The news begins to spread on the ship. Soon the wheelhouse is filled with crew members and Hammarstedt orders one of them to take note of their position. Then he pulls down the window of the wheelhouse and lifts his binoculars to his eyes. The ship is partially hidden behind an iceberg. Through the binoculars he can see flocks of seagulls diving for the fish waste being thrown overboard. The net floats hang over the rails, ready for deployment into the ocean.
From the bookshelf furthest back in the wheelhouse, Hammarstedt takes down the red folder containing pictures and descriptions of “The Bandit 6” and rapidly leafs through the pages to the picture of the Thunder. Meyerson hangs over his shoulder.
“That’s the Thunder,” Hammarstedt says. He smacks the palm of his hand into Meyerson’s and presses the alarm. Five short blasts. That is the signal to the crew for everyone to prepare themselves.
They have found the ship that nobody has seen for two months, and which has been wanted all over the world by New Zealand, Australia and Norway for extensive poaching of fish. The vessel is the most notorious of them all, the vessel that ministers, bureaucrats and criminal investigators from four continents are hunting for. It has been mentioned in speeches and discussed at seminars, its movements recorded in strategic documents and investigation protocols, and it has been blacklisted and hunted for eight years.
The Thunder is the evasive ship that turns up only to suddenly vanish again, as if it didn’t really exist, but was merely a folktale, Hammarstedt thinks. He knows that the analogy might seem melodramatic, but in the course of recent months, the Thunder has become his own Moby Dick.
“17 December 2014, 2118 hours,” Hammarstedt notes in the ship’s log.
He then sets the ship’s course for his prey.
3
OPERATION ICEFISH
FRANKFURT, 2012/VERMONT, 2014
May 2012. After having presented his identification to the security guard, Peter Hammarstedt was led behind the walls of the more than 100-year-old, high security prison Preungesheim. He had been asked to come right away; therefore only a few hours passed from the time he boarded the flight from Stockholm until he was standing before the prison on the outskirts of Frankfurt city centre.
In one of the cells was his boss.
Paul Franklin Watson had been on his way from Denver to the film festival in Cannes, but when he stopped over in Frankfurt, he was taken aside by the German police and placed under arrest. During the almost 40 years that had passed since he founded Sea Shepherd, Watson had had his regular altercations with the law. While in custody, Watson learned that Costa Rica had circulated an arrest warrant for him through Interpol due to a dispute between Sea Shepherd and a shark fishing vessel ten years earlier.
While the red carpets were being rolled out in Cannes, the Hollywood darling Watson was sitting in solitary confinement in the old prison. To be sure, the activist and former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson was also on her way to show her support, demonstrations were taking place outside German embassies and one of the group’s supporters had offered to pay Watson’s bail, but the Sea Shepherd leader was at risk of being extradited to both Costa Rica and Japan. It was the thought of a legal battle in Japan that frightened him the most.
When Watson came out of the cell to meet Hammarstedt, he sat down at the tiny table in the visitors’ area and glanced up at the walls, which were decorated with children’s drawings. Hammarstedt thought Watson appeared collected and unworried.
“In the time ahead, you will represent me in the media and at all events. If anyone should question it …,” Watson said, and then stopping mid-sentence, he pushed a small piece of paper across the table. The text was written in longhand.
“Peter will represent me. Paul Watson.”
Hammarstedt was already a loyal veteran. He had taken part in all of Sea Shepherd’s large-scale campaigns since 2003. For ten Antarctic summers he had chased Japanese whaling ships through Antarctica, and had spent almost five years at sea. He always obeyed the lines of command and had proven fearless. When he left the prison, Captain Peter Hammarstedt was Sea Shepherd’s new front man – the Commander.
After eight days in prison Watson was released on bail in the amount of EUR 250,000 and placed under house arrest in a flat in the Bornheim district of Frankfurt. Every morning at noon he walked over to report to the local police station. He stepped down from his positions of president of Sea Shepherd USA and the captain of the flagship SS Steve Irwin. Now he had received a tip that Japan wanted him extradited and he was convinced that the nation would not give him a fair trial. There were also rumours circulating that the mafia in Costa Rica had put a price on his head of 25,000 dollars.
Watson killed time in the evenings by walking along the bank of the Main River. And planning his upcoming escape.
One evening in August he shaved off his beard, dyed his chalk-white hair and disappeared in a car over the border to the Netherlands. He felt ill and weak from an infection in his leg, had neither a passport nor a cell phone, and didn’t dare use his credit card.
On the coast of the Netherlands Watson was met by the sailboat the Columbus. The Sea Shepherd logo was covered up so the boat wouldn’t attract needless attention. After the Columbus had sailed out into the English Channel and onward into the Atlantic Ocean, four months would go by before Paul Watson appeared again in public.
In the Southern Ocean.
When the German police realized that Watson had escaped, Japan also requested that Interpol issue a Red Notice – the type of notice
