Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
'Captivating, a John le Carre-esque yarn' Telegraph 'A thoroughly good read' Michael Portillo, author of Portillo's Hidden History of Britain and presenter of Great British Railway Journeys 'A compelling story of courage, determination and skill' Terry Waite CBE, author of Taken on Trust The true story of a retired British army officer's private Somali-hostage rescue mission During the peak of the Somali piracy crisis, three ships - from Malaysia, Thailand and Taiwan - were hijacked and then abandoned to their fate by their employers, who lacked the money to pay ransoms. All would still be there, were it not for Colonel John Steed, a retired British military attaché, who launched his own private mission to free them. At 65, Colonel Steed was hardly an ideal saviour. With no experience in hostage negotiations and no money behind him, he had to raise the ransom cash from scratch, running the operation from his spare room and ferrying million-dollar ransom payments around in the boot of his car. Drawing on first-hand interviews, former chief foreign correspondent of The Sunday Telegraph, Colin Freeman, who has himself spent time held hostage by Somali pirates, takes readers on an inside track into the world of hostage negotiation and one man's heroic rescue mission.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 389
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
To my children, Daniel and Robyn, and to Jane, who somehow still puts up with me
Contents
About the Author
Colin Freeman was born in Edinburgh in 1969 and has spent most of his working life as a journalist. He started his career on the Grimsby Evening Telegraph, before moving to the London Evening Standard and eventually trying his luck as a freelance correspondent in Baghdad after the fall of Saddam Hussein. From 2006–16, he was chief foreign correspondent of The Sunday Telegraph. He is the author of two previous books: Kidnapped, Life as a Somali Pirate Hostage, and The Curse of the Al-Dulaimi Hotel and other half-truths from Baghdad. He lives in London with his family.
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide, wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.
‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
List of Key People
John Steed: ex-British military attaché to Kenya and counter-piracy advisor to the United Nations. Leads the mission to free the Albedo, the Prantalay 12 and the Naham 3
Aman Kumar: nineteen-year-old Indian sailor on his maiden voyage aboard the Albedo
Captain Jawaid Khan: the Albedo’s Pakistani captain
Shahriar Aliabadi: the Albedo’s Iranian bosun
Omid Khosrojerdi: the boss of Majestic Enrich Shipping and owner of the Albedo. Based in Malaysia
Shahnaz Khan: Captain Jawaid Khan’s wife
Mishal and Nareman Jawaid: Captain Jawaid Khan’s daughters
Leslie Edwards: an expert hostage negotiator who works alongside John Steed
Richard Neylon and James Gosling: London lawyers specialising in piracy cases, who work alongside John Steed
Ali Jabeen*: translator and negotiator for the pirate gang that hijacks the Albedo
Ali Inke*: chief guard for the pirate gang that hijacks the Albedo
xivAwale†: pirate negotiator who acts as go-between during talks between John Steed and the Albedo pirates
Rajoo Rajbhar: the other Indian sailor aboard the Albedo, later executed
Arro: female pirate, khat dealer and later investor in the Albedo hijacking
Omar Sheikh Ali: contact of John Steed’s in Galkayo
Channarong Navara: the captain of the Prantalay 12
Arnel Balbero: Filipino sailor on the Naham 3
Said Osman: a Somali intermediary who helps Edwards in talks with pirates holding the Naham 3
* Not their real names.
† Not his real name.
Timeline of Hijackings
18 April 2010: the Prantalay12 is hijacked
26 Nov 2010: the Albedo is hijacked
26 Mar 2012: the Naham 3 is hijacked
Author’s Note
Any journalist seeking to find a publisher these days is usually asked: What makes you uniquely qualified to write this book? It’s a question most writers hate, as in truth, few of us have a monopoly on competence in any particular field. For this book, though, I do for once have a fairly good answer. I was once kidnapped by Somali pirates myself, so I have some idea of what it’s like.
In 2008, while reporting on the piracy crisis for The Sunday Telegraph in northern Somalia, I was abducted along with my photographer colleague and held prisoner in a remote mountain cave. We lived off goat meat, rice and Rothman cigarettes, and passed the time with a chess set made from cigarette foil. Several times, our captors threatened to kill us, and at one point, they had a gunfight in the cave with a rival clan.
Thankfully, we were released unharmed just six weeks later, but as an exercise in field research for this particular book, it was a reasonable primer. In the years afterwards, it also meant I became The Sunday Telegraph’s unofficial piracy correspondent, keeping a close eye on the mayhem off Somalia’s coastline. It was during that time that I noticed that while most ships were being ransomed out, three seemed to be languishing indefinitely. The rescue of the sailors on those ships – the Albedo, the Prantalay 12 and the Naham 3 – is the subject of this book.
