Pirates of Somalia (30 page)

“What is that? What’s its name?” they asked him.

“How am I supposed to know?” he retorted, gesticulating at an imaginary radar display. “It’s a radar! It tells you the position, course, speed—no problem. But that’s it.”

Mihai chuckled at the recollection. “Everyone ran outside to the edge of the ship, pointing their guns. ‘If they come closer, we’ll just kill them,’ the pirates said. Then they hailed the ship on the VHF [high frequency radio] in the Somali language, checking to see if it was one of their own,” said Mihai. In the end, the situation was resolved without violence. It is possible that this incident was the alleged “American attack” described by Hersi. For his part, Mihai hypothesized that the unknown vessel was a Somali fishing boat—far more likely than an American warship attempting to sneak up on the pirates in the middle of the night.

One night, about a week after arriving at Eyl, the Chief was serving his watch shift on the bridge. At around midnight, several pirates barged in and demanded that he start the main engine and set an immediate course for the south. Mihai hurriedly tried to explain to non-receptive ears that the main engine required half an hour to warm up before it could be engaged.
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“ ‘It’s not a car,’ I told them,” he said, miming the act of turning a key in an ignition. “ ‘You can’t just start it and go. It’s impossible!’ ‘No, now!’ they said.” Pleading that he had no authority to order a course change, Mihai hastily summoned Captain Tinu to the bridge. When he arrived, Tinu took an unsuccessful turn at explaining the mechanics of the engine to the pirates. Finding it difficult to get their message across, the two men asked to speak to Loyan, the interpreter.
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“ ‘Fuck Loyan,’ they said. ‘Start the engine!’ Then one of them points a gun at my head,” Mihai said, raising an imaginary weapon to my temple. “And tells me that if I don’t start the engine in five minutes he’ll kill me.” In desperation, Captain Tinu convinced the would-be absconders to first speak with their boss on the shore. Two or three minutes later, Tinu was on the satellite phone with the group’s chief (presumably Computer), who did not prove much more helpful.

“Captain, please start the engine,” Computer said through the interpreter. “I can’t control these guys, they’re crazy. Do whatever they tell you.” Faced with no alternative, Mihai contacted the engine room and ordered a cold start-up. Seven or eight minutes later, the
Victoria
weighed anchor and headed south.

“It was a big risk,” said Mihai. “The engine could have easily broken down.” If the pirates had had a good reason for risking damage to their hard-won prize, the Chief was not aware of it. After sailing south for six hours, the
Victoria
dropped anchor for two or three hours before turning around and heading straight back to Eyl. “I have no idea why they wanted to leave,” he said. “Maybe because they were chewing their drugs.”

If their khat had more influence over the pirates than Computer, one wonders how strong a leader he could have been. Perhaps he could be better likened to the majority shareholder in a company, whose employees—as is the case in any corporation—sometimes functioned in divergent and unpredictable ways. Of the nine pirates who attacked the
Victoria
, Mihai said, three of them held positions of authority over the others, though the exact nature of their power remained a mystery. “One of these leaders was very dangerous,” he said. “Very evil.” Mihai described how Mohamed Abdi, the first pirate to board the ship, had approached him as he was eating in the mess hall with three of his crewmates.

“Chief, today I’m going to kill the whole crew,” he said.

“Why?” Mihai replied, in a tone of mock incredulity. “Why you gonna kill me? I’m on board this ship working for the German company to make money. I have a wife and children to support, no? You understand?”

“Yes, Chief.”

“You are a pirate. Why’d you capture this ship?—For money, no?”

“Yes, Chief.”

“Then, Romanian and Somalian, we’re the same, no?”

“Okay, Chief. I’ll kill the Germans instead.”

Mihai burst into hearty laughter, and my interpreter and I could not help but join him.

* * *

With the air conditioning switched off to conserve power, most of the crew was forced to sleep on the floor on mattresses the Chief had managed to beg from their captors, while the pirates slept comfortably in their beds. To pass the time, Mihai and his crewmates watched movies (the
Victoria
had a library of over a thousand DVDs), listened to music, and played cards and backgammon. Cigarettes were ample; at sixty cents a pack, the pirates were extremely liberal in providing them to the crew. The Chief lamented, however, that there had been no alcohol to help them pass the time; the crew had intended to replenish their depleted supply once they reached their destination of Jeddah. Contrary to Hersi’s assertions, Mihai never witnessed the pirates consume any alcohol themselves.

