Dead in the Water E-Book

Matthew Campbell

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 488

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Winner of the True Crime Awards Book of the Year Shortlisted for the 2022 Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award. ***A Waterstones Best Books of 2022 pick*** A Financial Times,The Times and The Economist Book of the Year 'Gripping... A startling tale of fraud and impunity. ' TheEconomist 'I read it in one sitting, and I know it'll stay with me for a long time.' Oliver Bullough, Sunday Times bestselling author of Moneyland Inside the corrupt and secret business of global shipping, the explosive true story of a notorious international fraud and murder In July 2011, the oil tanker Brillante Virtuoso was drifting through the treacherous Gulf of Aden when a crew of pirates attacked and set her ablaze in a devastating explosion. But when David Mockett, a maritime surveyor working for Lloyd's of London, inspected the damaged vessel, he was left with more questions than answers. Soon after his inspection, he was murdered. Dead in the Water is a shocking expose of the criminal inner-workings of international shipping, an old-world industry at the backbone of our global economy. Through first-hand accounts of those who lived the hijacking - from members of the ship's crew and witnesses to the attacks, to the ex-London detectives turned private investigators seeking to solve Mockett's murder - award-winning reporters Matthew Campbell and Kit Chellel piece together the astounding truth behind one of the most brazen financial frauds in history.

Leseprobe

Matthew Campbell is a reporter and editor at Bloomberg Businessweek. He has reported from more than 20 countries and is currently based in Singapore.

Kit Chellel is a reporter at Bloomberg and a writer for Bloomberg Businessweek. His features have won numerous international awards and prompted investigations by the UK’s market regulator. He is currently based in London.

This edition published by arrangement with Portfolio / Penguin, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

First published in Great Britain in hardback in 2022 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Matthew Campbell and Kit Chellel, 2022

The moral right of Matthew Campbell and Kit Chellel to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

Portions of this book were previously published in a different form as ‘The Hijacking of the Brillante Virtuoso’ on bloomberg.com in 2017.

Insert photo credits may be found on page 249.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-83895-252-5

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-83895-253-2

E-book ISBN: 978-1-83895-254-9

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

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For our families

CONTENTS

Introduction

1. A LUCKY LAND

2. THE GATE OF TEARS

3. INTRUDERS

4. DISTRESS SIGNALS

5. A BRAVER WORLD

6. THE TALLEST MAN IN YEMEN

7. EVIDENCE, DEAR BOY

8. SHOCK WAVES

9. AN UPSTANDING CONSTABLE

10. FOR THOSE IN PERIL ON THE SEA

11. NO CURE, NO PAY

12. HOT FROGS

13. BELOW THE SURFACE

14. WAR RISKS

15. METAL MICKEY

16. CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE

17. MARKED

18. SUPER MARIO

19. AN UNRELIABLE WITNESS

20. BEARING GIFTS

21. I’M NOT AFRAID

22. ZULU 2

23. TWO GREEK GUYS

24. THE JOB

25. DON’T LEAVE THE HOUSE

26. JUDGMENT

27. THE CAPTAIN

AFTERWORD

Acknowledgments

Insert Photo Credits

Notes

Index

INTRODUCTION

The oceans make the modern economy possible, providing the most convenient and affordable means to move the things we buy, sell, build, burn, eat, wear, and throw away. On any given day, sneakers stitched together in Cambodian sweatshops are packed into forty-foot containers, then winched by dockside cranes into ships bound for Europe, where they will line the shelves of big- box stores. Oil sucked from a 150- million- year- old deposit beneath the Saudi desert travels the aquatic highway of the Suez Canal, ultimately filling the tanks of Ford sedans in New Jersey. Iron ore gouged from the red earth of Western Australia is loaded into cavernous bulk carriers and shipped to China, where it’s forged into the steel that frames Shanghai skyscrapers.

Without seaborne trade, there would be no smartphones, and no glass of red wine with dinner. Without tankers to distribute it cheaply and efficiently, there would be no economic way to extract much of the natural gas that heats our homes, nor the fuel that allows us to fly off on vacations and business trips. The evolution of the shipping business to enable this commerce is one of the most remarkable achievements of capitalism, a symphony of technical and financial innovations that have drastically reduced the cost, and increased the reliability, of long-distance trade.

Yet the industry’s success has also, curiously, led it to become largely invisible. The world’s greatest cities—London, New York, Tokyo—were once dominated by their ports, their streets crowded with the sailors and dockworkers who made them run. But as ever-larger vessels required ever-larger quays, and robotic cranes replaced longshoremen’s brawn, the ports moved away, to obscure locales like Felixstowe and Port Elizabeth. Eventually the sailors also receded from view—some made obsolete by automation, the rest pushed out by cheaper, less demanding workers from developing countries. Even more than power lines or sewer pipes, ships slipped into the background of modern life, not so much taken for granted as barely noticed at all. As consumers, we’ve never before had access to such a bounty of goods, and we’ve never had to think so little about how they come into our possession.

The story told here centers on just one vessel, a rusting hulk of an oil tanker called the Brillante Virtuoso. It is the product of more than four years of reporting, drawing on tens of thousands of pages of court filings, witness testimonies, police records, military documents, emails, memos, and audio transcripts, as well as interviews with more than seventy-five people involved in the events concerned. No scenes or dialogue have been invented or embellished; all are based on the recollections or contemporaneous notes of direct participants, or drawn from the materials described above. Where the accuracy of an account is substantively disputed, the objections are described in the text or notes.

On its own, the Brillante was nothing special, just another useful cog in the machine of maritime trade. Yet for a decade, this unremarkable vessel has been fought over, picked apart in court, and investigated by police, naval forces, private detectives, and experts who make their living boarding ships to look for nearly invisible clues. And it still hasn’t given up all its secrets. Mention its name in one of the world’s maritime hubs, and as often as not you’ll get a certain kind of reaction—an arched eyebrow, perhaps, or a glance over a shoulder to see who might be listening. More than once during our research, we were warned of risks to our safety if we continued to investigate, and many of the sources we consulted asked not to be identified, fearing for their own well-being. Their anxiety was understandable. For years, the Brillante has been leaving a churn of ruined lives in its wake. At least one person involved has been murdered. Others have been threatened, kidnapped, or forced to flee their homes in terror.