Much of this book is based on interviews with the sailors themselves, some of whom would not have talked to me xixhad I not been through a similar experience. Let me stress, though, that in their company, I felt like small fry. Six weeks in captivity, after all, is a blink of an eye compared to the years of incarceration that they endured. My captors never physically harmed me, whereas they suffered regular beatings and torture, as well as seeing many of their companions die. Nor, for most of that awful time, did they have any reason to think it would ever end. Some have suffered lasting trauma. Given what they went through, I am surprised it’s not more.
In return for their speaking to me, I’ve aimed to tell their story as best I can, although I wouldn’t claim it to be perfect. This isn’t a case of false writerly modesty. In retelling a trauma lasting four years or more, many of the sailors found dates and times hard to remember clearly, and sometimes events themselves. At times, accounts from one sailor tallied only vaguely with those from another.
Most of the sailors also spoke through interpreters – which, no matter how good the translation, often impacts how vividly they tell their stories. Sadly, that’s also one of the reasons why these particular sailors were ignored by the world in the first place. When it comes to attracting international media attention, being non-Western and non-English speaking is still a major handicap.
Sailors and fishermen are also generally robust individuals, not overly given to soul-baring or introspection. Often, when I asked how they coped in the darkest of times, their answer was that they prayed hard, thought of their families, and told themselves to tough it out. For some, that seemed literally all they had to say on the subject – at least to me anyway. What I have tried to do, though, is convey at least the basics of their ordeals – which, in most cases, is quite horrifying enough.
xxiGathering the story from the viewpoint of their rescuers was rather easier. John Steed, together with negotiator Leslie Edwards and lawyers Richard Neylon and James Gosling, were all generous to me with their time, although once again, the precise details of a mission that ended up lasting more than three years had occasionally blurred. As a result of his own brush with death at the outset of his mission – more of which later – Steed finds his memory sometimes lets him down. Fortunately, he has emails and files which act as a back-up.
I also imposed limits of my own in writing this book. Some of the accounts of torture and mistreatment I have left out, as to relay them all would have felt both gratuitous and repetitive. Readers may also notice that I recount the hijacking and cruelty that took place on the Albedo in more detail than on the other two ships. Again, this is not to underplay what went on the Prantalay 12 and Naham 3, but simply to avoid repetition. In amid the horrors, there are also acts of extraordinary courage and decency – by the Britons and Somalis involved in the rescue effort, and by the sailors too. I like to think that this is a story about humanity at its best, not just its worst.
The research for this book was often hard, as many of the hostages were still too traumatised to talk or hard to track down. Some had gone back to further long stints at sea, to make up for wages lost during their time in captivity. Those I did meet were often in remote, impoverished villages – places that they’d hoped seafaring would fund an escape from. But I’m glad they spoke out, for they also serve as the voices for a much larger cadre of seafarers who suffered at the hands of Somali pirates, whose ordeals have gone largely unrecorded. xxiiIn the five years that the piracy crisis was at its peak – roughly from 2008 to 2012 – nearly 2,000 sailors were hijacked. The vast majority were from the poorer parts of Asia and Africa, whose only crime was to seek to earn a living. Yet beyond a few paragraphs in the odd news report, very few of their stories were ever properly told.
Instead, to much of the world, pirates only existed when they captured Westerners – be they adventure-seeking yachters in the Indian Ocean, or yes, journalists like me, who’d stumbled into trouble. Hence, perhaps, the ongoing belief that modern piracy, in the best tradition of buccaneering, is a war of the have-nots against the haves. The Somalis who manned the pirate gangs were mostly poor, indeed, but so too were most of their victims – so much so that in cases like the Albedo, Prantalay 12 and Naham 3, the world did not seem interested in buying them out of trouble, never mind in learning about their ordeal. So here – in as much detail as I can manage – is their story.
Colin Freeman London, May 2020
Prologue
The Luckiest Man in East Africa
Nairobi, Kenya, August 2013
John Steed lay in the intensive care unit of Nairobi’s Aga Khan Hospital, drifting in and out of consciousness. He had a drip in his arm, and a strange, unfamiliar ache in his chest. He had no idea where he was, or why he was there. Thanks to the fug of anaesthetic and painkillers pumping round his body, it was hard to separate dreams from reality. Sometimes he thought he was back commanding his old army regiment in England – he’d surprised the hospital nurses by barking drill instructions for the 33rd Signal Regiment in Liverpool.
He tried to move, but was still too sedated even to open his eyes. At the back of his mind, he knew something had gone very wrong. Like a man waking up with a monster hangover, there were vague, unsettling memories of the day before.
