CHAPTER NINETEEN

Getting Your Kicks on Route Il-76

Central Asia and the Caucasus, 2009

MICKEY DOES PLENTY of what he calls “pizza delivery” runs, too—a common feature of the routes over former Soviet territory from Afghanistan through the dusty wastes and old Red Army bases of the Central Asian ’stans and the Caucasus, as well as Africa—in which some cargo planes still take hitchhikers and drop off casual packages in lieu of there being any serviceable roads or functioning infrastructure. These are impromptu or short-notice landings and diversions, sometimes for fuel, sometimes for pickups and dropoffs, sometimes just for social visits. We’ll remain on the ground just long enough for Mickey to run over to the terminal, hut, or patch of earth and point, and for the one, two, or three uniformed or squinting, shirt-sleeved men to shout and point and drive their flashing, bleeping truck up to the plane and rummage about and disappear again, waving.

These runs don’t appear on anyone’s flight plans, so wherever we land, pizza-delivery stop-offs are often a surprise for the conning tower, air traffic control, and even the runway cleaners and sleeping technicians (whose first indication that they’re about to be landed on is when they see an Il-76 bearing down on them over the perimeter fence). They’d be just as big a surprise to Mickey’s clients, bosses, shippers, and business partners if they knew.

Mickey’s not alone. One European security contractor who’s flown with these outfits on business for coalition support illustrates just how ad hoc many of the missions undertaken by pilots like Mickey are. “I was in an Il-76 en route to Afghanistan from an airport in Germany, or at least I thought we were en route to Afghanistan. But halfway there we just banked and landed with no warning on some godforsaken barren runway. The pilot himself leaped out and disappeared into the Nissen hut. He was back five minutes later, which was when I found out he’d just stopped as we entered this particular country’s airspace and paid for over-flight permission using his own credit card! It was just like buying some petrol for the car.”

Reporter Doug McKinlay, meanwhile, recalls an incident from one aid flight to northern Afghanistan during the first freezing post-invasion winter of 2002. “I’d traveled out there in an Il-76, stretched out on top of a pallet of tomatoes someone was sending as aid,” he says. Once airborne, he found he wasn’t the only noncrewmember on board. As McKinlay stretched out, he found himself greeted by “this creepy American pastor” who was along for the ride. The pastor explained he was heading out there doing a tour of the refugee camps and an aid flight was the only way to get him and his camera crew there from Dubai. There were warning signs in the way the man seemed preoccupied with his appearance, and kept bawling out his long-suffering personal assistant. But nothing prepared McKinlay for the bizarre spectacle of the pastor’s attempt to engage with the locals he was there to help. “The whole thing was a circus,” recalls the Canadian. “He was standing on stages in front of these starving people freezing their asses off and holding up boxes of food, telling them through the mic that whoever said they wanted to know about Jesus could have some food. The Afghans were just bewildered and he kept on asking for shows of hands for Jesus, then shouting that wasn’t good enough, and the security goons kept beating on anyone who got too close to the food truck.”

To add to the surreal scene, the pastor’s assistant was “all hair spray, too much makeup, and high heels right in the middle of the refugee camp,” recalls McKinlay. “Just in case the evangelical address to the camp was shown on local TV back home.”

It was on the home leg, heading back toward Sharjah, that these unlikely Samaritans got their own first taste of just how flexible a crew used to pizza runs can be. “So over Uzbekistan you could see this assistant started looking a little weird,” laughs McKinlay. “She tottered up to the pilot and said she needed to use the bathroom. Now this is an old plane, they’ve ripped almost everything out, so the toilet was a bucket. Plus she’s gonna do it around a bunch of journalists, the reverend, and eight Byelorussian airmen. So she went back and pleaded with the pilot, and he just said, ‘Okay,’ and banked this gigantic Ilyushin, found an airfield he used to know from Soviet days right out on the plains, and landed it on a dime.” The grizzled airmen, the pastor and his entourage and one veteran Canadian reporter all found themselves looking everywhere but out the right-hand side of the plane as the assistant clattered down the steps in her heels, then hobbling to a concrete shelter in the distance that the loadmaster had pointed her toward. “Two minutes later she emerges,” laughs McKinlay, “stumbles across the dirt trying to be ladylike, climbs back up the ramp, and we’re gone. That plane was on the ground for ten minutes, max. But with the amount of fuel it takes to get that thing off the ground, it had to be the most expensive piss in history.”

The speed and agility of our load-offs, stopovers, and informal supermarket sweeps encapsulates everything that makes crews like Mickey’s so fundamentally perfect as business partners to organizations of all stripes. Often, deals are done and loading handled so quickly to maximize turnaround and minimize red tape that the first time Sergei will audit or adjust the cargo—if he goes to it at all—is at cruising altitude.

Like any long-distance truck driver, Mickey’s come to know the best places to make convenient refueling stops, too. Indeed, he’ll often divert from his route specifically to refuel at what first appear to be little more than glorified filling stations; places like Baku, the oil-rich former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan’s capital.

Fly with them and you’ll notice this booming, freewheeling oil town holds a special place in the hearts of many of these Afghantsy cargo dogs and their business partners. There’s something of the Here-Be-Monsters about it for Mickey; the last bit of Caucasus before you enter Central Asia. And with thousands of square kilometers of metronomic oil pumps pushing black stuff out of the ground so manically, the suburbs are often knee-deep in cheap fuel. On our final approach, I saw ragged men dipping buckets into shiny back puddles in the bare earth by the roadsides to light their lamps and fire their tractors.

Low avgas prices, even by Russian crews’ standards, make it the cheap-as-chips place to refuel a twenty-five-year-old superplane—especially when you’re on a European aid run from Germany, the UK, or Scandinavia down into Afghanistan, Iraq, Dubai, Sharjah, Pakistan, or China. Receipts are plentiful and generously prepared. But one thing Mickey is far more circumspect about, and what puts the chills on just about everyone here you mention it to, is the illegal market in the other black stuff.

