Catching Thunder

by Eskil Engdal

  While the pursuers argue among themselves, the Kunlun sails towards Dakar with a hand-picked crew who are experts at not attracting attention. All electronic equipment that can disclose the position of the vessel is turned off, and a new name is written on a steel plate and attached to the railing by simple wires. When the ship arrives in Senegal, its name is the Asian Warrior.

  At the harbour in Dakar the 181 tons of toothfish are loaded into containers and shipped to Vietnam on one of the container ships of the world’s largest shipping company, the Danish Maersk. The bill of lading states Thon en vrac congele – frozen tuna fish in bulk.

  Had Interpol known that the Kunlun’s sister vessel the Yongding had stolen into Dakar and unloaded 268 tons of toothfish worth EUR 3.5 million a few months before the Kunlun came to the same harbour, they would also have known where to search for the ship.

  Yet again “Tucho” and his sons “Toño” and “Naño” Vidal are one step ahead of their pursuers.

  Then fishing captain José Regueiro Sevilla makes a mistake that will be enormously costly for the Vidal family.

  After having spent half a year getting the ship and fish out of Phuket, then a couple of months sailing across the Indian Ocean and up the western side of the African continent, on the evening of 1 December, José Regueiro Sevilla boards an Iberia flight in Dakar. It is the only direct flight from the West African country to Madrid and the quickest route home for Sevilla and the four others who have been on the Kunlun’s final voyage.

  Four hours later they land in Madrid. When Sevilla passes through the Schengen control, the alarm goes off.

  Everyone who shows their passport at the Schengen control in Madrid is checked every day against the Spanish police’s database of wanted persons of interest and criminals. And now the Spanish police investigators are secretly monitoring José Regueiro Sevilla’s movements, but Sevilla doesn’t learn about this. It is his employer the police are interested in.

  After all the hardships and months at sea, had Sevilla only spent a few extra hours on his trip home to Spain by stopping over in France, Portugal or any other Schengen nation and shown his passport there, the Spanish police would probably never have noticed that he arrived from Dakar.

  Now they know where to search. And yet again, random events conspire against the Vidal family.

  When Sevilla lands in Madrid, a Spanish police investigator is meeting with two fisheries officers from Senegal in Interpol’s headquarters in Lyon. As soon as the investigator receives word that Sevilla has just arrived from Dakar, he tells the two Senegalese officers that they very likely have a vessel wanted by Interpol in their harbour. When they come home, the Senegalese officers find a ship that fits the description – the Asian Warrior.

  Now things happen quickly. The containers of toothfish from the Kunlun are traced to the North Vietnamese seaport Haiphong. There they are stopped and inspected by local authorities. Then samples of the fish are taken to confirm that it is Patagonian toothfish and not tuna fish, as stated on the bill of lading.

  At the seaport in Haiphong the inspection officers behave as if it were an ordinary control procedure so the owner of the cargo won’t suspect that Interpol and the Spanish police are involved.

  For one year the cargo of frozen toothfish has been on a circumnavigation of the world from the Southern Ocean to Thailand, then around the entire African continent, past the Horn of Africa, across the Indian Ocean and into the South China Sea before ending up in Vietnam.

  All this for a few million euro.

  43

  THE UNLUCKIEST SHIP IN THE WORLD

  SÃO TOMÉ AND PRÍNCIPE, SEPTEMBER 2015

  As Peter Hammarstedt walks down towards the Palace of Justice in São Tomé, a light pink colonial building by the Ana Chavez Bay, he feels slightly uncomfortable. He is dressed in a black suit and tie, the only suit he owns. He found it in a dustbin in Söder in Stockholm and paid a tailor a few kroner to repair the lining. Five months after the shipwreck of the Thunder he will stand face to face with Luis Alfonso Rubio Cataldo for the first time. On the beach below the Palace of Justice he observes the remains of abandoned ships sticking up out of the sand like rusty bones.

