Outlaws Inc. Read Online Free Page B

businessman. This has opened up a black-market wormhole through which anything—guns, people, cash, black-market goods, drugs—can appear or disappear. It makes sense. When you drive through impromptu barricades all day, these mysterious giant Soviet-era planes begin to sound like no-brainers—no stickups, shakedowns, or quasi-military roadblocks at thirty thousand feet. But they also sounded expensive. The fuel for a journey from anywhere outside the Balkans would cost hundreds of thousands of (theoretically unavailable) U.S. dollars. Someone has to be flush.
    It turns out that a man named Rade Markovic, one of MiloÅ¡evi ć ’s most trusted secret-police chiefs and a regime assassin implicated in a series of unsolved gangland murders across Belgrade—for which he will later be sentenced to forty years in jail—is now liaising extremely closely with a man called Mihalj Kertes, head of customs at Belgrade’s Nikola Tesla Airport. And over the past couple of years, the routes on the flight plans have gone from interesting to downright suspect: mysterious midnight departures originating in Russia or the Emirates, making their way from Belgrade via the ’stans and Cyprus to Iraq and Libya. They’ve coincided with a spike in trafficking activity through the Balkans in drugs, guns, and hard currency to sustain the regime’s proxy militia armies down in Kosovo.
    â€œProbably we know before anyone when war is on the way,” Mickey will remember years later, casual as an after-hours minicab driver running down the nightly routine. “Jobs change. A lot of jobs at one spot. Or maybe a different kind of job becomes popular very quickly. It always means something. And it means money.”
    The Serb businessman and I finished our wine, paid the waiter in new U.S. dollars, and headed away from the hotel to our respective jobs, the next meeting.
    BUT I DIDN’T forget what he’d told me, or what I’d seen. From that point, every time I traveled as a journalist, the airfields and terminals glowed with occult significance. I’d find reasons to separate myself, accidentally on purpose, from the press packs in places like Indonesia, Central America, the former Soviet states, the Balkans, Africa. I sat and watched the comings and goings of these giant cargo planes and the men who flew them. Mostly, I’d sit there for hours and nothing would happen; often, I’d attract the attention of the local security or military police. Either way, most of it was spent either explaining or wondering to myself what I was doing there.
    But sometimes I’d catch a glimpse of some interesting planes, some interesting people. You got to recognize the crews: the worry lines, the likely hangouts, the incongruous overalls, Hawaiian shirts, and sports clothing. Even the way they’d walk across the asphalt, drink, and wait for their connection together, all watchful-casual just like military units. Watch them through the foyer window for long enough and you could almost feel their civilian clothes making them itch.
    I’d spend the next decade and a half tracing these men and their movements and trying to get to the bottom of exactly what they were carrying, where, and for whom. And when I got my chance to hitch a ride with a crew of “delivery men” into Afghanistan in the wake of the U.S.–led coalition’s invasion, I made sure I took it.
    As it turned out, the pilot and his crew of Soviet veterans would lead me into the shadowy side of the new global economy, from South American guns-for-cocaine drops to the Afghan heroin trade, from the warlord-controlled jungles of the Congo to parachuted suitcases full of cash for Somali pirates. But that was all in the future.
    To understand Mickey and his business, I’d first have to hear his story. And to understand the cosmic rupture that threw him, his plane, and a tidal wave of deadly cargo unequaled in history out into