“I asked one pirate: Why don’t you drink? Because of the Koran?” he said.

“Yes, that’s right.”

“You read the Koran?”

“Yes, Chief.”

“What else does the Koran say? Don’t kill, don’t kidnap people …?”

“Yes, Chief.”

The pirates showed as little regard for the Koranic injunctions against theft. “They stole
everything
, even Ruxandra’s Tampax and underwear,” said Mihai. The pirates’ cook had taken a liking to her, and managed to convince his colleagues to return all of her belongings. The Chief was not so lucky: he lost his mobile phone, a pair of shoes, two bags, a set of pyjamas, two sweatshirts, a leather jacket, and around $500 in cash; fortunately, he had managed to hide his laptop. The pirates also helped themselves to communal goods, ransacking the medical stores and stealing, among other things, the defibrillator and emergency oxygen kit—though according to Mihai they had no inkling what the items were used for.

Nor were the Romanian crew members the only victims of the hijackers’ seemingly compulsive desire to thieve. “One pirate stole the Somali cook’s mobile phone,” said Mihai. Wondering where it had gone, the cook did the first logical thing in such a situation: he called his telephone from another line. “The phone rang in the thief’s pocket,” said Mihai, laughing aloud. Punishment was swift; the pirates tied up the transgressor and sent him to shore, only receiving him back about two weeks later. “That was a unique case,” he said.

Not surprisingly, fights involving khat were much more common. “When one of them had greener stuff, and the other had drier stuff, they would fight,” said Mihai, throwing a few shadow boxing jabs in my direction.

Unlike his younger shipmate, the Chief had never felt the desire to experiment with khat, and seemed more shocked by the pirates’ lack of fiscal responsibility than anything else. “Thirty-eight dollars per kilogram they paid for that stuff,” he said. “My God!” Yet, despite their khat-fuelled antics, the Chief had no objections to the majority of his captors. “The three leaders were the worst,” he said. “The others were okay.”

Nevertheless, the crew and the pirates always ate separately, said Mihai, relating how he spurned the one invitation he received to the pirates’ dinner table, extended by the pirates’ cook. “They used their hands to eat, and they added a hot green pepper to their food,” he said, disgusted. “My God! If I had eaten that I would have had to run right to the toilet.”

In a sign of improving relations between hostages and captors, the pirates began to bring goats on board for the crew during the final three or four weeks of their imprisonment. “Small ones, eight or nine kilograms,” said the Chief. They had to slaughter the goats themselves, but the meat was a welcome complement to their previous meals, which had been based around potatoes, onions, and flour—as well as an endless supply of rice from the
Victoria
’s ten-thousand-tonne hold, as my translator Teddy lightheartedly pointed out. “Yeah!” Mihai exclaimed. “I told my wife on the telephone: ‘Honey, I’m coming home. No rice, please, no rice!’ ” wagging his finger in mock consternation.

The Chief’s loving warning to his wife had occurred during one of only three or four opportunities the crew were given to speak to their families on the
Victoria
’s satellite phone, each call lasting only a few minutes. The exception was Levenescu, once again thanks to the kindness of the Somali cook, who risked his colleagues’ wrath by secretly allowing Levenescu to contact his family on his mobile phone.

In addition to the predictable assurances of their well-being, the crew members also urged their loved ones to help bring them home. “We told our families to protest, to talk to the media—anything that could help put pressure on the German company,” said Mihai.