He’d been at a business lunch. Not a beer or glass of wine in sight. Then, just a blank, nothing. And then it got really crazy. Being wheeled down a corridor on a hospital trolley, covered in vomit. Alan Cole, his UN colleague, at his side, telling him to dictate his last will and testament, scribbling it xxivdown on a staffing rota torn from a hospital notice board. To onlookers, it had probably looked like an over-hyped episode of the hospital drama ER.
Onlookers there had certainly been. As news had spread around Nairobi of Steed’s heart attack, dozens of friends had turned up, waiting overnight as he went into surgery. Old pals from the British embassy, where he’d worked as military attaché, colleagues from the UN and contacts from the diplomatic circuit. They weren’t just hanging around to deliver get-well messages. The Aga Khan was one of Kenya’s top hospitals, one of the few where heart attack victims didn’t just leave via the morgue, but like many Kenyan hospitals, it had limited blood supplies. Patients’ friends and relatives were encouraged to donate to replenish the stocks. The donors milled around in the hospital corridor, drinking tea to replace their missing fluids. Mobile phones rang constantly from other well-wishers.
The calls came from far and wide. In his time in East Africa, Steed had met all manner of people – presidents, ministers, clan leaders, warlords past and present. In the region’s turbulent politics, yesterday’s villains were often tomorrow’s leaders. Some were now on the phone to his friends in the corridor, sending best wishes.
The blessings seemed to work. After a seven-hour operation, the medics declared success. The main artery to his heart, which had ripped open, had been repaired with an artificial graft. A few days later, Steed became lucid again. No more morphine-fuelled parade drills in Liverpool. A doctor appeared by his bedside.
‘You had an aortic dissection. Pretty serious stuff.’
‘A what?’
xxv‘A split in one of the arteries to your heart. Normally it would have killed you, because the operation to fix it is very difficult. But the same night you came, we had a specialist arrive in from London, who’s here to set up a new heart clinic. He fixed you up. You’re a very lucky man.’
‘Right. So how am I now?’
‘You should be okay. Another couple of weeks here, then home to recover.’
He tried to feel thankful. Whatever the surgeon said, it really didn’t feel like his lucky day. Yet the proof was there in front of him, quite literally. Running from his sternum to his stomach was a foot-long incision, sewn up with heavy-duty, Frankenstein-style stitches, where the surgeons had split his rib cage open to get at his heart. That had been the easy part, according to the medics. The operation to repair the rupture itself was so delicate that on the four occasions it had been tried before at the Aga Khan, every patient had died. Steed was the only person in Kenya who’d survived. In fact, the only person in the whole of East Africa. The surgeon was extremely pleased, hoping it would be a good advert for the new clinic he was starting up.
The medics warned it would take a while to recover. ‘Goal number one is lots of physio to regain your strength,’ they said. ‘Goal number two is reducing your blood pressure – watch the diet and the booze. And goal number three, most important of all, take it easy. Relax. No stressful activity.’
Goals one and two he could manage. Goal three, about avoiding stress, was going to be tricky. Just a few weeks earlier, the Luckiest Man in East Africa had begun a mission to help some of the unluckiest. Those crews of hijacked sailors, held for years by pirates on the Somali coast. It was a mission xxvithat often sent his blood pressure soaring, and sometimes made it run cold. Not ideal for someone recovering from heart surgery. But it was a mission he now felt bound to. As much as anything in his last will and testament on that scrap of hospital paper.
Chapter 1
Sinking Feeling
Nairobi, Kenya, June 2013. Two months before John Steed’s heart rupture
‘Take a look at these,’ said the caller. ‘The maritime patrol aircraft took them on the dawn flyover. Not looking good.’
John Steed opened the photos attached to the email. They showed a container ship, the Albedo, anchored a few miles off the coast of Somalia. It was huge, with a six-storey control tower and a deck the length of a football pitch. A workhorse of global commerce, built for ferrying tens of thousands of tonnes of cargo round the planet.
For the last two and a half years, though, it had gone nowhere. In November 2010, the Albedo had been hijacked by one of Somalia’s many gangs of pirates. Confined to the history books in most other parts of the world, piracy had become Somalia’s first boom industry in recent memory. The ship was now among dozens being held for ransom up and down the coastline. There were elderly Taiwanese fishing trawlers, clapped-out Yemeni dhows, and brand-new oil tankers, some of them ten times the size of the Albedo, all idling like fish in an angler’s keep net.
The photos had been sent by a contact of Steed’s at EU 2Navel Force (NAVFOR), the European Union’s arm of the new international anti-piracy force. Over the past five years, scores of nations had sent naval vessels to patrol the pirates’ hunting grounds, through which some of the world’s busiest shipping lanes also passed. It was the first operation of its kind in more than 200 years.
