Hammarstedt sends an email to Interpol and tells them about the find, and then he takes a taxi to the airport. As he is driving down the coastal motorway along the Porto Grande Bay, he looks out toward the decrepit pirate to bid a final farewell, but now there is another ship in the water beside it. It is painted white and has brownish-orange streaks of rust running down the hull from the scuppers. There is something about the profile of the ship; he is sure he has seen it before, many times, while he was preparing for the search for “The Bandit 6”.
Before he boards the plane to Lisbon, he calls one of the Sea Shepherd activists in Mindelo and asks him to take a dinghy out into the bay to take a photograph of the ship.
“Make sure that nobody sees you!” he warns.
When Hammarstedt lands, he goes straight to the hotel and checks his email. He studies the photographs from Cape Verde, then he checks Interpol’s website. There is another name on the ship that was photographed just outside Mindelo, but he is certain that it is the Songhua, one of “The Bandit 6”.
He calls the fisheries officer Gary Orr, New Zealand’s man in Operation Spillway. When a groggy voice answers the phone, he remembers that it is the middle of the night in New Zealand.
“I am so sorry for waking you up,” Hammarstedt stammers.
“Don’t be sorry. I’m getting up,” Orr replies when Hammarstedt has told him the story from Cape Verde.
Half an hour later Orr calls back.
“I am 100 per cent sure it’s them.”
Hammarstedt goes into the bathroom of the hotel room and gets a plastic cup, and then he goes to the minibar and plucks out a small bottle of whiskey. As he celebrates by himself in the silence of the hotel room, he is filled with amazement over the luck of the draw. He spent half a year of his life tracking down and chasing the Thunder; now he found one of “The Bandit 6” by chance.
The next morning he flies home to Stockholm. As he is retrieving his baggage, he receives another email from the photographer in Cape Verde. There is now a third ship beside the Itziar II and the Songhua. This ship also has a strange name, but when he sees the pictures, he is sure that it is the Yongding. Again he calls Gary Orr in New Zealand, who confirms his find.
There is a yellow flag flying from the foremast of the Yongding, a signal from the captain that there are no contagious diseases on board and that the crew is waiting for the customs officers to inspect the ship so they can go ashore. For Hammarstedt it means two things: the crew is still on the ship and there is definitely no toothfish to be found in the cold storage room. He is right. When the police of Cape Verde board the two ships, they don’t find any fish.
The crew that goes ashore from the Yongding and the Songhua are a motley group of Spaniards, Indonesians and Latin Americans. Most of them travel on to the airport, but some of them get no further than the many bars found in Mindelo. There they celebrate with beer, Johnnie Walker and the local liquor grogue. When they come to a few days later, the morning-after sets in. They are broke and there will be no salary from the ship owner in Spain. The interior, provisions and electronic equipment on the Songhua and the Yongding end up on the black market in Mindelo. Some of them manage to drag themselves to the airport, others continue the party.
Peter Hammarstedt knows nothing about the drinking binge in Mindelo, but he can scarcely believe his own good fortune. When he finished Operation Icefish, two out of six pirate vessels were put out of commission – the Thunder was gone for good and the Kunlun under arrest in Thailand. Now only two remained – the Viking and the Perlon.
Sea Shepherd has already commenced the preparations for Operation Icefish 2, but when they receive the news that the Perlon has also been apprehended, they drop it.
When Sea Shepherd found the Thunder on the Banzare Bank, the Perlon was nearby. Hammarstedt’s record-breaking chase could just as well have been a search for the Perlon, but while the Thunder, Kunlun, Songhua and Yongding were being tracked down and chased throughout the Antarctic summer, the Perlon managed to stay out of sight. At the end of April its luck ran out. At the Australian Cocos Islands, the ship was boarded by armed agents dressed in black from Australia who seized ship documents, the contents of computers and papers. Then the agents alerted the authorities in Malaysia.1
Two weeks later, a mere three nautical miles south of Tanjung Bulat on the south-eastern tip of Malaysia, the Spanish fishing captain tried to transship the fish onto a barge. But a Malaysian patrol vessel sailed up alongside them while the operation was underway, and the jig was up.
For the authorities of Australia and Malaysia this was a huge victory. For the first time in the long-standing battle against the pirates in the Antarctic they could confiscate the fish. The captain of the Perlon had not applied for a transshipment permit. It was a violation of Malaysian law.
The captain and the crew had to pay 1.6 million Malaysian ringgit – 400,000 dollars – in fines to avoid prison time. 270 tons of Patagonian and Antarctic toothfish were sold at auction for 5 million ringgit – 1.25 million dollars. The 64-year-old Perlon was sold as scrap metal.
When the crew of the Perlon receive their sentences, the Songhua and the Yongding are still in Mindelo. The ships have been dry-docked, repainted and appear to be ready for a new mission, but Peter Hammarstedt calms down by
