This was a world few people get to see. The wild characters, the heart-stopping scenery, the outrageous behavior. It was everything I’d become a merchant mariner to be a part of.
I was hooked.
That trip began my education in how to command men. (Lesson number one: Learn how to talk to your guys.) It also taught me that, on the sea, nothing goes like you expect it to. You have to be prepared for a staggering amount of possibilities, from mutiny to hungry bears to optical illusions at sea. And you have to improvise. Captains who become fixated on one thing—like the crew having a beer or two—quickly lose the trust of their men.
That was doubly true in the waters off the Somali coast. To survive in Apache country, you have to think like an Apache.
The next day dawned sunny and hot. The Office of Naval Intelligence in Maryland e-mailed its latest Worldwide Threats to Shipping Report. I opened it immediately. Pirate attacks and other threats were broken down by region. For the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the entire Atlantic, there wasn’t a single incident reported.
I skipped ahead to the East Africa section. There were thirty-nine attacks reported. For a single week. I sucked in my breath. The bulletin was like a police blotter for mariners, and it told me that East Africa was the last place in the world you wanted to be right now.
I flicked my eye over some of the entries:
1. Vessel reported suspicious approach 20 Mar 09 at 0600 UTC while underway, Bab-el-Mandeb.
2. Five men in two speed boats armed with guns approached vessel from the port bow, Bab-el-Mandeb.
3. Chemical tanker reported attempted boarding 29 Mar 09, Gulf of Aden.
4. German navy tanker (FGS SPESSART) fired upon 29 Mar 09. Seven pirates in a skiff opened fire on the naval ship, mistaking it for a merchant vessel, Gulf of Aden.
5. Vessel fired upon, approached by one skiff with seven men onboard armed with AK-47s, Gulf of Aden.
6. Bulk carrier (TITAN) hijacked 19 Mar 09. Six men in a speed boat armed with AK47s and pistols boarded and hijacked the vessel, Gulf of Aden.
7. Cargo vessel (DIAMOND FALCON) fired upon 14 Mar 09. Two skiffs with men onboard armed with automatic weapons and RPGs fired upon the vessel.
8. Vessel reported attempted hijacking 1 Jan 09 at 1730 local time, Gulf of Aden.
9. Bulk carrier fired upon 30 Mar 09. A speed boat approached the vessel while a mother ship was sighted further back, Indian Ocean.
10. Container ship reported suspicious approach 28 Mar 09, Tanzania.
The pirates were approaching and attacking each and every kind of vessel that ventured around the Horn of Africa: tankers, fishing schooners, even luxury cruise ships. Nothing was safe out there. There were so many ships flying down the coast of East Africa, you had to hope you weren’t one of the unlucky ones to see a few pirate boats pop up on your radar. Once you saw them, you had very few ways of preventing an attack: speed, fire hoses, and deception were pretty much your only tools. The Somalis had automatic weapons, speedboats, rocket-propelled grenades, and a reputation for complete ruthlessness.
It was like a lion and a herd of wildebeest on the African plain. You just hoped there was safety in numbers, because if the lion chose you, you were going to have a very, very bad day. And just as the lion looks for weakness—the slow, the lame, the young—pirates zeroed in on ships that looked defenseless.
But Americans seemed out of the reach of pirates. The last time seamen on a U.S. ship were taken hostage by pirates was two hundred years ago, during the days of the Barbary corsairs, Muslim bandits who’d operated out of North African ports like Tripoli and Algiers, on the other side of the continent. Back then, piracy was near the top of Thomas Jefferson’s priority list. In 1801, 20 percent of the U.S. federal budget was spent paying ransoms to the African buccaneers. Crewmen from the ships lived and worked as slaves in the luxurious homes of the Algerian pirate chiefs. America even fought two bloody wars with the Barbary states, giving the Marines’ Hymn its famous second line—“to the shores of Tripoli.”
