That spring day, Peder kept an eye on the ship’s blindspot, as the black hulled fishing boat angled toward the supertanker’s starboard aft just outside the wake.
The Somali fishermen had been tracking the vessel for a day, passing intel through a broken chain of fishing boats. The Somalis trolled for information from a network of local Yemeni fishermen with satellite communication equipment, some stolen, some salvaged from previous raids, others bought from the spoils of the shipping companies’ ransoms from past hijackings. But it was the remote work of Qas, the Syrian Electronic Army engineer in the Empty Quarter, who took command of the ship’s navigation system without the captain knowing.
In NATO’s quest to collect data for the big picture on the growing piracy threat, they required commercial ships to radio their charts. The broadcasts of ships’ flag, ports of loading, course, and destination compounded the folly, since the network of soft protection openly shared radio transmissions with pirates and fishermen who eavesdropped from near and far.
In 2002, the AIS ship-tracking software system was implemented worldwide, continually transmitting critical shipping data between seafaring vessels—again handing over the specifics of route, course, speed at sea level, and position to the scouts and hackers every ten seconds. Qas hacking the ship relayed that information back to the pirates.
The captain and Peder, a sniper from Norway’s Forsvarets Spesialkommando (FSK)—“Special Forces”—monitored neither the weather nor the AIS tracker of an American-flag container ship heading toward them thirty nautical miles west. Instead, like the pilot, their attention shifted to the third boat on the radar cruising in their shadow of the starboard flank.
Peder spoke in Norwegian, which is similar to Danish, saying: “Captain, we must keep an eye on that craft. It looks suspicious.” He picked up binoculars, dialing the zoom. He tracked the forty-foot dhow as it raced across the sea. His trained eye identified the craft as a pirate mothership—a floating platform from which pirates launch skiff attacks to ensnare targeted vessels. That’s what he deduced from eyeing a large canvas sprawled over a hidden object. Did the canvas cover hauls of fish or bundled nets? Or did skiffs lie in wait underneath?
The captain, a dignified, gray-haired Dane, put his hand on the first mate’s shoulder, and ordered, “Take the crew down to the engine room and lock them in.”
“Ja, ja, run. Hurry,” Peder urged the Filipino, giving the pilot a first aid kit as he headed out the door. The pilot took the ship’s manifest and exited the bridge.
The captain hit the button to start the water cannons, but nothing happened. He hit the button again—no response.
Chapter Nine
PEDER PULLED A barrel-bag from under a cabinet and placed it on a seat. He aimed binoculars at a distant point beyond the bow and watched the dhow cut in front of the tanker. Seconds later, it launched a pair of skiffs with what looked like a mix of Yemeni and Somali pirates. The speedboats tore across the sea, moving ahead of the supertanker. But then, like in an eerie dream, the skiffs swept in a mirror figure eight and gunned it back toward the tanker.
“What the hell?” Peder observed, confused by the tactic.
“Are you sure that’s a pirate ship?” the Danish captain asked, zooming his binoculars.
“Ja. The skiffs are hauling,” Peder said. He eyed the coast of Yemen through the heat haze. “Captain, are we on the right course?” The captain checked the navigation, the GPS coordinates, and the electronic compass. Peder looked at him as if he were a bookish professor, then took out a compass. He swiveled it around in his palm until the needle aligned with the north cardinal point.
“Here, look—” Peder said, holding the compass over the ship’s electronic compass that showed the ship’s instrumentation was off by several degrees. “Something’s wrong, captain. Have you been hacked?”
“Hacked?”
“Ja, cyberterrorists,” Peder said, growing incensed at the captain’s lack of situational awareness. “Maybe it’s why you can’t turn on the water cannons.”
The mothership left the skiff and headed west toward the unseen American container ship, relatively close in nautical miles, but still out of sight in the haze.
Peder put down the binoculars. He watched the skiffs back into the shadow of the supertanker. With the mothership racing ahead, the other twin fishing dhows—well behind the vessel—released a trio of skiffs into the water. One by one, the boats, powered by twin-engine outboard motors, began to crisscross in the tankers’ wake to surround the vessel.
