CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Just Drop the Cash out of the Plane

Uganda, 2009

THE HIGHWAY that runs between Uganda’s Entebbe airport and the capital, Kampala, is nicknamed Smoke Street for the acres of semisecret cannabis farm-and-wholesale operations, shielded from passing motorists by simple rows of palms and creepers. The location of these plantations is not a coincidence, as Smoke Street serves both the local and export markets.

Compact, bright, and home to garrisoned African Union troops, UN men, and almost everyone involved in aviation in East Africa, Entebbe town itself is where the exporters and consumers of this exceptionally potent weed—and much else besides—meet and mix in a number of very rough bars with rougher reputations.

The Four Turkeys bar is quasi-legendary among airmen, dealers, and whores, arguably the sleaziest pilot pit in the whole of Entebbe, which certainly puts it in contention for all of Africa; a twenty-four-hour bar-cum-pickup-joint conveniently placed for the air base, just in case any off-duty aircrew fancy loading up before they load up. It’s said that this was where the Lake Victoria crash’s doomed Il-76 crew was last seen alive, reportedly just an hour before they made their way across the early-morning runway to a plane that would never make it farther than the bed of the lake opposite. A beer before a flight is not considered particularly unusual by many crews like Mickey’s, and after one recent crash, one Russian official even told Ernest Mezak, in exasperation: “So they were drunk, so what? The plane does everything by itself. The worst that could happen is the pilot trips over the bulkhead.”

It’s a hot wet night at the end of another rainy season. Across the way is the heavily patrolled perimeter of the combined military/UN/cargo air base. And in the fuggy night, Mickey is so face-meltingly stoned on a bag full of Smoke Street’s finest that he can barely stand. I am here with five very loaded mercs—and all their languages appear to have mystically melded with mine into a series of half-finished gibberish, canny smiles of absolute recognition, and shouted exhortations to drink.

Scanning the dark, narrow room, I spot Ugandan hookers and a handful of tattooed South Africans with terrible teeth. (I read later that SA Special Forces operating in Angola found that local guerrilla scouts could smell the menthol of their toothpaste at fifty paces. They promptly stopped using it for the duration of their deployment—often upward of three months—and have teeth so bad they wear them as a badge of honor.) A team of migrant road diggers from the former Yugoslavia roll in. One character at the door offers to sell us loose Viagra. There’s enough pungent skunk-weed aroma sweating through enough pockets to make my eyes sting.

Mickey is letting off some steam, shouting over the televised African football match, downing Club beers with vodka chasers so fast they don’t touch the sides, and looking forward to a night on expenses in a collection of huts with towels just down the track. He’s heard me on the phone telling someone sadly it was “a hell of a way to live” and keeps repeating the phrase with a proud smile. We’ve been talking, shouting, and communicating in a mixture of my comically decrepit Russian and his haphazard English—a mixture that regularly leads to chaos for crews like his in Africa, where air-traffic control often speak French as their second language and only have enough English, the international language of air travel, to ask Mickey in a panicked cry, “Are you speaking English?”

We sit and chat, swap tales about Uganda, Afghanistan, Russia, Germany, the DRC, Sudan, and Somalia, about his Soviet air force days and how Kabul is suddenly neck-deep in Chinese prostitutes. And before the booze takes over completely, I try to tell Mickey about the phone call I got today from someone who clearly doesn’t much care for my snooping around things at Entebbe airport and the army/UN base Mickey flies from, but frustratingly, he’s not getting what I’m saying at all.

As far as warnings go, it was actually rather good-natured, nothing like the rough stuff that researchers like Brian Johnson-Thomas have endured. The well-spoken, African-accented voice was so disarmingly civil I genuinely thought it was one of the hotel staff at first. As far as I can recollect, because I wasn’t writing it down, it went like this.

“Hello, Mr. Potter. How are you? Are you well, Mr. Potter? Because you know, we just want you to know we are concerned with your welfare. We want you to have a pleasant stay, not, you know, having any difficulties.”

What kind of difficulties?

“Oh, don’t worry, I am sure you will keep out of any dangerous situations. We’re concerned for you to have an enjoyable stay in our country. Now, have a wonderful day, Mr. Potter, and we’ll see you at Entebbe airport on your departure, but not before then, I’m sure.”

Friendly chap, polite, and nobody I knew. Which intrigued me. Someone’s interested. And I will find out who it is as soon as I can stand up and straighten out a little. But with the deadly timing of a low-level firebombing run, a bottle of African Nile beer is plonked down hard in front of me by Sergei’s filthy, almost nailless hand. I lift it toward parched and buzzing lips. I realize, even as I tip my head back and drink it straight down, that I’ve switched off as I’ve relaxed into Mickey’s world again; just like him and Sergei, I’ve stopped thinking too much about cause and effect.

