by Eskil Engdal
“But there is a possibility that they will strike our ship, and there is a possibility of a collision. They are unpredictable. It is important for me to know where the whole crew is at all times. Is anybody uncomfortable with this plan?”
Nobody answers Hammarstedt’s question.
“Any likelihood of the Thunder tossing anything overboard?” one of the crew asks.
“We know that after the fishing season they have millions of dollars’ worth of catch in their hold, and that is not something they will give up lightly,” Hammarstedt replies.
There are quotes hanging on the walls of the great cabin from classical authors which Hammarstedt now and then will recite for the crew at the morning meetings. But more than anything else he loves his police metaphors.
“If a drug dealer has a lot of cocaine on him he only flushes it down the toilet when the police are right at the door,” he says as he returns to the bridge.
There he learns that the New Zealand Navy is now searching for three members of “The Bandit 6”.
For the Kunlun the first days of fishing have been wonderful. The fog snatches at the peaks of the ice bergs around the ship, the air temperature is a comfortable five below zero Celsius and the waves are not rising to more than 2 or 3 metres. It is 12 January, and before the day comes to an end, they will haul on board another four chains of nets. In the relatively calm weather, this will take eight hours.
Alberto Zavaleta Salas is distressed about bad news from home. In Peru his son has been born prematurely. Nonetheless, he tries to enjoy the clear air and the translucent night that never really becomes dark.
Down in the fish factory, the movement of the cutting blades glitters from early in the morning. The washing tanks are dark red from fish blood and in silent concentration the Indonesian crew sends ton after ton of the fatty toothfish meat into the flash-freezers. In contrast to the ship’s miserable exterior, the fish factory is clean and free of rust. It could have been the kitchen of a first class restaurant. It has capacity for 220 tons of fish and they will not leave Antarctica until the cold storage room is full – or the fuel tanks empty. No other reason is acceptable to the ship owner.
Suddenly, Alberto Zavaleta Salas sees a grey-painted bow cutting through the ocean mist. It is the battleship the HMNZS Wellington, which has been hidden behind the icebergs to avoid detection by the pirate’s radar. Now the crew are lowering the dinghies and sending them on their way towards the Kunlun.
For the first time a country’s armed forces are to be used to challenge a pirate ship in the Antarctic. That means 2,000 tons of high technology, brute force and superior speed against a rusty and dodgy slaughterhouse. Two 50-millimetre machine guns against a terrified crew from the third world. The 35-year-old Lt. Commander Graham MacLean against the despondent officers from Peru and Spain. The Wellington commander’s orders are to document the illegal fishing operation, procure evidence and board the vessel. The Kunlun’s officers’ orders are to refuse to allow the Navy to come on board, pull up the nets and flee to the north.
If one can say that a criminal is as cold as ice in action when faced with a hostile naval battleship on the outskirts of the Antarctic – if outskirts of the Antarctic even exist – that is an apt description of the Kunlun’s fishing boat captain José Regueiro Sevilla.
The moment he sees the Wellington emerge from the mist, he calls the ship owner in Galicia and is instructed to pull in the nets and deny the Navy permission to board the ship, but to give them the papers they ask for.
The Kunlun is sailing under Equatorial Guinea’s flag and is in international waters. In order to be allowed to send his men on board the longline fishing vessel, Commander MacLean must have permission from the closed dictatorship in Africa. Because of the time difference, José Regueiro Sevilla hopes that it will take at least 12 hours before Equatorial Guinea answers the phone.
In front of the Wellington’s cameras, the Kunlun’s Indonesian crew begins pulling up the gillnets, but the ocean is becoming rough, and they cut the nets, leaving half of them behind. At any moment the Wellington can receive a phone call informing them that the papers from Equatorial Guinea are false. Then they can board the Kunlun without asking permission first.
Alberto Zavaleta Salas therefore sails the Kunlun at full throttle to the north. If they can manage to outmanoeuvre the battleship, the two vessels with which the Kunlun is collaborating, the Yongding or the Songhua, will return to pull up the four nets left behind.
