Outlaws Inc. Read online

  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 ont
o 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.