Still, dealing with blue-chip companies and major governments on one side of the equation, and the cargo operators, plane owners, and crews like Mickey’s on the other, these agents see the big picture better than most. And it’s a big picture that shows just how few degrees of separation really exist between Mickey, out there amid the missiles and warlords, and our own daily lives.

A boyish, muscular, sandy-haired South African, Iain Clark looks more like a tournament tennis coach than an essential cog in the execution of global cargo contracts for a highly respected firm. His smart office is discreetly tucked away beyond a maze of empty corridors and dilapidated, abandoned offices in an unvisited corner of Entebbe airport’s main building—so discreetly, in fact, that on the day I visit him, airport security either doesn’t know of its existence or isn’t telling. But a good twenty minutes after they frisk me and x-ray my bag, he’s sitting at his desk, talking me through arrivals of the one São Tomé–registered Il-76 and the three banned white Antonov-12s permanently grounded outside.

As the Africa director of a respected and highly legitimate global air-charter agent, he’s the man who calls up the guys with the planes, from Il-76s and Antonovs to Hercules or whatever it takes, when a job comes in from private clients, the military, or anybody else. But he’s also got his nose to the ground and sees everything that happens out here and where it goes next.

Clark explains how one flight in spring 2010—arranged by a contact of his, Russian pilot turned Soviet Air Charter owner Evgeny Zakharov—underlines the anytime, anywhere, no-job-too-tough capabilities of outfits like Mickey’s for clandestine missions.

“That very aircraft there, that Antonov-12, did a ransom drop recently for some pirates,” he smiles, pointing to a photo of a Soviet-era plane with an Air Armenia logo on the side. “It flew from Entebbe, and they flew the money in—it was twenty million dollars—about three months ago. In fact, I don’t know who the insurer [who commissioned the plane] was because it was all kept so secret, everybody kept everything separate.”

The crew’s mission, following orders from the Somali pirates by phone as they flew, is pure James Bond. The arrangements, dictated by the pirates through a chain of gofers, insurers, and cargo middlemen, recall the classic kidnappers’ ploy of leading the ransom dropper to a succession of ringing phone boxes at different locations in order to hold off revealing their whereabouts until the last second.

The Russian-speaking crew was briefed on their mission, just like always. Only this time, one thing was different: They weren’t to know their destination. Instead they were simply given a set of GPS coordinates—at a glance, they could tell it was somewhere over the waters off the Somali coast—and handed a cheap cell phone.

“They had to fly to certain coordinates given by the pirate ship,” says Clark, turning to look out over the runway, his eyes gleaming. “The plan was, once they got those coordinates, they had to come in low at one thousand feet or whatever. At that point, one of the pirates would send them to a text message with new coordinates they had to go to.”

The pilot and his crew shrugged. No problem. And if making a dash for it ever crossed their minds up there, flying over the world’s biggest radar blind spot with a full load of fuel and twenty million dollars in small denominations in a box, then the thought passed quickly. The plane steered its course toward the GPS coordinates steadily: rising eastward, passing over Kenya and the wild borderlands of Ethiopia, then out over Somalia and low over the pirate-patrolled sea.

As they roared onto their destination coordinates, the phone in the navigator’s hand buzzed. The SMS message was blank but for a new set of numbers. The pilot turned his plane in a wide arc and followed this new instruction. Keeping low, the crew’s eyes scanned the water for boats, flares, RPG fire, anything. At this point, they could only trust it was not a trap.

The ritual was repeated. Then, at their next set of coordinates, they made visual contact with two small, fast boats in the water below, hundreds of meters apart. The navigator’s hand phone rang, and an accented, English-speaking voice said simply: “Don’t stop. Just drop the fucking money.”

That was the signal the loadmaster had been waiting for. The strongbox and its attached parachute were already positioned, the loading ramp open, affording him a spectacular, dizzying view. He cut the lines and twenty million dollars vanished into the sky; he watched it sail down. The last thing he saw as the pilot turned the plane for home was a surge in the bright blue water as the pirate boats pulled back their throttles with a loud Vrrrrmmm!, speeding in to converge on the strongbox.

“And that was it,” smiles Clark. “They picked up the cash and off they went.”

