The Desert and the Sea

by Michael Scott Moore

  Step Up Marine Enterprise later changed its name on the shop at the mall, and its owner, Victor Lim, was charged with trafficking Filipino sailors in another case. Other Naham 3 crewmen would tell similar recruitment stories. And now they were hostages in Somalia, where pirates were happy to treat them like thieves.

  A number of pirate bosses had boarded the Naham 3 when it anchored in Hobyo, and they beat the Chinese crew with broom handles. They interrogated the Filipinos, who spoke English. “One man aimed a rifle at me from behind,” said Ferdinand. “Another asked how long we had been in the Somali area. He said, ‘Since December, right?’ I said no—it was only a few days. But they didn’t like this answer.” So the interrogator ordered his gunman to blow off Ferdinand’s head. “I make my prayer to God,” Ferdinand told me, “and the man pulled his trigger.”

  There was an explosion, and a flash, but the rifle was loaded with blanks.

  Asian and European ships have exploited Somalia’s rich fisheries for decades. They’ve exploited the ill-defended waters of almost every African nation, up and down both coasts of the continent, and this foreign heist of live fish represents a disgusting crime against people who can hardly feed themselves. The crime is exacerbated by trawlers, which rake heavy nets behind them and essentially bulldoze the bottom of the sea. Illegal industrial fishing can make refugees of traditional fishermen in places like Madagascar, Kenya, São Tomé, and Senegal, where seafood matters to the culture.

  Seafood plays a less important role in Somalia, where the culture is nomadic more than seafaring; but the crime is real, even if pirates tried to extend their sense of grievance. Most pirates I met, for example, seemed vaguely aware of a two-hundred-mile “exclusive economic zone.” International law tends to draw two borders off the coast of any nation—twelve nautical miles from shore, and two hundred. The twelve-mile limit represents territorial waters, and foreign fishing within that margin is a crime, outright theft of food. The U.N. also recognizes a two-hundred-mile “exclusive economic zone” for most countries, where it would break treaties for foreign interests to fish or, say, drill for oil. The legal hitch for Somalia was that no government in Mogadishu had ever claimed the two-hundred-mile zone under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. “Somalia doesn’t have an EEZ because it’s never claimed an EEZ,” a U.N. expert told me in early 2012.* Some foreign vessels therefore came in to exploit this stretch of water, and some pirates claimed to defend it.

  The Hobyo pirates, in any case, had captured the Naham 3 hundreds of miles off Somalia. The nearest landmass was the Seychelles’ Bird Island, more than seven hundred miles from Hobyo. The Taiwanese owners and captain had made the dicey but not illegal decision to fish near pirate-infested waters. They may have overfished—the owners were later fined in South Africa for landing too much tuna with a similar vessel in their fleet—but the Naham 3 had not been stealing Somali fish. It was innocent, as far as any industrial vessel could be innocent.

  The crew felt these tensions keenly. Later in the afternoon, three pirates came down to the work deck, and Abdinuur, the machine gunner, wanted to try some recreational fishing. The crew fell silent. Someone baited the line. We watched him hurl it out. Abdinuur wore a gold-colored watch high on his wrist; he could be flashy and arrogant, but he had no patience, no feeling for a meaningful tug. Soon, in a panic, he tried to reel in the line. His thin arms flailed; the gold watch glinted in the sun.

  All the hostages laughed.

  “Why are you laughing?” I asked Tony.

  “Pirates can’t fish,” he said.

  IV

  Later, from our mattresses under the conveyor belt, Rolly and I watched a Vietnamese man toss out the same fishing line and pull up a fat, fire-red snapper. He wore a round straw hat in the mounting sun. We saw him clobber the fish with a knife.

  Rolly frowned. “You must not kill a fish like this,” he said.

  “How do you kill them?”

  “You must cut their necks,” he said, and drew a finger across his own. “Is better.”

  I shuddered. Rolly went on watching with professional interest.

  “We anchored over a reef,” he said.

