Not all of the dhows operating so far south are engaged in illicit activities. There were some that Schulz and the rest of the crew were sure were carrying illegal cargo that were unexpectedly clean and others that appeared to be clean that turned out to be anything but.
‘There have been some vessels that we’ve come up to and they just meet all of the expectations. Our boarding party has got on board and they’ve looked at it and said, “Guaranteed, this is absolutely everything we were taught to look for,” and at the time that we were on board they certainly weren’t doing anything illicit,’ he says. ‘Other times, you will do a routine stop and you won’t have a great hope for it, you think it’s going to be nothing at all and that turns out to be a jackpot – a successful boarding. In many ways it is a numbers game. The more people that you can get onto, the more people that you talk to, the more likely you’re going to have success.’
Just being in the area, observing patterns of life and engaging with as many vessels as possible allows Darwin and other coalition vessels to build an intelligence picture. ‘So if fishing vessels always look like this and they’re always doing these kinds of things then that’s great, and if you find somebody who’s not doing that certain thing then that sets off an alarm bell.’
As a first-timer on patrol in the region, Schulz says the biggest surprise for him has been the standard of seaworthiness of the tiny dhows and the seamanship of their crews – not to mention their capacity to hide illicit cargoes.
‘These vessels go a very long way and they are well prepared, they are well equipped, they are incredibly savvy about how they disguise their illicit activity,’ he says.
Schulz has also been pleasantly surprised by how casual the crews are about the contraband that in some cases would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. ‘They deny, deny, deny until such time as its obviously incontrovertible that, “Yes you’re doing something untoward,” and then they’ll say, “Great, you got us.” There’s no malice whatsoever on board. It’s purely a business. That’s probably the biggest surprise for me.’
The fishermen are the truck drivers of the ocean earning an extra dollar carrying something illegal.
‘They simply take a consignment and they move that consignment and they’re paid for their time,’ Schulz says.
Just like a truckie on land, the master of the vessel is responsible to those who have paid him to deliver their product. In the case of a consignment of smuggled drugs or arms this could be a matter of life and death for a skipper whose cargo is confiscated, so the RAN takes its responsibilities very seriously. Each vessel that has cargo seized by Darwin is issued with a receipt signed by Commander Henry that explains what has happened.
‘It says, “Yes, we’ve taken this off you. Yes, it’s illegal. Here is the proof that we’ve taken this off you.” I am certain that it’s important for them to be able to account for the fact that their stuff didn’t make it to wherever it was going,’ Schulz says.
The official certificates of seizure do seem to carry weight with the smuggling kingpins back at the Makran coast because some skippers whose cargoes have been confiscated do make repeat trips down the hash highway and the smack track.
Before each search operation, a security team boards the suspect vessel to ensure that the crew is unarmed and there are no booby traps on board. It also conducts an initial assessment of the crew to try and establish who might be the most talkative and therefore most likely to give up useful information. Once it is apparent that the captain’s story is not credible a search is authorised.
Sometimes the story told by the master of the dhow is so far-fetched that it simply defies belief. During an earlier boarding the ‘red’ team had been told that the dhow was so far south and well away from the fishing grounds because the skipper was searching for a friend who was lost at sea. He told James Hodgkinson that his mate had disappeared three months earlier.
‘All his cousins were on board and they’d been at sea for a little over a week. He’d gone down south and he was showing me on his GPS where he was going and he was basically heading down a hundred miles off Somalia. And then he said he was going to search in this exact pattern back towards the coast,’ Hodgkinson says.
Hodgkinson asked, ‘Okay, so what was the last thing that you heard from him?’
‘He was stopped in this position here,’ the master claimed. ‘And his engine was stopped and seized and he sent out a distress call to Iran and we’ve come to get him three months later.’
‘I talked about the improbability of actually finding him,’ Hodgkinson recalls, ‘and he was, “No, no, I’m going to find him.” And apparently he didn’t have any means of communicating with him. What he was going to do was go around to every dhow that he saw and say, “Is he on board? Have you guys seen him?”’
It was hardly a convincing story. ‘Yeah, this ship was full of intelligence tripwires, fresh paint, new bulkheads, new wood panelling.’
With the master’s fantastical story and the other evidence, the team felt certain that there was something illegal on board somewhere but they just couldn’t find it. According to Dave Herrer, they drained every single fuel tank, drilled around 150 holes at various points and put the borescope camera in to look for contraband, but after two frantic hours of searching it was to no avail.
Hodgkinson has become known as ‘the dentist’ due to the number of holes he drills in the bulkheads of suspect dhows during search operations.
‘Unfortunately we had some time constraints, which meant that we had to leave the vessel,’ Hodgkinson says. ‘So it left and continued on its way, and then we had some subsequent intelligence that it in fact didn’t go a hundred miles off Somalia and then start its exact search pattern. It actually went another 350 to 400 miles south and then lingered off the coast of Tanzania. So we boarded it again on its way back north.’
