‘Do you have a military background, General?’ Duat realised the question was profoundly rude. After all, he called himself a general, didn’t he?
The general stared at Duat for a long, quiet moment.
‘Phaa…’ he said, waving a hand dismissively after a few seconds. ‘Why lie about it? I approached the government in Rangoon, and volunteered to keep the Thais on their side of the border if they allowed me to keep a small, paid army to do so. Paranoia is a wonderful thing. You can make it work for you, especially when regular deposits in the bank accounts of various senior officers accompany it. The rank of general, along with the occasional wearing of a uniform, just helps keep some of the recruits in order.’ He indicated the men drilling below with a lowering of his head.
‘Try some of these. You are too thin.’ He flicked a fat finger impatiently at one of the girls. She spooned various coconut treats onto a quivering banana leaf and handed them to Duat with a bow.
‘Thank you, General. I envy your lifestyle.’ In fact, Duat didn’t envy the general in the least, for the man was most obviously without God. But he was anxious to close the deal and be on his way, and felt that a compliment might tidily end the conversation.
‘Phaa…’ he said again. ‘Do you know what I would really like to do?’ The general didn’t wait for Duat to answer. ‘Take my new Ferrari Enzo and drive it with my foot to the firewall all the way from Rome to Milan, collecting as many speeding tickets as possible. But of course I can’t. Spies are everywhere. If I so much as pass wind it makes the daily CIA circular. I am here for good. But I knew from the start that would be a hazard of my chosen profession.’ He shrugged. ‘Now, let’s talk about you, Duat.’
The Indonesian nodded, trying to smile as naturally as possible. He wondered exactly what the general had been told about Babu Islam, and decided to say as little as possible about it. The general was a businessman and an infidel. ‘General, I have several million US dollars and, ultimately, I would like to turn that into several hundred million.’
‘Ah yes, capitalism. There is no nobler cause. I myself am a capitalist.’
Silence followed. Duat wasn’t sure what to say next.
The general rolled his eyes in exasperation. This Indonesian was not particularly forthcoming with any useful or entertaining conversation. He was impatient, a fiddler who kept sneaking glances at his watch. The man was obviously uninterested in social discourse. ‘Duat, I can see that you are a man in a hurry. You would like to conduct your business and be on your way. I can appreciate that, for time, as they say quite rightly, is money. But, unlike you, I am not in a hurry and, therefore, I will not be rushed. I have built my business over fifteen years, and I continue to live and breathe for the simple reason that I have a nose for good business partners. Of course, I also have on retainer some of the best assassins you’re likely to find anywhere should our interests clash.’
‘I apologise for my rudeness. I didn’t mean to cause offence,’ said Duat nervously. The general appeared to accept that with a ‘humph’. Duat was less concerned about his own bad manners than he was about the general’s reputation. He was rumoured to have murdered at least a hundred people throughout the world over the past decade and a half, including several from American and Australian drug enforcement and police agencies. He was known to be utterly ruthless and fearless, a wanted man in over fifty countries.
‘You are then also aware of my new-business policy?’
‘Yes, General. Our mutual friends in the Philippines made me aware of it as being non-negotiable. Ten percent of the total in US dollars, up front. Only, in this case, I hope you will make an exception.’ Duat leaned forward and placed a wooden box on the table between them. He opened it. Inside were a number of large pink crystals. The general’s eyes widened almost comically.
‘Well, Duat, you are indeed a surprising fellow,’ said the general picking up two of the stones and examining them.
‘Their collective worth is slightly more than five million US dollars.’
The general rolled one between thumb and forefinger, holding it up to the light. ‘Hmm…Argyle…’
‘You know your diamonds, General.’
The general ignored the compliment and held the other stone to the light. ‘Naturally, I’ll have them valued before we proceed.’
‘Of course.’
‘Speaking on behalf of your three companions, I hope you’re right about their value.’
Duat swallowed involuntarily. If the stones’ value did not measure up, he knew the general’s disappointment would not stop at his missing bodyguards.
