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WHITE CHRISTMAS

a Brazilian police chief, flew out of Rio to São Paulo to meet Fox, who collected them from the airport. Fox took them to his mother's ten million dollar mansion, where he gave them two loaded booms; the bigger one packed with 1.7 kilos, the smaller with 1.3 kilos. To boost their confidence, he dunked the booms in his mother's swimming pool. If the water didn't seep in, no smell would seep out.

Narco was the carrier, Sparrow the back-up. Deciding to try a different route, they flew to Buenos Aires first, then to Bali, where they breezed through. Despite the increasing numbers of high-profile busts – including Australian beauty school student Schapelle Corby, arrested with 4.2 kilos of dope in her boogie board bag, a month prior to their run – most horses were still getting through easily. Chino, who made it his business to know, estimated only 2 per cent of traffickers to Bali were getting caught.

After taking a taxi to their hotel, Sparrow and Narco picked up a hire car, tied the windsurfer board and booms onto the roof, and phoned Rafael as they drove to his house. Rafael was sitting at the beach café, drinking Coca-Cola and watching the waves. He didn't want to say anything on the phone, but the place to keep the booms wasn't ready. 'Bro, can you stay with the booms until tomorrow? The boy in the bungalows where I want to keep them is busy,' he asked Sparrow.

'Okay, yeah.'

That night Sparrow parked his car, with the loaded booms strapped to the roof, in the hotel car park in Legian. The next day he delivered them to Rafael and moved into his small room under the water tower, ready to start his surfing holiday. It was a couple of weeks later that Rafael asked Sparrow to move into the bungalows behind his house, where he still had one boom.

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