They’d had little success. They were trying to police the entire western half of the Indian Ocean – an area of 20 million square miles – an impossible feat, even for modern navies armed with helicopters and spy planes. When a vessel sent an SOS saying that a pirate raiding party was in sight, the warships were usually miles away. And once the pirates were on board, guns pointed at sailors’ heads, there was nothing anyone could do. Special Forces rescues, with teams of commandos storming on board, weren’t an option, as there was too much risk of hostages or soldiers getting killed. Anyone who thought otherwise had read too many thriller novels.
Much of the time, the anti-piracy force found itself reduced to monitoring the progress of the hijackings. Their maritime patrol aircraft would cruise the Somali coast, checking which ships were still being held, photographing pirate skiffs as they shuttled to and from the mainland. Every so often, a ship would be released after the owners paid a ransom. A light aircraft would fly over, dropping the cash by parachute in the sea next to the ship – a couple of million dollars, sometimes more, packed into a floating plastic capsule the size of a large suitcase. After counting it, the pirates would abandon ship and speed back to the mainland, richer than most Somalis could ever dream of becoming.
Even then, though, the anti-piracy force was reluctant to pursue them. Chasing Somali pirates onto the mainland was 3beyond their remit. Besides, if a warship grabbed one gang of hijackers with their loot, the pirates would sometimes get their friends aboard another hijacked ship to threaten to kill the hostages there instead. Like the anti-piracy force, they showed solidarity in the face of a common enemy. A bunch of men in ragged clothes and sandals, running one of the largest kidnapping operations in modern times. Right under the nose of the combined might of the world’s naval superpowers.
Most hijacks lasted about three months. Many sailors emerged traumatised, vowing never to go to sea again. They, though, were the fortunate ones. Their ship owners usually had kidnap and ransom insurance, so that if their ship did get hijacked, the insurer would reimburse the cost of the ransom. The cost of such premiums had rocketed, but no responsible owner sent a vessel into pirate waters without the means to buy it out of trouble.
That, though, was what the owner of the Albedo appeared to have done. The ship’s fifteen crew had been stuck for two and a half years because its owner had no money to pay a ransom. Not only that, he seemed to have abandoned them to their fate, becoming ever harder for the pirates, the crew and their relatives to contact. Perhaps he hoped that the pirates would eventually give the hostages up. They hadn’t. In somewhere as poor as Somalia, kidnappers didn’t lightly walk away from the prospect of a fat ransom pay-out.
Yet the Albedo’s days as a floating jail were now numbered. Large container ships were designed to be kept in deep-water ports, not anchored in the shallows of an ocean-battered coastline. During the last few weeks of stormy monsoon weather, the ship had started to list to one side – the result, most likely, of a reef gouging a hole in the hull. The photos 4showed the ship’s bow half-submerged in the sea, assaulted on all sides by grey-green monsoon waves. With another big storm due in coming days, EU NAVFOR reckoned it was only a matter of time before it sank.
‘If it starts sinking, it could be all over in minutes,’ Steed’s contact told him. ‘Especially in a storm at night. Could be impossible to get on the lifeboats, even if they’re still working. Those hostages could drown.’
Officially, it wasn’t the anti-piracy force’s responsibility. Because the Albedo was in Somali territorial waters, they couldn’t send in a rescue ship to pick the hostages up. However, it wasn’t anyone else’s responsibility either. Which was why his friend in EU NAVFOR had come to him – Colonel (Ret’d) John Steed, formerly of the British Army, now Head of Maritime Security and Counter Piracy for the UN Political Office for Somalia, known in the trade as UNPOS.
It was a grand-sounding title, with not a lot of power attached. What UNPOS did have, though, was a ‘Hostage Support Programme’. Steed had set it up a few months ago himself, to help sailors who’d got stranded after being freed from pirate captivity. He’d help get them home, sorting out new passports, arranging flights, using the UN’s name to barge through what often felt like ludicrous amounts of red tape.
The Albedo sailors, though, weren’t ex-hostages. They were current hostages. And, if his friend at EU NAVFOR was correct, soon-to-be-drowned hostages. How the hell was he supposed to help them?
5The Albedo wasn’t the only hijacked ship that seemed to have been left to fend for itself. There was also the Naham 3, a Taiwanese trawler moored just next to the Albedo, now in its fourteenth month in captivity. And further down the coast was the Thai trawler Prantalay 12, whose crew had now been hostage for more than three years. They had the dubious distinction of being the longest-running hijacking case in modern history. Their plight ought to have been a global scandal, yet there was barely a mention of them in the international media, other than a few brief lines in the shipping newspaper Lloyd’s List when they’d first been hijacked. Steed wasn’t surprised. Piracy cases only attracted much attention if they involved Westerners. Like the Maersk Alabama.
