by Ross Kemp
‘Is there any particular environment,’ I asked him, ‘that the pirates prefer to operate in?’
The captain stretched out his hands and indicated the wide open ocean that we could see through the bridge window. The water was flat. Calm. Like a millpond. A vast merchant ship chugged in the distance.
‘This environment,’ he said. ‘It’s easier for them to board ships when the sea state is calm. The choppier the water is, the better it is for the merchant vessels.’ Made sense.
I wanted to know what ships were most at risk. ‘The vessels that have been pirated have all been slow and have a low freeboard – the distance from the water to a deck they can put a ladder on.’
I learned that a ship is unlikely to be pirated if it’s travelling above 14 knots. Pirates are like burglars – they will go for the house where the latch isn’t secure. Like burglars, they know that there are easy pickings out there, so why make life difficult for themselves? ‘All the pirates will do,’ the captain told me, ‘is wait until they find something that looks promising.’ As we stared out of the window I pointed out a vessel. Its freeboard seemed pretty high to me – certainly I didn’t much fancy the idea of using a ladder placed precariously on a little boat many metres below to try and board it. ‘Too high?’ I asked the captain.
He shook his head. ‘Low enough.’ Pointing to another vessel, he explained that the freeboard on that would present more difficulties – to me it looked unnaturally high. I was beginning to get the impression that there was a lot of at-risk shipping out there – I’d only been on board a few minutes and I’d already seen some. HMS Northumberland and the rest of the Operation Atalanta fleet had their work cut out.
Having patrolled these waters for the past six months, Lieutenant Commander Simpson obviously knew a great deal about how modern pirates operate. I asked him what usually happened once they took control of a ship. ‘The pirates themselves don’t hurt in any way the crew of the vessels they’ve pirated,’ he told me. ‘We want that to continue. If we start taking down vessels that have been pirated, there is a very great risk that the innocent civilians will either be caught in crossfire or, at worst, executed.’
The captain of the Northumberland, then, and indeed those in charge of the rest of Operation Atalanta, had a difficult balance to strike between the threat of force and actually carrying it out. It struck me that all the advanced weaponry the ship was carrying could very well be redundant when it was faced with delicate hostage situations, that in the hunt for pirates, brain could be more important than brawn. That didn’t mean, though, that the weapons systems weren’t at the ready. While we were in Omani waters, the guns weren’t allowed to be loaded, but the moment we crossed over onto open sea and into our patrol area, that changed. Ammo was inserted; weapons systems were activated. It wasn’t long before the air above me turned to thunder and all around us the water exploded as rounds slammed into the sea – the ship’s guns had to be test-fired to make sure they were fully operational. It was only a short demonstration of Northumberland ’s firepower, but it was enough to make it clear that the frigate’s arsenal was as impressive as I thought it would be.
Now that we had entered dangerous waters, the ship’s crew were instructed to prepare for action stations – a state of readiness that means every single member of the crew, from the cooks to the captain, is ready to enter a battle situation. Every man and woman on the Northumberland needed to be able to switch to action stations at a moment’s notice. Should that happen, off-duty members of the crew would have to report to their posts and the weapons systems would be placed on ‘hot standby’, which meant they would be ready to fire. Officers would make regular checks to ensure everyone was at their posts and ready to do battle. At action stations, though, the day-to-day running of this ship still had to go smoothly – meals, for example, would still have to be produced and so Northumberland ’s cooks would be tested regularly on their ability to do this.
Action stations is exhausting for the crew. Keep it up for too long and they’ll be knackered before you know it. And so they would maintain a state of advanced readiness, just below action stations, for as long as the frigate was patrolling Pirate Alley.
The majority of the crew of HMS Northumberland were not armed. There was, however, a small contingent of men carrying firearms. They were highly trained, and performed constant firearms exercises. These were, of course, Royal Marines. It was the Marines who would be on the front line of the battle against the pirates. With any luck, we’d be joining them in this battle, and having spent some time with their colleagues in Afghanistan, I wanted to get to know them as soon as possible.