Because the whole operation was carried out on such a need-to-know basis, nobody—even Clark—sees more of the picture than what takes place in their stretch of the pipeline. But the aircraft’s operator, Johannesburg-based Russian aviator and businessman Evgeny Zakharov, tells me the ransom was dropped on behalf of none other than world-famous insurance underwriters Lloyd’s of London. “Rather than paying out on the insurance from the lost ship, Lloyd’s preferred to give a percentage of the new-for-old cost of that insurance payout direct to the pirates and get the ship back,” he explains. “It sounds James Bond, but it’s not. For a Russian pilot in Africa, it’s normal, just a day’s work. You know something? We’ve done many of these ransom drops for Somali pirates, and for an ex-Soviet air force pilot used to dropping tanks from his plane, believe me, opening the door and pushing a one-hundred-kilogram box of money out is easy.”

It’s an intriguing counterpoint, and one that highlights the way big Western shipping businesses and former Soviet pilots, legitimate blue-chip multinationals and Somali pirates, coexist, if not happily, then in a way that keeps the wheels of everybody’s business oiled and rolling. In my naïveté, I’d always believed that when governments proclaimed, “We never pay ransoms to kidnappers,” they actually meant no ransom would be paid to the kidnappers. Instead, they mean that of course a ransom will be paid—but they’ll leave it to the private sector. And while a spokesperson for Lloyd’s of London told me they could not confirm whether they’d financed that specific drop without more details on the ship and its policy, these ransom drops to Somali pirates are fast becoming routine for the insurance industry.

It’s also a fascinating snapshot of the realities of global business, the weird force field of mutually repellent opposites that keeps Mickey flying in the middle. When transactions are regularly called for between perhaps the world’s most august, venerable finance institution and AK-47-toting cutthroats in speedboats off the Somali coast, there’s only one mutually acceptable, universally adaptable, ready, willing, and able group of middlemen. And it sure as hell isn’t UPS.

The shift toward private contractors that has private security outfits like Blackwater and DynCorp playing soldiers in Iraq has given small, unaccountable, and hard-to-trace outfits like Mickey’s an increasingly important role in international policing, hostage-release, and peacekeeping efforts, just as they do in humanitarian relief. Between 2005 and 2006, with recruitment targets regularly being missed, the U.S. military began to loosen its rules in an effort to remain viable. Top recruitment bonuses were doubled to forty thousand dollars; the age limit was raised from thirty-five to forty-two; medical standards and rules on past criminal records were loosened; and still they found themselves needing to outsource more “noncore” duties. The delivery of military equipment, cash, construction materials, anything and everything to Afghanistan and Iraq was already up for tender from private companies; now it was spreading like wildfire to anywhere a job needed doing without the risk of what the U.S. State Department termed “entanglement.”

Open your eyes to it, and Mickey’s world is the one we all inhabit: a world where Blackwater, Halliburton, DynCorp, ArmorGroup, and the other private military companies are making hay in Africa and the Middle East by doing the things national armed forces would normally do. January 2011 saw the news break that Saracen, a private security firm linked to Erik Prince of the private military-contractor outfit formerly known as Blackwater, was training private armies in Somalia. (Saracen International is based in South Africa, with an offshoot headquarters in where else but Uganda; intriguingly, Prince’s spokesman denied he had “a financial role” but was, like Mickey, mainly involved in “humanitarian efforts” and fighting pirates off the Somali coast.)

The thing is, for anyone watching the skies, it wasn’t breaking news at all. There had been a private air force—or rather, dozens upon dozens of them—out here for some time.

Indeed, it’s increasingly difficult for governments anywhere to talk credibly about the “good” or “bad” work that teams like Mickey’s do, while the global brands we all love to wear, drink, walk on, talk on, and watch source their labor from developing—read lawless and highly corrupt—economies, and need their own instant transport and logistics infrastructure to match. Of course dirty work is going to need doing by someone so the rest of us can benefit. And any pronouncements about “dodgy” air operators who’ll take anyone’s shilling begin to sound very hollow indeed.

And it strikes me that this is what all the monitors, the record keepers, the global policemen who watch and wait and report on “shady deals” or allegedly inconsistent paperwork, rogue plane registrations and illicit flights, “merc” crews, and secret ops are missing.

It’s not just that some of these hush-hush flights and supply drops in unstable places might in fact be made in the name of completely legitimate causes; but that the very willingness of some outfits to enter into unconventional business dealings, do things that aren’t necessarily by the book, and take no-questions-asked mission briefs from unknown clients that the monitors lambaste is precisely what makes them the only game in town when the good guys want a bit of Mission: Impossible–style swashbuckling done, too.

As Iain Clark says, “They’re easy to deal with, you know? If they can do it, they’ll do it. It’s not like they’re full of shit, basically, like a lot of the Western crews, where it’s, “Uh, no, the book says this, so, no, we can’t do that’—sometimes just to be difficult. The Russian crews are quite obliging, you know? It’s like, ‘Don’t worry about it!’ ”

Talk to anyone on the ground from Darfur to Dubai, and they’ll agree with Clark—perhaps off the record—that there’s a place for small, wildcat crews like Mickey’s too; indeed, the loyalty and admiration they command is genuinely surprising.

