| |
|
Malacca Strait Pirates
October 2007
|
|
Malacca Strait Pirates
|
|
By Peter Gwin
|
|
|
At a nearby beach, they stole a fiberglass speedboat, painted it blue, and loaded it with gasoline, water and food, two cell phones, a GPS, and five freshly sharpened parangs. In addition, each man brought a ski mask, a change of clothes, some cash, and a passport. After midnight, they slipped into the strait. Meanwhile, the turncoat crew member was sending text messages from the tanker, updating the ship’s position, course, and speed. Most important, Ariffin said, “he told us when he would man the watch.”
A few hours later, the pirates, wearing ski masks and wielding parangs, commanded the Nepline Delima’s bridge. The tanker’s distress signal had been disabled, and 16 of its 17 crew lay bound and blindfolded in a locked cabin, some of them bleeding. The pirates set a new course for the Thai tanker on the open sea. By the next evening the gang would be on their way back to what Batam pirates call “happy happy,” a blur of hedonism, ranging from extravagant amounts of crystal meth and ecstasy to marathon sessions with prostitutes. Or, if Ariffin is to be believed, home to his family.
The problem was the 17th crewman. Soon after the pirates had boarded the tanker, Ariffin, guarding the speedboat, heard one of the sailors yell: “Lanun!” Bedlam erupted on the ship’s decks as the pirates tried to round up the frightened crew. Lukman and two others were on the bridge. They switched on the public address system and started beating the captain until his shouts for the crew to surrender blared over the ship’s loudspeakers. “Please, they are killing me,” he cried. Sixteen crewmen eventually gave up. Each was asked his name, then bound and blindfolded. “We had a copy of the ship’s manifest,” said Ariffin, “we knew one was missing.”
Meanwhile, the sea had picked up. Ariffin tied the speedboat to the tanker’s railing and scrambled aboard to find the engine room. It was there, an hour later, that he got a frantic call from Lukman on the bridge. The missing crewman had escaped in their speedboat, stranding them on the tanker. Ariffin ran the Nepline Delima’s engines at full throttle trying to reach international waters, but even at top speed the tanker could make only about 12 miles an hour (19 kilometers). Within a few hours the Malaysian marine police had cut off their escape. Ariffin went up on the deck and lit a cigarette. “There was nothing to do,” he said. “Allah had his hand on that sailor.”
A guard signals that our time is up. I hurriedly tell Ariffin about my plans to visit Batam. The guard puts his hand on Ariffin’s shoulder. The prisoner squeezes the phone. For the first time, I notice his muscular forearms. He speaks quickly before the guard leads him away.
“He said go to the coffee shop behind the Harmoni Hotel,” says the interpreter. “Tell the seamen there that John Palembang said hello. And don’t forget about the toothbrush.”
Cinderella’s Dark Sister
“You want girls?” the cab driver asked on our way to Nagoya, one of Batam Island’s largest towns. “Drugs?” he caught my eye in the rearview mirror. “I can get for you. Everything. No problem.”
If Singapore, just seven miles (11 kilometers) to the north with its glittering skyline and robust economy, is Southeast Asia’s Cinderella, Batam is her dark sister. The two are located across from each other where the Malacca Strait feeds into the smaller Singapore Strait, and a ceaseless parade of ships, more than a thousand a week, passes between them. Most do business in Singapore, home to one of the world’s preeminent free ports and expanding financial and technology sectors.
Subscribe to National Geographic magazine.
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
|
|
