Outlaws Inc. by Matt Potter Page A

(though the paper never managed to verify it) to be Bout’s brother and business partner, Sergei, Bout was likened by the caller to a cabbie. “Imagine a taxi driver who is supposed to give a lift to a customer who asks him to take him to a certain location. But suddenly the taxi driver asks what is in your suitcase. It’s not my bloody business what my customer has in his trunk. I am a carrier.”
    Over the years, Viktor Bout has become a cause célèbre, a thorn in the side of an ever-larger band of arms-trade monitors, plane watchers, UN investigators, and governments who can’t quite believe it should be so hard to stop the deadly cargo of missiles, planes, guns, and ammunition to an unstable developing world full of cash-rich customers. His aviation companies have shape-shifted so often that nobody, not even Interpol, the CIA, or MI5, seem to this day to be exactly sure what, or where, they are.
    But for now, all that—the fame, the photo shoots in glossy magazines, the arrest warrants—was still in the future. He was the undisputed cargo kingpin of this new age, and business was good. And Bout was nothing if not a big thinker. In the months ahead, as he rose to prominence as the operator of several ex-Soviet planes, he would move to South Africa, locate bases in the Middle East, become Boss Hogg of a remote airport near Mafikeng, and in time draw allegations of being a platinum-service gunrunner simultaneously to both the Afghan Taliban and the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance, arms trafficker to Angola, smuggler of blood diamonds and more. He was, if not first to market, then certainly the best.
    But he wasn’t alone.

 
    CHAPTER SIX
    The Warlord Is Always Right
    The Caucasus, 1994
    THE DEAFENING WHINE CHANGES TO A HOLLOW, throaty roar as the engines surge. There’s shouting and pointing in the cockpit, the copilot’s tapping on the glass at something below; everyone’s looking down. We’re too high for mountains and the sky’s been as smooth as a monorail. Then a nod from Mickey and it’s over, the roaring silence and the blackness closing around us again.
    Steely glances and forget-about-it shrugs ricochet around the fuselage as shadows melt from the bathroom-lit cabin and into the half light of the fuselage. We’ve been curled, slumped, and slouched, entering a kind of willing suspended animation like men trapped in a bank vault or down mines in disaster movies. Now the spell snaps. Alarmed by the shouting, it’s a while before I can find out what’s going on.
    â€œChechnya,” tuts Dmitry, turning out of his pod to grab a bite. “The idiots are shooting at us.” He rolls his eyes. “Again.”
    â€œWhat’s the point? We’re too high. Much too high,” sighs the flight engineer. Everybody shrugs. Someone opens a can of Sprite, but it’s been shaken and explodes out, to much cursing.
    Apart from the word Chechens passing back down the cabin, nobody says anything after that. I look round at the faces. They are blank, intense but vacant, and it’s hard to tell if they’re just doing their jobs, lost in the automatism of aircrew life, or thinking about being shot at, beyond range or not.
    Despite the crew’s obvious disdain for the possibility that someone’s shooting, it often can and does end badly, even here. On a clear and starry night like this in August 2002, a giant Russian transport helicopter was shot down by a trigger-happy Chechen warrior on this same spot. The giant helicopter crashed in the midst of a minefield, one of the inky-black, unlit areas now visible through the navigator’s glass. In the biggest single loss of Russian life of the whole Chechen war, 119 aircrew and Russian soldiers died, and a used rocket launcher was recovered close to the crash site.
    There’s been antiaircraft activity around Chechnya for years. Mostly they’re wreckers just like the