Baku, on the shores of the Caspian Sea, an inland sea covering more than 1.4 million square miles, is part of a watery trade crossroads linking Iran, Russia, Caucasian Azerbaijan, and the first of the Central Asian ’stans—Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Fed by Russia’s Volga and Ural rivers, and home to the world’s largest concentration of sturgeon—the fish whose caviar commands prices of up to sixteen thousand dollars for a single kilo—it is also a smugglers’ playground with a long and dark history.

The city’s organized-crime cartels were legendary even in pre-Soviet export-boom times, when one of its most feared enforcers was a young upwardly mobile biznesman, bank robber, kidnapper, trafficker, counterfeiter, and killer by the name of one Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili—later known to the world as Josef Stalin. Today its growth as a freewheeling buffer zone between Iranian, Russian, and Turkish spheres of influence has, according to Russian diplomats, turned it into a thrilling, terrifying arms traffickers’ paradise. But it is also home to one of the most powerful former-Soviet mafiyas on the planet: the caviar mafia. Though supposedly protected, the gourmet black eggs are increasingly in demand among the new rich of China, the Arab world, and Europe. According to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), more than $25 million worth of illegal caviar is airlifted from these shores into the Arab Emirates every year, where it is bought and sold by Dubai’s all-powerful organized-crime networks, with whom Baku’s own institutionalized mob can do good, good business. The caviar, says CITES, is then shipped onward to hubs in Asia, North America, and Europe, where it is sold as being of lawful origin. From dirty to clean, as laundered as a Sharjah sheet.

Normally, of course, airport security would notice. But airport security just might not be Baku’s high point. On one journey back out of Kabul, the guards’ state-of-the-art bleeper detects some old ammo I picked up in Bamiyan, northern Afghanistan, and have hidden about my person as a souvenir. I’m stopped. We talk. They take one of the bullets away, wave me on through to the plane with the rest.

So the caviar heads somehow, and very quickly, to the UAE, global hub for planes, businesses, and Mickey. From where I’m crouching in the glass belly as we take off again and climb over the Caspian, the aerial view is spectacular: oil tankers and glittering blue water, and all the business connections laid out before us. We circle round, above the city center, and over Baku’s upscale shopping district, where row upon row of empty upscale boutiques provide the perfect wash for all that money coming back; then past the swankiest hotels in town, the Baku and Absheron, where Chechen warlords were flown by Soviet-made cargo planes via Turkish Cyprus for rest and recuperation during the wars with Russia. There, says Russia’s NATO representative Dmitry Rogozin, they received “Azerbaijani passports on which they could travel to Turkey or Russia on criminal business, while those who did not fancy long-distance trips could stay and earn money on the side through racketeering and drug trade, as Azerbaijan became a transit point for weapons supplies from Turkey.”

Then up, into cloud, and toward the Gulf.

Rogozin talks of an illicit “air corridor” that was opened up between Cyprus and Chechnya via Azerbaijan and Georgia in 1995, a wormhole through which guns, troops, and cash could be teleported. But if the route and destination sounds familiar, then so do the men: rootless, international business types haunting the air-conditioned, high-class-escort-lined, luxury-branded malls and corridors of Dubai’s hotels and palaces, rubbing shoulders with old armed forces, GRU, and JAJ pals; crews and captains of Sharjah-based planes, and captains of import-export industry from the former Soviet Union, Serbia, Britain, the USA, Europe, China, Japan, Australia. Indeed, stories of Il-76 and Antonov-operating cargo businessmen with checkered pasts in this “caviar mafia” are legion.

CITES says that these Dubai-based mafia groups coordinate the caviar smuggling by “forging documents and making false declarations to customs officials to obtain re-export certificates from local authorities.” With a huge, speedy pipeline in hidden cargo capacity using Baku as a staging post on its way to and from whiter-than-white aid drop-offs and Sharjah, Dubai, and Western Europe, not to mention Central Asian forgers selling diplomatic IDs and Russian driving licenses at roadside markets, the risks are phenomenally low. But the rewards—a kilo that costs twenty dollars to buy from a Caspian poacher retails for four thousand dollars in New York—are sky-high.

So it’s no surprise that feuds, murders, and double-crossings are common. Since the 1990s, guards and policemen who’ve attempted to stop the trade have been assassinated, with the most deadly attack killing sixty-seven people—twenty-one of them children—when a nine-story apartment building for border guards in Kaspiysk was bombed. A few years ago, a hundred-man mob raided a coast guard station on the Caspian and liberated confiscated caviar boats in what officials described as part of “an ongoing war with the caviar mafia.”

Unsurprisingly, some claim the link between the caviar mafiya and the planes goes deeper than client-courier. One clearly bitter man claiming to be an avialegioner wrote a letter to an African newspaper recently denouncing a Russian business associate as having very strong links with the “black caviar mafia” at home in the former USSR. The mafia had, claimed the man, lent him money to purchase the cargo aircraft he started out with. “But because they have been in jail for some years [the operator] has never repaid his investors’ money. The problem is, now they are out of jail and searching for him in order to get it back.” But again, there were some strange points in the letter that cast doubt not only on its credibility but its origin. For one thing, the writer claimed in his letter that his former associate had relocated to Africa as a way to remain out of reach of his creditors in the mafia and “keep a low profile”—although if that’s true, then his base, the most GRU-haunted, Russian-speaking enclave in sub-Saharan Africa would seem an odd choice of bolt-hole. The African telephone numbers supplied by the correspondent are disconnected (mobile) or ring until they cut off (landline), while the e-mail seems to be dormant. No wonder the newspaper to which it was apparently sent refused to publish.

Indeed, one pilot on a Russian forum calls the writer “a very-informed person with a good imagination and a bad upbringing.” Of course, embittered former employees and business associates will say much, and even if the letter did originate from the name given at the foot of the page, there’s no evidence that this is more than an attempt to smear a former business partner—perhaps even to tar him with the same brush, fairly or otherwise, as Viktor Bout. I asked the subject of these accusations for comment, but though he said he would respond, and though I chased him, I never did hear back either way. And I can’t honestly say I blame him.