* * *

The German owners had warned the pirates that no ransom would be agreed upon unless the
Victoria
had enough fuel remaining to reach international waters—twelve nautical miles from the Somali coast—under her own power; in response, the pirates immediately shut down the main engine in order to conserve bunker fuel. The endless circles the vessel had been performing in Eyl’s harbour for almost two weeks had taken a toll on its reserves. According to Mihai, the ship had consumed 146 tonnes of oil, leaving a mere 28 tonnes, enough for only a day and a half on the open sea. There was another problem: the heating system used to warm the main engine prior to ignition was diesel-powered, and the
Victoria
’s diesel stores had long since been depleted. Consequently, the pirates began a mass importation of diesel, bringing on board four tonnes, in increments of thirty- and forty-litre drums, over the course of three days.

As the negotiations drew to a close, the pirates started to plan their getaway. Two or three weeks before the ransom was delivered, the supply boats began to bring sets of new combat fatigues and matching boots, which the pirates subsequently used to disguise themselves as Puntland soldiers upon leaving the ship.
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By satellite phone, the
Victoria
’s owners had kept Captain Tinu and Mihai closely apprised of the status of the ongoing negotiations, and, as a result, the two knew a week in advance when the ransom was to be delivered. When the big day arrived, every leader, attacker, and holder in the pirate operation turned up on the
Victoria
, including, as Levenescu testified, Computer himself; Mihai counted a total of thirty-two individuals, including the gang’s accountant. They all waited with anticipation for a small eight-seater aircraft en route from Kenya, loaded from the vaults of a Nairobi bank.

When the plane was sighted, the crew was told to assemble on the main deck in plain view. Mihai observed that the plane was carrying “military men” (most likely private security forces), and guessed that a representative of the shipping company was also aboard. When, after two fly-bys, the plane’s occupants were satisfied that all crew members were alive and accounted for, they released a parachuting bundle containing the ransom money. So strong were the monsoon winds, said Mihai, that the pirates had to chase the package in one of their supply boats after it landed dozens of metres away.

Once retrieved, the ransom was brought on deck and meticulously divided according to a pre-arranged formula. “The accountant had a laptop,” said Mihai. “On it was an Excel table with the name of each pirate.” Of the $1.8 million ransom, “The man who threatened to kill us received $150,000,” Levenescu had told me earlier, almost certainly describing Mohamed Abdi, the head attacker. “The cook got $20,000.”

After five or six hours, twenty-two pirates had received and counted their money and departed for the shore, leaving ten on board to oversee the lengthy preparations to ready the main engine after its long period of disuse. Twenty-four hours later, at exactly quarter past five on the morning of July 18—the time was etched in Mihai’s memory—the last pirate left the deck of the
Victoria
.

* * *

For the Chief, the worst part of the experience was unquestionably the night on the bridge when he came closest to death. But he soon grew accustomed to living under the Damoclean sword of such threats. “At one point they sent the Germans an email,” he said. “It read: ‘If you don’t send us the money we’ll start randomly executing the crew, starting with the Captain.’ ”

I asked if he thought that the pirates would ever have carried out their threat.

“No,” he replied. “It was just a tactic to push the owners into paying.”

I pressed, “What makes you so sure?”

“Because if they had killed us, they wouldn’t have gotten any money,” came the matter-of-fact response.

Besides mass executions, the pirates also threatened to transport the crew onto land and scuttle the
Victoria
, a threat that Mihai did not view as credible. “I don’t believe they would have done it,” he said. “But who knows? They were unpredictable.”

And if the shipping company had refused to pay?

“They wouldn’t have let the ship go,” he said. “But they might have released us, maybe after five or six months. Maybe.”

As with Levenescu, Somalia was now on the Chief’s personal travel ban list, as I discovered when I asked if he would ever accept a berth on another vessel transiting through Somali waters.

“No!” he exclaimed, shaking his head and chuckling. “Maybe I’d run into the pirates again—they’d say, ‘Chief! You’re back! You must like it so much here!’ ” Once again, my translator and I found ourselves laughing aloud at his infectious levity. Going into these interviews, I had been nervous that I would encounter mute and traumatized wrecks; never would I have expected the Chief’s carefree attitude towards his experience.

The half-hour Mihai had originally promised us soon stretched into an hour and a half, leaving him over an hour late to pick up his wife. When his phone rang with her latest reminder, the Chief concluded that he had pushed his luck to the limit. Still chuckling, we got up and made our way out of the restaurant.