The Maersk Alabama was the one everyone remembered. A US-crewed cargo ship, hijacked by four pirates in early 2009. The crew turned the tables on the hijackers, ambushing one of the pirates in the engine room and taking him hostage. The other three pirates then fled in a lifeboat with the ship’s skipper, Captain Richard Phillips, as a captive. A stand-off ensued with a US warship, all over in a split second, when snipers on the warship killed all three pirates with synchronised shots to the head. The good guys had won – Hollywood got interested.
A blockbuster movie version of the hijacking, Captain Phillips, was due out that autumn, yet most hijacked seafarers got no media spotlight at all. They were men from the poorer parts of Asia, from villages in Thailand, India, Bangladesh, Cambodia. Most didn’t speak English – not the kind of people who worked well on CNN, or captured the imaginations of Hollywood producers. Likewise, just as most hijacks didn’t end up as movies, most hijacks didn’t end 6up with the cavalry coming to the rescue, as they’d done in Captain Phillips. America, Britain and several other countries on the anti-piracy fleet had Special Forces soldiers on standby, ready to carry out rescues by force; but they’d normally only use them to rescue their own citizens, and only if there was an imminent threat to life. There’d be no good guys coming in to help the Albedo, the Naham 3, or the Prantalay 12.
Steed had recently tried contacting the ships’ owners, hoping to shame them into action. It was bad enough that they weren’t properly insured, but couldn’t they try to help anyway? Borrow some money from somewhere? Rather than leaving their sailors to rot? He’d got nowhere. The Albedo’s owner had already cut off his phone and email accounts, blanking even the sailors’ relatives. He’d been unable to get hold of the owners of the Prantalay 12 or Naham 3 either. There were rumours that the Naham 3 owners were in financial trouble.
Nor had the sailors’ governments been much help. Several had smart embassies in Nairobi’s diplomatic quarter, complete with retinues of house staff and chauffeurs. Steed had rung round them, but most simply never returned his calls, or flannelled: It’s a civil matter, sir, nothing to do with us. Can you put this request in writing to our foreign ministry? Have you contacted the police in Somalia? Sorry, what sailors?
All of which meant that neither Steed nor anybody else had any idea how the hijacked sailors were faring. All three ships were entirely incommunicado. It wasn’t even clear if the hostages were still alive or not. Steed had put out feelers among contacts in Somalia, locals who were tuned into the gossip on the pirate coast – the word that came back was not good.
The pirates on all three ships, by all accounts, didn’t believe the owners’ pleas of penury. Instead, they’d assumed 7it was just a particularly callous negotiating ploy, and they’d responded in kind. They were now torturing their captives, to heap pressure on the owners. Not just the odd beating, but lashings, scaldings, thrashings and even executions, harking back to the brutality of piracy’s medieval heyday. Several sailors were said to have starved to death after being put on punishment rations. Of those still alive, many were slowly losing their minds, or suicidal.
Somali pirates weren’t supposed to be like this. As a rule, they treated their hostages reasonably well. They styled themselves as Robin Hood characters, stealing from the world’s rich to give to its poor. Just a tax on passing seafarers. Businessmen with guns, as they called themselves.
Steed had asked his contacts if it could be just exaggeration. Might the hijackers be putting out stories to frighten the owners? Maybe, yes. But the piracy game was attracting some bad people these days.
Steed had spent most of his life in the British Army. After officer training at Sandhurst, he’d joined the Royal Signals, the service’s communications experts. He’d spent the last decade as a military attaché, first with the British embassy in Dublin, then at the embassy in Nairobi. People thought he spent his time watching military parades and cruising the cocktail circuit. The Canapé Corps, they called it. If only.
For his final job in uniform, he’d been seconded to UNPOS, to help run international efforts to start a new national army in Somalia. The last one had collapsed back in 1991, when Somalia’s civil war had begun. More than twenty 8years on, the new one was still very much a work in progress. Every so often, he’d fly to Mogadishu, skimming in on a plane low across the sea to avoid rocket fire, before heading for what passed for the British embassy – a Portakabin in a fortified diplomatic compound. Then he’d take an armoured personnel carrier to the president’s villa for the latest security updates. The news was seldom good. It reminded him of films he’d seen about Vietnam in the run-up to the US evacuation of Saigon, only everyone was sticking around for the storm to come.
Yet the work – part soldier, part diplomat and part aid worker – had been rewarding. So much so that when he’d reached his 55th birthday – the official retirement age for the army – he’d taken a new job with the UN as a counter-piracy advisor. He’d worked on a range of carrot-and-stick measures to try to curb the problem. There were legal measures to prosecute pirates caught in international waters, and job creation schemes for Somalia’s coastal villages, to give young men money-making options other than hijacking.
It was easy to tell himself that he was doing some good. Yet as long as those poor souls on abandoned ships like the Albedo were languishing indefinitely in captivity, it all seemed slightly beside the point. He’d wanted to do something to help them himself: at least to establish contact with them, to find out how many were still alive, and whether any needed medical help. But with the crew of the Albedo now at risk of drowning, he might already be too late.
