The Spoilers / Juggernaut

They drove again among the ochre-red mountains of Kurdistan along the winding and precipitous roads. Warren was thankful to be in the lead; somewhere behind and hidden in the cloud of dust were Tozier and Follet in the second Land-Rover and he did not envy them. Bryan was driving and Warren navigating, trying to find his way to a spot pinpointed on the map. This was more difficult than had at first appeared; at times Warren felt as though he were in Alice’s Looking Glass Land because the roads, unmarked on the map, twisted and turned sinuously and often it seemed that the best way to approach a given point was to drive in the opposite direction.

And again, it was only by a considerable stretch of the imagination that these scratch marks in the mountains could be called roads. Ungraded, stony, washed-out and often on the living rock, these tracks had been worn by the pads of thousands of generations of camels over hundreds, possibly thousands of years. Alexander had marched through these mountains, riding among his hetaeroi to the conquest of Persia and the penetration of India, and Warren judged that the roads had not been repaired since.

Several times they passed groups of the nomadic Kurds who were presumably in search of greener pastures, although where those pastures could possibly be Warren did not know. The whole land was a wilderness of rock and eroded bare earth with minimal hardy vegetation which sprouted in crevices in the bare hillsides, sparse and spindly but with the clinging tenacity of life. And it was all brown and burnt and there was no green at all.

He checked the map again, then lifted it to reveal the three sheets of paper which Javid Raqi had abstracted from his office at so much expense of the spirit. The information had been a constant worry to Warren ever since he had seen it. He had been prepared for a reasonable amount of chemicals – enough to extract, at most, a hundred pounds of morphine from the raw opium. But this was most unreasonable.

The quantities involved were fantastic – enough methylene chloride, benzene, amyl alcohol, hydrochloric acid and pharmaceutical lime to extract no less than two tons of morphine. Two tons! He felt chilled at the implications. It would provide enough heroin to saturate the United States illicit market for a year with plenty left over. If this amount got loose then the pushers would be very busy and there would be an explosion of new addicts.

He said, ‘I’ve checked the figures again, Ben – and they still don’t make sense.’

Bryan slowed as he approached a difficult comer. ‘They are startling,’ he admitted.

‘Startling!’ echoed Warren. ‘They’re damned nearly impossible. Look, Ben; it calls for twenty tons of raw opium – twenty tons, for God’s sake! That amount of opium would cost nearly a million pounds on the illegal market. Do you think the Delorme woman has that much capital to play with?’

Bryan laughed. ‘If I had that much money I’d retire.’ He twisted the wheel. ‘I’ve just had a thought, though. Perhaps Raqi fudged the figures in his excitement. He was translating from an oriental script into western notation, remember. Perhaps he made the identical mistake throughout, and uprated by a constant factor.’

Warren chewed his lip. ‘But what factor? Let’s say he made an error of a factor of ten – that brings us to about four hundred pounds of morphine. That’s stall a hell of a lot, but it’s much more reasonable.’

‘How much would that be worth to Delorme?’ asked Bryan.

‘About twenty million dollars, landed in the States.’

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