Outlaws Inc. by Matt Potter Page B

nineteenth-century lantern carriers who’d steer ships onto rocks in the hope of plundering some of the valuable cargo that survived the wreck. But animus against Russian planes specifically plays a part too—for the scorched-earth bombing tactics deployed against civilians in Grozny during the war. On September 9, 2010, a female Chechen suicide bomber dressed as a medic blew up a busful of Russian air force personnel on its way to Mozdok air base in North Ossetia.
    â€œA really experienced pilot can fly his Il-76 anywhere,” grins one Ukrainian I talk to later. “Snow, heat, fucking anywhere. But Chechnya still makes everyone nervous.”
    â€œNot really true, I think,” frowns Mickey when we next speak. “No problem at high altitude. And even if you take a hit, maybe it doesn’t damage you too badly. I could crash-land it, probably.” He coughs up a wheezy little laugh. “Maybe even in a minefield.”
    The savage irony nobody mentions is that these rebels are firing weapons from the very same stockpiles as the ones Mickey’s team is carrying. Because one unintended consequence of the global move toward self-determination that the collapsing USSR kicked off is that you get a whole lot more of these freelance psychos with rolling eyes, itchy fingers, and a bellyful of plum brandy or religion taking wild potshots at your Candid from the rooftops, hillsides, and treetops of places like Grozny. And when the market rules, these whooping vigilantes will always have more than enough rockets. The dawn of the era of the customer was also the beginning of a new kind of terrorist.
    Back in 1992, it took a special kind of sixth sense to see just how snugly the two new doctrines in town—political self-determination and personal consumer choice—would fit together; to see that large groups of people, from the former Yugoslavia to Chechnya, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Macedonia, were determined to have it their way. And that like all consumers, they were prepared to enter the open market to get whatever it took.
    Not that armed militias were anything new: In the superpowered past, rebel groups had always been supported by one bloc or the other. The long-running Angolan wars (1961–1975, 1975–2002) had long been proxy Cold War confrontations, with the UNITA rebels receiving military assistance from the U.S. and South Africa, and their enemies the MPLA backed by the Soviet Union. It was all part of a larger game, there was no doubt as to who was in charge—the phrase “puppet regime” said it all—and, of course, there was always a political and military quid pro quo. But suddenly things were different. Now access to the finest, most powerful military hardware—along with anything else—wasn’t a favor they needed to beg of anyone with a broader range of interests at heart; not the Kremlin or the White House or China, not the CIA or the KGB, or anyone else for that matter. The hardware, the bullets, the mercenaries, the mayhem was their right as consumers, and their money (or homegrown cash crops, natural resources, whatever they could trade) was calling the shots now.
    In Angola, Liberia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone, diamonds bought those old Soviet stockpiles; in the DRC, timber, gold, diamonds, furs, and coltan called the tune, with operators like Bout and Leonid Minin (a heftily built Israeli-Ukrainian, boss of the Odessa mafia turned trafficker and all-around wheeler-dealer who’d recently set up a business called Exotic Timber Enterprises, flying innocent-looking cargo flights between Europe and Africa on a regular basis) making the deals and men like Mickey flying in and out packed to the rafters with extras on the side.
    It looked like chaos. It was a thriving market. The International Relations and Security Network, part of the Zurich Center for Security Studies, nails the spirit of the 1990s globally when it calls Minin’s and