Through all of this the master has been offering advice that contradicts what his own and the Australian engineers are saying about the emergency.
‘I just got him to sit down and stay out of it while we fixed it,’ Hodgkinson says.
About forty-five minutes later they are able to start the engine and move forward, which eases the wallowing of the dhow. Meanwhile, John Armfield and his team have uncovered the extent of the initial drug find and have tested the contraband to confirm it is indeed heroin. The sailors use a portable tool called a Trunarc handheld narcotics analyser that fires a laser through the bag to identify the drugs within minutes and without risking contamination. They remove the booty from the hold and onto the deck, and radio back to Darwin that they have found about 160 kilograms of a substance that has tested positive as heroin.
After the initial find Agent Lerza and Hodgkinson summon the master to the wheelhouse for a serious heart-to-heart chat.
‘We started to get a bit sterner with him,’ Hodgkinson recalls. ‘We started off again saying, “All right, we’ve been on board. You know what we’re looking for – we’ve already talked extensively. What do you think we’re looking for?” He answered, “Oh, you’re looking for drugs but we’re just fishermen,” and he kept sticking to his bullshit story.’
The pair decide to play good cop bad cop. Hodgkinson quietly urges him to come clean and to help them out as Agent Lerza reads him the riot act about where the drugs end up and how the drug money funds terrorists who kill innocent people. At this point the master shows signs of concern, so Agent Lerza pulls out a bag of heroin.
‘This is what we’ve found in your ship,’ he says. ‘Are you the master of this boat? You’re the master of this boat, you’re responsible?’
‘Yes, yes I’m the master, I am responsible’.
‘So you’re the one responsible for the transporting of these drugs to sell to make terrorists money,’ Lerza says.
After thirty minutes the skipper finally comes clean and tells them the whole story.
‘He changed his story completely and told us how he left Gwadar and went to another port to pick up an uncle before going to his at-sea transfer spot,’ Hodgkinson says. ‘He loaded the drugs from another dhow which gave him radio frequencies to call when he reached a certain position.’
The master said he had been told, ‘We expect you to be there at this time and then we’ll send another boat out.’
Under further questioning he spilt the whole story and even confessed how much he and the crew were being paid.
‘This guy just started telling Paul everything he knew and it was apparent that he’s not really that deeply involved, he’s just a mule,’ Hodgkinson says.
From Hodgkinson’s discussions on the dhows it is clear to him that the major drug syndicates usually pay the owner of a dhow a handsome fee and outfit the vessel with fuel and stores. The owner then finds a crew and a master to make the run to Africa with the illicit drugs on board. The master and crew may not even be aware of what the illegal cargo is. They are simply told to sail from point A to point B to meet someone’s cousin and return home again.
In this case they were aware of the drugs because they helped to load and hide the cargo under the supervision of the drug agent. Once the first stash is uncovered it is no-holds-barred as the search becomes a ‘destructive’ exercise. Hodgkinson draws a diagram of the vessel and asks the crew to point to where the drugs are hidden. They point to a hatch on the opposite side from the first hiding place, and that is where the main stash is discovered.
John Armfield sends Able Seaman Eddie Tomsana, who is celebrating his twenty-third birthday, into the drug compartment. Birthday boy comes up with seven more sacks.
‘That’s about 140 bricks worth millions of dollars,’ Armfield says.
Tomsana is the last of Darwin’s newcomers to have been cycled through the boarding party team. His first boarding two days earlier ended in a slight anticlimax because after spending hours searching the dhow it was time to hand over to the ‘black’ team – who then made the 380-kilogram find. So for him, this huge haul is second time lucky.
‘We do two patrols just to get our work experience up. So I was pretty lucky to have got on a team and then have a find. That was pretty exciting for me,’ he says happily.
Tomsana is no stranger to fishing vessels. Born and raised on remote Thursday Island in the Torres Strait, he worked on the local Indigenous crayfish boats before joining the navy. While the rough life lived by the crews on the dhows plying their trade in the Indian Ocean come as a shock to some of Darwin’s sailors, it had a familiar ring to Tomsana.