This book is about the hidden system that powers international commerce, and, more particularly, about what can happen on its chaotic fringes. The shipping industry has the unique attribute of being utterly integrated with the world economy while existing apart from it, benefiting from its infrastructure while ignoring many of its rules. It’s sometimes said that the seas are lawless, and that’s true: far from shore, on a decrepit trawler or a juddering ore carrier, there are certainly no police, and often no consequences. But the most audacious crimes can occur where the maritime world intersects with the more orderly terrestrial one—enabled by the complexities of twenty-first-century finance and, perhaps most of all, the collective indifference of a global populace that wants what it wants, wants it now, and doesn’t want to know the human cost.

DEAD IN THE WATER

CHAPTER 1

A LUCKY LAND

In the middle of a spring night in 2011, Cynthia Mockett woke to the sound of gunshots. The rattle of automatic rifle fire was something she’d learned to tolerate over the years. But this sounded close, just outside her bedroom. Cynthia was sixty-four years old, a small, forceful woman with silvery hair and intense eyes. Her husband, David, was still asleep as she slid out of bed and crept over to the window. She could see the outlines of the old city of Aden laid out before her, its neat white buildings clinging to the rocky slopes of an extinct volcano, illuminated by the lights of the harbor beyond.

The villa that she and David had rented for several years in Yemen was situated a few blocks back from the ocean in Mualla, a district built by the British for colonial officials and soldiers, half a century before. As she knelt at the window, Cynthia breathed in the acrid smell of burning tires. Below her, crowds of young men were running through the darkness, yelling and shooting out streetlights, the muzzles of their rifles flashing with each report. It wasn’t clear if they were pursuing or being pursued. Suddenly, she heard David’s voice, bellowing at her from across the room. “What the bloody hell are you doing, Cynth? Get away from there!” She climbed back in bed and lay awake until the sky began to lighten, listening to the gunfire and, farther away, the claps of artillery echoing off the hillsides.

A little before eight o’clock, Cynthia opened the villa’s cast-iron gates and David eased his Lexus sport-utility vehicle into the pitted street, giving her a wave as he set out for his office near the Aden port. She looked around as he drove off. Children were playing amid the broken glass and vendors were hawking fruit, like nothing had happened the night before. At first Cynthia felt foolish, as if she’d imagined it all. But she couldn’t escape a feeling of unease. David had lived and worked in Yemen for more than a decade, a period in which Cynthia had shuttled regularly between the Arabian Peninsula and their home in England. Never an easy place, Aden had been noticeably disintegrating for months. They’d begun to talk about David’s plans for retirement, and spending more time with their grandchildren. Maybe now was the moment, Cynthia thought, for him to move back permanently.

The Mocketts had spent most of their forty-three years together in hot, dangerous places. They met when Cynthia was fifteen, living in a small town in Devon, a pastoral county in southwest England that’s also home to Europe’s largest naval base. He was a year younger, the friend of a cousin, and introduced himself by wolf-whistling in her direction. “Cheeky devil,” she said to herself. Later, he turned up at her bedroom window, refusing to leave until she agreed to go to the movies with him. Just before Christmas 1968, David put on a tie and Cynthia her best dress, and they hitched a ride to the registry office in a relative’s delivery van, sitting atop a pile of cabbages on their way to be married. David was a strapping six feet four, with a thunderous laugh and a way of dominating any room he walked into. In black-and-white photographs from the time, he looks like a young Sean Connery, broad-shouldered with a thick brow. His father worked for the Admiralty, the government department responsible for the Royal Navy, and he’d lived as a child in Sri Lanka and Gibraltar, gaining a taste for adventure that never left him. Cynthia thought he was the most exciting man she’d ever met. She still thought so four decades later, after he’d lost most of his hair and thickened around the middle.

As a sailor in the merchant navy, David went to sea for months at a time, which was hard on Cynthia, even if she knew the life she’d married into. It was unusual, especially in the 1970s, but David would invite her to join him on voyages whenever he could. She sailed with him once on a cargo ship carrying iron ore from India to Japan, spending much of the trip cleaning rust-colored dust out of their cabin. Some of the crew objected to the presence of a woman on board, but Cynthia didn’t much care. She had a quiet manner that masked a steely streak. She laughed easily, even at the bawdy humor of the young sailors, who treated her as a kind of surrogate mother. When the captain wasn’t on the bridge, David liked to let her steer the ship.

Money got tight when the Mocketts’ two daughters, Sarah and Rachael, were born, and in 1977 David took the offer of a well-paid job on land, as a port superintendent in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in the midst of the oil boom. By then he’d earned a master mariner’s certificate, qualifying him to skipper a vessel. Though he went ashore before being given his own command, he was still known thereafter as Captain Mockett.

Initially, Cynthia and the girls lived with him in a secure development for Westerners, insulated from the conservative strictures being enforced by Saudi religious police. But after a few years, Cynthia suspected she’d go mad with boredom if she had to spend many more days drinking gin and tonics with the other wives inside the walls of the compound. And she wanted their daughters to have a proper British education. She and the girls moved back to Devon, into a rambling stone cottage that everyone called the Vicarage. David stayed in the Middle East. He loved the people, and the rugged beauty of the coasts. Besides, the pay was good, and maintaining the Vicarage wasn’t cheap. When he was back in England, he would relax with a jigsaw puzzle and tell Cynthia about his adventures, like the time the Saudi king’s camels escaped and rampaged through the port. Some of them had to be retrieved thirty miles away.

