burning on the asphalt.
Cluzet punched numbers on the sat phone, catching the puzzled gaze of his two men. He turned around and saw Lin in the cab of the truck, his white-knuckled hands welded to the steering wheel in abject terror.
Cluzet turned to the German, grinning.
“I think that went very well, don’t you?”
27
BADAKHSHAN PROVINCE, NORTHEASTERN AFGHANISTAN
It was a clear, cool morning, the sky a blue so brilliant it hurt Cluzet’s eyes as he stared at it, sipping a hot tea.
His three tractor-trailers stood beneath tents of heavy camouflage netting to mask the heat signatures of the big diesel engines and to avoid the prying eyes of the school-bus-sized KH-11 Keyhole satellite passing over Afghanistan nearly fifteen times per day at a mean altitude of four hundred kilometers.
The satellite’s optical sensors were capable of seeing objects just four inches across in broad daylight, but it also possessed thermal and infrared capabilities. Deployed primarily to assist U.S. and ISAF coalition military operations, it was sometimes tasked with drug interdiction assignments for the ISAF and the Afghan Army. Given their remote location, unless the KH-11 satellite was tasked with a mission specifically directed at them, they were likely safe. Still, as far as Cluzet was concerned, it never hurt to be too careful.
The first items that had been unloaded and restacked overnight from the trailers were pallets of BEGO-brand “Star Battles” toys—Chinese knockoffs of the famous LEGO Star Wars building-block sets. The rest were, as Cluzet told Khatloni, pallets of Chinese-manufactured DVD players and portable radios.
Once the cheap Chinese goods were unloaded, it was possible to remove the dozens of two-hundred-liter plastic drums of chemical precursors for the manufacture of heroin. Despite decades of American and European interdiction efforts, Afghan heroin production was at an all-time high at nearly 500,000 acres of poppies—the equivalent of 500,000 American football fields, not including end zones—producing an estimated 9,000 metric tons of refined product, the vast majority of global heroin sourcing.
While there was no shortage of poppies to produce the raw opium latex typically harvested by Afghan children, the largely agrarian and dysfunctional Afghan economy was incapable of producing the hydrochloric acid, acetic anhydride, and other chemical precursors required in the otherwise simple heroin manufacturing process.
European governments had successfully monitored legal shipments of these important chemicals used in many industrial and pharmaceutical applications, and had even managed to clamp down on the illegal distribution of them.
Chinese government officials who were secretly part of the global criminal enterprise known as the Iron Syndicate were more than happy to fill in the gap. The Iron Syndicate rerouted the heroin precursor chemicals into Afghanistan under official cover with all necessary documentation out of Kashgar, an ancient city along the original Silk Road of Marco Polo fame in China’s far-western Xinjiang Province. The city had enjoyed a great deal of German foreign investment of late, including with development of the largest and most sophisticated chemical plants in Central Asia, with managers on the Iron Syndicate payroll.
Cluzet and his team were hired to provide security for the illicit chemical shipment needed in the process to transform raw opium into a morphine base, then into brown tar heroin, and finally grade 4 “pure” white heroin.
Delivering the four tons of precursors was only half of Cluzet’s dangerous assignment. The second half was even more treacherous: delivering one metric ton of processed heroin to the shipyards in Gdańsk. The distribution and sale of the final heroin product would generate just over two hundred million dollars of profit for his employer and their Afghan producers.
The Afghans unloaded the pallets of radio cases with the aid of a rusted 1964 Massey Ferguson forklift–tractor conversion and stacked them inside a cinder-block storage shed, where young village women began their work. They first opened the cases of radios, then pulled out individual units, carefully opened the boxes, and removed the specially designed digital radios, mindful not to damage the packaging or lose the instructions.
Individual radios were pried open and a package of heroin was placed inside a storage compartment. Once a radio was loaded with heroin, it was placed back in its packaging box and the box was resealed. Then the box was marked with a small brown sticker, round and innocuous. The “heroin radio” was then put back in the case of “clean radios” and the process repeated. Only one in four of the radios carried the illicit drug. Once finished with the pallets of radios, the women moved on to the DVD players and finally the