A Captain's Duty

then on, it’s a game of ransoms and threats.
    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 hell: 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.