CHAPTER FOUR

The Machine

Post-Soviet Russia, Early 1990s

THE GUNS, AMMUNITION, PLANES, EVEN NUCLEAR WARHEADS flowed out of the military stores, the bases and the silos, even straight off the factory lines and into the hands of anyone with a good contact, a bill to pay, or a score to settle. But for Mickey and his comrades, turning the free-for-all into a worthwhile business would take all the wiles, expertise, and perseverance they’d learned flying their endless sorties over Afghanistan. It would also take the right plane.

After years of neglecting the wider economy in favor of military might, the former Soviet Union now faced a downhill race, just as Mikhail Gorbachev had predicted, to liquidate as many of these assets as possible, as quickly as possible. Warheads, tanks, bullets, guns, jet fighters, ships, grenade launchers, transport planes, the lot.

Arms manufacturers, sensing the approach of a drastic liberalization of the economy, began to adapt to market conditions. But their production lines, used to working toward targets outlined in five-year plans, couldn’t react fast enough. Commissioned by a suddenly bankrupt army, dozens of Soviet monster aircraft—Ilyushins, Tupolevs, and Antonovs—often made it no further than the post-assembly depots, left to rust in their dozens outside factories and on silent, abandoned airfields across Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. Faced with the option—sell them and claw back some cash for yourself, or let them rust—their guardians were only too pleased to let them go to whomever came knocking. But if a new model was still too much—well, there were also plenty of combat-worn planes in various states of airworthiness to be bought, leased, or borrowed on very favorable terms, solo or crew included, from the armed forces themselves.

For a team like Mickey’s, trained to a high level but with only one skill to speak of, taking to the skies again in a repainted Il-76 felt, he says, “like getting back to business as usual after all the worry.” They had the plane, the crew, and, in the burgeoning black markets of former Soviet states, no end of demand for discreet, speedy transportation to satisfy.

Suddenly, and to this day exactly how remains a mystery, these men with no money of their own and a few solid army connections were in business. They flew whatever came their way, from that first “liberated” Candid in Kazakhstan to whatever hastily assembled patchworks of leased engines and borrowed airframes someone had losing money on a parking berth and wanted crewed. They flew for others and flew whatever unlisted cargo they could for themselves: pilot fish for the new breed of sharks that were suddenly circling international waters. And they soon found they had three “invisible” competitive advantages that would prove crucial as their business activities grew.

The first was a vast, loyal contact network. With ex-Soviet military and crew stationed everywhere from the coast of Afghanistan to Angola, they enjoyed the benefits of the world’s biggest old-boy club. For discreet missions at short notice, reliable recommendations—preferably not just for capable crew, but the right sort of people—were often the only way to staff up extra charters. And reliable connections on the ground at destination were often the only way to ensure customs could either be successfully negotiated—or negotiated with.

The second subtle advantage enjoyed by ex-Soviet airmen taking to the privatized skies was a deep knowledge of mission terrain that went way beyond most other pilots’. Between 1979 and 1991, Soviet Il-76 pilots made more than 14,700 flights into Afghanistan, transporting 786,200 service personnel and 315,800 tons of freight. Soviet support for proxy regimes in Africa, Asia, and Latin America like Angola, Cuba, Afghanistan, Korea, Vietnam, and Chile throughout the Cold War meant a large number of the pilots knew more about the airstrips, weather, terrain, and even local infrastructure, customs, and connections than anyone quite realized.

The killer difference, though, was in these DIY import-export barons’ relationship with their aircraft. After all, having trained, graduated, captained, and seen active service in Il-76s throughout their careers, often fixing engines by hand and stripping down the interiors to accommodate more men or equipment under duress and in sometimes extreme conditions, they knew their plane like it was part of them. And that meant they knew its hidden secrets.

Today, British aviation consultant Brian Johnson-Thomas sits on the UN’s panels of experts on the traffic in destabilizing commodities throughout the world. But as an investigative journalist and former flight manager, he’s witnessed these crews’ sheer grit, talent, and ingenuity up close. He’s also come to admire them, cautioning me when we meet that they are among the finest aviators he’s ever seen, and “certainly no worse than anyone else when it comes to moral choices.” A strapping, white-bearded fiftysomething with a soft Celtic burr and a tweed jacket, he cuts an incongruous figure among the bony, glazed faces of the former Soviet crews and deathtrap planes with whom he flew for years for NGOs and monitoring groups. This experience has given him a rare insider’s view of their operations … and their hardware.