In any case, a low profile is always good even for those on the legitimate side of the cargo business too—which is the vast majority of hardworking airmen and businessmen from ex-Soviet backgrounds.

Still, sometimes, unavoidably, Mickey’s profile sinks lower than even he would like. Downtime is the part he and the crew all dread, with a Soviet-bred fear of famine. Nevertheless, it’s a reality nobody, whatever their connections, prices, or networking skills, can avoid completely. It lasts as long as it lasts, too—for unlucky crewmen, there can be months of trying to exist on the last paycheck, eking out an existence in some far-flung corner of the developing world or a flat in Ulyanovsk until another job comes up. Little wonder the pressure to take on jobs that look dodgy or downright dangerous starts to tell.

Which is where Mickey and Sergei’s entrepreneurial touch—their shuttle traders’ instinct for business within a business—pays off. When something breaks, when a deal falls through, when there’s simply no work on and we’re kicking our heels, their time is filled with “shopping”—though not of the air-conditioned-mall variety. In late-2000s Kampala and Jinja, we brokered deals together for ten-kilo sacks of this, cases of that, paid in cash, got it into a rusty old Mercedes with a flatbed trailer, and drove to the plane, lugged on and pushed down and covered over. The next morning, he took me shopping at an open-air market in Kampala, stacked high with bald car tires and bolts as big as your forearm, “for spares.”

Wreathed in the barbecue smoke, the tumbledown avionics marketplace straddles the muddy disused railway line by the side of the highway. Festooned with garish, hand-painted ads and hoardings featuring lurid approximations of Nokia phones, medical symptoms, pop stars, and Heineken cans, these pile-it-all-on-the-dirt-floor markets are as close as it gets to repair centers for the lower-end Antonov and Ilyushin jockeys passing through. Gigantic, bald tires lie in heaps; dials and panels are stacked and swept into table corners; wing and tailplane flaps weigh down the canvas roof coverings in the African breeze; more bolts, screws, and washers, nuts and clips, glisten among assorted tat (the front half of a VW camper van, sawed off; dozens of “found” car registration plates from South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya; seats torn from an airliner).

“Everything’s very cheap,” says Mickey, “but only if you don’t tell them how much you need it.”

The stallholder says he had a flight recorder here once. I am surprised. “Who wants them?” I laugh, without thinking.

“Maybe somebody just wants theirs back,” deadpans the merchant.

Only later, when I read about the cloud of uncertainty around so many crashes here, and the semi-illicit nature of some of the flights that have come down, do I realize he’s not joking at all. If I was behind at least a couple of the flights that have come to grief somehow in Africa over the years, and about which the rumors of sabotage and weapons running refuse to die—and when clients include warlords, corrupt military, big business, and government interests from Somalia to the Congo—there’s plenty of scope for pissing off the wrong people and racking up scores that need settling, as well as the paranoia and suspicion that lingers around any unexplained incidents. I’d want to get my flight recorder back from whichever fisherman found it, and pretty badly.

The make-do-and-mend attitude to using whatever you’ve got on hand spills over into other areas too. If we’re short on time, we eat whatever’s on board, and some of us—but never Mickey, and never Dmitry the navigator—take our bottles of beer, Coca-Cola, or spirits with us to finish during the flight. Once the flight’s over, it’s fair game for everyone, but on the wing, it’s only Sergei who really unwinds—sometimes unravels—with the airborne partying, knocking back anything he can find among the cargo and from time to time hitting the aviation spirits.

For loadmasters, the job’s pressures come in quicker bursts than most. They are the ones who must cajole, wisecrack, and charm everyone from local herders to militiamen and customs officials to airport baggage handlers into helping get everything in. They are the ones who need to remember what’s where and who knows it. And if that means Sergei self-medicating to the brink of psychosis with whatever’s handy, so be it. I’ve seen him sleep on the runway, in the shadow of the plane, joint in hand, and I’ve seen him drink to celebrate takeoff. On one flight he gashed his head so badly falling off the pile of crates where he’d been dozing that the skin on his temple opened like a hatch, and the hot, greasy floor began to stink like an abattoir with his congealed blood. He’d been drinking neat spirit and African waragi, or “war gin”—a potent, home-distilled alcohol made from yam or banana plants that regularly kills whole villages in East Africa. Even while we cursed, bandaged him, and poured water into his mouth, Sergei only woke up enough to mutter and turn over. I next spoke to him shortly after landing, where he appeared bright as a pin, though as pale, skinny, and bloody as a Times Square down-and-out. He coyly ruffled his bandaged wound as if I’d complimented him on a new haircut, and seemed quite baffled by my concern that he get to a doctor. After a while the others were pretty much leaving him to it. “Sergei is Sergei,” shrugged Mickey when I told him.

Just how close Sergei came to death that day doesn’t dawn on me until a few months later, when three Russian aviation technicians on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi die, having been found staggering, vomiting, and complaining of breathing difficulties. Toxicology tests will later confirm they were killed by drinking methanol—a highly toxic form of alcohol used for aircraft maintenance. In fact, Sergei falling off the crates midclimb because he was dizzy may have saved his life. In the Islamic hinterlands of Indonesia, Sudan, and Somalia, where drinking alcohol is illegal, potentially lethal local moonshine or, failing that, aviation spirit is the scourge of expat aviation guys.

One high-ranking Russian diplomat and Afghan war veteran speaking to me on condition of anonymity recalls garrisoned Soviet pilots out on “the spirit” in Kabul. In a curious twist, it was noticed by Soviet commanders that the pilots and crew who drank their aviation spirit, though they were often unreliable and occasionally died, never came down with hepatitis or parasites because they drank it instead of water, which was often unsanitary. It became an article of faith among veteran crews that methanol drinkers enjoy a net gain in lifespan. Still, through accidents, liver disease, or OD, it was a winter-warmer habit that would kill thousands.