A thin man in jungle camouflage gear materialised. His shiny bald head gleamed like polished teak. The general placed the two stones in his palm. The man bowed slightly, turned, and left without saying a word.
‘I do hope we can be friends, Duat,’ said the general. ‘Come on. Allow me to show you what you might have made a down payment on. Do you ride?’
The general and Duat were met at the bottom of the white marble staircase by a golf cart advertising an expensive brand of clubs. The dash panel was signed with indecipherable scribble. The general followed Duat’s gaze and said, ‘A present from one of my US contacts, who picked it up at a children’s benefit, signed by the leader board in last year’s US Open.’ The general smiled as if recalling some happy memory. ‘Must always help the little children,’ he said, smacking his lips.
The golf cart stuck to the cobbled road that wound around the estate. ‘I must tell you, Duat, how nice it is to be dealing with one of my Asian brothers. I’m tired of the Americans, Dutch and Lebanese. Too much testosterone.’
It had been Kadar Al-Jahani who insisted that Duat should handle the general and Duat silently acknowledged his partner’s foresight. ‘Are they your main customers?’
The general paused before continuing, as if weighing up whether to answer the question, but then he shrugged as if saying to himself, ‘What the hell …’ A squad of around thirty young men with muscled torsos jogged on the road towards the cart. At the last moment they detoured onto the grass and crisply saluted their commanding officer en masse as the cart whined past. ‘Business is changing,’ said the general. ‘Asia was once the centre of the world but the US is seeking supply closer to home. Now Mexico and Colombia are the flavour of the month and are making sizeable inroads. An inferior product, though, as any discerning buyer will tell you. But it is cheap.’ The general steered the vehicle onto a narrow path that opened into a wide cobbled forecourt and pulled up outside an elaborate building. Stables. Two white stallions snorted and clattered about their handlers, as final adjustments were made to bridles and saddles.
‘N…no, general. I wasn’t sure what you meant by “ride”. I thought you meant motorcycles.’ Duat was plainly terrified at the thought of sitting on top of an animal with a mind and a spirit of its own.
‘Pity. You know you’re missing out on one of life’s great pleasures. Should you become rich and idle as a result of our dealings, perhaps it’s something you might consider taking up?’ The general pulled a small handset from his front pocket and spoke into it. Almost instantly, three heavily modified Land Rovers appeared, laden with men dressed in jungle greens and armed with M4 carbines. The vehicles themselves sported heavy calibre mounted machine guns and grenade launchers. ‘This neighbourhood has gone completely downhill since the Thais started courting the Americans more seriously. Beyond the walls, one absolutely must travel with an escort.’ He slapped the vehicle lightly with the flat of his hand.
The general climbed awkwardly up onto the second vehicle with the assistance of three young soldiers, grunting and farting loudly. He sat behind the heavy machine gun. ‘South African,’ said the general, patting it. ‘Seven point six two millimetre. If it’s good enough for their battle tanks, it’ll do me.’ Duat sprang up and sat beside the general, and the small convoy lurched forward.
The vehicles approached the encircling wall. It was taller than Duat had first thou
ght. Also, it was not made of brick, but of metal painted to look like brick. The general said, ‘Reactive armour. It explodes outwards when a shell hits it, dissipating the force.’ His guest was plainly impressed. ‘Ah yes, I have all the latest toys. See that camouflaged dome?’ said the general, pointing at an object that looked like half of a very large green vitamin pill perched atop the wall. ‘It’s a naval Phalanx Close-In Weapons System. We had it adapted for ground-to-air and ground-to-ground use. We have two of them defending our perimeter wall. It can fire up to four thousand five hundred, twenty-millimetre armour piercing discarding sabot rounds per minute, each with a depleted uranium sub-calibre penetrator. Clears the jungle faster than a bulldozer. One has to protect one’s property,’ he said, adding a high-pitched chortle.
