CHAPTER EIGHT
The Arab Gulf, 1995–1997
ANOTHER FLIGHT, heading for the Caucasus. I wake from excited half sleep in the belly of the Candid. For a few disorienting seconds, my brain is as fuzzy as one of Mickey’s cargo manifests. I look at my pager, where the digital display says it’s just before 1:00 A.M. By now we’ve got to be over Ukraine, or maybe the Caucasus Mountains already. I’m freezing, but at least the claustrophobia, like the stink of men at close quarters, has faded. The metal hums so loudly everything went quiet about half an hour after takeoff, and the effect at night is oddly disorienting. The antique gaffer-taped fuselage shakes steadily. Just yards away in the night, four engines roar so loudly they’ve got the Il-76 banned from most European countries.
Dmitry, the navigator, sits at the cockpit entrance, pulls a pair of fingerless gloves from the lunchbox by his elbow, and slips back down the sloping floor to his hanging, front-gunner-style cubbyhole, where he settles his lofty frame into a comfy posture and watches the night roll by through the glass beneath his feet. Pens laid out on the folding desktop; charts out, notebook open. My fellow stowaway on the flight, a Scots-Canadian photographer named Doug McKinlay on assignment to shoot the dynamited Buddhas in the northern Afghan hills for CNN, cracks off a photo of the glass pod. Dmitry, surly at the best of times, jumps. He isn’t too happy about the distraction from the flash and wheels round, eyes blazing, arm flailing at the camera with a curse. Doug backs off, for now.
Silence settles in again. The flight engineer sits on a fold-down metal bench the same battleship gray as his overall top and track bottoms, and closes his eyes. Sergei, draped in an outsized jogging shirt, is drinking from a plastic cup and compulsively rubbing his eyes. The spring bed is taken—I can see a pair of feet from here—so I lie sideways on a small quarter of available fuselage space on a ridged metal bench jammed to the wall just behind the cockpit area with my head on my jacket, as I’ve seen the guys do. It’s horribly uncomfortable, but it’s all there is.
In Mickey’s flying warehouse, even if your tiny wire bench is taken, you can sit, or stretch out among the mountains of tethered crates of rice, open pallets of clothing and stacks of boxes, opaque twelve-kilo sacks, wooden crates, and blue plastic sheeting. I wonder if these are the so-called green boxes Mickey’s hinted they carry on runs like this, used to transport ammunition and small arms. And if they are, whether they’re licit or not. So tightly are they packed that there’s no hope of getting farther back, or burrowing between the tethers and boxes looking for stenciling.
There’s no point asking the crew, not really. The “double-blind” nature of the illicit stuff means that they’d be the last to know, or to ask. As for what happens at the other end, on paper at least it’s not their problem. They’re just the couriers, and—again, on paper—never need to cross the customs line with anyone’s smuggled gear but their own.
And it’s not as if that’s ever a problem either. It helps that many of the hubs these humanitarian cargoes fly from—like the wreck-studded cargo perimeter at Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates—have been notoriously lax about customs and security, frequently allowing cargo to come in and leave the airport without being inspected, failing to run the requisite checks on its airlines or keep records of airline business at the airport.
Sharjah is a word that keeps cropping up in conversations with Mickey and the team about their past and their plans. It’s their safe haven, they say, their R & R, just like home leave in the air force. There, nobody’s taking potshots at them; there’s air-con in the bars and hotels; they don’t get any hassle from anybody. Sergei can’t resist giving me too much information. “You know, you can always get a great shower in Sharjah,” he laughs, shoulders shaking, “and you take it, because you never know when you’ll see another.”
You will not be surprised to hear that Sharjah is a word that also figures prominently in whispered conversations, classified reports, and official correspondence about rogue aviation outfits in general and about money laundering, the international black market, gunrunning, the Afghan heroin trade, and human trafficking in particular.
Still, if you’ve never heard of it, that’s not an accident either: You and I were never meant to.