He got up from his desk, staring out of the window of his flat in Nairobi. He lived on the tenth storey of an apartment block, home mainly to UN-types like himself, and bureaucrats from aid organisations. Nairobi was the hub for aid agencies for the whole of East Africa. There were countless 9aid missions based here: education; health; empowerment; human rights. A global capital for the caring and concerned. Why, he sometimes wondered, with so many benevolent organisations on the doorstep, was nobody shouting about these forgotten sailors? Where was the public outcry on their behalf? Why, in an age when charitable appeals could direct billions of dollars around the world, were a bunch of hostages stuck in limbo for want of a ransom payment? And, God forbid, what was life like for them on those ships?
Chapter 2
It’s a Sailor’s Life for Me
Kardial village, northern India, 2009
Seafaring opens up a universe of opportunities for achieving different landmarks as successful human beings.’
Brochure for the Trident Maritime College, Calcutta
The farming village of Kardial in India’s far north is not a place where many locals consider a career in seafaring. It lies in the foothills of the western Himalayas, 700 miles from the Indian Ocean and more than 2,000 feet above sea level. In the days of the British Raj, the surrounding valleys were a favoured summer retreat for sweating colonial envoys, desperate to escape Delhi’s ferocious heat. Today, they’re better known as a picturesque backdrop for Bollywood movies. Big-eyed starlets go on the run in the forested glades, fleeing thwarted suitors and scheming uncles.
While outsiders seek sanctuary here, locals dream of leaving. In Kardial, few were keener to see the wider world than Aman Kumar Sharma, a restless, boyish-faced teenager often seen cruising his motorbike up and down Kardial’s 12main street. At one end was a new electricity substation and a shop selling the latest smartphones. At the other, a tailor still knocked out suits on a pedal-operated sewing machine.
Kardial, like the rest of rural India, was slowly being dragged into the 21st century. Youngsters now had a choice of career beyond tilling the fields. As he reached his seventeenth birthday, though, Aman had already decided on one thing. Whatever he did when he left school, he was not going to become a bloody engineer. In Kardial, it seemed like nearly every family wanted at least one son to be an engineer. Most of Aman’s friends had had the pep talk: Engineers built the roads that connected this village to the outside world, son. And who do you think built that hydroelectric power station in the valley? The one that brought us electricity. Engineers, that’s who.
If it wasn’t engineering, it was some other profession. Accountant, doctor, lawyer, whatever. Modern India was obsessed with social mobility. The pressure wasn’t just at home. On Kardial’s main street, the billboards were festooned with adverts for engineering colleges, most run by ex-army officers boasting long rows of medals and even longer rows of B.Eng’s, MScs and PHDs. The message was always the same: letters at the end of your name equates to zeros at the end of your salary. Yet it fell on deaf ears with Aman. By his final year of school, when most of his class were sitting exams to become engineers, he’d already set his heart on joining the merchant navy.
As with most life-changing decisions, it had come by chance. He’d been out on his motorbike when he’d spied another rider on a 200cc Honda, the most expensive bike he’d ever seen round Kardial. Its owner looked barely older than him. 13
‘What do you do for a living, man?’ Aman asked.
‘I’m a sailor. Merchant navy. It’s a good living, my friend – $1,000 a month, if you get on the right ships. Buy yourself a bike like this, visit the USA, whatever you want.’
This was how men had been lured into merchant sailing for centuries. Not through adverts or recruitment drives, but through sailors flashing their money around. Richard Phillips, the hero of Captain Phillips, had fallen for just the same patter in 1970s Boston. He’d been driving a cab, his life going nowhere, when a merchant seaman clambered into his car one morning and declared: ‘I want booze and I want broads.’ The seaman tipped him $5 for the $5 fare to the nearest fleshpot. A year later, Phillips enrolled in Massachusetts Maritime Academy.
Unlike Phillips, who grew up in one of America’s biggest port cities, Aman had never even seen the sea before. But so what? If nothing else, joining the merchant navy would get him out of Kardial – away from the village gossips, always wondering how so-and-so’s son was doing, and when they were going to do their family right by getting onto a good college course. It wasn’t as if that guaranteed you a job anyway. Aman knew plenty of engineers in Kardial who were working as cabbies. The more he thought about it, the more a life as a merchant seaman appealed.
The job had a good reputation, judging by the comments posted on Indian jobseeker websites. Sure, you could be away at sea for nine months at a time, but you could take as much holiday as you wanted in between. Not like those call centre jobs, having to be polite all day to whingeing Europeans, where the bosses tutted if you even asked for time off to get married. And while it wasn’t quite up there with being a 14doctor, it still had a certain cachet. That crisp white sailors’ uniform made a good picture for the family to hang in the parlour, stopped the relatives asking why you hadn’t become a bloody engineer.
