(2005) Rat Run Read Online Free Page B

retire, he had Ricky Capel's promise, and then he could live his dream . . . but not yet.
    He didn't talk about it to Billy, just gave him his cut and turned away. He thought he might be destroying the life of Paul, his grandson, but there had never been a right time to jump off the treadmill.
    In the middle afternoon, as the wind force grew, the shoreline came clearer.
    Billy would have finished gutting, would be breaking up the package and dividing it between rubbish sacks and their own kitbags. They would take it onshore, then in his car he would reassemble the twenty-five kilos and drive it, alone, to the drop-off point. Afterwards Harry would take himself to the Long Bar in town, drink till he staggered off to the B-and-B where he had a front-door key. By midnight, Ricky's cousin would have done the collection and Harry would be snoring drunk and asleep.
    He was ashamed that he had shouted at his grandson, but the tension was always bad when they were within sight of shore and had a package on board.
    The trail started in the foothills of northern Afghanistan.

    Far into remote mountains, in little irrigated fields, farmers grew the poppies and were the first to take the cut; it was subsistence farming, and without the poppy crop they would have starved. For the farmers, the recent American-led invasion of their country had been a gift from God: their previous rulers had reduced, on pain of death, the growing and harvesting of the poppies, but now no government writ reached them.
    It was a slow-moving trail. Eighteen months from start to end. At first the journey took the poppy seeds to market for haggling and argument, then buying. As opium, the product travelled in caravans of lorries, camel trains or in pouches on mules, north out of Afghanistan. It reached the old Spice Route, half a millennium old, and in Dushanbe, Samarkand or Bokhara Customs men, warlords and politicians took more cuts. The price was beginning to ratchet.
    Then, on to Turkey, the nexus point of the trade, where the laboratories waited to render opium into raw heroin. Ten kilograms of opium made one kilogram of heroin. More cuts, more profits to be taken from the farmers' labour. Turkey was only a staging point, not a place of consumption.
    Europe was the target. Each year, the craving for and addiction of Europeans to heroin demanded a supply of an estimated eighty tonnes. Turkish gangs took it on. Across the Bosphorus or by ferry over the Black Sea and a landing in mainland Europe. Up into the war-ravaged Balkans and more division of the product made in Belgrade or Sarajevo, and the price kept climbing as more men took their share of the profits. When wads of dollar bills were passed, the lorries drove unsearched through international boundaries. On into the Netherlands and Germany.
    The trail led to the United Kingdom, the biggest consumer of heroin inside the European Union.
    Expenses soared. Wealth was being made that the humble, illiterate farmer in Afghanistan could not comprehend - but the men bringing the trail to its end had made evaluations of risk against profit. The risk was a prison sentence of twenty-five years in a maximum-security gaol, but the profit was huge.
    Only a few had the skill to stay ahead of the ever more sophisticated techniques of law enforcement set against them. By ferry, tunnel, car or coach in the bags of pensioner tourists who saw no wrong in making easy money, inside the cargoes of lorries, and by boat to unsuspected landing points where vigilance had slipped, the freight landed.
    A man had paid up and housed what he had
    bought in a warehouse or a lock-up garage. He was a baron and remote from the process of the street. He sold split portions of what he had purchased to a network of regular suppliers; he was hands-off, crucial to the process but distancing himself as far as he could from risk, while retaining as much as he could of the profit.
    The supplier further diluted the purity of the heroin with flour,