by Ross Kemp
The pirates had said that what they were about to show us required the use of parangs – a kind of machete that is very common in that part of the world. But for some bizarre legal or health and safety reason that I still don’t understand, we were informed by London that I had to supply the weapons. Fortunately, getting your hands on a parang is rather easier on Batam island than it is back home – you just walk into a hardware store and pay your money. They even did me a deal – buy two, get a third off. In Indonesia parangs are everywhere – it’s a bit like buying a screwdriver. Except, of course, that a parang can do a lot more damage than a Phillips. In any case, when we finally hooked up with our pirates again, they already had their own machetes.
Hardware sorted, it was time to leave Batam. This time the pirates sent a boat for us. We loaded up and sped towards one of the many islands that are dotted around this stretch of water. As we travelled, the horizon was dominated by the skyline of Singapore and I was reminded once more what a temptation that must be for the poor people of Indonesia. With millions of dollars’ worth of goods and cash sailing out of that port, right past their front door, it’s hardly surprising that some of them grab the opportunity to fill their boots. And there were hundreds of islands too. If the pirates had a fast boat, they could squirrel themselves away on one of these islands and it would be virtually impossible to find them.
We had agreed with the pirates that we wouldn’t reveal the name of the island they used for their activities. When we arrived there, the tide was out so our boat had to anchor several football pitches away from the shore. As a result we had to wade in with water up to our knees – a slightly nervy process because the region plays host to stone fish, highly poisonous ceatures which are able to camouflage themselves against the underwater stones. Stepping on one of those can be at best excruciating, at worst fatal. The locals were happy to take the risk; I wore my shoes. We must have been an odd sight, and the balaclava’d pirates waiting for us on the island – five or six of them on this occasion, members of Storm’s crew – knew that. They stayed firmly out of sight, behind the treeline, in case we attracted any unwanted attention.
Bamboo grows high on this island, and it was among the bamboo that the pirates were waiting for us. This was the raw material of their trade, the thing they used to board ships in the absence of ladders and grappling hooks. Armed with super-sharp parangs – which they wielded with great skill – they cut down a 40- to 50-foot high bamboo stalk, before shaving off the sharp edges to leave a perfectly smooth pole. As they worked I noticed for the first time that almost to a man the skin on their legs was covered with indentations that looked as if they had been carved away with a teaspoon. This, I was told, was a result of scratching away at mosquito bites when they were children, and it was certainly true that the mosquito population was very high.
The pirates would use a bamboo pole such as they had just prepared to rest against the side of the ship, but in order for it to stay in place they needed some sort of hook at the top. I was expecting a dedicated metal hook; in fact they used a short, strong length of a particular root, which they tied to the end of the bamboo with twine (in a delightful shade of pink) and fixed in a V-shape so it could be used to hang the whole bamboo from the railing on the edge of a ship’s deck.
The pirates made their bamboo poles from scratch in minutes. In order to scale a high-freeboard boat they would need to join a few such lengths of bamboo together, so it might take a little longer. But not much. I couldn’t help wondering what would happen if they were caught travelling with a piece of equipment like this. Storm shrugged. ‘Before the marine police catch us,’ he said, ‘we throw everything overboard. Into the sea.’ Which made perfect sense, of course, because all they needed to do was come back here and make another one.
It was impressive stuff, but I still couldn’t quite see how anyone could shimmy up it so they offered to show me. Obviously we couldn’t do it out at sea because we’d be arrested; instead they hung the bamboo pole from the branch of a nearby tree. The base of the pole was a couple of metres from the ground; the top was several metres up. If I had tried to make like a pirate and climb the bamboo, everyone would have had a good laugh and I’d have landed in a heap. Not so these guys. With his parang slung across his back, the first one shimmied up the pole in moments. Then the next. Within seconds, there were five little pirates sitting in the tree. And if they could be up a tree in seconds, they could be on the deck of merchant vessel in seconds too.
The pirates slid back down as easily as they had shimmied up. Once they were on terra firma, Storm explained to me exactly what would happen once they had boarded the vessel. ‘We take our parangs,’ he said. ‘We look for the crew on the ship and we apprehend them. We go directly to the bridge and turn off the communications system, then we look for the captain. I tell the captain I need money and it’s better for him to surrender and not fight back. If you fight back, you’re going to die.’
And if the captain says no?
‘Then we have to hurt them.’
Generally speaking, Storm said, it was the Russian and Korean crews who tended to put up a struggle. If this should happen, they cut their victims’ hands – he demonstrated with a mock slash across his palm. ‘When their hand is wounded, they start bleeding, and when they see the blood, they usually give up.’ And, of course, a man with sliced-up hands is severely disabled.
But what if their hostages still fight back?
‘We kill him.’
