Just as dawn was breaking over the Afghan capital one day last month, Zafir, a greengrocer in Kabul's main fruit and vegetable bazaar, loaded up his clattering Russian-made Kamaz lorry with water melons and set off on a 72-hour drive.
A 32-year-old father of two, Zafir was on duty for the Taliban, playing a vital part in the billion-dollar dealing that keeps the regime in power and the Afghan war well oiled.
He ferried his cargo north along bonebreaking mountain tracks and the searing heat of desert trails. On the checkpoints of the civil war, the bearded gunmen gave him a nod and a wink and ushered him onward.
Zafir kept behind the Taliban lines on his journey, which ended in the Taliban-held northern capital of Mazar-i-Sharif where he dumped his lorryload of fruit.
The water melons were snapped up. But secreted among the large green globes for other customers was a cache of dozens of kilograms of high-grade heroin recently processed from the poppy harvest in a Taliban-run factory in the eastern town of Jalalabad.
Snow-white powder
The stamped 1kg cotton bags of snow-white powder, each one declaring its source and refining date, were passed on to the Taliban's central Asian trafficking mafia, hidden in new vehicles, and dispatched to two ex-Soviet republics two hours' drive from Mazar to the north and the west.
"The cars come back and forth. I just take it to Mazar and sell it on to the guys who come in cars from Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. I do it twice a month," Zafir says.
From there the contraband wends its way up into the Urals in Russia, takes a left turn, heads for Moscow and St Petersburg before being smuggled onward to western Europe. There 90 percent of the heroin injected in Frankfurt, Barcelona or Edinburgh originates in Taliban Afghanistan.
"Our dear friends, the Taliban commanders, they take the stuff from Kandahar and Jalalabad to Kabul," says Zafir, an alias agreed to protect his identity. "We take it on to Mazar and to Kunduz."
Millionaires
For the past five years Zafir has been a bit-player in the lucrative rackets that make millionaires of Afghan warlords and keep the Taliban fighters in guns, food, and fuel. "I've been working in the heroin business since the Taliban seized Kabul [in 1996]."
Brown-haired, blue-eyed in a turban, pale pink tunic, and black trainers, Zafir sweats anxiously as he discloses the details of the Taliban's heroin trafficking after agreeing to meet at a quiet spot in the mountains north-west of Kabul.
He nervously unwraps a black-and-white kerchief on the back seat of an old Russian jeep with blacked-out windows. Inside are several thousand dollars worth of the purest heroin. The white cotton bag inside sealed cellophane is stamped purple with the name of the refinery, the number 555 and the year 2001.
The packaging betrays a certain element of honor among thieves, with those involved easily traceable should the heroin prove to be sub-standard.
"This is from the Taliban factory in the Shinwar district of Jalalabad," says Zafir. "If it's not good, it can be sent back."
He offers to sell the kilo package. Until the US started bombing earlier this month, the going rate was US$6,500 a kilo, he says, a quarter of the price it would fetch in London.
Prices are falling. Zafir wants US$ 5,500, with US$500 for the commander on the Taliban checkpoint near Kabul.
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