Pirates

by Ross Kemp

  I grabbed a quick breakfast before joining Commander Simpson on the bridge for an update on what had happened overnight. Nothing in terms of piracy, he told me. We looked at his chart which mapped the flow of shipping up and down the corridor. It was a busy old place but that didn’t guarantee that we’d find ourselves any pirates. I continuously had to remind myself that robberies are unpredictable events, whether you’re on land or sea. I was glad, of course, that nobody had been pirated over the past couple of days, but I couldn’t keep the nagging disappointment at bay that so far our search had been unsuccessful. I asked the ship’s commander, straight out, what the chances were of us coming into contact with pirates.

  ‘There’s every chance,’ he told me firmly, before indicating the shipping map again. ‘If you’re a pirate, there’s a lot of trade out there.’

  He was right. What none of us knew at the time, however, was that things weren’t going to pan out quite the way anyone expected.

  To pass the time, I decided to go and chat with some of the junior ratings, the rank and file of Northumberland ’s crew. I wanted to know what the ordinary sailors thought about the job that they were being tasked to do. We met in the 45-man mess, so called because, surprise surprise, 45 men live in it. They were a friendly, welcoming bunch, and I asked how many of them thought, when they joined the Royal Navy, that they’d be tasked with looking for pirates. They all shook their heads – all of them, that is, apart from one bright spark. ‘I did, I must admit,’ he announced. ‘But then again I joined in 1640.’ Give that man a prize!

  I pointed out to the lads that it was costing a great deal of money to keep them out here in the Gulf of Aden. Was it worth it? Weren’t our resources better used elsewhere. One of them shrugged. ‘You’re pretty much damned if you do and damned if you don’t,’ he said. ‘If you do go and investigate skiffs and it just turns out to be fishermen, you could be seen as hassling them. But if you didn’t go and investigate and it turned out to be a piracy attack, then they would look and say, what’s the point of you actually being here?’

  A pretty succinct distillation of the problem, I thought. But what of the pirates themselves? There are two sides to every story, and was it possible, while deploring their actions, to have sympathy for their motives? The people of Somalia are, after all, very, very poor. Mr 1640 gave his opinion.

  ‘I see their point of view,’ he said, ‘because they’ve got families to feed. And they think the only way they can do it, because they’ve had no government for 20 years and all the rest of it, is to go out and rob some vessels. But I’ve got a family to feed. I don’t go round pointing guns at people.’

  A pause.

  ‘Well,’ he added, ‘I do…’

  Everyone laughed, me included. In a funny kind of way, however, this light-hearted comment had highlighted the problem well. Piracy is a serious criminal act, and like many criminal acts it is being dealt with by the threat of force. That doesn’t mean to say, however, that some pirates aren’t driven by genuine necessity. The World Bank estimates that about three-quarters of Somalis live on less than two US dollars a day. One of the few industries they have is fishing. The Gulf of Aden has traditionally been rich in tuna and other valuable fish. With worldwide fish stocks plummeting as a result of overfishing, the relative riches of the Gulf of Aden have attracted illegal trawlers. Foreign ships have made a beeline for the Gulf, hoovering up the precious fish stocks – to the tune of $300 million worth a year – to sell around the world, destroying the livelihood of these Somali fishermen before their very eyes.

  The destruction of Somalia’s fishing industry is not the only seaborne indignity the country has had to suffer at the hands of greedy foreign nations ready to take advantage of the political upheavals in the area. Another example has been going on for many years, but did not fully come home to roost until the Asian tsunami of 2004. Somalia is almost 3,000 miles away from the epicentre of the earthquake which caused that tsunami, but the effect on the country was devastating nevertheless. Accurate official figures do not exist, but it’s thought that nearly 300 people were killed by the coastal damage and more than 50,000 were displaced. The region of Puntland took the lion’s share of the damage, and that is the area of Somalia from which most of the pirates originate.

