The Dark Art

by Edward Follis

  Don was still the head of the Organized Crime Strike Force for the Honolulu prosecutor’s office, and we’d kept in touch for years, since I was a young USMC military policeman. Don told me he’d recently watched a TV documentary detailing the ABC’s of skin cancer. Squarely in the center of my back, he said, was a growth that was asymmetrical, colored in weird hues of blue, red, and orange.

  “Eddie,” Don said, “this is no joke. We need to get you in to see a specialist.”

  Next day, we flew back to Oahu—but I was in denial or being unbelievably stubborn, because there was no way I was going to see a doctor. I didn’t want to believe I had skin cancer.

  Thankfully, Don Carstensen is such a powerful guy, physically and emotionally, that through brute force he dragged me to an Oahu dermatologist. The dermatologist said: “No time to wait—we’re doing a biopsy.”

  The next morning, he said grimly: “I’m sorry to tell you, Mr. Follis. You have malignant melanoma.”

  After a second biopsy, the surgeons cut the tumor out: a four-inch-diameter incision that went almost all the way down to the spine. We’d caught the malignancy early, but we had to make sure it hadn’t spread. The surgeons felt they had clean margins. That’s why they cut out four full inches of rectangular-shaped tissue. But only time would tell: If you can make it four years cancer free, they said, it means you’re a survivor.

  “That’s the only reason I’m sitting here and talking to you today,” I told HJK. “The only reason I’m not lying someplace in a cemetery. We acted fast—decisively and aggressively.”

  But being a complete madman, with this stuff still oozing out of my back—a catheter draining the red and pink fluid—I checked myself out of the recovery room and was on a flight back to Thailand, where I’d been working deep cover with Mike Bansmer, constantly trying to advance the Shan United Army case.

  I didn’t dare tell HJK about the complications that resulted from medical error. Wrapping up the procedure, the surgeon had left a suture inside when he sealed me back up. Over time, I developed a ridge-like hump on my back that people used to teasingly call my dorsal fin. I thought it was scar tissue—turned out to be an accumulation of white blood cells and body fat forming a benign growth called a lipoma, shaped into this long, hard, raised ridge. You could see it through my summer shirts and my sports coats. My DEA buddies would constantly bust my balls about it. “Yo, Eddie, what’s the deal with your dorsal fin?”

  • • •

  In my sweltering office at the US Embassy in Kabul, I didn’t tell HJK about the complications or my dorsal fin, didn’t tell him anything other than how my buddy Don Carstensen had been so vigilant, so persistent, that he’d saved my life.

  Now I wanted to do the same for him.

  The opium king sat there, watching me speak, all the while tracing one finger along his jawline, through the thick black bristles of his holy man’s beard.

  “Listen,” I said, “I don’t know if your tumors are malignant—could be a benign growth—but this shit is nothing to mess with. You need to take care of business here. You don’t want it spreading to your organs or your lymph nodes.”

  We were speaking half in English, but mostly our words were being translated by Tariq, my primary Afghan investigative assistant. For the first time, as Tariq relayed my meaning about the cancer possibly metastasizing, HJK seemed genuinely upset. He didn’t understand it on a cellular level, but the very thought of some mysterious disease spreading, multiplying, taking over his vital organs, clearly terrified him.

  “Mister Ed,” he said, softly, “what do I do now?”

  The scheme hit me, in a flash.

  “Look,” I said. “You can’t deal with this shit here. Afghanistan doesn’t have the proper facilities . . . What if I arranged for you to come to DC with me?”

  “Come to United States?” He looked incredulous.

  “Yeah, come with me to Washington. We can have some competent doctors examine you. I don’t think you’re going to find anyone here in Kabul who knows what he’s doing. And you damn sure can’t rely on some kind of goddamn tribal medicine.”

  He glanced at his bodyguard, eyeing me warily.

  “While you’re there in DC,” I said, “we can talk to you about a few things . . .”

  HJK nodded. He understood the unspoken: that we would debrief him about whatever he knew about Islamic terrorist activity and its symbiotic relationship with the opium and heroin trade.