“People who don’t actually fly them don’t realize that Il-76s especially have all these hidden advantages to them,” he says. “For example, they can load and unload, land and take off without any ground assistance, so whatever you do, you don’t need anyone else’s help. But the real surprise for me was the hidden spaces. Nobody ever looked beyond the cargo hold—not once—but it’s an open secret among the crews that there are all these spaces down in the belly of the plane. You’re flying these things all over the world, and nobody but you knows that there’s a good fifteen tons of stowage beyond what it says on the operator’s manual.

“Even customs officials, who check cargo off every day, don’t ever fly in these things. They have the contents on the cargo manifest, and they tally with the maximum load on the spec. Then, if they stop for a moment, they’ll do the maths and sure enough, the manifest takes the plane up to Maximum Take Off Weight. They expect a single hold space, and that’s what they’re shown, and they tick off what’s in it, and that’s their job. Beyond that, they don’t have the time or the resources. A customs official in the third world might get paid five U.S. dollars a day, on a good day. They aren’t likely to stop and arrest and generally make life difficult for the people who fly in and give them a bottle of vodka or case of cigarettes that will fetch five times that on the black market.”

It was perfect. It quickly dawned that “the people who’d check the cargo against what we’d say we were carrying had never flown the plane—they hadn’t a fucking clue, quite honestly,” tuts Sergei.

“They’d look at the manual, see that 192 tons was the maximum takeoff weight, and sixty tons of that was cargo. When that sixty tons had been loaded up and accounted for, they’d sign it off! But the thing is, we can carry fifteen tons more under the floor. Maybe sixteen, if we’re feeling lucky. You have to start a little way back on the runway because it’ll take you that much more power to get airborne, but you can do it. Well, we can.”

So long as they didn’t want to carry all the standard escape equipment that would normally fill those chambers, they had the perfect smuggler’s vessel. Not only did the plane itself have what amounted to a fake bottom to it; because of Soviet secrecy around its military, the only people who knew it was even there were the engineers, and the airmen who flew it. And they were hardly likely to ruin a good thing by telling.

So now Mickey, like everybody else with a plane to fly and a living to make in that first desperate burst of free enterprise, just had to figure out a) what openly declared cargo jobs they would take on, and b) what illicit cargo a man of his skill could get away with carrying, for the right price.

For Mickey himself, of course, there was a third question. What hidden extra cargo, in the spaces of the Candid that not even his bosses knew about, would make him the most illicit cash in hand on each journey?

He needed to figure it out quickly. The crews were in high demand. The year was 1992 and things were changing. The Cold War was over, and the free market had trumped ideology. Meanwhile (and thanks largely to the glut of small arms suddenly flooding the market), small, bloody, internecine conflicts were spreading across Southern Europe and Africa.

By 1992, the former Yugoslavia had began its ugly descent into all-out sectarian war: Croatia and Slovenia, having declared independence, were recognized by some Western governments and began looking at what they could take with them, while Serbia geared up to prevent more secession, by force if necessary. On the edges of the old Soviet Union, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Tajikistan were plunged into civil war. Libyan-armed Tuareg rebels were opposing government forces in Mali. The Democratic Republic of Afghanistan had collapsed to the same mujahideen resistance fighters who had seen off the Soviets. Rebel militias were running riot in Rwanda, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Angola, the Sudan, Somalia, Guatemala, Peru, Colombia, Algeria, and Uganda. And in the Caucasian borderlands of Russia itself, another ex-Soviet air force Afghan-war veteran and Chechen separatist named Dzhokhar Dudayev was about to declare independence from the motherland and sign a law giving all Chechens the right to bear arms against their oppressors.

And for Mickey’s crew, finding the answers to those questions would lead them into close contact with some of the worst people, and most hair-raising places, on earth.

Suddenly there was a new mission on the board.

IF THE SOVIET Union was broken—and veterans still refer to the snowballing chaos of 1992 as “the Cataclysm”—its former pilots were unstoppable.

The perfect storm of the imploding USSR that had ripped apart the lives of men like Mickey was soon putting it back together again in some rather improbable, highly exotic, and infinitely more profitable ways. Far from being on the scrap heap, these aircrews found, to their considerable surprise, that they and their planes were exactly what this brave new world was looking for. Suddenly there was a wave of well-paid work for pilots and cargo planes from some unexpected quarters.

