CHAPTER 29

TRIPLE FRONTIER

IT was fast approaching noon. The sun high in the sky. The valley turning into a soupy mix of heat and humidity. Karim waved away a large bug that almost flew up his nose and then mopped his brow with a drab olive bandana. He looked over at the white and blue plane. It was a Basler BT-67. Basically an old DC-3 that had been refurbished with two Pratt amp; Whitney turboprop engines and a new skeleton and avionics. It sat a mere fifty feet from the ramshackle warehouse, its two propellers glistening in the sun.

The tractor had been retrieved from the edge of the jungle, and the bucket had been removed and replaced with a set of forks. The two pallets of cocaine were then eased out of the warehouse and positioned as close to the plane as possible. Four of Karim’s men formed a line, passing the bricks of cocaine to each other and into the cargo hold. They’d been working steadily for an hour. One pallet was loaded and they were about halfway through the second one. Unlike the men they had just killed, these men worked without complaint and were far more efficient at their task.

Karim glanced at his watch and thought about the pickets he’d placed on the two main trails. It had been nearly thirty minutes since they’d last checked in. He thumbed his radio and asked for a situation report. They both reported back that the trails were quiet. Karim felt his chest tighten and his pulse quicken. He was caught in a no-man’s-land between two conflicting thoughts. The first was that he simply wanted to get out of this horrible place, and the second was that he hated to fly. New engines or not, this plane looked to be of a very old design. His friend Hakim had told him that it was indeed an old design. Nearly a hundred thousand of them had been made in the 1930s and then during World War II, but that was a good thing. The fact that they were still being refurbished and flown after all these years was a testament to the plane’s simple and robust design.

Karim looked nervously over his shoulder at the plane and wondered if his childhood friend knew what he was doing. Not in terms of flying. He was more than capable of that. Hakim had been flying since he was sixteen. Helicopters, planes, jets, gliders – pretty much anything he could get his hands on, and besides, he’d got the thing here and landed it with only one tiny bounce. Karim’s more immediate concern was how they were loading the plane. He didn’t know much about such things but it seemed there would have to be a science to it. The two men had met at the age of seven. They lived only a few short blocks away from each other and attended the same school. Karim knew that his old friend had many talents, but academic proficiency was not one of them. Hakim had never been a good student, and the thought that he was now trying to load more than a thousand pounds of cargo onto a plane made him extremely nervous.

Karim marched over to the plane and told his men to take a quick five-minute break. All four of them were dripping with sweat and could use a drink of water.

Hakim poked his head out the door, flashing his smile with a slight gap between his top two front teeth. “Karim, you are a genius.”

Karim glanced nervously over his shoulder at his men.

Hakim saw the concern and moaned, “When are you going to get over it?”

“Maybe never.”

Lowering his voice so the others wouldn’t hear, he said, “Then you are a fool.”

If any other man had spoken to him this way he would have considered killing him, but it was his old friend so he let it pass. As a devout Muslim he abhorred drugs, but his options were limited.

“I love you like a brother, but you are so naive to the ways of the world.”

Karim was proud of the fact that he was naive to such ways. They were ways that led one to stray from the path. Three years earlier he had convinced Hakim to come fight in the holy war and the two had made the journey to Pakistan together. Only a year out of graduate school, Karim had seen little of the world. Drugs were nonexistent in Makkah, the town where they had grown up. After college his parents had tried desperately to find him a wife with the hope that it would prevent him from running off and fighting in Afghanistan or Iraq. In his mind Iraq was never a consideration. The Muslim world was a better place without Saddam Hussein, and he did not want to give his life fighting for Baath party thugs so they could once again turn on their Saudi neighbors and repress their fellow Muslims.

So it was off to Pakistan to join the fight with al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Karim had prepared himself for all of the mental and physical challenges, but he could never have guessed the role that the heroin trade played in the struggle. Opium was everywhere. It was cultivated and collected and sold and distributed. Many of the foreign fighters were addicted to it. For them it was the best way to cope with the hardship of the mountains and fighting an unseen enemy who could strike at you from over the horizon any time, day or night. For the Taliban it was their lifeblood.

Karim did not worry that he would fall under the spell of the highly addictive heroin, but he worried about his friend Hakim. Even more troubling, though, was the complete lack of judgment by the al-Qaeda leadership. That they would lower themselves to the status of common drug dealers was beyond belief. That they would so willingly participate in something that the prophet was so against was an affront to their very faith, and it deeply affected his willingness to volunteer on their behalf.

Karim looked at the half-loaded pallet, shook his head sadly, and said, “I don’t know if he will forgive us for this.”

“Oh,” Hakim moaned, “there are times when I would like to choke you.” He jumped out of the plane and walked over to the pallet, where he picked up one of the bricks. “Do you have any idea how much this is worth?”

“You told me if we were lucky we could get a million dollars for it.”

“Yes,” laughed Hakim, “but you never said there would be this much. You were talking about loading several duffel bags. This…” Hakim backed away, held out his hands, and spun in a circle. “This is worth… I’m not even sure… ten million, maybe more.”

Karim could not hide his surprise. “Ten million?”

“Yes. Maybe more.”

“I had no idea…”

“Now how do you feel about drugs?” Hakim grabbed his friend and put his arm around his shoulder. “I told you this would work. Think of what you can do with that type of money. You will never again have to ask them for permission. You will be able to fund and run your operations.”

Karim smiled ever so slightly. He would never forget what his friend had told him nearly two years earlier while they were sitting by the campfire one night. Karim had been in a particularly pious mood that night and was angry with Hakim for spending too much time with the drug-dealing Afghanis. The argument had started with a simple premise on Hakim’s part: How was opium any different from oil? Karim was shocked by the stupidity of the question, but not for long. Hakim stated his case very clearly, that opium was a resource no different than any other commodity. When Karim tried to argue that oil did not destroy people’s lives, Hakim had laughed at him. What good had all of the oil profits done Saudi Arabia? They had discussed this many times while in college. That oil was corrupting their country. Hakim furthered his point by saying that Karim was a hypocrite. That he willingly took oil money to wage their jihad, but somehow the profits from the local crop were not good enough for the cause.

That night they had gone to bed as mad at each other as they had ever been, but later Karim began to ask himself what Allah would want. He wanted them to win, that was for certain, but at any cost? Karim wasn’t sure, but as the al-Qaeda and Taliban leadership proved increasingly inept, he’d been looking for other ways. Other avenues to carry the fight to the enemy without the aid of al-Qaeda. Karim left them not long after that. He wanted to make his own money. Money he would never be able to make in Saudi Arabia, for there was no upward mobility. The royal family and their friends had a monopoly on power and wealth.