  Up to that point in our relationship, I would casually, tangentially broach the subject of Al Qaeda and Taliban terror activities—but never heroin.

  It was highly ironic, of course. HJK was integral to the global drug trade—a man whose personal armies were responsible for a large percentage of Asia’s opium and heroin production—but his own involvement was always unspoken.

  Again the subtle dance, this implicit understanding between us. He was playing me for what he could get, in terms of American protection and influence, and I was playing him for whatever actionable intel I might glean down the road . . .

  Seeing his fear about his skin cancer, I saw that I had the opportunity to engage him on a deeper, more profound level.

  That’s the thing most people don’t get about undercover work. It’s not enough to be able to improvise on the fly. You also need to use what’s real. You can’t fake a cancer scare. No one is that good a fucking actor.

  We had been sitting there and staring at each other a long time, both seeing that ineffable glimpse of death burning like the black pinpoints in our irises.

  “Then we’re agreed? I’ll fly you to DC, get you in to see a decent dermatologist,” I said. “If necessary, we’ll get some other specialists to examine you.”

  He held my gaze, unflinching. But he wouldn’t articulate the questions evidently burning behind those jet-black eyes: How could he be sure that this wasn’t some trap? How could he really trust me if he put his safety in my hands and flew to America?

  I tried to contain my excitement, not betray any emotion. But I knew that, in that simple nod, I had the Great Haji Juma Khan in my hands.

  • • •

  The months of having gone into the field with him, traveling on my own, without security, now began to pay dividends. Indeed, HJK said that he trusted me enough to vouchsafe his security. I arranged to get him a false passport and visa—so he could travel under an assumed name—and put him and one of my interpreters on the same flight.

  It wouldn’t be an American military transport; he’d never agree to that. I told him he could fly covertly, undercover, as if on his own personal business. I would purchase a first-class ticket for him on a commercial Emirates flight from Kabul to Dubai.

  • • •

  When he arrived from Heathrow at Dulles Airport, we met him at the arrivals gate like he was a traveling head of state. We had a Lincoln limousine, with diplomatic plates, and put him up in a comfortable—if relatively discreet—hotel in Chantilly, Virginia. First, the spooks wanted to debrief him; they had their own long-standing, if highly controversial, relationship with HJK dating back to 2001.

  In fact, it was the CIA that provided the doctor to come do an assessment of HJK’s skin cancer, right there in his hotel room. The doctor was ex-military, apparently a well-regarded Washington dermatologist. The doctor had a look at the tumors, made a preliminary diagnosis of squamous cell carcinoma—treatable, to be sure, and not the aggressive malignant melanoma I’d been diagnosed with.*

  The dermatologist set up an appointment for three days later and recommended a course of treatment for HJK. We did debriefings with him in the hotel, and we took him out for a good time on the town every night.

  I brought in various people to speak to him, all representing themselves as major Department of Defense figures—full-bird colonels and one-star generals. They were actually all DEA special agents working undercover for me.
They didn’t come in uniformed, of course, but wearing business suits and ties. No one outside of the Pentagon would ever have guessed these guys weren’t high-ranking DoD brass.

  We were constantly stroking his ego. HJK’s narcissism was boundless. Since I always referred to him as “the Great Haji Juma Khan,” as if that were an official title, now our undercover DEA agents followed suit. These were supposedly Pentagon brass, kissing the ass of a tribal drug lord from the badlands of Nimruz.

  On our second afternoon, I finally broached the subject of the drug trade. There was a long and uncomfortable pause. HJK denied even remotely being involved in drugs. He was cagey enough not to make any personal admissions. Of course, he knew everything there was to know about other people’s operations. He talked freely about Bagcho and Noorzai and Mohammad. He could quote us chapter and verse on all his rivals and competitors, every other major trafficker underpinning the Taliban, but would never admit to his own massive operations in Baluchistan.