Before I leave Clark’s office to navigate the endless abandoned corridors, dead ends, puddles, hanging wires, and shut doors that will finally open and spill me back out into the daylight, he throws a copy of the Ugandan news journal the Independent across the table to me. “Read that,” he says. I pick it up. The cover story is a report into the causes of, and alleged government cover-up involving, an Il-76 that exploded and crashed into Lake Victoria in 2009, reportedly on a secret mission to Mogadishu for another U.S. contractor. “Jeez, it makes me angry,” says Clark. “I mean, these guys really have their knives out for the Russian guys, the crews, and the operators.”

For the first time, this relaxed, infectiously good-humored man shows a flash of indignation as we part. “I’ve always found Evgeny Zakharov—whose company operated that flight—to be pretty much aboveboard,” he says. “But read that article, and it lays the blame on his planes. Now, I’ve never known him to cut corners. A lot of people who operate Russian planes will go with documents they’re given, if you know what I mean—and if the documents have been falsified, so be it—but I’ve never had a problem with him or his aircraft.”

By the time I’ve been searched again and am blinking in the African afternoon heat on the other side of Entebbe runway’s razor wire, Clark’s impassioned defense of the crews I’ve come to know seems somehow misdirected. Because while I was waiting to be frisked and ejected, I read the report he threw across the desk. And I don’t think it has its knives out for the crew or airline. The real villain of the piece is a very different one. And like the Mafia itself, it’s far more subtle and elusive than any one man.

The demise of the Candid and the men on board was almost crueler for being so sudden and so complete. Unlike Sharpatov, unlike Starikov and Barsenov even, the crew never knew what happened. And they never had a chance to play their one and only ace—their supernatural skill with a 1970s-vintage Ilyushin.

The plane took off from the notoriously slippery tarmac at Entebbe without a hitch, bound for Somalia. It was 5:14 A.M., the March morning still had its bite, and the radar was down again—it had recently had a complete overhaul, but the new, upgraded system had mysteriously stopped working after only four months. The surface of the great lake was smooth, only birds and early-rising local fishermen punctuating the calm through which the huge plane tore upward, still low enough over the water’s surface to cause ripples. The men on board were tired but they were professionals, and Mogadishu was a run that always made you concentrate, focused you. Tense, but not too tense. Nothing they couldn’t deal with. That one Russian word: nichevo.

That’s when the universe opened its jaws and swallowed the men and their plane whole.

If there had been radar, the operator in the control tower would have seen the plane abruptly drop from the screen just five and a half miles out over the lake. In fact, there were eyewitnesses—the fishermen, two of whom were nearly killed by pieces of the plane as it exploded, disintegrating in midair. One saw fire coming from the left side of the plane before it exploded. One saw the plane’s lights were out a split second before the blast. But it was all so fast, said everyone. In the blink of an eye (and some had the order of impact and breakup differently) the Candid had “split down the middle like an egg,” an American salvage technician said later—and plummeted, flaming, into the lake.

It lies there still, buried under twelve meters of silt and mud, itself beneath many meters of water, literally inside the lake bed. X-rays of the earth show the fuselage, sure enough split down the center, and maybe a piece of tailplane sticking up at an angle like a question mark.

The question mark won’t go away. And while the newspaper report Iain Clark threw across to me is hardly generous to expat airmen or the charter airline, Evgeny Zakharov’s former outfit, Aerolift, it reads to me like the indictment of an ecosystem.

Sure, the piece does point to alleged failures of maintenance on the part of the company, which appears to have been flying a plane twelve years beyond its end-of-service life; more tendentiously, it makes claims about the airmen. First, that navigator Evgeny Korolev had a forged navigator license. “Navigator Licence First Class No. 000316 which you have in your possession was issued on 08 October 1996 in another navigator name,” wrote the Ukrainian aviation authority in response to inquiries by the Independent. “Please, pay attention to the fact that the photo of Korolev is stuck over the stamp. Therefore the certificate in the name of Korol should be considered illegal.” Second, that copilot Alexander Vochenko hadn’t flown an Il-76 since his Soviet air force days back in the 1980s and 1990s, and it’s never been established whether Captain Viktor Kovalev had ever actually possessed an airline pilot license. And yes, it reports claims that the crew were witnessed drinking in the Four Turkeys at three A.M., then reporting for flight duty at four. But it ends with a cry: “People’s lives are worth more than a few extra dollars’ profit.”

