Several times in recent years BD PHELANhas left his home in Cork to work as a maritime security contractor in the Indian Ocean, where he and his fellow crew members live under threat of pirate attacks
IT’S 11PM, and Mike, Rene and I are in a small motor launch 20 miles off the Sri Lankan coast. We have a further half-hour’s journey before we take on the most dangerous part of the anti-piracy operation for which we’ve been contracted.
I had met Mike, a former royal marine, for the first time at Heathrow airport that morning, and we’d flown together to Dubai airport. There we had met Rene, a former French marine and our team leader. The three of us had then flown on to Colombo, from where we were driven for five hours in a minibus to Galle, on the southwestern tip of Sri Lanka.
We are all self-employed security contractors and have been hired by a Kenya-based company to provide cover for a gas tanker while it makes a voyage from southern India to the Persian Gulf and back.
I have been a soldier, a university student, a teacher and a policeman. In 2000, after leaving the police force in Britain to devote myself to writing, a chance visit by one of my oldest friends got me involved for the first time in maritime security.
This is my fourth anti-piracy voyage on the Indian Ocean.
Since 2008 the threat to shipping from pirates operating out of Somalia has been steadily increasing. Their activities now extend to the coastlines of India and Madagascar and to the Persian Gulf, targeting oil tankers, cruise ships and yachts.
The international response to this phenomenon has been fragmented. Nato, the EU and other global powers have stationed warships to cover a transit corridor in the Gulf of Aden, a fraction of the area under threat; the reaction of countries whose coastlines are affected is usually relative to their often limited naval capabilities. Into this vacuum have stepped the private security companies.
Mike, Rene and I are on an unarmed operation to oversee the physical hardening of a ship’s perimeter and shell, provide training for the crew and supervise anti-piracy watches during the voyage.
The first danger we face is our embarkation by pilot ladder on the dark seas off Galle. With a small launch rapidly rising and falling by two or three metres on the sea swell it’s vital to be accurate in timing our transfer to a rope ladder hanging down the ship’s side. Commit too soon and the launch will sweep us off the ladder; too late and we will be unable to climb quickly enough to avoid the launch coming up again on the next swell.
Never mind the pirates; in the maritime industry the commute to work can kill you.
For all the advances in marine technology, the sea is still a dangerous place to earn a living. The loss of ships is more common than one might think, and working ships are replete with mundane industrial dangers. One security contractor in the Indian Ocean was lost overboard while rigging razor wire along a ship’s side. By the time the ship had turned, strong currents had carried him several kilometres away.
Many of the seafarers I have encountered seem to accept the threat of pirate attack as just another risk on an already long list. They take it seriously, but I haven’t met any who were truly fearful. Many oceangoing crews are Filipinos, who seem to take everything in their stride; most of the officers are from countries such as Greece, Norway, Russia, Ukraine, Montenegro and Croatia.
It’s not all hardship. I’ve been on ships that have been well appointed in terms of accommodation, leisure activities and food. The latter is enormously important at sea, not just in terms of nutrition but also because meals are the punctuation marks of the day. If food is repetitive, badly cooked or scarce, morale can fall sharply.
I took one voyage along the east coast of Africa that was supposed to take 14 days. Three days out of La Réunion, our water plant broke down and supply was reduced to one hour a day, for washing and flushing toilets. This would have been okay for 11 days, but a wrangle between the owners of the ship and the owners of the cargo (€5 million worth of cement bound for Mombasa, in Kenya) meant that we had to sit at anchor for 16 days off the coast of Mozambique.
There had been a lot of pirate activity along our route, and, although I felt confident that our security measures were sufficient, the owners were getting nervous about their assets. So we waited for two armed escort vessels to join us.
We recommenced our journey against a heavy prevailing current and discovered that the escort vessels could make only four knots against it. When, after Mombasa, we finally disembarked in South Africa, the voyage had lasted six weeks and our food stocks were reduced to pork, eggs and rice. On the Johannesburg-Heathrow flight, our fellow passengers understandably gave us a wide berth.
