“I appreciate your cooperation,” Rizzoli said. “I’ll tell the boys. I have another favor to ask of you.”
“Yes?”
“I’d like to go along with the next shipment.”
There was a long pause. “That could be dangerous.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
The following afternoon, Tony Rizzoli was introduced to a large, hulking bandit of a man, with a grandiose, flowing mustache and the body of a tank. “This is Mustafa from Afyon. In Turkish, afyon means opium. Mustafa is one of our most skilled smugglers.”
“One has to be skilled,” Mustafa said modestly. “There are many dangers.”
Tony Rizzoli grinned. “But it’s worth the risk, eh?”
Mustafa said with dignity, “You are speaking of money. To us, opium is more than a money crop. There is a mystique about it. It is the one crop that is more than food alone. The white sap of the plant is a God-given elixir which is a natural medicine if taken in small quantities. It can be eaten, or applied directly to the skin, and it will cure most of the common ailments—upset stomachs, colds, fever, aches, pains, sprains. But you must be careful. If you take it in large amounts, not only will it cloud the senses, it will rob you of your sexual prowess, and nothing in Turkey could more destroy a man’s dignity than impotence.”
“Sure. Anything you say.”
The journey from Afyon began at midnight. A group of farmers, walking single file through the black night, rendezvoused with Mustafa. The mules were loaded with opium, 350 kilos, more than 700 pounds, strapped to the backs of seven stout mules. The sweet, pungent odor of the opium, like wet hay, hovered in the air about the men. There were a dozen farmers who had come to guard the opium in the transaction with Mustafa. Each farmer was armed with a rifle.
“We have to be careful these days,” Mustafa told Rizzoli. “We have Interpol and many police looking for us. In the old days, it was more fun. We used to transport opium through a village or the city in a casket draped in black. It was a heartwarming sight to see the people and the police on the street, lifting their hats and saluting in respect as a coffin of opium went by.”
The province of Afyon lies in the center of the western third of Turkey at the foot of the Sultan Mountains on a high plateau, remote and virtually isolated from the nation’s leading cities.
“This terrain is very good for our work,” Mustafa said. “We are not easy to find.”
The mules moved slowly through the desolate mountains, and at midnight three days later they reached the Turkish-Syrian border. There they were met by a woman dressed in black. She was leading a horse carrying an innocent sack of flour, and there was a hemp rope knotted loosely on its saddle horn. The rope trailed behind the horse, but it never touched the ground. It was a long rope, two hundred feet in length. The other end was held up by Mustafa and his fifteen hired runners behind him. They walked in a crouch, each bent over close to the ground, one hand holding the rope line and the other clutching a gunny sack of opium. Each sack weighed thirty-five pounds. The woman and her horse walked through a stretch booby-trapped with antipersonnel mines, but there was a path that had been cleared by a small herd of sheep driven through the area earlier. If the rope fell to the earth, the slack was a signal to Mustafa and the others that there were gendarmes up ahead. If the woman was taken in for questioning, then the smugglers would safely move on ahead across the border.
They crossed at Kilis, the border point, which was heavily mined. Once past the area controlled by the gendarme patrols, the smugglers moved into the buffer zone three miles wide, until they reached their rendezvous, where they were greeted by Syrian smugglers. They put their sacks of opium on the ground and were presented with a bottle of raki, which the men passed from one to the other. Rizzoli watched as the opium was weighed, stacked, tied, and secured upon the swaybacks of a dozen dirty Syrian donkeys. The job was done.