“Jesus Christ, they’re going to attack,” the captain said, alarmed.
“Jesus isn’t here.” Peder unzipped the barrel-bag. He assembled a folding-stock assault rifle with grenade-launcher. He zipped a bag filled with ammo, slung it over his shoulder, and said, “If I can’t turn away the skiffs, we’re fucked.”
The captain pressed a distress beacon, signaling a SOS to NATO and an international defense force stationed on the Yemen-owned island of Socotra off the Horn of Africa. But the base, equipped with rescue and attack helicopters, naval littoral ships, and Navy SEALs and Special Forces battalions, was located hundreds of miles east in the Indian Ocean from their present position. Knowing that, the captain picked up the radio and contacted the American vessel ahead. He warned the American captain about the pirate mothership moving toward his vessel’s direction in a coded message. Then he called mayday, spewing: “This is Blå Himmel, Blå Himmel. Mayday, mayday. We are under pirate attack.”
A staccato burst of gunfire punctuated his words. Bullets ripped across the steel deck below. Screams of panic followed the next exchange of gunfire. Pounding footsteps vibrated the metal stairs and across the decks and catwalks, as crewmen fled or hid to take cover.
An errant rocket-propelled grenade arced over the bridge, scorching the air in a hot vapor trail. The RPG projectile missed with a boom, exploding over the sea.
Peder opened a side portal. He placed the barrel-bag outside, turned to the shaking captain, and warned, “Be careful.”
A burst of shots pelted the metal deck and bridge; the captain ducked. When the shooting stopped, he opened the starboard door, slid outside onto the landing, and listened to the throttle of the skiff engines. He gazed over the rail: the three skiffs from the dhows trimmed alongside and tied on to the supertanker. Skinny, dark-skinned Somali pirates, many of them teenagers, climbed up grapnels and rope ladders, like invasive lizards scurrying up a tree.
The pirate boarding party wore dark blue tee shirts and shorts, forgoing the white tees and tan shorts worn on previous raids, giving the tiny specks out in the gulf a hue harder to detect against the deep blue.
The captain peered down the stairs and saw one Filipino crewman lying in a pool of blood. A tall, sinewy pirate, gripping an AK-47 assault rifle, stepped over the body and raced up the steps. The captain retreated back into the bridge. He picked up the radio to call the distress signal again, when the door flung open with a hostile pirate aiming a rifle in the captain’s face.
In a deep, heated voice with a thick Somali accent, Samatar said, “Cup, no rad.” He swatted the radio out of the captain’s hand, pushing him away from the controls. A second pirate slipped behind Samatar and took over the ship, slowing it down to ten knots … then eight … then held her steady at six knots. “Cup, take me to da box.”
Samatar stared at the captain’s twitching lips and inspected his hollow gaze. The pirate slapped him across the face, pressed the gun’s hot barrel against his cheek, grinding it into the bone, singeing the Dane’s fair skin, barking, “Box, man. Show me the box now.” Samatar grabbed the captain and shoved him out the door into a captured Malay crewman, held under gunpoint by a trio of teenage pirates.
“Again. The box? Show me,” Samatar demanded, cocking the pistol to fire.
The captain shrugged. Samatar shot the Malay crewman in the face—a jet of blood shot out. The victim’s legs gave way; the pirates caught the lifeless body; the head slung to the sid
e. Samatar dug his fingernails into the captain’s neck and pressed the smoking hot barrel against the Dane’s cheekbone, saying, “Money. Take me to da box.”
The Danish captain flinched when Samatar clucked a trigger sound with his tongue, pulling the gun away. The captain pressed his burned flesh, asking, “Box? You mean the safe?”
“Yeow, Cup.” Samatar slapped the captain across the back of the head, shoving him down the stairs toward the captain’s quarters.
Shocked, prodded, and goaded, the trembling captain gripped the handrail and stumbled down the metal steps. He gazed ahead to a couple of pirates chasing a squat Vietnamese sailor—the only other non-Filipino in the crew—across the main deck, where all the crude oil was stored underneath in massive vats. The quarry scurried toward the bow. A moment later another team of pirates climbed on board from the mothership skiffs, cutting off the sailor’s path of escape. Trapped, the sailor threw his hands in the air and surrendered. One pirate searched his pockets; the other pirate knocked him down with the butt of the rifle.
