by Dave Gerard
Our eyes were now fixed on a particularly big set of images underwater. They stood out in bright relief on the screen. The sonar and the magnetometer were registering large metal objects directly underneath us.
“What are we looking at?” I asked.
“Well,” said Schnizzel, “I would say that, given the size, shape, and metallurgical signatures being emitted, the logical conclusion is that, well—”
Diamond interrupted him. “Cannon,” he said with a rare grin. Schnizzel nodded his agreement, smiling from ear to ear.
We spent the next hour in breathless anticipation. Thompson, Diamond, and Schnizzel carefully maneuvered around the area and took readings. They confirmed multiple signatures consistent with cannon, though they cautioned us that we couldn’t yet be sure.
At about 4 a.m., as the first hint of the sun blushed the sky, Thompson and Diamond engaged the ROV. We lowered it down over the side and into the water. This was difficult to do in the darkness, but none of us could stand to wait another moment, so we all pitched in to get it done. Once the ROV was at the bottom, there would be no difference between day and night.
The ROV descended slowly, and we looked through its eyes on our monitors. The moonlight quickly faded, and we were left with a grainy blue-green feed from the ROV’s floodlamps, which illuminated the ocean as it went deeper. A few startled fish passed through the ROV’s field of vision. After their initial surprise, they ignored it entirely and continued with their strange, deep ocean lives.
“One hundred feet,” called Diamond, guiding the ROV inexorably toward the ocean floor.
“That’s thirty meters,” added Schnizzel, for the benefit of the audio record we were making. It was a measure of our preoccupation that Thompson didn’t even glower at him.
“Two hundred feet,” said Diamond after another minute.
“Visibility good,” Schnizzel said. “Current low. ROV functioning within normal parameters.”
We watched in absolute silence, as deep as the ocean floor, as the ROV continued down into the depths. Diamond quietly counted out three hundred feet, four hundred feet, and then five hundred feet, with no change to the grainy blue-green screen in front of us. We waited breathlessly, our anticipation growing with each foot the ROV descended.
At about six hundred feet, the view began to change. Particles flitted across the monitors. The ROV kicked up silt as it reached the end of its journey. It looked like a swirling sandstorm down there.
“ROV approaching bottom,” Diamond said. “Visibility obscured. Stand by.”
We leaned closer to the monitors to try and make out the view. Jared moved the ROV carefully. He didn’t want to hit anything. Slowly, the swirling particles relaxed.
Suddenly, the bottom loomed into view, and we had a clear view of what was in front of us. This was the spot that the magnetometer had highlighted. Diamond set the ROV down gently on the bottom. And as we craned our necks forward, even my untrained eyes could see what was right in front of them. It was covered in mud or sand or barnacles or whatever else. But it was unmistakable.
“We have cannon,” Diamond said laconically.
“Yes!” I screamed. My voice was shockingly loud in the soundless, open ocean, and I thought for a moment that the entire Nicobar Island chain must have heard me. But Ashley and Vijay were yelling at the top of their lungs too. “We’re rich!” Vijay yelled. “We’re rich!” Schnizzel whooped and cheered and broke into some kind of crazy Yiddish dance, and then Thompson started dancing a sailor’s shanty, and all of this was so infectious that we all started jumping and dancing and flailing around the deck, screaming at the top of our lungs at this magnificent thing that had just happened.
“By God, Schnitzel,” roared Thompson, clapping him on the back. “You did it! Your plan wasn’t half bad after all!”
“No, no,” Schnizzel protested. “It was your sonar skills. And Jared! Brilliant!” Jared was grinning along with all the rest of us, lighting a victory cigarette with a silver Zippo.
We continued to scan the ocean bottom with the ROV. It remained sandy, and the screen’s vision was murky. But we began to make out what looked like wooden beams, or a corroded hulk, through the grainy lens. Schnizzel, Thompson, and Diamond agreed there was no question that we had found a wreck. They also saw signs that things had been moved around or unearthed recently. Lloyd Gunthum and his crew, I thought.