When they boarded the dhow for the second time, they realised that a lot of things had changed on board since the voyage south that indicated that it probably had been carrying a drug consignment when they first searched it. There had previously been four large water barrels on either side, each of which had held about 2000 litres of water. Now several of them were drained and one had been moved up to the top of the wheelhouse. A small boat it had been carrying had been flipped over and moved. There was also a broken chimney stack and the forward net hold, which had been full of nets, was now being used as a sleeping space. They had searched as comprehensively as they could on the first boarding and would have liked to have spent another couple of days on it.
Herrer says, ‘The problem is, though, if we don’t find anything and even if we do, we have to repair and that’s the danger. So you could spend three days on there drilling big holes and then you’ve got to fix it. That’s the one thing I guess the Australians are good for. We come up here and we fix it, we don’t just destroy it.’
As for the crews, Hodgkinson says, ‘The sad thing about a lot of these blokes is that they’re either heroin addicts or recovering heroin addicts so when you board it there’s little methadone bottles all on board and they’ll be speaking to you and they’re just drinking methadone out of a little brown bottle.’ This was the case on that particular dhow.
‘They all get sick,’ Herrer explains. ‘I didn’t know at first. He was like, “Oh we’re all sick,” and said they needed their medicine, and then got it out and then we realised it was their methadone. So they all drink up and then they come good again.’
But by the time they boarded the dhow on its return journey north, the crew had run out of methadone.
‘The master was a gibbering wreck who had been alternating between talking to me and vomiting and pleading for methadone,’ Hodgkinson says. ‘I said, “I don’t have any methadone to give you.”’
‘So they’d obviously done a drop-off,’ says Armfield. ‘But he was not really making sense when we were talking to him.’
Even on the legitimate fishing boats there are a lot of
heroin addicts on methadone.
‘It’s a bit of an eye opener,’ says Herrer. ‘These men are aged. They look like they’re in their fifties and you read their paperwork and they’re twenty-eight.’
Like the master of the dhow on which they had made the weapons haul, this skipper was from Baluchistan.
‘Most of them aren’t criminals,’ Herrer says. ‘They just need to make money for their families.’
On one of the dhows they found a crew member who had actually gone to college, Kelly says. ‘That was really rare.’
‘So they live in a rural village in Baluchistan,’ says Hodgkinson, ‘and then go to Chabahar on the Iranian coast looking for work, or they know someone who’s a fisherman and they get told it’s a pretty good way to earn. We had a few guys that had been builders and stuff like that but that work dried up and they couldn’t get a job so they’d gone to Chabahar to get a job on a fishing vessel. They go and do two-month trips.’
Chabahar is a big fishing port on the Makran coast of southern Iran. The illicit drugs come out of there and several other ports around the porous border between Iran and Pakistan in Baluchistan. They then travel down either the hash highway to Yemen or the smack track to East Africa and especially Tanzania, although some do get to Kenya, Mozambique and South Africa.
As James Hodgkinson says, ‘I don’t know if you saw that little fishing village right on the mouth of the river as you went out [of Dar harbour] but if I was running drugs and I was picking them up off the coast of Tanzania that would be a good place to go in.’
17
Jackpot
Day five of Darwin’s ‘Out of Africa’ patrol on Saturday, 21 May 2016, dawns fine and sunny with a moderate breeze and a rising sea. All is well on board the warship and there is renewed optimism among the crew as Orko is up and running and ready to resume the hunt.
At about 10 a.m. word filters through that the French P3 maritime patrol aircraft has located a suspect dhow about eighty kilometres from the ship’s position, steaming southwest towards Tanzania. This contact and the fact that several other suspect vessels are steaming south and west of the Seychelles confirms suspicions that the smack track has moved even further south as the smugglers risk longer journeys in even rougher seas to avoid detection.
The decision is taken to board the dhow. A boarding huddle for a pumped and excited ‘red’ team on the ship’s waist at 11.10 a.m. is followed by the command brief at 11.25 a.m., before the launch of the first RHIB in choppy seas.
As they prepare to leave the comfort of the ship, the excited boarding team members, both male and female, conduct final checks of their gear. They are wearing helmets and goggles as well as life preservers over their uniforms and are armed with 9 mm pistols and batons as they line up behind Hodgkinson and John Armfield, who also carries a large sledgehammer known affectionately as ‘the key’.
Darwin has emerged from the shadow of Madagascar, and the sea state is right on the outer limit for boarding operations, with strong winds and waves of three to four metres in height. However, as the ship approaches the target, the RHIB is launched from the port (left) side and the coxswain (driver) employs his considerable skills to position the inflatable boat on the starboard side of the moving frigate so that the team can safely climb down the ship’s wriggling rope-and-timber ladder and into the bucking, bobbing and increasingly wet inflatable boat. There is plenty of chat about the conditions as we watch the twenty-metre dhow disappear below the growing swells and jump around the angry sea like a frog in a sock.
James Hodgkinson is first to scramble down the ladder and into the wildly pitching boat, followed by Armfield and the rest of the team. One team member realises that the conditions are outside her comfort zone, so she is immediately replaced. Finally, the inflatable is loaded with six boarding team members, but as it speeds towards the dhow it appears unlikely that they will be able to board it in such marginal conditions.