When its larger, splashier, less fussy neighbor Dubai opened up to trade and tourism with the goal of becoming the “Singapore of the Sands” and immediately began riding a monster two-decade boom, the tiny emirate of Sharjah saw the immense wealth that could be generated by turning a sparsely populated, feudal, Islamic desert city into a destination in its own right, a freewheeling hub for people, goods, and business. Only rather than open the Pandora’s box of tourism and attempt to attract fun-seeking foreign riffraff to its uniform, beige-and-cement city center—where a particularly puritanical form of Sunni Islam similar to Saudi Arabian Wahhabism held sway and all alcohol, short trousers, and popular music was forbidden—advisors to the ruler, Sheikh Sultan Bin Mohammed al-Qasimi, had one or two better ideas.
Their first plan—to turn Sharjah into the global center for Islamic studies, packed with madrassas hosting boys from devout families across the globe—turned out to be a dud: too much investment, not enough quick return. Besides, it meant building a brand name from scratch. In religion, that’s no easy task. So by the mid-1990s, his advisors presented the sheikh with plan B. The small, single-runway desert airport that would make Sharjah’s foreign-investment fortune would not bring planes laden with unpredictable, high-maintenance tourists, or compete with Jeddah for the Islamic dollar. It would bring quiet, low-profile, easy-to-manage crates of cargo. Any cargo.
Of course, financial incentives and tax breaks were part of a package designed to lure freight and transport businesses to operate from the airport. But equally well understood was that this would be “a place to do business”—somewhere companies could come without fear of interference or overzealous regulators. And while the sheikh may not have seen it happening, bit by bit, for the duration of the 1990s, Sharjah airport gained a reputation among insiders as a gray cargo hub.
As early as 1993, former Soviet-issue Il-76s and Antonov An-12 and An-124 aircraft and their ex–Red Army pilots and aircrews were flocking there. By 1995, it was clear Sharjah had a hit on their hands. Which meant that the sheikh’s men, like the mayor of the Maine seaside resort in the movie Jaws, came to rely on the money that was flooding in so much that even as the really big sharks started sniffing around, they simply turned up the music and ignored the warnings. The emirate had a sketchy past as a trans-shipment hotspot in the nineteenth century’s hashish- and opium-smuggling trade, with drug-laden dhows flocking the waters around the dock, so it’s possible the sheikh’s court simply misunderstood any warnings they received about some of the custom Sharjah was attracting, or that he wasn’t kept as informed by his staff as he might have been. At least until he decided to take a direct hand in matters.
The sheikh hired a delicately spoken, fine-boned Syrian-American named Richard Chichakli as commercial manager of Sharjah Airport International Free Trade Zone. Chichakli is a talented alumnus of Riyadh University in Saudi Arabia, where he and one wealthy young student named Osama bin Laden had been friends. (He’s reported to have recalled how the preradical bin Laden “was a lot of fun in those days.”) A certified public accountant, real estate guy, and car dealer with an office in Texas, who served in the U.S. military in the early 1990s and prides himself on “a strange hobby that involves creating highly decorative fruit plates,” Chichakli seems an unlikely candidate for the title of international aviation player. Yet this likable amateur chef is also, by his own admission, “one of the world’s top experts in managing [air]fleets … setting up airlines and managing and administering all financial operations.” And after leaving the army, Chichakli put all the aviation knowledge he’d gained there to spectacular private use.
The Free Trade Zone boom Chichakli oversaw became Sharjah’s gold rush. Soon, newspaper reports in the region were gasping at the speed and success of the enterprise. Indeed, Chichakli would later protest that those who accused him of a full-time role helping Bout have “no idea” of the workload involved in running an airport. The figures certainly make impressive reading. The airport’s special zone opened in 1995 with fifty-five aviation outfits based there, and doubled that figure within a year. By 2003, a staggering 2,300 aviation outfits were based there. One of the aviation specialists who turned up early and became “a brother and a friend” to Chichakli, he says today, was Viktor Bout.
It’s quite possible that even Chichakli himself never guessed quite what was brewing out there on the tarmac and in the shade of the hangars as the sleepy emirate began to change. But as more and more former Soviet aircraft circled and landed and left again, the twentieth century’s black-market boom took hold.
These were dusty, sun-baked, lawless Sharjah’s Wild West days, when anyone who arrived at the frontier with guts and cunning and a fistful of dollars could grab himself fifty acres and a mule—or at least a huge tax break, a landing berth, and a no-questions-asked policy on what went on, and came off, his plane. Strangers blew into town with shady connections and out again with fortunes, and everybody was, effectively, the Man with No Name.
