?,” it was seemingly issued on behalf of an exiled sheikh with designs on a victorious return. Yet when I contacted them about the release, they stonewalled. Then one employee denied that the release had anything to do with them (despite having their company letterhead at the bottom). Requests for clarification have so far gone unheeded.

The really curious thing is that Mercury LLC is a key part of the U.S. corporate-lobbying machinery, with access to U.S. Congress and legislators; and if they were also involved in a campaign to destabilize an emirate by “linking” it to lots of bad guys, it would be absolutely perfect if someone were arrested in a blizzard of publicity—someone like Viktor Bout, given Public Enemy Number One status and quickly “linked” to Ras al-Khaimah via a mysterious press campaign.

For their part, Bout’s prosecutors, monitors, watchers, and opponents claim that he appears to be in denial, pointing to the masses of arms flights in and out of sub-Saharan Africa and Taliban-held Afghanistan he operated through the 1990s and early 2000s. They point to the charges on which he’s been incarcerated and extradited to the U.S., still unproven at this time of writing—an alleged offer by Bout to procure missile launchers and drones for FARC “to kill Americans with.” His defenders contend meanwhile that as the source of much of the world’s cocaine and seasoned phantom-flight charterers themselves, FARC are just convenient bogeymen in a cynical DEA set-up.

For his part, when I coaxed him on it, Mickey was cynical about both sides. He said: He’s a businessman, what do you expect? Just how big the gulf is between what we in the West mean by that word and what Mickey’s generation understand by it became clear late one muggy and oddly silent Saturday afternoon in June 2010 at a small, godless garrison town turned municipal dump in Central Africa with one muddy track leading through it. I’d hooked up with Mickey once again en route to another meeting for a quick beer on the understanding that I’d “lend” him fifty dollars in exchange for his time. I soon began to wish I’d left it. We got into quite a heated exchange about it all at a makeshift table (cupboard door, two oilcans, skinny dog in its shade) beside a dust runway stalked by giant, reeking crane birds while we waited for Sergei to finish cajoling, bargaining, and pacing back and forth with the local officials (the “official” uniform round these parts apparently being Manchester United replica shirts and no shoes).

We’d been talking business. Mickey told me the same line I’ve heard from countless ex-Soviets scarred by the West’s robber-capitalist plundering of Russia in the early 1990s. You don’t get big in business by being nice—look at the West’s magnates. Henry Ford. J. D. Rockefeller. Fritz Thyssen. Robert Maxwell. Take your pick. Hard to argue—and the fact that I’m only naming the dead ones we threw about just goes to show how rough my publishers’ lawyers think the live ones can be. Well, I used the Klebnikov defense: Sure, these guys were robber capitalists, but look at what they built! They weren’t just bastards, carpetbaggers, exploiters, and wheeler-dealers—they created industries, changed nations, built empires.

Mickey pointed out that Bout has done both these things one way or another, and as for empires, he took over swaths of airport land in the South African veldt as his global base.

I pointed out that changing nations could mean a lot of things, but I wasn’t sure that illicit arms flights were quite within the spirit of the phrase.

Well, at this point I believe I was sort of shouting, and Mickey was sort of shouting back, if I recall, that he knew exactly what Western businessmen were like, because he and his friends and family had seen their work up close as they stripped Russia bare. It was unbearably hot suddenly, and people were looking, but I do remember him saying “Biznesman is mafiya.” Then that the problem of a lot of people, not just in the West but back home too nowadays, is they just can’t stand to see a hardworking Russian make good.

That, in a paragraph, in one overstressed and pissed-off little exchange, is the whole schism, really. And whatever Bout’s done or hasn’t done, however much in the way of blood diamonds, illicit arms, and black-market cargo he has or hasn’t trafficked, smuggled, and brokered, the air-freight industry never, ever had a rock star before. At which point Wayne Rooney (number 10) and David Beckham (number 7) emerged from the hut with rifles and wished us a safe onward journey.