Outlaws Inc. (28 page)

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.