Devil May Care - Sebastian Faulks [70]
‘ Taliak,’ hissed an old man at Bond, gesturing him to follow behind a curtain. His grey beard was yellow from years of smoking the taliak or opium he hoped to sell.
Chagrin pushed the old man in the chest, and he fell back through his curtain. What surprised Bond was how few police there seemed to be in Zabol. From this he concluded that the main trafficking was done far away from the bazaar and that the police
were tolerant of small-scale dealing, no doubt because they were themselves implicated.
They walked through the town till they came to an industrial area. Here, Bond saw the ten Jeeps reassembled outside a low mud-brick warehouse which, to judge from the illustrated hoarding beside it, was supposed to deal in melons. The corrugated doors were reeled back, screeching on their runners, and the Jeeps drove in.
In the gloom inside, a dozen Afghans, their tribal costumes criss-crossed with bandoleers of ammunition, pointed Soviet rifles at Chagrin’s men as they loaded wooden tea chests into the back of the Jeeps. There were twenty in all, two for each Jeep. It was a colossal amount of raw opium, Bond thought, but nothing like enough to keep the wheels of Gorner’s factory turning. Heaven knew how much he was flying in from Laos.
Under heavy cover from his men, Chagrin walked to the middle of the warehouse and placed a thick foolscap envelope on an empty crate. He stood his ground while one of the Afghans opened it and counted the fistfuls of US dollar bills it contained. At the Afghan’s silent nod of approval, Chagrin turned and gestured to the men. There was the sound of ten engines starting, and the convoy left at
one-minute intervals. Bond and Chagrin were in the final Jeep, which was driven rapidly round the edge of town by the youngest and most nervous-looking of the drivers. About ten minutes outside Zabol, they joined the nine other vehicles behind a hill of sand and rock.
The way ahead, back to the military transporter, which Bond could just make out on the flat horizon, was through a narrow defile with bare, pitted hills on both sides.
Chagrin took a pocket knife from his trousers and cut through the ropes at Bond’s wrists. ‘Hellfire Pass,’
he said.
Then something resembling a smile crept over his half-inanimate flesh. Bond thought of the Vietnamese children in their Bible-study groups.
‘You drive first Jeep,’ said Chagrin. ‘Go.’
All the other men were laughing.
Bond climbed into the driver’s seat on the lefthand side. There was no time for hejira, or tactical retreat. This was the moment to go hard. He rammed the gear lever into first and dropped the clutch. The four drive-wheels screeched, then gripped the desert earth. The Jeep went forward with such leaping eagerness that Bond was almost thrown from his seat. He battled with the steering-wheel and regained control
as he put his right foot down and worked up through the gears. He felt the weight of the two tea chests in the back shifting from side to side on the ruts and potholes of the sanded track. He saw a flash of rifle fire from the hillside on his left, glanced up to where Afghan tribesmen were firing from behind rocks. He heard a bullet whine off the Jeep’s bonnet and wrenched the wheel from side to side to make himself a harder target. Then came the heavier wheeze of a hand-launched rocket, and the road in front of him exploded into a ball of spitting rock and sand, shattering the Jeep’s windshield and filling his eyes with dust. Bond dashed his sleeve across his eyes to clear his vision. A long shard of glass had cut through his cheek and impaled itself there, with the sharp end in his gum.
Gunfire started