In 1998, David took a position as a marine surveyor in Yemen. Surveyors play a vital, unsung role in seaborne trade, providing independent analyses of marine mishaps, helping to pinpoint their cause and informing decisions on compensation. It would be Mockett’s job to inspect vessels and cargo passing through Yemeni waters, on behalf of the various merchants, traders, bankers, shipowners, and insurance companies who required his services. One day he might cast his expert eye over a tanker with engine trouble carrying oil from Kuwait to Texas; the next a damaged consignment of steel rebar bound for Rotterdam. Even in an age of largely automated container vessels and real-time satellite navigation, such incidents occurred at sea constantly, and with a shortage of skilled surveyors in the region there was good money to be made.

Yet moving to the poorest nation in the Middle East was a daunting proposition. Then as now, Yemen could make a strong claim to being the least governable place on earth. And many have tried to govern it, since the country sits on an important geopolitical choke point between Saudi Arabia and the Horn of Africa, abutting the main shipping route from Asia to Europe. The Ottoman Turks came in the sixteenth century, trying to bribe the local sheikhs into loyalty, only to be beaten back again and again by fierce highland tribes. One Turkish official described mountains that “pierce the clouds, a place where there was only pain.” Legend has it that Ottoman troops had to be chained to their ships to force them into service in Yemen’s battlegrounds.

Next came the British, who set their sights on Aden as a way station for ships sailing to and from the Indian colonies. In 1837, an attack on a Britishflagged vessel provided a pretext for the East India Company to seize what was then a fishing village. British investment helped bring a degree of prosperity to southern Yemen, especially after the Suez Canal opened up the trade route through Egypt, and Aden became one of the most important ports in the Empire, a gateway between East and West. Colonial administrators installed a clocktower known as “Little Ben,” a statue of Queen Victoria, and a Western-style bureaucracy. Once again, though, the region’s inhabitants vigorously asserted their independence. Aden was so rough that it became a punishment posting for army regiments that had fallen into disgrace. A Scottish officer stationed there in the 1850s complained about the prickly heat, the howling of wild dogs, and an “aspect of desolation which pervades the place.”

In the 1960s, as the British were being driven out by militants armed with grenades and machine guns, Egyptian troops were embroiled in a bloody campaign in the north of Yemen, in what Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser called “my Vietnam.” After the British left, a Kremlin-backed socialist regime took control of the south, which nearly came apart in a bloody civil conflict in the 1980s. Russians stationed in Aden were forced to flee the slaughter, ignominiously, on the royal yacht Britannia, which had been sailing nearby. Even fellow Marxists found the violence excessive. “When are you people going to stop killing each other?” Cuban leader Fidel Castro grumbled to a local counterpart.

By the time David Mockett settled there in the late 1990s, Yemen’s southern and northern halves were united under a lavishly corrupt military ruler called Ali Abdullah Saleh. The country was still roiling and chaotic, overflowing with Russian firearms, aggressive tribal militias, and, increasingly, Islamic extremists. The president’s security forces offered a haven to jihadis returning from Afghanistan, including associates of Osama Bin Laden and his growing Al Qaeda network, even as Saleh tried to persuade the outside world that he was a willing partner, deserving of foreign aid. Traveling outside the major cities often required an armed escort from police who, along with roughly three-quarters of the male population, spent every late afternoon chewing qat, a mildly narcotic leaf that produces a high said to be somewhere between a strong cup of coffee and a line of cocaine.

Despite it all, Mockett was intoxicated by Yemen. He’d tried a spell in Dubai and hated it. It was like living in Disneyland, he told friends. In Yemen, he found the Arabia of One Thousand and One Nights, untainted by money and modernity, home to some of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth. In the northern capital, Sana’a, thousands of stained-glass windows twinkled like jewels above qat sellers working by lamplight. In Hadhramaut, mud palaces painted in pastel shades were carved out of desert cliffs, unchanged since the time of the Romans, who called Yemen “Arabia Felix,” the lucky land, a fertile territory where camel caravans stopped to rest and relax.

Mockett thought Yemen’s dangers were mostly hype. As long as you’re respectful, he told Cynthia, it’s perfectly safe. He was quite happy eating breakfast on the street with regular Yemenis, using his hands as they did and making small talk in his limited Arabic. On long drives through sun-blasted mountain ranges, he and Cynthia could hear the echoing shouts of herdsmen communicating across valleys. Cynthia thought they sounded angry. “They’re just talking to each other,” David said. “That’s the way they do it.” Those peaks had a harsh beauty that appealed to him, just as they had to the interwar explorer Freya Stark, who wondered at “the high-shouldered mountains of Yemen . . . smoldering and dusky, as if the black volcanic points were coated with desert sand, and the red sandstones subdued by ashes of volcanoes.”

Not even a brush with death could change his mind about his adopted home. It happened in March 2002. At the time Mockett was living in Hodeida, a port town up the coast from Aden. Returning from work one evening, he was locking his car when he noticed two men on a motorbike, stopped outside the front of his house. One of them had turned to face Mockett, raising an object to his shoulder that looked very much like a rifle. Before he could fully comprehend what was happening, Mockett heard a crack, and then felt a searing pain in his neck. “Naturally, I clapped my hand to the area and then, to developing horror, saw blood!” he wrote in a report for the police. “I dropped my keys and the phone and clipboard and RAN.”

It turned out the bullet had ricocheted off Mockett’s car and passed through his neck, just missing an artery. Like a good surveyor, he made sure he collected the round, as evidence, before calling a friend to drive him to the hospital. He told Cynthia about the shooting over the phone, a few days after it happened. They were in the middle of doing a crossword together—David in his Yemeni villa, Cynthia at the Vicarage, when he interrupted. “Cynth, I’ve been shot,” he said curtly. She was shocked, although she tried not to show it; her immediate response was “How did you manage that?” Mockett never found out who targeted him or why. The local cops told him, improbably, that he’d been hit by a stray bullet fired in celebration from a nearby wedding. Later, Cynthia would come to suspect that a local businessman was behind the attempt on her husband’s life, perhaps someone who’d lost money because David refused to participate in a cargo scam.

Dozens of visitors came to see the injured surveyor in hospital, including the regional governor, which Mockett took as evidence that most Yemenis wanted him around. He took the bloodstained bullet home as a souvenir and added the incident to his repertoire of stories. Whenever he told it, he mock-lamented that the doctors had done such a good job that he didn’t even have a proper scar to show off, just a tiny pale dash. “No badge of honor!” he complained.