‘It’s a bit similar to back up at home actually, like when we go out on crayfish boats – our vessels are that big as well,’ he reflects. ‘It’s sort of like that dhow and, yeah, they’re [a] living environment. You can actually see where they’ve got their little beds set up for themselves. When we do a sweep around, some of them are up forward [on the bow]; some of them are [below decks] and they’re cooking. Yeah, they’ve got some food on there, some dishes. When we went on board they had a little rice and chicken going. It’s pretty much the same – they just crash anywhere around the ship.’
What is different on the dhows is the filth and the infestations of rats and cockroaches.
‘Yeah, there was a few [rats] on there,’ he says laconically. ‘I actually saw a few when I was down under the bilge area, underneath the lower deck. There was one crawling around there. I had one on my leg as well.’
Like many children from the Torres Strait islands, Tomsana went to school in Cairns and Townsville. He was on his way to becoming a rifleman in the army when he received a letter from the Defence Indigenous Development Program inviting him to apply for the navy’s Indigenous development course.
After a five-month residential training course based in Cairns, he was one of twelve out of fifty candidates who were selected. ‘And that’s when it started for me in the navy. It was good, I was happy with it – get away from home for a bit.’ His parents were pleased too. ‘Yeah, my mum and dad were heaps happy with that. My dad was actually in the army. He was a sergeant in Charlie company in Darwin.’
Of Tomsana’s four sisters and four brothers, one – his youngest sister – has also joined the navy. He was posted straight into Darwin as a boatswain’s mate, and by May 2016 he had been with the ship for nine months, including the six-month work-up period.
The navy has put a lot of work into Indigenous recruitment, and Phill Henry was able to see for himself just how much the families appreciate it when Darwin passed through the Torres Strait on the way to the 2016 deployment. The frigate stopped in Prince of Wales Channel north of Thursday Island and from across the open ocean came a tiny flotilla of ‘tinnies’ (open metal runabouts) bringing family members from the island out to the ship.
Says Henry, ‘We only had about forty-five minutes or an hour with them but it was just brilliant, because their families couldn’t make it to Sydney for the departure and so we just decided to do that. When we arranged it I didn’t quite realise the families were going to come quite some distance by very small tinnies but it’s what they normally do.’
Some fifteen family members came aboard Darwin.
‘It really was a magic afternoon,’ Henry says. ‘Just to see the faces of the families, seeing what their kids are doing – I can’t really put words into it. And then [there were] the younger kids, their brothers and sisters and nieces that came on board and were able to look around the ship and see what these guys are doing, and they’re telling me that there are some planning to join the navy now.’
While Tomsana is unfazed by the squalid living conditions on board the dhows, they have come as more of a shock to his shipmate Pete Irvine who was in the team that made the seven-tonne weapons haul in February during his first ‘real’ boarding. He had been with Tomsana in the ‘red’ boarding party that was on the brink of finding the initial heroin haul on 21 May when they
had to hand over to the ‘black’ team. They were both determined not to miss finding the drugs this time.
It is also Irvine’s first experience of boarding during very rough conditions.
‘When we were up north it was a lot flatter,’ he says – not that the sea state particularly bothers either of them.
‘Well, for us two, we’re pretty small and light, pretty mobile,’ he explains. ‘We go to the gym a fair bit so we sort of just bounce up on to [the dhow], but for the bigger boys I think it would be harder. I reckon it’s more fun. In our team no one gets sea sick, so we enjoy ourselves over there. I do.’
Tomsana says that as soon they climbed into the RHIB he had a strong feeling that they were going to find some drugs on the dhow. ‘But I didn’t want to jinx us, so I didn’t want to mention anything. I had that sort of [feeling] that, “Oh yeah we’re going to find something,” because I did want to get it down under my name that we actually found something, that I was part of that.’
