THEY ARE THE WORST OF THE WORST, violent hellholes where the last person you'd expect to find living large is some small-town American. Congo is a country the size of Western Europe, with only 300 miles of paved roads. It's a country reeling from 32 years of despotic one-man rule and another ten of civil war, a place where, in late 2006, 18,000 heavily armed UN troops were trying to keep the peace long enough to hold the elections. And where, the grapevine said, there was this guy from Pennsylvania making big money and having the time of his life.

"I'm sitting here watching Six Feet Under and the pool and hot tub are ten feet away," Roman said when I called him from the U.S. "What's not to like? Come on out for a visit. I make the best damn martini on the continent!"

Roman arrived in Nairobi, Kenya, in late 1996, when the heart of Africa was pumping blood. In Rwanda, the Hutu had recently hacked to death 500,000 of their Tutsi countrymen. The Tutsi chased many of the murderous Hutu across the border into eastern Zaire, where more than a million of them gathered around the town of Goma. That was the beginning of the end of Zaire and its storied big man, Mobutu Sese Seko. It was also the beginning of Roman, a white guy from Hazleton, Pennsylvania, who helped take over a country.

When he arrived, Roman was 33 and knew nothing about Africa. But he had a thirst for adventure and he'd been around, to put it mildly. His father operated a farm, a construction company, and an airport-services operation in Hazleton. Flying and working—that's all young Tim did. By age 17 he had a private multi-engine-airplane license. Later, he became a fire-bomber pilot for the U.S. Forest Service, flew for USAir, and started a construction business and aircraft-maintenance shop in his off hours. When he got laid off from USAir in 1992, he bought his first Nord 262—a French-made two-engine turboprop with high wings, good for hauling cargo or passengers on and off short landing strips. Then a friend in the maintenance business told him about a Colombian he knew who had a Nord in Panama that had been shot up in the 1989 U.S. invasion.

That's how Roman found his true calling, the perfect business for a pilot who loved money but didn't mind a little discomfort. Wherever there is chaos and violence on the ground, you'll find men (and a few women) like Roman: Westerners with airplanes—complex, expensive machines that soar over roadblocks and pirates and borders and rapacious rebel armies and trackless jungles. Sometimes they work on their own, sometimes they do dirty work for governments or governments-in-waiting. Sometimes they do a little of everything. They're gods, of a sort, not bound to the land. If things get too bad, they just take wing and fly away.

Roman went to Panama in '92, got the plane running, and flew it to Bogotá. The Colombian needed airplanes to fly "things." The Nord was perfect, so Roman bought 13 more. But then the Colombian and his partners ran into a bit of trouble—one was arrested, the other killed. Suddenly Roman had a bunch of planes and not enough business, so he leased them to operators in Honduras, Guatemala, and Kenya, where he went to personally train the crew in the aircraft's operation and maintenance.

Africa is even more tangled than South America. Roman wasn't flying tourists over game parks; he was flying the amphetamine-like drug khat into Mogadishu, Somalia, where he got shot at, he says, "every fucking day." And Zaire, just a few countries away, was not just a blank nothingness of jungle and desperate people; it was one of the richest places on earth. Under its jungles and savannas, in its immense rivers, lie gold and diamonds and copper, uranium and cobalt and oil. Riches so immense they boggle the mind and aid the rise and fall of nations thousands of miles away.

When the Hutu fled to Zaire, all hell broke loose. Zairean rebel Laurent-Désiré Kabila, a native of eastern Zaire, had been fighting Mobutu for some 30 years. Kabila's Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire was born, backed by Rwanda and Uganda, and full-fledged war broke out in eastern Zaire.

In Nairobi, Roman watched. The guns of Mogadishu didn't bother him as much as not getting paid—after three months in Nairobi he still hadn't received the monthly leasing fee for his airplane. He could file suit to repossess the aircraft, but Roman sensed a better opportunity: Some passengers needed to get from the Rwandan city of Kigali to Goma, the Hutu stronghold. He fired up the Nord and took off, his Kenyan copilot and the plane's Kenyan "owner" fully expecting the Nord back in Nairobi in a day or so. But Roman wasn't coming back. He was seizing his own plane and flying it to the safest place he could think of—the middle of a violent African war zone, a place without rules or laws about who owns what, a place where more than four million people would die over the next few years.

Roman flew to Kigali, picked up his passengers, and flew on to Goma, in the thick of the war. The thing was, everyone spoke French. "I was fucked," Roman says. But, while standing around on the airport's ramp, he fell into conversation with the sole English speaker, a young Congolese man named Joseph. They talked, they laughed, they shot the shit. That afternoon a Mercedes SUV pulled up and the driver waved Roman over. Joseph was inside, as was an older man. "We have a mission for you," they said. "Can you do it?"

"If I know what it is," Roman said, "I can do anything."

They asked him to fly three dead and two wounded to a country that Roman won't name. "In the dark," he was told.

"Not at night," Roman said. "But I'll take off at 5 a.m. in the dark and land in the light."

Joseph, it turned out, was Joseph Kabila; the older man was his father, Laurent. When Roman dropped off his cargo, his mechanic and the Kenyan copilot ran away—"They were scared shitless," he says—and Roman returned with a load of weapons. And never stopped. For the next five months, Kabila's forces marched south and west toward Kinshasa, aided by Rwanda and Uganda.

"I did frontline support and hip-hopped my way to every dirt strip from Goma to Kinshasa," Roman says. Bukavu. Kisangani. Lubumbashi. One shithole after another, a big fat white American smack in the heart of an epic African war and loving every minute of it. "I am an adrenaline junkie with a high tolerance for aggravation," he says.

He flew rebel VIPs and weapons, under fire, to strips without navigation aids, strips that had been mortared, through thick African smoke and tropical thunderstorms that were "harum-scarum violent motherfuckers." He slept in the plane, slept under the plane, ate whatever they fed him. He flew giant 105-millimeter howitzer shells, 30 to a load, two loads a day. In May 1997, Kabila's forces swept into Kinshasa and Mobutu fled the country. Kabila became president. Zaire became Congo. The U.S. embassy was in lockdown behind double rows of steel girders and a fortress of walls and barbed wire—but there was Roman, out and about.

"I left the bank in a Toyota pickup filled with sacks of cash," he says, "and drove through Kinshasa sitting on top of the money with a soldier holding an AK-47."