Mockett decided to stay in Yemen, later relocating to Aden, the country’s primary port. As a former outpost of the Empire, it could offer comforts that were hard to find elsewhere. There was a decent hotel, the Sheraton, which had a metal detector in the lobby and a sign saying “NO GUNS OR DAGGERS.” There was an Anglican church, a smattering of eccentric British expats to hang out with, and even places where they could order beer. It was Yemen’s most outward-looking city, a place where people from all over the country could let their hair down, relatively speaking. Once their daughters were grown, Cynthia never turned down a chance to visit and spend some time with her husband. She’d envisaged her 2011 trip as a vacation, though the nocturnal gunfire punctured any notion that it would be a carefree break. Not much of a holiday, she thought the next morning, as she surveyed the damage outside their villa.

In the days that followed, street protests broke out all over Aden. It was the dawn of the Arab Spring, a wave of demonstrations against oppressive regimes that had spread from Tunisia across the region. President Saleh’s government was as corrupt and unscrupulous as its neighbors, and money from the country’s few oil fields, which he’d previously used to placate would-be opponents, was running out. Yemeni security forces responded to calls for change by attacking unarmed protesters with tear gas, rubber bullets, and live ammunition, killing hundreds, while Saleh’s image—slick hair and a prototypical despot’s mustache—looked on reproachfully from billboards and murals.

One morning, the Yemeni woman the Mocketts employed as a housekeeper and cook approached Cynthia. “You need to go home, madam,” she said. Cynthia nodded. “No, not on your own. You need to go home with Mr. David.” Cynthia went to a meeting of expats at the Anglican church, where many of those present suggested the same thing. “I think I’ll wait,” she told them. Shortly afterward, the vicar fled.

But when Cynthia tried to talk to David about the situation, he told her that people were being hysterical. He refused to hire a driver or bodyguard and continued driving himself to work as usual. If there was a protest blocking the road, he simply took another route. Following his instructions, Cynthia stayed inside during the day, keeping toward the center of the house, where she passed the time reading and knitting. Otherwise, she would join him as he pored over maritime reports in his office by the port. The Yemeni employees there called her “Mrs. David.”

There were things about her husband’s professional life that had always been mysterious to Cynthia. She suspected he was holding information back, to stop her worrying about his safety. Every week, he would take her down to watch ships come and go at Steamer Point, where Queen Elizabeth had once disembarked. Aden’s port had faded considerably since its British days—the paint on the oil pipes fueling the ships was peeling, and rubbish was strewn around in shoulder-high piles—but there was always something to see. There were hulking tankers and container ships the size of floating towns, jostling with motorboats and slender-sailed Arab dhows. There was sometimes a half-submerged wreck in the harbor, the ragged carcass of an earlier “casualty,” as people in the maritime trade called broken vessels. David always watched the tugboats off-loading passengers. Cynthia often felt he was looking for something or someone, but if he was, he kept it to himself.

Anxiety was growing in Aden’s tiny expatriate community. The Mocketts had hosted a security meeting with staff from the British embassy at the villa, and the UK government had advised citizens to leave Yemen as soon as possible. David and Cynthia bought a rolling airline ticket in case they needed to get out in a hurry; at the end of each day, it automatically renewed for the next available flight. One of their friends had mentioned a slightly outlandish fallback: if shelling closed the airport, they might be able to load the remaining foreigners into a dhow and sail across the Gulf of Aden to East Africa.

By April, Al Qaeda militants were fighting government troops for control of a town called Zinjibar, just sixty kilometers to Aden’s east. Daily life in the port continued, punctuated by the occasional burst of gunfire. The area’s warring factions were using the collapse of law and order to settle old scores. Cynthia’s trip was scheduled to end that month, and she and David made use of their rolling ticket to return to Devon. “I won’t be back until this is sorted,” she explained to their housekeeper.

David, however, seemed more concerned about the tax man than the civil unrest. He’d once been hit with a hefty bill for spending too many days in England, missing out on the lower rate for those who met the criteria for residing abroad. The mistake had wiped out their savings. “I will never be caught out like that again,” he told friends, even when they pleaded with him not to return to Yemen. He wasn’t going to let a bit of local trouble stop him from working, and his wife knew better than to try to change his mind.

Mockett flew back to Aden in May, promising Cynthia he would be home in August, in time for a niece’s wedding. He found the city even more unstable. The police had melted away, and outlying districts were being patrolled by masked men with guns riding pickup trucks. A July 2011 report in The Economist summed up the deteriorating security situation, describing a collision of Islamists, armed southern separatists, and government-backed assassins: “The south is a dangerous mess where the writ of the government in Sana’a now barely runs.”

By then, Mockett’s next big job had sailed through the Suez Canal and was cruising through the Red Sea toward Aden at a steady twelve knots. Painted in white letters on a blunt, flat bow was the vessel’s name:

Brillante Virtuoso.

CHAPTER 2

THE GATE OF TEARS

In more than a decade at sea, Allan Marquez had seen the world—and it looked, for the most part, like the inside of a ship. The forty-year-old Filipino sailor had been born in a small town in Batangas, a coastal province south of Manila, on a plain of modest farms worked by sprawling, hard-tofeed families. But for the luckier and more adventurous among the men of Batangas, there was another option, more lucrative if hardly less difficult. Becoming a seafarer, as they’re known in the Philippines, meant first attending a training college and then finding an assignment from one of Manila’s manning agencies, lightly regulated companies that source crews for shipowners they’re unlikely ever to meet. Marquez went through the training program as a young man. He knew that what came next wouldn’t be easy. A seafarer was expected to live away from his family for as long as ten months every year, time spent isolated on vessels with cramped quarters, bad food, and, sometimes, abusive, dictatorial superiors. But he would also earn money—not much by the standards of developed countries, but multiples of what would be feasible at home. After building up some experience and rising in rank, the sailor would be able to afford to put his parents into a concrete house, instead of one made from wood and thatch, and send his children to a competently run private school instead of relying on the Philippines’ underfunded public system.