  A pirate upstairs pointed at a crewman and yelled, “Fish, Somali!”—a direct order, meaning “Prepare fish for Somalis.” Three hostages cleared tools from the top of a dark box built in to the deck, which resembled a workbench. They lifted off the metal top; vapor rose from below. With gloves and a hand hook they wrestled out a massive tuna and thumped it onto the rubber deck mat. It was iron-colored, with snowy eyes, four or five feet long and plump as a sow. D-shaped holes were carved where its gills had been. Someone produced a circular saw, and two men leaned on the fish to steady it with gloved hands while the other started a lateral cut through the side. The blade whined and tossed an arc of pink dust.

  The strips of meat and silver skin went clattering like metal bars into a pan filled with seawater. The tuna carcass went back into the freezer hold. When the meat had defrosted, a small team hacked the strips into smaller pieces. Tony then disappeared to cook them in the kitchen for the pirates’ lunch.

  “That’s slave labor,” I said from under the conveyor belt.

  “Yah. I want to say this, too.” Rolly nodded. “Is slavery.”

  On our second morning aboard the Naham 3, the guards upstairs grew agitated and shuffled around with brandished guns. One came down to yell, “Michael! Helicopter!” and ordered me to sit deep in the work area. I moved into the prow and sat near a sun-warmed steel wall, where I made friends with two Cambodians and an Indonesian. The sound of rotor blades descended and circled us more than once; from our stowage I watched Somalis on the bridge deck aim rifles at the sky. I never saw the helicopter, but I could imagine what it was doing.

  When I had sailed on the Gediz, with Captain Özyurt and Yaşar, I had also flown on the ship’s helicopter. We’d ridden out to inspect a mysterious dhow. I sat near an open side door, next to a sniper, who held a high-powered rifle in his lap. We circled close to the dhow but saw only lumps of unidentifiable cargo covered in blue tarps. The vessel had a wooden bridge, painted white and yellow and blue. The crew looked Indian or Pakistani. They stared up from the deck while the Turkish sniper took aim through our open door.

  “Why did you aim your gun?” I asked after our first pass.

  “Force protection.” He smiled. “This is the rule.”

  Pirates often hijacked dhows to use as mother ships, trailing skiffs across the Gulf of Aden or hundreds of miles into the Indian Ocean. This one had no visible weapons, ladders, or fuel tanks, no skiffs or outboard motors. “Force protection” was a euphemism for We make sure we don’t get popped.

  When the helicopter came around the Naham 3 again, the chop of its rotors vibrated the steel hull. All the fishermen hunched. Every pass, in their minds, carried the threat of a raid. I didn’t think the helicopter would attack in broad daylight, but I didn’t mind being watched, and I had no doubt that a uniformed sniper was aiming out the side, making sure our pirates could see him.

  The helicopter left, and Somalis quit pacing the bridge deck. The mood of the fishermen relaxed. I returned to my spot under the conveyor belt.

  “How often do these helicopters come?” I asked Tony.

  “We have been here three weeks,” he said. “There have been three helicopters.”

  V

  A supply skiff buzzed out from Hobyo twice a day, as a rule, and the first skiff on our second morning delivered a load of new clothes. I got a red Manchester United jersey wrapped in plastic and cardboard. A label on the package had sultry underwear models and cheap slogans in Chinese, and where exactly the Somalis had acquired this merchandise was a glaring question. One crewman, a kid named Jie, with full lips and a dark swoop of hair—who could have been a Chinese underwear model himself—took the package, studied it, gave an impenetrable smile, shrugged, and handed it back.

  “Cargo,” he quipped.

  On the third mor
ning, pirates on a bouncing skiff handed up a live goat and a tall, awkward-looking Somali who carried no weapon but wore a lethal Hawaiian-print shirt. He disappeared up to the bridge. Another Somali tied the goat to the staircase. The goat watched him sharpen a rusted fish knife and bleated in the wind. Soon four men wrestled it to the rubber mat and held its kicking legs while the Somali sawed open its neck. The goat protested by trying to leap off the boat, but the men held its legs, and blood spread across one corner of the deck. I noticed the nervous tail wag even after the rest of its body had fallen still.

  They strung the hind legs from an upper railing and let the gash bleed out. Chinese and Cambodian men made expert cuts at the heel of each leg and flayed the skin. What swung from the upper rail was soon no different from the meat suspended in any Muslim butcher shop—I had seen ribbed sections of goat like that in Morocco, Gaza, and northern Iraq—but with a staring, swinging head.