‘No, I don’t think so. Why don’t you apply to be a vet instead?’
Aman’s father, Kewal Krishan Sharma, looked like he could have stepped out from one of the college adverts on Kardial’s main drag. An army veteran, he’d fought in India’s war with Pakistan in 1999, when for three scary months, the two nuclear powers had battled over the disputed territory of Kashmir. That made him a respected man in Kardial. He wasn’t insistent on his son following him into the military, but he had his doubts about the merchant navy. Not least because maritime college was going to cost $6,000.
Aman didn’t want to be a vet any more than he wanted to be an engineer. He’d had enough of farm animals around the family home, where water buffalo still grazed in the back yard. The more his father pushed back, the more he wanted to go to sea. Eventually, he got his way. In 2008, shortly after his eighteenth birthday, Aman headed for a private maritime college in Calcutta, 1500 miles south-east on the Bay of Bengal.
The college was one of dozens in Calcutta, feeding what was now one of the largest merchant navies in the world. Cadets lived in dorms, and wore a uniform of neatly-ironed shirts, shorts and socks pulled to the knees. They studied container ships and oil tankers, and how to load them to 15keep them stable. They were trained in how to climb ladders and masts, practising on a ten-metre tower, and they learned knotting, a skill that even Boy Scouts no longer bothered with, but which sailors were still expected to perform with their eyes closed.
Yet Able Seaman Sharma, as he became a few months later, found himself unable to become a seaman. By the time he graduated in 2009, the global recession was kicking in. Shipping was one of the first casualties. Around the world, businesses were trimming orders back, be it for boxes of Sony PlayStations or 100,000-tonne consignments of steel. Container ships were idling in port, and so too were the men that crewed them. In Calcutta, the seamen’s hostels were full of jobless sailors, yet the maritime colleges were still churning out another 50,000 sailors every year. With no prior experience, they had no chance against the older hands.
‘Give me $6,000, and I can get you a job on a ship around the Gulf,’ the agent told Aman. ‘A nine-month contract.’
The naval college had warned him about guys like this. The backstreet shipping agents, who operated out of shabby offices around Calcutta’s docks. Men with connections here, friends there. Men who somehow always knew of jobs going somewhere – so long as you paid a ‘recruitment fee’. The ‘fee’ was often just a bung to some disreputable captain, the kind whose ships were best avoided anyway. But after six months languishing back in Kardial, Aman was desperate. The agents spun it as a kind of paid-for internship – get the experience you need, then get a better job next time. Even though the 16$6,000 they wanted was the same amount he’d paid for maritime college.
He did the maths. On the ship the agent was offering, his wages would be just $200 per month. So much for the $1,000 a month that his pal with the smart Honda back in Kardial had boasted of. At $200 a month, it would take three years just to pay off the recruitment fee – not much better than bonded labour. His father thought it was throwing good money after bad. Or rather, bad money after good, given the stories one heard about these agent types. Still, anything to help his son.
Chapter 3
Maiden Voyage
Jebel Ali Port, Dubai, October 2010
On 16 October 2010, Aman flew to Dubai to start his new job. His first time on a plane, taking him to his first time at sea. He spent a night in a hotel downtown, surrounded by skyscrapers and construction sites. Looking out of the window, it was hard to believe there was a global recession in full swing.
Dubai is the Arab world’s Hong Kong, a hot, humid city that lives by its wits. An oasis of prosperity in a tough neighbourhood, its banks are stuffed with the life savings of half the Middle East’s people, from war-weary Syrians to sanctions-wary Iranians. With no shortage of willing investors, it always looks busy, even in an economic downturn.
There was even more bustle down at the port of Jebel Ali, Aman’s destination the next day. The largest manmade harbour in the world, it was twice the size of Manhattan island. As Aman came through the gates, he saw endless piles of oblong cargo containers, stacked up like gigantic Lego bricks. He’d learned about them in maritime college: the standard delivery box for world trade; super versatile; designed to be stacked ten-high on a ship, loaded end-to-end on a train, or carried solo on a lorry. 18
Next to them were fleets of huge container ships, some a quarter of a mile long. Behemoths that transported 90 per cent of the world’s trade, be it shoes, food, steel girders or flat-screen TVs. Without merchant sailors, the planet’s shop shelves would be empty.
