Now he sat strapped into the cockpit and waited for final preparations to be completed on the helicopter deck. He leaned forward and squinted up through the glass canopy at the aft mast. A peregrine falcon was sitting there, despite the noise from the engines and the spinning rotor. For a week, he’d seen it following the ship, mostly perched there, watching, or gliding on the winds around the ship. Now it had prey in its beak, Christ knows where it’d been caught, because it was not a fish.
A fresh splash of seawater hit the rotor, spotting the glass. The ship rocked in the rough seas of the southwest monsoon. Newly arrived, it had brought strong winds over the past few days. The pilot tried to get comfortable, but he couldn’t, not with his bulky vest bursting with all the survival equipment someone else had decided he needed. The worst, comfort-wise, was the bulletproof vest beneath his flight suit, with its heavy protective plates front and rear. It weighed almost twenty kilos. But he wanted that vest, even though it would drown him if he crashed into the sea. Stray bullets were what scared him the most, beyond the fear of being taken hostage by any of the insane militias based in the Horn of Africa. The flight crews no longer joked about why they’d save one last bullet in their gun.
The ship lurched again, and the helicopter’s shock absorbers reluctantly responded. The copilot rattled off the final checklist items, and the gunner in the rear, after swearing about something, announced: “Cabin check complete.” Outside, the flight deck crew stumbled off, carrying the lashings they’d removed from the helicopter. Already, big flowers of sweat darkened the pale blue fabric of their jumpsuits. Even in the strong wind, it was impossible to defend against the heat.
They had an extra passenger in the helicopter. An hour before takeoff, the ship’s first officer had told the pilot: “You know, we’ll have Lieutenant Slunga aboard, the head of MovCon.”
MovCon, the logistics unit, normally kept to their unloading duties in Djibouti. The HMS Sveaborg had made a brief stopover in Salalah a few days before, when the ship’s air-conditioning had broken, and they’d quickly arranged a delivery of spare parts to the nearest port. It was Slunga himself who’d organized it, then stayed on board when they cast off again. “MovCon performs miracles, but they work their asses off, especially Slunga,” said the commander. “He’d probably appreciate a ride.” One of the few rewards the brass on board could give their men was a trip in a helo, if the pilot in command didn’t object.
“Of course we’ll take him.”
Before takeoff, the pilot helped Slunga put on his gear, a slimmed-down version of what the others wore, and they’d introduced themselves. The lieutenant, with his white-blond hair, projected something both friendly and preoccupied. He chatted about his family, especially his son whom he clearly missed a lot, and never stopped asking questions. But as soon as Slunga’s attention wasn’t required, his thoughts drifted away, and he seemed startled when the conversation started up again. He grabbed a cup of coffee before takeoff but took only a sip.
Now Slunga was in the aft of the cabin with the gunner. Amid all the commotion around him, he seemed finally to have forgotten what was bugging him, and he sat down looking expectant as the engines roared.
A gust ruffled the falcon’s feathers up on the mast, while on the helicopter deck, the pilot tried to get a feel for the motion of the ship, looking for the sweet spot in the erratic rhythm. The deck light turned from red to green, and he got his chance as the aft heaved upward. The helicopter lifted off through the gusty winds in one long sweep over the starboard side.
They flew under radio silence at low altitude toward the coast. After the tension of takeoff, they got a half hour of peace. The sea always seemed calmer and bluer from the air than when you stood on deck. The short period of calm invited conversation, sometimes even confidences.
“So . . . ,” asked the pilot, “how’s it going?”
The gunner knew exactly what he was talking about. “I was in her cabin yesterday, but she said that now that we’re on duty, everything’s off. But the next time we’re in port, she wants to go out.”
“And you want to go in,” laughed the copilot. The gunner said nothing.
“Are you serious about her?” asked Slunga, the extra passenger.
“Yes, he is,” replied the pilot for the young gunner.
“Do something special, then, don’t just take her out for a few beers.”
“It’s hard,” replied the gunner, sounding blue. “You know, you only get one day ashore.”
“Not beer and a disco ball,” continued Slunga, “not with the life you live out here. Give her peace every minute of those twenty-four hours. Take her away from it all, to the beach, where it’s only her and you, with no one from the ship around.”
“That’s a sweet dream, but how can I make it happen from here?”
“Not you. I’ll do it, and I know just the place. If you say she’s worth it.”
“Are you serious?”
“Doesn’t MovCon have anything better to do than arrange love nests?” the copilot tried to joke.
“What could be more important?” said Slunga. There wasn’t a trace of irony.
They flew in silence for a minute, before the pilot broke it. “The first officer says you’re working hard these days.”
“Did he mention me specifically?” replied Slunga.
“Why?”
“No, nothing. We have enough to do, sure, we work around the clock. But I have all the people I need. I’ve even managed to hire a crew of locals on the base in Djibouti. It’s just that you’re on the ship out here, while I’m ashore with my little gang. Strong personalities, and lots of distractions near the base and in town.”
“Discipline problems?”
“Sometimes.”
“You’ve got to keep them on a short leash.”
“I try to.”
