Rahim watched as his assistant moved around the room, sweeping away the dust, humming. Her name was Etti. She had worked at the blood bank in Jakarta. She did not have the kind of medical knowledge he had hoped for, but she had a little useful experience and she would have to do. Lately, Etti and her cat had begun to share his bed to keep him warm. He remembered a time when he would not have been able to lie beside a woman without taking her, the demands of manhood overcoming all reason, but those days were long gone. The warmth she gave was almost motherly and he lay in her arms limp, without ardour, reassured by the simple presence and comfort of another human being. He had banished the cat, however. It made him sneeze. Cats were truly disgusting animals.
‘Doctor, doctor!’ The young man burst into Rahim’s quarters without knocking. He held the package high. Rahim, lying on his cot dozing, opened his eyes slowly and waited till they focused before speaking. Rahim was no doctor of medicine, but lately the men had come to call him that because it was he who set their broken limbs and bound their sprains. Duat’s recruits were getting younger every day, he decided.
‘Emir wants you to test this,’ he said, panting. Emir — leader — was what the men called Duat. Rahim wondered what ‘this’ was. He reached down beside the cot and felt around on the wood-slatted floor for his spectacles. He put them on while still horizontal, refusing to be rushed. ‘What is it?’ asked Rahim as his assistant relieved the young man of the red package and brought it over to him. Etti shrugged, as did the courier.
A surge of excitement filled Rahim when it came into his hands. Many kilos of this had already passed through the encampment and he had been extremely annoyed when none had been kept for camp use — his use. Rahim had been waiting for this moment. He had tried opium to relieve the pain, but it made him sick and unable to work, and work was his sole release, but this…Rahim knew what it was instantly: heroin. Properly administered, he could use it to function without suffering, for he knew that the alkaloid in his hands was the finest pain relief known to man.
‘Yes, yes, of course,’ said Rahim, ‘test it.’ In the excitement of the moment, he had forgotten exactly how to perform such a test. He placed the package on the workbench that occupied two sides of his abode and considered it for a moment, searching his memory. The full chemical description for heroin was diacetylmorphine, formed when acetic anhydride reacted with morphine hydrochloride. That much he knew. He sliced one corner of the package with a knife and chipped off a corner of the brick. The powder was white with not a trace of yellow, suggesting that it was reasonably pure. But how pure? ‘I will need ten minutes,’ Rahim grumbled.
The young man nodded and disappeared as Rahim sifted through his small library. He found what he was looking for after a few minutes and left the book open on the bench so that he could refer to it. He broke off a larger chunk of heroin, weighed it, then chipped away smaller pieces until he was satisfied with its weight. As the book instructed, he dropped it into a solution of ethyl alcohol, ether and hydrochloric acid. The beaker was placed over a low flame and more acid added until the chip had dissolved. Rahim then smeared a drop of the solution on clear glass and allowed it to evaporate. Within a couple of minutes, all that remained was the residue. It was totally clear. Rahim looked up. The young man had returned and was picking up various bits of equipment then putting them down, bored and impatient. ‘Tell Emir, ninety-nine percent pure,’ said Rahim.
The young man turned and ran out the door, keen to deliver the good news.
‘Rest now, Abd’al,’ said Etti, hands on her broad hips. ‘You do not look well.’
‘I’ll do what I choose, woman. Have you checked the swine this morning?’ he asked, unable to take his eyes off the white powder on the workbench.
‘No, Abd’al. Too many distractions.’
‘Well, don’t let me keep you from your duties,’ said Rahim as he poured the test solution into a heavy-duty yellow plastic barrel stencilled with distinctive interlocking circles, the international symbol for biological hazard.
‘You must rest, Abd’al. You will kill yourself one day,’ grumbled Etti, annoyed by his dismissive attitude more than anything else.
‘May Allah let that day be soon,’ he said, hunting through the medical supplies, searching for a hypodermic syringe.
The messenger ran back to the water. The gathering on the beach was now very large, with nearly everyone from the encampment congregated there. The kitchen had fed the largely Thai crew with nasi goreng and most of the men were now smoking, enjoying the local kretek cigarettes, and the sweet smell of cloves laced the gentle sea breeze.
‘Emir, Emir,’ said the young man, out of breath after having sprinted back and forth between the doctor’s hut and the beach a couple of times. ‘The doctor says it’s ninety-nine percent pure!’
Duat had randomly checked the contents of more than twenty of the wrapped packages and was in the process of recounting the stack of red bricks a third time. ‘…one hundred and sixty-five, one hundred and sixty-six, and the package with Rahim makes it one hundred and sixty-seven.’ Duat nodded, satisfied.
‘You must sign for it,’ said the toothless old captain, presenting Duat with a piece of paper held to a clipboard. Duat almost laughed. Couriers were the same no matter what the parcel. The paper was covered in a script Duat was unfamiliar with, but its purpose was plain. Once signed, Duat couldn’t complain to the general that he had not received what he’d paid for.
‘Did you say, ninety-nine percent pure?’ Duat asked the messenger, the number filtering through his preoccupation with the captain and his paperwork. The young man nodded vigorously. Duat beamed broadly and slapped the captain on the back. He’d thought this part of Kadar’s plan would be difficult and dangerous but, apart from an uncomfortable visit to Myanmar, it had been trouble free.
The captain snapped at one of his men who, in turn, shouted at the rest of the crew. They retired to their launch, a military-style RHIB powered by a phenomenally large outboard motor. The captain gestured Duat over with a wave of his hand. ‘Be careful, my friend,’ he said to Duat when he reached the side of the boat. ‘There are eyes everywhere.’ He flung back an old canvas on the bottom of the launch.
Duat’s eyes went wide. ‘Hendra, come here,’ he said.
The technician, who had been sullen and withdrawn since the failure of the test flight, trying to work out what might have gone wrong, had to be prodded by one of the other men.
‘Hendra, Emir wants you,’ said the man, tapping Hendra’s shoulder with the flat of his machete blade.
Hendra pulled himself up and walked over to the launch.
‘We were shooting at sharks half an hour out when this flew past, low,’ said the captain. ‘One of my men brought it down with a lucky shot.’ Beneath the canvas lay the sodden remains of Hendra’s drone, a wing and part of a smashed fuselage. ‘I think you should know…it was on a direct course for your camp,’ he said, a look of concern on his face.
Rahim released the tourniquet and lay back on his bed as a surge he’d never known before flowed through his body. He’d administered what he’d believed to be a very small dose, but the drug was enormously powerful, lifting him within a handful of seconds beyond pain and into the heavens themselves.
‘Abd’al, Abd’al. Come quick,’ said Etti as she burst through the door. ‘You must see this.’
Rahim wondered what could be so important.
‘The pigs!’
The pigs, yes, now that could be important. He leapt off the bed most unlike a terminally ill man in his last few months of life and dashed out the door. In yesterday’s experiment, he had added one milligram of the substance to three litres of water, which had been absorbed by two kilos of rice. The rice was then fed to one of the pigs, a sow, and a very large one at that. The sow was then admitted to a pen with three males, all of whom had been denied food for four days.