If you are targeted, you can’t call 911. There is no such thing as a Somali coast guard and the Europeans and the Americans can’t guarantee anyone’s safety. There is a twenty-nation task force with warships in the region to combat piracy, but they are concentrated in a corridor in the Gulf of Aden, along the southern coast of Yemen, leaving the coast of Somalia practically unguarded. And the entire area represents millions of square miles of ocean. The pirates could have control of your ship and your crew in a matter of minutes. The best you could do would be to make a fast call to the UKMTO, or United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, which is a security clearinghouse for mariners in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. They would get the word out.
Ship owners desperate to get their cargo moving—let’s face it, their real motivation for ending these hostage situations—would hire helicopters and drop ransom money in burlap sacks onto the decks of the ships. Or they would send it in waterproof suitcases in tiny boats with outboard engines. One company even used a James Bond–style parachute to get the money to the criminals, dropping $3 million on the deck of the MV Sirius Star. Everyone made money. The professional security companies were paid handsomely to negotiate the deals with the Somalis. The guys who delivered the ransoms were paid $1 million to risk their lives. The shippers got their vessels back and their insurance companies paid them for the lost time and doubled the premiums for everyone else. Their statisticians would tell them, “Well, only .04 of all shipping in the Gulf of Aden is taken by pirates.” So the vessels kept sailing through it. And the pirates walked away with a king’s ransom.
But the crew members? They usually went home to a hot meal, a few tears from their family, and then they were back on the water again as soon as possible. There was no such thing as combat pay for a merchant mariner.
The pirates always claimed to treat their hostages with care, and from what I heard through the grapevine that was usually true. But I knew they killed when their backs were against the wall. When a group of Somalis hijacked a Taiwanese fishing boat, the Ching Fong Hwa 168, in April 2007, one crew member was shot in the back during the attack. When the owner refused to pay the Somalis’ demands for $1.5 million in ransom, they chose another Chinese sailor at random and shot him six times, executing him in cold blood. The pirates wanted to throw the body to the sharks that swarm in the Indian Ocean but the captain convinced them to store it in the ship’s freezer. Then the bandits put a gun to the head of the captain’s twenty-two-year-old son and threatened to pull the trigger unless the man called Taiwan and got the ransom negotiations on track. For seven months, the crew went through pure helclass="underline" they were pulled out of their beds for mock executions, beaten when they couldn’t understand the Somalis, and fell victim to the oldest killer on the ocean—scurvy—when their vegetables ran out. The Somalis even forced the men to call home and beg their families for their lives.
If they don’t get their money, the pirates get brutal. They flogged Russian sailors whose bulk carrier was being held for $10 million and forced them to lie down on boiling hot decks when the temperature was above 100 degrees. Captured Nigerian crewmen were held in their cabins for three months straight without being allowed to see the sun or breathe fresh air. Indian seamen were tortured and threatened with execution. And as the Maersk Alabama entered the Gulf of Aden, there were more than two hundred crew members of different nationalities being held hostage by pirates on twenty different ships, most of them captured in or near the Indian Ocean.
There were four main groups who were causing most of the havoc, including the National Volunteer Coast Guard, which mostly stuck to raiding small commercial boats and fishing vessels. There was the Marka Group, which operated out of a town by the same name, and the Puntland Group, who were actually former fishermen turned bandits. The last was the Somali Marines, and these guys thought of themselves as a kind of national navy: they had an admiral of the fleet, a vice admiral, and a director of finances. They launched speedboats from mother ships and then directed their members to their targets by satellite phone. And they specialized in the big targets: tankers, container ships.
Us.
The most disturbing news about the pirates actually came from my brother, who’s a Middle East analyst with a conservative think tank down in D.C. He told me that he’d seen reports about Al Qaeda fighters from Pakistan making their way into Somalia and Yemen. That worried me to the nth degree. Al Qaeda is just a whole other ball game. There was actually one bizarre incident I’d heard of where a group of pirates approached a ship in the Strait of Malacca off western Malaysia, threw hooks over the side, and boarded it. They rounded up the crew and stuck them in a room. You would think the next stop would be to demand ransom, but they didn’t. What they wanted to do was learn how to sail the ship. They went down to the engine room and inspected it. They went up to the bridge and practiced steering the ship. They got on the radio and practiced using the VTS (Vessel Traffic Service), utilizing calling-in points for monitoring a ship’s route. When they’d learned everything they could, they left, taking the manuals from the engine room and the bridge manuals and a list of checkpoints that captains use when they’re maneuvering through heavy traffic.
It seemed like a dry run for an Al Qaeda operation, a seaborne 9/11.
After I’d read through the security bulletins, I wrote a short e-mail to Andrea. I guess I was feeling a little lonely, because I started with our ongoing search for a dog to replace the dear, departed Frannie.
Hey Ange—
No word on the dogs? I actually was thinking of Frannie last night, a tear came to my soul. That dang dog is still bugging me! I need a dog!
En route to Mombasa, will call around the 11th or 12th of April. Weather is very nice, until the monsoon sets in. The pirates are getting more active lately. They are attacking even naval military ships. I guess a lack of recognition on their parts.
I didn’t want her to worry, but I couldn’t pretend the Somalis weren’t out there. Andrea and I were in this thing together. We always had been. Before I left, I’d told her that it was getting more dangerous with the pirates. “Eventually they’re going to take an American ship,” I said.
“They’re not that stupid,” Andrea said. “They wouldn’t attack one of ours.”
Deep down in her heart, though, she knew that sort of thing could happen. It’s part of being a merchant mariner’s wife. But somehow she was counting on that American flag to keep me and the crew safe. Who would dare to attack the Stars and Stripes?
Andrea never lost sleep over my being out there. Maybe it was wishful thinking, but she’s always been good at keeping her mind away from that idea. We’ve always been lucky. We’ve worked hard for everything we’ve had and we consider ourselves blessed. I guess she thought that would continue.
Andrea’s friends always marveled at her, saying, “I don’t know how you do it, being a merchant mariner’s wife.” Her joking response always was “Are you kidding me? Your husband’s away half the time, you get a check every two weeks, what’s not to like?” That always got a lot of laughs. But it’s true that most seamen’s wives are strong, independent women capable of picking up a shovel or a hammer or grabbing a flashlight when the water heater stops working. When I left for sea, I often gave Andrea what she called the “honey-do list”: “Honey, can you make sure to get the oil changed in the car, see that the taxes are paid, get the dryer fixed, et cetera.” In the early days of our marriage, when she was home with two kids in diapers, in the dead of a Vermont winter, Andrea really had to be strong. “There were many times when I felt like the proverbial woman standing on the side of the road with a flat tire,” she’s fond of saying. “You either learned to survive on your own or you got a divorce and went back to a normal way of life.” Thank God we have terrific neighbors and family who would always be there if Andrea needed anything at all. If a tree fell down on our property, our neighbors would show up with a chainsaw and a tractor.