  Someone washed away the blood with a seawater hose. Parts of the goat went straight to the kitchen. The rest went into the freezer.

  The Hawaiian-shirted man came down to sit on the tuna bench. He had work to do, apparently, involving his mobile phone and a notebook. He used a plastic chair for a makeshift desk. He ordered Tony to fry him a fish. After a while he asked me a question.

  “How do you like the food on this ship?”

  It felt strange to be addressed like that, with no preliminaries, from about twelve feet off.

  “An improvement,” I said.

  “Yeah, it’s because they got dedicated cooks on board here.”

  That was not the only reason, but I decided not to mention the relative sophistication of Chinese versus Somali cuisine.

  This man’s name was Abdul. He had clear, American-accented English. Ferdinand whispered to us that he was the pirate who had questioned him about the ship’s whereabouts in December and ordered his mock execution. The crew seemed afraid of him. They thought he was a pirate boss.

  At last Tony served up a whole deep-fried wrasse, and Abdul asked for ketchup.

  “Okay, I want all the Vietnamese over here,” he announced.

  Three fishermen crawled out from the crowded work area to squat around him. Abdul explained, through Arnel, that he would call the Vietnamese embassy in Kenya. “Then we’re gonna talk to your families,” he said. He dialed a number and we listened to him give a glib spiel to an English-speaking embassy worker: “Yeah, I’m calling about your guys who are hostages on a fishing boat here in Somalia? Yeah. The Naham 3. What? I’m calling from Somalia. I just came from talkin’ to these guys, and I gotta say, they’re really, really suffering a lot . . .”

  When the conversation ended, he dialed each Vietnamese man’s home, one at a time. When the calls went through, we heard quiet discussions in Vietnamese. The negotiator then summoned the Cambodians and went through the same cycle. It lasted all morning.

  Arnel translated because he understood English, not because he spoke other languages on the boat. The Naham 3 had no common language. Arnel spoke to the other men in an improvised pidgin of English and Chinese and several other languages. They used the Chinese hai dao* for “pirate.” Saitei was “the worst” or “no good,” from Japanese, and loco-loco meant “crazy.”* Doubling any simple word could turn it into pidgin, so “laundry” was washy-wash, “a little” was small-small, and “eating,” as well as “food,” was chum-chum. “Talking” was bow-wow. “Too much” or “plenty” of anything was sa-sa, and it could apply to water, food, or insanity among the pirates. I learned quickly that if you wanted to express how pirates flapped their mouths with little or no consequence—an idea that came up more than once—you said, “Hai dao bow-wow sa-sa.”

  One man called Nguyen Van Ha sat with us after his phone call and showed us notes written on a scrap of cigarette carton. He was the Vietnamese man who liked to fish in a peaked straw hat. The pirates wanted three hundred thousand dollars per Vietnamese sailor—a total of nine hundred thousand dollars from the Hanoi government—but they had also demanded three hundred thousand from each family. So they were demanding the same ransom twice.* Nguyen Van Ha tapped his head.

  “Loco-loco,” he said.

  Ransom demands were different for every national group. A Chinese man cost three hundred fifty thousand dollars, a Cambodian one hundred fifty thousand. The twenty-eight ransoms were supposed to total about twenty million dollars, but what each figure had in common was the impression it made on the hostage and his family at home: That’s fucking crazy. (“Hai dao loco-loco.”)

  During a pause between phone calls, the negotiator came over to chat. Like Boodiin, he had deeply dishonest habits of speech, mixing his chummy American slang with a Somali talent for insult. It harmed my blood pressure to talk to him.

  “I heard about your case,” he said to me. “You got arrested in January.”

  “‘Arrested’ is a funny word for what happened to me,” I said.

  “The commander just now said you got something wrong with your back.”

  By “commander” he meant Tuure. I told him about the skiff accident.

  “Well, maybe you don’t know how to ride in these boats,” he chided me.

  “No one advised me to take boating lessons before I came to Somalia,” I said. “But your pilot was a madman.”

  Abdul tried to act worldly and smooth, but when he smiled, he looked smug as well as depraved. His upper teeth flared in a neat fan. “We will get you some antibiotics,” he promised.