Marquez, who had a square jaw, powerful hands, and wispy, slightly thinning hair, had been part of the invisible army of seafarers that powers the global economy for most of his adult life. Seafarers are responsible for the movement of virtually every product the modern world desires: shoes, cars, oil, food, and everything in between, accounting for over 80 percent of all worldwide trade in physical merchandise. The scale of the industry is astonishing, a direct result of the drastic expansion of international trade that began after the Second World War and has continued, with scant interruptions, ever since.

The merciless economic realities of the shipping industry largely explain why, by the beginning of this century, the bulk of its laborers came from just a few low-income countries: India and Indonesia and, especially, the Philippines. Filipinos tend to be favored above all others by shipowners because of their good English, as well as their willingness to work long hours, ask few impertinent questions, and accept low wages. At least 200,000 people working at sea hail from the Southeast Asian archipelago—often serving as primary breadwinners for large extended families.

Marquez came aboard the Brillante Virtuoso in January 2011, with a contracted salary of just $465 for a forty-eight-hour week, plus another $139.50 for “fixed overtime” of one hundred hours a month. Everyone else on board the tanker was Filipino, too. The master, or captain, was Noe Gonzaga, a fifty-seven-year-old with a dignified air and a grandfatherly smile. The task of keeping it running efficiently, and therefore profitably, fell to Nestor Tabares, fifty-four, who as chief engineer had dominion over the engine room and other mechanical systems. He had been serving on the Brillante since early the previous year and knew the ship intimately. All told, there were twenty-six men on board, and apart from brief shore leaves, they would work, eat, and sleep together for months, forming a sealed mini-society that’s been compared to living in a monastery, or even a prison—an example of what the sociologist Erving Goffman called a “total institution,” but one in near-constant motion.

More than 11,000 oil tankers ply the sea-lanes, ranging from modest barges to so-called VLCCs, or very large crude carriers, as long as the Chrysler Building is tall. The tankers share the ocean with another 5,300 container ships, the greatest of which are even larger than the biggest tankers, with capacity for tens of thousands of standardized steel boxes. The large-scale adoption of the shipping container in the 1960s revolutionized the industry, drastically reducing the time and money required to move products across vast distances. Along with larger tankers, such ships catalyzed explosive growth: in 2019, the total volume of goods loaded onto ships worldwide, oil included, exceeded 11 billion metric tons, more than four times the figure in 1970.

The Brillante Virtuoso was owned by a company called Suez Fortune Investments, which was domiciled in the Pacific tax haven of the Marshall Islands. In June 2011, about five months after Marquez joined the crew, the Brillante was hired by a Cypriot logistics firm to pick up just over 141,000 metric tons of fuel oil from Kerch, a faded industrial port on Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula. Worth nearly $100 million, the cargo needed to be delivered to consumers in eastern China, two oceans away. The Brillante was nearly twenty years old, built in South Korea in 1992, a veteran compared with many ships at sea and near the end of its working life. But the job it was hired to perform was one of the oldest in the business. Tankers began carrying oil from the Black Sea to Asia more than a hundred years ago, when the British entrepreneur Marcus Samuel sent a vessel called the Murex from present-day Georgia through the Suez Canal and on to Singapore. A decade and a half after the Murex’s 1892 sailing proved it was feasible to carry oil halfway around the world in the hull of a ship, Samuel’s London-based trading company, which had grown dramatically through its mastery of the tanker trade, merged with a competitor from the Netherlands to create an entity that would long outlive him: Royal Dutch Shell.

The Brillante set out for China on June 23, easing gently away from the splintered wharves and rusting, Soviet-era trawlers of Kerch’s harbor. The helmsman set a course that would take the vessel toward the Mediterranean and beyond. Soon Marquez and the twenty-five other men on board settled into a dull regularity, with long shifts on the bridge, in the engine room, or attending to odd jobs like painting or scrubbing, punctuated by breaks watching action movies on laptops or sneaking cigarettes on the rear deck. Marquez was expected to pitch in with whichever tasks needed doing: maintaining a lookout on the bridge, chipping rust off the superstructure, ensuring that the lifeboats and other safety equipment were in usable condition, or anything else his superiors told him to do. It was hard, tedious work, and Marquez was sometimes so tired by the end of his shift that he could barely stand. The ragged condition of the Brillante didn’t help. The ship threw off thick, noxious exhaust fumes, and the air-conditioning sometimes broke down, forcing the crew to sleep on deck rather than in their sweltering cabins. Whenever it got especially difficult, Marquez reminded himself of the sole reason he was at sea. His family was counting on the money he sent home, income that gave them a far more comfortable life than many of their compatriots. Thanks to his earnings, they had a foothold in the Philippines’ middle class, and his duty now was to make sure they didn’t slip off it.

In any case, such hardships weren’t a surprise. As Marquez and the others had learned through bitter experience, few shipowners cared much for their comfort, or even their safety. Indeed, the entire modern shipping industry had been structured to interpose layer upon corporate layer between the men who profited from owning ships and those who labored on them. When something went wrong, if there was a fatal accident or the crew ran out of food, it was easy for shipowners to claim ignorance and diffuse responsibility. What mattered was getting the cargo, whatever it might be, to its destination quickly, cheaply, and in reasonable condition. Everything else was secondary at best.

A couple of days out from Kerch, an amateur photographer captured the Brillante as it passed through the Bosporus, the narrow waterway that cleaves the metropolis of Istanbul into its European and Asian halves. Although it was considerably smaller than the largest supertankers, the vessel was nonetheless impressive. Nearly as long as three football fields and with a dead-weight, or carrying capacity, of 150,000 tons, it was shaped like a giant letter L that had been knocked over onto its side. The upright part of the L was the accommodation block, housing the bridge and crew cabins, all stacked atop an engine room the size of a large house. Every other inch of its hull was devoted to the Brillante’s sole economic function: carrying oil, and lots of it, separated into twelve tanks to stop it from sloshing around and destabilizing the ship, connected by a thick band of pipework that ran the length of the forest-green deck. As the tanker steamed through Istanbul, it sat heavily in the water, with its lower hull completely submerged—an obvious indication, to even a casual observer, that it was fully loaded.

