Outlaws Inc. by Matt Potter Read Free Book Online

their masters was, for a short time, a very real one; and a mutinous air force capable of carrying nuclear warheads and troops anywhere, anytime, would have been a prospect too dark to contemplate in a state all too conscious of the possibilities of armed revolution.
    The writing was on the wall. Arms, planes, equipment, and men were going AWOL anyway, and given the choice between allowing the men at least a piece of the action or forcing mutiny and civil war, one can only speculate that Shaposhnikov effectively had no choice. His colleague, Minister for Privatization Anatoly Chubais, said, “We did not have a choice between an ideal transition to a market economy and a criminalized transition. Our choice was between a criminalized transition and civil war.”
    As for Mickey’s team of airmen, they were still in their twenties and thirties but already carried the skills, scars, habits, hardship-forged contacts, and thousand-yard stares they’d brought back from the war in Afghanistan—today, Shaposhnikov calls it “the Russian version of Vietnam syndrome.” For them, the sudden collapse in prospects for the army and air force combined with feverish talk of rich rewards to be made in the burgeoning private sector. Their families were hungry; they themselves had frequently been forced to survive on their wits by foraging and bartering what petty goods they could steal. Now, finally, with the fire sale they had a shot at something bigger.
    With the service descending into chaos, the country on its knees, and rich incentives on offer to join the global movement of goods and capital into, between, and from the lands of the erstwhile Soviet Union, the question for these boys wasn’t if they’d use their skills to go into business, but how .

 
    CHAPTER FOUR
    The Machine
    Post-Soviet Russia, Early 1990s
    THE GUNS, AMMUNITION, PLANES, EVEN NUCLEAR WARHEADS flowed out of the military stores, the bases and the silos, even straight off the factory lines and into the hands of anyone with a good contact, a bill to pay, or a score to settle. But for Mickey and his comrades, turning the free-for-all into a worthwhile business would take all the wiles, expertise, and perseverance they’d learned flying their endless sorties over Afghanistan. It would also take the right plane.
    After years of neglecting the wider economy in favor of military might, the former Soviet Union now faced a downhill race, just as Mikhail Gorbachev had predicted, to liquidate as many of these assets as possible, as quickly as possible. Warheads, tanks, bullets, guns, jet fighters, ships, grenade launchers, transport planes, the lot.
    Arms manufacturers, sensing the approach of a drastic liberalization of the economy, began to adapt to market conditions. But their production lines, used to working toward targets outlined in five-year plans, couldn’t react fast enough. Commissioned by a suddenly bankrupt army, dozens of Soviet monster aircraft—Ilyushins, Tupolevs, and Antonovs—often made it no further than the post-assembly depots, left to rust in their dozens outside factories and on silent, abandoned airfields across Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. Faced with the option—sell them and claw back some cash for yourself, or let them rust—their guardians were only too pleased to let them go to whomever came knocking. But if a new model was still too much—well, there were also plenty of combat-worn planes in various states of airworthiness to be bought, leased, or borrowed on very favorable terms, solo or crew included, from the armed forces themselves.
    For a team like Mickey’s, trained to a high level but with only one skill to speak of, taking to the skies again in a repainted Il-76 felt, he says, “like getting back to business as usual after all the worry.” They had the plane, the crew, and, in the burgeoning black markets of former Soviet states, no end of demand