Those who’d flown in Afghanistan, like Mickey, were in particular demand. Not only did they know the capacity, and the abilities, of their giant cargo planes like no one on earth; they were also, it turned out, old hands at the “gray cargo” game.

There’s a joke Mickey likes to make.

“Was the Soviet-Afghan war good cover for smuggling operations?”

“No, terrible!”

“Why?”

“Because the Soviet-Afghan war was a smuggling operation.”

The stories are many. Like so many, there was Mickey’s first visit to one of the local Afghan markets near his billet, where he, like so many other enlisted men, saw not only exotic fruits and foods he’d never laid eyes on before but tape-to-tape cassette players and microwaves, and he and his crew, like so many others, pretty much bought or bartered everything they could and hoarded it until they could get it out. It went down so well that they started “losing” or writing off as destroyed or damaged items on inbound runs—boots, fuel, even arms and ammo—and swapped them at the same market for more microwaves and electric shavers to haul back to the motherland.

Even then, the same discreet two-way silence ensured shadier pieces of official business, and these crews’ cash jobs could be carried out with mutual blind-eye indulgence. Among many similar tales in his chronicle of the war, historian Gregory Feifer recounts one occasion on which KGB spooks smuggled loyal former Afghan ministers out of Kabul under the noses of the authorities, packed tightly inside green boxes pierced to allow the “cargo” to breathe. On another, Spetsnaz men—the Soviet Union’s own Special Forces—captured the Taj-Bek Palace, and the looting lasted two days. Trophies were taken: hats, guns, carpets, anything that wasn’t fixed to the walls and a whole lot that was, but the prize booty was the trove of Panasonic TV sets and Sharp boomboxes. What didn’t get found by the Spetsnaz and sent back was coveted; unobtainable in the Soviet Union, just one of these unlikely finds alone would make a grunt’s crafty extra baggage stowed away on board the Ilyushin more than worthwhile on his next pickup back home.

Suddenly, the humble cargo crews with their Il-76s, Antonovs, Tupolevs, and helicopters were the go-to men for anything their fellow servicemen, secret agents, diplomats, or their families back home wanted ferrying in or out on the sly. It ended up so well known that Mickey, Sergei, and the rest were put under special observation by some of the straighter KGB men, anxious to put a stop to their secret supply-line favors. Today, one senior Russian diplomat recalls his tour as a young Red Army conscript in Kabul back in 1984, and the rumors of aircrews who were said to transport illicit goods. “They had to be careful,” he says. “The pilots and aircrews weren’t stationed with the soldiers, and if anyone was seen speaking to them too much, it would get noticed. The other soldiers and airmen weren’t the problem, but the KGB people stationed over there. If they thought there was something going on, there would be trouble.”

But Mickey was nothing if not resourceful, and he was already perfecting ways of staying one step ahead of his watchers. A favored method of hooking up was in the discreet “Russian-friendly” restaurants in town, where “accidentally on purpose” encounters between services and ranks could be engineered and pulled off, albeit with some care. And among these circles, slowly, these pilots of the giant Soviet cargo planes laid the foundations of a career that endures today.

Even among 1920s barnstormers and World War II flying aces, few had the intimate knowledge of their planes that Mickey does. Theirs is a marriage, an equal partnership in business and in life: one born of eating, sleeping, fighting, and working in the Il-76 for a quarter of a century. Even watching him prepare for takeoff on a standard run in Africa is like spying on a bachelor alone in his flat. As I fidget and pace in the plane, he’s outside on the runway, having a last smoke with two Latvians and some local gofers. They’re shuffling about among the cans, weeds, and crows in the last rays of sunlight, talking, joking, and smoking. No one looks toward the plane.

Then the boots clatter and Mickey appears inside. He takes off his threadbare captain’s uniform and hangs it on a twisted coat-hanger peg at the cockpit threshold, pulling on a polo shirt and jeans and settling in for a day’s shift work—stepping into the cockpit proper and pushing a newspaper, charts, invoices, clutter from his seat onto the floor, gathering the paper puddle and stuffing it into a plastic carrier bag on a pile behind him. Down below, from the glass pit of the nose, Dmitry the navigator, a strapping, sulky-faced man with sandy hair and slanted Tatar eyes, looks up and round, catching my eye, then away. Lev, the spooky-eyed, unblinking blond flight engineer, pops another chewing gum and makes one last check that everything’s as it should be.

