“Sorry but I think you both need to be aware of this so please forgive me. This is Anthony Burr who was employed by this office to act as a liaison officer to the Paris Embassy.” He said explaining the situation to the Minister. “Mr Burr has just revealed something to me, in his debriefing, which I feel the Secretary should hear directly from the horse’s mouth so to speak.”
“Please,” said the Minister.
Tim recounted his suspicions as to the imminent attack on a super tanker and the effect it would have on the fortunes of the terrorist’s bank balances. There was a stunned silence in the room. The Home Secretary spoke, “I will inform the PM and recommend that he should call a meeting of COBRA. You had better let MI6 know the score. Keep me in the loop, no delay as soon as you know I want to know,” he gathered himself up and left with a wave.
“Sit,” said Elaine.
“What about MI6?” Jeff asked.
“M denies knowing anything personally in their involvement, or lack or it, in Anthony’s adventure.”
“Tim.”
“What,” said Elaine irritated.
“Please, my friends call me Tim.”
“I’ll call you what the fuck I like,” said Elaine, “Where was I? Don’t’ answer that either.” She warned him. “It would appear that a junior Minister took it on himself to ignore the information about Yosuf and Tim.” Tim kept his mouth shut.
“He didn’t just ignore it. He passed information to the Turks,” said Jeff, “Why?”
“We will never know officially. MI6 will sweep it under the carpet. It is pretty dam clear though that someone in the Foreign Office wanted the Turks to get credit for thwarting this for whatever reason.” Tim knew the reason, Mailer, Delong’s buddy covering his mates arse. He was also pretty sure MI6 knew the reason but were not going to embarrass themselves or the Government. Mailer would come to Paris and meet up with Jason and they would go off and party. Tim guessed what sort of parties these two enjoyed and it sickened him. More under carpet sweeping was about to take place.
“Do we hand this over to MI6?”
Elaine looked out of the window. Drizzle, June and drizzle she thought. Britain was heading for one of the wettest Junes in its history. “I think we should leave that for now after all I distinctly heard the Minister say he was calling a meeting of COBRA and I should brief to the PM and other interested parties then. Well at least that is my understanding.”
“That will not help our relations,” observed Jeff.
“Well they shouldn’t have left one of our operatives out in the cold, poor what’s his name here, was left to his own devices. They should have come straight to us.”
“Right,” said Jeff. “You didn’t even know he was on our pay role. Now you are suddenly offended by MI6’s handling of him?”
“Tim,” said Tim
She ignored him. “It is the principle of the thing.”
“Which, principle is that then, the screw MI6 whenever you can principle?” Jeff laughed.
“Let’s get this right. Take Tim here, sort out his background checks and upgrade his security level and decipher the rest of the information on the memory stick and find out where and when ISIS intends to sink this oil tanker.” She said. “Go”
They went.
Tim found himself in a tiny office. There were people working in groups but he could not join them or wander about until the security checks were completed. He found himself with limited access to files and the use of the internet. Tim looked around and wondered where all this was taking him. Only a week ago he had been having a jolly time in Paris and Monte Carlo. Since then he had been involved in gunfights, drug smuggling and murder. He had lost a friend and found himself becoming a spy.
He wondered what you did for lunch around here.
Chapter 27
Tim looked at the information he had gathered together while he waited for the code breakers to decipher the final part of the USB card. The stick had been sent to GCHQ and there was nothing to do but wait.
He had settled into a routine and had been staying at an MI5 flat while he looked for somewhere to live. He owned a flat in London but he had rented it out when he was transferred to Paris. The lease still had over four months to run so he would have to rent himself until he regained possession. He had been interviewed and background checks done and he now had his security clearance. Things had moved quickly. He feared that he would be pushed into a backwater but Jeff seemed to have taken a liking to him and had him reclassified. He had been promoted and had a salary increase. He was now just poorly paid whereas before he had been piss poorly paid He would need a lot more training but that had been deferred for the present while they dealt with the immediate threat.
He was completing a background briefing for Elaine and Jeff, which was more or less his old job at the embassy so he was on firm ground. He also now knew at lot more about oil. There was a massive glut of oil and oil products and prices were at rock bottom. Oil tankers were backing up at the Euro Port in Rotterdam and the oil storage facilities there were full. The tonnage and capacity anchored in the North Sea waiting to unload was staggering. Some fifty takers all with over two hundred and fifty tonnes were sitting idle.
The oil glut was also having an effect on the route taken by the tankers. The owners of the tankers were extending the voyage to avoid paying the cost of port fees. Ships coming from the Middle East have a choice of two routes. The first a fifteen to twenty day journey through the Suez Canal or a forty day journey round the Southern tip of Africa, Cape of Aqulhas. Taking the longer route saved on the cost of the canal as well as dock fees. It also has the added benefit of giving the shippers more time to find buyers for their product.
Tim had spent several hours interviewing a broker to fully understand the information. For the first time he could actually say, “MI5, I should like to ask you some questions.”
