by Eskil Engdal
Peter Hammarstedt gives the order to batten down the hatches and secure everything on the vessel. During a storm on a previous expedition he was thrown out of his berth and woke up on the floor to catch a fleeting glimpse of a refrigerator that had been torn off its wall-hinges soaring through his cabin. Before it crashed into the bulkhead, it whizzed past just a few centimetres from his head.
“I am going to assume that the Thunder have weather and ice charts and stuff like that,” says the Chief Engineer Erwin Vermeulen, who has come to the bridge.
The winds have begun blowing the foam off the crests of the waves; they are beating upon the port side of the ship. The contents of drawers and cupboards spill out across the floor, the lifeboats rock and bang against the cradles. Finally, the lock mechanism on one of them breaks, and it is now held on board only by a thin strap. Then one of the large Yokohama fenders under the wheelhouse is torn loose, the one that is meant to protect the ship when it docks or comes up alongside another vessel. It weighs more than a ton and is dancing back and forth across the foredeck like a wrecking ball. Hammarstedt must send two of the crew out into the Armageddon taking place on the foredeck before the fender crushes the motors on the dinghies. In this weather he would prefer not to send anyone out on deck; a man overboard has no chance. In 7-metre waves the Bob Barker cannot turn around.
The Australian boatswain Alistar Allan and engineer Pablo Watson volunteer to go on deck to secure the dancing fender. The majority of the crew are knocked out by the weather. Only a handful show up for meals; the few crew members who have staggered down to the messroom discuss which of the two ships are having the most hellish time of it.
Hammarstedt knows which stage of seasickness is the worst. He has navigated a ship through 15-metre high waves on the coast of Labrador all the while vomiting into a bucket. But that isn’t the worst stage; neither is it when the seasickness has drained you of all your strength and you are just tired, worn down and have the cold sweats. The worst moment is when you feel you are going to die, the moment you really believe that it’s all over, but then you realize that it isn’t over after all, that liberation will not be forthcoming. Then you start sliding in and out of your dreams, you imagine that you see family and friends, but they too are tottering around seasick in your delusions.
Throughout the entire night the wind hammers away at the two ships and the hull becomes an echo chamber of disturbing noises. Fifty litres of cooking oil spill through the galley of the Bob Barker. It leaks down over the decks and gets mixed in with the oil and diesel. Throughout the entire ship, the pounding of the fuel being thrown back and forth in the fuel tanks can be heard. It’s as if somebody is trapped inside and desperately trying to break their way out.
When the bow plunges down into the trough between the waves and sends the propeller whirring out of the water, the air bubbles meet the end of the rotating propeller blade with a high-pitched whine, sending vibrations through the body of the ship. With less resistance to the propeller, the sturdy banging from the engine room suddenly changes its rhythm and frequency. The heart of the ship trembles.
From the bridge it is impossible to distinguish the white crests of foam from ice. Hammarstedt has posted a watchstander at the clear view screen, the window that steadily rotates to throw off ocean spray, sleet and snow, and which is heated to prevent condensation and icing. He constantly monitors the autopilot to ensure that it is navigating correctly, and now and then he sees the Thunder like a dim shadow in front of him. You are doing this to frighten us, but now we are in the storm together, Hammarstedt thinks.
Now Hammarstedt is trying to understand the captain of the Thunder. He navigated into the ice, but kept their speed down, did not sail at full throttle and he was not there for long. Now he is sailing straight into the storm. Even though the waves are up to 7 metres high, he is navigating with assurance and calculation and without being foolhardy or reckless, Hammarstedt thinks.
On the Bob Barker all the lights on the bridge are turned off to enhance visibility; only a faint red light filters in from the media room behind the wheelhouse. In front of them, the Thunder changes its course by five degrees.
“Was it a big wave or is it course change?” Hammarstedt asks.
The gusts of wind are now blowing at up to 60 knots. The change in course will lead them to the French territories on the Crozet or Kerguelen Islands, and it will soon be morning, with a grey and lifeless light. Adam Meyerson glances down at the map.