  The tsunami was disastrous enough in itself, but it also uncovered a dirty little secret of the Somali coast. When the waters subsided, they left behind debris carried in from the sea. This debris included rusty steel drums, barrels and a range of other containers, many of them smashed open by the force of the tides. These containers held vast quantities of toxic waste – waste that foreign countries had been dumping off the coast of Somalia for more than a decade. Why Somalia? As usual, it comes down to the green stuff. To get rid of toxic waste in Europe is expensive – around the $250-a-ton mark. To dump it off the coast of Somalia costs $2.50. You do the math.

  These containers of toxic waste are more than just an eyesore. They contain all manner of harmful materials – radioactive uranium, lead, heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury, hospital waste, chemical waste… The list goes on, and none of it’s the sort of thing you want ending up on your beaches. The effect of this waste on health is terrible. Since the containers washed ashore there have been many reports of locals falling ill with symptoms that you might reasonably expect to be associated with such substances – bleeding from the mouth and abdomen, for example. There’s no real way of proving that these symptoms stem from exposure to the toxic waste, if only because there’s no one brave enough to set foot in Somalia to investigate it fully, but the correlation between the waste and the illnesses seems obvious enough to me.

  Although it was the Asian tsunami that highlighted this problem, both to the Somalis and to the world, there had been rumours it was happening for a number of years. In 1994 an Italian journalist by the name of Ilaria Alpi travelled to Somalia to investigate. She claimed that the Italian Mafia was behind a large chunk of the toxic waste dumping, and it has been estimated that the Mafia is behind about 30 per cent of Italy’s waste disposal. It was to be the last investigation the journalist ever made. She and her cameraman were killed in Somalia. Word on the street is that they were assassinated. By the Mafia? By Somali warlords? By any of the many people with a vested interest in keeping this business alive? Who knows, but it seems clear that a major international criminal organization was polluting the Somali coast without any thought for the people of that country. And it wasn’t like they didn’t have enough to deal with already.

  Their livelihoods taken from them, their land poisoned, it would have been naive to expect the Somali fishermen to take this sitting down. They armed themselves, took to their boats and started patrolling the area. Some of them tried to scare foreign shipping away; others tried to levy a ‘tax’ on them. These fishermen did not see themselves as pirates, but as an unofficial coastguard, there to stop their waters being destroyed in the same way as their land had been. From these beginnings, the piracy epidemic spread. This is not to say that there are not gangsters, opportunists and out-and-out criminals among the pirates of Somalia. There are. Many of the pirates of Somalia are, relatively speaking, wealthy men, happy to use the wrongdoings of other nations as an excuse for their actions. But the truth about the origins of piracy in the area is not black and white. As usual, it is shades of grey.

  1500 hours.

  What looked like being a quiet day was suddenly hotting up. Two small unidentified vessels had been picked up on the radar. Nobody knew who they were or what they were doing, and so Lieutenant Commander Simpson had ordered the Fleet Protection Group and the Merlin to go and investigate. The already busy corridors of Northumberland became suddenly busier as we prepared ourselves for the off.

  The Marines loaded themselves into their RIBs while I joined the Merlin crew and once more took off into the skies. The two Marine snipers in the helicopter took up position by their weapons – one with a GPMG, capable of firing a lot of rounds and designed t
o take out people, the other with an AW50 50-cal rifle designed to take out the engine block. Each weapon had a piece of black material attached to its side, the purpose of which was to stop the casings of discharged ammunition from pinging back into the Merlin. Those casings are very hot, and you want a fire on a helicopter even less than you want a fire on a boat…

  Down on the water, the RIBs started circling one of the two skiffs. Everyone on the boats put their hands up. They were a ragtag bunch – men, women and children, all poorly dressed and with expressions of confused despair on their faces. It was clear from a single look that these were yet more refugees, unfortunate Africans risking the dangers of being smuggled across the water to Yemen.

  The Merlin circled the second skiff, but something was happening back at Northumberland. A channel 16 distress call. Something was going on, and it was going on nearby.

