Finally, the master admits that there is someone else on board who is the real navigator. It is his brother – the same fellow whom Petty Officer Armfield has already identified as the probable drug agent. This man speaks a little English and is sitting back doing nothing, wearing a clean white shirt when the others are all clad in filthy fishing gear. The story does not alter, so Hodgkinson and Armfield plan the search to start with the forecastle area where the crew is being held.
As they move through, they find rats’ nests and cockroach infestations both in the cramped crew quarters, which are simply a platform beneath the captain’s cabin, and elsewhere throughout the typically filthy and stinking boat. The dhows and the crew members are always dirty and after fifteen days at sea this vessel is reeking. The crew tend not to wash; they eat and sleep in close proximity and go to the toilet over the side. There are hazards everywhere but especially in the engine room where wheels and belts and flywheels spin without any protective measures. Occupational health and safety is not a priority in the world of poor South Asian fishermen.
At this time, each crew member is paid about $600 for a drug smuggling run and the skipper gets around $1500 – much more than any of them can earn from a legitimate fishing trip.
‘This dhow in particular had half-eaten food in amongst the sleeping space which was just being feasted on by the vermin on board,’ Hodgkinson says. ‘It has really given me a deep appreciation of how good we have it because these men are honestly on the edge of survival and they are trying to make money for their families so they can eat. They have no grand aims of achieving anything more than surviving and providing.’
At about 5 p.m. the boarding teams are changed out and as the ‘red’ team is leaving the dhow, a team member falls off the ladder and into the drink. It is a tense moment, but soon one of the screens in the ops room clearly shows the sailor being rescued, fortunately without incident. The soaked boarders are soon safely back on the ship for a shower, change of clothes and a hot feed.
About two hours into the boarding, a crew member on the dhow quietly tells the interpreter that he wants to give the team some information.
‘One of the guys [crew] had gone to the bathroom and as he went through he tapped the interpreter on the shoulder and started speaking to him,’ Hodgkinson says later. ‘I didn’t catch what he was saying. He was speaking in Baluchi and the interpreter grabbed him and just sort of brought him back aft and sat him down and he just started saying, “I need to tell you that there’s drugs on board. I’m a good man, I’m a good Muslim, I’ve been caught up in this and this boat is carrying drugs.” So that really confirmed the suspicions that I already had that we were definitely onto something.’
The informant becomes agitated and it appears to the Australians that he is coming down off a drug high of some sort.
‘Once we calmed him down he said that he didn’t see the drugs come on board but he’d heard the others talking about it and he’d principally heard the guy we’d identified as the drug agent,’ Hodgkinson says. ‘He said, “Yeah, I heard this guy talking about it, he said that they’re in the snow.” The translation was initially not quite right. He said the place with “all the snow”, which we interpreted to be the ice tank, but the more I talked to him about it and drilled down, we got it down to, “It’s in the ice hold,” was what he said. He didn’t know where but, “It’s somewhere in the ice hold.”’
They reassure the man that they will not go straight there and uncover the stash, but will continue with their methodical search. ‘We then redoubled our efforts further forward in the net hold and the engine space to check tanks and things like that and actually left the ice hold and I passed that back to command.’
At about 8 p.m. word comes from the dhow that the ‘black’ team has found a large quantity of what appears to be heroin deep in the ice hold. The Australians have spent hours breaking up and removing about four tonnes of ice that had melted and formed into a solid sheet.
Given the length of time since the weapons haul back in February, there is great excitement on board the ship, with everyone from Phill Henry down delighted to finally have a drugs haul under their belt. Early estimates put the find at about 380 kilograms, with fifteen large sacks containing twenty-five one-kilogram bags of the drug. That is around $100 million worth on the streets of a Western city.
‘A good deposit for a new frigate,’ Phill Henry says happily.