Once the crew passed through the Bosporus, there would be several days in the Mediterranean, including a stop on the Greek island of Chios to take on fuel and supplies, then a journey through the Suez Canal into the Red Sea, skirting around the Arabian Peninsula at the Gulf of Aden before hitting the open ocean and powering toward India, Singapore, and finally China. But in the stretch of water beyond the Suez, the men on the Brillante knew that their cargo’s obvious value would be a liability. Where they were headed, there would be more than just photographers watching.

The Gulf of Aden is near the top of any list of the world’s most important waterways. Bound by Yemen in the north and the Horn of Africa in the south, it’s shaped like a jagged rectangle, opening on its eastern side into the Indian Ocean. As the sole route between that body of water and the Red Sea—and thus the Suez—transiting the Gulf is the only way for ships to travel from Europe to Asia, or vice versa, without making a detour of several thousand nautical miles around South Africa. Apart from the Strait of Malacca, the slender passage between Malaysia and Indonesia, no single shipping lane is more crucial to global commerce.

Something happened to sailors as they approached the Gulf of Aden, a phenomenon that Marquez had seen, and felt himself, again and again. Tempers got shorter. Captains became more demanding. The amount of work to be done, rarely less than exhausting, grew even more intense. The reason was simple: At the time of the Brillante’s voyage, the Gulf was an intensely dangerous place. Somalia had been essentially a failed state since the collapse of its central government in the early 1990s, creating a uniquely hospitable environment for warlords, Islamic extremists, and pirates. There were more than 170 attacks on ships in the waters surrounding the country in 2010, despite deployments of naval vessels by the United States, European Union, and other world powers to deal with the ongoing crisis. In the six months before the Brillante chugged into the Gulf, pirate incidents were being reported every couple of days. Often occurring hundreds of miles from shore, the raids were becoming increasingly audacious, with large motherships serving as command- and- control centers and supply depots for high- speed skiffs.

The goal of such attacks was to make money by holding ships and crews for ransom, not to kill or maim the people on board—unless they got in the way, of course. But Marquez had heard the stories, traded on ships’ decks and in Manila bars, about what a successful raid could mean for sailors like those on the Brillante. The case of the Maersk Alabama, the cargo vessel whose captain was rescued by US Navy SEALs in 2009—later immortalized, with the help of Tom Hanks, in the film Captain Phillips—was far from typical. More often the crews of captured ships could expect to be held hostage for weeks or months as ransoms were negotiated. In the meantime, they might be confined to a remote Somali anchorage, vulnerable to disease, malnutrition, and abuse or even torture by their captors. Short of sinking, it was one of the worst fates that could befall a sailor.

One of the goals of naval operations in the High Risk Area, as the region where Somali pirates operated was called, was to establish a kind of safety net over the worst-affected zone, to ensure that no vessel in distress was ever too far from assistance. Even so, the distances involved meant that during the decisive phase of an attack—the attempted boarding, with pirates attempting to scale the sides of a tanker or freighter using boarding ladders and grappling hooks—crews were likely to be on their own, with backup potentially hours away. As a result, the shipping industry had developed a set of tactics that commercial vessels could use to render themselves less appealing targets, and to give them some ability, if necessary, to fight off attackers.

The passage that marks the boundary between the placid Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden is known as the Bab el-Mandeb—the Gate of Tears—named by long-ago mariners for the dangers of navigating it. As the Brillante steamed toward its entrance, Marquez got to work putting the usual measures into place. With several other crewmen, he attached coils of razor wire to the white railings that marked the perimeter of the tanker’s deck, using steel ties to secure them in place every few feet. He helped test the fire hoses that had been distributed up and down the ship, ready to knock a boarding party out of their skiffs, or off the hull if it came to that. The crew prepared a “citadel,” stocking a room with food, water, and medicine, a place to barricade themselves and await rescue if pirates did somehow make it aboard. They had also placed a dummy in coveralls on the stern, a sort of nautical scarecrow intended to give the appearance of a man perpetually on watch.

There was one final safeguard, which made Marquez feel a bit better about the Brillante’s chances of making it through the Gulf of Aden unmolested. As the piracy situation worsened, some vessels had begun carrying teams of guards on board, usually ex-soldiers looking for a way to cash in on their skills. They had a reputation for being the gold standard of shipborne security measures: even in the most frenetic periods of pirate activity, virtually no vessels carrying armed guards had been successfully captured. But they were also expensive, in an industry that prioritized cutting costs wherever possible, and Suez Fortune, the Brillante’s owner, had never hired a security team for the tanker’s previous journeys through the Gulf. This time, however, the company had decided to spring for one. The plan was to rendezvous with them near Aden, on the morning of July 6, after the Brillante had already been in the area for the better part of a day. Until then, Marquez and the rest of the crew would have to hope the precautions they’d taken would be enough.

Everyone on the Brillante knew the risks they were running as they neared the rendezvous point on the afternoon of July 5. One of the officers had scrawled an all-caps reminder on the navigation chart: be vigilant pirated areas. During the afternoon watch, the bridge crew nervously debated just how aggressive, and well armed, any pirates might be, their conversations picked up by the Brillante’s voyage data recorder, the nautical equivalent of an airliner’s black box. “I heard from the other vessels that fifty-caliber guns were used,” one sailor said. Another chimed in, accurately, that they could have rocket-propelled grenades. On the other hand, they might be easy to scare off once the security team was on board, the first crewman speculated. “I heard from other vessels that once the pirates get shot at, they retreat.” He added a nervous joke. Maybe, he said, the Brillante crew should show them they were unafraid and announce: “Hello pirates, we are here, waiting for you!”