Irvine was just as keen. ‘I thought when we first got there, “Yep, there’s definitely going to be something.” And then we’d been over there for a few hours and we had no indication that there was anything. We weren’t finding anything until one of the boys just noticed a small little thing, you know. Then we knew it’s got to be there. So that was good.’
As for the crew of the dhows, Irvine says, ‘Most of the dudes you can tell are like proper fishermen, they’re just out there trying to earn some money so you sort of feel sorry for them a bit – to an extent. But realistically they know that they’re not doing fishing – like they’re coming down south. We’ve been on dhows before where they’re legit fishermen and they’re happy and they’ll always offer you food and they’re a different bunch of people. So you know they’re not the head people but I guess they’re just trying to make some money as well. They’re not really the real drugs smugglers. They’re not there to make the big dollars.’
But he says there are always one or two who are part of the smuggling ring. ‘You can always tell them because they’re a bit smarter, cleaner and their attitude – they’re a bit more cranky once they know what’s going on, like one of those dudes the other day was starting to get a bit shitty because he knew he was in the shit. So you don’t have any time for him because realistically he’s not there to help us – and they don’t help. He’s not there helping them very much [either] when it comes to like pulling out the nets and that. You know he’s not a fisherman.’
Irvine describes the living conditions on the dhows as ‘atrocious’.
‘I definitely couldn’t sleep there,’ he says. ‘Four hours on one of those is enough for me. Compared to our growing up I think it’s terrible because they don’t have showers, they drink water out of this drum that everyone shares and they wash their hands with, and like the toilet is just a cut out into the ocean. They obviously don’t do washing and they all don’t look like the healthiest most hygienic people, so their sleeping conditions, they’ll sleep in the engine room, they’ll sleep in the fishing nets, they’ll sleep wherever they happen to have a pillow and rug. It’s filthy, it stinks.
‘There’s been farm animals – goats, all sorts of non-hygienic things. It’s totally different, all different culturally. Another thing – it’s pretty amazing to see – we’re pretty respectful of them when it comes to their prayer time and that. So we’ve been on boardings where the sun rises and so you give them their prayer time and they still take all of that, their culture seriously even though they’re doing the wrong thing. So that’s a big culture thing, their prayer time.’
During the boarding the pair spent hours down in the ice hold, chipping away at the ice with a crowbar.
Tomsana says, ‘They used to be just blocks of ice but they [had] all just sort of melted together so it’s pretty easy to start chipping away to see where all the blocks are and then you’re just carving through just to get to the bottom. We started from one end and then sort of just worked our way across instead of just trying to dig a big hole in the middle. The first part we found, you could see where the cut-out was. It was just in the centre, so when I started hacking on the other side I just worked around and went straight into the middle then spread out from there and then yeah I saw that new plate that was on there, and knew straight away, “Yeah there is something under there.”’
With the help of the crowbars they managed to remove the top, and that’s when they saw all the bags.
‘There were more than what I expected too,’ Tomsana recalls. ‘Pulled out five at first and it was such a small space, once you go under there you can’t sit up, you have to lie down. But then once I got under there I asked for a flashlight and then I had seven more bags under there and I was like, “Oh shit, there’s still more down here,” and there was just rat poo everywhere – crawling around in rat poo. I could feel one just crawling up, it wasn’t bugging me, it was just trying to get away from me as well so I just sort of let him find his way out of the hole and he was out of there.’
Irvine was not quite as sanguine as Tomsana when a rat crawled up his own leg.
‘Brad yelled out to me, “Pete, there’s a rat on your leg.” I just screamed like a girl.’
But once they saw the drugs, excitement took over.
‘Because it was my first drug [haul],’ Irvine explains. ‘We had a good idea that there was more than the previous day and it was just like, “Oh this is pretty cool, that’s what we’re out here for!” Because I’ve done heaps of boardings now where we’ve got nothing and it’s pretty disappointing when you spend twenty-four hours on a dhow taking it apart, and then you’ve got to put it all back together because you haven’t found anything. So finding this one was like – you just see everyone’s faces of the team. It didn’t matter which rank it was, everyone was the same, so excited. It’s just boosted morale around the ship.’