In response, the community is quick to rally to the defense of men, the airline business, and the aircraft itself. Iain Clark’s anger at what he called the “knives out” report in the paper is echoed by others I talk to, including Stepanova.

“The Il-76 in Lake Victoria was in very good condition—very good!” she rages.

A friend of the navigator Korolev and an acquaintance of Vochenko and Kovalev, she was with the crew the week before. They were new arrivals, and she helped them open their Ugandan bank accounts and had lunch with them the week before the flight. She says she’d agreed to let them use her home address to open the accounts, and then heartbreakingly, one day in September 2010, a year and a half after the crash, received a bank statement for one of her dead friends through the post.

“I couldn’t stop crying,” she says. “It was so sad for me. I flew with him everywhere. He even taught me to drive …”

Even the facts are less clear-cut than the article suggests. “Evgeny Korolev had his license,” she says. “He might have had his revalidation to one of the African countries forged, which I doubt, but if he’d forged it, how would he have got away with flying in South Africa before that? I’d flown with him many times over the Congo, in fact I was sitting with him most of the time, and he was in the cockpit with my friend over DRC the flight the bullets nearly got them.”

Perhaps, I venture, and it wouldn’t be for the first time, the Ukrainian aviation authorities’ records are inaccurate, as well as the Ugandans’. Or it may be that for jobbing airmen, the rush—indeed the need—to get on a crew, get flying, and make a paycheck as soon as possible on arrival in a new country—at the same time as trying to sort out their affairs and get their paperwork in order—means men take to the air before the official t’s are crossed, just like the otherwise law-abiding motorist who drives for a few days while his car tax is “in the post.” And when it all goes wrong, it looks bad to observers, regulators, and reporters used to getting definite answers.

Even Mickey shies away from some of the stuff that goes on. Ask him to name names, and he’ll just say, my guess is as good as his. He mentions the Il-76 at the bottom of the lake. “Who knows what caused that crash? Sabotage? Terrorists? Cargo? The plane? Maybe nobody even knows what was on that plane. The cargo they were paid to take, yes. What else? Probably the crew didn’t know really what it was. All of these things. Nobody knows.”

But for all the doubts they throw on the validity of the crew’s paperwork, and indeed on the condition of the plane, the investigative team at the Independent save their real ire for the postcrash cover-up, and for the politics of a system that can allow men like these to fly and die on a secret, quasi-military mission to Somalia in the name of getting their dirty work done cheaply, and then let them—literally—take the fall.

They also point toward a more sinister culprit: an illicit, or at least highly discreet, network of secret dealings between their government, its military, and the warlords, terrorists, and pirates of the Congolese hills that use Mickey, and crews like his, as often unwitting, deniable gofers, mules, and fall guys—with the UN’s MONUC base in Entebbe as a fig leaf.

And just as with the Somali ransom drop, the crews’ missions into these rebel-patrolled hills tell the secret story behind some of the most high-profile headlines in recent years.

ACCORDING TO THE newspaper’s news editor, Patrick Matsiko wa Mucoori, with whom I’m sitting less than an hour after leaving Iain Clark, the frantic rescue mission by locals and airport staff was aggressively hampered by the police and the army who appeared, just like the military and secret service agents throwing a security blackout around the runway in Belgrade back in 1996. Out on the lake, he says, they prevented rescue teams, and even local fishermen, from trying to make their way over to the burning, and rapidly sinking, wreckage.

The more Patrick talks, the more it becomes clear that while the planes, the owners, the crews, the operators are all convenient targets for investigation, their presence is a symptom, not the cause, of a deeper malaise.

Patrick’s office at the Independent is, it has to be said, pretty grand: dark-wood tables, bright, contemporary decor, PCs and polished steel. I tell him so. “It’s not my office,” he laughs, knocking back the last of his strong tea and cassava. “This is a meeting room. Here we can talk more privately.” The privacy (heavy door, no window onto the street, airlock-style reception) is necessary, he explains, because of the constant attentions and office intrusions of government spies at the newspaper offices. “You might have noticed one or two outside the entrance,” he smiles. “They just stand there looking like they’re waiting for friends, then report on their mobile phone who they see coming and going. They figure they’ll spot who’s leaking us stories that way.

“They get in, too—you see someone in the office and you assume it’s just a new person or a visitor, and it turns out they got in and were looking around.” He sighs. “Then after that, we usually get raided and the police take our computers away. Again.”

Stocky and smartly dressed with a neatly clipped mustache, Patrick is every inch the image of the urbane city slicker, with a confident, unflappable manner. And since the Il-76 came down, he’s needed all the confidence and steel he can muster. Because part of the reason the government is currently so interested in him is his team’s investigations—prompted by the Ilyushin’s explosion over the lake—into the vast amount of smuggling, profiteering, corruption, trafficking, and mercenary adventuring carried out by the Ugandan authorities themselves.

