Outlaws Inc. (27 page)

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

 

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.