The political situation with Iran was also very fluid. The USA had imposed sanctions to pressurise Iran into falling in line on the development of nuclear weapons. A third of all oil in the World flows through the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s supreme leader had threatened to close it earlier in the year in retaliation.
The Strait of Hormuz is only twenty nine miles wide at its narrowest point. Its north coast is Iranian and to the south lays the United Arab Emirates. It provides the only access from the Persian Gulf to open ocean and is a natural bottleneck to the transit of the oil tankers. Blocking the channel would in many ways help the oil industry in general and clearly benefit the terrorists behind the “tonners” insurance policies specifically.
Tim left the building headed for Whitehall. He bagged a taxi and headed for his appointment with the Navel liaison officer, He was shown into a small office and a well dressed young man about his own age introduced himself with a warm hand shake. Following an hour long meeting he was on his way back armed with more detailed information as to what the Royal Navy was up to in the region.
“The Combined Maritime Force operates three Combined Task Forces in the region. CTF 150 covers the Hormuz Straits and CTF 151 is active in the Gulf of Aden. The former incorporates counter terrorism in its mandate while CTF 151 was established to deal with the threat of piracy, specifically from Somalia,” said the Naval Officer.
Tim found out that the UK has four mine hunter ships on permanent deployment in the region with an operation name of “kypion” as part of CTF 150. Its brief was to keep the sea lanes clear and the oil flowing through the Hormuz Strait. On the other hand CTF 151 was a multinational force. Command of CTF 151 is rotated between participatory nations on an approximately three to six month basis. CTF 151 is constantly changing as ships and aircraft from a variety of countries assign vessels, aircraft and personnel to the task force.
Tim sat and pondered. On the face of it looked like there was no way ISIS could sink an oil tanker at sea. It was crucial the ship was sunk at sea. If the tanker was docked the “tonners” policy would not pay. The ship had to be sailin
g or it was not a marine voyage policy.
The size of an oil tanker was prohibitive and the sinking of it with its compartmentalised hull made a total loss almost impossible unless you had a submarine and Tim was pretty sure that ISIS did not have its own navy. His conversation with Navel Liaison also convinced him that with the Combined Task Forces in the region getting a ship close to a tanker would be exceedingly difficult.
He was stumped. He made his way to Jeff’s office to update him. “Well where are we?” he asked.
Tim outlined his various meetings and the results. “So basically nowhere,” he said “I assume that when the USB stick is decoded it will give us enough information to identify their target ship, but on the face of it there appears that there is no practical way of dodging our Navy and even if you did it would be almost impossible to sink a tanker with say a small boat.”
“We are missing something, but what?” Just then he was alerted to an encrypted email from GCHQ. He studied it for a moment.
“We have our Tanker. The USB stick contained is the navigational coordinates for a tanker. We have our boat and we know where it should be and when, the Nord Viking, nearly three hundred thousand tons due to go through the Strait of Hormuz in seventeen days.”
Chapter 28
The sign above the factory read “Northern Cross Inflatable” proprietor Razul Terzi. It was a busy place, these days, employing nearly sixty people. Rasul had taken the business on from his Father and uncle. They had started the business making plastic inflatable boats for the beach, selling most of their product to the resorts in and around the coast by Bodrum. The area had been put on the holiday map and it had a mini boom.
Rasul had moved the business from essentially toys boats and novelty beach items into making rigid hulled inflatable boats known for short as RIBs. His factory was in Izmir, the third largest city in Turkey with coastal access. The impetus for the change of direction had been a meeting with Osman who had been looking for craft of any sort to smuggle the large volume of refugees and economic migrants to the Greek Islands
Razul was not a stupid man and immediately saw the potential. He obtained a loan and set about expanding the business. He couldn’t keep up with the demand as Osman introduced more and more smugglers to him and was in turn paid a small commission on the sales that followed. Razul also had a sideline in importing cheap knock off motors from China. The smugglers were not too worried about reliability and wanted to spend as little as possible. In essence they just wanted the hull with no trimmings like seats, the inflatable ring and a cheap low powered engine. They crammed the boats full and pointed them towards the Greek Islands. They cared little or not at all for the safety of the occupants.
Razul with the rapid expansion had the foresight to look for further markets outside of Turkey for his RIBs. He could make the boats for about a third of the cost of the established manufacturers owing to his low labour and establishment costs. His breakthrough came in the Canadian market and from there to the US. So when Turkey came to a deal, with the EU, to stop the immigrants entering he was no longer dependant on the illegal trade.
Razul had if anything taken on more orders than his business could cope with. He had had a massive order for boats from Iraq, some forty two boats and they were to be equipped with top of the range motors which they had also asked him to supply. These RIBS would be very fast indeed. The buyers had said they were for running tourists trips off the coast in the Gulf. Razul found this an unlikely explanation but left it at that.
The Iraqis had driven a hard bargain and he was making a minimal profit on each unit so when he received a big order from his Canadian distributors, giving him a much larger profit, he had no hesitation in diverting some of the Iraqi order. They would just have to wait, he decided. He had phoned them up and told them that he would be sending a part order by the due date and that fifteen boats would be delivered the following month They had been unhappy and he had said they could take it or leave it, knowing that he could sell the rest of the boats at a higher price if they cancelled.