As the night wears on, the CO and several chiefs go to the galley to help prepare toasted sandwiches for the weary boarding team members. At 12.30 a.m. we watch the inflatable pull alongside the ship and the first six mail sacks containing the heroin are hoisted onto the ship and into the arms of a delighted Kelly, who carries them to the torpedo magazine on the port waist to be stored under lock and key (there are just two keys on board). A temporary table is set up inside the magazine and the racks of torpedoes provide a bizarre backdrop to the sacks of contraband. The Naval Police Coxswain, Chief Petty Officer Denis McKenna, and XO Tina Brown begin the painstaking task of weighing, cataloguing and testing the drugs, which are also photographed by the ship’s photographer, Able Seaman Sarah Ebsworth.
Small samples are taken for the Australian Federal Police and they are carefully labelled and stored in the captain’s safe. Agent Lerza arrives to take samples for further testing ashore by the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).
Phill Henry has also come down to witness the transfer and to examine his ship’s first heroin haul of the 2016 patrol. There is no official competition between RAN ships, but his broad smile indicates that he is really happy now that Darwin has both heroin and weapons on her score sheet. The second load arrives back on board just after 1 a.m. With all boarding team members and their bounty safely in the ship it is time for a well-earned rest.
Sunday, 22 May, begins with a late start for many who have been hard at it for more than twenty-four hours during the latest boarding operation. Over breakfast in the chief’s mess, the discussion turns to the vexed question of the fate of the informant on the drugs dhow. It transpires that the man has appealed for sanctuary on board Darwin. He has told the Australians that the skipper of the dhow and the drug agent will kill him if he stays put. Commander Henry takes a hard line and after consulting with headquarters he has little choice but to refuse the man’s request and leave him to his fate.
Given the unpleasant task that many RAN sailors have had in turning asylum seekers back at sea only to hear of them washing up on rocks in Indonesia, leaving people under duress to their fate can be a genuine moral dilemma and emotional test for those on the front line.
‘It is a tough call but the right one for sure,’ says Warrant Officer Tim Brading. ‘The hardest part of the job sometimes is putting your personal morals to one side to do the job and accept the command decision.’
Navy sailors and other defence personnel regularly have to deal with such grey areas. Phill Henry, who ultimately must make the call and has spent his fair share of time turning back asylum seekers off northern Australia, freely admits that the decision was a tough one. Unfortunately, when the informant initially told the boarding team about the drugs he did so in front of the dhow’s helmsman. While the search wore on he repeated the claims and he indicated to the Australians that he had felt threatened during the dhow’s journey south. He also revealed a long history of personal conflict between himself and the master.
‘It also would appear from the questioning that the NCIS agent and interpreter formed the opinion that the gentleman concerned was also a drug user and was coming off a high, which is when people are often paranoid,’ Henry says.
Under the Safety of Life at Sea obligations he would have been obliged to bring the man onto Darwin if he judged him to be under imminent threat. After consulting with those on the dhow, as well as his bosses at Task Force 633 and Combined Maritime Forces headquarters in Bahrain, Henry took the decision to leave him on the dhow.
‘It was a bloody horrible decision,’
he says frankly.
To help to salve his conscience and as added insurance, the Combined Maritime Forces headquarters reported the incident to Pakistani authorities, who undertook to check on him when the dhow arrived back in its home port. To further ease his own considerable concerns and those of his shipmates, Commander Henry kept the ship’s optical equipment zoomed in on the dhow as the two vessels parted company.
‘We kept an eye on the vessel for over an hour to make sure that there was no sign of anything untoward going on,’ he says. ‘The last sight that we had of the gentleman concerned, he was actually helping to reorganise all the stuff that we’d pulled out and re-stow the boat so there was no visual indication as we departed that anything was going on.’
With a successful boarding under their belts, Darwin’s crew are exultant and the talk around the ship has turned to the chances of achieving the magic ‘one tonne’ of heroin. Grumblings about the lack of shore leave in Dar es Salaam have evaporated as the ship’s company focuses on the prospect of boarding more smugglers and finding more drugs. Only one RAN ship has ever hit the 1000-kilogram figure for heroin, and that was Darwin during her 2014 deployment under Commander Terry Morrison.