The Marines on the frigate were part of the Fleet Protection Group Royal Marines (FPGRM). This elite commando force is a cadre of just over 500 soldiers whose responsibility is the security of Royal Navy assets, both at home and worldwide. Once known as the Comacchio Group, they were originally responsible for the protection of Britain’s nuclear weapons and for counter-terrorist operations at sea. This latter role is now the responsibility of the SBS – the Special Boat Service – but the SBS continues to be backed up by the Fleet Protection Group. The FPGRM is divided into four squadrons: HQ headquarters squadron, O rifle squadron, R rifle squadron and S rifle squadron. Each of these is divided into several units, and the lads on board Northumberland were from the Fleet Standby Rifle Troop (FSRT), a high-readiness unit tasked to support the Royal Navy worldwide. FSRT teams have specialist weapons skills, and are specifically trained in ‘non-compliant boarding skills’. (To you and me, that means getting on a boat when the pirates don’t want you to – a dangerous occupation in this part of the world, but a crucial one.) The Fleet Protection Group can find themselves almost anywhere in the world – from the Arctic Circle to the equator.
The Marines I met were as fit as a butcher’s dog. These guys spent a lot of time on the ship working out and were, they told me, a little frustrated not to have had the chance to fire their guns in a combat situation. To a man, they wished they had been posted to Afghanistan like some of their mates. I told them they were better off where they were, but it was a testament, I think, to their professionalism that they were eager to face up to whatever anyone could throw at them. The Marines constantly had to practise close-quarter battle techniques on board the ship. Sergeant Macaffer explained to me that it was impossible to drill these techniques too often: they had to be second nature to the team because they never knew when or under what circumstances they would have to use them.
The ship’s captain had explained to me the difficulties involved in engaging a vessel that had been pirated. In addition, I knew from my time in Afghanistan that the military’s actions are governed by their rules of engagement – the predetermined regulations that state when, where and how they are permitted to engage an enemy. In Helmand Province it was well known that Taliban fighters would put down their RPG launchers, pick up a hoe and pretend to be innocent villagers, and when that happened, the British army couldn’t touch them – even if, minutes ago, they’d been trying to take the soldiers’ lives. Commander Simpson had hinted at similar problems at sea, and I wanted to know exactly what the Marines’ rules of engagement were. Once pirates were on a vessel and controlled the hostages, were the Marines allowed to exercise their ‘non-compliant boarding skills’?
Sergeant Macaffer shook his head. ‘No. If it’s effectively a hostage situation where they’ve adopted a defensive posture and are threatening to take the lives of the crew, that’s out of our jurisdiction.’
I could well imagine that it must be frustrating for these highly trained soldiers not to be able to use their well-honed expertise to deal with dangerous hostage situations. At the same time I could see the problems involved. The pirates in the Gulf of Aden tended not to kill their captives, and as Sergeant Macaffer succinctly put it, ‘We don’t want to force the issue.’
It was becoming clear to me that there was only a small window of time during which the forces of HMS Northum
berland – and therefore I – would be able to catch up with any pirates, and that was when they were actually in the process of boarding a target vessel. In order to capture them at that crucial moment, we needed to be in that part of the Gulf of Aden where they were likely to be most highly concentrated. Where the action was, and the danger.
And so it was that we set sail for the corridor.
4. The Corridor
Shipping convoys have been around for a very long time, and for very good reasons. Safety in numbers is one; ease of military protection is another. During the Second World War, the British made it compulsory for all merchant ships to travel in convoy along specific routes so the Royal Navy could more readily offer them protection against German surface ships and U-boats. The Germans soon developed anti-convoy tactics, but convoys were still better than the alternative – ships dotted willy-nilly around the ocean, easy targets for enemy strikes. When the Americans joined the war and refused to use convoys along their eastern seaboard, the German U-boats had a field day. The Americans were finally forced to follow the British example, and convoys became the norm for the remainder of the conflict.