The sands around Sharjah airport still bear mute, grisly witness to the wing-and-a-prayer flying of many former Soviet crews, with plane fuselages sticking up from dunes, and tailplanes visible under the drifting sand. “They just leave them where they crash,” says Sharjah veteran John MacDonald. “The end of the runway’s littered with them, just stuck there where they came down or blew up in the sand.”
By 1996, bookish, bearded, and rather humorless young men in Afghan salwar kameez were stalking the hangars at dusk, sauntering from cooling plane to cooling plane and desk to desk asking pretty much anyone still in the area about doing some “don’t-ask–don’t-tell” cargo runs in and out of Kandahar, as cash jobs of course. One fiery-eyed twentysomething cleric named Farid Ahmed briefly became a local figure of fun, sneaking round the secure areas and introducing himself to anyone he (literally) bumped into as the buyer for a then-still-obscure organization called the Taliban, a nascent Islamic movement with an extreme interpretation of Koranic imperatives borne out of Afghanistan’s religious madrassas who saw themselves not just as the rightful successors to the anti-Soviet mujahideen as the saviors of their country, but also as the solution to Afghanistan’s problems with corruption, opium, petty crime, and foreign interference. Their agenda—strict observance of a particularly austere view of Islam—we now know. But at that time, they were just another rebel group with pockets full of secretly donated Saudi and Pakistani cash. And it wasn’t long before Ahmed found a man with a plane ready to talk money, in the shape of Viktor Bout.
While most operators were on the level—or at least as close as you could stay to level in an environment like Sharjah—they found themselves lined up alongside other ground staff, crews, and owners some of whom routinely changed their planes’ registration numbers overnight, under cover of darkness, to avoid being fingered for any particularly cheeky arms-running jobs. Airlines and cargo operations that appeared on the paperwork may or may not be the ones who owned the planes, and the signatories on the registration, tax, customs, and ownership papers may or may not be real names, or pseudonyms for a real person, or made-up names for entirely fictitious owners of fictitious companies running unlogged flights. Taliban gold was now being flown into Sharjah and Dubai alike by Il-76 or Antonov, bound for Pakistan and the Sudan; blood diamonds, guns, ammunition, explosives, caviar, fur, drugs, and currency all made their way in and out, and nobody there, it seemed, knew a thing.
Today, one seasoned cargo aviator still has trouble believing the no-questions-asked regime around the airport at the time—and well into the 2000s. “There wasn’t any security at all—not around customs, or the hangars. Nowhere. Practically anyone could just walk into the airport from the street and up to, around, and into the planes. It was really incredible. Even tourists could buy tickets entitling them the freedom of all areas of the airport, going up around the planes, everything. And you could see cargo coming into the airport straight from boats and the road, without being logged in or out or checked or anything, put on planes and flown off to wherever. My airline did it, and though there’s no suggestion we were carrying anything improper, we easily could have, so easily. Nobody kept track. Anything was possible.”
The murk, whether the result of a calculated obfuscation or naïveté on the part of the local authorities, made any attempt to chase the trail of illicit cargoes quite scattershot, with conscientious operators soon being caught up in the same wide dragnet of suspicion and investigation as the gunrunners. Indeed, so arcane and complex was the web of bought, sold, part-owned, leased, chartered, borrowed, loaned, verbally transferred, and informally operated planes, logos, and businesses in which Bout was involved at the height of his influence that the authorities were reduced to “linking” planes to him in a desperate attempt to keep tabs on him—or even simply to get some idea of where he’d been.
“It’s just got ridiculous,” says one UK-based charter agent. “We’re a highly legitimate company, and our reputation is important, but some people out there make so many spurious connections that all the big leasing agents like us are totally paranoid. We’ve got to be careful now that we don’t even lease a chassis that he once had anything to do with—even one he previously owned, several owners ago—because people start coming after you. A relative of mine was claimed to be somehow ‘linked’ to his ‘network’ on some bloke’s Viktor Bout–monitoring Web site, though he’d never had anything to do with him or his aircraft. It’s that confused.”