And so Sergei drinks. And try as I might, I can’t understand the continued allure of the life for men in their mid-fifties, or the need Mickey and the rest of them, one way or another, have for taking risks. Their very continued existence feels like an airborne contradiction to me, a Self-Preservation Society for kamikazes, an ultimate survival course for men who don’t seem to fear death at all. Which concerns me greatly, because I’m a dedicated chickenshit with a healthy aversion to any kind of danger.

Sometimes the combined promise of the big payday and this unshakable faith in their own continued existence leads Mickey and the crew to take on the world’s Premier League death trips. One day Mickey asks me, just casually, if I’d like to stow away, for a small consideration, on a flight to Mogadishu the next time he flies there. “See-It-and-Definitely-Die Mogadishu,” as one expat pilot cracked to me, is officially the most corrupt, lawless, and dangerous place on earth, patrolled by pirates, stalked by the Islamist guerrillas of al-Shabab, and a graveyard for shot-down Candids. Even Soviet Air Transport’s Evgeny Zakharov calls it the most dangerous of them all. “For operations in very dangerous places, like Somalia,” he says, “people know what they’re doing. We pay big, big money for people to fly there.”

The Indian Ocean is regularly awash with cash, the strongboxes and parachute pods used for drops bursting on impact with the ocean occasionally. But if you believe Mickey, there’s another side to it all, beyond the money, that makes Mogadishu both genuinely scary and weirdly exciting to fly into. We don’t get it together this time. The UN’s got it sewn up officially, and the crew have nothing on with them this week, though the Candids flying U.S. military contractors on Somali black ops are an open secret, as are the regular “rogue” flights carrying arms for al-Shabab, and it’s anyone’s guess as to who else is coming and going. But Mickey tells me not to miss it if I get the chance. “It is,” he assures me with the weird half smile of the connoisseur, “something very special.”

But then so, it turns out, is his specially formulated approach method, which is even more taxing than the crazy downward lurch into trigger-happy Kabul. Or more suicidal. On missions to Somalia, with pirates rattling off machine-gun rounds from their boats and the local al-Shabab militia firing antiaircraft rockets from the ground, Mickey’s gang have learned to barnstorm in, wave-hopping low over the water, dropping to “well under” a thousand feet, skipping the spray straight onto the salty tarmac at Mogadishu’s beachfront airport.

This is a navigator’s favorite nightmare—Dmitry hunkered down there in the glass blister hanging beneath the cockpit for one long panning shot across the bright blue ocean as shoals of fish, ground-to-air missiles, and more shoals of fish zip past below. Weird, he says, how the presence of pirates has done wonders for the local sea life; now the Moonraker-style Japanese supertrawlers have got kidnap fear and are staying away like everyone else. All very beautiful, “like Eden.” The navigator distracts himself by thinking about such things because, well, what else should he think about? In fact, the whole crew knows Mickey must get his approach absolutely right again—and that they have to be lucky.

If Mickey needed anything to focus his attention on the takeoff and landing in Mogadishu itself, it came in the form of two Il-76s piloted by friends shot down within days of each other amid the Battle of Mogadishu.

On March 9, 2007, the crew of a Byelorussian Il-76 were flying into Somalia from Entebbe carrying a top-secret African Union cargo—described as aid. The plane was on its final landing approach, just under three kilometers from the runway at Mogadishu International Airport, when a rocket fired from a small boat a few hundred meters out to sea blew a hole in the left of the fuselage, damaging the landing gear. The rocket should have exploded, sending shrapnel through the plane, and yet mysteriously, neither crew nor passengers received a scratch. Unverified reports suggest this is because it hit the armor plating of an unlisted piece of secret cargo, unknown even to the Ugandan troops on board—a tank hidden in among the cargo in the hold. As it was, the plane caught fire but the pilot managed to wrestle it to the ground safely. While the fire spread, the crew and passengers—Ugandan soldiers—smashed through the escape hatches. Their speed saved their lives: Mogadishu airport’s only fire engine took more than an hour to reach them because of a fuel shortage. An airport employee had to run and fetch a can of petrol and fill it up first.

The stricken eighteen-year-old Candid sat charred and smashed on the runway for two weeks. But just as with the plane whose crew were wiped out by malaria, there were forces at work that would see the plane fly again, even fatally damaged. Or at least pieces of it, for there was too much money in its parts for it to be written off completely. Its four Soloviev engines alone would fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars if they could be rescued. So on March 23, 2007, just two weeks after the downing of the first Candid, another Il-76 and crew was dispatched by the owner, bringing equipment and engineers who would cannibalize the dead plane.

The second Il-76 crew, all Byelorussians, some from Mickey’s old base in Vitebsk, flew in and dropped the repair team without incident. But someone had been watching them closely. Shortly after takeoff, at a height of just three thousand meters, the pilot reported “a problem” with engine number two. As he turned to return to the airport, the second and third of three surface-to-air missiles slammed into the plane. The wing exploded, falling into the ocean, while the plane, now a ball of fire, continued along the beach line, smashing into a farm. Witnesses saw crushed farm animals, human corpses, and wreckage spread over a four-acre radius. Ten of the eleven-man crew died instantly, while the eleventh was found staggering around the crash site and died later that day. Reports suggest that missiles were fired from a farmhouse near the airport and from a small boat, suggesting that the attack was coordinated. Somali troops quickly cordoned off the area—not to trap the pirates who’d shot the plane down, but to “clean up” the scene. Within hours, they’d stripped the wreckage and issued a statement claiming no missiles had been fired after all, and they didn’t know what had happened to the Il-76.