Simple as that. Indeed, simplicity was the key to the pirates’ endeavours – I doubted that the techniques they had shown me had changed for hundreds of years. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. The pink twine they used to attach the hook was a modern invention, but it would have been perfectly possible to use some sort of natural cordage in its place. It also struck me that their outlay was minimal. Storm said that they tended to hire boats from local smugglers, and the rest of the equipment they need is just there for the taking, with the exception of the parangs, which can be bought cheaply from a hardware store. It’s not quite like having to get your hands on a sawn-off shotgun to commit an armed robbery. Expenditure tiny; potential rewards huge. No wonder Storm and his crew were eager practitioners of their art.
Before we left the island, the pirates used their parangs to hack up the bamboo stalks and hide their tracks. They were worried about the patrol boats in the area, so we decided to call it a day. As we headed back, we encountered yet another torrential Indonesian rainstorm, one of the worst I’d ever experienced. Forging across the water back towards Batam, I couldn’t have been wetter if I’d jumped in the sea. In the distance, a huge, bright rainbow shone above one of the many islands, dipping over the horizon and back down into the sea. Was there a pot of gold at the end of it? I couldn’t help thinking that if you were a pirate, armed only with a piece of bamboo and a razor-sharp parang, there probably was.
*
In our minds, pirates are mysterious, romantic figures. In reality, they’re just ordinary people, criminals who ply their trade at sea. As such, they have ordinary concerns, and families too. I was given the opportunity to meet the wife of one of Storm’s crew. Like her husband, the pirate’s wife didn’t want her face shown or her name revealed. Rather than don a makeshift balaclava, however, she hid her features more elegantly using a small umbrella as we sat by the waterfront and discussed what it was like to be married to the mob.
She was a lovely girl – softly spoken, heavily pregnant and with passable, if hesitant, English. She had met her husband nine years previously and for a while they were best friends. She came from a good background and explained that her family – many of whom had died in the Bali bombings – had no idea that she was married to a pirate. They all believed he earned his living from a small shop he owned, where he sold handmade chairs. I wondered what would happen if they found out the truth.
‘They ask me to divorce, maybe.’
Even though the baby’s on the way?
/> She nodded her head.
The pirate’s wife explained to me that when Storm’s crew went out on a job, the wives would all spend the night together in one house, trying to sleep but more often chatting and comforting each other as they waited for their husbands to come home safely. The worst times, she said, were when the men switched off their mobile phones. Out of sight. Out of contact. But not out of mind. I could only imagine the strain they must be under, knowing that their men were out doing something so potentially dangerous, knowing that they could disappear, or die. Who would look after her then, I asked.
She gave a little laugh. ‘Nobody,’ she replied.
Doesn’t that worry her as well?
‘Yeah, I worry. I say this one already to him, but he say, “This is my life. I had this one before I see you.”’
It was in his blood, she told me, to be a pirate. ‘Sometimes he say, “If I have a son, I want him same like me. Be the pirate.”’
And would that make her happy too?
‘No. I want he be the police. Maybe this is how to stop the father being a pirate.’
This young lady was under no illusions about the reality of her husband’s activities. She surely knew that he could kill people – that maybe he had already. Did that not bother her? ‘This is a problem for me,’ she said, ‘but I cannot say anything. This is his life.’
The pirate’s wife clearly worried and disapproved of her husband’s nocturnal activities. At the same time she accepted that this was how he brought home the bacon. ‘We eat from this job,’ she said quietly. ‘If he not go for working, we no have anything.’
She was very frank with me, and the more we spoke the more I realized that her life was very far from being a bed of roses. Her husband clearly liked life in the fast lane, and that wasn’t limited to piracy. ‘Girls, money, drugs – all the pirates same like that.’ Even her husband? ‘Now after married, no – but before he always drunk. If he drink, he always slap me, fight with me, hit me. After he know I’m pregnant, he change everything. But I know him. He’s not a good man. He’s a naughty boy.’
There was something slightly tragic about her. Without wanting to over-romanticize it, I was reminded of Carmela Soprano. She wasn’t a bad person; she was just resigned to the reality of her life. She didn’t want her husband to be a pirate, but she knew she couldn’t change him. Maybe she didn’t want to change him. There was a curious mixture of disapproval and acceptance, and it all came down to the age-old story. Before they got married, her husband’s family gave her the third degree.
‘They say, “Do you know he no go to school?”
‘I say, “Yeah, I know.”
‘“Do you know he the pirate? Do you know he stay in jail before?”
‘And I say, “Yeah, I know.”
‘“And you accept him?”
‘“If he accept me, I can accept everything, bad and good, from him. Because I love him.”’
It was abundantly clear that this young woman was not with her husband for any reason other than love. ‘For me, money not mean anything. If you have love, maybe you can have anything you want.’
And maybe you can. But as the sun went down over the seas where her husband plied his dangerous trade, I couldn’t help wondering what the future held for this quietly spoken woman, pregnant by a pirate she loved and unable – perhaps unwilling – to get him to change his ways.