  As the conversation unfolded, HJK leaned back on the off-white sofa and sipped his cup of jasmine tea. He’d already polished off three plates of the halal chicken kebobs we’d provided from a Middle Eastern takeout joint called Sahara.

  His was a cunning shadow dance. HJK moved like the most skilled boxer, sticking and moving, never getting pinned in the corner. Sure, he’d cooperate—be very forthcoming—about other major narco-terrorists, Taliban leaders, and command-and-control figures in Al Qaeda, both in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

  Now, like some ancient caliph, he laid out the three overland smuggling routes: There was the venerable Silk Route to Iran and up through Turkey, then onward to cities of Western Europe; the northern route up through Uzbekistan and Tajikistan into the heart of Russia (which now has an astronomical rate of heroin addiction); and the route straight down through Nimruz Province to the great Pakistani port of Karachi, where the opium base and heroin can be smuggled onto container ships to travel anywhere on the globe, primarily up through the Suez Canal and into the Mediterranean.

  I already knew—from our satellite surveillance and from the weeks I’d spent traveling undercover though Afghanistan—that HJK had his tentacles reaching down all three heroin-smuggling routes, but the bulk of his drugs were smuggled though his Iranian crime associates and down into Karachi. Once again, though, he would admit absolutely nothing about his own involvement in the opium and heroin trade.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE PASSION

  When I arrived back in Afghanistan with HJK, working the Kabul streets again undercover, things began to heat up. The undercover case with HJK now went into its second phase, yielding surprising and unprecedented results. This is one of the least-understood aspects of undercover work.

  Sun Tzu delineates it explicitly in The Art of War:

  Spies cannot be usefully employed without a certain intuitive sagacity. They cannot be properly managed without benevolence and straightforwardness. Without subtle ingenuity of mind, one cannot make certain of the truth of their reports. Be subtle! be subtle! and use your spies for every kind of business . . .

  In the weeks and months ahead, I did manage HJK with “benevolence and straightforwardness.” I’m not sure I was always so subtle. But HJK would prove to be one of the United States’ most valuable counterterrorism assets. Indeed, it wasn’t until we sent him back from DC to work with me undercover in his native country that we would see how valuable indeed.

  • • •

  Ramadan was quickly approaching, and the entire US Embassy was on edge. The holiest month in the Muslim calendar was set to begin in the evening of Saturday, September 23. There was an overwhelming dread that this particular Ramadan could turn into a contemporary version of the Tet Offensive, the massive uprising and counteroffensive begun on the Vietnamese New Year’s celebration in 1968.

  I’d been battling various bugs and infections, on and off, ever since I got to Afghanistan. As soon as I arrived back in Kabul, I had walking pneumonia for ten days. That’s nothing to play around with, and I reluctantly went to see our embassy doctor. His name was Dr. Jordan—technically a physician’s assistant—a sixty-five-year-old former Army field medic who lost half a finger in Vietnam. He laid me up for a day or so, gave me antibiotics on an IV drip.

  And it was in the clinic, in the days leading up to Ramadan, as I was drifting in and out of fever, that Dr. Jordan gave me the truth. He told me that many of our spooks and the FBI guys were coming in suffering from anxiety disorders. Every single morning they woke up fixating on those same five words that had haunted me back in LA.

  You want to die today?

  Virtually everyone else in the embassy compound—CIA, DEA, FBI, and State Department staff—was under unbearable stress and many were taking medication to handle it.

  I long ago got out of the judgment business. “Whatever gets you through the night,” like John Lennon said. Guys were doing what they had to keep functioning. I suppose it was better than self-medicating with booze. But how are you meant to get through the night—or the day, for that matter—when the place you work, your supposed safe haven, has repeatedly been shot up by fanatics with AK-47s? It’s all you heard about in the hallways and at dinner: the perils of living with PTSD.

  Everyone within the embassy compound was freaking out over getting post-traumatic stress disorder before it was even post.

  I knew what they’d be dealing with as soon as they returned to the States: Waking in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. Consumed by nightmares. Paranoia. Seeing in every face on the street corner a looming threat, thinking the harmless Middle Eastern checkout kid at the local Costco is a potential suicide bomber . . .