Back in Byelorussia, mourners lined the streets to welcome the airmen’s corpses home. Talking about it, Mickey himself is obviously affected by the fact that the Byelorussian airmen were Vitebsk alumni, and some were returned to his old billet town for burial. I was pretty shocked myself—I’d done a humanitarian run from Denmark to Baku on the plane with its Byelorussian crew a couple of years before. But guerrillas’ rockets and pirates with RPGs have long been a fact of life on Somali flights. In a curious twist of fate, May 6, 2010, saw a Spetsnaz commando raid to free a Russian supertanker’s crew from pirates (who were threatening to blow up the $93 million ship) launched from a Russian destroyer called Marshal Shaposhnikov.

Information is everything to Mickey’s crew: who’s shooting, who’s paying, who else has been, who’s made it back. These guys are info addicts, and that makes them incurable gossips. They’d make great reporters, I tell them: They’ll shoot the shit with anyone—bag ladies, cops, soldiers, crims—if it’ll give them a lead, if someone’ll let slip a phone number, if it’ll help them get a fix on the weather, the fighting, or some guy who’s in the market for a couple of crates of Courvoisier they just happened by over the border. Where there’s reception, they talk on phones in short snatches or while we’re waiting for takeoff, then switch to radio to finish the conversation. We live point to point, not day to day, and measure out our lives in stacks and crates—the toppling, strapped-down bar chart of the independent trader.

The crew get supremely antsy whenever they’re on the ground for longer than it takes to pick up or drop off. Because while everyone in the aid game keeps telling you it’s a race against the clock, everyone in business will tell you just as straight that time is money. In any case, as far as the guys shipping the goods are concerned, they are indistinguishable—same game, different logo.

In some ways, it’s infuriating to chat with Mickey and have the most casual questions batted back at you. It took me ages to find out where he was from, simply because his gut response to everything is to shrug, mutter something vague like “the USSR,” or fob me off with a half-truth. Conversations about destinations, cargoes, or friends and family connections are nonstarters. In a moment of exasperation, I once told him the only reason I asked so many questions in the first place was because he didn’t tell me anything to start with. Mickey just shrugged and offered me a cigarette, then called to Dmitry and started talking to him.

But looking back, I can’t really work out why that surprised me so much.

On December 12, 2009, apparently working on a tip-off, Bangkok police raided and grounded an Il-76 on the tarmac at the city’s international airport. The plane was refueling on a bizarre, twenty-four thousand–mile planned route from arms-embargoed North Korea that zigzagged over most of the earth, taking in the Ukraine, Iran, and Thailand.

This time, the mysterious tip-off was spot-on. As they ripped the plane apart, they found case after case of what were listed as “machine parts for the oil industry,” but was in fact thirty-two tons of RPGs, bombs, ground-to-air missiles, and other military hardware, guns, and ammo. This was big: a sanctions-busting run carrying an illicit arms consignment from North Korea. The crewmen were taken away, the plane impounded, the cargo confiscated. For the Thai police, the raid was a total success.

That’s where the jubilation ended, and the bafflement and frustration began. Because this was where investigators looking for answers encountered the same blurriness that drives me to distraction with Mickey and the boys.

The man whose crew was manning the Il-76—a Kazakh from Shymkent called Alexander Zykov whose cargo aviation company, East Wing, may or may not have been operating the flight, instantly washed his hands of the shipment. Zykov and his wife—who, it turned out, was registered as the Il-76’s legal owner via her Sharjah-based company—denied all knowledge of the flight and its business. They claimed to know nothing of any arms, and reportedly told journalists that, although the men worked for him, they were all currently on holiday, having rather mysteriously taken unpaid leave together a few weeks before. Indeed, when reporters from the Associated Press called Zykov by telephone prior to paying a visit to the compound where the men had stayed, he’s reported to have told them he’d no idea how to find out who’d even booked the flight, or on whose behalf, slamming the phone down after suggesting they “Go find them” themselves.

Yet when the detained crew’s close friends and families were tracked down, they reacted with indignation, intimating not just their belief that the crew (who’d all worked for East Wing for long enough to be known locally as the Zykovtsy, or “Zykovites,” and even had their own bedsits in a military-style company compound for downtime between jobs) had been very much on East Wing business at the time of the Bangkok bust, but that this obfuscation was pretty much par for the course, along with faked papers and sketchy jobs. The crew themselves protested they’d assumed the cargo was what it said on the manifest: components for oil equipment. Beyond that, it was “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Then things began to turn really weird.

The more investigators tried to find out who was behind the flight, or who’d placed the order, the more they felt they were wandering in a labyrinth of mirrors. Airmen, charter agents, customs officials, monitors all weighed in, coming up with company after company whose name appeared on different forms and certificates. Yet every single one turned into a dead end. Contacts explained they’d never heard of the plane, flight, or owner. Telephone numbers turned out to be dead. E-mails bounced back. People named on the documents denied any responsibility for the contraband. The plane had been leased and chartered onward, through shell company after shell company, and finally to a firm created just one month before the flight in Spain whose listed owner appeared, after much research, to be fictitious. Then, in a further blow, the North Korean company who appeared as having fulfilled the order for the weapons turned out not to exist either.

Days later, the crew were quietly released from their Bangkok jail and sent home without charge. After all, there was no evidence at all suggesting that they had any knowledge of the nature of their cargo. Even seasoned trackers like Brian Johnson-Thomas shake their heads looking back on it. “It smelled of a setup,” he says. “There’s something fishy about it, all the way from the tip-off to the fact that the guy behind it all now seems not to exist. Is it a failed sting, something bigger? We have to wait and see.”

While the bust and intercontinental goose-chase gained brief news value for its perfect storm of sketchiness, there’s so much about this case that’s actually pretty typical—almost textbook—for gray ops. If you take all the statements at face value, neither crew nor owner knew of the cargo; nobody was responsible for the plane; the crew were employed by the airline, but not flying on the airline’s business or behalf; and clients existed on paper only.