  The distress call came from a vessel called the MV Saldanha. It had a crew of 22, including 19 Filipinos, and was registered to the Marshall Islands in the north Pacific Ocean. On the bridge of the Northumberland the radio operator made contact. ‘Can you tell me what your situation is? What’s going on now?’

  A hesitant voice replied. It spoke English but with a heavy accent. ‘Three speedboats on the starboard side. They send a message to slow down. The mother ship is on our port side, about one and a half to two miles.’

  You didn’t have to be a naval expert to twig that it sounded suspicious. The officer operating the radio turned to Commander Simpson for instructions. ‘Do you want them to increase speed and start manoeuvring, sir?’

  More from the Saldanha: ‘They are still approaching us, at low speed now. We’ll try to keep them astern.’ He didn’t sound entirely confident.

  The radio operator received his instructions, then relayed them: ‘Saldanha, this is Foxtrot 23. I want you to increase speed to your maximum and start manoeuvring heavily to port and starboard.’

  This was a defensive manoeuvre. If the Saldanha could get up speed and then start swerving, it would create a wave and make it more difficult for the pirates – if indeed that’s what they were – to approach. In the meantime, Commander Simpson ordered the Merlin, with us on board, into action. ‘Send the helicopter off to that bearing.’ It looked like we were about to have our first taste of piracy.

  The MV Saldanha was 60 miles from our current position. In a Merlin helicopter in clear conditions, that takes about 12 minutes. Not a long time, but we were all aware of the need for speed. If these were pirates, we knew that they could board the Saldanha extremely quickly, and once this had been completed, there was nothing we could do about it. There was a feeling of tense expectation in the helicopter as it sped towards its target; and if it was tense for us, I couldn’t help wondering what it must have been like for the crew that believed itself to be under attack.

  As we crossed the water as fast as the machinery would allow, the Saldanha kept in constant contact with Northumberland, relaying its precise position. But at that distance the warship was of little practical use to the merchant vessel. It was all going to be down to the Merlin. The Marine snipers took up their positions, but I couldn’t help thinking that, if it came down to it and the sniper with the AW50 had to destroy the pirates’ engine blocks, these would be pretty hard shots to make, being from one unstable platform to another. I pointed this out to one of the Marines and he didn’t disagree.

  The minutes passed. Saldanha appeared as a blur on the high-definition screens when we were still eight minutes away. We were approaching from the west, and word came through that an American missile cruiser in the vicinity – the USS Vella Gulf – had dispatched a second helicopter from the east, which was also hurrying towards the distressed ship. For both aircraft it was a race against time. We had to catch the pirates in the act of taking the ship. From a distance the Merlin’s cameras scanned the decks of the Saldanha, looking for signs of boarding. So far, nothing. But we didn’t know how long that would last.

  Four minutes away.

  GPMG prepped and ready to go.

  Update from the Saldanha. ‘The mother ship is about three miles behind me. One fast boat together with this vessel. The other three fast boats, they run away. Maybe they are now eight, nine miles far from me.’

  The skiffs were retreating. Evidently the Saldanha’s evasive action had deterred the supposed pirates.

  The American helicopter arrived at the Saldanha first. It circled the vessel to assess the situation. Our pilot opened up communications with the American ship and reported back to Northumberland. ‘Just spoke to the Vella Gulf, sir. Their cab’s [helicopter] on top. Don’t assess it as a threat. They’re keeping it there to monitor the situation. He says it’s more likely they’ll RTB their cab shortly.’

  Not a threat? Well, perhaps. But I couldn’t help thinking it was unlikely that those skiffs had been closing in on the Saldanha just for the hell of it. The same thoughts were clearly going through Commander Simpson’s head. ‘I want to know when he’s absolutely convinced they’re fishermen, not pirates,’ he instructed. As we all knew, however, telling the difference between the two is not always straightforward.