The jungle opened up outside the gate and swallowed the armed convoy. Duat felt a tap on his shoulder and was handed a tube of mosquito repellent. ‘You’ll need it,’ said the general. The cinder road quickly gave way to mud. The vehicles selected low range and began a climb that seemed to Duat to be almost vertical. ‘Just five years ago,’ said the general as the trucks bounced and ground slowly up the incline, ‘all this was under cultivation. But then the soil gave out, so we returned it to the jungle. It wasn’t one of our better fields, anyway. The gradient’s too steep and it’s on the wrong side of the hill. The flower prefers a gradient of between forty and seventy degrees and the western side of the hill. And what the Papaver somniferum wants, it shall have.’
Duat nodded and glanced at his watch.
‘As I said to you earlier, Duat, you should become familiar with the factory floor.’The general indicated the jungle pressing in on them by firing the machine gun into it briefly.
The convoy reached the summit of the ridge and tipped over the other side. Suddenly, the jungle gave way to sky and vast fields of open cleared ground clinging to the hillside. Here and there, men and women moved through the fields attending to the crop that had grown to roughly the height of a man, the workers’ heads shielded from the tropical sun by wicker hats with wide brims. ‘You’re lucky, Duat. You’ve arrived at the perfect time to see the whole process – we’re at the tail end of the harvest season. I have around two hundred families under my personal protection here, each cultivating around three rai.’
The Land Rover bounced over a tree root.
‘A rai is around one point three hectares or three point two acres. The conditions here are almost perfect, so the farmers are getting around a million plants on the average plot. The yield is around twelve choi or, in western measurements, sixty kilos of opium for each family plot – give or take. Just two years ago, we expanded our operations significantly, so that we now process opium grown and collected within a radius of around twenty kilometres.’
The lead truck slowed to a crawl and then stopped as it rounded a corner made blind by the presence of a hardwood tree with a vast girth. An elephant lumbering in the opposite direction delicately threaded the gap between the vehicle and the tree. On its back towered a load bound in hessian that swayed precariously with every step. ‘I believe this animal’s name is Rambo, after the action hero. He’s our biggest and strongest worker – a favourite around here. We used to operate four-wheel drives to transport the morphine for further processing, but we found the elephants to be more reliable and we have fewer accidents.’
Duat nodded. The ‘factory floor’ was both vaguely interesting and annoying. He wanted to fix his order and get back on Indonesian soil. Yes, this was a vital piece of the plan but he was anxious to know how Kadar Al-Jahani was making out, and how things were progressing back at the encampment.
The general said something to one of his men, who immediately jumped out of the truck, broke off one of the poppy pods and then hopped back on as the convoy began to move. The soldier handed Duat the pod. It was dark green, the size of a large chicken egg, and crowned with brown, dry petals the shape of upwardly curved fangs. The outside of the pod was scored several times and a sticky brown substance hung from one of the score marks.
‘This is the source of my wealth, and soon to be the source of yours, my thin friend,’ said the general. ‘A little money-making engine. The people you see moving amongst the plants are collecting this brown latex here on the side of the pod.
‘The yield from a single poppy can vary. My breeding program has borne fruit and we are now consistently getting from a hundred to one hundred and ten milligrams of latex per pod and five pods per plant!’ The general beamed. Duat recalled the large glasshouse back at the compound. The general took the pod from Duat and kissed it before tossing it back into the field. ‘Rambo is carrying cooked opium to one of the many processing plants we have scattered about the place. Would you like to see one? Of course you would,’ he said before Duat could say he’d rather not. The general barked an order at the driver, who then radioed the command to the lead vehicle. A fork appeared in the road and the armed convoy took the right hand turn that headed up into the poppy field. Again the climb was extremely steep, but rather than jungle, tall poppy stems like emaciated soldiers lined the road, their green egg-heads just above Duat’s eye line.
The road burst into a clearing occupied by a sprawling shack made of sheet roofing iron and packing crates. Another elephant with a handler touching it gently on its ears with a long stick stood outside, passing the time with a little training. The handler bowed low to the general as the convoy passed. ‘Inside is where we cook the raw opium. No point showing that. The raw latex is simply boiled in water, the impurities strained, and the excess water boiled off. The opium can then be smoked or eaten. We don’t waste our time with that market, but it is the first step in a lengthy process. We’re in the business of value adding. Cooked opium contains more than thirty-five different alkaloids – morphine, codeine. But we’re really only interested in one product here: heroin.’