  Hammarstedt and Sea Shepherd’s photographer Simon Ager are the first to arrive at the courtroom. The tall windows and heavy wooden benches give the room the appearance of a church. Hammarstedt ponders over whether or not he should shake Cataldo’s hand but he believes the man may interpret this as a sarcastic gesture. He decides to refrain.

  As Cataldo enters the courtroom, Simon Ager raises his camera. The Thunder captain rushes towards him but Ager wards off the attack by placing one hand against Cataldo’s chest. Then the Thunder captain continues towards Hammarstedt. With his chest pushed forward and clenched fists, he leans over him. Hammarstedt raises his hands above his head. In the background he hears Cataldo’s defence attorney scream and he leans back in his chair. The attack will appear even more violent if he demonstrates the he’s not going to defend himself, he thinks.

  But the blow never comes; mumbling, Cataldo returns to the dock, where he sits staring into the shimmering hot and humid air.

  During his testimony the Thunder shipmaster states that he feared for his life for 110 consecutive days.

  “You were two days from port and you feared for your life. Why didn’t you go into land?” the judge asks.

  “I had my orders.”

  “But you are the one responsible for safety on board. For you that must be the most important thing?”

  “I had my orders,” Cataldo repeats.

  But he refuses to reveal whom his orders come from.

  The judge shakes his head in resignation before asking the next question.

  “Who do you work for?”

  “I don’t know,” Cataldo replies.

  After the first day of the trial, when Hammarstedt returns to the secluded bungalow by the beach, he notices that the hotel grounds are not properly fenced in. In his room he checks the window and wonders if he would hear it should somebody try to break it open.

  After the incident earlier in the day, four policemen carrying MP5 machine pistols and wearing bulletproof vests stood guard in their respective corners of the courtroom. But on the way out, when Cataldo laid eyes on the Sea Shepherd activists in the cool patio on the courthouse’s ground floor, he launched another attack. Now Hammarstedt is starting to worry about his own safety. Cataldo and his men are staying at a hotel not far away.

  The thought of an inebriated and vindictive Cataldo causes Hammarstedt to call the public prosecutor Kelve Nobre de Carvalho and request police protection. They agree that an agent from the federal police force will keep an eye on Cataldo, see how much he consumes at the bar and call if he should leave the hotel.

  Hammarstedt is just about to fall asleep when somebody knocks on the door. He can’t see who it is, but he is sure that it is Cataldo. Gripped by fear, he picks up the water pitcher on the nightstand and jumps out of bed. For 110 days they were separated by an abysmal sea and a few tons of steel. Now there was only a thin wall.

  “Who is it?” he called out.

  “Open the door,” is the reply from the other side while the knocking continues.

  “Who is it?” he repeats.

  “Tranquilo,” is the reply from the other side of the door.

  It turns out to be the police agent, a giant of a man who went by the nickname “Africa”.

  “Tomorrow I will follow you to court. When the pirates see us together they will never touch you again,” he reassures him.

  When Hammarstedt crawls into bed again, it’s as if the sheets are vibrating in time with the hammering of his pulse.

  On the second day of the trial, Peter Hammarstedt is the first witness called to testify. The three defendants seem far less tense. They enter the courtroom joking and laughing. Chief engineer Agustín Dos
il Rey sits leaning forward with his elbows resting on his knees and keeps his eyes glued to Hammarstedt. The first engineer Luis Miguel Pérez Fernández stares mainly at his own shoes, and does not look up all day. Captain Cataldo allows his gaze to rest on the view outside the window. For seven hours they will continue, without a recess, without lunch and without water.

  Hammarstedt has decided to paint a picture of the fish poachers as a criminal organization and mentions the fishing captain Lampon’s business partner, who was apprehended in possession of two tons of cocaine.

  “These three were not involved. Somebody on the ship was,” Hammarstedt stresses.

  Chief engineer Agustín Dosil Rey looks at Hammarstedt as if he is a leper. Every time Hammarstedt mentions Interpol, the chief engineer rolls his eyes.

  “You don’t represent Interpol. What gave you the right to follow this ship? Did Interpol ask you to follow them?” the defence attorney asks.

