‘Will we be able to go home?’
‘I cannot say.’
‘Is there anything you can tell us?’
‘I cannot say.’
In Copenhagen, Moscow, London and Amsterdam, Greenpeace staff are calling relatives of the crew. Some families express shock and horror, others sound like they were expecting this. In Amsterdam, Mimount Oulahsen-Farhat – Faiza’s mother – hears the telephone ringing. It’s a Thursday, she’s at home watching television. The man on the line says he’s from Greenpeace. He says the ship her daughter is on has been stormed by Russian soldiers. Everything is okay, he says. Everyone’s safe. When there’s more information he’ll contact her immediately. Mimount puts the phone down, stares at the wall and bursts into tears.
At just past 10 p.m. Moscow time, Russian state media reports that the Arctic Sunrise is being towed to Murmansk. Five thousand miles away in Washington DC the first protest is beginning, outside the Russian embassy. By the next morning there will be demonstrations planned or happening in thirty cities across the world.
On the Sunrise the night stretches out before them. Under the watch of armed guards the activists spread out across the mess, playing card games or lying on the floor under the tables. Only in the morning – more than twelve hours after the raid – are they finally allowed to leave. An officer stands in the doorway and reads out a list of numbers. ‘These are the cabins you are not permitted to enter. The others you can use. You can sleep now, if you want.’
They spill out into the corridor and retreat to the cabins. Frank tapes his computer memory stick to the bottom of the table in his cabin. Kieron hides his camera card in the light fitting in the ceiling. Fazia slips a mobile phone into the underside of a drawer. Alex slides hers into a bag of rice.
After a few snatched hours of sleep they start reappearing from their cabins and gather again in the mess. Dima passes three of the commandos in the corridor. They’re still masked but he can see their eyes are red, and they’re using the tips of their gloved hands to steady themselves against the wall. He can smell burnt alcohol on their breath.
The Sunrise hits some weather, she’s not the most stable ship and the troopers stumble down the corridors, seasick and hungover, guns slung over their shoulders. When the activists try to talk to them the soldiers are impatient and angry.
Dima tells the other activists he’s not worried about their situation, he says the rest of them should be as relaxed about this as he is. This is the third time he’s been arrested in these waters. The first time was in 1990 when it was still the Soviet Union. He says the ship will be taken to Murmansk, they’ll be held for a day or two, there’ll be some paperwork to complete then they’ll sail out of port and back to Norway, where they left from last week. And in the meantime Greenpeace offices around the world will be exploiting the media moment to the maximum. He’s been getting arrested on the high seas for a quarter century. This is nothing to get stressed about, says Dima. Best to just sit back and chalk it up as another great story.
The main threat now is boredom. The activists play endless games – chess, Scrabble, Pictionary, Mexican poker. Anything to eat up time. Pete Willcox, the captain, is allowed down twice a day for lunch and dinner accompanied by a guard before being taken back to his cabin.
Three days in and Frank is thinking these Russians are real professionals. Not arseholes. Just doing their job. A commando even helps Frank carry a tray with tea and cakes up the stairs, the commando’s face covered by a balaclava, a Vintorez special forces rifle slung over his shoulder and a handgun and a knife strapped to his thigh.
When the crew goes to bed a contingent of troopers prowls the corridors or stands guard outside the cabins. Camila Speziale wakes in the night needing the bathroom. She pushes open her door and finds herself face to face with a masked man cradling a rifle. ‘Hi,’ she says then eases past him and slips into the washroom. Two minutes later she walks past him again.
‘Hi again.’
‘Hullo.’
‘Goodnight then.’
‘Yes.’
The next day Camila tries to engage the soldiers in conversation, but her advances are met with surly monosyllabic replies. She resolves to orchestrate a detente. It’s four days after the boarding and she decides to make them pancakes. She prepares them with a chocolate and fruit topping. Dima tells her the Russian word for pancake is blini, then she approaches the guard at the mess room door.
‘Blini. Tasty. You want?’
‘Nyet.’ The trooper stands ramrod straight, his eyes staring over Camila’s shoulder.
‘Chocolate and fruit.’
‘Nyet.’
‘For you, blini.’
He looks down at her, smells the pancake, then looks away. ‘Nyet!’
FIVE
At the Greenpeace office in Moscow, a ping pong table has been rolled into the main meeting room to accommodate the numbers of people working on the campaign to free the Sunrise crew. The room was requisitioned and turned into a crisis response centre the morning after the ship was seized. A light-fixture resembling a chandelier hangs from the ceiling and the floor is a smooth polished wood, so the team dubs it the Dance Hall. But right now it feels more like a bunker. Twenty staff crowd in from six in the morning until past midnight, organising lawyers for the moment when the ship arrives in Murmansk.
But from the first moment they’re swamped by a full-frontal propaganda assault. The protest was a terrorist attack, the activists are CIA operatives, they were acting as stooges for Western oil companies, the pod could have been a bomb. The lies come from all corners of the Russian establishment – from journalists, ministers, the security services, and from the state-owned oil company, Gazprom.[5]
In Amsterdam – where Greenpeace International is based – the organisation’s digital campaign team is looking to mobilise global public opinion. A conversation on Skype sees the first use of a phrase that will soon become the name of an international drive for the crew’s freedom.
James Sadri: we want to go for a big push on #freethesunrise30 as a hashtag to mobilise people
Andrew Davies: #savethearctic
Andrew Davies: It keeps arctic in the frame
James Sadri: #freethearctic30
Andrew Davies: #FreeTheArctic30
James Sadri: nice
Meanwhile, Greenpeace legal chief Jasper Teulings is working with Moscow to assemble a team of lawyers for Murmansk. From the first moment it’s clear to him that the organisation is in serious trouble. He’s a lawyer himself but he knows this isn’t about the law, and that’s what scares him. Greenpeace is facing what he calls ‘a lawless, cowboy situation’.
He telephones his colleague Daniel Simons, a Russian-speaking lawyer who’s on a romantic holiday in Venice, and asks him to fly to the Russian Arctic immediately. Next he contacts the foreign ministry in Amsterdam (Greenpeace ships sail under the Dutch flag) and pushes them to bring a case before an international maritime court to demand the release of the Sunrise and her crew. But this is the official Russian–Dutch year of friendship: huge trade deals are planned, a state visit to Moscow by the Dutch king is just weeks away.[6] Surely Teulings can’t expect all that to be put at risk over an Arctic oil protest?
Two days after commandos raided the ship, a man claiming to be a reporter turns up at the Moscow office asking for a tour of the building. Staff there soon become suspicious. It’s the way he’s dressed and the questions he asks when he interviews them. ‘And who ordered the protest at the platform?’ ‘How does your hierarchy work?’ They think the man is probably from the Federal Security Bureau. FSB agents have a certain style and this guy is an archetype. He’s wearing a white shirt and a black leather jacket, and he has what one campaigner calls ‘a Bill Gates type of haircut’.