  The assessment was eventually made that the retreating skiffs were fishermen chasing tuna, but we didn’t have the chance to consider how likely or unlikely that was, because just then the Merlin crew received new orders. Yet another suspicious vessel ten miles back the way we’d come. The pilot performed an about turn, leaving the Saldanha to go on its way while we hurried to assess the new threat. The snipers remained at their stations as I gazed at the water below.

  A small flotilla of yachts came into view, boats that looked like they’d be more at home off the Côte d’Azur than in Pirate Alley. I have to admit that a part of me wondered what the hell they were doing in that part of the world; it’s certainly not where I’d choose to take a yachting holiday. A skiff had been chasing them, or at least had appeared to be chasing them. But now it had backed off. Once more word came through that it was just a fishing vessel. Yet again a false alarm.

  The sun was beginning to set as we returned to HMS Northumberland. It had been an exhausting afternoon, and a frustrating one. I’d learned a lot about the job the Royal Navy is asked to do in the Gulf of Aden. I’d come to realize that although there is a formidable military presence in that waterway, the guys are still incredibly stretched in terms of responding to the distress calls when they come in. The sheer size of the ocean they have to patrol means that the odds are stacked firmly against them.

  Still, it was some small comfort that the MV Saldanha had been allowed to continue safely on its way.

  Or had it?

  6. The Pirates Strike

  In the centre of HMS Northumberland lies the command room. It’s the most heavily defended part of the ship and it is from here that the captain makes all his tactical decisions should the ship go to battle stations. And it was here that we congregated for an intelligence briefing from Sub Lieutenant Simon Henderson. ‘It’s believed that a majority of pirates are affiliated to clans,’ he explained, ‘within the northern part of Somalia. These clans give logistical support to pirates, giving enough food and supplies for vessels that are held in the detention area, and their crews. Mother ships were introduced to the piracy organizations around September last year. They allow pirates to loiter at sea, operate further out in excess of 500 nautical miles and in rougher conditions, and also hold resupplies of food, ammunition and water.’

  After the briefing, I approached the sub lieutenant. I was frustrated that during our time on the ship we hadn’t managed to catch up with any pirates, and I wondered if, having gathered so much detailed intelligence about them, he felt the same.

  ‘It’s extremely frustrating,’ he told me. ‘We have a snippet of information that in this general location there may be a pirate skiff. However, we may be two or three hundred miles away. By the time we’ve launched the Merlin helicopter, they’re long gone. A piracy attack lasts ten or fifteen minute
s. So unfortunately, unless you’re in the right place at the right time, you aren’t going to catch people. It’s a lot to do with luck, unfortunately.’

  From my small experience so far, he was spot on. Luck hadn’t been on our side. And it was about to run out for a merchant ship not a million miles from where we were at that very moment.

  Pirates like to attack at dusk or at dawn, when the half-light cloaks them and they can approach their targets with less chance of being seen. In this respect they are very much like their buccaneer and corsair predecessors. As dawn broke the following day, I looked out from deck to see shoals of dolphins diving through the waves. A beautiful sight. Despite others’ attempts to pollute it, this remains a very clear sea. That morning we were due to come alongside an American oiler to refuel. This vessel was absolutely vast, dwarfing even the Northumberland, and it was an intricate operation to pull up against it. The oiler used a rifle to fire a line over; Northumberland reciprocated and this continued until a network of wires existed between the two ships and they could pull themselves together. Once we were close enough, an enormous pump was winched over to us, and the ship started to refuel. The whole process took a good couple of hours. We were taking receipt of 200 tonnes of oil, after all.

  What none of us knew, however, was that we were not the only vessel in the vicinity to be drawing up alongside another. As Northumberland had its oil thirst quenched, the crew of a merchant ship 60 miles away was coming under attack. That merchant ship went by the name of the MV Saldanha. The same ship we had attended the previous day on account of it being followed by skiffs that had been dismissed as fishermen chasing tuna…