The airport, its hangars and loading bays, rapidly became a sanction-breakers’, black marketeers’, and traffickers’ playground, and a natural honeypot for Mickey’s connections and, quickly, Mickey himself. Soon, air-conditioned restaurants with Russian-only menus, discreet vodka bars, and handling-agent types from Odessa and Vitebsk were part of the crew’s monthly, if not daily, routine. Bank accounts were opened, apparently without ID or with the same people using different passports every day, in names nobody knew; paper companies were born, registered, and then immediately seemed to disappear. Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun, investigative journalists and the coauthors of Merchant of Death, wrote that by the end of the 1990s, when HSBC Sharjah did a housekeeping audit, it found that some 1,186 bank accounts had been opened by hundreds of different Russians in one branch alone. The speed at which the accounts opened, were used to transfer huge sums, then closed again, was, they concluded, proof of “money laundering on a huge scale.”
Across Sharjah and neighboring Dubai, the hawala system of Islamically correct banking, in which large sums could be given, loaned, invested, and repaid without the need for interest—or, crucially, transfer records or receipts—was an open door for smugglers, launderers, and mafia from all countries looking to “clean” the suspiciously large profits from their illicit ventures. Airline employees taking home less than two thousand dollars a month would receive transfers of millions in and out of their accounts. In one incident, bemused investigators challenged one such aviation worker, whose indignant response was that he’d just been amazingly lucky with a few flutters on the stock exchange. (As scrutiny grew in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and the world’s eyes turned to the Emirates as potential havens for terrorist funds, Dubai at least set up an investigation team—though many view it as lip service. Later that year, a Sharjah national on the Dubai Central Bank’s money-laundering investigation team had his house attacked by a group of suspected Russian money launderers. With uncanny timing, another promptly began receiving death threats.)
But through the mid-1990s as free-and-easy Sharjah grew, such scrutiny seemed unthinkable. First more planes and crews, then more menus, prostitutes, and businesses were from the former Soviet Union. There was no doubt who was running things now. Mickey began first visiting, then staying. Seemingly without anybody noticing, the Man with No Name who blew into town with a battered old Il-76 or a couple of fuel-guzzling An-12s to his name had become the Man with a Dozen Different Names and Bank Accounts. The only difference was that in this spaghetti western, when he disappeared off into the sunset nobody even asked who that enigmatic stranger was.
But Sharjah wasn’t the only one of these wild frontiers rapidly becoming a honeypot for screaming super planes, local mafia, contraband, and hell-raising former Soviet aviators. There were many others, from Ostend in Belgium to Maribor in Slovenia, which locals call “Mafiabor,” though Mickey and Sergei affectionately call it “Marlboro” in honor of the huge mob-run cigarette-smuggling pipeline from Serbia and Montenegro to the EU that its airport served through the 1990s. And yet more from Freetown in Sierra Leone to the former Soviet states in the Caucasus, who were close enough to political fault lines, rogue regimes, and war- and disaster-prone areas to know a good business opportunity when they saw it and jump on the open-market bandwagon.
Like Bavarian beer or Savile Row suits, says Mickey, every airstrip had its own “thing”—its own specialism. For Afghanistan’s Kabul, Herat, Jalalabad, and Kandahar, it was humanitarian aid, illicit booze, consumer goods, arms, and cash in; heroin, siphoned-off aid money, raw materials, artifacts, people (both willing clients and unwilling marks) out. Across the Balkans, it was humanitarian assistance, luxury items, black-market cigarettes, guns, heroin, and cash. For Rwanda, Congo, and the rest, humanitarian aid, guns, and helicopters crossed paths with raw materials, foodstuffs, and natural resources—including blood diamonds.
The transportation business model was perfect in its evenhandedness, in the way it spread the money around: the operator, the owner, the crew who fill up whatever extra space they can find with their own cash jobs. But the best part was the way the dynamics of catastrophe meant they got paid by both sides, on their way in and out of each destination. The crews will never fly empty if they can help it, so on the way out they make sure they fill up with whatever it takes. And on runs in and out of “fucked” countries, that could be anything—chickens, fruit, fish, wood, rugs, bricks, sand, coffee, whatever.