“There is not much of anything here …”
“We’re still with the Thunder,” Hammarstedt says.
11
THE SECRET CHANNEL
LYON AND BERGEN, DECEMBER 2014
As the Thunder and the Bob Barker are fighting their way through the storm in the Southern Ocean, Interpol’s Alistair McDonnell and his second in command, the agent with the nickname “Super-Mario”, are forming a plan.1
“Super-Mario” is an expert on fishing vessels, fishnets and fish poachers, but is feeling the absence of the Glock pistol the police organization does not permit him to carry. The husky Portuguese man with a well-groomed bush of black hair is the low-key and correct McDonnell’s clear opposite. “Super-Mario” is happiest out in the field and in dark interrogation rooms. In Lyon he likes to end the work day with a good evening meal at one of the restaurants in the Cité Internationale.
This year it looks like it will be an austere Christmas. Mario settles in on the couch in McDonnell’s flat. In the evenings he must make do with a hamburger for dinner and on the weekends the two of them work from a café on the Croix Rousse plateau. Every evening they have conversations over the phone with a number of Interpol’s member nations, the sole topic of which is the search for the Thunder.2
When the Thunder is finally forced into a port, an Investigative Support Team from Interpol will turn out to assist the local police force.3 In Lyon the Operation Spillway team is working out a detailed formula for how to handle the vessel as a crime scene. Documents, computer equipment, telephones, maritime maps, nets, floats, cabins and cold storage rooms are to be turned upside down and catalogued in the search for evidence. The catch is to be subjected to DNA testing, and computers and all digital equipment handed over to experts in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.4 If they are to succeed in bringing the owner of the Thunder to court, there must be no gaps in the chain of evidence. For the time being, the only evidence they have indicating that the Thunder has been fishing illegally are statements from Peter Hammarstedt on the Bob Barker. The nets and floats that were found beside the Thunder will not be sufficient. They are but strong circumstantial evidence.
From the Southern Ocean they now receive daily emails from Peter Hammarstedt reporting the position and speed of the two ships. But the investigators still have questions they can’t ask the Sea Shepherd captain directly. The solution is to treat Sea Shepherd like any other police informant within a criminal network, but then they must find a back channel: a person they can trust and who can communicate the questions to Hammarstedt.
They find the secret channel in an office at the Directorate of Fisheries in Bergen. The Norwegian fisheries officer and former homicide investigator Tor Glistrup is head of intelligence for the Fisheries Crime Working Group.5 Glistrup is assigned the job of maintaining regular contact with Hammarstedt. Telling the world that they are in direct contact with Sea Shepherd is too incriminating, also for the Norwegian fisheries authorities. The head of intelligence’s communication with Hammarstedt is kept secret.
In his emails Glistrup asks Hammarstedt detailed questions. He requests photographs of the Thunder’s antennas to find out the type of radar the ship has, he asks about the kind of gear found on deck, he wants photos of the hull from every conceivable angle and of every single officer who is imprudent enough to stick his head out of the Thunder’s wheelhouse.6
Peter Hammarstedt answers the questions by navigating t
he Bob Barker closer to the Thunder. Then he sends the ship’s photographer Simon Ager out on deck. He sends the photographs from the Southern Ocean to Bergen. From there, unbeknownst to Hammarstedt, they find their way to the Interpol headquarters in Lyon.
Every day the Operation Spillway team tracks the ships’ journey by plotting coordinates on a digital map. They analyse oceanographic data and current conditions to see whether this will affect the Thunder’s fuel consumption – and thereby its endurance.
Once a day they check the shipping lane and the areas lying ahead of the two ships. A foreign, unidentified ship on the radar image can be an ally of the Thunder, who will confront the Bob Barker and perhaps attempt to sink the campaign vessel. If they see suspicious vessels, they check their identities and whether they have any connection with the pirate fleet. Hammarstedt can then receive a warning. And time to prepare for an impending altercation.