The Marine Engineering Officer, Lieutenant Commander Trevor Henderson, rates their first heroin bust of 2016 as the biggest morale boost of the entire deployment. He concedes that after the seven-tonne weapons haul the ship had lost momentum following the two long empty-handed patrols, a maintenance period in Bahrain and a port visit to Dubai. Due to workloads and security concerns many of the crew did not get a decent break during this time, so by the time they reached Dar es Salaam at the end of the third patrol the mood on board had been tense.
‘When we got the drugs you could just see the batteries suddenly recharge,’ Henderson says. ‘You could feel it. I can feel things in the ship. I get around all decks – that’s my job, to go down below, and you can feel it. I talk to all the sailors, senior sailors, young officers and there was a lift. We had the guns, we got the drugs and we’re hoping to get more because now we feel like we’re actually really doing something good for everyone around the world getting these drugs, [this] insidious substance off the streets. Throw them over the side because that’s where they belong, they don’t belong inside your veins, mate. They belong in the garbage.’
With several other suspect vessels in the area, optimism is spreading from the ops room to all parts of the ship. Most departments have members attached to the boarding parties and the joy of a successful boarding soon spreads.
Boredom is the natural enemy of morale and after the lack of results on the two earlier patrols Chaplain Richard Quadrio was as happy as anyone that the ship had bagged her first heroin haul.
Says Quadrio later, ‘I remember vividly talking to one of the sailors and he said to me, “Chaplain, this is why I joined the navy. I didn’t join the navy just to stooge around doing exercises off Jervis Bay. I joined to go on operations and make a difference for my country, do something important.”
‘There have also been lots of days at sea where we haven’t done anything and that’s like any war story. In between the battles there’s a lot of down time – “Hurry up and wait.” But you don’t get one without the other.’
The crew does not have to wait long for the next morale-boosting job.
Just a day after the first 380 kilograms of heroin have been secured in Darwin’s torpedo magazine, the frigate intercepts another suspect dhow, flying a Pakistani flag. Similar in size to the previous smuggler, this vessel is lying a little lower in the water. Fortunately, the seas have abated slightly, making boarding a little easier. Once on board it is soon clear to boarding officer James Hodgkinson that the vessel, also from Gwadar, is dodgy.
‘When you get on the boats where they’re legitimate the crew are really calm, they welcome you on board, they start hitting you up for things, “Oh, Mr Navy man, have you got a radio?” Even before the interpreter gets on board they’re trying to get food and water because they know that you’re there to help them,’ he says.
On suspect dhows such as this one there is none of that interaction. That absence, the general intuition that experienced boarders feel and the master’s dodgy paperwork often add up to smugglers. The dhow’s manifest lists ten crew names but there are twelve men on board, so the team is authorised to carry out a flag verification boarding and search. In addition, the master’s story about why they are in that location is so ridiculous that alarm bells are ringing loud and clear. The master tells Hodgkinson that he was fishing in company with four other dhows off Somalia when they were attacked by pirates in skiffs, who fired AK-47s at them.
‘Because of his swift actions they cut the nets, turned and ran and because they had the wind behind them this little dhow was able to apparently outrun a skiff,’ Hodgkinson says drily, explaining that this is hardly likely since skiffs do thirty to thirty-five knots, whereas at best a dhow might manage eight knots with a following sea and wind.
In addition, Hodgkinson has previously been told by genuine fishermen that the Somali pirates are running an extortion racket and have no interest in killing fishermen because there is no money in it for them. He goes forward to see John Armfield, share his thoughts and see what he has found.
The first thing Armfield says to him is, ‘Sir, when the blokes went down to do their security search in the ice hold a few of the crew members said, “Oh you don’t need to go down there, there’s no need to search down there, don’t bother. Nothing to see down there, don’t go down there.”