  It had already started its creep into my unconscious. From my desk at the embassy, I’d been keeping in touch with my family back home, of course, but couldn’t tell them directly about the daily dangers I was facing—though some were too high-profile to keep hidden.

  I’d been on the cell phone with my mom live—Kabul to St. Louis—when a three-hundred-pound Semtex bomb nearly took out the entire embassy compound.

  It was perhaps the most sophisticated VBIED seen in Kabul since the arrival of the Coalition forces in 2001. The jihadists had packed the front end of a Volvo sedan with ball bearings—they’d devised an elaborate detonation system involving the air bags—and set their sights on the US Embassy as the direct target.

  The damage zone resembled a fuming meteor’s impact crater: The bomb tore a hole some three hundred yards wide in the street, killing twenty-eight, wounding more than fifty. I was dashing around outside the walls not long after the explosion, as a first responder and then as a street cop reconstructing the crime scene. After a few hours, we found the foot of the suicide bomber some fifty yards away from the blast site.

  At the precise moment of the Semtex explosion, I’d been having a routine conversation with my mom back in St. Louis. When the explosion hit, I heard my mother gasp, then a truncated half-scream—and our phones went totally dead. They first evacuated us all into the embassy bunkers, but within ten minutes a crew from Fox News was on the scene; my mom and my stepfather, Ray, were watching the shrieking and mutilation and mayhem live on TV, not sure if I’d been blown to bits in that blast . . .

  • • •

  Some nights, half in delirium, I flashed back to the first time I ever heard the term “PTSD.” It was in our local church, St. Gabriel the Archangel, on Nottingham Avenue, St. Louis, where I met one of the most inspirational figures in my life: James Fuller.

  Mr. Fuller was a US Army veteran; he’d been hit by a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) in Vietnam on August 8, 1969. He returned home to St. Louis, returned to our own St. Gabriel’s, missing half his left arm and the index finger on his right hand.

  I was eight years old when we met in the church pews.

  He became my godfather, though in everyday speech I usually called him “Uncle Jim.” He was a
remarkable man; even with all his disabilities, he made no complaints, still managed to learn how to do air-conditioning and heating repair, stained glass window repair, carpentry, plumbing. He worked as the handyman and jack-of-all-trades at St. Gabriel’s.

  I lived most of my life from the age of eight through twenty-two at St. Gabriel the Archangel, graduating from altar boy and becoming the church custodian in high school. I probably spent three or four hours each day in those pews.

  By the time I was about thirteen, I started to call Uncle Jim the “Unexpected Warrior.” He didn’t want to be a soldier. He didn’t want to go to war, certainly never imagined he’d be thrown into the maelstrom of vicious jungle combat. All he ever wanted to be was a motorcycle cop like his father. Jim’s dad, Big Joe Fuller, was a motorcycle police officer in St. Louis, dead from a heart attack at age fifty—long before I was born.

  But Jim never fulfilled his dream, though he later told me he still had spectral images of himself tearing down the open highway on a Harley. No, by the time he came of age, the Vietnam War was heating up. Jim was drafted into the Marine Corps; with no real educational or occupational specialty, he simply became a grunt.

  Grunts are a different breed; more than anyone else, they bear the brunt of any battle. They’re the guys right on the ground. Right at the front. They’re literally what the politicians and generals mean when they talk about needing to put “boots on the ground.” And no matter how technologically advanced we’ve become with our satellite surveillance and UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), short of an all-out thermonuclear strike, there’s always going to be the need to have boots on the ground.

  I was his little helper around the church, and he would constantly tell me stories. In 1967, Jim was drafted, went into the Marine Corps; after boot camp, he served briefly in Chicago, worked on the pallbearer patrol as all the corpses came back from Vietnam. He was on the Marine detail of escorting the dead to the burial sites. He told me that had quite a profound impact on him psychologically, seeing all those young men killed in action, going to their final resting places in flag-draped coffins, before he’d even left for his tour of Vietnam.