As the captain relived the Malay crewman being shot in the face at point-blank range, he knew that in the first minutes of boarding the escalation of violence had peaked. Why the shock of violence? Why the cold-blooded killing of a crewman? A dead hostage is not a bargaining chip.
In his quarters, the captain followed the advice of Peder to “submit.” He opened the safe without any tricks or resistance. He stepped back as Samatar stuffed stacks of US dollars, Swiss francs, euros, British pounds, and Norwegian kroner into a backpack. The haul netted more than sixty thousand dollars total from Åsgard Lines A/S.
Samatar zipped the backpack shut, slung it over his shoulder, and dragged the captain outside.
Chapter Ten
OUT IN THE glare of the sun, the captain shielded his eyes. Samatar, donning mirrored sunglasses, dragged the captain past the housings covering the giant oil tanks that sprouted up from the double-hulled vessel.
Amidships, Samatar pushed the captain across the entire length of the tanker toward the bow, where pirates stood around a pair of captured sailors, who kneeled over the body of the Vietnamese deck mate.
At the bow, Samatar threw the captain on top of the felled sailor. He clicked a radio and spoke in rapid-fire Somali tongue, barking orders to one of his men: “No. Follow the plan. You see an American eagle watching … a boat off the tail … NATO ships … dump the black gold in the sea. Don’t let your father down.” Samatar listened for a moment. After a pause, a reply shot back: “Okay, Sama.”
Seven stories beneath the bridge, below the fuel tank that fed the ship power to travel across oceans, through the pump room at the base of the hull that separated the reservoir of oil tanks from the stern, sat the engine room. Tucked inside, the first mate and half the crew had barricaded themselves in with the three engines of the U-shaped stern. With the ducted propellers facing inward, the U, as opposed to the V-shaped design, made the screws churn the sea into a single vortex of power to propel the tanker to sail faster. The noise of the engines drowned out the shouts of the pirates banging on the walls and doors to breach the engine room.
Trapped, hiding in the rear of the room, where the shafts of the screws stuck out from the engines through the stern hull, the first mate and crew listened to the muted sounds of banging and braced for the worse. They couldn’t hear all the words of the pirates, but they did hear the broken English that cursed them, that spat out threats, that demanded they open the door or die.
As the escalating Darwinian battle between predator and prey of the pirate attacks ramped up, month-by-month, year after year, the Somalis had come newly prepared for the crewmen hiding behind barred steel doors. The young teen with two front teeth missing took out a wad of Slovakian plastic explosive—Semtex-H—and stuffed a blasting cap in the clay brick, formed the putty over the door handle, then ran a wire around a column. With a signal to other pirates, the teen set off the shaped charge connecting the wire to a mobile phone. He tapped a picture.
The door exploded open, shredding the steel.
The pirates charged in through the smoke, firing into the ceiling to avoid damaging the engines. Shrapnel from the blast ricocheted, wounding a couple of cowering crewmen. The first mate trembled, holding his ears in deafening pain. Behind him, other crewmen quivered with their chests on their knees, their hands raised in surrender.
The Somali teen with the missing teeth slapped the first mate hard. He pushed him into the arms of henchmen, who whisked him out of the engine room. The pirate took out a radio and called topside, telling Samatar that the engine room was secure and the remaining crew were now hostages.
Chapter Eleven
AT THE BOW, Samatar received the radio message that the supertanker was under his control. He lifted the captain off the deck, turned to take him to a metal ladder to stuff him in one of the skiffs, when a gunshot cracked the heat haze.
A bullet ripped through the backpack and clipped Samatar’s shoulder. The shrapnel from the exploding shell blew open the backpack, scattering money, like leaves blown off a tree. With strength fading, Samatar spun around to see where the shot came from. In the pivot, he grabbed hold of the captain’s arm and pulled him into the line of fire. Before he could shield his body with the Dane, the next shot struck Samatar, blowing a hole in his stomach.