Maritime technology might have come a long way in the intervening 60 years, but a lot of things have stayed the same, and the convoy system is one of them. Any merchant shipping travelling through the Gulf of Aden is advised to follow a particular route. They queue up at the end of this narrow corridor, then travel together through it. This stops the merchant vessels from being spread out all over a million square miles of sea and allows naval ships and air support to patrol a more concentrated area of ocean.
There is just one problem. The existence of the corridor not only tells the warships of Operation Atalanta where the merchant vessels are congregating, it tells the pirates too, and some of them flock to the corridor like wasps to jam. It seemed to me that the corridor didn’t reduce the number of Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden, it just forced them to operate in a smaller area. And it was to that area that we were headed. (Other pirates have worked out that ships queuing up at the end of the corridor to travel through the Gulf of Aden together have to have come from somewhere and that it’s impossible to police all the world’s oceans. And so they simply move their area of operations. If you look at maps on which piracy hot spots have been charted from year to year, you’ll see that they change location. It’s like cutting the heads off the hydra – remove one and another grows somewhere else.)
As the sun set on our first day on board HMS Northumberland, a radio operator sent out a message to all shipping in the Gulf: ‘All stations. All stations. All stations. This is coalition warship Foxtrot 23. We are conducting maritime security operations within the Gulf of Aden. Anyone witnessing any criminal or suspicious activities are to contact coalition warship on channel 16.’
Channel 16. The international distress channel. Monitored day and night by coastguards around the world and used only for broadcasting distress calls. The radio operators on Northumberland would be keeping constant, careful tabs on channel 16 for as long as we were in Pirate Alley, waiting for the call that meant a merchant ship was being boarded by pirates. Whether that call came or not was anyone’s guess. We just had to wait and see.
*
Darkness. My first night on board. The stars above were blindingly bright, a breathtaking canopy out here in the middle of the ocean where there was no ambient light to make them dim. But out to sea it was impenetrably black. Anything could be going on out there.
The sun might have gone down, but it was still hot on deck thanks to the winds blowing off the deserts of Africa and the Arabian Gulf. I was sweating even as I peered into the gloom, wondering what was out there waiting for us. I knew that most pirate attacks took place at dawn or dusk, but I also knew that when you’re dealing with dangerous, unpredictable people like this, the one thing you have to expect is the unexpected. The crew of Northumberland, on constant rotation, would not be letting their guard slip for a minute. And aboard the merchant ships in the Gulf of Aden the cover of darkness wouldn’t bring much comfort…
And then word reached me that we were just about to enter the corridor. I made my way to the bridge to speak to one of the guys. He showed me a navigation screen, glowing blue in the darkness and with our position and that of the corridor clearly marked. It was 50 nautical miles to the south-west. ‘As you go past Aden,’ he told me, ‘you get a lot of vessels that look like pirate vessels, so we’ll stick to the north of the corridor because the merchant traffic does tend to get a bit nervous around there.’ I bet they do.
It would take us around 40 hours to travel the length of the corridor. Two days, two nights, as near as damn it. I tried to imagine what it must be like for a merchant ship travelling that route, knowing that they could be boarded by pirates with RPGs at any moment. Not for the first time, I felt a sense of relief that I was on board a Royal Navy frigate and not one of those vulnerable vessels.
With that thought going through my head, I turned in for the night, genuinely not knowing what the next few days would bring.
In Afghanistan I had learned that war was characterized by long stretches of boredom, punctuated by moments of sudden activity (and in the Stan, blind fear). The fight against the pirates wasn’t much different – acts of terror on the high seas don’t tend to happen where and when you want them. In a million square miles of ocean it’s difficult to be in the right place at the right time and there’s a lot of nervous waiting around. So it was not until my third day on board HMS Northumberland that the call came in. Captain Andy Morris of the Fleet Protection Group Royal Marines was called to the bridge for a briefing and I went with him. There was a large group of Somali boats, or dhows, in the vicinity, surrounded by a significant number of skiffs – long flat boats of the type favoured both by Somali fishermen and by Somali pirates. ‘My intention,’ Simpson told the Marine unit leader, ‘is to perform an approach-and-assist visit on that group.’
