PROLOGUE

The hilltribe women back slowly through the sloping fields. Bulbs the size of bird’s eggs sway atop vein-thin, chest-high stalks, dancing in the soft highland breeze like tentacles of a poisonous sea anemone. In the late-morning glare, the women work carefully, mindful of their harvest’s value. The earth is soft and warm beneath their feet, which rustle the dead ruby-and amethyst-colored petals blanketing the mountainside.

Wielding curved, tri-bladed knives as sharp as an eagle’s talons, they gently pinch the poppy pods between thumbs and forefingers and make quick, vertical incisions. In the heat of a brass-brilliant winter sun, tears of chalk-white sap soon well in the shallow cuts. Opium. The latex will ooze during the day; the droplets will coagulate and darken overnight. The next morning, while it is still cool, the women will return to painstakingly scrape the henna-colored gum from the pods with semicircular blades, then deposit the treasure into metal cans hanging from their necks like amulets.

This year, the spirits have smiled upon their mountain village. The earth the menfolk ate the previous spring to test its quality had been sweet with alkaline. A good place to burn the forest for the mineral-rich ash. The summer monsoon watered the cover crop of maize; autumn, dry and cool, was perfect for the poppy seedlings. The women descend through the fields. Gradually, their metal cans grow heavy with the weight of the blackened beads that bring both dreams and despair. Beneath their burden, the women smile. There will be opium enough to barter for salt, sugar, tobacco, and cloth. They know not where the opium goes, only that it brings merchants to their distant huts, that the fruit of their fields is coveted by the powerful men whose soldiers walk the dragon-toothed mountains. They know their hard, simple life will endure another year. Their ancestors knew the same rituals, endured the same risks, kowtowed to the same unseen, omnipotent warlords. It has always been thus in a land as wild as the waves of a raging typhoon.

*   *   *

In January 1996, Khun Sa, the most powerful, most infamous warlord in this lawless region, announced he had peacefully relinquished his control of the opium trade to become a private citizen and legitimate businessman. The following account is of a series of journeys through the shadowlands of the Golden Triangle on the eve of Khun Sa’s “retirement.”

Boston, Massachusetts

June 1996