Free Outlaws Inc. by Matt Potter

Because for every shock, in which food, clean water, shelter, or medicines become scarce, there’s an aftershock. This is the critical phase in which institutions break down: Corruption, violence, profiteering, and the law of the gun hold sway.
    â€œThe UAE, for example, is a main way-station and hub for the Afghan air bridge, and for aid to the Middle East and South Asia. Places like Uganda and Kenya are the only game in town for flights to Angola. That places them right where they need to be for aid flights and for anything else they might want to take to or from these countries.”
    Still, international monitors were for many years baffled at the way small arms and black-market goods find their way into disaster zones so quickly—and local resources, from cash and looted treasures to opium, find their way out.
    But just as every complex ecosystem evolves parasites, it will evolve predators, scavengers, and masters of disguise and diversion. And, in among the jobbing airmen seizing their chance at a new life, there were others—legitimate businessmen and rogue operators, too, who cannily registered their planes in known-quantity countries with notoriously lax, obscure, or corrupt record-keeping and monitoring regimes like Georgia and Kazakhstan and set up their businesses in the Arabian Gulf and across sub-Saharan Africa. Once there, they formed a whole new class of altogether more freewheeling business owners. And the story of the most celebrated of them, an old air force comrade of Mickey’s no less, is the key to understanding just what Mickey did next.
    JUST OVER AN hour’s drive east from Mickey’s old air base at Vitebsk, the green, mossy earth smells of fresh rain and birch resin. Russian, Polish, and German cars, open-topped trucks and transcontinental container lorries hiss and spray along the cracked wet blacktop of the E141 auto route, bound for the Russian border city of Smolensk.
    Slow down, indicate right, and pull over. Get out of the car, step off the hard shoulder, away from the whooshing traffic and into the trees, and the dripping silence quickly closes in. Giant, raggedy crows flap and peck over the soft forest earth. The abandoned shells of German Tiger tanks stand immobile and rusting, though even they are now rotting into these giant, misty birch forests through which they once advanced, clanking and roaring.
    In the Forest of Katyn, the ghosts are piled six-deep in some places; in others, pieces of human debris turn on twigs in the wind. Either way, it’s not a place you want to be after dark. Between 1942 and 1943, under the leaves and dirt, the bodies of as many as twenty-two thousand Polish army officers, writers, lawyers, engineers, and teachers were found, piled several deep in hastily dug pits twelve miles west of the city. On the orders of Stalin’s secret police, they had been massacred in the woods in one single day of almost industrial slaughter in April 1940. And here, amid these same birches, they lay—alongside Ukrainian and Byelorussian comrades executed simultaneously and in their hundreds, in Smolensk’s main industrial abattoir, and in the NKVD secret-police headquarters in town. The Katyn massacre still poisons Polish-Russian relations, and the ghosts still bring travelers to their deaths.
    On April 10, 2010, the Polish president, dozens of war veterans, and the entire top tier of Poland’s government were killed en route to a remembrance ceremony for the victims of the massacre. The Tupolev Tu-154M plane of the Thirty-sixth Air Transport Regiment, lost in the fog and attempting to reroute to Smolensk, hit the birches and disintegrated. Of the eighty-seven passengers and crew, not one survived. Photographs show the smoking wreckage of one of the engines, nestled among the birches on the forest floor, precisely twelve miles west of town. It looked like something that had found its way home.
    Like Mickey’s old base across the border