THE REVERSE CURRENT - The Body Packs
The dust along
Highway 320 did not s
The dust along
Highway 320 did not settle; it just hovered, thick and red as pulverized brick, baking in the midday heat.I sat in the passenger seat of a tinted, black
SUV parked under the sparse shade of a roadside tamarind tree, sixty yards past the highway inspection station.
The engine was idling, the air-conditioning blowing a quiet, cool stream against my chest.
Through the dark glass,
I watched the border patrol officers move through the lane of long-distance passenger buses.It was mid-August 2003.The heat inside those buses was an active violence.
You could see the heat haze shimmering off the corrugated tin roofs of the blue-painted coaches.
The passengers—mostly rural laborers heading south, women with wicker baskets of green mangoes, young men from the hill tribes with dirty nails and no papers—were lined up along the concrete barrier.I wasn’t there to trade.
I was there with
Than’s assistant, a quiet captain in a sweat-stained khaki shirt who was getting five hundred yuan every time he let me sit at the perimeter to observe the mechanics of the stop.”Look at the third one from the left,” the captain muttered, pointing a tobacco-stained finger through the windshield.It was a woman.
Thirty, maybe thirty-five, though her face was so lined and sun-baked she could have been fifty.
She wore a faded blue sarong and a cheap synthetic blouse that clung to her ribs.
She wasn’t running.
She wasn’t yelling.
She was just sitting on her heels against the concrete curb, her arms wrapped tight around her stomach, her jaw clamped so hard her neck tendons stood out like thick cords.”Swallowed eighty,” the captain said, flicking an ash out the cracked window. “Four hundred grams of high-grade base wrapped in double-layer rubber condoms, lubricated with mineral oil.
They pay them three hundred yuan a run.
If they get through, they buy a sack of rice and a tin of tin roofing for their hut.”A border officer in a grey cap walked over to her, kicked her dusty foot with his boot, and barked a question.She didn’t answer.
She couldn’t.
Her eyes were wide, glassy, staring straight ahead at the dirt, her lower lip slick with a yellow, frothy bile.Suddenly, her body jerked violently, her knees pulling up toward her chest.
She let out a sound that didn’t sound human—a wet, muffled gurgle—and fell sideways onto the hot gravel.The officer didn’t jump back in horror.
He didn’t call for a doctor.
He just sighed, took two steps back to keep his polished boots clear of the mess, and signaled with his hand to two junior conscripts standing by the tin shack.”One ruptured,” the captain remarked casually, taking a drag from his cigarette. “Cheap rubber.
The hydrochloric acid in the stomach eats through the knot if they don’t pass them within twelve hours.
High-grade heroin hits the intestinal lining directly.
The heart stops three minutes later.”The two young conscripts grabbed the woman by her ankles and hauled her behind the inspection shed like a sack of spoiled cabbages, leaving a dark, wet smear across the red gravel.
Nobody in the line of passengers looked.
They kept their eyes glued to their own feet, their faces blank, their mouths shut.I sat in the cool, leather-scented air of the
SUV, my stomach turning into a hard, cold knot.It wasn’t pity that hit me.
I felt pity for every desperate soul dying along the border,
I would have walked into the river and drowned myself five years ago.
It was a profound, suffocating disgust.It was the filth of it.
The sheer, miserable, degraded smallness of the whole enterprise.Human beings turned into disposable garbage sacks, swallowing latex condoms filled with poison for the price of a bag of rice, spilling their guts onto a public highway while some twenty-year-old soldier spat on their shoes.If a man moves twenty grams inside his belly, he is a dog.
If he gets caught, he dies in a ditch behind a corrugated shack while people eat ice cream across the street.
But if a man moves twenty tons inside a sealed steel container, backed by a junta colonel’s signature and a casino invoice, he sits in a
VIP suite on the second floor of the
Sun, drinking blue-label
Scotch with the head of the task force.The scale dictates the morality.
The scale dictates whether you are a criminal or an enterprise.”You look pale,
Leo,” the captain said, glancing sideways at me with a thin, mocking smirk. “Never seen a mule burst before?””I’ve seen enough,” I said, my voice cold, flat as a iron last.”They’re everywhere,” the captain shrugged, turning the key to restart the engine. “We pull ten a day off the buses.
The bosses in the hills don’t care.
If two burst, eight get through.
The math works.””It’s bad math,” I muttered, looking out the dark window as the black
SUV pulled away from the tamarind tree, leaving the dust and the red stain behind the shed.I made a vow right there, my fingers digging into the leather of my seat until the seams groaned.I would never touch the body trade.
I would never hire a desperate woman to swallow rubber, and
I would never deal in small-time, petty-cash contraband that left blood on the gravel.If
I was going to walk this road, if
I was going to risk my neck and my daughter’s future, it would be industrial.
It would be cold, clean, and massive.
It would move in welded steel tanks, in hollowed-out teak logs, in eighty-foot container freighters that cleared customs with an official stamp before the ropes were even untied from the pier.No blood on the shoes.
No cheap rubber.
Just freight.