In his 2004 film, Darwin’s Nightmare, about the effect of globalization on Central Africa, Austrian filmmaker Hubert Sauper recorded the sudden coming together of aid, business, and smuggling in the holds of the now-ubiquitous Il-76s flocking to Africa on fat aid contracts and even fatter gunrunning jobs, and the birth of a new kind of chaos wherever Mickey’s hordes went. He issued a statement explaining what he called the film’s “trigger”:
In the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1997, I witnessed for the first time the bizarre juxtaposition of two gigantic airplanes, both bursting with food. The first cargo jet brought forty-five tons of yellow peas from America to feed the refugees in the nearby UN camps. The second plane took off for the European Union, weighed down with fifty tons of fresh fish. I met the Russian pilots and we became kamarads. But soon it turned out that the rescue planes with yellow peas also carried arms to the same destinations, so that the same refugees that were benefiting from the yellow peas could be shot at later during the nights. In the mornings, my trembling camera saw in this stinking jungle destroyed camps and bodies. This booming multinational industry of fish and weapons has created an ungodly globalized alliance on the shores of the world’s biggest tropical lake: an army of local fishermen, World Bank agents, homeless children, African ministers, EU-commissioners, Tanzanian prostitutes, and Russian pilots.
The picture Sauper paints is like a scene from a modern-day Hieronymus Bosch. But as with Sharjah, the sense of chaos and confusion may not be quite as accidental as it seems. Indeed, the appearance of disorganization is a positive boon to crews and their charter masters keen to traffic in illicit goods.
“The illicit stuff is how your crew makes its real money,” says Johnson-Thomas, who’s flight-managed former Soviet crews on Il-76s and An-12s all over the world. “Most of these particular pilots are freelance—they don’t work for anybody, just whoever needs them. And because they’re freelance, they’re not in any union, or on any payroll, so they’re very, very difficult to keep tabs on, and they can carry whatever they like.”
He can’t help beaming with admiration as he recalls how one Il-76 crew hit on the brilliantly counterintuitive idea of making more money by offering to do all their aid flights for charities for free. “The pilot made his fortune on the fifteen secret tons of belly cargo he’d carry in addition to the official payload. Depending on the destination, he’d fly something for free for you—he’d fly all the official cargo for no charge whatsoever—providing you let him carry what he wanted in the belly cargo space. The aid organizations, bless them in their innocence, all just thought he was being enormously public spirited!”
The thing is, most people didn’t know that it was there. But even if they did know, money talks, so it was no problem just the same. The organizations were getting their main cargo to the destination for free, so they kept taking him up on it. On a typical trip, remembers the veteran flight manager, he’d take his official cargo of aid or pineapples between Mogadishu and Ostend, but in the belly cargo he’d have fifteen tons of whatever else. It might be ammo in or coffee sacks out.
“That’s what eventually got him his lovely house,” says Johnson-Thomas, “and his-and-hers sports cars. And not one penny of that money showed up on any cargo manifests, let alone the tax returns! It wasn’t on any declarations, and as far as the world was concerned, the plane was full to capacity with the official cargo.”
Like that anonymous master of commerce, Mickey and Sergei make it their personal business to know the perennial hot tickets in most cities, too—devouring local news, sweeping for rumors everywhere they go, and even checking in with distant contacts by telephone constantly. “Sometimes you hear things when you’re out or talking even to airport and customs officials,” shrugs Sergei. “Someone will maybe say, we really have trouble getting toothpaste, or we can always use more mineral water, or whiskey. Maybe you will know if a new business is coming to your city, and you tell us. And then we know what to do next time we are in town. It is quite easy.”
“These crews are the epitome of globalization,” says Moisés Naím, former executive director of the World Bank, Venezuelan minister for trade, and author of Illicit, an award-winning report on “how smugglers, copycats and traffickers are hijacking the global economy.” “The common theory is that this was chaos. But there’s nothing chaotic about it at all! What we’ve been witnessing here is not disorganization—it’s markets at work.
“There were superpowers, and now they’ve gone. But that doesn’t make it chaos—anything but. This is like saying that before, you had an organized oil and energy market because you had the Seven Sisters—the seven big oil companies—and that was an organized market, and that now you have a disorganized market because you have thousands of independent oil companies. Wrong: What happened is that the barriers to entry in that market have lowered. So now you have new people—you’re right, they are not foot soldiers, they are SME businesses—operating in this market. Before, they were dominated by big organizations that had first-mover advantages and were able to capture a large chunk of the market. Then as a result of competition, government intervention, disruptive technologies, changes in consumer behavior, changes in supply, demand, financing, logistics, and everything else, that same market is no longer dominated by the equivalent of the Seven Sisters—the Mr. Big types, the Viktor Bouts and Pablo Escobars—but it’s an open market where you have hundreds or thousands of independent players. Some are very big, some are very small, some are medium, and it’s all just a market.”
