Pirates

by Ross Kemp

  I blinked, then turned to the guys. ‘Did I just see that?’

  ‘See what?’

  ‘My name, up on that screen.’

  They shook their heads. ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  I agreed with them, perfectly willing to believe that with the jet lag and exhaustion I’d been seeing things. But then I looked up again.

  ‘Welcome to international celebrity ROSS KEMP! Staying here for five nights only!’

  I turned to the guys again. ‘You saw it this time, right?’

  They nodded their heads slowly. ‘Yeah, we saw it.’ So much for our top-secret undercover investigation.

  We’d been tipped off that the pirate gangs hang around the many pool bars that line the docks, waiting for their next job. So it was that on our first night in Batam we headed down to one of these bars with a couple of local fixers. They were grubby, low-rent places, the sort of joints where you could well imagine people of a criminal tendency hanging out. Smoky. Dimly lit. While we took up residence in one of the bars, our fixers moved to a neighbouring establishment, asking questions and gently probing the locals, trying to get an in with a Batam pirate who might be willing to speak to us while we did our best to keep a low profile.

  That first night, though, there was nothing doing. It was with a vague sense of déjà vu that we headed back to our hotel room empty-handed, desperately hoping that we weren’t about to relive our frustrations in the Niger Delta.

  That evening in the pool halls, however, paid off. As a result of our under-the-counter enquiries, one of the pirate commanders of Batam agreed to meet us. It was a turning point in our investigation. We had travelled all over the world in search of pirates. We’d witnessed acts of piracy at first hand, and we’d experienced some of the factors that led desperate people to become pirates. However, although we’d come close – agonizingly close – to meeting actual pirates, we’d always fallen at the final post. Now was our chance, and I was a little apprehensive as we drove through the busy streets of the island, dodging the traffic as we made our way, finally, to meet a pirate.

  The principal mode of transport on Batam, as it is all over south-east Asia, is the 50cc motorcyle. You see them everywhere and soon get used to their constant wasp-like humming. I’ve seen six people on one of these things – Dad driving and the rest of the family clinging on wherever they can like a hugger-mugger version of the Royal Signals Motorcycle Display Team. There are no people carriers for the poor of Batam. The vehicle that we were following, the one that was supposed to be leading us to our pirate, was not a motorcycle but a small silver car. The irony wasn’t lost on me. To find a pirate, I wasn’t going to sea but following a car, weaving among the overloaded motorbikes. But as I was beginning to learn, trouble on the water is directly linked to trouble on land. In a weird kind of way, it made sense.

  As we followed the vehicle – and attracted glances from the locals, for whom Europeans were clearly a curiosity – I couldn’t help but feel a bit dubious that this was anything other than a wild goose chase. We’d been let down too many times before to get our hopes up.

  This time, though, our local fixers were on the money.

  When we were a mile from the pirate’s house, we stopped filming. The conditions of our interview were, reasonably enough, that we revealed neither his identity nor his location – not that I would ever have been able to find my way back there. But, in accordance with his request, we refrained from turning on the camera again until we were inside his house. A nice house, with a four-by-four parked outside. Clean. Well kept. It was a far cry from the poor buildings and shanties you find elsewhere on the island. If the balaclava’d man sitting in front of me genuinely was a pirate, as he claimed to be, it struck me that his line of work was definitely keeping the wolf from the door. What surprised me was that this had the hallmarks of being a religious household. A piece from the Bible was displayed on one of the walls, but in the background you could hear regular calls to prayer from two nearby mosques, reminding us that Indonesia is a Muslim, not a Christian, country.

  In order to keep his identity secret, our pirate insisted that we use a fake name. ‘What do you want me to call you?’ I asked.

  He spoke an indecipherable phrase, and our translator giggled. I turned to her. ‘What does he want to be called?’

  ‘He is called Lightning Storm Across the Sea.’

  Modest, huh? It sounded like a bit of a mouthful to me. ‘Do you think it would be all right if we just called him Storm?’ I suggested.

