Blood Lily Company - Afghanistan, year 1

LVIII

Patrols came and went, one after the other, and May arrived.

During the end of April and all of May, every week, we were doing up to three actions against Durrani. We alternated between acts of war and school pranks.

Fatso had finally obtained a great deal of information on the poppy fields ownership. If we had any doubt, we just had to wait. Usually, after burning a field or two, we would see guards appear around the plots belonging to the Pashtun, which allowed us to complete our map. In general, our close quarter assassins, Tito, Bloody Mary, Dio too, slipped behind the newly dispatched guards and put them to sleep, most of the time with a veterinary sedative, sometimes with morphine, just to rub it in for Duran Duran.

That nickname made Kitty laugh, by the way, and she told us it was the name of a really good band from the 1980s. She would try to get us to listen to some of their pieces during our breaks.

Back to Durrani. So, our assassins, armed with hypodermic injectors, slipped behind the guards' backs and injected them with a dose of sedative. And did not touch the fields, content with noting their position so our map was updated. Of course, we would go back to that field, either to set it on fire, or to use it for a prank.

Setting the field on fire was simple: look for the direction of the wind, pour gasoline, throw a match. Well, a whole matchbook actually, those that usually have the name of a bar on it. You tear one of them off the matchbook, rub it against the scraper on the side. Then slide the burning match under the ones still in the matchbook, wait for them to ignite and drop everything into the puddle of gasoline. It burns nicely.

Pranks. Pranks they apparently were, but also served to damage the crop. For example, we started by spreading a mixture of soil and concentrated methylene blue in the fields, it was quite boring and long to do so, but with the next rain, when the plants began to absorb the dye, the beautiful white flowers took on a progressively darker blue tint and Durrani, rightfully fearing the dye would render the final product unfit for consumption, burned his own field. It was very, very, very enjoyable.

We did it again with other dyes, each more industrial and artificial than the next. We saw fields in red, purple (magnificent), orange, turquoise, black...

We also had a lot of fun drawing various patterns in the fields. For that, we rolled logs to crush the plants down and prevent them from rising again by breaking the stems. It was the method used by some jokers to create some of the crop circles that had been the cause of a lot of theories back when we still believed in extraterrestrials aliens. The current fashion is infraterrestrials. Beings more evolved than us, inhabiting underground and yet to be discovered, despite our explorations of the Earth crust. But I digress.

We weren't drawing strange patterns. Ours were either very simple – squares, most often circles, triangles – or very stupid – cocks, smileys, even a stylized naked woman, from a design by Lin. Yes, apparently she draws and she has a knack for suggesting a shape with a few lines. Might be coming from her studies in chemistry...

Duran Duran harvested the geometric fields, burned the ones with cocks or naked women, which might have offended him a little bit too much. So, we used these patterns quite often. Seeing him burn his own fields is quite pleasant, I must admit.

Attacking his home was one of our most dangerous, silly and satisfying ideas, quite difficult to implement, especially after Poll's mishap.

We waited one night for him to be on tour inspecting the fields we had redecorated – there was a bit of everything, in the patterns – and we approached with the truck, then on foot.

Tito, in the lead, armed with an injector and several vials of ketamine, traced a path for us by putting to sleep any human encountered, any dog crossed. For the smell of Alpha and Yaka to not betray him to Durrani's dogs, he had had to scour himself before leaving, with a product that was particularly aggressive for his skin, and he had spent the inbound journey trying not to scratch himself.