Peter Hammarstedt and Sid Chakravarty decides that the sister vessel, the Sam Simon, will commence the search for the three pirates who escaped. Simultaneously, he also directs a jab at the Australian government.
“New Zealand was left to single-handedly tackle the poachers – one vessel up against three. With the New Zealand Navy ship en route back to Wellington, and the Australian government nowhere to be seen, Sea Shepherd is now the only sheriff in town.”4
19
THE FLYING MARINER
THE INDIAN OCEAN/LAGOS, JANUARY 2015
The Thunder slowly circles its way northwest. Three knots, then a stop. Two knots, and then an about face. Four knots, then a bit to the east, before turning the ship around again. In Norway and at Interpol’s headquarters in Lyon, the investigators continue to plot coordinates into a digital map and as the days and weeks pass, the maps resemble more a child’s connect-the-dots drawing than a shipmaster’s carefully considered route. It is a waltz without rhythm or precision and the pattern does not offer any warning of where the Thunder’s captain may be headed.
On 27 January, the Thunder speeds up its pace. The two ships are located in the Indian Ocean, a mere day’s sail from South African waters. The closest major ports are Durban and Cape Town. On the bridge of the Bob Barker the speculations start up again. If they follow the same course, they will cross the Atlantic Ocean and end up in Montevideo in Uruguay, a city several of the Spanish pirate syndicates previously used as a home port. But it’s a long trip. Hammarstedt believes that the Thunder will sail around the Cape of Good Hope and there the ship will meet another vessel to unload the illegal catch.
On the Thunder Captain Luis Alfonso Rubio Cataldo tells the crew that they will perhaps sail to Nigeria, because it’s possible the difficulties they have run into can be resolved there. The countries Gabon and Papua New Guinea are also mentioned. The latter is located an ocean away and in the opposite direction of the ship’s course. The information produces more confusion than clarity, but Nigeria at least makes sense. Everyone knows that the name Lagos is on the stern of the ship.
So, after a day and a half of something resembling a properly considered course, Cataldo suddenly stops the ship again. Perhaps he fears what he will find if he were to sail around the Cape of Good Hope.
On the same day, Captain Warredi Enisuoh of NIMASA, the Nigerian coast guard in Lagos, receives an unusual request. Over the telephone he is encouraged to join a secret intelligence group with a connection to Interpol. The group’s primary mission is to stop a fishing vessel.
The name the Thunder sounds familiar to Warredi Enisuoh. He remembers a letter he received from Australia’s High Commissioner in Nigeria expressing a wish for information about the old trawler that was registered in the ships register in Lagos and sailing under the Nigerian flag.
Warredi Enisuoh will now become critical to the future fate of the Thunder. The same evening he takes part in a telephone conference with the Interpol group.1
The Gulf of Guinea is Africa’s most violent fairway, and seamen, ship owners and the authorities all over the world expect the Nigerian coast guard to bring the brutal kidnappings, random killings and the thefts of valuable oil cargo to an end. In the recently opened surveillance centre in Lagos, Enisuoh and his team study satellite images every day and have complete oversight of all the ships moving in and out of Nigerian ports. He can requisition battleships and aircraft immediately if he receives notification of a hijacking.
Enisuoh was born in the eternally conflict-ridden Niger Delta in the mid-1960s and in his youth he signed on with a shipping company in Singapore, where he climbed through the ranks to mate and captain. His boyhood dream came true when he became a pilot on the svelte jet aircraft Embraer E-190 for the company Virgin Nigeria. Privately he began calling himself “the flying mariner”. Now he was back on the ground once more.
When he starts digging into the Thunder’s secrets in Nigeria, what he discloses is a story he has difficulties believing.
Four years earlier, the ships register had received a letter from the ship agent Maritime Consultants Limited, under the address of a bankrupt amusement park in Lagos. Maritime Consultants Limited wanted to register a new vessel: FV Thunder – formerly MS Typhoon. Enclosed in the letter was a sales agreement stating that the Lagos-based company Royal Marine & Spares had bought the ship for 140,000 dollars. The seller was a company in Panama.2
The Lagos company that supposedly purchased the Thunder is owned by two of West Africa’s wealthiest businessmen. The youngest, Henry Macauley, had long been Sierra Leone’s High Commissioner in Nigeria and is now the Minister of Energy in his native country. The eldest, Dew Mayson, has been a powerful man in his homeland of Liberia for almost 40 years – a freedom fighter, ambassador, peace mediator, professor and Liberia’s first multimillionaire.
In the early 1980s, the freedom fighter Dew Mayson was rescued from death row by the coup leader Samuel Doe, who in 1980 led a group of drunken and disillusioned soldiers towards the presidential palace in Liberia’s capital Monrovia. Doe killed the president and made himself a general and head of state. After his assumption of power, Doe’s soldiers threw themselves into an orgy of violence in which ministers and supporters of the former regime were paraded around the capital naked before being massacred on the beach by Doe’s inebriated executioners.
Doe appointed Dew Mayson leader of Liberia’s national investment commission and later the country’s ambassador in Paris. In 1985, Mayson stepped down, according to his own account, in protest against Doe’s brutal regime. When Charles Taylor overthrew Doe in 1989, Mayson took