Marquez was assigned to the evening watch, from 8:00 p.m. to midnight. He arrived at about 7:45 to begin his shift. His superior, Second Officer Roberto Artezuela, came onto the bridge a few minutes later. Not long afterward Noe Gonzaga, the ship’s captain, gave the order to “finish with engines.” The rumble of the Brillante’s powerful motors soon came to a stop, and the vessel quieted, the men suddenly able to hear the sound of breakers sloshing against the hull. For the rest of the night the ship would drift, pitching gently up and down with the waves. Gonzaga had ordered Tabares, the chief engineer, to keep the engines “on short notice,” meaning they would require as long as twenty minutes to restart.

Marquez had a commanding view from his perch on the bridge, high above the deck. He could see a couple of other ships in the distance, strings of lights out toward the horizon. His job was to keep a careful lookout for danger, shuttling with a pair of binoculars between the bridge itself and the bridge wings—narrow outdoor decks that extended on either side—stopping occasionally to look at what was being picked up on the Brillante’s radar. To pass the time, the men on watch chatted about the usual distractions, sports and movies. Like millions of their countrymen, they were fans of the champion Filipino fighter Manny Pacquiao. They were also partial to action flicks in the Jean-Claude Van Damme mold. At one point, Gonzaga and the helmsman compared which cinemas they liked to visit back home. Occasionally the radio crackled to life, often with naval ships liaising with commercial vessels in the area to check their positions and plans for the rest of their passage—nothing that the crew of the Brillante needed to worry about. A bit before 11:00 p.m., Gonzaga decided to call it a night, leaving orders that he be contacted immediately if a suspicious vessel appeared.

Just under an hour later, Marquez was nearing the end of his watch and looking forward to returning to his cabin to get some sleep when he noticed a blip on the radar. “I have a target on the port side,” he called out. Something was headed for the Brillante, and it was moving fast.

CHAPTER 3

INTRUDERS

Allan Marquez raised his binoculars to get a better look at whatever was coming toward the Brillante. He spotted it off the port bow, a streamlined silhouette emerging from the darkness ahead of the ship. It was a small wooden boat with an outboard engine and red, white, and blue stripes painted on the side. The boat slowed down noticeably as it came closer, illuminated by the Brillante’s deck lights. The men inside, Marquez thought, seemed to be looking at the forward section of the hull, as if to read the name that was painted in white capital letters just behind the anchor.

A couple of minutes later the boat was moving again, powering toward the Brillante’s stern. Roberto Artezuela, the second officer, told Marquez to go down and investigate. He took a walkie-talkie and walked down the stairs of the accommodation block, emerging on the deck just a stone’s throw from where the visitors to the ship were floating. There were seven men in all, Marquez saw, armed with assault rifles with long, curved magazines. All but one, the man driving the boat, were wearing camouflage uniforms. Their faces were covered by what looked like medical masks. Marquez’s mind raced through the possibilities of who they might be. It was certainly possible they were pirates; on the other hand, they might be some sort of naval patrol, conducting a mission. He had no way to be sure.

Seeing he was in earshot, one of the men shouted at Marquez in English, asking to be let on board. That was not a decision for a low-ranking seaman to make, and Marquez, who’d been relaying what he was seeing by radio to the bridge, needed to ask for instructions.

“Bridge, bridge,” he called up in Tagalog, the primary language of the Philippines.

“Go ahead.”

“The persons on the boat are requesting to lower the pilot ladder,” Marquez said, referring to a piece of equipment, made of thick rope and wooden slats, carried by every commercial ship to allow someone to climb from a smaller boat onto the deck.

“No, no, don’t lower, I’ll call the captain,” his crewmate replied.

A moment passed. “Allan, ask them if they are the security.”

Marquez called down to the boat and radioed the answer up to the bridge. There, one of the crew had contacted Captain Gonzaga, who was still in his cabin. “Allan asked, sir, and they said they are security,” the crewman said. The captain’s order quickly came back. “Okay, Allan, lower the pilot ladder.”

Looking down at the masked men bobbing around in the darkness, Marquez wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly. He asked the bridge twice to repeat the instructions. Letting them on board so quickly didn’t make any sense to him. The Brillante crew had just spent hours hardening their vessel against intruders, and every antipiracy handbook emphasized the importance of not letting unexpected visitors onto a ship without careful verification of who they were—by hauling up their passports in a bag to be inspected, for example, and checking their identities with someone trusted onshore. Those were basic procedures, expected to be observed even in far less dangerous times and places than the dead of night in the Gulf of Aden. Nor did the men in the boat match the description of the security team that Marquez knew the Brillante was expecting. It was supposed to have three members, not seven, and they weren’t scheduled to arrive until the next morning. The last time Marquez had been on a ship that carried guards, they’d arrived with their weapons in a sealed box, which was then stowed securely on the bridge—not with Kalashnikovs slung around their shoulders.

But an order was an order, especially when it came from the captain. The pilot ladder was heavy. Marquez managed with some difficulty to maneuver it over the coils of lacerating razor wire that he’d strung around the deck himself, just a few days earlier. He dropped the ladder down, and moments later, six of the men climbed up from their boat and onto the Brillante.

It took just a few moments for Marquez to realize that his captain had made a terrible mistake. Seconds after coming on deck, the apparent leader of the group demanded Marquez’s radio, leveling his gun to leave no doubt as to who was now in charge. The sailor handed it over. A strange, numb sensation spread through his body as it reacted to what his mind was still struggling to process. The thing that all seafarers dread, that they’d read and joked nervously about and seen in movies, was happening. To him.

Overhead, the bridge crew were trying to raise Marquez for an update. “Deck, bridge. Deck, bridge. Deck, bridge,” his radio squawked. “Allan, come in.” But Marquez couldn’t respond. He knew he had no choice but to accede to the man’s next order: to take him and the others to see the captain. With a gun pressed into his back, Marquez led the group onto a staircase leading up the accommodation block to the bridge. He kept his eyes forward, afraid to turn around. When they reached Gonzaga’s cabin, Marquez got his first good look at the men he’d let on board. The leader was wearing a red-andwhite keffiyeh scarf and, in addition to his rifle, carried a pistol in a holster. The camouflage he wore was desert brown; oddly, he wasn’t wearing shoes. The others were dressed similarly.

