The senator was taken aback. “Well, I suppose I’ve read things in the papers. But I’ve always thought those were comparatively minor incidents — native fishermen pillaging yachts, that kind of thing. With the theft of this satellite, we’re talking about a completely different scale of events.”
“That once might have been the case, Senator, fifteen or twenty years ago, but not any longer.” Christine’s fingertips did another swift dance on her laptop keyboard. “Here’s another incident report from Indonesian waters near where the INDASAT Starcatcher was taken. It concerns a comparatively new eleven-thousand-ton tanker of Philippines registry with a crew of twenty-four.”
The file had long been committed to her eidetic memory, but she read from the screen for form’s sake. “After taking on a full load of mixed petroleum products at a Brunei refinery, the vessel sailed on its return voyage to Manila. Shortly afterwards, all communications with the tanker were lost and the ship and crew vanished.
“The only result of the immediate search following the disappearance was the discovery of several members of the tanker’s crew washed up dead on an island beach. Their hands were wired behind their backs and their throats had been cut. Of the ship itself and its cargo, no trace was found for over two years.
“Eventually,” she continued, “insurance investigators found the tanker operating off South America. It was sailing under the Ecuadoran flag with a new name, a new owner, and a masterfully falsified set of ship’s documentation. The ship’s new owners testified that they had purchased it in good faith a year and a half before from a ship’s brokerage in Goa, India, and that they had no clue that they had been operating a pirated vessel. Further investigation revealed that the involved ship brokerage was a ‘one-off’ operation set up specifically to dispose of the tanker and that the broker and his staff had long since closed shop and disappeared.”
Christine turned back to the wall screen. “Over the past decade there have been numerous other instances on this same scale.”
Donovan shook his head slowly. “I had no idea.”
“Not many people do, sir. In most instances, piracy is an ‘invisible’ crime. The events usually take place in isolated corners of the world: the Indonesian archipelago, the South China Sea, the coasts of Africa and South America. Also, it’s mostly been a Third World problem. Much of the world’s shipping operates under various flags of convenience and sails using Third World crews. The U.S. media generally would consider the disappearance of a Greek-owned, Panamanian-flagged freighter with a Malay crew a non-story. No flash for the news bites.
“You’ll see articles about it in the dedicated trade journals now and again,” she concluded, “but the shipping lines don’t like to talk piracy up too much, even while they’re the ones being victimized. They’re scared of spooking their crews and clients and of seeing their insurance rates sky rocket.”
“What’s triggered this explosive growth in piracy?” Van Lynden inquired.
“I can name any number of general reasons, Mr. Secretary,” Christine replied with a shrug. “The draw-down of the world’s navies following the end of the Cold War. The international turbulence caused by the collapse of Communist China and by the various Third World splinter conflicts. A failure of the First World powers to recognize the renewal of high-seas piracy as a critical point of concern. But in the Indonesian archipelago, we may be facing another, much bigger, problem.”
“Which is, Commander?”
“In my opinion, we may very well have a new pirate king out there.”
“A pirate king! Now, that is preposterous!” Donovan exploded. “This is the real world, Commander, not a… Gilbert and Sullivan opera!”
An edge came to Christine’s voice. “Excuse me, Senator, fa’ sure this is far, far too real. Maybe I picked an inappropriate word for it, but there is a growing body of evidence that we have someone who is attempting to weld the Indonesian pirate clans into a single unified naval combat force capable of dominating the Indonesian littoral and the sea-lanes that pass through it.”
The intel continued. “The Indonesian pirate clans are primarily factions of the Bugis tribal grouping. These people have a long, long history as shipwrights, master mariners, and sea warriors. Until broken by the coming of the British and Dutch colonial navies, the Bugis fleets ruled the archipelago.
“However, during the twentieth century, their buccaneering operations had mostly been small-scale, disorganized, and primitive — as you said, Senator, primarily targeting yachts, small craft, and local coastal traffic. A few years ago, however, that started to change dramatically.
“Suddenly, someone began providing them with large-scale logistical and organizational support. They’re receiving better boats and equipment, including electronics and military heavy weapons. They’re also receiving training on how to effectively maintain and use this new higher-tech gear. Someone is also providing the pirates with a secure multi-currency money laundering link and is serving as a fence for high-value ships and cargoes on the international market. This individual or group of individuals is also procuring advanced cargo-targeting data from within the shipping industry and, I suspect, is systematically buying off senior government and security officials within the region.”
She spun back to her personal computer and executed another call up. The image of a sleek merchant ship with a stern deckhouse rezzed into the corner of the video screen.
“Consider this case, Senator. This is the Dutch containership Olav Meer. Two months ago, she sailed from Amsterdam eastbound to Kobe, Japan, with full tier loads of mixed cargo. Off the coast of Surabaya, she was intercepted by a flotilla of Boghammer gunboats, fast outboard motor launches mounted with automatic weapons and light antitank rocket launchers. The Meer was ordered to heave to and then was boarded by a well-organized band of Indonesian natives, believed to be Bugis, all armed with modern assault rifles, submachine guns, and hand grenades.
“As the Meer was being boarded, the captain got off distress calls to both his company home office and to the International Maritime Bureau’s Regional Piracy Center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Both immediately notified the Indonesian authorities of the event. However, for reasons explained only as ‘communications difficulties,’ the nearest Indonesian naval patrol craft was not informed of the situation.
“While the Meer crew was held at gunpoint, pirate demolition teams proceeded to blow open a series of outer-tier cargo containers with the expert use of shaped plastique charges. Two million dollars’ worth of high-value cargo was stolen, including pharmaceuticals, bricks of ultra high-purity silicon used for the manufacturing of computer chips, and industrial lens-grinding compounds — stuff that your average Bugis raider would not recognize as treasure trove.”
Christine looked up from the laptop’s screen. “Here is where it really gets interesting, Senator. Not only did the pirates have the specific bill of lading numbers for these specific cargo containers, but high-value loads of this kind are routinely stored in the core tiers of a containership’s cargo stacks. where they are impossible to get at while the ship is at sea. According to the ship’s load manifests and those of the Amsterdam container port that had stacked the Meer’s cargo, that’s where these items had been stored.”
Christine tapped the tabletop with a fingernail to emphasize each word. “But they hadn’t been. The books had been cooked and the high value cargo containers had been loaded into the outer tiers of the stacks, right at weather-deck level — easily accessed by the pirates. Someone within the Amsterdam stevedoring crew had been bribed to misload this cargo specifically so it could be intercepted and stolen in Indonesian waters ten thousand miles and three weeks later.”