Pirates of Somalia (29 page)

The attack did not come as a complete surprise, Levenescu told me, since there had been an attempted hijacking in the area only seven hours earlier. Levenescu knew this because it had been his duty to monitor international piracy bulletins and report potential trouble spots to the captain. Before entering “Pirate Alley,” moreover, the crew had implemented a series of counter-piracy measures ordered by the vessel’s German owners: positioning high-powered water hoses, welding metal plates to the windows on the first and second levels, and blocking the stairwells leading up to the bridge. None of these precautions, however, made much difference to a ship as slow and sluggish as the
Victoria
.

The deck officer and second mate, Ruxandra Sarchizian, spotted the pirates at only six kilometres’ distance (the
Victoria
’s radar was blind to the attack craft until it was three kilometres away). “There were nine of them in one ten-metre-long boat,” Levenescu recalled. “They came up fast on our port side, moving at twenty knots.” Equipped with two 350-horsepower outboard motors, the craft was carrying about five hundred litres of gasoline—not nearly enough fuel, it must be noted, to get them back to Somalia (Hussein Hersi may not have been exaggerating when he spoke of his cousins’ suicidal “capture or die” philosophy).

Even though the
Victoria
had been travelling in the Internationally Recommended Transit Corridor and was in the vicinity of two NATO frigates, Mohamed Abdi and his team boarded the vessel unmolested. When asked how the pirates could have pulled off their assault practically under the gunnels of two warships, Levenescu rolled his eyes. “They’re useless,” he scoffed. “There was a warship, a Turkish one, fifty miles away when we were attacked. But at the same time, a Turkish cargo ship was also calling for help, and so it chose to help them instead.”
¹

Sarchizian raised the warship on radio, but instead of mobilizing a response, the Turks plied her with aimless questions. “What colour is the boat, what speed is it going at, how many pirates, how many guns, what kind of guns, … all this shit, you know?
Help us!
Finally, when the pirates were about fifteen cables away, they said a chopper would arrive in thirty-five minutes,” said Levenescu. When it arrived, the helicopter circled two or three times overhead as the pirates nervously tracked it with their rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) launchers. “The warships, they don’t prevent anything,” Levenescu said, with a contempt he extended to the international safety corridor. “That corridor is hell,” he said. “It just makes the pirates’ job easier, because they know where all the ships will be going. ‘Okay,’ they say, ‘Let’s fish!’ ”
²

The sea was calm, and with the
Victoria
’s thirteen-knot top speed and two-metre freeboard, the pirates had been able to board her with ease; the entire hijacking, from sighting to capture, took less than forty minutes. Once on deck, the pirates fired several rounds from their Kalashnikovs into the air in an attempt to intimidate the crew into surrendering. As the rest of the crew huddled on the lower decks, the captain and two seamen barricaded themselves in the bridge. Using a four-metre aluminum ladder, the attackers climbed from level to level until they reached the command deck. One pirate advanced with his weapon raised, shooting a bullet through the bridge’s glass housing and into the ceiling. Before he could decide to switch to living targets, Captain Tinu opened the door to the bridge and pushed the man’s weapon down, agreeing to surrender the ship.

Once in control of the
Victoria
, the pirates ordered the crew to hoist their attack boat aboard using the vessel’s deck cranes. Lacking the proper cables with which to secure the boat to the crane, the ropes snapped and it fell back into the sea. As the crew looked on in terrified anticipation, the pirates’ reaction was remarkably cheery. “No problem,” they said. “We’ll just buy another one.”

And what happened after that? Levenescu shot me a bemused look. “We go to Somalia,” he replied in English. For two days the crew stayed confined to the ten-metre-square bridge as the ship made its way to Eyl. Arriving towards the end of “pirate season,” they joined a fellowship of three hostage ships already moored in the harbour; for the next seventy-five days the crew watched other commandeered vessels come and go, until, finally, only the
Victoria
remained.

After the first two days, the crew was moved to the captain’s and owner’s quarters, where they spent the rest of their imprisonment in a world consisting of the two cabins, the ship’s mess, and the corridor linking them. The pirates, conversely, came and went freely, rotating between ship and shore in two- or three-week shifts.

