📸 Photo

SNOWING IN BALI

Sparrow. He was a tall, skinny, goofy guy, who’d been asking Rafael for a run since holidaying in Bali several months earlier. Potentially, he was a great horse, with an English passport and a lot of travel experience, but being worldly wise meant he was acutely aware he was playing Russian roulette.

After months of hassling, Rafael gave him a run. He sent him cash to buy a flight from Rio to Bali, via Peru to pick up the cocaine. But after nervously biting his nails in Lima for a week, and no sign of the bag of drugs, Sparrow bolted empty-handed back to Rio. Rafael was annoyed but practical and organised a runner, Carlos, to deliver the surfboard bag with 2.4 kilos of cocaine directly to Sparrow’s doorstep in Brazil, two days later.

Sparrow was finally off and racing across the skies. He flew via Johannesburg to Bangkok, where he changed airlines. Singapore was the next transit stop and he started to spook again. Now only hours from Bali customs, he kept imagining being busted and executed. To soothe his panic, he went to the smokers’ lounge and puffed non-stop for 90 minutes. Then he forced his heavy legs to walk back down the corridors to board his flight to Bali. It was 2 am. He was having dark thoughts; these could be his last steps as a free man for a long time, maybe forever. Suddenly, he was at the departure gate. It knocked him out of his fog of fear. The seats were empty; reality hit – he’d missed the flight. It had left 25 minutes earlier, with his surfboard bag on board. Sparrow knew he was now in deep trouble. He raced to a public phone to call Rafael, waking him up. ‘I missed my aeroplane,’ he confessed like a naughty kid. The line went blue as Rafael blew expletives down it, but he quickly became practical.

‘Okay, let’s be calm, calm. We’re going to do this. Go to the Garuda desk and rebook on the next flight,’ he said evenly, suddenly mindful not to spook Sparrow into bolting again.