Free THURSDAY'S ORCHID by Robert Mitchell

of wool. We pack the marijuana into strong plastic bags. Then we compress the bags, bind them up and insert each bag into the middle of a bale of wool. Simple.”
    He stood and thought it over for a minute or two.
    “What about the weight factor?” he asked. “Surely if we compress grass into a small block, it’s going to be much heavier than the fleeces we’ll have to take out to make room for the grass?” It showed how little he knew about wool. “Wouldn’t the stevedores become suspicious if they handled bales of wool that were heavier than they should be?”
    “Nick,” I replied. “It’s easy to see that your old man was just a dirt farmer.”
    He shot forward, his colour rising.
    “Hold on there,” I said, taking a fast step backwards. “I’m not insulting your father. I’m only saying that he might have taught you a lot about cabbages and carrots, but he didn’t teach you much about wool.”
    He sat back in his chair, waiting for me to continue.
    “F or your information,” I went on. “A bale of wool is one of the heaviest non-solids you’ll ever come across. A single bale can weigh anything between say, one hundred, and one hundred and thirty five kilograms. They measure about seventy-five centimetres along each side. So, weight for size, it’s not too light. If anything, the grass might even be a shade lighter.”
    “How come a bale weighs so much?” he asked. “A hundred kilos is a fair weight. You’d need a hell of a lot of fleeces. And how the hell do you cram them in?”
    “Quite right,” I replied. “You do need quite a few and, as for cramming them in, well, every shearing shed is equipped with a piece of machinery known as a wool-press. It’s shaped something like a large wooden crate: open at the top. To operate it, you hang an empty bag – the bale – inside the box, and then start stuffing fleeces into the bag. When you can’t cram any more in, and they’re piled up over the top, you crank down a bloody great screw-operated press, forcing the fleeces into a compact cube, and there’s your bale. The wool’s been compressed. You sew up the top of the bag and it’s finished. Simple, but hard work.”
    “Fine,” he said. “So where does that take us?”
    Did I have to plan the whole scheme?
    “Well, Nick. The way I see it is for the Singapore people to set up a bogus corporation over there. That corporation will purchase a quantity of wool here in Adelaide. We arrange the purchase, as agents, and store the wool for them whilst it’s waiting for a suitable ship. Once we’ve got it in storage, we unpack the bales, stuff in the bags of grass, and press them up again. The whole lot can then be shipped to Singapore as a perfectly legitimate cargo.”
    He nodded his head backwards and forwards slowly, finally appreciating the simplicity of the process. “I like it, Jeff .” He smiled. “In fact it’s brilliant. But what about Customs? What about dogs?”
    He was referring to the drug dogs, the sniffers.
    “No problem,” I replied. “There’s so much lanolin in a bale of wool, not forgetting the smell of sheep and sheep-shit, that you could stuff a dead rat in there and the dogs wouldn’t sniff it out in a hundred years. Apart from which, we’ll pack the grass into airtight plastic bags.”
    The more I worked on it the better it became.
    “What about random sampling?” he asked.
    “Again no t a problem, Nick. At least I don’t think so. The only way to take a sample would be to slit a small hole at the top of the bale and draw out a piece of wool. There’s no way a probe could be pushed right into the centre. It’s packed too tight. Opening up a bale couldn’t be done either, because the whole thing would explode all over the place. It would make a hell of a mess. I doubt very much whether they’d try it. There’s no way a bale could be repacked without using a press.”
    So that took care of the Customs angle. The only reason Customs would open a bale would