There’s a high, sick whine, then the hot roar of the engines as we begin our taxi. Some of us cover our ears against the earsplitting pitch of the engines, some of us don’t, and I crane my neck to check out the in-flight movie—the view through the huge, panoramic nose cone, a glass screen providing such spectacular floor-to-ceiling action it earned the plane an affectionate nickname, “the Cinema.”

There weren’t any passenger seats in an Il-76 (there still aren’t in most), so chairs were brought onboard and lined up in hotchpotch fashion: chairs from offices, schools, terminal buildings where they had terminal buildings, sentry boxes where they didn’t, but really, just wherever they could find them. These chairs naturally weren’t fixed down, so they’d slide about a lot during takeoff, landing, and any evasive maneuvers the pilot had to make, which were many and varied, and of course the passengers would have to link arms while those closest to the fuselage walls just held on to whatever protruding metal lugs, instruments, or bits of loose webbing they could.

For the former NBC newsman and Soviet-Afghan war reporter Arthur Kent, trips with Mickey or his fellow pilots in the Cinema “became a regular treat, every time I skipped over to Moscow with a Soviet troop-transport flight, or into Pakistan and back for more chaos.”

In fact, the basic, cavelike interior of an operational Candid is an attractive proposition to many airmen and flight managers, who speak affectionately of its spartan comforts—no comfy seats, just eggs frying on a gas burner, a liberal smoking policy that extends way beyond tobacco, and all the half-inched vodka and warm beer you can drink. Even today, asking a veteran passenger of those Il-76 flights if he fancies taking a trip to Moscow in the Cinema is enough to make him turn white and remember that urgent appointment he’s already late for somewhere else in town. One veteran flight manager once described the Candid to me as “two hundred thousand rivets that just happen to be flying together in close formation.” But it’s only when you cadge a lift with an old warhorse like Mickey’s that you really understand what they mean.

Just like the chairs in the Cinema, lots of the fittings aren’t nailed, soldered, glued, or fixed down. It makes for an exciting takeoff, and generally adds to the fun when the pilot takes any kind of sudden evasive action, or even decides to swoop down and land somewhere for a pickup. It’s quite an odd feeling watching furniture, baggage, and boots moving up and down the plane under their own steam. There are two stoves: One’s a standard burner, one’s a two-hob hotplate on a cable. (On some old Antonovs there’s even a chimney for the smoke.) Lights are strung along a runner. Pots and pans jammed in a box by the side, more ripped-open packages, a couple of thirty-two-packs, some big batteries wrapped in cellophane, a well-cared-for metal coffeepot. Lots of people, most of them Westerners, don’t understand the beauty of the setup and make wisecracks about these gas canisters for the stove being our emergency fuel tanks, or they joke that the Il-76 burns vodka, shouting, “5, 4, 3, 2, 1 … cleared for Smirnoff!” whenever they see an overloaded old Candid take off. I actually remember laughing about it to myself once, but that attitude faded as soon as the smell of frying bacon and beans wafted through the pressurized cabin as we flew into the dawn.

The cabin’s got that panoramic view, glass all over the nose, light flooding in. Except right now, the crew’s clothes are slung on hangers from hooks and rails across the front: a couple of those cloth hanging bags for pressed suits you get from hotel laundries and alterations services form a blanket obscuring the duck-egg green cockpit. Push it aside and you’ll see the instruments almost all have needles and dials—a few calculator-style digital displays and autopilot, of course, but otherwise everything’s mechanical—and therefore fixable with a screwdriver if you take the console up. Whatever else crashes, you suspect it won’t be the onboard computer.

Boxes, crates, ropes; tattered brown padded lagging all over the fuselage and hold; metal-plate signs in Russian Cyrillic saying things like (“exit”)—“Don’t touch that one,” deadpans Sergei); masking tape, lockers in the gun-metal gray, a couple metal pallets and a fold-down iron-springed bed about half the length of a human body to lie on; and small, high-up, porthole-style windows just to boost the whole Kursk submarine vibe. Outside, along the side of the bird, what looks smooth and bullet-skinned from a distance is really a network of holes and patches. This one’s starting to look like a quilt. If you see riveted patches like these, you know you’ve got an ex-Soviet air force model, and the odds are it saw action in the Soviet-Afghan war, where the curtain of mujahideen RPG fire around every airstrip meant pilots either had to turn the giant plane into an impromptu and entirely inappropriate dive-bomber, or attempt to land using the Khe Sanh method.