That was a long time ago. Piracy had faded from the nation’s memory. And if you did get in trouble, it was assumed you were on your own. The U.S. Navy hadn’t been in the pirate-hunting business for two centuries. But by the end of that second day, I felt the crew was ready for an attack. Things could always improve, but we’d made a good start. Little did I know that the men who were going to test us to our limits were already on the water.
FOUR
-6 Days
The situation in this region is extremely serious. We have not seen such a surge in pirate activity in this area previously. These pirates are not afraid to use significant firepower in attempts to bring vessels under their control. Over 260 seafarers have been taken hostage in Somalia this year. Unless further action is taken, seafarers remain in serious danger.
—Statement by Pottengal Mukundan, director of the International Maritime Bureau, August 21, 2008
I’d never been approached by a pirate ship in my entire career, but I’d come close. On a run through the Gulf of Aden the previous September, I’d been standing on the bridge when Shane, my chief mate, pulled me aside.
“Cap, you know I mentioned to you that ship we passed earlier?”
I nodded. On the more well-traveled routes around the world, you’d see the same ships again and again, running the same legs of the trip you’re on and stopping in the same ports. Their names pop up on the AIS, the Automatic Identification System. We’d passed a container ship the night before. Shane had been monitoring the radio and heard its name mentioned.
“Six hours ago, it was taken by pirates.”
“Where?” I said.
“Just north of the Kenya-Somalia border.”
It had been a roll of the dice. The pirates had turned north and gotten them, instead of turning south and attacking us.
Piracy has seasons, just like the weather. The Indian Ocean is usually as smooth as glass, a dazzling tropical blue, what sailors call “pretty water,” but from late June through early September, the khareef season arrives, bringing southwest monsoons sweeping across the ocean, making it dangerous for small craft. That means pirate season runs from October through May. By April, the bandits are looking to make a few rich hauls before the stormy season puts them out of business.
Most of the pirates, I knew, came from a northeastern region of Somalia known as Puntland, named after the mythical Land of Punt, known to the ancient Egyptians as the source of gold, ebony, and African blackwood. But from a place that exported riches to the Pharaohs, it had become a place where famine, bandits, and chaos were the order of the day. The government’s collapse in 1991 brought on mass starvation and the arrival of a U.N. peacekeeping force led by the U.S. Army. That all ended on October 3 and 4, 1993, when the infamous “Black Hawk Down” incident occurred and eighteen American soldiers and one Malaysian lost their lives in a horrific gunfight.
The pirates claimed they were former fishermen who’d been forced into banditry when their livelihoods disappeared. According to them, foreign trawlers had arrived off their coastline and taken hundreds of millions of dollars of tuna, sardines, mackerel, and swordfish out of the ocean. Other ships dumped hazardous waste in the water to make a quick buck. The local fishermen couldn’t hope to compete with the advanced fleets from Spain and Japan and found that the intruders shot at them when they tried to work the same coastline. Soon they were reduced to begging, and even starvation.
But I’d seen schools of mackerel, tuna, and other fish every time I’d gone down the coast of Somalia. There was a living to be made out there. I believed the Somalis had simply found easier work: piracy.
In the 1990s, boats began leaving Somali ports like Eyl with armed young men aboard to seize the foreign crews and hold them for a small ransom. They were ruthless, professional bandits who’d seen a chance to make it big and took it. They made $120 million in 2008, in a country where most people make around $600 a year. These guys had left any thoughts
of sardines and swordfish far behind. To me, there was no difference between them and a bunch of Mafia extortionists, or armed robbers sticking up a gas station. Sure, they’re poor, but stealing is stealing.
When the pirates began, in the early 1990s, they would shoot out of their local ports in beaten-up wooden skiffs with a single outboard engine, so they could only prowl along the coastline, covering a few thousand square miles of ocean. Their boats weren’t equipped to go out any farther. But ships did what they always do when faced with a pirate threat along known shipping routes. They altered their routes. The big ships started sailing farther offshore and the bandits found they were out of luck.