No pirates materialised on that trip, though in a Mombasa bar I met the Ukrainian first officer of a ship that, coming into port directly behind us, had been attacked. I inspected his ship the next day and saw the lines of bullet splashes stitched across the front of the bridge.
In fact, in my time on the Indian Ocean, I’ve never been confronted by pirates. People like me are hired specifically to avoid such attacks on vessels, so if I found myself having too many adventures it would mean I was doing something wrong. A properly rigged ship, bristling with razor wire and rocket screens, moving at speed on a well-planned route with a well-drilled crew, will never present an attractive target for pirates, especially when there are other ships at sea taking none of these precautions.
Pirates are opportunists, and they don’t want to work at taking a ship unless they have to. I have been in a small, fast boat in the Arabian Sea, taking part in a simulated attack, as part of a drill, against a ship moving at more than 25 knots. I can confirm that a large ship, with razor wire and an electric fence around its lower decks, and fire hoses angled over the side to spray a curtain of eye-stinging seawater, is a dangerous beast.
An alternative tactic used by pirates is to pour fire at a ship’s bridge from AK-47s or rocket-propelled grenades, in the hope of intimidating the captain into surrender. If the bridge is well protected, there should be no reason to give in.
In any case, surrender isn’t a soft option. At best it will still get the crew a year in some Somali hellhole living on fish heads, with the occasional beating or mock execution thrown in.
If all defensive measures fail and pirates get on board, the last resort is to retreat to a prepared citadel in the bowels of the ship, behind a series of heavily reinforced steel doors. Ideally the bridge party or engineer will have disabled the steering, leaving the ship to be controlled from the citadel and sailed to the nearest large land mass. The theory is that the pirates, when they find themselves on a vessel they can’t control, will eventually leave.
Why do I do this sort of work, with all its hardships and dangers? For one thing, there are the people. In 11 years in the business I’ve yet to meet another security contractor I haven’t immediately liked. They are all serious men, but none seems quite serious enough to hold down a proper job. They’re all former military men, and old soldiers always enjoy the company of other old soldiers, especially in a modern society that frequently looks askance at what one might call the martial virtues.
The second reason for doing it is that I like being at sea on the open ocean. By day, whales, flying fish, sea snakes, huge schools of dolphins chasing leaping barracuda, sharks, large butterflies, sea birds and birds of prey are all on display. And you will never see a canopy of stars such as you will find at sea at night. Below the surface, meanwhile, thousands of alarmed squid pulse and pop with light along the ship’s sides.
But the other major reason for doing the work is that, when I boarded that flight from Johannesburg to Heathrow after six hungry, unhygienic weeks at sea, I was about €15,000 richer.
Peril on the sea The rise of the Somali pirates
Until 2001 I was unaware that piracy still existed, although at the time it was rife in the Strait of Malacca, between Malaysia and Sumatra, as well as off Nigeria. Sometimes entire ships were taken in the strait, and their crews were thrown overboard. The tsunami of 2004 dealt a blow to pirates in the strait, engulfing the areas they operated from.
Somali pirates began to make their presence felt in about 2008. Their operating area now includes the Gulf of Aden, the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean and parts of the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, an area big enough to swallow Europe.
At the most recent count 46 vessels and 482 hostages were being held for ransom in Somalia. The size of the ransom varies, but it’s usually between €2 million and €8 million for a large commercial vessel and crew.
Because of piracy, the maritime industry has to pay higher insurance and security costs, which are passed on to western consumers in the form of more expensive products.
For hostages, drug-fuelled beatings, lack of exercise and near-starvation are common. Captivity can last for many months, and ultimate freedom often depends on the ability of ships’ owners to make contact and part with astronomical sums.
Piracy is fraught with risk. Travelling in motorised dhows (if they are well-financed) or in open skiffs (if they are not), pirates operate in the vast Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean with limited food, fuel and water. A third of pirates who set out from Somalia never return.
