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 children’s toys.
While the women continued stashing heroin packets, men unloaded the heavy barrels of dangerous chemical precursors and transported them gingerly to the heroin-processing lab with the help of the wheezing tractor.
The Afghan in charge of the mobile heroin-processing station, Ahktar Hayat, was a twenty-four-year-old gray-eyed Pashtun with a chemistry degree from a university in Peshawar, Pakistan. He and Cluzet had worked together before.
Cluzet’s team was spread out around the camp, cleaning weapons, eating food, or catching up on sleep, including the Ingush mercs he’d hired for the job—murderous Caucasian cousins of the Chechens. Two of his men he kept on sentry duty. His walkie-talkie crackled with chatter in Pashtun. One of Hayat’s sentries called in over the radio:
“A Devil’s Chariot! Ten kilometers out!”
A Devil’s Chariot—the Afghan term for the hated Mi-35 Hind helicopters flown by the Afghan Air Force—was bad news for Hayat, Cluzet knew. His wasn’t a Taliban combat unit, per se. Hayat’s job was to cook heroin, bag it, and ship it on. His small band had only AKs and RPG-7s for defense against bandits or rival gangs. The forty-millimeter rocket-propelled grenades were powerful enough to blast away a rotor assembly even on the heavily armored Russian helicopter, but the RPG-7 had an effective range of only two hundred meters. Every helicopter pilot who had ever flown in Afghanistan over the last forty years knew to stay high off the deck, especially in the mountains.
Cluzet didn’t wait for Hayat’s panicked call. An attack by the heavily armed machine—called the “Flying Tank” by the Russians who built them—would be catastrophic.
A lone Hind, though, likely wasn’t on a combat mission. Quite possibly it was on a surveillance run, or even just a training exercise. But discovery of their operation or his convoy when it pulled out in the morning would be equally disastrous.
Either outcome would interrupt his assignment, something both he and the Iron Syndicate took very seriously. Failure was not an option.
The Hind had to be destroyed.
The lookout called in the incoming direction of the Hind as Cluzet whistled up his number two and designated spotter, the German, an ex-KSK (Kommando Spezialkräfte) sergeant named Manstein. The two of them jogged over to the back of a Range Rover. Cluzet grabbed the FIM-92B Stinger MANPADS from its locker in the back of the vehicle and Manstein fetched range-finding binoculars.
The two of them scrambled to higher ground as the mountains began to echo with the whirring doom of the Hind’s rotors beating the thin, cool air.
“Got him,” Manstein said, pointing toward the southwest. “I’d say one thousand meters elevation above our position.”
With the five-foot-long launcher balanced on his shoulder, Cluzet slammed home the battery cooling unit into the stock’s pistol grip and twisted it, powering up the missile with a thermal battery and cooling the seeker to operating temperature with argon gas.
He lifted the launcher in the direction Manstein was pointing and glanced over the top of the sight.
“Yes, I see him. About four kilometers out and one kilometer altitude.” Well within range of the fearsome Stinger.
“Confirmed.” Manstein kept his binoculars fixed on the Hind.
Cluzet raised the launcher even higher and put his eye to the sight. In order to set the UV/IR tracker, he lined up the sight above the helicopter against the clear blue sky as he pressed down and in on the safety and actuator switch. This immediately initiated a howling tone over the small speaker that also shot through his skull, thanks to the vibration of the small transducer pressed against his cheekbone.
He lined up the Hind in the “canoe” between the forward range ring and the rear reticle. Once the tracker locked in the “negative UV”—the light blocked out by the chopper—the tone changed sharply, telling Cluzet his missile was also locked in.
Cluzet uncaged the missile with the press of his left index finger, releasing the missile’s seeker eye to follow the Hind independently. He super-elevated the launcher at an exaggerated angle and depressed the trigger, holding it until—
WHOOSH!
The missile’s small ejection motor fired, spitting the twenty-two-pound missile out of the tube, just far enough to clear away safely from Cluzet before falling away. The now powerless missile dropped a few inches before the second, more powerful two-stage solid-fuel flight motor engaged, driving the missile toward the Hind at nearly 2,400 feet per second, almost ten times faster than its target. A plume of white rocket exhaust trailed behind the speeding Stinger.
The Hind instantly fired countermeasure flares and chaff, but the Stinger’s UV/IR homing system was impervious to them. In just over five seconds after launch, the missile’s 6.6-pound high-explosive fragmentation warhead ripped into the airframe. A secondary explosion erupted in the fuel tank, and the flaming nine-ton wreckage plummeted toward the earth.
Cluzet lowered the launcher, a smile plastered across his boyish face. His green eyes tracked the falling wreckage until it crashed in a fiery heap on the valley floor far down below.
The irony wasn’t lost on him that he’d just shot down a Russian helicopter flown by an Afghan pilot. It used to be Afghans that shot down Russian pilots.
But always, it was the Stinger that was the victor.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
“Nice shot,” Manstein said, clapping him on the back.
“Hard to miss a flying brick.”
Cluzet checked his recently acquired Russian airborne watch. “Let’s get all hands on deck and help these mountain goats to finish up. We need to get this shipment loaded up fast and get out of here and on the road before another helicopter comes looking for their dead friends.”
“The Ingush won’t like it,” Manstein said. “They’re fighters, not stevedores.”
“They’ll like getting eighty-millimeter Russian rockets up the ass even less,” Cluzet said. “Now go!”