Soon after that, Diamond spotted a glint on the ROV’s camera. It was something buried in the sand. It had been partially unearthed. I didn’t even notice it. But Jared’s sharp eyes seemed to miss nothing. “Look,” he said. “I think that’s a coin.”
And sure enough, as he gently worked the ROV’s robotic arms in the sand, we saw what looked like coins scattered within a three-foot circumference on the ocean floor.
“Oh my god,” I said breathlessly. “Can we bring them up?” My heart was pounding.
Diamond nodded. He had been reluctant to bring up any piece of the cannon, because it was too big and we risked damaging it. But with the coins he smiled and obliged. He maneuvered the ROV’s robotic arms under the coins. It reminded me of one of those claw machine games at an arcade, where you try to grab a prize like a stuffed teddy bear or a nerf gun. Except here we were grabbing at the beginning of what might be several billion dollars’ worth of solid gold. Diamond was skilled, and he carefully coaxed a few coins into a bowl-shaped panning device on the end of the robot’s arms. Then he slowly brought the ROV up. A few minutes later, it broke the surface.
We dashed over to it. The ROV was dripping, seeming like it had returned from an alien world. I still didn’t quite believe that what we had seen on the screen was real.
But there in the ROV’s claws sat the three coins that Jared had brought up. Even though they were dirty and caked in mud, I saw the unmistakable glint of gold.
Jared stepped aside and extended his hand toward Ashley with a flourish. She grinned and stepped forward do the honors. Ignoring Schnizzel’s protestations, she took the coins and rubbed one of them clean on her shirt, holding it out for us to see.
There, on the surface of the coin, were the very same markings that we now knew represented the rich and proud city of Malacca, conquered by the Portuguese some five hundred years ago.
After that, we yelled and screamed and cheered until our throats were raw. Vijay broke out our last case of Tiger beers to celebrate the occasion. I hesitated, since it was not quite 5 a.m., but Ashley cracked one open, and the rest of us followed. Thompson got the ship’s radio working and managed to find some music on a Malaysian nautical channel. Incongruously, they were playing old 50s or 60s American swing, and we started dancing around the deck, singing and yelling wildly as dawn broke over the horizon.
I couldn’t believe it. Here we were, in the middle of the open ocean, and sitting precisely 668 feet below us was a treasure almost beyond what the human mind could conceive. I imagined Alfonso de Albuquerque’s great hoard, eighty tons of worked gold and two hundred chests of sparkling gems, sitting right there beneath us, just waiting to be claimed.
As the sun started to come up, I became aware of a noise in the distance. It sounded like a buzzing or humming. As it grew louder, I recognized it as a motor, and then multiple motors. I glanced over at the others and saw that they heard it too. Jared walked toward the other side of the boat, where it was coming from. We followed him, and craned our necks to try and see what it was.
There, in the distance, was a cluster of small boats, rapidly headed our way.
THIRTY-ONE
This was the first time we had seen anything like this before. For the most part, the only watercraft we had seen were some isolated fishing boats. This was different. The boats were making straight for us. I felt a malevolent intention from them, whether real or imagined. Trevor Thompson grunted something. Jared Diamond was silent, but he looked concerned, which worried me
more than anything else.
The boats closed in on us quickly. One of them turned on a floodlight, suddenly blinding us. I heard shouts, and then the staccato burst of an automatic rifle. I had fired one on a range once, and I knew the sound. The burst came again, closer, and this time I thought I heard the whine of a bullet flying past my ear. I crouched down and threw a hand across my eyes, straining to see against the harsh light. I could vaguely make out the outline of a figure, poised high in the bow of the lead boat, a rifle raised defiantly toward the sky.
In moments, one of the boats was alongside us. Up close, I saw it was a small wooden craft fitted with a heavy outboard motor. Two hooks sailed out from the boat and caught on our railing. The hooks were lashed to long bamboo poles, and before we could blink, two men shimmied up like squirrels and leapt onto our deck. They didn’t have guns, but were brandishing some type of primitive machete. The weapons looked sharp, and they glistened with oil.