* * *

Frequent shore leave was a necessary pressure release valve to prevent tempers on the ship from flaring. Supply boats went to and from the shore two or three times per day, though this ferry service was later reduced to one evening transport as the
hagaa
season wore on and its winds became increasingly merciless.
³
The pirates came and went with the transports, but there was an average of twenty on board at all times. Those not native to the Eyl area rarely left the ship, but the Romanian hostages observed that even the group’s Eyl residents were decidedly apprehensive about taking shore leave.
⁴

“They had some problems in Eyl,” said Levenescu. “There was trouble between the pirates and the government, or other pirates … I don’t know.” Given the anti-pirate hostility I had witnessed from the local people while in Eyl—as well as the recent Puntland government crackdown—the pirates’ anxiety was hardly surprising.

The pirates treated him and his shipmates with decency, if not kindness, Levenescu asserted, and never resorted to physical violence against any crew member. All things considered, he was content with the lot that he and his shipmates drew. “The group that captured us was a good one,” he said. “In the south, the pirates are terrible. They do much more violent things to intimidate the shipping company into paying.” Levenescu’s (somewhat accurate) generalization stemmed from the brutal treatment of the crew of the
Hansa Stavanger
, whom the pirates subjected to mock executions in order to pressure the
Hansa
’s owners into paying a higher ransom.

Levenescu had few quarrels with his captors, and recalled that the only woman in the crew, Sarchizian, was treated with more respect than any other crew member. “They would sometimes call her name seductively, but nothing more than that,” said Levenescu. Of the
Victoria
’s complement, in fact, it was the Romanians who had the more lascivious inclinations. “We asked them to bring some women on board,” said Levenescu, sheepishly. “They said no.”

I laughed, and mentioned my own difficulties in dealing with the
Victoria
gang, partly owing to the fact that they had believed me to be a CIA operative. He nodded understandingly, “Yes, they are stupid. They are very stupid.”

But Levenescu dashed my solipsistic assumption that the
Victoria
had fled from Eyl, during my second night in the town, because Computer feared my meddling in his plans. By the time I reached Eyl, forty-four days into the
Victoria
’s captivity, the vessel’s vital supplies—fuel, water, and food—were critically low. She was completely out of fresh water, and the ship’s desalinator functioned effectively only in the open ocean, away from the algae blooms and other contaminants present close to shore. What I had thought of as the gang’s flight from Eyl was merely a water harvesting trip, down the southern coast and back.

The ship’s fuel woes also explained why the
Victoria
’s distance from shore continually oscillated, giving the appearance—from my vantage point on Eyl’s beach—that she was being swept back and forth by the tides. Shortly before I arrived in Eyl, the ship’s supply of diesel had run out, and the auxiliary generator, which had powered the ship’s lights and mess facilities while anchored, sputtered to a halt. In order to generate electricity, the crew re-engaged the main engine, and with it the main propeller, forcing the
Victoria
to weigh anchor and chart continual circles in the harbour.

Using a four-thousand-kilowatt engine as a generator was an extremely inefficient way of powering light bulbs and kitchen elements, and it was not sustainable for long. Shortly after I left Eyl, on June 20, the ship’s reservoir of bunker fuel (the crude oil by-product consumed by the main engine) was exhausted. The prospect of losing the
Victoria
’s floodlights—a critical defensive resource in case of attack—was not an option for the pirates. So they resorted to transporting small amounts of diesel from shore to power the vessel’s emergency generator during the night. For the final month of the ship’s captivity, the emergency generator provided limited power for its occupants’ basic daily needs.