  “No, we came across a criminal act and followed the ship,” Hammarstedt answers.

  To the question of the consequences of the Thunder’s wreck, Hammarstedt replies that the oil will start leaking out of the wreck.

  “You sell fishing permits to the EU. This destroys the opportunity to do so. São Tomé is a natural habitat for sea turtles and you are investing in ecotourism. These people are destroying that for you. How can you put a price on the country’s ecotourism?” Hammarstedt asks.

  At that moment, Hammarstedt is sure that the chief engineer is going to stand up and knock him down. A stenographer is seated on a wooden bench against the wall and diligently writing down every word with a ballpoint pen.

  The Thunder officers’ defence attorney Pascoal Daio got his education at the prestigious university La Sorbonne in Paris, has formerly been a Supreme Court Judge and is a highly esteemed man in São Tomé. His strategy is to discredit Sea Shepherd, to portray the organization as terrorists and a kind of ISIS of the environmental movement. He accomplishes this by showing a series of YouTube videos of Sea Shepherd and the Bob Barker in confrontations. Many of the videos have been published by Sea Shepherd supporters. When he shows the near-collision between the Bob Barker and the Thunder in February, Cataldo gets to his feet, clicks the heels of his shoes together, and holding his hands behind his back, he takes the floor.

  “I have never been so afraid. I was sure that my crew and I would die,” he says.

  Then Hammarstedt speaks up.

  “What Cataldo is saying is absurd. The film shows that the Bob Barker is sailing at full throttle astern to avoid being hit. We saved them! It’s not certain they would be here had it not been for us. Every day for 110 days we reported to the police. We saved them. We gave all the evidence to Interpol. We came to São Tomé at our own expense to testify. Captain Warredi Enisuoh of the Nigerian coast guard stated that never before have two ships sacrificed so much to stop a ship. That is why we are here,” Hammarstedt says.

  “Why didn’t you put in at port?” the judge asks Cataldo again.

  “I had my orders,” he answers.

  “Who did you report to?”

  “I don’t know.”

  After their initial optimism the three defendants seem battered and resigned. There is no Spanish or Chilean consul present during the trial. Also Cataldo’s attire surprised Hammarstedt. He has come dressed in dungarees and a blue shirt unbuttoned at the neck. Beforehand he had imagined the ship owner would hire a local tailor to sew the captain a suit. The first engineer Luis Miguel Pérez Fernández scarcely utters a word. Most of the time he stares at the floor, now and then he glances up to send Hammarstedt a look of contempt. The impression is that the three have been left to manage on their own. Nonetheless, they are clearly protecting the ship owner.

  Throughout the entire trial they categorically deny having sunk the Thunder, but cannot give any sensible explanation for why the ship is now resting on the bottom of the ocean off the coast of São Tomé.

  “Why did the Thunder sink?” the judge asks in closing.

  “It was a perfect day to sink a ship,” Hammarstedt replies. “And they thought they could get away with it. Either the Thunder was sunk intentionally, or it was the unluckiest ship in the world,” he continues.

  During his entire testimony the three defendants listened to Hammarstedt’s explanation without moving. Now all three of them nod in approval. As if they want to say: Yes. The Thunder was the unluckiest ship in the world.

  44

  THE JUDGMENT

  YELLOWSTONE, OCTOBER 2015

  When he wakes up, there is hoarfrost on the tent canvas. After packing up the tent, Peter Hammarstedt gets in the car and drives south through Yellowstone. From the window he sees the sulphurous vapour rising from the hot springs. It’s as if the earth is alive. When he catches sight of a bison, he stops the car and gets out. He is finally on the holiday he dreamt about during the search for the Thunder half a year ago.

  While he is silently observing the grazing animal, his mobile phone chirps. It’s a message from Sid Chakravarty.

  “Everyone was sentenced. They got three years in prison. EUR 15 million in fines,” the message says.

  “What?” Hammarstedt answers.

  “Cataldo and the officers. They were sentenced to three years in prison.”