More followed, and soon men from all four boats were aboard. One of them carried an AK-47 rifle. A few more carried old handguns. The rest were armed with machetes. There were maybe a dozen of them altogether, all of them screaming and shouting as we put our hands up in the air and yelled back at them in English, trying to figure out what the hell was going on.
There was a crescendo of shouting from behind me, and I spun around to see that five of them had surrounded Jared. Their machetes were raised, and the AK-47 rifle was pointed directly at him. Jared had a hand in the back of his waistband, and I saw he was fingering a pistol. I saw the set of his face. He looked ready to pull the thing and send everyone to hell.
“Don’t!” I yelled. “Jared, don’t do it! There are too many of them!” Ashley started screaming at him, and then Trevor Thompson did too, and Jared slowly took his hand off the gun and came back from the brink. He spat over the side of the rail, and then the men jumped on him and took the gun and forced him to the deck.
Vijay was speaking to the men in Malay. Gradually, amid the clangor, they realized this. The men seemed surprised that he spoke the language. They went back and forth with him in harsh voices. I couldn’t understand a thing. One of the men pointed a finger firmly at his own chest a few times and said something that sounded like “noon.” Eventually, Vijay and the men seemed to reach an understanding.
“What are they saying?” I asked Vijay during a lull in the conversation, as the men talked amongst themselves.
“They’re telling us to surrender. That we should put up our hands and nothing bad will happen.”
“And what the hell is ‘noon’?” They kept jabbering that. Or something like it.
“Lanun,” Vijay said. “They are saying that they are lanun.”
“Lanun? What does that mean?”
“Pirates,” he said grimly.
We spent the next day below deck in our own boat, our hands bound behind us. Two of the lanun guarded us at all times.
Up close, and in the daytime, the lanun were not as fearsome as they had first appeared. One of the two men guarding us couldn’t have been more than seventeen. The other was older, maybe in his forties, with sparse grey hair and missing teeth. His skin was weathered and wrinkled, and he wore ripped jeans and a threadbare Armani shirt. Neither of the men could have been much more than five feet tall.
The leader of the gang was different. He was taller and well-muscled. He carried the rifle, and the few times that I glimpsed him, I noticed what looked like other equipment on his belt too.
When they first captured us, the lanun had searched us thoroughly. They threw our cell phones, computers, and other electronics overboard. So no one could trace us, I guessed. When they threw my firm laptop away, I had the absurd thought that IT had just issued it to me, that they were going to kill me when I didn’t come back with it. The lanun took our money, credit cards, passports, and everything else of value. They also took the gold coins we’d found at the Flor de la Mar, which I saw the leader put into a pouch at his belt.
After the raid, the pirates were pretty lax, and not altogether unfriendly. They fed us and offered cigarettes and coffee from time to time. But we weren’t allowed to talk amongst ourselves. I tried once and almost got a machete butt in the face for my trouble.
Vijay, charmer that he was, got on well with the guards. He got them to redo our bindings in front of us after we complained they hurt. One of the guards, the old man who often watched us, spoke a smattering of English. With a gap-toothed smile that was oddly endearing, he told us that his name was Ricky Tang and that he loved American movies. All fraternizing stopped, though, when the leader was around.
As far as our destination, we couldn’t tell where we were going. All we could discern was that were going south through the Strait, back the way we had come. It was hard to get a sense of direction from the brief glimpses of the outside that we got. I saw nothing more than blue waters and the endless mangrove trees that dotted the edges of the Strait.
Eventually, we arrived at our destination. I heard the lanun yelling and jumping off the boat, and guessed we had tied off somewhere. The lanun ushered us out of the hold and onto the deck. Our hands were still bound. I looked around.
We weren’t in the Strait anymore. We were in the jungle, floating on a narrow river. I guessed the lanun had steered us into one of the innumerable rivers and inlets that ran off the main waterway. They led off the boat and marched down a well-trodden path that ended in a large clearing. There was a ramshackle collection of rough wooden buildings there, an outpost in the middle of the jungle. We stopped outside the largest building.