Against these giants, the ship Aman was now clambering onto was a minnow, yet still massive to a newcomer. The Albedo’s main deck was bigger than a full-sized football pitch. At the stern was a khaki-painted tower block six storeys high, housing the living quarters, the engine rooms and the bridge, or control room. The ship’s bow was 30 feet above the water, but was sinking lower as 10,000 tonnes of cement and rice were loaded onboard. Aman’s first voyage on the Albedo would be to haul the cargo to ports in Pakistan and Iran, and then back to Dubai. Beyond that, he knew little about his employers for the next nine months, the Majestic Enrich Shipping Company. The founder of Majestic was an Iranian, Omid Khosrojerdi, who worked out of offices in Malaysia, where the Albedo was flagged. Had any crewman searched the internet to learn more, all they would have found was a brief entry in an online shipping registry giving Majestic’s office address, and the Albedo’s International Maritime Organisation number, the equivalent of its number plate. It had the corporate profile of a back-street mini-cab firm.
This wasn’t unusual in the world of international shipping. In an industry that has been globalising since the age of sail, ships were often owned in one country, flagged in another, based in a third and crewed from a fourth, fifth, sixth and more. Operated through networks of agents, charter firms and middlemen, the set-up could be as opaque as a shell company in a tax haven. Things were not always what they seemed. 19Majestic Enrich, for example, was neither majestic nor rich. The firm had aspired to be a major player on the Asian trade routes, but the recession had reined in its ambitions. Now, rather than a fleet, it had just the Albedo, an ageing journeyman that had already had several previous owners and several different names. In eighteen years at sea, it had operated as the Universal Bahana, the Silver Dawn, the Mumbai Bay, and most recently, the Cape Ann.
Still, Aman felt overawed as he walked up the gangway. The hatchways, corridors and stairwells seemed to stretch forever. There was the smell of diesel and cleaning products, levers, lights, buttons and warning signs everywhere, the sense of being inside a giant machine. It was going to take him weeks just to learn his way around the rear tower. Now he realised why they’d practised gangway guard at naval college: if stowaways sneaked on board, it would be impossible to find them.
After being shown his cabin, a small shared bunk room, he took a wander. There was a dining room, a kitchen and a small lounge, where the crew could watch TV, play video games and socialise. At the top of the tower, fitted out with tinted panoramic windows like an ocean-going penthouse suite, was the bridge where the captain sat.
As he made his way around the ship, Aman saw men from all over Asia. Westerners were a rare sight among big container crews these days, the jobs long outsourced to countries with cheaper labour. The Albedo’s captain, Jawaid Khan, was Pakistani, as was the chief officer, Gulam Mujtaba. The ship’s bosun, the officer in day-to-day charge of the crew, was Shahriar Aliabadi, from Iran. Of the nineteen other sailors on board, there were six more Pakistanis, six Sri Lankans, three 20Bangladeshis, and an Egyptian. Plus, Aman was pleased to learn, one other rookie Indian about his own age.
The newcomers weren’t the only ones feeling a sense of occasion. Ahead of a long stint at sea, even the experienced sailors would find themselves in a reflective mood. Like soldiers embarking on a tour of duty, the start of each trip to sea was a marker in life, a time to take stock. They’d ponder the state of their marriages, their finances, the ever-present gap in life between where they were and where they wanted to be. There’d be resolutions to spend more time with the children, to treat the wife better, to divorce her; to find a better ship to sail on; to quit sailing altogether.
While Aman was contemplating the start of his days at sea, the Albedo’s captain, Jawaid Khan, was contemplating the end. A 63-year-old career sailor from the Pakistani port of Karachi, he’d spent most of his adult life on the oceans. Probably more time than he’d spent on land. He was slim of build and save for a few strands of swept-back hair, it was as if his scalp had been worn smooth by decades of ocean breeze. With his crisp white captain’s shirt and well-spoken, lightly-accented English, he could have passed for a Greek shipping magnate.
Yet the bags under his eyes and the lines across his face betrayed a certain frailty. Or so his elder daughter, Nareman, had told him just days before. She’d noticed that the father who’d always seemed so sturdy, who’d spent his life as a leader of men, was now looking rather old. Her words came back to him now as he did the final paperwork for the Albedo’s 21journey: ‘Why don’t you retire soon, father? Please make this your last journey. Come home and spend more time with the family.’
It was always hard to ignore his daughters’ wishes. Even though that was what he’d had to do for half his life. He’d been away when Nareman was born, and had seen her and her sister Mishal grow up in snapshots. Whenever he came home on shore leave, the girls who ran into his arms were at a different stage in life. First as toddlers, then as boisterous, gap-toothed young kids, then as shy teenagers, and now as self-assured young women. Self-assured enough to start telling him what to do.
Nareman, now 21, had recently finished university, and had moved to Dubai to work as a consultant. She’d come down to Jebel Ali to see him off on the Albedo. Aware that he owed her some time in his dotage, he’d agreed to make it his last voyage. He’d hugged her and said goodbye, wondering what retirement with his family would really be like.
On 30 October 2010, the Albedo