12
THE LONGEST DAY
THE SOUTHERN OCEAN, DECEMBER 2014
24 December.
It is one of the longest days in the southern hemisphere. On the northern side of the continent of Antarctica there are only a few hours of dusk following sunset before the sun appears again and paints the first faint strokes of blue shadow across the sky.
In gentle swells the two ships move on their course headed northwest. Inside the Bob Barker it is still damp and chaotic after the storm. In the evening, oven-baked vegetables, roast potatoes and tofu turkey – a roast turkey substitute consisting of tofu, vegetable broth and bread, herbs and spices – are served. Almost the entire crew of the Bob Barker are vegan. For the members of Sea Shepherd, saving one species while simultaneously eating another is considered to be less than consistent.
For the early explorers, Christmas in the Antarctic was a highly treasured period, offering a break from the toil, uncertainty and usual diet of penguin and seal. On board James Cook’s the Resolution, Christmas was celebrated with “drunkenness and boxing”. Roald Amundsen and his crew celebrated Christmas south of the Kerguelen Islands, just a few nautical miles away from where the Thunder and the Bob Barker are now located. On Christmas Eve, he shut down the engine on the Fram. When the crew came down to the lounge which was decorated with coloured lights and a Christmas tree, they were so clean shaven and well-groomed that he barely recognized them. “We had all received something to help sustain us when the requirements of daily life imposed themselves once again,” Amundsen wrote.1
In the evening, the crew members of the Bob Barker are granted a five minute conversation with their families. For a brief moment, Captain Hammarstedt thinks of the famous football match between German and British soldiers who laid down their arms for a few hours on Christmas in 1914.2 He considers calling the Thunder and wishing them a Happy Christmas, but he does not act on the thought. Instead, he has a short conversation over the phone with his family. They are gathered in the small Swedish town of Sigtuna. They are also eating a vegetarian Christmas dinner, his mother tells him.
The first clear memory he has of his mother is in front of a window in Beijing. He was four years old and he watched in amazement as the tanks rolled down towards Tiananmen Square.3 Then his mother came and lifted him away. She subsequently packed all the family possessions into four suitcases and hurried to the airport.
Hammarstedt’s father worked for the Swedish industrial group ABB, living an increasingly nomadic existence at the company’s foreign offices. When Peter Hammarstedt was seven years old, the family moved to the sleepy town of New Hope in Pennsylvania. It would turn out to be years of personal hardship. He was short, frail and wore eyeglasses that covered half his face. He bought the right clothes at the wrong time, and his boyish voice whined and slid all over the place. He also became a vegetarian after a classmate told him about how hens and chickens were bred in narrow cages. He was friendless and was tormented by his classmates. At home he tried to hide the bruises from his mother. He soon developed a compulsion to stand up for the defenceless. Once a month his parents took him to a bookstore in New Jersey, where he found his way to the Afro-American section and started reading in depth about the Black Panther movement. He travelled to California to find John Carlos, one of the two track and field athletes who had done the Black Power salute during the medal ceremony at the summer Olympics in 1968. Hammarstedt wanted to know why Carlos had chosen to utilize the moment in a way that would change his life and make him a traitor in the eyes of many Americans.4
When the young Christian boy Hammarstedt as a 14 year old received 200 dollars from his father, he decided to donate it to a charitable cause. Through an Internet search he found the civil rights movements the American Civil Liberties Union and Free Tibet, and the special interest lobby group the National Rifle Association. While he was searching online for worthy recipients of his dollars, he came across a film showing a group of Greenpeace activists in a rubber dinghy. They were trying to stop the Japanese factory ship the Nisshin Maru from hauling a whale on board.
That was when he made up his mind. He wanted to be one of them, like the activists in the dinghy who risked their lives in the fight for what they believed in.