The Ugandan government and the military, he says, use private operators to do covert work in neighboring Congo, Sudan, and Chad as well as Somalia to the north. Many of these government-chartered flights involve private racketeering and looting by the army’s top brass. Given the very visible United Nations presence at Entebbe airport, and its use as a staging post for secret U.S.-led private military missions into Mogadishu, the government is understandably keen to disguise its use of these former Soviet planes.

“I started thinking, why didn’t our Civil Aviation Authority guys on the runway check whether these crashed Russian planes were okay to fly before they took off, like they would with any other plane?” Patrick says, though it’s worth pointing out that the cause of the crash still remains in doubt, and the aircraft’s condition is no more likely to be guilty than anything else. “My CAA source told me, ‘These planes are parked at the air force base part of the airport. So they get in these planes, they taxi for takeoff from the military base, then at the last minute come onto the airport runway—where our jurisdiction begins—then off!’ As they are actually taking off, you only hear the base commander—that is the commander in charge of the air force base—calling the head of the CAA, saying, ‘We have this flight, it’s going now, please clear it immediately!’ So the CAA says no, how can we clear it, we need to inspect it. But when they do, the air base commander calls the minister of defense—he makes a telephone call, and that’s it. He just tells them, ‘No questions! Just clear these flights from the military base. We take responsibility, but don’t ever ask to inspect them, just clear them to take off, understand?’ And of course nobody but the crew and soldiers is allowed anywhere near the air force base.”

Already alerted by the shroud of secrecy around the lake on the night of the crash, Patrick did some digging. What he and his team found was a huge operation, bigger than anyone had suspected: a regular, top-secret trade corridor involving Ilyushin and Antonov crews being commissioned by the army and government to fly between the lawless, warlord-controlled uplands of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and Kampala, carrying priceless natural resources that they could sell for cash to line their own pockets. Clandestinely logged timber, gold, and silver, and even animals and animal furs, are all part of the traffic.

“Eastern DRC, which borders Uganda, is a rebel area, there’s no military there, no government—completely lawless,” he explains. “It’s almost like Somalia; it’s in the hands of warlords. You just deal with different warlords and bandits here and here and here. So you deal with them, and of course you buy the goods cheaply, pay them, and come back. Now, the Ugandan army spent about five years in Eastern DRC, claiming that they were pursuing Ugandan AVF rebels that were based in the Congo. So they captured the eastern Congo—it was actually under the control of the Ugandan People’s Defense Force—and started transporting minerals and wood and so on using these planes. And the UPDF formed alliances with various rebel groups. Eventually, due to international pressure, the UPDF left, but it maintained its ties with those rebel groups, and now they go in on these Russian planes, buy timber from local militia leaders in Congo—and you can buy anything—and just come back.”

For insiders, the logistics are breathtakingly simple. You want a local warlord to source the goods for you? Call up an old contact from the conflict, they’re all there, and they’re all on the same mobile provider as you. You need backup, hired muscle? That’s okay—you’re the army, just bring a few colleagues or command a few of your men.

Now, the plane. That’s easy, you’re the army, you’ve got dozens to choose from, right? Except you want to do it on the cheap because whatever you spend here is coming out of your own sweet pocket, and you certainly don’t want to have to ask too many people’s permission—less still have the UN contingent camped across the grass ask where the plane is they were going to take on an aid drop today. Bad look. So you hire an independent air operator and a team of mercs—probably one of the Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, or Byelorussian teams—with a giant plane that can fit, say, a platoon of men, a couple of jeeps, and a whole lot of contraband timber. Call it an Ilyushin-76, hypothetically, for the sake of argument. And make sure the guys you’re dealing with have that can-do spirit Iain Clark mentioned. If the price they quote is $3,000 an hour, offer to double it on invoice if they’ll split the difference. If they’ll do it, you pay $6,000 from the army’s coffers and collect your $1,500 personal cash-back to share among your men, with maybe a crafty $250 for your commanding officer to look the other way while you’re gone. Everybody’s happy.

Still, the cheapest planes might not always be the newest or the best maintained. They probably wouldn’t pass the CAA’s airport runway inspection. No sweat—just use your triple-security, razor-wire, well-guarded, UN-populated air base. And if the CAA boys get uppity on takeoff, that colonel you bunged the hundred-dollar bill to will put them in their place. Hell, cut him in on the proceeds later, why not. With margins this big—and we’re talking hundreds in return for every dollar invested—there’s plenty to share around.

