Outlaws Inc. by Matt Potter Read Free Book Online Page B

manual.
    â€œEven customs officials, who check cargo off every day, don’t ever fly in these things. They have the contents on the cargo manifest, and they tally with the maximum load on the spec. Then, if they stop for a moment, they’ll do the maths and sure enough, the manifest takes the plane up to Maximum Take Off Weight. They expect a single hold space, and that’s what they’re shown, and they tick off what’s in it, and that’s their job. Beyond that, they don’t have the time or the resources. A customs official in the third world might get paid five U.S. dollars a day, on a good day. They aren’t likely to stop and arrest and generally make life difficult for the people who fly in and give them a bottle of vodka or case of cigarettes that will fetch five times that on the black market.”
    It was perfect. It quickly dawned that “the people who’d check the cargo against what we’d say we were carrying had never flown the plane—they hadn’t a fucking clue, quite honestly,” tuts Sergei.
    â€œThey’d look at the manual, see that 192 tons was the maximum takeoff weight, and sixty tons of that was cargo. When that sixty tons had been loaded up and accounted for, they’d sign it off! But the thing is, we can carry fifteen tons more under the floor. Maybe sixteen, if we’re feeling lucky. You have to start a little way back on the runway because it’ll take you that much more power to get airborne, but you can do it. Well, we can.”
    So long as they didn’t want to carry all the standard escape equipment that would normally fill those chambers, they had the perfect smuggler’s vessel. Not only did the plane itself have what amounted to a fake bottom to it; because of Soviet secrecy around its military, the only people who knew it was even there were the engineers, and the airmen who flew it. And they were hardly likely to ruin a good thing by telling.
    So now Mickey, like everybody else with a plane to fly and a living to make in that first desperate burst of free enterprise, just had to figure out a) what openly declared cargo jobs they would take on, and b) what illicit cargo a man of his skill could get away with carrying, for the right price.
    For Mickey himself, of course, there was a third question. What hidden extra cargo, in the spaces of the Candid that not even his bosses knew about, would make him the most illicit cash in hand on each journey?
    He needed to figure it out quickly. The crews were in high demand. The year was 1992 and things were changing. The Cold War was over, and the free market had trumped ideology. Meanwhile (and thanks largely to the glut of small arms suddenly flooding the market), small, bloody, internecine conflicts were spreading across Southern Europe and Africa.
    By 1992, the former Yugoslavia had began its ugly descent into all-out sectarian war: Croatia and Slovenia, having declared independence, were recognized by some Western governments and began looking at what they could take with them, while Serbia geared up to prevent more secession, by force if necessary. On the edges of the old Soviet Union, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Tajikistan were plunged into civil war. Libyan-armed Tuareg rebels were opposing government forces in Mali. The Democratic Republic of Afghanistan had collapsed to the same mujahideen resistance fighters who had seen off the Soviets. Rebel militias were running riot in Rwanda, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Angola, the Sudan, Somalia, Guatemala, Peru, Colombia, Algeria, and Uganda. And in the Caucasian borderlands of Russia itself, another ex-Soviet air force Afghan-war veteran and Chechen separatist named Dzhokhar Dudayev was about to declare independence from the motherland and sign a law giving all Chechens the right to bear arms against their oppressors.
    And for Mickey’s crew, finding the answers to those questions would lead them into close contact with some of