Marquez knocked on Gonzaga’s door, and the captain promptly opened it. “They have a gun in my back and took my walkie-talkie,” he said to Gonzaga in Tagalog. If Gonzaga was afraid, he didn’t show it. He told Marquez to stay calm and to gather the rest of the crew in the TV room, two decks away—one of the few spaces on the Brillante set aside for recreation. Following his instructions, Marquez went door-to-door, rousing his sleeping crewmates and telling them where to go.

A little after midnight, everyone was gathered in the TV room along with the six intruders who’d boarded the Brillante. The gunmen hadn’t identified themselves or explained what they wanted, and Marquez could only guess at their intentions as he watched them counting off the crew, making sure all twenty-six were accounted for. They soon split up. Two left with Captain Gonzaga, and two with the chief engineer, Nestor Tabares. The remaining pair stayed with the rest of the ship’s personnel, standing guard just outside the TV room. They closed the door, leaving the group sealed inside. Marquez put his ear to its surface, trying to hear what was being said in the hallway, but couldn’t make anything out.

What seemed like hours went by. No one dared leave, not even to use the bathroom. Marquez sat silently wondering what was happening elsewhere on the ship. Just after 1:00 a.m. the main engine rumbled to life, which wasn’t a good sign. Sailors in the Gulf of Aden knew that pirate attacks often ended with the ship and crew being taken to Somalia—about ten hours’ sailing from the Brillante’s position. In Somalia, captured crews waited, sometimes for a very long time, while a shipowner or, more likely, the owner’s insurance company, negotiated a ransom. One particularly unfortunate group of sailors was held for more than four years in a remote town, four hundred kilometers from Mogadishu, before a bounty was paid. Three of them died during the hijack or in captivity; the rest survived by eating rats. As Marquez and the others locked in the TV room worried about their fates, a more immediate terror took hold. At 1:30 a.m. there was a clatter of gunshots. Some of them assumed the worst: that Gonzaga and Tabares had been murdered. But they remained where they were, fearful that if they tried to leave, the next fusillade could be aimed at them.

At about 2:30 a.m., the throbbing hum of the engine stopped. The Brillante was no longer moving, though no one knew why. Then came the sound of an explosion, a boom resonating from deep in the bowels of the ship. Minutes later, smoke began billowing into the TV room through an air-conditioning unit. Somewhere, a fire had begun—an alarming development on any vessel, but terrifying on one carrying more than 100,000 tons of oil.

Soon the lights went out. Up to that point the sailors had tried to stay quiet, keeping their fears mostly to themselves. Suddenly the room was alive with the sound of panicked voices. Though they were still frightened of the intruders who’d taken control of their ship, the men decided that if they didn’t do something, they would likely die in there. One of them slowly opened the door, only to discover that the hallway was empty. At some point, their guards had taken off.

The sailors formed themselves into a line to make their way to the bridge, where they might be able to determine what was happening. Marquez took a position in the middle, keeping his hands on his head in case the gunmen reappeared. The electricity had gone out throughout the ship, forcing the crew to navigate by the faint glow of emergency lights. As Marquez and the others were climbing through a stairwell, those went out, too. A few of the men had flashlights, which illuminated the reflective arrows showing the way to the bridge. Later, Marquez would recall the eerie silence, all of the ship’s machinery suddenly stilled, and how exposed and vulnerable he felt as they drifted in the sea.

The bridge was pitch-dark as they entered. Marquez stayed low to the floor, scared that the Brillante’s attackers, if they were still around, might open fire if they saw or heard the sailors moving. Like the pirates who were guarding the TV room, however, the ones on the bridge seemed to be gone. The only person there was Gonzaga, his hands bound in front of his body with a cable tie. One of the crew cut it open. “Water, water,” someone called out, and a sailor passed the captain a bottle. Collecting himself, a visibly shaken Gonzaga tried to explain to the crew what had happened. One of them “kept aiming his gun at me and kept asking for money,” he said. “I kept telling them we do not have anything valuable.”

The men still didn’t know where their attackers had gone, or what exactly had happened. “Everybody just sit down,” one of the sailors urged. “They might spray us with bullets.” But the Brillante was still on fire, and even if the pirates had fled the ship, the lives of the crew were very much at risk. Standing on the darkened bridge they counted off, to make sure everyone was safe, and immediately realized that Tabares was absent. No one had seen the chief engineer since the attackers had escorted him away from the TV room, hours before. Gonzaga sent two men down through the accommodation block to look for him. He wasn’t in his cabin. In the engine room, the next likeliest place for Tabares to be, the smoke was too thick for them to enter, and they soon turned back. Meanwhile, the fire was clearly intensifying. From the windows of the bridge, Marquez could see smoke pouring from the hull into the night sky. An acrid, chemical stench was rising from deep within the ship, the smell of flames consuming the contents of what was, in effect, a floating industrial facility.

The tanker had a carbon dioxide system that could suppress even an out-of-control blaze by depriving it of the oxygen it needed to sustain itself. But if Tabares was indeed in the engine room, and had managed to stay alive amid the smoke, turning on the system would likely suffocate him. And even if they somehow contained the fire, the crew had no way of knowing if gunmen were still hiding somewhere on board.

As he stared up at the black plume pulsing into the night sky, Marquez made some mental calculations about what might happen in the next few hours. He could feel his temples pulsing from the adrenaline. If the twenty-six men on the Brillante were going to make it through the night alive, they would need help.

At that moment, about thirty-five miles to the south, the USS Philippine Sea was patrolling its sector of the Gulf of Aden, on the lookout for pirates. The cruiser was an imposing sight. With a top speed of more than thirty knots, it had a full suite of advanced sensors and weaponry: high-powered search and targeting radars, antiaircraft and antiship missiles, ultra-accurate Phalanx cannons capable of directing a lethal hail of metal at incoming threats, and a pair of Seahawk helicopters that could operate well ahead of the ship itself.

Early on the morning of July 6, it also had a crew that was hungry for action. For several weeks the Philippine Sea