“The phase we’re in,” says Moisés Naím. “is about certain activities becoming tightly interwoven with other very legitimate operations, so much so that it’s hard to detect them, and even harder to legislate against them.” In other words, there’s sufficient room, here and on many such flights, for doubt, deniability—and for a lot of clients, that’s just fine. Nobody wants to put their stick into the anthill for fear of what they’ll stir up. Right now, the shippers get their flights, the pilots get their business on the side, the airports make money, everyone’s happy. Like Brian Johnson-Thomas’s pilot friend, who came across as highly public-spirited by offering the NGOs his services for free on some routes, Mickey’s generous terms are a gift horse to aid agencies. Understandably, with rates as cheap as his, many are reluctant to dig deeper into his motivations.

Still, the Dunkirk-spirit nature of the cargo business—not just humanitarian flights to emergency zones, but just-in-time commercial and military logistics deliveries too, along with a breakneck schedule of too many flights in too short a time frame so familiar to small-time man-with-van operations everywhere—means turnaround is often alarmingly quick and scrutiny often comically low.

Even the most brazen stowaways and bizarre cargo consignments get carried through. After the 2004 tsunami sent waves over thirty meters high into coastal communities from Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia to Sri Lanka and countries across the Indian Ocean, destroying cities and killing more than 230,000 people, the veteran Eastern bloc A-Teams with their cavernous superplanes and anything-anywhere attitude were the first on the scene with relief and reconstruction supplies in what, at the time, was close to hell on earth.

When the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers mounted their first air attack in March 2007, the Times (London) reported that the Tigers’ attack aircraft had been smuggled into the country in kit form after the tsunami of 2004, exploiting lax security amid the aid effort.

There was time to pick up plenty extra to smuggle home, too. John MacDonald remembers having the wits scared out of him by one vodka-drinking stowaway while flight managing for the hordes of swarming Ilyushin and Antonov crews that turned the skies black over the disaster zone.

“During that period in Southeast Asia, there were these Il-76s and these two Antonov-12s; they were taken out there to be based in Kuala Lumpur and to fly aid and supplies all around the region,” he says. “I was running around these aircraft, just running around like crazy, finding out whose they were, just to make sure they were okay and safe—it all went well. So I walked into one plane, and the crew compartment’s not that big in those things, and I could hear this unearthly shrieking. I walked through the cargo door, and walked up, and this horrible screaming was getting louder. I looked up, and from the floor to the ceiling, there was a huge, four-foot-six, maybe five-foot-high cage there in the darkness, and in the cage was this huge tropical bird with half its feathers fallen out, just flapping and squawking. These guys had been based in west-coast Africa, and the pilot had bought it on the black market over there the week before the tsunami thinking he was going home the next week to the Ukraine and would give it to his little girl. But then when the emergency came, there was too much work to turn down getting relief jobs in. They traveled halfway round the world, and all the while there was this man-size bird, they’d been feeding it vodka and bread, and its feathers are falling out, and it’s just squawking away with this unearthly sound in there. You could hear it for miles around.”

He laughs as he counts off all the checks and landings they’d have had to make with their shrieking passenger on the way.

“Just look at the map and the range of the plane—they’d made all these flights to get from West Africa to Malaysia, it took them ages, from Pointe-Noire to Nairobi, then Addis Ababa, then the UAE—maybe Sharjah—then somewhere in India, then one more stop somewhere else, then over to Kuala Lumpur. All with this giant bird squawking and flapping. Nobody saw a thing. Not only that, but bear in mind the crew have been sleeping, eating, everything on the plane: It’s a madhouse. Anyone who’s been in these planes at the best of times knows the smell is like the back of a Moscow taxi, all body odor and grease and whatever else, and on top of that you’ve got a giant bald alcoholic bird.”

In fact, animal life is a frequent stowaway with some crews, and a nice little earner if you can keep it alive long enough to deliver it. But these extra cargoes have unintended consequences, too. Within a year, black-cargo flights in and out of Africa were being identified by TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring network, as the real culprits for several outbreaks of bird flu in previously “clean and contained” countries.

“The official line that it was migratory birds was rubbish,” says TRAFFIC’s Richard Thomas. “It’s no coincidence that in Nigeria, where they banned the import of chickens because of bird flu, a supposedly sealed-off and certified farm right next to the airport was the site of their outbreak. They’d banned imports, but of course diseased birds then began being smuggled in on these masses of unmarked planes.”

Their laissez-faire take on import-export “piggybacks” when flying aid to tsunamis or peacekeeping runs for the UN has made them legends, even among UN staff themselves. “I can’t help but miss them,” sighs one aviator who flew supplies during the Angolan war in the early 1990s. “Back in Luanda my colleague was flying for the UN,” he recalls. “He wanted to buy an African gray parrot for the pilot house, so he promptly went over to the Il-76 crew, who were also flying for the UN, to ask for a favor—he wanted to ask them to buy an African gray parrot in the northeast of Angola on their next trip, during the week. Well, they invited him in and offered him a vodka or two—and this was at ten A.M. My friend declined the vodka and showed them his walkie-talkie; he said he was on standby and asked them to get him a gray parrot on their next trip. The conversation got involved and more vodka flowed, then all of a sudden the drinking stopped and the Il-76 crew got up and walked out. My friend asked if this was an inconvenient time and apologized for interrupting their socializing time in UN camp. The captain turned around and said, ‘No problem—we fly now and fetch the bird!’ And so they did. By six P.M. there was an African gray parrot in the house!”

The stories are legion—birds, tanks, pigs, helicopters, statues of pop stars, pianos, whole wine cellars, people, fake watches, arms, drugs, there’s nothing that hasn’t at some point become a bit of piggybacked “cash cargo” on a fully legitimate humanitarian run paid for by someone who has no idea what’s coming in and going out with their lifesaving goods.

But beyond the hijinks, there are clues that this casual approach—and the black-hole status of airports in places like Afghanistan and sub-Saharan Africa—prevail at least partly because of the reluctance of the people we’d normally think of as the “good guys” to clean them up.