After six days, Captain Zavaleta Salas sees the Wellington come about and change course. MacLean has observed the Yongding fishing in the midst of a sheet of pack ice. The Wellington commanding officer has finally received an answer: Equatorial Guinea can find none of the ships in its register and grants permission to board. MacLean calls up the Yongding and asks for permission to enter the ship, but the response is to stay away.
Due to the fog and the 2–3-metre waves, MacLean decides it is too risky to board by force. He has too little fuel to chase the Yongding and decides to return to New Zealand.
MacLean has filmed and documented the illegal fishing activity. Interpol will be notified and can now circulate wanted notices on the three vessels.
On board the Bob Barker the news of the Wellington’s retreat is received with disbelief. The most pessimistic among them imagine that the Sea Shepherd crew are the only ones who will end up in prison after the chase is over.
At first, Sea Shepherd decides not to criticize Graham MacLean, but when the Wellington’s chief commanding officer implies in an interview that he does not have much respect for Sea Shepherd, Paul Watson decides to strike back.1
“Commander MacLean proceeded to lament to media about the rough sea conditions, cold weather and potential dangers. Maybe he is trying to convince the public that it was a resounding success, but the reality is that it was a pathetic and cowardly failed intervention,” Watson writes in a press release.2
Watson also asks the question of why the Wellington does not fill up its fuel tanks and return to the Southern Ocean.
“My bet is that the New Zealand government and Navy will do nothing, that they will allow volunteers – including Sea Shepherd’s Kiwi volunteers on the Sea Shepherd ships – to take the risks that they will not and to undertake the responsibility from which they have walked away,” a frustrated Watson writes.
For New Zealand’s government, the incident in the Southern Ocean resembles more a PR disaster. In the end, Minister of Defence Gerry Brownlee must defend the failed operation against the pirate fisherman in the Senate: “Look, remember that we’re talking about illegal fishing, we’re not talking about starting a war …”3
Peter Hammarstedt and Sid Chakravarty decides that the sister vessel, the Sam Simon, will commence the search for the three pirates who escaped. Simultaneously, he also directs a jab at the Australian government.
“New Zealand was left to single-handedly tackle the poachers – one vessel up against three. With the New Zealand Navy ship en route back to Wellington, and the Australian government nowhere to be seen, Sea Shepherd is now the only sheriff in town.”4
19
THE FLYING MARINER
THE INDIAN OCEAN/LAGOS, JANUARY 2015
The Thunder slowly circles its way northwest. Three knots, then a stop. Two knots, and then an about face. Four knots, then a bit to the east, before turning the ship around again. In Norway and at Interpol’s headquarters in Lyon, the investigators continue to plot coordinates into a digital map and as the days and weeks pass, the maps resemble more a child’s connect-the-dots drawing than a shipmaster’s carefully considered route. It is a waltz without rhythm or precision and the pattern does not offer any warning of where the Thunder’s captain may be headed.
On 27 January, the Thunder speeds up its pace. The two ships are located in the Indian Ocean, a mere day’s sail from South African waters. The closest major p
orts are Durban and Cape Town. On the bridge of the Bob Barker the speculations start up again. If they follow the same course, they will cross the Atlantic Ocean and end up in Montevideo in Uruguay, a city several of the Spanish pirate syndicates previously used as a home port. But it’s a long trip. Hammarstedt believes that the Thunder will sail around the Cape of Good Hope and there the ship will meet another vessel to unload the illegal catch.
On the Thunder Captain Luis Alfonso Rubio Cataldo tells the crew that they will perhaps sail to Nigeria, because it’s possible the difficulties they have run into can be resolved there. The countries Gabon and Papua New Guinea are also mentioned. The latter is located an ocean away and in the opposite direction of the ship’s course. The information produces more confusion than clarity, but Nigeria at least makes sense. Everyone knows that the name Lagos is on the stern of the ship.
So, after a day and a half of something resembling a properly considered course, Cataldo suddenly stops the ship again. Perhaps he fears what he will find if he were to sail around the Cape of Good Hope.
