CATCHING THUNDER
Eskil Engdal and Kjetil Sæter are both feature journalists at the Norwegian broadsheet Dagens Næringsliv. They have both been recipients of the prestigious SKUP Award for investigative journalism, in addition to numerous other awards and distinctions.
Diane Oatley is a writer, independent scholar, and translator. Originally from the United States, she transferred to the University of Oslo in 1983, completing an MA in comparative literature there in 1990. She is a member of the Norwegian Non-fiction Translators Association and the Norwegian chapter of PEN.
Scribe Publications
18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia
2 John Street, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom
First published by Fagbokforlaget, Norway, as Jakten på Thunder 2016
This edition published by agreement with the Kontext Agency.
Published by Scribe 2018
Copyright © Eskil Engdal and Kjetil Sæter 2016
Translation copyright © Diane Oatley 2018
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.
Cover design by David Gee
9781925322224 (Australian paperback)
9781925548884 (e-book)
CiP records for this title are available from the National Library of Australia.
scribepublications.com.au
scribepublications.co.uk
CONTENTS
1 The Pirate
2 “The Bandit 6”
3 Operation Icefish
4 The Occupation
5 Hot Pursuit
6 Operation Spillway
7 The Ice
8 Vesturvon
9 The Pirate Capital
10 The Storm
11 The Secret Channel
12 The Longest Day
13 The Shipmaster
14 Desolation Island
15 The Phantom Ship
16 The Wall of Death
17 The World Record
18 “The Only Sheriff in Town”
19 The Flying Mariner
20 A Bloody Nightmare
21 La Mafia Gallega
22 God’s Fingerprint
23 Buenas Tardes, Bob Barker
24 Message in a Bottle
25 Raid on the High Seas
26 Operation Sparrow
27 Exercise Good Hope
28 The Bird of Ill Omen
29 The Wanderer
30 The Man in the Arena
31 The Third Ship
32 “You Are Nothing”
33 The Snake in Paradise
34 The Armpit of Africa
35 Mayday
36 A Weird Dream
37 A Last Resort
38 The Island of Rumours
39 48 Hours
40 Three Condemned Men
41 The Luck of the Draw
42 The Escape
43 The Unluckiest Ship in the World
44 The Judgment
45 Prisoners’ Island
46 The Man from Mongolia
47 The Last Viking
48 Operation Yuyus
49 The Tiantai Mystery
50 A Dirty Business
51 The Showdown
52 The Madonna and the Octopus
53 The Final Act
Acknowledgements
Notes
1
THE PIRATE
APRIL 2016
He hasn’t slept in the past 24 hours, he says.
The rain is beating down against the large window panes of the airport terminal. He is standing in the arrival hall and holding a sign bearing our names, as if we were meeting for a conference or a safari.
There is nothing distinguishing him from the cluster of taxi drivers battling their way through the tiny group of travellers who have just landed in the provincial town, the name of which he has asked us not to reveal.
“Who gave you my phone number?” he asks over and over again on our way out to the waiting car.
He feared it was a trap – that it was the past that had brought down the plane’s landing gear.
“These people are capable of murder to protect their name and their profits.”
His sole motivation for wanting to meet us is greed, the same motivation that sent him on mission after mission to the Southern Ocean. He is demanding a considerable amount of money for telling his story, along with the assurance that we will disclose neither his identity nor that of the city, the country or even the continent where we meet.
Every morning he arrives, trudging dutifully to the hotel, listing names and places, trying to untangle the various poaching expeditions, to remember details that time has erased from his mind. He is neither well-spoken nor particularly observant. Now and then the stories are choppy waves that suddenly break – and then spill out into a large, uniform mass.
As soon as he is done with his story, he hurries off to the day job that has kept him alive since he was forced to go ashore from the Thunder. His only friends appear to be some neighbourhood dogs and a young nephew.
When he signed on with the Thunder in Malaysia, the ship had been wanted by Interpol for one year. On the way from land in the dinghy that transported him through the darkness to the Thunder’s anchoring site, he had an uneasy feeling that something terrible was going to happen.
2
“THE BANDIT 6”
HOBART, AUSTRALIA, DECEMBER 2014
The Shadowlands. There is no evidence of it on any map, but Captain Peter Hammarstedt sets the ship’s course for this region on the afternoon of 3 December 2014. He sails the MY Bob Barker down the River Derwent, towards the capricious Storm Bay and out on a 15-day voyage to an out-of-the-way purgatory with the worst winds and the highest waves of all the oceans in the world.
He is headed into no man’s land. There he will bring down a mafia operation. There are very few people who believe he will succeed.
His boyish haircut and reluctant beard growth make the Swedish-American shipmaster seem younger than his 30 years. Despite his youth, he is already a veteran of the militant environmental movement Sea Shepherd. The target is a fleet of vessels that are poaching the Patagonian toothfish, a deep sea delicacy that can be just as profitable as narcotics or human trafficking. The trawlers and longline fishing vessels operate in a region so inhospitable and inaccessible that the chances of locating them are negligible.1 Should he find the vessels, he will chase them out of the Southern Ocean, destroy the fishing gear and hand the crew over to the coast guard or port authorities.
Before setting out from the Tasmanian capital of Hobart, Hammarstedt studied the target of his search in depth. He scrutinized the maps of the regions where the fleet of illegal fishing vessels had formerly been observed by research vessels and surveillance planes. Now he is trying to think like a fisherman, studying the underwater topography and the banks where large concentrations of Patagonian toothfish might be found. In the Ross Sea, the bay cutting