Because sometimes, even humanitarian-aid flights in Mickey’s Il-76 become a cover not just for illicit extra cargo the crew themselves might want to carry, but for top-secret, Bond-style “black ops” missions by governments like our own.

JUST AS THE bad guys are all looking for a little legitimacy from the cover a UN contract or humanitarian mission provides, so do the people we’d normally think of as the good guys.

Which means someone very powerful indeed has an interest in providing the best smokescreen possible for whatever Mickey’s crew is doing—and some of the “illicit” cargoes we’re all trying to track are in fact carried as part of a highly complex, well-planned web of operations on behalf of our own governments. There have long been reports of unlisted passengers arriving and being spirited out of crisis areas by easygoing crews or game-playing operators. Diplomats and UN officials are known to fly undercover, inside specially comfort-fitted Il-76s, when they have to fly en masse. The photos are on the UN Web site after the fact; but for security reasons, the details are kept vague until they’ve landed. Indeed, I’ve been unlisted on most of my flights, albeit under less salubrious conditions, dealing directly with the crew alone and paying them for the inconvenience rather than go through official channels, airlines, or lessors themselves; it’s simpler that way. But it’s now clear that the odd cash flight, and the occasional scandal over “extraordinary renditions” of suspected Taliban combatants, is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to governments turning to ex-Soviet black-cargo planes themselves when there’s a shady job they need doing. According to Igor Salinger, Damnjanovic and Djordjevic’s doomed arms shipment from Belgrade under the watchful eye of the Milošević regime was far from the only black-ops waltz the former Yugoslavia’s cargo charter men danced with world governments. “They made a number of flights out of Bosnia on behalf of U.S. arms trading companies,” he smiles. “And we both know that in Bosnia you can’t pee your pants without Langley CIA being informed.”

In 2007, a UN panel of experts report circulated to the UN Security Council even found that the Sudanese government in Khartoum had chartered Antonov-26s, painted them in white United Nations livery, and used them to ferry secret stashes of arms to the Janjaweed militia with which to terrorize villages in Darfur.

On occasion, these heavily disguised cargo giants themselves had, it was revealed, been used as bombers in a secret bombardment of civilian populations by President Omar al-Bashir’s Sudanese regime. “The most astonishing revelation,” reported the Times, “was the use by the Sudanese armed forces of [these] white-painted military aircraft in Darfur.” On March 7 [2007] a photograph was taken of an Antonov An-26 aircraft on the military apron of Al-Fasher airport, the Darfuri regional capital. Guarded by soldiers and with bombs piled alongside, the plane was painted white and has the initials “UN” stenciled on its upper left wing. Another Sudanese military aircraft was disguised in the same manner. The report said that white Antonovs were used to bombard Darfur villages on at least three occasions in January.

Like Damnjanovic’s doomed arms shipment from Belgrade on behalf of the Milošević regime, like the masses of spontaneously combusting, flapping, vaporizing-in-midair flights over the Congo and Angola, these apparently harmless humanitarian-aid flights have a strange habit of blowing up—almost as if there were high-explosive cargoes on board instead of the tires, sanitation equipment, foodstuffs, and tents that appear on the manifests.

And whenever these flights do come down, it feels like Surcin all over again. I do some more digging into the fate of Katya Stepanova’s navigator friend. And the more I discover, the more it looks like talk of incorrect paperwork, faked licenses, alcohol intake, and so forth is (intentionally or not) a very convenient smokescreen. Increasingly, it seems that nothing the crew did or did not do would have saved them. And equally, perhaps Stepanova is right when she says the Candid was in tip-top condition.

Because the simple, inescapable fact is, the Ilyushin-76 blew up midair, shortly after takeoff from Entebbe, just after five A.M. on March 9, 2009, disintegrating with such force that an engine shot off, missilelike, and sank a local fisherman’s boat on Lake Victoria. That looks like an explosion. And if the plane was sound, and the crew didn’t ever know what hit them, then just what exploded up there?

This is something the investigators seem unusually keen to gloss over, preferring to ask questions about the navigator’s paperwork and the pilot’s CV to questions about the nature of the cargo. Indeed, early claims coming from Ugandan authorities and the owner were that it had been carrying water-purification equipment and tents for the African mission to Somalia. And then the wreckage, physical and metaphorical, began to float up to the surface. And something else emerged with it: claims that the plane was carrying Burundian soldiers on a peacekeeping mission, and men from the Pentagon’s new breed of corporate mercenaries, a U.S. “private military contractor’ called DynCorp, then at the center of controversy about its conduct carrying out contracts for the Pentagon in Iraq.

If there was a secret military cargo on board—perhaps one so clandestine that even the flight’s operator, Evgeny Zakharov, perhaps even the pilot, didn’t know what it was—could it have caused the crash?

It’s a conclusion that has plenty of support among aviation communities in the area. Some—and Stepanova and the operator of the flight, Zakharov’s former company Aerolift, appear to agree on this—go further, believing the flight was sabotaged by Somali militants opposed to Uganda’s assistance in the UN peacekeeping effort there. They point to the fact that peacekeeping operations have been sabotaged at Entebbe many times before; that organized attacks on peacekeeping operations in the region are frequent and the subsequent bombing, in July 2010, of venues showing World Cup games live in Kampala, were carried out by Somali Islamists al-Shabab.

One thing’s certain: Whenever a cargo flight explodes, focusing on the crew and raising the possibility of human error is convenient for everybody but the dead men. From insurance claims to official secrecy, everything gets easier if the crew caused the crash, not the plane or the cargo. And ironically, the pressure the Ugandan army put on the CAA to clear flights as they take off not only means their cargo can’t be inspected; it also denies ground staff the chance of finding any other irregularities. An al-Shabab bomb, for example.

There are too many questions to leave it alone. So I decide to return to the crash site myself, in the company of one of the first men on the scene.

The sky is black and bruised over the northern shore of the world’s second-largest freshwater lake. On this overcast June afternoon, the breezes in the grass ringing the gunmetal waters have the look of the rural East Anglian coastline, albeit with eerily calm sea and thinner cattle grazing on the adjoining fields. On the far shores, invisible on the distant, watery horizon, are Kenya and Tanzania.

