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URI, Kashmir—

A hand-painted truck carrying a load of Pakistani almonds pulled over in Uri, a lonely, picturesque mountain town in Kashmir, on the afternoon of Jan. 17, 2014. Customs agents had searched the driver’s multicolored vehicle at least 30 times over the previous few years without any trouble. Plus the agents liked the driver. On multiple occasions they had shared a sweet, lightly spiced local tea called kahwa with the man, and they knew about his kids, his wife, and his neighbors on the other side of the line of control in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir.

Border control is a lonely line of work, especially in an isolated region where it often feels like there are more guns lying around than people to carry them, and the agents considered the driver something like a friend. So when he begged the customs agents to speed up their search because he was running behind on his route, they wanted to accommodate him. And they might have even acquiesced politely, were it not for the suspicious eye of Kameshwar Puri of the Jammu and Kashmir State Police.

“The man looked nervous to me,” Puri, 30, recalls of the driver. Puri was about to make the biggest heroin bust in Kashmir’s history.