‘That means there is something that they don’t want us to see down in the ice hold,’ Hodgkinson says. ‘We had a bit of a chuckle to ourselves and knew we were definitely onto something here.’
On some smuggling dhows, the crew are in a hurry to get home so they just confess immediately and point out where the contraband is located. In this case they angrily insist that they are just fishermen and to prove their innocence they even provide a demonstration of how they cast their nets.
Armfield says the reaction of the crew tells the tale. ‘Real fishermen are like tradesmen, they’re just professional, they want to do their job. If they want to do something they’ll tell you because they’ve got nothing to hide. If they want to go to the toilet, they’ll just tell you. If they want to eat, they’ll just tell you. They’ll put out a fish, cut it up and you just go, “Yeah these guys know what they’re doing.” These guys were worried and you could tell they weren’t being themselves because they held off on things and even prayers.’
Hodgkinson says that the crew’s unusual behaviour at prayer time was a dead give-away because on all of the legitimate fishing boats that they have boarded, praying is not negotiable.
‘We make every accommodation that we can for that because a lot of what we do here is building goodwill, particularly amongst the genuine fishermen. The only way we’re going to actually try and improve the situation on the ground is through building those relationships,’ he says. ‘But the dodgy guys, they didn’t pray the entire time that we were there. They didn’t even ask for food, and we prompted them. We said, “Do you want to eat now? Go and get lunch?” and they were like, “Oh you want our food, here go and take our food,” and we’re like, “No, that’s not what we’re saying.” We got the interpreter who was speaking in their language to say, “We’re happy for you to eat now.”’
Once clearance is given to begin an intrusive search, the team heads straight into the ice hold. They immediately notice a newly fitted section of the aft bulkhead towards the rear of the hold, but it proves to be an innocent repair. A couple of hours later some team members working in one of the smaller ice holds uncover a brand new hatch in the floor. Removing the ice is hard work and it has to be chipped into small blocks that are then removed and stored, to be replaced should the vessel be clean. Chipping ice in a filthy fish hold in a madly rocking wooden dhow is not a fun job.
Several hours into the search the team chipping away i
n one of the smaller bays notices a place with much less ice than the rest.
‘The guys started clearing that one and when they cleared it down to the deck level they could see that the deck plating of tin was brand new and that all the bulkhead was rusty so John gave me a hoy,’ Hodgkinson says. ‘I was back up doing questioning and I came forward and had a quick look down into it. You could just see bright as day that it was different, so we went, “Yep, that’s the next spot,” and that’s when I started to get pretty excited.’
They peel up the tin and underneath a layer of Styrofoam they find a fifty-centimetre wooden hatch. When they lift it up they discover that the void beneath is packed with plastic and synthetic hessian sugar bags. Some are marked ‘Matiari Pakistan Refined Sugar’ and others say ‘model management’, and all of them are full of what looks like heroin. The bags are wrapped more simply than yesterday’s seizure, which was wound tightly in foil, plastic, cotton and then two more layers of plastic.
John Armfield says several new members of his team became excited when they saw the contraband. ‘They’ve worked really hard, as you know, on all the other boardings to pretty much do eight hours of work without a win,’ he says. ‘We rotated them all through, brought them all down so they could actually experience that’s where they’re hiding it, that’s how they’re hiding it. Because they’re able seamen, they’ll probably do another ten years [in the navy] and hopefully when they’re petty officers or chiefs they’ve got the experience.’
18
More smack on the track
By the time they find the stash, the dhow has begun to take on serious amounts of water. Darwin’s engineer cannot get his portable bilge pump into the bilge behind the dhow’s engine, so they have to shut down power to ease the flooding. With no power the vessel just wallows like a tyre tube in a choppy surf as they repair the leak around the propeller shaft and get an extra fire-fighting pump from Darwin brought over to dry the bilge out.
The Smack Track Page 20