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 thought. 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.