As Dr. AL-KHATTAB’S London-bound airliner was taking off, the Java Star eased away from her berth in the Sultanate of Brunei on the coast of Indonesian North Borneo and headed for the open sea.
Her destination was the West Australian port of Fremantle, as usual, and her Norwegian skipper, Knut Herrmann, had no inkling his journey would be anything other than usual, routine and eventless.
He knew that the seas in those parts remain the most dangerous waters in the world, but not because of shoals, riptides, rocks, tempests, reefs or tsunamis. The danger here is pirate attacks.
Every year, between the Straits of Malacca to the west and the Celebes Sea to the east, there are over five hundred pirate attacks on merchant shipping, and up to a hundred hijackings. Occasionally, the crew are ransomed back to the shipowners. Sometimes they are all killed and never heard of again; in those cases, the cargo is stolen and sold on the black market. If Captain Herrmann sailed with an easy mind on the “milk run” to Fremantle, it was because he was convinced his cargo was useless to the dacoits of the sea. But on this trip, he was wrong.
The first leg of his course lay north, away from his eventual destination. It took him six hours to pass the ramshackle town of Kudat and come round the northernmost tip of Sabah and the island of Borneo. Only then could he run southeast for the Sulu Archipelago.
He intended to move through the coral-and-jungle islands by taking the deepwater strait between Tawitawi and Jolo islands.
South of the islands, it was a clear run down the Celebes Sea to the south and eventually Australia.
His departure from Brunei had been watched, and a cell phone call made. Even if it had been intercepted, the call referred only to the recovery of a sick uncle who would be out of hospital in twelve days. That meant: twelve hours to intercept.
The call was taken on a creek on Jolo Island, and the man who took it would have been recognized by Mr. Alex Siebart, of Crutched Friars, City of London. It was Mr. Lampong, who no longer affected being a businessman from Sumatra. The twelve men he commanded in the velvety tropical night were cutthroats, but they were well paid and would stay obedient. Criminality apart, they were also Muslim extremists. The Abu Sayyaf movement of the southern Philippines, whose last peninsula is only a few miles from Indonesia on the Sulu Sea, has the reputation not only for religious extremism but also of being killers for hire. The offer Mr. Lampong had put to them enabled them to fulfill both functions. The two speedboats they occupied put to sea at dawn, took up position between the two islands and waited. An hour later, the Java Star bore down on them, passing from the Sulu Sea into the Celebes. Taking her over was a simple task, and the gangsters were well practiced.
Captain Herrmann had taken the helm through the night, and as dawn came up over the Pacific, away to his left, he handed over to his Indonesian first officer and went below. His crew of ten lashkars were also in their bunks in the fo’c’sle.
The first thing the Indonesian officer saw was a pair of speedboats racing up astern, one on each side. Dark, barefoot, agile men leapt effortlessly from speedboat to deck and ran after toward the superstructure and bridge where he stood. He had just time to press the emergency buzzer to his captain’s cabin, and the men were bursting through the door from the flybridge. Then there was a knife at his throat, and a voice screaming, “Capitan, capitan…” There was no need. A tired Knut Herrmann was coming topside to see what was going on. He and Mr. Lampong arrived on the bridge together. Lampong held a mini Uzi. The Norwegian knew better than to begin to resist. The ransom would have to be sorted out between the pirates and his employer company HQ in Fremantle. “Captain Herrmann…”
The bastard knew his name. This had been prepared. “Please ask your first officer, did he in any circumstances make a radio transmission in the past five minutes?”
There was no need to ask. Lampong was speaking in English. For the Norwegian and his Indonesian officer, it was the common language. The first officer screamed that he had not touched the radio’s transmit button. “Excellent,” said Lampong, and issued a stream of orders in the local dialect. This the first officer understood, and opened his mouth to scream. The Norwegian understood not a word, but he understood everything when the dacoit holding his number two jerked the seaman’s head back and sliced his throat open with a single cut. The first officer kicked, jerked, slumped and died. Captain Herrmann had not been sick in forty years at sea, but he leaned against the wheel and emptied his stomach.
“Two pools of mess to be cleaned up,” said Lampong. “Now, Captain, for every minute you refuse to obey my orders, that will happen to one of your men. Am I clear?”
The Norwegian was escorted to the tiny radio shack behind the bridge, where he selected channel 16, international distress frequency. Lampong produced a written sheet.
“You will not just read this in a calm voice. Captain. When I press TRANSMIT and nod, you will shout this message with panic in your voice. Or your men die, one by one. Are you ready?”
Captain Herrmann nodded. He would not even have to act in order to affect extreme distress.
“Mayday, Mayday Mayday. Java Star, Java Star… catastrophic fire in engine room… I cannot save her… my position…” He knew the position was wrong even as he read it out. It was a hundred miles south into the Celebes Sea. But he was not about to argue. Lampong cut the transmission. He brought the Norwegian at gunpoint back to the bridge. Two of his own seamen had been put to work frenziedly scrubbing up the blood and the vomit on the floor of the bridge. The other eight he could see marshaled in a terrified group out on the hatch covers with six dacoits to watch them. Two more of the hijackers stayed on the bridge. The other four were tossing life rafts, life belts and a pair of inflatable jackets down into one of the speedboats. It was the one with the extra fuel tanks stored amidships. When they were ready, the speedboat left the side of the Java Star and went south. On a calm, tropical sea, at an easy fifteen knots, they would be a hundred miles south in seven hours, and back in their pirate creeks in ten after that.
“A new course. Captain,” said Lampong civilly. His tone was gentle, but the implacable hatred in his eyes gave the lie to any humanity toward the Norwegian. The new course was back toward the northeast, out of the cluster of islands that make up the Sulu Archipelago, and across the national line into Filipino water. The southern province of Mindanao Island is Zamboanga, and parts of it are simply no-go areas for Filipino government forces. This is the terrain of Abu Sayyaf. Here they are safe to recruit, train and bring their booty. The Java Star was certainly booty, albeit unmarketable. Lampong conferred in the local lingo to the senior among the pirates. The man pointed ahead to the entrance to a narrow creek flanked by impenetrable jungle.
What he asked was: “Can your men manage her from here?” The pirate nodded.
Lampong called his orders to the group round the lashkar seamen at the bow. Without even replying, they herded the sailors to the rail and opened fire. The men screamed and toppled into the warm sea. Somewhere below, sharks turned to the blood smell.
Captain Herrmann was so taken by surprise he would have needed two or three seconds to react. He never got them. Lampong’s bullet took him full in the chest, and he, too, toppled back from the fly-bridge into the sea. Half an hour later, towed by two small tugs that had been stolen weeks earlier, and with much screaming and shouting, the Java Star was at her new berth beside a stout teak jetty.