  She nodded. ‘Yes, I think so.’ And so it was that I found myself sitting down with a balaclava’d pirate called Storm. Over the years I flatter myself that I’ve become something of an aficionado in balaclava wear for the discerning criminal. To be honest, though, I wasn’t quite sure what Storm was wearing. Maybe there’s not much call for such items in Indonesia, but Storm’s headwear had a distinctly homemade look. I couldn’t help wondering if in one of his drawers there was a jumper with an arm missing.

  I didn’t dislike Storm. There was a calmness about him. Perhaps that’s something that comes with being at sea for a long time. I don’t know, but I could tell that he wasn’t shouty or showy. As I grew to know him better, I learned that although he treated us with respect, he had a ruthless side. Calculating. Mess with him while he was going about his business and you’d surely regret it. He was the leader of a small group of pirates, some of whom I would meet later. That didn’t mean, though, that he was entirely autonomous. Storm admitted to me that he took orders from someone further up the line to target certain ships, and I wanted to know who that person was.

  Nothing doing. ‘We don’t know who the boss is,’ Storm told me. ‘This is Mafia law.’

  Either Storm genuinely didn’t know, or he wasn’t going to tell me his name, and I could understand why that might be the case. He wasn’t referring necessarily to the Italian Mafia, but it was clear that he was a cog in the wheel of some bigger crime organization. I doubted that his bosses would have taken too kindly to their names being revealed just because Storm wanted to get on the telly.

  Storm wouldn’t reveal the names of his masters, but he did shed some light on how his instructions, and the information about which boat to take, filtered down to him.

  ‘Sometimes the crew gives us information. They give us the coordinates, the location of the ship that must be attacked.’

  Knowing what I knew about the Nepline Delima, Storm’s words rang true; the MMEA admiral had also hinted at this. Inside jobs – Treasure Island for the twenty-first century.

  Storm went on to explain what happened to a ship once he and his colleagues had taken it. ‘Up to the buyer,’ he said. ‘If it’s wanted in Europe – no problem. If it’s wanted in Asia – no problem. Sometimes it can take two weeks or even a month.’ Quite an operation – these guys were substantially more than hit-and-run merchants, and there was clearly a lot of money involved in what they were doing. Storm explained that most of the time when a ship is hijacked in this way, a buyer is already lined up – they don’t just do these jobs on spec. But occasionally ‘they want the boat to be lost because they need the insurance money to buy another boat’.

  Once the pirates had delivered their boat to its designated destination, they would catch a flight back to Indonesia as part of the deal. So far, so sneaky. But a pirated ship has a crew, even if some of them are in cahoots with the hijackers – they would be lightly beaten up for the sake of appearances. But what happens to them then? Storm spoke matter-of-factly. ‘We tie them up, blindfold them and leave them on an island,’ he said. ‘Or we put them on a raft and send them away.’

  It was sounding more and more like Treasure Island by the minute, and I was struck by the fact that some things, at least, hadn’t changed all that much since the Golden Age of Piracy, when pirated crews would be left on an island as a matter of course. Nowadays it’s easier to locate somebody abandoned in this way, but crews can still potentially be marooned for quite some time.
I wondered what they did for food. Or did the pirates just leave them to starve?

  ‘They’re human too,’ Storm replied. ‘They must be fed and not left to die.’ That, at least, was something.

  It was clear that in Storm’s line of work you needed to be armed. I wanted to know what sort of weapons he and his buddies carried. ‘Machete,’ he told me. ‘But I don’t always use it.’ You can bet your bottom dollar, though, that he threatens to use it, and when I put that to him Storm just nodded.

  My Indonesian pirate had spoken in an honest and straightforward manner about what he did and how he did it. He might have been hiding his face behind his balaclava, but I didn’t have the impression that he was hiding the truth. On the contrary, he appeared, if anything, proud of his activities. He saw himself as a professional, and demanded the respect that came with it. And as a proud professional, I wondered what he thought about his more high-profile Somali cousins, the ones who had so successfully eluded us in the Gulf of Aden. Storm was rather dismissive of them.

  ‘In Somalia they board the boat and start shooting,’ he said as if that was an act of the highest foolishness. ‘You don’t do a job like that. The pirate from Somalia is a stupid pirate. They’re not in our class. They’re low class in Somalia.’ Pirate envy? Storm definitely thought that he and his boys were a cut above the rest.