The vehicles followed the road as it wound behind the shack to a more permanent building made from fired clay bricks. ‘This is one of the many field kitchens where we refine our product,’ the general said. The convoy pulled up outside the structure and several young men in jungle greens carrying M16s saluted crisply. The general’s guard dispersed around the forecourt, not exactly nervous, but not relaxed either. ‘You have to excuse my men their enthusiasm, Duat. The DEA, the American drug enforcement agency, paid us a visit recently. Nothing to worry about, but we’ve ratcheted up our awareness to Defcon Two,’ he said, smiling at his own use of the US system for defence preparedness. ‘We have our own active security here that extends not just to Thailand, but also into the heart of darkness itself – America. One must stay on top of one’s biggest markets.’ The general’s confidence was mildly reassuring, but with the mention of the DEA Duat’s anxiety to be gone from this place grew exponentially.
The general walked quietly through the entrance door held open by one of his men. ‘Shh,’ he said behind him to Duat. ‘Don’t want to stop the presses making money.’ The interior of the building was clean and brightly lit by electric bulbs, the faint hum of a generator nearby. A dozen local men and women, wearing next to nothing and of ages that varied from the very young to the almost decrepit, attended huge steel vats in which liquid boiled furiously. Two of the men, one old and one young, had faces and hands that were horribly disfigured. The temperature was almost unbearable and Duat broke into an instant sweat.
The general continued to speak, unfazed by the heat although he too was sweating profusely. ‘These vats are each two hundred and fifty litres in capacity. A hundred and thirty-six litres of water are brought to the boil and then around fifteen kilograms of the cooked opium are dissolved in it. Next, slaked lime is added forming watersoluble calcium morphenate. A bunch of alkaloids form but these are left as a sludge at the bottom.
‘We scoop out the solution, strain it and reheat it. We then add enough ammonium chloride so that the pH is adjusted to around eight and, hey presto,’ the general waved his hands as a magician might over a vat,
‘morphine hydrochloride precipitates out and settles on the bottom.’
Ammonium chloride. Duat had used that himself many times. Fertiliser. The same chemical used to make bombs was used to make heroin. It was indeed useful stuff.
‘Duat…’ said the general, noting that his guest’s attention had wandered, ‘we purify the base by redissolving it in hydrochloric acid, adding activated charcoal and straining it several times.’ The general walked over and placed his hand on the old man, whose face looked like it had partially melted off. ‘As you can see, we occasionally have little accidents with the acid, but otherwise the whole thing is a very simple process. Hardly worth sweating through a degree in chemistry,’ he said playfully, perspiration streaming down his face. ‘But what did I know? I was young and, as I said, foolish.’
The general picked up a small, flat cream-coloured brick and dropped it in Duat’s hand. The little block was surprisingly heavy. ‘Thirteen kilos of opium produces one point three kilos of morphine hydrochloride. It’s not even something we can sell yet. Yes, Duat,’ said the general, nodding seriously, his forehead furrowed, ‘we work hard for our money here.’ He then clapped the old man with the acid-burned face on the back somewhat boisterously, almost knocking him down. The old man bowed and smiled when he’d recovered his balance. Or at least Duat thought it was a smile – it was difficult to tell.
‘Recently, we’ve also started making that all-important finished product here in the fields. Used to happen back at my house. But the smell…This is a new addition to the building, and we have another dozen like it scattered about. Conversion to heroin number three, the smoking variety, happens out back.’ The general opened a wide steel door. Duat looked in and a wave of cool air struck him, as did the overwhelming stench of pickles. ‘That’s the smell I was talking about – acetic anhydride. It reacts with the morphine hydrochloride to form diacetylmorphine, otherwise known as heroin. Of course, there are other things we add – more activated charcoal and sodium carbonate. But the bottom line? One whole hectare under cultivation, around a million poppies, will produce a little over a quarter of a kilo of pure heroin.
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