Patrick continues: “That’s how simple it is. First, make contact with your rebel leader. Go armed—contract a local or use your own soldiers—then come with a plane. Your warlord will be armed, and let’s say you want timber, he’ll just find a road, and say, ‘Okay, from here, all this timber, take it.’ And your men just roll it and put it on the plane, because these planes are huge.”

In fact, it’s quicker and easier to make a private mission for black cargo than it is to go by scheduled civilian airlines: no papers, no passport, no visa, no immigration, no customs, and—best of all—no limit on what you carry back, says Patrick. It’s all very civilized, too. “You can do it all in a day, or you can stay over—all the warlords have comfortable places where they put our guys up when they come over—and to their contacts they’re only ever a mobile phone call away.”

Who’d have thought it? In this bright new world of the consumer as king, even the die-hard Congolese guerrillas resisting government forces in the hills and jungles of Central Africa put twenty-four-hour customer service at the very heart of their business plan.

And that’s it. Except for customs—and let’s even assume you’ve got some independently wealthy and heroically incorruptible customs guys here for a moment, highly theoretical guys who are immune to bribes. Hmm, could be a problem. Then again, no. Remember, stupid, you’re in the army.

“Customs can’t go into the military/UN cargo air base,” says Patrick. “It’s not civilian jurisdiction. It’s army and defense ministry property. Soldiers guard it, and if a customs officer goes there, they just arrest him for trespassing. Trespassing! And”—he laughs at the irony of it all—“jeopardizing national security!”

The clock is ticking, Patrick’s on deadline, and his editor’s getting antsy for this week’s news pages to hit the press, so we say good-bye. I decide to walk home and take my chances with the snitches, to see if I’m followed. As I step out into the overcast, red-earth-and-tar patchwork of Kanjokya Street, hobbling between termite mounds and potholes and wondering which of the loiterers in the wet dirt road is the army spy, I’m splashed by a camouflage, open-topped UPDF jeep doing its best to circumvent the foot-deep holes and the Friday rush-hour traffic. In it are four men in tailored suits and jewel-tipped sunglasses carrying antiquated wooden rifles over silk-clad shoulders.

There’s no pavement, so I step carefully between road and grass, jeans getting splattered with mud. I turn around at the corner and look back. The guy reading the paper has folded it up and is looking past my shoulder, and there’s a man regarding me steadily while he talks away on a mobile phone at the junction. Then again, I’m a wet, muddy mzungu on foot in a country where even the hardest-up local trader would rather flag down an illegal boda-boda moped ride, so of course everyone’s looking. Then the rain starts again and I stumble between torrents and traffic, wondering about that anonymous Ugandan voice on the phone who wished me a safe stay. But now there are too many people walking my way to be sure of anything at all.

WHAT ALL THIS means for monitors of illicit activity is something most can’t even begin to fight, even though men like Peter Danssaert and Brian Johnson-Thomas have long known it and have seen it again and again, in Belgrade, in Uganda, in Afghanistan.

The problem is this: Mafia activity is by its very nature against the interests of the state. We’re used to thinking in terms of “families” and “gangs”—tuxedoed Sicilians making offers we cannot refuse. So when the state itself gets in on the act, as it did in early-1990s Russia, late-1990s Serbia, and in our own time Afghanistan, where President Hamid Karzai’s inner circle, including his warlord brother Walid, stand accused of facilitating “Afghaniscam,” awarding contracts, and plundering coffers at will, nobody quite knows the difference anymore between organized crime and economic policy. This appears to be true in Uganda.

A UN report entitled “Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” published back in 2002, sums up the reach of this private-enterprise shadow state and its devastating effect.

The elite network operating out of Uganda is decentralized and loosely hierarchical, unlike the network operating out of Rwanda. The Uganda network consists of a core group of members including certain high-ranking Ugandan People’s Defence Force officers, private businessmen and selected rebel leaders/administrators … The network continues to conduct activities through front companies … Each of these companies may concentrate on one or two commercial niches, though these may change. The role of the companies is to manage their respective niche activities by assembling the personnel, logistics and occasionally the financing for the operations … The network generates revenue from the export of primary materials, from controlling the import of consumables, from theft and tax fraud. The success of the network’s activities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo relies on three interconnected features, namely, military intimidation; maintenance of a public sector facade, in the form of a rebel movement administration; and manipulation of the money supply and the banking sector, using counterfeit currency and other related mechanisms.

