ONE
STRAIT OF MALACCA
Captain Omar Rahal tracked the small boat racing across the placid waters of the narrow strait. It was approaching his California-bound oil tanker from dead ahead, and far too quickly to be a fishing boat. He’d tried to raise them on the radio, but there was no response. It meant only one thing.
Pirates.
Using his binoculars, he could see that the boat was full of men armed with guns, but there was nothing he could do to avoid them. The Dahar was more than 300 meters long, and the strait between Malaysia and the Indonesian island of Sumatra was barely three kilometers across at its narrowest point. The ponderous ship would be impossible to turn around, and the speedboat would easily outmaneuver any attempt to ram it.
“Increase to full speed,” he nevertheless told the executive officer. “We’re not going to make the Dahar an easy target.” Such high velocity for a ship as big as theirs was risky in these tight confines, even with calm seas, but he couldn’t let them hijack his ship without doing something.
As the XO ordered full power, Rahal activated the shipwide intercom. “Now hear this, men. We have hostiles off our bow. They are armed and mean to board us. Initiate emergency lockdowns and go to your action stations. Do not, I repeat, do not attempt to fight them.” He didn’t want any crew members to die on his watch.
The boat passed behind the bow of the Dahar so that Rahal could no longer see it. He went to the port bridge wing so he could watch for it over the side of the ship.
They came back into view, and he could now make out seven men clad in T-shirts and armed with automatic rifles. There had to be an eighth driving, hidden by the roof of the tiny wheelhouse. The boat circled around so it could match the tanker’s speed. Rahal spied a man holding an extendable ladder.
He called to the XO. “Activate the SSAS alarm.”
The XO flipped open a safety cover and pressed a large red button. The Ship Security Alert System was a silent alarm that contacted the ship’s base of operations to inform them that a hijacking was in progress. It ensured that the hijackers would not be warned that help had been summoned.
A few seconds later, the bridge phone rang. Rahal picked it up.
“This is Captain Rahal on the Dahar.”
“Captain, this is operations headquarters. We are calling to verify that you have an emergency in progress.”
“Affirmative. This is not a false alarm.” Rahal recited the code sequence verifying his identity. “Seven or eight armed men are preparing to board us.”
“Understood. We have your position and will contact the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency and the Indonesian Sea and Coast Guard. Stay on the line as long as you can. Are there any ships in your vicinity that could render aid?”
“What do we have on our radar?” Rahal asked the XO.
The XO peered at the
radar screen and shook his head in dismay. “The closest vessel looks to be a freighter thirty kilometers behind us.”
“Even if we stop, it would take her two hours to get here,” Rahal spoke into the phone. “What’s my ETA on the Coast Guard?”
“The MMEA is scrambling a helicopter in Johor, but the soonest they’ll make it to you is ninety minutes. Stay calm and do not resist the hijackers. Help is on the way.”
Rahal smirked at the XO. “‘Help is on the way,’ he says.”
“We’re going to need it,” the XO replied, pointing down at the deck.
The top of the ladder poked above the railing. Rahal dropped the phone and ran out to the bridge wing again. While some of the hijackers had their weapons trained on the railing in case anyone tried to push it away, others began climbing up, several of them carrying large backpacks in addition to their weapons. When seven of them were on deck, they ran toward the superstructure at the rear of the ship.
Rahal got back on the phone. “Headquarters, I have to hang up now. The hostiles are approaching the bridge.”
“Good luck, Captain.”
Rahal tried to calm himself for the sake of the rest of the bridge crew, but his insides felt like pudding. He hadn’t been this shaken since the Iraqis invaded his native Kuwait when he was a teenager working on a fishing boat.
A few moments later, he heard feet pounding up the stairs.
“No sudden moves,” Rahal said to his men.
The door was flung open, and three Southeast Asian men burst onto the bridge with their weapons at the ready.
“Don’t shoot,” Rahal said in English with his hands in the air. “We’re unarmed.”
A lean and wiry man with scarred flesh where his left ear should have been stepped forward with a menacing grin. He didn’t have the rotted teeth of a drug-using robber. This man was a trained professional.
“You are Captain Rahal?” the man said in Indonesian-accented Arabic.
“Yes,” Rahal replied in the same language, surprised that the man knew his name. “What do you want?”
“I want your ship. Now I have it.”
“And my crew?”
One of the hijackers went to the controls and set the engines to full stop.
“If you and your crew behave, you will depart the ship with me, and we will ransom you. If no one pays, then we will kill you.”
Rahal nodded. “We’ll cooperate. And my company will pay your ransom.”
“That’s very good to hear,” the scarred hijacker said. “Because if you give us any trouble, I’ll leave all fifteen of you on board, and you can go down with your ship when I blow it up in the strait.”