JonDLundyn Parker 2 #7/2
February 10th 2007 02:42
The captain of Ocean King gave the order to turn his tanker to two hundred and fifty degrees. This would line him up with the entry into Hydrographers Passage, a main channel to enter the Australian Great Barrier Reef. To do so without a pilot and particularly being the size vessel she was, alarm bells were going to be set ringing. Ocean King had not made any radio calls to any other ship or shore station since being boarded by twenty pirates as she sailed through the straight of Malacca.
The crew, were kept in their canteen dining room. They slept on the floor and used the adjacent toilet for their ablutions but they had no contact with the officers. The officers were kept to the bridge and they ate, slept and ran the ship from there. They were not allowed back in to their cabins from the moment the ship had surrendered. By now however the owners and ships agent were getting concerned about the whereabouts of their ship and cargo of Crude Gulf Oil.
Ocean King was carrying two hundred and fifty thousand tonne of crude oil, the slick mud like material that was pumped straight out of the ground in the Arabian desert sands. Thick as molasses and contained many other minerals as well as sand and other debris pumped up from beneath the sands. When she was built, her naval architects gave her a double hull which was standard at the time of her construction for all fuel carrying ships. This meant that she had an outer hull of steel and then also an inner hull of steel. Each hull was around a metre apart and held apart by steel flanges that ran the length of the ship. This space between the hulls could be flooded when Ocean King was running in ballast. This meant that she was still carrying enough weight down low enough in her hull when she was not loaded with crude oil to keep her stability on the ocean. She would not suddenly turn turtle in big waves.
The fuel was carried in ten tanks. The hull was so divided that each tank could, if need be carry light, heavy, crude or refined oils. One single cargo or several different types. The pirates who had captured the ship had also dragged on board from their four fast RIBs, explosives and detonators. These had been lowered into the space between the hulls and sat about twelve metres below the water line. Each device could be exploded individually or in one big huge firework. The control device was in one of the RIBs that had been dragged on board and sat at each corner of the huge deck housing looking from the air like well arranged lifeboats for the crew.
Ocean King was now a huge floating ecologically dangerous bomb. It had multiple uses as far as the terrorists were concerned.
1) Sink the ship and block the major shipping artery for coal, fuel, oils, general cargo and passengers for the inside passage of the east Coast of Australia. Ocean King is nearly 1.2 kilometres long.
2) Drift the oil to cover a huge portion of the Great Barrier Reef, one of the seven natural wonders of the world. During this particular time of the year, the coral is “blooming” and spreading it’s spore all over the sea. This would die. Fishing, tourism and shipping would stop while the clean up was under way. Ocean King is carrying over 300,000 barrels of crude oil or over 12,000,000 litres of black tar like substance.
3) Terror! The threat of the act. Drag out the intended blowing up of the tanker for as long as possible to promote terror in the hearts and minds of all people of the world.
4) Utilise and waste resources of the country. Australia has an emergency response group to attend to oil spills but due to good marine management procedures the risk of a major oil spill is rare and consequently the response group is small and under funded by the oil industry.
The huge frame of Ocean King started to shudder as the super tanker slowed her engines then called for engines full reverse. She would take several miles to slow down and come to a stop and meanwhile the pirates were preparing to drop her anchor. Her bow, it was planned would be in twenty metres of water and her stern would drift across the narrow passage of the reef to come to a stop hard against a coral ledge of about 12 metres in depth. She would lay across the tide flow and with the south east trade winds blowing a consistent fifteen to twenty knots day in and day out the oil was guaranteed to spread across hundreds of square miles of pristine barrier reef waters.
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