One year on from the crash, boats still comb the endless waters close to the shore, known as Magombe, where the parts of the Candid’s fuselage and engines fell. “Magombe actually means ‘death,’ ” says Entebbe-based investigative reporter for the national Daily Monitor newspaper Martin Ssebuyira, pointing out to the spot, a couple of miles out, where the Candid’s remains lie, split and smashed, under eighty feet of water and a further forty feet of impenetrably thick mud. “It’s had the name for centuries—I think nothing good happens there. Fishing boats sometimes don’t come back from that patch, so most of them avoid it. And now it’s death again.”

A wiry, soft-voiced Ugandan in his early twenties, Ssebuyira looks nothing like the kind of hard-bitten gumshoe who’d pose as a member of the secret police to get on the hastily scrambled boats and see the crash site close up, but that’s what he did. The Entebbe reporter was chased away from the crash scene the night the UPDF boats and their searchlights went out on the lake. But unlike the other reporters, he came back, hid a camera beneath his jacket to resemble the bulge of a plainclothes officer’s shoulder holster, bluffed his way onto one of the boats, and was one of the first to the point of entry.

“We kept finding body parts,” he says. “A lot of things. And it was clear from the floating wreckage that this plane did not simply crash … But that was the story that kept coming out! One of the fishermen said he saw fire on the plane in the air. Then he was taken away by the authorities. Then boats came to patrol the shore of the lake. All the local people on the lakeshore were prevented from fishing.”

Ssebuyira filed his reports. More witnesses appeared, more evidence surfaced. Slowly, the official story changed. In addition to the crew, seven “others” had been killed in the crash. They were later claimed to be fighting men, service personnel on a low-profile flight to join a Burundi peacekeeping mission. Then the DynCorp connection came to light.

The reasons for the crash, though, are shrouded in mystery; not because there are too few of them but, unusually, too many—certainly more than enough to lead Ssebuyira and others, like the expat Russian airmen and their families, to suspect smokescreening. “It was announced that the crew were drunk,” says Ssebuyira. “They were seen drinking at the Four Turkeys at three A.M., before reporting for flight duty at four A.M.,” he says. “And there were claims the captain thought an hour’s sleep was enough to sober up. But they also claimed that the plane was past its service life—it had expired, but they were still flying it. Then they found that the crew might not have been the expert fliers they thought. There were a great many things that should have been fixed, but they weren’t.”

So who was behind the smokescreen, if indeed there was one? In addition to the Ukrainian aviation authority casting doubt on the navigator’s qualifications, over at the opposition paper the Independent, news editor Patrick Matsiko wa Mucoori’s sources also told him that the CAA of the Russian Federation had drawn a blank in tracing the pilot’s papers, too. Their report concluded simply: “Maybe Kovalev did not have a pilot licence.” But despite the accusations regarding the crew’s fitness to fly, the plane’s state of repair, and the rebel activity in the area, another story slowly began to emerge.

The huge explosion onboard that “cracked the fuselage down the center like an egg,” in the words of U.S. divers who attempted to raise it, was, according to this version of events, not caused by any water-pumping or purifying equipment or other innocuous aid; and the DynCorp “peacekeeping contractors” bound for Mogadishu weren’t just hitching a lift. The water burned so fiercely and long that even the military stayed clear. Something down there was worrying them, and with the high-explosive nature of the event, it didn’t take too long to figure out what it was.

“They weren’t carrying aid equipment,” snorts one pilot who claims to have known the men. “They were carrying a payload to Somalia for the Pentagon’s private army. Then the plane blew up before it hit the water. That was a big fucking bang. And now they’re arresting anyone who goes near it or saw the flash in the sky. It doesn’t take a genius to spot a cover-up.”

Without evidence, without transparent investigation—and U.S. navy divers subsequently being called in to conduct the salvage operation inside a cordon sanitaire didn’t help calm the conspiracy theories one bit—these are the theories that spread. And now, with the plane buried under forty feet of mud at the bottom of one of the great African lakes, it’s likely we’ll never know the exact cause.

Still, Mucoori continues to hope something good will come out of it, for the sake of the crews if nothing else. “Hopefully,” he wrote in his report, “this will mean that aid agencies and large logistics companies will start using legitimate operators rather than just using the cheapest option and feeding the cowboys. People’s lives are worth more than a few extra dollars.”

But with even blue-chip Pentagon partners willing to use shadow planes and lie about the cargo—not to mention using “humanitarian aid” as a fig leaf for whatever military payload they are really transporting in beat-up Soviet charter planes with crews like Mickey’s—suddenly every cop is a criminal. Indeed, those who’ve known Viktor Bout for many years claim his gunrunning was as much for the major governments and their cronies as for anybody they disapproved of, and that’s why he was allowed to continue for so long, with so many investigative task forces being pulled off the case and resources constantly being diverted from the departments monitoring his activities.

Typically, investigations are halfhearted or too quickly concluded. Causes are covered up. E-mails—mine and others’—to investigative teams, to governments, to aviation authorities, go unanswered, calls unreturned. The UN’s Congo operation lists a phone number in Kinshasa, but I rang it every day for six months and never once got picked up. Even the UN secretary general’s office becomes evasive with me when I ask how come the UN base in Entebbe is so unaware of the extra cargo on flights in and out, saying they can’t tell me “when we’ll have an answer for you, or if we’ll have one at all.” Africa is chaotic, say all parties, and a soft, universally beneficial vagueness descends again—one from which Mickey and his men may be small winners, but from which there are those who stand to gain far, far more. And while everyone has an interest in leaving room for doubt about their use of this secret superpipeline, men like Patrick Mucoori continue to push for transparency, men like pilot Viktor Koralev and navigator Evgeny Korolev continue to die, and the Soviet-made steel keeps roaring overhead.