For the last few days, the Swedish patrol vessel HMS Sveaborg had been skulking outside a known pirates’ nest not far from Bosaso.
As they reached the beach, the helicopter climbed to a few hundred feet, and then the cabin door opened wide and the machine gun emerged, ready in case of trouble. With their powerful cameras, the crew started taking videos and stills. The beach was more than a kilometer wide, but what interested them stood by the water’s edge: a half-dozen open boats, their hulls resting wearily on their sides, right on the sand where the tides came up, along with some improvised shelters built from rubble, and the fuel storage, with oil barrels covered by orange tarps.
“Not many awake,” said one of the pilots, about the stillness below.
“Sleeping off their khat highs.” With the cabin door wide open, they had to half-shout to make themselves heard over the wind and the rotor’s roar.
“There, at two o’clock,” yelled the copilot. The gunner turned the high-magnification camera sitting in a gimbal under the fuselage, the movement making the TV screen flicker. Then it stopped and came into focus.
“Weren’t there some oil drums here before?”
“Nothing left but marks in the sand.”
The camera moved again. “And I can’t find that pile of RPG grenades we saw yesterday.”
“High tide was just after sunset.”
“Seems a few snuck out at night.”
On the second lap around the camp, the radio crackled. They couldn’t hear a thing but figured it was the ship. Distance was a problem, and the pilot had to corkscrew up to a higher altitude before they got a voice.
“Snowman from Mother, do you read us?” It was the combat control officer on the Sveaborg.
“Not even a half hour out. Always something,” said the copilot in a tired voice, as he pressed the transmit button. “Snowman here.”
The Sveaborg had received a distress call from a merchant ship. The helicopter was given a position, and the pilot turned around and picked up speed toward the sea. While the copilot went over the adjustments on the radar screen, the gunner pulled in his machine gun and closed the cabin door. Instant
ly, the wind noise died down in the helmet headphones.
Soon afterward, an agitated voice came on the radio, heard through constant interruptions in the transmission. It was the skipper of the MV Sevastopol, a Russian freighter. If there was anything you learned in the Gulf of Aden, it was how to understand all the world’s accents in English, shouted over Channel 16. “Calm down, calm down . . . Please, say again . . . Who is shooting?”
But they got the gist. “Shit!” swore the gunner, who felt tricked by the pirates sneaking out at night. It took a while to get more out of the skipper than “Two boats, two boats” and “Please hurry up!” The pirates were shelling the bridge with bursts from their automatic weapons, and it seemed the ship had also taken some grenade hits. The men in skiffs had tried more than once to hook ladders onto the sides, and one of the freighter’s crew members was badly hurt. But so far, no pirates had gotten on board, and the captain was maneuvering his ship as well as he could to keep them off. “Please hurry up!”
The MV Sevastopol had grown into a fat cigar-shaped blip on the radar screen, matching its swelling dot on the horizon, and now had a clear wake.
Only in the last few hundred meters did the helicopter slow down. The same routine as before: door open, machine gun out. Although they weren’t taken by surprise, the men in the motorboats hesitated for a moment. The pirates had been so close, the prey almost in hand, just one more minute and . . . Even if you looked right into their faces, you’d never see disappointment. The skipper kept yelling over the radio, and on another channel, the Sveaborg kept asking what was happening, but the helicopter crew couldn’t care less about that. They had a single focus: the men in the boats, and what they did with their hands. The only one actually aiming with a weapon was their own gunner. The MV Sevastopol had stopped zigzagging and held a steady course, with one pirate boat just a few meters from her side, and a man still holding on to the long, hooked boarding ladder. The other boat was farther out. Five men in each—bare feet, skinny arms, T-shirts and shorts. A few moments to decide who was strong and who was weak. “Shoot! Shoot the monkeys!” shouted the Sevastopol’s captain.
As if on cue, the two pirate boats revved to full throttle, spraying arcs behind their outboard engines. The Russian freighter remained on course, a tired old dinosaur, while both skiffs disappeared, leaving white streaks.
The pilot had already caught up. He could see how the men below shook as their boats hit the waves, even though their speed was child’s play for the helicopter. He felt a shameful wave of satisfaction, for in that instant, it was all just a game. An interlude between the pirates’ firing on defenseless people and the consequences that would bring. Now they were trying to escape, but escape was impossible.
“Give them a few rounds, see what happens.”
The gunner, who already had them in his sights, pulled the trigger. Twenty meters in front of the first boat, the water leapt up in white columns. The skiffs didn’t slow down. But the second boat, which had been following the first, made a wide arc and took off on its own. One helicopter, two boats; they’d certainly lose half their catch. The pilot continued straight ahead, a hundred feet up, just behind the remaining boat. The copilot updated the Sveaborg over the radio about what was happening. They needed no further orders or permission to pursue. It was obvious what they were facing, and what the people in the boats had done—piracy, no small thing; someone had been seriously wounded on a merchant ship. They were to be stopped at any cost.
“Fire again.”