That’s when the Somalis changed the game. Instead of capturing trawlers and freighters and holding them for ransom, they stole the vessels and used them as mother ships. These trawlers can travel hundreds of miles offshore in rough weather, and the Somalis simply tied their skiffs to the back and went searching for bigger game. When they spotted a ship, they’d offload teams of three or four pirates into the skiffs and go hunting. It didn’t matter if they failed. The mother ship gave them the ability to stay at sea for weeks at a time, searching for the right victim. By 2005 or so, there was nowhere to run off the coast of East Africa. Anywhere you could sail, the pirates could follow.
The standard operating procedure for a pirate attack goes this way: three or more quick boats would approach a ship just before sunset or just after sunrise, moving fast. There would be a mother ship lurking behind, shadowing the target from over the horizon. The pirates would come up to the hull of the target ship, throw grappling hooks up to the deck, secure them, then shimmy up to the deck. From then on, it’s a game of ransoms and threats.
If you are targeted, you can’t call 911. There is no such thing as a Somali coast guard and the Europeans and the Americans can’t guarantee anyone’s safety. There is a twenty-nation task force with warships in the region to combat piracy, but they are concentrated in a corridor in the Gulf of Aden, along the southern coast of Yemen, leaving the coast of Somalia practically unguarded. And the entire area represents millions of square miles of ocean. The pirates could have control of your ship and your crew in a matter of minutes. The best you could do would be to make a fast call to the UKMTO, or United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, which is a security clearinghouse for mariners in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. They would get the word out.
Ship owners desperate to get their cargo moving—let’s face it, their real motivation for ending these hostage situations—would hire helicopters and drop ransom money in burlap sacks onto the decks of the ships. Or they would send it in waterproof suitcases in tiny boats with outboard engines. One company even used a James Bond–style parachute to get the money to the criminals, dropping $3 million on the deck of the MV Sirius Star. Everyone made money. The professional security companies were paid handsomely to negotiate the deals with the Somalis. The guys who delivered the ransoms were paid $1 million to risk their lives. The shippers got their vessels back and their insurance companies paid them for the lost time and doubled the premiums for everyone else. Their statisticians would tell them, “Well, only .04 of all shipping in the Gulf of Aden is taken by pirates.” So the vessels kept sailing through it. And the pirates walked away with a king’s ransom.
But the crew members? They usually went home to a hot meal, a few tears from their family, and then they were back on the water again as soon as possible. There was no such thing as combat pay for a merchant mariner.
The pirates always claimed to treat their hostages with care, and from what I heard through the grapevine that was usually true. But I knew they killed when their backs were against the wall. When a group of Somalis hijacked a Taiwanese fishing boat, the Ching Fong Hwa 168, in April 2007, one crew member was shot in the back during the attack. When the owner refused to pay the Somalis’ demands for $1.5 million in ransom, they chose another Chinese sailor at random and shot him six times, executing him in cold blood. The pirates wanted to throw the body to the sharks that swarm in the Indian Ocean but the captain convinced them to store it in the ship’s freezer. Then the bandits put a gun to the head of the captain’s twenty-two-year-old son and threatened to pull the trigger unless the man called Taiwan and got the ransom negotiations on track. For seven months, the crew went through pure hell: they were pulled out of their beds for mock executions, beaten when they couldn’t understand the Somalis, and fell victim to the oldest killer on the ocean—scurvy—when their vegetables ran out. The Somalis even forced the men to call home and beg their families for their lives.
If they don’t get their money, the pirates get brutal. They flogged Russian sailors whose bulk carrier was being held for $10 million and forced them to lie down on boiling hot decks when the temperature was above 100 degrees. Captured Nigerian crewmen were held in their cabins for three months straight without being allowed to see the sun or breathe fresh air. Indian seamen were tortured and threatened with execution. And as the Maersk Alabama entered the Gulf of Aden, there were more than two hundred crew members of different nationalities being held hostage by pirates on twenty different ships, most of them captured in or near the Indian Ocean.