“Where are we?” I muttered to no one in particular. Ricky Tang heard and grinned at me with his missing teeth. “Coffee shop,” he said, gesturing at the crude building. The others laughed uproariously.
The lanun ushered us inside. The place was smoky and dimly lit. There were half a dozen men already there. They greeted us with hearty cheers and applause. I saw a bar on one side of the room, lit with old neon signs. One said “Singapore” and displayed a glowing rendition of the skyline in screaming green. Another looked like it had been stolen from a dive bar in the American Midwest. Beer and liquor bottles littered the room, and there was an acrid aroma of chemicals in the air. It smelled like burning plastic, or nail polish, mixed with something rotten.
The men inside got up to greet us. They spoke quickly in Malay and slapped our captors on the back with enthusiasm. Then they greeted us the same way. I felt more like a celebrity than a prisoner. “Happy happy!” One of the men said to me, laughing and pointing at us.
After that, the lanun split us up and led us to small rooms adjoining the main one. They put Thompson and Diamond in one room, and Vijay, Ashley, Schnizzel, and me in the other. They must have figured that Thompson and Diamond were doubly as dangerous as the rest of us, which was probably true. They closed the door, and I heard the lock turn. The room was dark.
When my eyes came into focus, I saw a dirty floor and bare, grimy walls. And then the figure of a man, sitting on the floor, his hands bound like ours. Another captive. To my shock, I recognized him.
“Rufus Rockaway?”
Rufus Rockaway looked up at me blearily through grimy strands of hair. “You know me?” he said, sounding surprised.
“Of course. I…” I stuttered out a few more words and then trailed off. I was hardly able to believe the surreal situation I now found myself in.
Vijay grinned. “Don’t mind him. He’s a little star struck. Aren’t you, Jackie? You’re our favorite show, Rockaway. MNN. We watch it all the time.”
“Oh,” said Rockaway, sounding flattered. “Why thank you. I’m always pleased to meet a fan. Even under the circumstances.”
“What are you doing here?” I managed to ask.
“That’s a bit of a tale,” Rockaway said, easing himself back against the filthy wall to tell it.
“Ironically, I came he
re to report on pirates. The maritime news business has been slow of late. Doubtless it looks all flash and glamor from the outside. But to be honest, it’s kind of a niche market.”
“You don’t say,” said Ashley.
“Yes. Ahem. Anyway, I decided I’d run a little story on modern day piracy. Everyone likes that, right? Excitement, a little danger. A bit of knowledge, delivered in serialized, thirty-minute segments. Some bang for the old buck. I began doing the research. I wanted to talk to real live pirates. I traveled to Batam, as other distinguished journalists have done before me, in the hopes of speaking with some of them, and telling their story. Hope, desperation, and perhaps a bit of derring-do.”
“How’d that go?” asked Vijay.
“As you see,” he said, indicating his fetters. “I met some pirates. But they kidnapped me to ransom me back to the network. I guess they decided that money was worth more than fame.” Rockaway shook his head sorrowfully.
“I thought pirates were in Somalia,” Vijay remarked.
“There too,” Rockaway said, nodding. “In fact, I had originally planned to go to Somalia. But some of the pirates there are a little more hardline. And I’d rather be ransomed than beheaded.”
“Good choice,” said Vijay. “But this is a pirate hotspot as well?”
“Yes. The Strait of Malacca is one of the highest-risk areas for piracy in the world. In fact, there was a brief time in the early 2000s where Lloyd’s of London classified it as a war zone for insurance purposes.”
“Why is piracy so big here?” I asked.
“Myriad factors. Malaysia and Indonesia are poor countries. Large parts of them are lawless. And the Strait of Malacca is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. A hundred thousand ships pass through here every year. At some points, the Strait is only miles wide. To either side of the Strait is dense jungle, which serves as a haven for the lanun to operate from, and escape to.