  “No, hang on,” I said. “I don’t have an infection in my gut, I have a bone-and-muscle problem. Antibiotics won’t do any good.”

  “What do you need?”

  “Pain relief.”

  Abdul nodded and turned to Rolly. “We’ve met before.” He held out his hand to shake, but Rolly, God bless him, answered:

  “Yah, we meet in Hobyo! You tell me you a doctor.”

  I laughed out loud.

  “No, I didn’t,” said Abdul.

  “Yah!” Rolly protested. “When I come to Hobyo, you ask if I need medicine—because me, I’m an old man. You say, you can get any kind of medicine.”

  “Oh.” He gave us the fan-toothed smile. “But I wouldn’t have said I was a doctor.”

  “Yes, you told me that!”

  Rolly wasn’t doing this for my sake—he didn’t even look at me. He just wanted the truth to be known. He was full of outraged justice, and in these moods he was wonderful to watch.

  “Okay, okay,” said Abdul, routed, and he returned to his position on the bench.

  VI

  Rolly and I slept under the conveyor belt for five nights. We got used to the rhythm of the other twenty-eight men unrolling their mats and arranging themselves for sleep while sharp floodlights glared from the upper deck, swells rolled under the ship, and Somalis upstairs played music on a tinny radio. But I woke up in the middle of each night with my heart trotting. If the worst condition for an untortured hostage is uncertainty, the rocking of the ocean deepened my disorientation. I thought about jumping into the dark water and wondered if I had steered myself into a psychological trap, similar to my father’s, a situation with no clear way out but self-destruction. You have made a mistake. Mistakes are human. Like any human I preferred to be proud of myself, not ashamed. Like any writer I wanted to be right. Now I was wrong—worse than wrong: I’d taken a spectacular risk in coming to this dangerous place, and the evil that continued to flow from my mistake was impossible to square or defend.

  Late on the fifth night, around ten, Abdul came out to wake everyone up. “Come on, we’re going upstairs,” he said. “Let’s go, come on.”

  The dutiful Asian crew took their mats and lined up for the stairs.

  “What’s the matter?” I said.

  “We are under attack,” said the negotiator. “We got helicopters comin’ in.”

  “Oh, boy.”

  “Yeah, you gotta get upstairs.”

  The crew was groggily obedient. No one moved very fast. We
filed up the narrow bridge stairs, but the line of hostages stalled, and we had to rock with the ship about three stories over the dark, floodlit sea. Abdul lost his patience. “Come on, motherfuckers, get inside!” he yelled. The Asians shifted on their feet. They seemed willing to help, but they couldn’t move. “Come on, motherfuckers!” Abdul hollered again, and in a frustrated rage he rounded on me, as if my presence were the source of his trouble. “Make yourself small!” he shouted. “Cover your head with your blanket! It is you they will be looking for!”

  I gave him a cold stare. If helicopters were coming, I wanted to be seen, and he had no weapon, no authority beyond his frantic tantrum. I was not about to “make myself small” for Abdul.

  In the tiny captain’s cabin, several of us had to lie on the floor while a pirate sat in the corridor and aimed a rifle at my head. He sat at a small table where the late captain used to eat his meals. This pirate was crazy. “Do not even open your eyes!” he warned me. “If you open your eyes, you will be shot!”

  Behind the bridge and down a set of stairs, the fluorescent-lit corridor led to a line of cabins where the others had to cram themselves. Abdul’s panic accelerated during this organizational mess. He said pirates had noticed “signals” on the ship’s radar. “Maybe they will attack, maybe they won’t!” he said as he passed our cabin door, his bloodshot eyes widening. “Maybe we will all get killed! We don’t know.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  Four of us had to lie on the floor, with two others on the bed, in a room intended for one. The thin hollow door to the cabin had a ragged hole where the knob had been. It swung open and closed all night with the listing ship.

  I slept in fits and woke from a doze around six thirty. Sun streamed into the corridor from the bridge. My guard looked sleepy and resentful, but when he saw me open my eyes, instead of shooting, he said, “Okay, come on,” and a few of us filed down the steps.

  We milled on the work deck before breakfast, trying to understand what had happened. Arnel told me the radar had malfunctioned. When the pirates couldn’t fix it, they forced us upstairs for safekeeping.