  Storm and his comrades didn’t just make their living from big hijacks and insurance jobs. Like in any business, they knew that downtime was time when they weren’t earning, and so they filled up the quiet periods with an activity known as ‘shopping’. Storm explained to me exactly what this was. ‘That’s the term used by the pirates in Batam when we board any passing ship, just take the money and go.’

  Hijacking they do with the cooperation of the crew; shopping is another matter. The piratical equivalent of smash and grab, it’s a lot less risky than hijacking a ship, and the rewards are potentially great – especially as you can hit more than one ship in a night. I asked him if the crews generally put up any resistance when Storm and his gang went shopping. ‘Some will fight back,’ he said quietly, ‘but we are not afraid of them. If they want to fight, we will kill them.’

  He sounded almost prosaic as he said it. Cold. There was something scary about that lack of emotion, about the fact that he wasn’t trying to be the big man but was just saying it as it was.

  I didn’t doubt that he was telling the truth.

  For whatever reason, Storm and I seemed to get along. He offered to take us out into the busy shipping lanes off the coast of Batam so that he could show me exactly how they operated and which ships made good targets. In order to do this, we linked up with another guy who wanted to give himself some sort of Dick Dastardly name – I think it was Ghost of the High Seas. More inventive than ‘Mr Smith’, I guess, but we tried not to show that we found their monikers amusing.

  Going out to sea with a troop of balaclava’d pirates has its risks. Storm and Ghost were clearly dangerous men but I didn’t feel, for the moment at least, that they were likely to give us any problems. And it wouldn’t have been difficult to pick Ghost out of a line-up, even with a balaclava, because he had wingnuts which made him look like he was wearing ear defenders. The authorities, though, were a different matter. The waters of Batam were highly patrolled – if we were caught in the company of pirates, we would have a lot of explaining to do. To keep our profile lower, Storm suggested we rent a traditional fishing boat – long and low and with a small outboard motor. To be honest, the vessel wasn’t really fit for the job. It wasn’t much more than 15 metres in length and a couple of metres wide. Into that space we had to fit me, two pirates, someone steering, a translator and three camera crew. A boat like this simply isn’t designed to come up against the wakes of the kind of shipping we were likely to encounter, and being heavily weighed down with bodies didn’t help matters. We were a mismatched bunch, and trying to explain what we were doing in the shipping lanes would not, I thought, be easy. But we were in the pirates’ hands and didn’t have much option other than to do what they suggested.

  Not long after we set sail, it started to look as if our plan wasn’t going to be successful. We were way out in the Malacca Straits – land had disappeared – when one of the many patrol boats turned towards us. It was painted in brown and blue camouflage, had a distinctly military look, and appeared to have clocked us.

  I felt my heart sink. Associating with pirates was undoubtedly a serious offence, and a stint in an Indonesian jail wasn’t very high up the list of things I wanted to do while I was here. Fortunately for us, at the last minute the patrol boat veered away. It seemed we were of no interest to it, and we were able to continue our voyage unobserved.

  We steered into the path of what looked to me like a very large vessel. I asked Storm if he would consider pirating a ship that size. He nodded his head.

  ‘Isn’t it too high?’ I asked him.

  ‘No,’ he replied emphatically. ‘No, this is almost perfect.’ He said he would take it from behind (no sniggering at the back), which surprised me because the freeboard was at its highest there. But what surprised me even more than that was the fact that as we were bobbing around in the ocean discussing the niceties of how to hijack a ship, the ship itself was heading straight for us. Because of our perspective, it was difficult to say just how fast the vessel was travelling, but it was certainly shifting – one moment it looked far away, and the next it was almost on top of us. Its bow wave and wake were massive – for a brief moment I got an insight into the nerves you’d need to get up close to one of these things when they’re moving. What was clear, however, was that this big ship simply hadn’t seen us. It was on a direct collision course and was making no attempt to steer away or to alert us to its presence. The implication wasn’t lost on me: if this ship couldn’t see us during the hours of daylight, what kind of chance would it have at night?

  Storm reiterated that he had taken ships this size. ‘For shopping,’ he said.

