C01 Air sickness

Scene from EC's novel "The Courier" - www.asstr.org/~caligula97030/c…

As the plane began its final descent into Danubian airspace, Maria Elena Rodriguez-Torres felt waves of nausea surging through her body. What the young Colombian felt was not simple air sickness, but rather the rebellion of her body against what she was carrying inside her stomach. A full kilo of cocaine, divided into grape-sized plastic packages, was the young woman's reason for being on the flight. Now she knew those packages, (or pellets, as they were called in the world of drug traffickers) were not going to stay down much longer. Sweat poured down the passenger's face as she tried to keep them down.

Por favor...por favor...o Dios mio...por favor...que llegue al aeropuerto sin...

It was not to be. Maria Elena surged forward, covering her mouth as it filled with vomit and three round grape-sized objects. She flailed about with her free hand while the man in the seat next to her frantically pulled out an air sickness bag, opened it, and handed it to her. She vomited, and to her horror felt more pellets working their way up her esophagus in a desperate attempt to escape through her mouth. It seemed that not only was her body rejecting the presence of those unnatural objects inside her, but the pellets themselves did not want to be there either and were determined to get out.

Over and over Maria Elena threw up into the bag, as sweat and tears poured down her face. She rudely waved off the efforts of her neighbor to comfort her as pellets passed upwards and gagged her, making her want to throw up all that much more. Within seconds the bag was completely full of the contents of her stomach, which included nearly thirty bluish-gray ovals, about a third of the cocaine that her handler had entrusted to her for delivery to Germany.

Panic and total despair swept over the unhappy courier, because not only her freedom, but her very life now was in grave danger. Maria Elena knew that the cost of losing any of the cocaine that her handlers had entrusted to her would be her life. She had been given 100 pellets to swallow, and she would deliver 100 pellets to her contact in Frankfurt. In exchange for her efforts she would be given 5,000 Euros. To deliver anything less than 100 pellets would cost her life, or at the very least enslavement in a brothel to pay off her debt.