It sounds like a complicated sexual practice, but the method is a good deal more difficult and hazardous. It’s a famous under-fire landing procedure perfected by the Americans during the North Vietnamese siege of Khe Sanh air base in 1968. For pilots in war zones who want to hit the runway at just the right angle without coming in low enough to be shot down by light bazookas—and that’s all of them—it means flying very high until they’re directly over the runway itself, then corkscrewing down in a near-impossibly tight descent. But there’s a problem. Because what the ground-to-air missile fire couldn’t achieve, the Khe Sanh method often did: After the Soviets introduced it during their Afghan occupation, these giant cargo planes’ fuselages regularly cracked under the stress of spinning round and round in circles tighter than the plane was ever designed to attempt, and in almost all surviving aircraft, fatigue cracks, fissures, and holes began to open up on engine skins.

Potentially fatal leaks appeared. Rivets groaned, then popped. Parts began to fall off. And aviators began falling from the sky. On November 26, 1984, the same guerrillas we’d evaded with Mickey’s astonishing piece of dive-bombing were camped in Kabul’s Missile Alley. Only on that particular day, the pilot wasn’t quick enough, didn’t climb high enough, didn’t corkscrew tightly enough. A rocket-propelled grenade smashed into the starboard wing of a Candid laden with cigarettes, notepaper, and ballpoint pens for the troops garrisoned there. Any other time, the plane would still have been able to land without too much of a problem. But this Candid had flown in one too many tight circles and dives. The fuselage was crisscrossed with invisible stress cracks like the rips in the inner seams of your jeans. So that day, as the plane rolled sideways, it simply imploded, disintegrating into metallic powder in midair. Not only did the crew not have time to send a distress signal; they didn’t even have time to cry out. For weeks afterward, farmers, kids, and soldiers were finding Russian-made ballpoint pens, cheap writing pads, and packets of army-issue cigarettes strewn across the countryside.

Always resourceful, the Soviet air force’s technicians and ground crew developed a method of riveting on metal patches—never enough to solve the problem, never pretty, never meant to be permanent, but just enough to keep the plane from splitting at the seams from all the diving and twisting.

But these planes are also remarkable in a lot of other ways. Not least in the way they owe their current capabilities—even a lot of their features—as much to the crews who fly them, customize them, cannibalize and adapt them as to the designers and workers of the Ilyushin and Antonov companies.

Mickey remembers more ad hoc, and certainly less official, ways of souping up his plane’s capabilities with the nostalgic affection of the man remembering decorating his first home. The wells for escape equipment, radar, even parachutes and the air-to-ground flares fired during takeoff and landing to fool heat-seeking missiles, were often hollowed out and stripped bare, their contents sold off separately either unofficially or with the connivance of superiors out in the field. On the one hand, says Mickey, that meant no escape equipment, which was bad—but then, you never knew if that stuff was any good anyway, because there had been a lot of problems reported with it, so “We’d been warned not to bet our lives on it.” Yet the upside was good enough to make even the prospect of taking on missiles and mountain ranges look like a reasonable risk to take.

The point of these modifications, along with knock-throughs and strip-downs applied to almost every other nook, cranny, and belly space, was to turn the Candid into the perfect deep-cover mule for whatever you wanted to take from A to B at the army’s expense. The ploy exceeded the cargo teams’ highest hopes: It was so effective, even among army checks, precisely because a lot of these spaces weren’t even there on the initial design blueprints or paperwork. By the time your commanding officer discovered you’d ripped out the escape chutes to make space for a few extra tons of rugs, jewels, Stolichnaya, and bullets, went the saying, you’d probably be too dead to court-martial anyway. In truth, shrugs Mickey, his commanding officer was almost always part of the whole deal—the safest way to make sure you weren’t thwarted by any of the other officers.

The most profitable journeys, he says, came when you were carrying bulky but light items in the hold. “Tents or uniforms or piping or whatever was good, because all the visible space could be full, but you still had lots of weight left to play with under the floorboards.” (More than two decades on, it’s a phrase I’ll hear echoed by Oliver Sprague, a trafficking monitor at Amnesty International, who’s watched these crews perform their cash-job dodges while piggybacking humanitarian aid runs.) But even if you had relatively little load space going spare, you’d always be able to shift something, since Mickey could fly it way beyond its stated maximum takeoff weight anyway.

So that’s exactly what Mickey did. And so did plenty of his cohorts. From all over the USSR, they descended on Central Asia in the hundreds for a crash course in survival, physical and economic. Theirs was an operation within an operation, a job both patriotically legit and on the side; biggest of all the Red Army’s regiments, battalions, and corps, it turned out, was the Self-Preservation Society.