Everything disappears into the network’s ravenous jaws, and then into the holds of the giant cargo planes it charters. Wood from protected plantations; blood diamonds; coltan, a chemical highly prized by African exporters for its value to mobile-phone manufacturers; gold. Local butchers are forced at gunpoint to skin animals and hand over their hides to the network’s fatigue-clad soldiers, and even live cattle is rustled, by stealth or force, from herders. And for their complicity, the suppliers, the local warlords, and tribal leaders enjoy the protection of UPDF troops, as well as gasoline, cigarettes, and arms, all exempt from taxation.

Sometimes the logic is so neat that even those most affected can’t see it. Later tonight, I’ll head to a hotel bar and watch some TV—BBC World, I think, but I can’t be sure—and see a documentary on a woman who runs an elephant sanctuary. She’s protected by soldiers because of the constant activity of armed poachers in the area and threats to her life, but complains that whenever she leaves her guarded headquarters on the reserve for a trip to town or abroad, “It’s as if I’m being followed and spied on by poachers somehow, because they only seem to strike the very moment I go away.” She regularly comes back, she will say, only to find that the soldiers she employs have been outfoxed by heavily armed ivory poachers who’ve raided the reserve, gunned down an elephant using military-grade Kalashnikovs, and disappeared with the ivory, apparently before the soldiers could locate and stop them. The soldiers keep a low profile in the doc, only to scratch their heads and wonder aloud to the woman how the mysterious poachers keep eluding their grasp. “They must be very clever,” says one.

And I’ll stare, and think, surely it can’t just be me? Surely everyone here can see the big, bad question hanging in the air—a figurative elephant in the room? But the woman doesn’t see it.

It seems to me like the perfect expression of the failure of agencies, NGOs, and law enforcement alike to stop traffickers. In the face of the pursuit of profit by any means necessary, anyone thinking in terms of moral right and wrong—anyone looking for criminals—is blind. Like government, like reserve stewards: the unthinkable is happening right under your nose, courtesy of regular Joes earning a buck, and you’re out looking high and low for the bogeyman. And the planes just keep coming and going, for the UN, the CAA, the military; for aid organizations and businesses. Wholly respectable and above-reproach operators are forced to compete with those who’ll do anything, take anything, work for anyone, and artificially lower their prices because they’re carrying secret cargo for cash.

Weeks later, in a rare bust, an unaccompanied shipment of two tons of ivory—317 elephant tusks—and five rhino horns will be seized at Kenya’s Nairobi airport, having flown by cargo plane out of Entebbe in huge crates declared as containing fresh avocados. The prime suspect, an employee of the cargo operation, simply vanishes.

THE FUNNY THING is, I’ve met a few of these pilots, on both sides of the divide, and some who’ve moved between them, and they aren’t bad guys—on the contrary. They’re also pretty anxious to do the right thing if they can. So they’re doing what everyone’s always telling them they need to do to stay out of trouble, just as they had to back in the air force, and just as we all have to. They’re keeping their heads down, working hard, and doing exactly what the authorities ask of them. If those authorities, if the state itself, is doing something wrong, they rightly ask, should somebody important not be doing something about that?

A week on. I’m standing on the wet perimeter track of Entebbe airport, looking out along the runway from which all flights—including, it is said, countless “merc” flights—depart and on which they land. To my left, the civilian airport. To my right, the military air base, with its containers stacked and ready for loading by soldiers onto flights to eastern Congo and, cuddled up next to them, its rows and rows of stenciled UN tents. Welcome to the world of advanced globalization. Welcome to the world where a mafia is not a mafia but is reborn as the state itself. Welcome to a place where even what is illegal is not illegal, if the network is doing it. The UN-Ugandan military base is for their use only; but the going rate for bribing your way to use it for a commercial flight is a mere $300 from the pilot.

Then again, if the network doesn’t want it done—poking around like Patrick over at the Independent, or me here—it’ll send someone to put a stop to it right away, legal or not. And right on cue, here’s the drab green jeep, purring round the perimeter to check my ID, make a call, escort me away.

The neat rows of UN tents, huts, and offices are so close I could pick up a handful of gravel and break the windows, but uncannily, despite the howling noise of the engines, the unloading of loot in front of them, the soldiers and airmen scattering through the gates, the daily coverage of the smuggling ring in opposition newspapers, nobody in the UN camp seems to notice a thing. The network is, after all, the government. And these people are its guests. So like everyone in every mafia economy, they make nice. Play the game. Make their pacts and deal with their devils. Focus on the always-worthwhile bigger picture. And meanwhile here come the goons with guns and wraparound shades, and here, as we talk, comes another planeload of goodies from the DRC.

There are no absolutes, and everything is allowed if the right person says it is allowed. Out here, away from the tiny, exclusive gated community that is the first world, out here in the sweltering dusk of the developing world, big rights and abstract wrongs are outweighed by cash on the barrelhead.