Desmond Bagley · 1969 · thriller

Desmond Bagley's 1969 thriller. A doctor who has watched too many addicts die is bankrolled by a grieving millionaire to do what governments will not: cut the heroin trade off at the root. He assembles a team of specialists and takes them east, from Beirut into Iran and the Kurdish hills, hunting the men who turn poppy into powder.

1. 1
   London

   In London, the drugs doctor Nicholas Warren is offered a fortune by a millionaire whose daughter died of heroin, on one condition - that he stops the trade at its source - and he recruits a team of hard, useful men to do it.

2. 2
   Beirut

   Beirut is the hinge of the business, where morphine base comes down from the hills and the shipping agents make it disappear into Europe - and where Warren's amateurs start learning how professionals operate.

3. 3
   Tehran

   The trail runs east to Tehran, and to the syndicate that turns raw opium into powder in a laboratory nobody can find, protected by money at one end and by very hard men at the other.

4. 4
   Sanandaj

   In the Kurdish hills near Sanandaj, where the poppy fields are and the borders mean nothing, Warren's team finds the convoy and the laboratory - and discovers what it actually costs to take a trade like this apart.