Mickey shrugs. Conditions at the Afghan war air bases were appalling. And anyone who could stomach that had more than back pay coming to him. And while the pilots themselves were lodged in hotels wherever possible (partly out of seniority, partly so they could sleep at least enough to fly without smacking into mountaintops), for loadmasters and the rest, something had to give. They kept warm and amused themselves on base by knocking back the pure-alcohol aviation spirit used for cleaning electrical circuits, nurturing a habit that sustains many of them and kills plenty still today. This was “white fever,” the scourge of Soviet cargo crews. Andrey, a former Il-76 pilot and Afghan comrade of Mickey’s who now runs his own cargo op down in Central Asia, recounts the tale of a young conscript diligently cleaning his engine with pure methanol, only for a wild-eyed airman to stride over cursing him for his wastefulness, grab the bottle, take a long lusty swig, and, with the words, “Idiot! You only need a thin layer,” finish cleaning the engine by breathing methanol fumes onto the metal and rubbing merrily.

Alcohol was the beginning. Many wiled away downtime, and often uptime, with the local crops, opium and hashish, in which even the air bases were swimming, with some being “donated”—thrown into tanks and over compound walls grenade-style by Afghan “well-wishers” keen to see the pilots and soldiers become addicted—though much of it just went onto the planes and off again at the other end.

These were the experiences, hastily acquired skills, and low expectations that shaped the men suddenly available for freelance flying work. And as it turned out, Mickey’s exit from military life was perfectly timed. Not only did he narrowly escape being dragged into the first Chechen war; he was also, he says, surprised to find that the world outside was ready and waiting for his services. For the business owners, all those who’d got themselves a piece of the arms action, and the airmen themselves, these were, he says, good times—the years of expense accounts, room service, tropical destinations, luxury hotels, parties with friendly capitalists, and encounters with exotic women who weren’t actively trying to kill him.

Not that it was easy from the start. Just three years on from evacuating Kabul under enemy fire and having being laid off by the military with a single, one-off payment of 150 rubles in lieu of all back pay, the abrupt arrival in this wild new existence of sun, sex, and self-interest came, he admits, as a bit of a headfuck—not just to him but to everyone.

The airmen found ways of coping. Many drank, heroically and often, then less heroically and more often. Some, like Mickey’s pal Artem, succumbed full-time to the heroin they’d first tried in Afghanistan, becoming thoroughly unreliable “ghosts.” These ghost airmen were a common sight in those days, he says. They OD’d on tower-block staircases, turned up dead in the thawing snow plowed from the railway sidings or under lake ice in spring. The more resilient often washed back down to the ’stans, where they took to opium full-time and worked as fixers.

There were other roads. Some clued-in vets from his regiment fell in with the new mafiya gangs springing up across the erstwhile Union, acting as hired muscle, security, drivers, whatever it took. Some got religion, got jailed, or got the fuck out of the country. Aeroflot, suddenly flush with private suitors and cash, soaked up quite a few ex-servicemen—including the erstwhile commander in chief Evgeny Shaposhnikov himself, who would become the firm’s director in 1995. Others got entrepreneurial, got settled, and went into business, stayed on the straight and narrow and gritted their teeth. Or they used other skills to start new lives as plumbers, shoe salesmen, and truck drivers.

And some, like Mickey, just kept flying. Hitting forty and still handsome in a lanky, sloping-shouldered way, he simply enjoyed seeing the world, revisiting some of the places he’d last seen in service, and living a little. So long as they were a few bucks ahead of the game and doing the thing they knew best, it was a good life. As Mickey tells it, with a matter-of-fact wave of his cigarette and that eyes-to-the-floor shrug, “There is no plan. Just me, the plane, the next job. I just do it.” Then he laughs. “Take the aerial view, or you can go crazy.”

It’s a truism that the turbulent breakup of the Soviet Union created a power vacuum in which crews like Mickey’s could thrive. But a stockpile is just a stockpile making small change on Arbat Street, an Il-76 cargo plane just a chunk of metal, and even a Vitebsk mafiya boss lording it over his local neighborhood with all the guns he can sell is just a hostage to fortune—until you match supply to demand. And in the freewheeling 1990s, so full of newly independent countries and post–Cold War movements struggling to be born, the demand was out there, all right.

It was time to go international.