Roux was not squeamish, but he was no lionheart either. He closed the box, went back to his flat, and started on the brandy bottle, for medicinal purposes only. He needed a lot of medicine.
Alan Baker emerged from the office of the Yugoslav state arms company into the bright sunshine of Belgrade, feeling well pleased with the way things were going. On receiving Shannon’s down payment of $7200 and the End User Certificate, he had gone to a licensed arms dealer for whom he had occasionally done work in the past on a subcontractual level. As in the case of Schlinker, the man had felt the amount of weaponry and money involved in the proposed deal to be derisory, but he had yielded to Baker’s argument that if the buyers were satisfied with the first consignment they might well return for more, a lot more.
So he had given Baker his fiat to fly to Belgrade and make application for the purchase, using the certificate from Togo, duly filled out with the appropriate names, and with a letter of authority from the dealer appointing Baker his representative.
It meant Baker would lose a part of his cut, but it was the only way he could be received in Belgrade, and for such a small deal he had in any case allowed a mark-up of 100 per cent on the buying price of the arms.
His five days of talks with Mr. Pavlovic had been fruitful and had included a visit to the state warehouse, in which he had selected the two mortar tubes and two bazookas. The ammunition for both was standard and supplied in crates of twenty bazooka rockets and ten mortar bombs.
The Yugoslavs had accepted the Togolese End User Certificate without demur, and although Baker, the licensed dealer, and probably Mr. Pavlovic, must be aware the certificate was just a piece of paper, the air was maintained that the government of Togo was eagerly awaiting the chance to buy Yugoslavia’s weaponry for testing. Mr. Pavlovic had also required full payment in advance, and Baker had had to pay over what remained of the $7200 Shannon had given him, after his travel costs, plus $1000 of his own. He was confident Shannon’s balance of another $7200 would reimburse him and, even after the licensed dealer had taken his cut, leave $4000 for Baker’s pocket.
His morning’s talks had confirmed that the goods would be granted an export license and sent by army lorries to a bonded warehouse at the port of Ploce in the northwest, close to the holiday resorts of Dubrovnik and Split.
It was here that the Toscana should dock to take the shipment aboard, any time after June 10. With a light heart, Baker took the next flight for Munich and Hamburg.
Johann Schlinker was in Madrid that morning, May 20. He had Telexed the full details of the deal in 9mm. ammunition that he wanted to put through to his Madrid partner, a Spanish national, a full month earlier, and had later flown to the Spanish capital himself with his Iraqi End User Certificate, as soon as he had received Shannon’s $26,000 in full payment.
The Spanish formalities were more complicated than those Alan Baker had discovered in Belgrade. Two applications were necessary, the first to buy the hardware, the second to export it. The application to buy had been made three weeks earlier and over the past twenty days had been vetted by the three departments of state in Madrid who concern themselves with such matters. First the Finance Ministry had been needed to confirm that the full purchase price of $18,000 had been received into the appropriate bank in hard currency. A few years earlier, only United States dollars had been acceptable, but more recently Madrid was more than happy to take German marks.
The second department was the Foreign Ministry. Its job had been to confirm that the buyer country was not a state to which Spain was opposed. There was no problem with Iraq, since the great bulk of Spanish arms exports habitually go to the Arabs, with whom Spain has always maintained close and friendly relations. The Foreign Ministry had no hesitation in confirming its approval of Iraq as a recipient of Spanish 9mm. ball ammunition,
Last, the Defense Ministry had been required to confirm that nothing in the proposed sale was on the secret list or among the categories of arms not for export. With simple small-arms ammunition, this too had been no problem.
Although there had been no sticky problems with such a consignment, it had taken eighteen days for the papers to pass through the three departments, accumulating more paperwork as they went, until the final dossier emerged with the stamp of approval. At this point the crates of ammunition were taken from the CETME factory and stored in a warehouse of the Spanish army on the outskirts of Madrid. From this point the Army Ministry took over, and notably the head of its arms-export section, Colonel Antonio Salazar.
Schlinker had come to Madrid to present personally the application for an export license. He had been in possession of the full details of the MV Toscana on his arrival, and the seven-page questionnaire had been filled out and presented. Back in his room in the Hotel Mindanao, the German expected no problems here either. The Toscana was a clean ship, small but belonging to a registered shipping company, Spinetti Maritime, as Lloyds Shipping List confirmed. According to the application form, she would wish to berth in Valencia between June 16 and June 20, take the shipment on board, and proceed straight to Latakia on the coast of Syria, where the consignment would be handed over to the Iraqis for trucking to Baghdad. The export license should take no longer than another two weeks, and then application would be made for a movement order, permitting the crates to be taken from the army warehouse and detailing an army officer to mount escort with ten soldiers as far as Valencia quayside. The latter precaution, brought into force over the previous three years, was to prevent any risk of hijacking by the Basque terrorists. The last thing the government of El Caudillo wanted was to see Madrid’s bullets being used against the Guardia Civil in Coruna.
As Schlinker prepared to leave for Hamburg, he reflected that his Madrid partner was perfectly capable of ensuring that the liaison with the Army Ministry remained at a cordial level and that the crates would be waiting in Valencia for the arrival of the Toscana on time.
In London a third and seemingly unconnected meeting took place. Over the past three weeks Mr. Harold Roberts, the nominee director of Bormac Trading Company, controlling 30 per cent of the company stock, had been cultivating the chairman, Major Luton. He had several times taken him to lunch and once visited him at his Guildford home. They had become quite friendly.
Throughout their talks, Roberts had made it clear that if the company were to get off the ground and go back into business, whether in rubber or in some other area of trading, a large injection of fresh capital would be needed. Major Luton could well see that. When the time was ripe, Mr. Roberts proposed to the chairman that the company should make a new one-for-two issue of shares—a total, therefore, of half a million of new stock.
At first the major was aghast at the boldness of the move, but Mr. Roberts assured him that the bank whose nominee he was would find the necessary fresh finance. Mr. Roberts added that in the event that any of the new shares were not taken up by existing shareholders or new shareholders, the Zwingli Bank would take up the rest at full value on behalf of its customers.
The clinching argument was that when news of the fresh share issue broke on the market, the price of Bormac ordinaries would be bound to rise, perhaps by as much again as their present value, which then stood at one shilling and threepence. Major Luton thought of his own hundred thousand shares and agreed. As is so often the case when a man has once weakened, he then went along with Mr. Roberts’s proposal without further demur.