‘When we approached from the stern we did a lap around looking for any obstructions or places where the crew on the dhow may have been hanging things over the side,’ Hodgkinson says later. ‘We also look for any identifying marks or, from the intelligence tripwires point of view, places you could see scrape marks on the side or freshly splintered wood that might indicate that that dhow has done an at-sea transfer with another dhow, one of the indicators that they’ve transferred drugs.’
Several minutes later as the RHIB nears the vessel, a large set of waves hits the dhow, causing it to rock violently and roll through about forty degrees.
‘At that stage I pulled the RHIB off and said that we weren’t going to board,’ Hodgkinson says. In addition, he says their radios had become waterlogged and they could not talk to the ship.
On their way back, the radios dry out and the skipper tells them to have another crack and to instruct the master of the dhow to steer down-sea so that the waves will come from behind, making it slightly easier for them to board.
Whenever boarding teams approach a dhow they try to identify the master and use hand signals and loud voice commands to push the crew to the bow of the vessel.
‘Most of the crews we’ve had so far have understood what that means and they all move up onto the forecastle and gather up there,’ Hodgkinson says. ‘It’s also an indication of whether they’ve been boarded before. Some dhows will see the RHIB approaching or they’ll see a warship approaching and the crew automatically moves up onto the forecastle and sits down to wait for you to board. Some dhows even lower ladders or ropes or are there to help you get on board because they know the procedure. It’s the nature of doing business in this part of the world that they get boarded by warships.’
They soon identify the skipper. Hodgkinson instructs him to go to the wheelhouse and turn the boat so he will have a following sea.
‘The waves were a bit more predictable and because we had the sets coming from behind us we could see where the bigger waves were going and we moved up alongside and commenced boarding,’ he explains later.
In calm conditions the boarding party will put a portable ladder up the side of the dhow to provide access. On this occasion, with the vessel behaving like a cork in a vortex, the sea state means that one minute the RHIB is almost level with the gunwale or deck rail of the dhow and the next it is three metres below. Instead of using the ladder they simply wait for the peak of a wave before leaping from the RHIB directly onto the dhow. The dangerous seas mean that the security detail does not go aboard in advance. Instead, all the boarders scramble on in quick succession.
‘Two or three of the guys were grabbing on at a time and then scrambling over and then helping up the rest of us as we came up,’ says Hodgkinson. ‘So it wasn’t graceful, but every time we’d come up at the top of the set the boat would manoeuvre in close to the side of the dhow, we’d climb on board, grab the gunwale or one of the posts and then pull ourselves into the dhow.’
Once the first six are safely on the dhow the inflatable returns to Darwin to fetch Agent Lerza and the terp. Meanwhile, the rest of Darwin’s crew enjoy a hot lunch that includes a tasty beef stir-fry. Afterwards, some play a game of uckers while others watch the Sharks versus Sea Eagles NRL match live on TV, while James Hodgkinson and his boarding team begin the arduous task of checking the vessel’s bona fides and commencing the search.
The interpreter speaks to each crew member, starting with the master, who is escorted back to the wheelhouse and asked to produce his paperwork. It is in disarray. The registration certificate is five years out of date and there are discrepancies in the crew manifest – the master has said that he has sixteen or seventeen crew members but the manifest lists just fourteen.
‘They only had twelve ID cards and when we counted them there were fifteen people,’ he says. ‘So, those sorts of inconsistencies.’
In some cases, an extra crew member will be the drug agent who has come on board at sea and will depart with the drugs at the destination. That person has no papers and no intention of
going through normal immigration channels at either end of the journey. Many of the dhows have papers that were amended by simply crossing information out with a pen.
In this case the dhow has come from Gwadar on the Makran coast in Pakistan. That is traditionally a key fishing port, and in recent years the Chinese have poured millions into its facilities. They are creating a ‘friendly’ deep-water port with direct access to the Arabian Sea from a new Chinese-funded road that is being built up through Pakistan to China. The port will be also be configured to handle large surface warships and could become a vital strategic outpost for Chinese ships during any future conflict. With tensions rising between the United States and China, Washington and its allies, including Australia, will be closely watching developments at Gwadar.
Hodgkinson thought the master of the dhow was a slippery customer. ‘He was smoking and arrogant with this little smile the whole time and just kept talking about how, “I’m just a fisherman I don’t know anything.” So I asked him where he was going and he said, “Oh, it’s so windy that I’ve decided that we’re going to go drive to the Seychelles so we can get all the big fish that are near the Seychelles,” and so I went along with that.’
When Hodgkinson asks him again if he is sure that he is heading to the Seychelles and what heading he is on he replies, ‘West on 220 degrees.’
‘I said “Oh, that’s interesting, because the Seychelles is actually the other way, it’s actually back towards the east,”’ says Hodgkinson. ‘So then we started to get a bit stronger in our responses and I said, “So where is it that you’re actually going if you’re not driving towards the Seychelles? Where are you going?”
‘At this point he started to splinter a bit in his story and he went, “Oh actually I’m not sure where we’re going, I don’t know where we’re going,” which is odd, because if you’re the master of the vessel and responsible for its navigation and the safety of all the crew on board, how do you not know where you’re going?’
The Smack Track Page 19