‘Everyone is happy now,’ Tomsana says.
‘Yeah,’ says Irvine. ‘It just picks up not only the boarding party teams but the whole ship, everyone just gets excited because we’re out here to do a job and it’s finally got done, which is good.’
Each morning they go through handover at 7.30 a.m., he says. ‘The off watch people who were on the previous day, they go to PT – we maintain a PT standard for the boarding teams – and then on watch, so we’ll clean our guns, make sure all our kit is ready to go for the next twenty-four-hour RAST [recover, assist, secure and traverse] period and then if we don’t do anything we hand over to the next team and we’ll do our PT and they’ll do the exact same. They’ll do their kit maintenance and when it comes to a boarding and if there is something, the online team will go for it and then we’ll swap out in accordance with the fatigue management.’
Neither Tomsana nor Irvine has personally seen heroin in Australia, but both have seen plenty of people affected by drugs. ‘So it’s a big thing to see it get destroyed and taken away. I’ve seen it ruin people’s lives, so it’s good.’
Tomsana says that back home the drug of choice is mainly marijuana imported from Papua New Guinea – but there is not so much of it in the outer Torres Strait Islands. ‘You know there are drugs going around. You see people using it and people getting affected by it, so it’s good to know that you stopped drugs from getting in the hands of innocent people and hurting themselves. Also, stopping all the money from getting around the bad people, cutting that cycle.’
The boarding team members are whooping it up and having the time of their lives as they stack almost $500 million worth of heroin on the deck of the dhow.
For James Hodgkinson the total half-tonne (512-kilogram) haul is vindication of a lot of hard work by a lot of people.
‘The mood is buoyant on board because it is a whole ship evolution,’ he says. ‘I’m obviously biased and very proud of the boarding party and the work that our guys do in very arduous conditions. There aren’t many people who would be able to stay on one of those boats for ten hours at a time while it’s rolling arou
nd like that.’
Armfield says the navy and the Australian Defence Force are strict about fatigue, but there was no way his ‘red’ team was leaving the dhow until the job was finished.
‘We’re in the military and you roll through, but this time there was no way our team was coming off and I’m pretty sure the comms [radios] would have been turned off at that point,’ he says. ‘We punched out a nine- or ten-hour day, whatever it was, and when we got off the boat and we come back on and everyone’s there to greet you and congratulate you, you’re exhausted but you are that stoked. I’ve been able to achieve a fair few milestones in my career and that will be a highlight. It was the first one we’ve actually been able to go right from leaving the ship to going right through to saying goodbye to the crew.’
Armfield had become quite friendly on the dhow with a man who said he was an uncle of the master and who spoke good English. ‘I was the last guy to get off so I went over and shook his hand and I said, “Mate, I appreciate everything,” because he was nice, he was hospitable the whole time, never once did he lose it, never once was there any rage or anger.’
Armfield is even more passionately against illicit drugs than he was before his numerous boarding operations.
‘The guys that are actually putting their lives on the line to get this to their suppliers and their customers are doing the most dangerous part of the job and they are not making the money for it,’ he says. ‘I wish we could inflict the pain that these guys are suffering on the guys at the top. They are only the guys transiting it – there’s bigger much fish out there that need to be crunched.’
Hodgkinson believes that if heroin users could see what he and his team had seen they might think twice about using the drug.
‘If you’d seen the rats running over the heroin, it’s been cut five times and you’re about to put it into your body, you probably wouldn’t be as keen to get amongst it,’ he says. ‘Also, if you’d met some of the people that were involved in this and you knew the thorough evil that some of the head honchos in these drug trafficking networks are, you might not be as keen to support it. And the money is going back to Al Qaeda, ISIS or Al-Shabaab.’
The Smack Track Page 21