As for the pirates, their daily activities were predictable enough. “They chewed a drug that made their eyes wide, like this,” said Levenescu, using his fingers to spread his eyelids in imitation. “They wouldn’t sleep for thirty or forty hours at a time. The supply boat came three times per day to bring that fucking khat. There was only one pirate who didn’t chew: the cook. But in the end, even he started.” The pirates partnered the khat with the habitual hyper-sweet tea, having brought three kilograms of sugar on board with them. One time, said Levenescu, they substituted 7-Up for their tea, but did not alter their routine, heaping spoonfuls of sugar into the soft drink as well.
⁵
Levenescu had also experimented with the drug. “A bit,” he said, gagging at the memory. “They all ate
a lot.
”

One pragmatic effect of the khat was its ability to keep the pirates alert and ready. Staying awake late into the night, the pirates would routinely shoot off their Kalashnikovs for amusement. According to Levenescu, their on-board arsenal consisted of two RPG launchers, two Russian standard-issue machine guns (PKMs), and an AK-47 for each man. But the gang did not seriously expect to fight off an international naval assault with this weaponry. “They were more worried about attacks from other Somali pirates, not the navy ships,” said Levenescu. Yet again, Boyah’s claims of pirate solidarity and mutual affection did not seem to match the reality.

Having heard so much about the eccentric Computer from Hersi, I eagerly asked Levenescu for his impressions of the man. But it seemed Computer was an elusive, shadowy figure even to the
Victoria
’s crew. “They spoke a lot about their leader,” said Levenescu. “But I don’t think he even existed. I think they made all their decisions as a group.” On the day the ransom was delivered, however, the entire gang assembled on the deck of the
Victoria
. “There was an older man aboard then, about fifty years,” said Levenescu. “He was dressed like a garbage man. If there was a leader, it was him.” There is little doubt that the shabby figure Levenescu described was Computer. If, as Hersi claimed, Computer had served as a police lieutenant under the former Somali Republic, he would probably be in his mid-to-late fifties.

When the pirates finally departed, they left the
Victoria
in much worse shape than her crew. “The ship was a mess,” said Levenescu. “There was trash everywhere. In the end, they stole everything from us—laptops, cellphones. But they did give us back our SIM cards.”

On July 18, the
Victoria
was finally released. But sudden liberty after seventy-five days of captivity was apparently not enough to perturb the stoic equanimity of Levenescu and his crewmates. “We weren’t happy,” he recalled. “We were nervous. Once we left Somalia, we were really worried about getting hijacked again.” The hardest part, he said, was the open-water dash from the Somali coast to the Yemeni island of Socotra, where a tugboat was waiting with fresh supplies, ready to take the
Victoria
in tow. Fortunately, the
Victoria
’s crew made the rendezvous, after which they were towed to Salalah, Oman, and from there were flown home via Bahrain.

If Levenescu had been irrevocably damaged by his ordeal, he concealed it well. “It wasn’t a difficult psychological experience for me,” he said. “Maybe it was different for the others. I don’t know. I guess I appreciate life a little more,” he added, shrugging.

Levenescu certainly had no plans to abandon his career path; as a matter of fact, I was lucky to catch him a few days before he shipped out on his next assignment. But he made it clear that he would not be returning to Somalia: “No way. Never again.”

* * *

The next day, in a diner on the other side of the country, Teddy and I met with Levenescu’s commanding officer and the
Victoria
’s chief mate, Traian Vasile Mihai—or, as he playfully called himself, “Chief.” Mihai looked to be in his early fifties, short and squat, with a drooping moustache and thinning hair. The lines of his face were imbued with mirth, his eyes lively and jovial. Like Levenescu, he declined to order any food, leaving me alone to munch on a chicken and ketchup sandwich between my questions.

Though posted to the same ship as Levenescu, Mihai was born of a different age; lighting one cigarette after another, he wistfully reminisced about the past glory of NAVROM, the state-owned shipping fleet active during the rule of Communist-era dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu. “Romania had a merchant marine of 345 ships at that time,” he sighed. “Now, nothing.” After about five minutes, I managed to steer the conversation to the subject of the
Victoria
’s capture.

Following the pirate takeover, said Mihai, he, Captain Tinu, and the second mate Sarchizian were the only three crew who remained on active duty—though “forced labour” was perhaps a more accurate description. Serving six- to eight-hour shifts, Mihai’s principal responsibility was to keep watch on the bridge and monitor the radar for possible threats to the pirates. One night, he detected a small vessel approaching, which he dutifully reported to his captors.