Andy Morris nodded. He had his orders, and left the bridge to brief his men.
The Fleet Protection Group congregated on deck. They wore desert camouflage gear and life jackets, along with Osprey body armour and Gecko Marine Safety Helmets. A couple of the guys carried the short version of the SA80 assault rifle. The standard version would be too long because in the event of them having to board a large ship, they would have to go round tight corners. (I learned that the shortened SA80 is also used by tank crews so that they can get in and out of their vehicles more easily.) Other members of the FPG carried Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns – predominantly a special forces weapon and more suited to the job in hand. The 556 round from an SA80 has more velocity behind it than the 9-millimetre from the MP5. This can be hazardous in a close-quarter battle situation: the 556 can go through a body and still bounce around the room like a rubber ball in a tin can. The rigid inflatable boats (RIBs) themselves were mounted with general purpose machine guns. All in all, everyone was pretty heavily armed.
Andy explained to me that it was commonplace in these waters for tuna fishermen to tow skiffs behind the slightly bigger dhows, and these skiffs usually had about 12 people on board. Unfortunately, this was exactly what the pirates do as well. Often the dhows will have been pirated in the first place, and the fishermen thrown overboard. The pirates will then stay out to sea for up to 40 days, watching and waiting for a suitable target to cross their path. I guess when you have the prospect of such a big payday coming your way, you don’t mind hanging around for a while…
From a distance, the dhows we were about to approach looked just like innocent fishing boats. Fly over the Gulf of Aden and you’ll see plenty of these boats, many of them sailed by legitimate Somali fishermen earning their living from the tuna-rich waters of the area. There were ways, however, of distinguishing fishermen from pirates. ‘They’ve got equipment that they use for getting on board other vessels, and that’s the key,’ Andy told me. ‘It’s the ladders – you can’t hide a ladder on a skiff.’ And obviously, if you
have a ladder out at sea, it’s not so that you can go and clean windows. ‘If we see grappling hooks,’ Andy continued, ‘and obviously weapons…’
‘Fishermen don’t have rocket-propelled grenades,’ I suggested.
Andy grinned. ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit of a giveaway.’
The Marines would approach the skiffs in their RIBs. Two members of the group would be ready to act as snipers from the Merlin helicopter, which could be called into action should things kick off. One of these snipers would be armed with an AW50 rifle. This is a serious bit of weaponry, as I had found out in Afghanistan when, more than once, its rounds flew just over my head. The sniper wouldn’t use his 50-cal to take out people; instead it would be used, should the situation require it, against engine blocks, a technique that’s used a lot in anti-narcotics operations out in the West Indies. Hit a small boat’s engine with one of those rounds, which can have either explosive or armour-piercing tips, and there really won’t be a lot left of it.
As the Marines, accompanied by some regular navy guys, prepared to disembark from Northumberland and speed in their RIBs towards the suspicious vessels, you could tell that this was a well-practised routine for them. There was just one small difference this time round: they’d have a couple of extra passengers, namely me and Will, the cameraman. It wasn’t just the Marines that had to get their gear together. We did too. I’d been told before I left England that if I had body armour, I should bring it along, so I had it wrapped around my torso and a helmet firmly on my head. I was also carrying camera batteries and tapes so that Will had a bit less to deal with. You don’t get a very stable ride travelling at 25 knots on a RIB (understatement of the decade), and it’s kind of difficult to get a steady shot. I was also wearing a life jacket. I’d had it explained to me that some life jackets inflate on contact with water, which sounds like a good idea, especially if you’re knocked unconscious into the water. But they have their downsides. If you’re underwater and your life jacket inflates automatically, you rise to the top no matter what’s above you (and in a military environment the thing above you can be sharp and dangerous). In situations like that, it’s much safer, if you can manage it, to swim out of the way of any hazards on the surface and then inflate your life jacket manually. So it was that we had been equipped with toggle-inflating jackets.