After six years of fighting, Al Qaeda remained a menace, the Taliban were resurgent, and NATO casualties were rising sharply. It was May 2007, and the war was going badly. The shipment was part of a $300 million contract that Packouz and his partner, Efraim Diveroli, had won from the Pentagon to arm America’s allies in Afghanistan. Reading the e-mail back in Miami Beach, David Packouz breathed a sigh of relief. Aboard the plane were 80 pallets loaded with nearly 5 million rounds of ammunition for AK-47s, the Soviet-era assault rifle favored by the Afghan National Army.
After stopping to refuel there, the flight would carry on to Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. A 747 cargo plane had just lifted off from an airport in Hungary and was banking over the Black Sea toward Kyrgyzstan, some 3,000 miles to the east.
The e-mail confirmed it: everything was finally back on schedule after weeks of maddening, inexplicable delay.
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