📸 Photo

- FROM HEAVEN TO HELL -

position we could have put ourselves in - and they knew that. The power was all with them, and they were playing good mind games. By the time they came back out, we were prepared to do anything they wanted.

Sure enough, a greasy-haired bloke with a gun suddenly came for us, screaming, 'Put your hands up! Put your hands up!' I only had time to think, 'Shit, what's going off here?' - I thought they were going to finish us off right there. But then they started laughing and instead pulled out a tape measure and started measuring our chests just like before. It was surreal.

They fitted us with green bullet-proof vests, the sort you see in American cop dramas on the telly. Only these vests weren't going to make us safe: all the padding had been taken out and replaced with blocks of cocaine. If anything, these vests were a death trap, a walking life sentence.

They fitted them to Paul and me, and I could feel the blocks of drugs digging into my ribs, hard, like steel fists. They were really, really heavy: there was a lot of cocaine in there. They'd told us it was five kilos each, but it felt much heavier than that. I tried to weigh up in my head how heavy a bag of sugar was, and did I have more than five bags there?

The weight and discomfort of the jacket combined to make it suddenly totally real. It was like something out of a video game. I kept thinking, 'Is this shit really happening to me?' But there was no way I was going to