  Hammarstedt sits down on a rock. The chase of the Thunder has reached its final conclusion. Now he stares out across the shining mirror of water on the lake before him and feels a trembling joy over the fact that Captain Cataldo must spend the coming years behind bars.

  45

  PRISONERS’ ISLAND

  SÃO AND PRÍNCIPE, JANUARY 2016

  They are like two pinheads in the enormous Gulf of Guinea, spit out of the sea and covered by a labyrinthine rainforest. Since the equator and prime meridian meet here, São Tomé and Príncipe are somewhat justified in calling themselves a kind of global midpoint. In reality there are few places located so far from the attention of the world as Africa’s second smallest nation.

  Four months have passed since the officers of the Thunder were sentenced for having operated with forged documents, sinking the ship and contaminating the waters of São Tomé. Captain Cataldo and his men have not paid the fine of EUR 15 million, and neither are they to be found in the country’s single prison, a facility described as being “tough but not life endangering”. And it seems as if nobody knows with any certainty where the prisoners have gone.

  Public prosecutor Kelve Nobre de Carvalho explains that Cataldo and his men have lodged an appeal and are living in a house “somewhere or other” in the city. In a corner of the office some of the evidence from the Thunder case lies tossed into a heap.

  “One day something strange happened. I was sitting at the café by the esplanade reading a book. Without my knowledge, the three from the Thunder had picked up my tab. The next time I ran into them, I told them that that was attempted bribery and that I would send them straight to prison if it happened again. It is really not usual for a defendant to pay the restaurant bill of a public prosecutor,” he says.

  “Is it possible they have escaped?”

  “This island is a prison. Nobody gets out of here. Sometimes I see them, at a café or outside the bank,” Nobre de Carvalho says.

  From the perspective of an ordinary visitor there is not much to do in the capital city of São Tomé. By the old fort on the coast there are enormous granite statues of the Portuguese explorers João de Santarém and Pêro Escobar, who went ashore on the island in 1470 and found it uninhabited. The explorers maintained that the island was a suitable place from which to trade with continental Africa, but the first colonists perished from malaria and tropical diseases. The next wave of Europeans who went ashore were deported criminals, prostitutes and 2,000 Jewish children who were taken from their parents in Lisbon and forced to convert to Catholicism. The fortune hunters also came, those who were seek
ing to profit from trading in slaves and spices. On the island they discovered fertile volcanic soil, ideal for cultivating cocoa. In the early 1900s, São Tomé was the world’s largest manufacturer of cocoa and was called “the chocolate islands”. The cocoa plantations, of which there were more than 800 on the islands, were owned by the feudal lords from Portugal. The workers were brought from Angola and Cape Verde and worked under contracts stipulating conditions that amounted to slave labour. After the liberation from Portugal in 1975, the Portuguese plantation owners fled, taking with them their knowledge of operations, and soon the nationalized plantations were invaded by the jungle and relentless deterioration. Now 90 per cent of São Tomé and Príncipe’s revenues come from developmental aid, the largest amount in the world per capita, and the national budget is at the level of the annual results of Snapchat. With EUR 15 million in debt to the state, Captain Cataldo and his men have to be some of the most valuable assets found on the island.

  In the hours preceding the wreck of the Thunder, a large sum of money was transferred from a bank in Singapore to the local bank in São Tomé. The money was intended to cover hotel costs, food and airline tickets for the crew and officers. The local ships register had also received a request to have the Thunder flagged in São Tomé. The enclosed documents were forgeries. The man who handled the money and paperwork was the Thunder’s local ship agent, Wilson Morais. The family’s agency is the oldest and most respected on the island, but the young Morais’ reputation was dubious. He is now the Thunder owner’s most trusted man.

  We meet him on a corner by the marketplace. He tells us that he has to continue down to the harbour.

  A ship has come in that needs supplies.

  “I like shipping. It’s exciting, you know,” he says, pressing down on the accelerator of the battered Japanese pickup. A walkie-talkie dangles from the mirror, and under the driver’s seat he has a black plastic bag full of cash.