The second volley hit just in front of the bow, so that water from the impact splashed into the boat. Some of the men ducked, as if the splashes were shrapnel. A chink in their armor, revealing that they were afraid. “We’ll give them a chance.” The pilot had dropped closer, less than a hundred meters between them now. Here the helicopter was at its most vulnerable, given that the pirates had more firepower: four or five Kalashnikovs and at least one rocket-propelled grenade. But these wouldn’t be an option now. The language of power was spoken through shiny technology, thundering rotors, and targeted firepower. Had anyone so much as reached for a weapon on the floor, the gunner would have instantly opened fire on the boat, without even an order from the commander on board. It would have been self-defense, clear and simple. And the men in the boat knew it. They might have been too high on khat or too afraid, but mostly they held their fire because of the balance of power. They had to accept their futility first.
One last chance, the pilot had said. The third volley sprayed from bow to stern next to the rail of the skiff. Impossible to shoot any closer without hurting someone, and none of the pirates wanted to risk a challenge. They just wanted to survive, and maybe get back home again. The boat stopped abruptly, and all five raised their hands. The helicopter pulled away and began circling. There was an intense burst of radio traffic, and they calculated their fuel reserves.
“How much time?” asked the pilot.
“Keep us at just below sixty knots, and we might have enough for an hour.” The HMS Sveaborg had been traveling at top speed for a while. Down below, the pirates had lowered their hands and sat bobbing in the boat, while the gunner kept them centered in the viewfinder of his TV camera. “Now they’re dumping the ladder,” he said. That was also part of the game. The Somalis were trying to get rid of evidence: they lowered the ladder into the sea while the gunner filmed.
“And there go the guns.”
Five nameless men in an empty boat somewhere in the Gulf of Aden.
The helicopter circled. They’d done this before. But then the radio crackled—an unexpected surprise.
“Snowman, Snowman, this is Russian Federation warship Admiral Chabanenko.”
“Shit,” swore the copilot. The Russians had a handful of warships in the region that didn’t belong to any task force. Instead, they ran their own show. Well-armed and aggressive, their approach to Africans with flip-flops and Kalashnikovs was: gloves off. The Russian destroyer Admiral Chabanenko was moving in like an arrow. And the fact that she could be heard over the VHF radio meant she couldn’t be very far off.
“Snowman, confirm you have the Somali pirates under your control.” The Russian combat controllers had a distinct accent, and their tone was never polite.
“Answer them,” said the pilot.
“You know what they’ll demand?”
“Answer them.”
The copilot replied to the Chabanenko, telling them where things stood. Then he radioed the Sveaborg: “Following the traffic?”
“We follow.”
“What’s happening?” asked Slunga, who’d been sitting silently in the cabin.
“We’ll explain later,” said the pilot.
“Just make sure to get a video of that damn boat down there,” the copilot reminded the gunner.
“Confirming your position,” said the Russians.
“They already see us on their radar,” the pilot explained to Slunga, and then added, resigned: “They’re taking over.”
“Mother, what are our orders?” radioed the copilot to the HMS Sveaborg.
“Wait,” said the Swedish combat controller.
It was obvious. The Russians had contacted their own military headquarters through other channels. Made their demands. Asserted their rights. Somewhere a Swedish admiral was sitting down with a lawyer, reading the fat paragraphs of rules and conventions: a Russian merchant ship attacked in international waters, a sailor seriously injured. Rights and wrongs—and politics. And keeping his hands clean. Chasing pirates was less about battle operations than about mastering these paragraphs.
The helicopter circled while the five men in the boat sat dazed and unsuspecting. A destroyer was on its way, doing at least forty knots. Somewhere in the Russian hull, weapons were being loaded and grenades readied.
“Snowman from Mother,” the Swedish ship radioed, “hand over the suspects.”
The copilot was silent for a second, letting it sink in before he answered. “Mother, we are handing o
ver five men to the Russians. You are fully aware of this?”
“Drop it,” snapped the pilot, over the intercom. But the copilot had scored his point and wouldn’t do any more grumbling. The admiral had decided that he couldn’t put up a fight. Who knew what he really wanted? Certainly he realized what was happening. But Legad, the military lawyer, had pointed to some lines in the rule book and showed the admiral that, even though he was cornered, he could come out with his hands clean.
“Hand over the object and document your actions,” repeated the combat control on the HMS Sveaborg.
“You bet your ass we will,” muttered the copilot, and called out, “Confirmed.” Then he asked the gunner: “You noted the time of the order, right?”
“Of course.”
Then the Russian destroyer arrived, first a blip on the radar, then a dark gray shape through the haze. A warship on the open seas—for the Russians in the twenty-first century, everything was still about flexing their muscles: huge spinning antennas and guns in every direction. A death star.
Now it was their show.
“Snowman, stand by, boarding team on the way,” said a voice that no human being would want judging his fate. Two rubber boats shot out from the destroyer carrying the boarding team: black boats, with men dressed entirely in black. On the helicopter’s TV, the men in the pirate boat looked vaguely anxious—they’d probably seen the destroyer and the rubber boats coming. They raised their arms again, straight up like exclamation points, all five.
“You still filming?” asked the copilot.
“Yes,” replied the gunner.
“Turn it off now and put away the camera,” commanded the pilot.
After the Monsoon Page 2