At the age of 17 Hammarstedt moved back to Stockholm. The first thing he did was to seek out the team that carried out direct actions in Greenpeace. In 2003, immediately after Iceland had resumed whaling operations, the Greenpeace ship the Arctic Sunrise was in Stockholm. While Hammarstedt was on night duty on the ship, he overheard everyone on board discussing what the competing organization Sea Shepherd would do with the Icelanders. Sea Shepherd was a small and scruffy organization: unpredictable, controversial and militant. This was where Hammarstedt wanted to be. He sent in an application, but never received any reply. For a month he called Sea Shepherd every day. Then Hammarstedt suddenly received word that he should come to Seattle to report for duty on the campaign ship the Farley Mowat as a seaman. He is now celebrating his tenth Christmas in a row in the Antarctic.
In the messroom on the Thunder, Christmas dinner is served at noon. The crew and the officers who are not on duty eat their meal together. On the menu is split cod, prepared in a stew with cabbage and potatoes. A roast turkey is also put out and a few bottles of red wine. But what could appear to be a low-key holiday mood, is in reality an uneasy uncertainty about what will take place in the upcoming days or weeks. Some are discussing how the evening will unfold for those who are at home. Nobody sings, nobody exchanges gifts and nobody says out loud what most of them are thinking: What is going to happen now?
Now there is only one man who can decide the fate of the 40 men who on this Christmas Eve are sitting and daydreaming about a life far away from the dark wood panelling of the messroom on the Thunder. The ship owner. El Armador. Not everyone on the Thunder knows who he is, not by a long shot; some members of the crew had caught a glimpse of him and his business partners when they unloaded their illegal catch in a disreputable harbour in Malaysia or Indonesia.
Those of the crew on the Thunder who are closest to him know that he is firm in his faith and that it is very likely that on this particular evening he will light the traditional oil lamps in his home and prepare a holiday meal of shellfish and ham. Later he will put his arm around his wife and lead her up the stairs of the local church. There the prosperous and respected businessman will be greeted with nods of recognition and soft-spoken good wishes. He will then allow himself to sink into the midnight mass as if nothing has happened.
13
THE SHIPMASTER
CHIMBOTE, PERU, NOVEMBER 2014
As the Thunder sailed toward the Antarctic in November, a stocky 47-year-old with a broad, thickset face and a wild, mane of black hair boarded the bus that would carry him from his home city of Chimbote to Lima, the capital of Peru. There was nothing to disclose his identity as a ship’s officer on a vessel that for years had been fishing in secret in the Antarctic. In his breast pocket he had a plane ticket and a reference
from the ship agent in Malaysia.
“It is hereby confirmed that Mr. Alberto Zavaleta Salas is employed by F.C.S. Trading & Fishery. He will travel to Hang Nadim, Batam to sign on with the vessel MV Kunlun.”
When the bus started moving and turned out onto the barren desert plains encircling the Pan American Highway, Alberto Zavaleta Salas left one catastrophe behind to travel into another.1
Chimbote was once a sleepy fishing village with an inviting harbour and a good selection of hotels for seaside holiday-makers. At dusk the fleet of brightly coloured fishing boats sailed out into one of the world’s most productive banks to fish the Peruvian anchovy. On one of these ships, Alberto Zavaleta Salas used to accompany his grandfather and later his father, both captains. He was born into the world’s largest fishery enterprise, the Peruvian “anchovy boom”, which would transform the slumbering Chimbote into Peru’s most powerful fishing port. When the fishing was industrialized and the news spread of the enormous fortunes that accompanied the catches, droves of restless men found their way to the city. They came from the slum districts of Lima and the impoverished villages at the foot of the Andes mountains in search of a wage and a new life in the protein bonanza.
The whores and fortune hunters followed and the slum districts grew on the mountainsides and the perimeters of the desert. In the city, which formerly was blessed with a single traffic light and only one paved street, lorries now thundered past loaded down with anchovies on the way to the more than 50 factories where the fish was boiled down into fishmeal. At its peak the anchovy was “the most heavily exploited fish in world history”.2
A penetrating stench of rotten fish hung over the city. It came seeping out along with the greyish-black smoke from the smokestacks of the fishmeal factories, and forced its way into every corner of Chimbote. It was said that even the steaks there smelled and tasted of fish.