On the same day, Captain Warredi Enisuoh of NIMASA, the Nigerian coast guard in Lagos, receives an unusual request. Over the telephone he is encouraged to join a secret intelligence group with a connection to Interpol. The group’s primary mission is to stop a fishing vessel.
The name the Thunder sounds familiar to Warredi Enisuoh. He remembers a letter he received from Australia’s High Commissioner in Nigeria expressing a wish for information about the old trawler that was registered in the ships register in Lagos and sailing under the Nigerian flag.
Warredi Enisuoh will now become critical to the future fate of the Thunder. The same evening he takes part in a telephone conference with the Interpol group.1
The Gulf of Guinea is Africa’s most violent fairway, and seamen, ship owners and the authorities all over the world expect the Nigerian coast guard to bring the brutal kidnappings, random killings and the thefts of valuable oil cargo to an end. In the recently opened surveillance centre in Lagos, Enisuoh and his team study satellite images every day and have complete oversight of all the ships moving in and out of Nigerian ports. He can requisition battleships and aircraft immediately if he receives notification of a hijacking.
Enisuoh was born in the eternally conflict-ridden Niger Delta in the mid-1960s and in his youth he signed on with a shipping company in Singapore, where he climbed through the ranks to mate and captain. His boyhood dream came true when he became a pilot on the svelte jet aircraft Embraer E-190 for the company Virgin Nigeria. Privately he began calling himself “the flying mariner”. Now he was back on the ground once more.
When he starts digging into the Thunder’s secrets in Nigeria, what he discloses is a story he has difficulties believing.
Four years earlier, the ships register had received a letter from the ship agent Maritime Consultants Limited, under the address of a bankrupt amusement park in Lagos. Maritime Consultants Limited wanted to register a new vessel: FV Thunder – formerly MS Typhoon. Enclosed in the letter was a sales agreement stating that the Lagos-based company Royal Marine & Spares had bought the ship for 140,000 dollars. The seller was a company in Panama.2
The Lagos company that supposedly purchased the Thunder is owned by two of West Africa’s wealthiest businessmen. The youngest, Henry Macauley, had long been Sierra Leone’s High Commissioner in Nigeria and is now the Minister of Energy in his native country. The eldest, Dew Mayson, has been a powerful man in his homeland of Liberia for almost 40 years – a freedom fighter, ambassador, peace mediator, professor and Liberia’s first multimillionaire.
In the early 1980s, the freedom fighter Dew Mayson was rescued from death row by the coup leader Samuel Doe, who in 1980 led a group of drunken and disillusioned soldiers towards the presidential palace in Liberia’s capital Monrovia. Doe killed the president and made himself a general and head of state. After his assumption of power, Doe’s soldiers threw themselves into an orgy of violence in which ministers and supporters of the former regime were paraded around the capital naked before being massacred on the beach by Doe’s inebriated executioners.
Doe appointed Dew Mayson leader of Liberia’s national investment commission and later the country’s ambassador in Paris. In 1985, Mayson stepped down, according to his own account, in protest against Doe’s brutal regime. When Charles Taylor overthrew Doe in 1989, Mayson took his family with him and moved to the neighbouring nation of Nigeria. As his homeland descended into full-scale civil war, he worked his way up in the oil industry and had soon gone from being a refugee to a flamboyant millionaire.
Dew Mayson later ran for president in Liberia, but received only one-half a per cent of the votes. The country’s truth commission labelled him a dubious ally of Liberia’s dictators and questions were asked about where his sudden wealth and fortune had come from.3
One of the companies that were important in the building up of Mayson’s fortune was Royal Marine & Spares. According to the documents, the company now owned the Thunder.
In October 2013 the ships register had received another letter from Royal Marine & Spares. The owners of the Thunder wanted to change the ship’s name to the Raz – to “reflect the management’s new visions” as the letter signed by Dew Mayson read. But the address the company gave for its headquarters in Lagos did not exist.
