Free The Solitary Man by Stephen Leather Page A

Zhou's a hero. Half the border guards, Thai and Burmese, are on his payroll and every undercover operation we've ever put together has been blown.'
    Gregory put down his fork and clasped his hands together. 'This 50 STEPHEN LEATHER time it's gonna be different. I'm putting together an operation that positively, absolutely is not going to be blown. And I'm going to need your help.'
    Carver's eyes widened. 'Whatever it takes,' he said.
    THE TWO THAI TECHNICIANS grunted as they manhandled the metal drum off the fire, using pieces of wet sacking to protect their hands. They eased it on to the soil and stood back to allow it to cool.
    The boiling mixture contained raw opium, water and lime fertiliser. The fertiliser had been brought across the border from Thailand, driven across in trucks and then loaded on the backs of donkeys for the thirty-mile treck through the jungle to Zhou's camp.
    The Thais worked outside, downwind from the main part of the camp because the fumes were unpleasant. Not as dangerous as the later stages of the process, but the technicians weren't trusted to do that. The technicians were paid to turn Zhou Yuanyi's raw opium into morphine, nothing more. He used an industrial chemist to transform the morphine into heroin. It was a loss of face for the technicians, but secretly they were glad not to have to be involved. They'd heard stories of technicians being blown up when the process went wrong. Blown up or burned alive. Better to work with the drum and the open fire, better to be outdoors so that if anything happened they could run like the wind.
    One of the technicians, a twenty-three-year-old former soldier in the Burmese army called Em, nodded at two boys who were sitting in the shade of a spreading tree and fanning themselves with banana leaves. They scampered to their feet and ran over to help. The four of them carried the drum over to a nearby stream. The boys picked up the filter, a metre-wide strip of flannel cloth which had been stretched across a wooden frame, and held it a foot above the flowing stream while Em and the other technician lifted the drum of opium suspension and carefully drained off the water.
    The technicians took the container over to another drum, one the boys had scrubbed clean earlier, and emptied the opium solution into it. The technicians left the dirty drum by the side of the stream for the boys to clean later.
    When the solution was boiling again the technicians took half a dozen plastic bottles of concentrated ammonia from a hut and poured them in one by one after tying strips of cloth across the lower half of their faces to protect themselves from the fumes.
    The morphine began to settle out, sinking to the bottom like a snowfall. Em nodded at his older colleague Ah-Jan and they lifted the drum off the fire. He shouted over at the boys to get the filter ready again.
    Em and Ah-Jan took the drum over to the stream and as the boys held out the flannel filter, they drained off the water. Left behind were globules of morphine, glistening wetly on the filter. Em would leave the boys to press the morphine into blocks and then wrap them with banana leaves. He and Ah-Jan had more opium and fertiliser to prepare. They would face Zhou's wrath if they didn't meet their daily quota. And Zhou's anger was a fearful thing to behold; the body of an informer was still decomposing on a stake at the entrance to the camp, his flesh eaten by ants, his eyes pecked out by birds.
    MICKEY AND MINNIE MADE soft growling noises as if they realised that it was the last time they'd see Hutch. He knelt down and the two Dobermanns licked his face eagerly.
    'How long will you be gone?' asked Chau-ling, his head kennel maid. She'd worked with him for almost five years and had been invaluable in building up the business. Her father was a shipping tycoon and he'd wanted her to join the family firm, but Chau-ling loved dogs and she'd pouted and sulked until he'd let her have her way. Despite having a