Devil May Care

military lorry itself, though big enough to carry back several hundredweight of opium, was obviously too conspicuous to be seen in town.
    A few minutes later, Bond was in the city he’d imagined, in his hotel in Tehran, as the end of the world. It was a dusty, treeless place of grey-brown walls made of mud bricks. The streets were laid out on a closed grid, which gave it a tight, claustrophobic feeling. The dry heat was intense, and unmediated by any tall buildings. Although there were some Persians of the kind he’d seen in Tehran, in Western clothes, there were many more dark-skinned tribesmen with Afghan headdresses and unkempt black beards. Sizeablethough it was, Zabol had the lawless feel of an old frontier town.
    Bond was ordered out of his Jeep, which then drove off to avoid being seen in the city. He was walked through the bazaar with the muzzle of Chagrin’s revolver against his lower vertebrae. It was a tawdry market. Instead of silk, the stalls sold cigarettes and imitation Western goods – records, perfumes, plastics – made in China. In the food section there were displays of Sistani sugar melons, ruby grapes, boxes of Bami dates and orange-coloured spices, but over them all hung the sickly smell of opium, the Papaver somniferum.
    ‘ 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 left-hand 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 suchleaping 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