Like any SME, the key advantages they had from the start were things like agility, their flexibility, their low overheads, and their speed. But there’s an added dimension, too: They’re importing tax-free and pay not a penny in transport costs.
Whoever Mickey, Sergei, Lev, and Dmitry are flying for, they are a business within a business: The client gets what they get, they overload with whatever will make them quick cash, and everybody wins. Once they know their next stop, says Sergei, they can make swift decisions about what to buy in Belgrade, Bangkok, Minsk, Frankfurt, Istanbul, or Shanghai; essentially, what will be most profitable and easiest and safest to sell, leverage, or drop off at their destination. Dealing with customs isn’t their problem for the main loads—they just drop the shit off and the client will have to get it released. But for whatever they want to keep for themselves, keeping customs sweet is a must.
Then there’s selling on what they’ve got. The smaller and more shady the client, the harder it is to shake money out of them. Cash flow is a constant headache—hence the value placed on regulars, from the Taliban to charities, Dow Jones 100 companies, and the UN. Because if Mickey’s loose network of clients, charterers, airlines, and contacts don’t pay their invoices on time, they don’t get credit. And if they don’t have credit, fuel, parking, maintenance, and overflight, permissions suddenly become unavailable. A twenty-five-year-old Il-76 drinks fuel like nobody’s business—and without it, you’re left with a useless metal sculpture in the shape of a plane at the end of some Central Asian or African runway, costing you thousands of dollars for every hour it sits there. Eventually, they just come and push you off it into the sand. Like the remote Afghan outpost where the crew dumped their crocked Candid, the dusty runways of sub-Saharan Africa and Eurasia are lined with rusting Soviet tin—some of it charred and twisted, but most of it just out of the cash it needs to stay airworthy and refueled.
It’s this insatiable appetite for avgas combined with the pressure on costs that often leads airline bosses to skimp on maintenance and to “encourage” crews to fly with planes that shouldn’t leave the ground. But the temptation to make savings they can trade, to make extra diversions for a little private business, and to fill up on unlisted consignments of their own can also tempt crews themselves to skirt the very edges of the possible when they fly.
The case of the Antonov-12 crew who simply ran out of fuel in midair on a run from Georgia to Turkmenistan because they forgot to factor into their knife-edge calculations the amount needed to start the engines on the runway at Yerevan has become legendary among these men, but only partly for its gallows humor. The sober truth is that it’s a cautionary tale, one drummed into newbies: about how much fuel restarting your engines a couple of times will cost you (close to a ton); about how to eke the last bit of vapor from your tanks (raise the landing gear while you circle for landing); about talking to ATC so they don’t keep you circling even when you divert to Baku for an emergency belly flop; and about keeping your eye on the money.
With the flights and their activities often shrouded in mystery, superstition develops. Among the crews, some tell me they believe there’s a mysterious sky-drunkenness, a narcosis that affects judgment and invites deadly errors, just as it does for scuba divers and the World War II bomber pilots who regularly saw “gremlins” on the wings at fifteen thousand feet, sabotaging their engines and giggling. In their accident-attrition log, Russian aviation experts Dmitriy Kommisarov and Yefim Gordon reported on one An-12 crew who, running low on fuel high over Siberia, collectively and mysteriously “changed their mind” about stopping to refuel. “The available fuel was not enough for a non-stop flight to Irkutsk, and the captain soon had misgivings. However, inexplicably, he pressed on, wasting several opportunities [to land and refuel en route]. The result was as predictable as it was deplorable: 120 km from their destination, the outer engines quit, followed one minute later by the inboard ones with the aircraft at 5,250 feet.”
Other reports tell of pilots, among them old comrades of Mickey’s, who crashed into clearly visible hills or treetops despite clear and repeated warnings from crewmembers, ground control, and warning systems; or of sudden, extreme behavior that survivors find impossible to explain. In the crash reports, just as in the whispered gossip among survivors, it’s a pattern that repeats itself again and again. Nobody really knows whether it’s sky narcosis or just business that makes men go mad.
