“So the extremists aren’t interested in the actual piracy operations.”
Ibrahim shook his head. “A few million dollars raised annually from ransoms would be nothing for them compared to the huge amounts they’re making from controlling the oil supply in the Middle East and Libya. They know that if we detected that kind of involvement in piracy, the Western response might count badly against them. We’re not talking drone strikes, military action, but about cyber warfare, shutting down bank accounts and stopping transactions. Unless a ransom is paid in hard cash, those demanding it have to reveal banking details somewhere along the line in order to get paid, and that’s their Achilles heel. Most of the terrorist organizations have astute financial management and are very careful to avoid anything like that. Even their recruiting activity among the villages is difficult to pin down, because they use the same agents as the ones used by those who bankroll the pirates. A few hundred dollars changes hands, a few more young men disappear either out to sea or to the terrorist training camps in the north, and some of them never return. Gradually the fishing communities have the lifeblood sucked out of them. It’s become the way of life here.”
“So who pulls the purse strings for the pirates?” Costas asked.
Ibrahim gave them a grim look. “Western investment consortia, hedge fund operators, working through so many layers of financial complexity that they’re impossible to identify. We’re not talking about some evil mastermind here, just about those same brokers who will quite happily put money into arms companies that sell to despotic regimes, or drug companies that hike up their prices when they have a monopoly. When you try to understand how a child soldier can gun down his neighbors in central Africa, or a mother die untreated in a village because she can’t afford the drugs, it’s the same as seeing a bullet-ridden pirate floating in the sea off Somalia or a terrified hostage in a ransom video. The real culprit is the ordinary investor living in Western affluence where these realities can barely be imagined, who hands his money to a broker with instructions to reach a certain profit margin. For those down the line who channel the money to the frontlines, it makes no odds whether it’s oil exploration or mining or pharmaceuticals or armaments or piracy, and morality rarely comes into it.
“You can add to that list the problem we have with overfishing. With the upwelling of the current along this coast, these should be the richest waters off Africa, and yet our fishermen are among the poorest. Why? Because foreign fishing companies underwritten by Western investors took advantage of the anarchy in Somalia to dispatch large trawlers and factory ships into our waters, knowing that we had no way of policing them. The result is that our fish stocks were decimated and have only just begun to recover. More Western investors reap profits, more of our people fall below the breadline as a result. That’s the reality of capitalism and the Third World for you.”
“We see something of the same with treasure hunting,” Jack said. “The investors who fund it through similar kinds of consortia are often decent people who are likely to be appalled when they see images of the destruction of ancient sites by terrorists, and who love to visit museums with their children. Few of them have any idea that their money is contributing to the wanton destruction of archaeological sites in the search for loot.”
Ibrahim nodded thoughtfully, and then straightened up, looking at his watch. “So. What can I do for you? Zaheed is an old friend, and of course I wanted to meet the famous Jack Howard. But you didn’t come here to fight pirates.”
Jack took out his phone, opened a photo, and pushed it across the table. “What do you know about this vessel?”
Ibrahim glanced at the image. “Deep Explorer. Zaheed told me you were on her trail. We’ve been tracking her for the past three days, since she came up on our screens. She’s owned by a salvage company of the same name, specializing in shipwrecks. You, of course, will know all about them.”
“Costas and I were the UN monitoring team two weeks ago that checked out a Second World War wreck off Sierra Leone they were intending to rip apart. Let’s just say the outcome didn’t exactly go in their favor. I know their boss personally, a guy named Landor, what makes him tick. Our own IMU satellite monitoring told us that they’d sailed from Sierra Leone around the Cape and into these waters. Have you seen anything to indicate why they’re here?”
“They’ve stayed just beyond territorial waters, so they’re outside our jurisdiction. When they first appeared, we ran the usual background check and everything seems legitimate: registration, officer qualifications, all the paperwork in order. There was no obvious cause for concern — that is, until yesterday morning.”
Jack stared at him. “Go on.”
Ibrahim gestured to one of the officers beside him, a young bearded man, immaculately turned out. “I’d better let Lieutenant Ahmed take over. This has been his operation.”
The officer stood up abruptly, speaking perfect English. “Firstly, Dr. Howard, let me say what a huge pleasure it is to meet you. I’m a keen diver and an avid follower of all your adventures, those of Dr. Kazantzakis too,” he said, nodding toward Costas. “If there’s anything I can do to help, especially underwater, please let me know.”
“Much appreciated, and we will,” Jack said, smiling. “Now, tell us what you’ve got.”
Ahmed pointed at the chart on the table. “At about 1100 hours yesterday, four crewmen from Deep Explorer came ashore in a Zodiac at this village on the northeastern Somali coast. We have informants in all of the main coastal villages, so we were kept abreast by phone of everything that went on. They recruited one of the most notorious of the pirate gangs. The pirates call themselves badaandita badah, ‘saviors of the seas,’ which the leader of this gang has abbreviated to Badass Boys. Unlike the local Somali men who have been forced into piracy by unemployment, the Boys are thugs from Mogadishu and further inland, former street gunmen who have only known war. Their leader, who spent his teenage years in America and goes by the name of the Boss, has only just got out of jail. Each time he’s imprisoned he gets out on a technicality, we think because the Western investment operatives who fund him pay backhanders to the judiciary. He and the Boys have orchestrated half a dozen ship seizures over the past year and several million in ransom payments. He’s also a brutal sadist, responsible for numerous murders, including his own gunmen when they displease him.”
“I can’t believe the Deep Explorer people have gotten involved with piracy,” Costas said, shaking his head. “They may be unscrupulous, but that would be sheer madness.”
“They’ve recruited the pirates as players, but we believe their objective has nothing to do with piracy.” Ahmed sat down, pulling his chair up and leaning forward, looking at Jack intently. “My club has dived the Somali coast extensively since things became more settled here, and we know the location of many shipwrecks. Several of us have a special interest in wrecks of the Second World War, and we’ve researched them comprehensively, including original documentation from Italian, German and Allied observers who were based in this region. There aren’t that many along this coast because it was away from the main theaters of war, but one of the most intriguing is the account of a Type XB U-boat, U-409.”
Jack stared at him. “What do you know about it?”
“She was last seen on the twenty-sixth of May 1945, almost three weeks after the war with the Nazis had ended. Her last known position was off the southern Somali coast, when she was spotted by a USAF Liberator out of Aden carrying out a routine patrol. It was assumed that she’d surfaced preparatory to surrendering, but she dived after the aircraft came into view and was never seen again.”