There were four main groups who were causing most of the havoc, including the National Volunteer Coast Guard, which mostly stuck to raiding small commercial boats and fishing vessels. There was the Marka Group, which operated out of a town by the same name, and the Puntland Group, who were actually former fishermen turned bandits. The last was the Somali Marines, and these guys thought of themselves as a kind of national navy: they had an admiral of the fleet, a vice admiral, and a director of finances. They launched speedboats from mother ships and then directed their members to their targets by satellite phone. And they specialized in the big targets: tankers, container ships.
Us.
The most disturbing news about the pirates actually came from my brother, who’s a Middle East analyst with a conservative think tank down in D.C. He told me that he’d seen reports about Al Qaeda fighters from Pakistan making their way into Somalia and Yemen. That worried me to the nth degree. Al Qaeda is just a whole other ball game. There was actually one bizarre incident I’d heard of where a group of pirates approached a ship in the Strait of Malacca off western Malaysia, threw hooks over the side, and boarded it. They rounded up the crew and stuck them in a room. You would think the next stop would be to demand ransom, but they didn’t. What they wanted to do was learn how to sail the ship. They went down to the engine room and inspected it. They went up to the bridge and practiced steering the ship. They got on the radio and practiced using the VTS (Vessel Traffic Service), utilizing calling-in points for monitoring a ship’s route. When they’d learned everything they could, they left, taking the manuals from the engine room and the bridge manuals and a list of checkpoints that captains use when they’re maneuvering through heavy traffic.
It seemed like a dry run for an Al Qaeda operation, a seaborne 9/11.
After I’d read through the security bulletins, I wrote a short e-mail to Andrea. I guess I was feeling a little lonely, because I started with our ongoing search for a dog to replace the dear, departed Frannie.
Hey Ange—
No word on the dogs? I actually was thinking of Frannie last night, a tear came to my soul. That dang dog is still bugging me! I need a dog!
En route to Mombasa, will call around the 11th or 12th of April. Weather is very nice, until the monsoon sets in. The pirates are getting more active lately. They are attacking even naval military ships. I guess a lack of recognition on their parts.
Love, R.
I didn’t want her to worry, but I couldn’t pretend the Somalis weren’t out there. Andrea and I were in this thing together. We always had been. Before I left, I’d told her that it was getting more dangerous with the pirates. “Eventually they’re going to take an American ship,” I said.
“They’re not that stupid,” Andrea said. “They wouldn’t attack one of ours.”
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br /> Deep down in her heart, though, she knew that sort of thing could happen. It’s part of being a merchant mariner’s wife. But somehow she was counting on that American flag to keep me and the crew safe. Who would dare to attack the Stars and Stripes?
Andrea never lost sleep over my being out there. Maybe it was wishful thinking, but she’s always been good at keeping her mind away from that idea. We’ve always been lucky. We’ve worked hard for everything we’ve had and we consider ourselves blessed. I guess she thought that would continue.
Andrea’s friends always marveled at her, saying, “I don’t know how you do it, being a merchant mariner’s wife.” Her joking response always was “Are you kidding me? Your husband’s away half the time, you get a check every two weeks, what’s not to like?” That always got a lot of laughs. But it’s true that most seamen’s wives are strong, independent women capable of picking up a shovel or a hammer or grabbing a flashlight when the water heater stops working. When I left for sea, I often gave Andrea what she called the “honey-do list”: “Honey, can you make sure to get the oil changed in the car, see that the taxes are paid, get the dryer fixed, et cetera.” In the early days of our marriage, when she was home with two kids in diapers, in the dead of a Vermont winter, Andrea really had to be strong. “There were many times when I felt like the proverbial woman standing on the side of the road with a flat tire,” she’s fond of saying. “You either learned to survive on your own or you got a divorce and went back to a normal way of life.” Thank God we have terrific neighbors and family who would always be there if Andrea needed anything at all. If a tree fell down on our property, our neighbors would show up with a chainsaw and a tractor.
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