As we sit talking in the cool shadow of the giant plane while Sergei clumps about inside, the oral history gets another footnote: News comes down the grapevine that another crew has perished in an incident so far unexplained. Unexplained to everyone, that is, but men like Mickey who know how seductive the chances you take for the sake of getting the job done can be.
Overloading is blamed for the overwhelming majority of unexplained fatalities among men like these, though rumblings persist of aircraft falling apart midair simply because they have become death traps, unserviced since the day they left the air force. Mickey says he’s careful, but admits that the pressures, financial and otherwise, to take unofficial, cash-in-hand extra tons—both by overloading the stated cargo for tax-free bonuses from shippers and bosses in the know, or concealing their own shuttle-trade goods in the belly and in the escape holes—are constant. It is, he says, exasperated, part of the package. The fifteen tons is only a rule of thumb, so all sorts of things could affect that, especially weather conditions—Entebbe in Uganda is notorious for its slippery runway surface, a result of the way it was built and its position right next to Lake Victoria, for example. Bald tires and a ton too many on that and you’ll end up underwater or in the terminal. Then there’s how you plan and execute your takeoff. The more you have on board, the farther back you want to start—even if it means you get rolling on the grass fields before the tarmac runway. If you’re in any doubt how fine Mickey can cut it, type “Il-76 takeoff” into your search engine and watch some of the home movies taken by stunned air-traffic workers.
Mickey’s spooky ability to judge down to the last kilogram what he can take off with is illustrated by an anecdote I hear several times on my travels, from different sources and in different forms. Most swear it happened during a plane they were on, some tell it as a joke; that either means it’s an urban myth or it happens quite a lot. It usually takes place in Africa or South Asia. The Il-76 is ready for takeoff: The crew have loaded both official cargo and their cash jobs, and the plane is stuffed to the rafters with exotic fruit and vegetables for export. The pilot begins taxiing for takeoff, and the plane gathers speed, but with only five hundred meters to go, they have no lift. Three hundred meters to the perimeter fence, and the plane still won’t lift. One hundred meters, they’re hurtling toward certain death. Fifty meters, and the front wheel finally lifts, as they just clear the fence. The pilot is furious. He turns to the loadmaster and shouts: “Idiot! I told you we could easily have loaded another punnet of cherries.”
That’s why Sergei’s job as a loadmaster is so vital. He’s not just some roadie, the guy with the trucks and the receipts, but the de facto physicist and safety engineer on every flight. With an Il-76, as with any of the Antonovs, he explains, you have plenty of room to maneuver if an engine fails or something—bad wind, or a rocket—knocks you. They’re built to withstand that; it’s what they do. Only when you’re overweight and knocking right on the margin of being able to get airborne or not are you vulnerable. “Then you are like a man carrying a piano up stairs,” points Sergei, marking a crazy angle with his arm. “It won’t take much to put you right on your ass.”
This is why, just as much as the pilot and navigator, loadmasters like Sergei are the ones they all have to trust. Together, their decisions about what extra tonnage fits where, and how much of it they can possibly manage this time, in these conditions, over these war zones, will see them make good money—and hopefully see them make it safely over the next set of mountains and with enough fuel, too—but only if Sergei gets the placements, the loading, and the numbers spot-on. More than one former Soviet source calls it “Russian roulette,” with the loadmaster as the man placed in the insane, hugely pressurized position of having to try and stack the odds in the crew’s favor with his sleight of hand and ingenuity before the trigger is pulled.
“Of course,” smiles Mickey, though it’s not much of a smile, “if he gets them wrong, we just have to be lucky.”
But in the mid-1990s, Mickey’s business antennae were already quivering again, looking for the next break. While the series of wars in the disintegrating Yugoslavia and borderlands of the Soviet Union were easy money, and Cyprus, Central Asia, and the Middle East were profitable strategic bases, the lure of Africa was harder and harder to resist for expert pilots and their ground crews. Word spread in the terminals and bars of the rich pickings to be made farther south, both on official business contracts and the potential for cash “extras” off the manifest. A strategic base like Sharjah was great, but sub-Saharan Africa had so much work going, there was almost no point being based anywhere but there for the moment.
Lke Starikov, Damnjanovic, Bout, and Hubert Sauper’s weapons-toting kamarads, Mickey was about to find out just how well a little equatorial sun suited him. And the tricks and dodges he would learn there would be as vital for his survival as any military service.