Samatar let go of the captain, twisted and hit the deck. The captain fell by his side. The Dane looked at the shock in Samatar’s eyes, then rolled away as the other pirates returned fire. Samatar held his entrails against his body to keep them from spilling out and gazed vacantly at the deck.
The pirates unloaded a volley of gunfire at the bridge.
On the roof of the bridge, bullets whizzed over Peder’s head. He flattened his body and fired one last shot that killed Samatar a quarter mile away. He knew it would be seconds before the pirates pinpointed the sniper nest. So he looked around, surveying the chimney stack rising above the bridge and figured that it was too big and bulky to climb down safely to the stern to abandon ship. Instead, he grabbed the rifle, rolled over, sprang up, and dashed across the roof toward the port stern.
A burst of shots whizzed by him—so close that he felt air molecules slice apart.
At the edge, Peder threw himself down and lowered his body onto the steel beam of an outrigger. He ambled across it, keeping his balance with outstretched arms. As Peder neared the end of the outrigger, extending over the sea, he tossed the rifle into the water and leapt off the superstructure. A swell broke fifty feet below … He fell in a controlled jump toward the wave, scissor-kicking the air, until his feet came together and plunged into the sea, like a fence post.
Underwater, the tanker’s massive wake plowed over him; the rumble of the triple screws forcing him down, churning, pushing him away. Counterintuitively he flapped his arms upward to sink deeper. When the pressure built up in his ears, he knew what to do from his days as an underwater welder: he pinched his nose, gently breathed out, popping the pressure in his ears. With his descent arrested, he looked up at the ship’s wake streaming overhead and fought the urge to surface and the need to breathe.
Peder floated upward, kicking, until he breached the surface like a cork, breathing hard and heavy, spitting salt water out of his mouth, choking, coughing over and over again.
Peder opened a Velcro flap and pressed a radio beacon, signaling to the NATO pirate response team for search and rescue.
Chapter Twelve
THE SUN BEAT down on a pair of lorries carrying white-hulled speedboats through the dusty roads of Bosaso, in the Bari province of northern Somalia. The vehicles rocked and bobbed down street after street, turning in front of stores, squeezed by a fish-processing plant, snaked past mud-caked Land Rovers parked in a narrow alley, and bounded and jostled toward the coast with a couple of passersby giving the delivery truck a second look.
In the pirate capital of Puntland, it was an open secret that the crafts were being delivered not to fishermen, but to the local
group of pirates run by Samatar’s brother, the Puntland warlord Korfa, who took over the pirate tribes of Somaliland to the northwest when NATO forces cracked down on piracy in the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden around the Horn of Africa. This effectively put their trade of hijackings and hostages-for-ransom out of business.
The port city of Bosaso housed 500,000 people. Swaths of sun-bleached, low-rise, clay and brick buildings cut views of the horizon, except when one looked out to sea, where a mosque dome topped nearly every block. Bosaso was the gem of Somalia, rising above the war and poverty. The poor man’s Morocco, with a skyline absent of construction cranes, was sandwiched in a bowl of mountains to the south. Situated on the Gulf of Aden, Bosaso became the hub that received the UN food relief program deliveries; brought in caches of Chinese, Russian, Iranian, Pakistani, and North Korean weapons; smuggled desperate Somalia emigrants across the gulf to Yemen; and once hauled in a third of the annual take of pirate hostages during its peak.
It wasn’t only Mogadishu that had been scarred and held without the leadership of a true government for a generation. Somaliland, which fell under the swift and brutal control of Islamic law, fought several bloody clashes with the Somalis of Puntland beginning in 2003. Brothers Korfa and Samatar played both sides of the war, fueling skirmishes, and ending them in violence.
On the outskirts of the city, a Yemeni boy dismounted a donkey by a watering hole. He left the animal with local farmers, ran through a flock of sheep, and cut across the road in front of the tandem lorries carrying the skiffs. Over an arid hill, a seaside villa came into view. The boy raced the vehicles to the house, where a family of poor Somalis waited outside, their expressions browbeaten, their bodies slack.
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