Two men, neatly dressed approached the boatyard. They checked the sign to confirm they had the right address and entered. They pushed the door open to Razul’s office and sat down on the chairs in front of him. He was taken by surprise and started to tell them he was a busy man and that he couldn’t see them at the moment.
“We have come to discuss our order,” said one,
“I have told you I cannot make the delivery. You will just have to wait,” he spoke in a condescending fashion as though lecturing children. “If you don’t want what I can deliver you can cancel. I honestly don’t care. You could sue me through the Turkish courts if you like. That is if you have the odd ten years to spare,” he smiled knowing he held the whip hand.
“We noticed that you are loading a number of your boats onto a truck. Where are they going?”
“That really is none of your business, but I do have other clients apart from yourselves.”
“I see. We do feel that you should reconsider. It is obvious you have the boats we have ordered but you are being greedy are you not?”
“I am a businessman” Razul stated. “Now you know your options. Take it or leave it.”
“Would you at least phone this number and speak to our boss and let him try and persuade you personally to change your mind.” He placed a piece of paper with a mobile number on it on the desk between them.”
Razul was now becoming extremely annoyed at the persistence of these idiots. “No I will not. Stop wasting my time and go, before I have you thrown out.”
“That may be harder to do than you think Mr Terzi.” His companion casually withdrew a large pistol from his pocket and pointed it at Razul’s face. “I suggest you stop wasting our time and phone that number.”
Getting Razul’s daughter to school had been the usual rushed affair for his wife. She had not taken her into the school itself as she was now twelve and liked to be grown up and wait for her friends and walk in with them. If she had looked in her rear view mirror as she drove away she would have seen her daughter being bundled into the back of the car that had followed her from their house that morning.
“Daddy, please daddy” his daughter sobbed. The phone went dead. The colour drained from Razul’s face and he trembled as he looked up into the face of the gunman. He now saw what had been there to see all the time had he not been blinded by is own greed. These people were killers.
He got up. The gun clicked. “What are you doing?” asked the gunman.
“Stopping that truck leaving for the docks with your boats on it,” he said. They followed him outside where he was just in time to prevent the trucks departure.
“You will get all the boats on time,” said Razul, “my daughter?”
“She will be returned unarmed, when we have the boats. There is one final thing before that we need to arrange however.”
“What?”
“As valued customers and given the fact that you have wasted a great deal of our time and put us through a lot of trouble we think that a discount on our purchase is in order. Let us call it a gesture of goodwill on your part. You will delivery the boats and return fifty percent of the money we paid. We think we are being more than reasonable given the circumstances. As you said to us take it or leave it.”
He took it.
Chapter 29
Tim arrived at the conference room in the basement of MI5’s building. He was surprised to find it crowded with staff on their lunch break. There was a large multi screen on the wall that the communications staff had kindly put up linking the screens to form a cinema experience for the viewers to watch Wimbledon. There was silence when Elaine and Jeff, the head and deputy head entered. Jeff signalled for Tim to follow and they proceeded to the next room where a communications link had been set up with the CIA.
It was two in the afternoon in England and early morning in the US. The deputy director appeared on the screen and greetings were exchanged. “Mr Deputy Dir
ector we have come into some information that we feel we should share with you” said Elaine. “I shall pass you to my colleague Mt Anthony Burr to brief you.”
“We have received information that an oil tanker the Nord Viking is to be attacked by ISIS in the Strait of Hormuz in sixteen days. We have the exact time and location. The Combined Maritime Force patrols the region and the Task Force has been alerted. My understanding is that a private security force is aboard the Nord Viking and is in some strength. However they are deployed to protect the crew and deal with a boarding. ISIS is not interested in taking the ship but sinking it and the attackers. They will not be concerned with their personal survival,” Tim said.
“I am not clear why the sinking of one oil tanker is on their agenda. All our intelligence would clearly point to mass killings and bombings on soft targets?”
“Fund raising,” Tim explained Tonners to the CIA man.
Following a long discussion between all the parties and a brief consultation with his advisors the Deputy Director addressed them.
“Look we have had a discussion here and it is pretty damn clear that the Iranians must be affording support if anything like this it get close to success. We are, as you can understand, reluctant to get further involved after those Iranian shits took that boat load of US Sailors and we had to grovel to get the hostages back. Sorry folks you are on your own in this one.” He signed off.
“That went well,” said Jeff,
“To be honest you can see their point of view. The ship is insured and it will be predominantly UK insurers that take the financial loss. Weigh that against getting embroiled in another Middle East conflict and I know where I would be on this if I were American.”
Waverly, head of MI6, settled himself down with a biscuit and a couple of tea in Elaine’s office. “Nice to hear from you again so soon,” he smiled.
“As a matter of interest did you get to the bottom of that bit of business in North London?”
Tanker (A Tim Burr Thriller Book 1) Page 12