My time on the island of Batam was drawing to a close. But before I left I took the opportunity to meet Storm and his crew one last time. They had shown me where they performed their acts of piracy; they had shown me how they performed their acts of piracy. But so far they hadn’t been too forthcoming on the whys and wherefores. We met on yet another island – the lads had even put on fresh balaclavas for the occasion – and as we sat under a tree, shading ourselves from the blistering heat of the Indonesian sun, I tried to get to the bottom of why these pirates did what they did.
‘Poverty is everywhere,’ Storm told me. ‘We steal to eat, not to get rich.’
Really? I put it to them that when they go shopping, they can make a lot of money in one night. Storm disagreed. ‘When we go shopping we find that not every ship has a lot of cash. So if we don’t get much we have to do it again until we get at least $10,000 each and then we go home.’
I wasn’t quite buying it. They said they only committed acts of piracy to eat, not to get rich. But that kind of money buys a lot of food. I suggested to them that it also buys cars and houses.
A beat.
An unpleasant silence.
Up until now the atmosphere between me and Storm’s crew had been good. Relaxed even. This was the only time it turned. They obviously didn’t like the way the conversation had gone, and suddenly the mood changed, like a cloud slipping over the sun. I knew that I couldn’t afford to upset them too much – if things became nasty between us, they could just mug us, steal our camera equipment and leave us on the island.
Storm shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. And that was that. He didn’t want to elaborate, and I certainly wasn’t going to push the issue.
We’d heard rumours that there was a mythology among Indonesian pirates that they could make themselves invisible. Not normally the sort of thing you’d give credence to, but after my experiences in Nigeria I was interested to know what Storm and the crew had to say. One of the younger members, whose ears made his balaclava stick out comically, put his oar in. ‘That’s right,’ he announced. ‘We have supernatural powers. You can call it magic. We make people see other things instead of us. For example, for two months I went shopping every day and I was never caught. So I believe it.’
He spoke passionately. His mates, though, were on the verge of laughter. I asked Storm what he thought. ‘I used to believe it,’ he admitted. ‘But then I was caught and put in jail!’
Ah.
‘So I don’t believe in magic any more. I use common sense now.’
Common sense sounded to me like a better strategy than mysticism. The guys told me that the brother of one of them was a member of the maritime police, and he knew full well how his sibling made his living. The two brothers had an agreement: if the copper had to nick the pirate, he would go to jail; but in the meantime he agreed not to shop him. Like I say: common sense, not magic.
Given that most of the crew didn’t consider themselves to be invulnerable, however, didn’t they worry that one day they’d be caught or would come to harm? ‘That’s always a risk in this kind of job,’ one of the crew admitted. ‘We don’t think about life and death. We die when the time comes for us to die. That’s the risk we choose to take.’
The vibe between us all had settled down now. I felt a bit more comfortable asking my last question of this gang of pirates. ‘What would happen if someone tried to give away your identity? If a pirate went to the police, what would happen to him?’
A pregnant pause.
‘Our law is Mafia law,’ answered Ghost. ‘We would kill that person.’
And as if to back him up, another repeated the words.
‘Kill him,’ he said.
We took our leave of the pirates. They didn’t, in the end, maroon us, or rob us. They just disappeared, unrepentant and proud, ready to steal another day. I prepared to leave Batam – and south-east Asia – with the strange feeling that always accompanies meeting people like that. I knew they were criminals. I knew that what they did was wrong. I didn’t condone it in any way. But when you get to know people on a personal level, you can’t help but start to understand things from their point of view. Storm and his crew claimed to be driven by poverty. How true that was, I can’t say. He certainly seemed to live in a nicer house than most, and he drove a decent car. The sort of sums they claimed to secure when they went shopping were substantial – enough to keep more people than just them well clear of the breadline. And though Batam was a notorious pirate hot spot, there were plenty of poor people there who didn’t resort to illegality.
That said, Storm and his boy
s were hardly living a life of unparalleled luxury. If they weren’t able to earn their living from piracy, what sort of life would they have? Indonesia is a poor country. Nearly 18 per cent of its people live below the poverty line, and nearly 50 per cent live on less than two dollars a day. It’s not difficult to see why crime might thrive; and in a country that is made up of thousands of tiny islands, it’s not difficult to see why a substantial proportion of that crime might take place on the water – especially in an area where they have the imposing skyline of rich Singapore to tempt them. I didn’t admire the pirates for their violence, but I did have a sneaking admiration for their focus and professionalism, for making their difficult way in a difficult world.
Moreover, by their own admission, the people I had met were very much on the bottom rung of piracy. They weren’t commanding multi-million-dollar ransoms like the Somali pirates, and they were being manipulated by shadowy Mr Big figures who were pocketing the real money while Storm’s crew risked their lives and their liberty. It was the Mr Bigs that I really despised, not their foot soldiers.
I didn’t leave Batam feeling sympathy for the pirates I had met, but I did feel I understood them. And I also understood this. Piracy at sea is not so different from criminality on land. It will exist as long as the gulf between the haves and the have-nots remains wide.