  Not for hijacking, though?

  ‘Sometimes.’

  Our little boat rolled and rattled in the wake. Wouldn’t they wait until it was stationary, to make life a bit easier?

  No way. ‘Moving. While it’s moving.’

  We continued our tour of the shipping lanes and before long drew up alongside another vessel, the NYK Antares, 300 metres long and registered in Panama. It was piled high with countless enormous, colourful shipping containers – impossible to say what it was carrying, but it certainly had a lot of stuff on board. It was, Storm told me, an ideal target for shopping. This wasn’t just because of its shape and size but because, as it came from Panama, its crew would most likely be carrying American dollars. As in so many other parts of the world, in Batam the greenback talks. Ships carrying dollars run a much higher risk of hit-and-run attacks than any others. Storm estimated that there would be a minimum of $3,000 on board. Three thousand bucks would go a long way in Batam, but our pirates told us that they wouldn’t be satisfied with that as a payday. ‘If they are only carrying the minimum then we have to find more boats,’ Storm explained. ‘In one night we aim to collect $15,000 before we go home.’

  Fifteen thousand dollars. Hence the smart four-by-four parked outside his house. I wondered how often they would go out shopping to swipe sums like this. ‘It’s difficult to say. Sometimes we go out once a month, sometimes it’s two or three times a month. We usually go shopping at the beginning of the month because that’s when the crew get paid.’ So, if nothing else, our boys knew how to get the maximum return on their investment. There was something extremely businesslike about the way they approached all this.

  Unlike the previous vessel, the Antares spotted us. There was a man on the bridge wing with a pair of binoculars and a radio. He clearly didn’t like what he saw. The air was suddenly filled with a huge sound. Many merchant vessels have the facility to operate directional horns, a piece of apparatus that they use in an attempt to prevent piracy. If I were a pirate, I coul
d well imagine that having that number of decibels blasted in your direction could encourage you to try your luck elsewhere. Apparently, though, they’re not all that effective.

  On this occasion the noise was more than enough to warn us off. If we didn’t move away they could easily have sent out a distress call, and in any case, if any of the patrol ships had heard the Antares’ horn, they could well be in the vicinity soon.

  ‘Turn away!’ Storm shouted. ‘Turn away!’ There was an edge to his voice, so we made ourselves scarce.

  As the day progressed, Storm and Ghost continued to point out vessels in the Malacca Straits. There barely seemed to be any that they wouldn’t consider pirating. Many of the ships they showed us had high freeboards. I’d learned in Somalia that high-freeboard boats were generally less vulnerable because it was more difficult for the pirates to use their ladders and grappling hooks to get on deck. But these Indonesian pirates seemed confident – blasé, even – that they could board such vessels with ease. What was more amazing was that they didn’t use ladders or grappling hooks. They had a different technique – one that had been used in this region for centuries.

  But there wasn’t time for them to tell me about it now. The sky was darkening. Clouds gathered. We had no lights on board, and because we were so small we were not identifiable on any ship’s radar. This meant we were vulnerable to collisions, so with that thought in mind we decided to call it a day, and headed back to shore.

  That night there was another torrential thunderstorm. The heavens opened. It had been a long old day, a day during which I’d had a small taste of what it was like to be a pirate on the Malacca Straits. Frankly, I was very glad to return to the relative comfort of a hotel room, rather than be stuck out at sea in a tiny rickety boat, buffeted by the billowing swell of the waves, the air almost as full of water as the wide, hazardous ocean.

  14. Five Little Pirates Sitting in a Tree

  There are certain things you never expect to hear yourself say. ‘I’m glad I’ve bumped into pirates’ is probably one of them. But after so much time searching, so many disappointments and shattered expectations, I was pretty pleased to have made contact with some genuine Indonesian pirates, to be shown the ropes by Storm and Ghost. And as they seemed to trust us, the next day they offered to take us out to an island where they would demonstrate to us the techniques they used to board ships. Just one problem: the island to which they were taking us was one of those that they used to maroon hijacked crews. I was glad that our investigation was bearing fruit, but I think it was at the back of everyone’s mind that we needed to stay on the good side of these characters if we didn’t want to be marooned ourselves…