“A careful assessment of your documents has revealed a number of inconsistencies. Your presence is therefore requested,” the Nigerian ships register replied.
Then everything related to the Thunder fell silent in Nigeria.
Warredi Enisuoh begins digging into the roles of the alleged owners. Royal Marine & Spares has a well-known history as an oil service company in Lagos, but he can’t find any connection to fishing vessels or fishing licences, other than in the Thunder’s documents. Do Mayson and Macauley really own the Thunder? Or have their names and signatures been stolen to hide the identities of the true owners?
The Interpol group wants the Nigerian authorities to ask South Africa for help in arresting the Thunder. South Africa has ships and resources to stop the trawler, but as a flag state, it is Nigeria that rules over the Thunder’s fate, at least in a legal sense.
Enisuoh is uncertain. There is nothing in the country’s laws stating that it is a criminal offence for Europeans, Indonesians and Latin Americans to fish in international waters. The Thunder will very likely just be forced ashore in a large-scale and costly operation only to be released again. It will be embarrassing for everyone involved, Enisuoh thinks.
There is also another obstacle. In order to ask South Africa for help he must go via the Nigerian foreign affairs authorities, a virtually impenetrable bureaucracy. Enisuoh is also worried that an untrustworthy servant within the bureaucracy might leak the entire plan, warning the owners. If the captain on the Thunder is alerted, the battle can be lost before it has begun.
Warredi Enisuoh begins discretely investigating whether it is really the multimillionaire Mayson and Minister Macauley who own the Thunder.
When he one day marches up to the powerful Coast Guard Director Patrick Akpobolokemi’s office on the eighth floor of the yellowish-brown office building a few blocks from the harbour in Lagos, he notices a book lying on one of the tables. On the cover there is a photograph of Dew Mayson, the suspected owner of the Thunder.
Is it a coincidence that a book about Mayson is lying on the table? Has there been a leak? Has somebody in the Interpol group unexpectedly blabbed to someone, who then sold the information to someone else? Has Mayson gone to the head of the coast guard to have the investigation stopped? If so, his career is very likely over. At worst, his life can be in danger, Warredi Enisuoh thinks.
Before he hurries out of the director’s office, Enisuoh asks questions about a subject completely unrelated to the search for the Thunder’s owners. Out in the corridor he fishes out his telephone and calls one of the Norwegian members of the Interpo
l group. No, nobody in the group has mentioned his investigations to anyone else, he is told.
Now there is no turning back. Enisuoh must meet with the powerful Mayson in person. He summons his courage and returns to Akpobolokemi and asks him how he knows Mayson. The head of NIMASA tells him that he has recently had a meeting with Mayson and a man from the oil industry. They wanted to discuss business prospects.
When Enisuoh and Dew Mayson finally meet, the powerful millionaire states that he has never heard of the Thunder. If that is true, someone must have used Mayson’s company to hide the true owners of the Thunder.4
Enisuoh contacts the shipping authorities in ports the Thunder has visited previously and soon receives ship’s documents that were supposedly issued in Nigeria. The Thunder’s registration certificate states that Nigeria has given the vessel permission to fish in foreign waters. That is not the case. And how can the Nigerian authorities have issued detailed safety and pollution certificates to a vessel that has never been inspected in Nigeria? The documents must be forgeries. The bureaucrat, who has allegedly signed the documents on behalf of NIMASA, denies having any knowledge of them whatsoever.
If Mayson and Macauley have nothing to do with the Thunder, where then do the signed company documents come from? Is there a spider operating on the inside of the Nigerian company register that has copied company documents and records of proceedings from meetings of the board of directors of Royal Marine & Spares and then sold them?
The American authorities have called Lagos an epicentre for identity theft and financial crime.5 By using post office boxes, the kidnappers can ensure that the correspondence of a given company never ends up in the hands of its actual owners. In the same way that somebody acquires a fake driver’s licence by using the identity of a deceased person, someone could have used the identity of the dormant company Royal Marine & Spares to procure ship’s documents for the Thunder. That must be how it was done, Enisuoh thinks.