Pirates Read online

  I wouldn’t be the first member of the family to step on board a Royal Navy warship. I could only hope, however, that I wouldn’t have the maritime luck of some of my fore-bears.

  I come from a family of seafarers. My mum’s grandfather was known to everyone – including my mum – as Pop. That was short for Popeye the Sailor Man. In the little village in Norfolk where he lived the final years of his life he was the only man to have gone to sea. He joined the merchant navy at the age of 12, and spent the last 17 years of his career, up to the age of 72, as a quartermaster on a pleasure cruiser called the Andes. (A quartermaster at sea is different from an army quartermaster. In the British merchant navy this was the person who actually steered the ship, and was so called because the duty was divided into four shifts. On pirate ships during the Golden Age of Piracy the quartermaster ranked just below the captain, and could even veto the captain’s decisions under certain circumstances. I’m pleased to report, though, that Pop kept entirely to the straight and narrow during his long years at sea.)

  Pop was shipwrecked several times, but survived them all. On one of these occasions he was marooned on a Pacific Island with members of the United States navy. He was missing for several months, eventually turning up on his home doorstep in a US uniform. During his time at sea he was involved in the transportation of troops all over the world. He watched the bombing of the Suez Canal, just north of the Gulf of Aden; he took troops to Korea; and during the Second World War he was involved in the ‘Russian run’, taking supplies out to the Russian troops. My mum still remembers him bringing her back a pair of fur-lined leather Russian boots. They must have seemed very exotic to a little girl all those decades ago…

  Pop’s brothers were also naval men. Two of them jumped ship in Canada, which was a serious offence – they had to wait for the monarch to die and the resulting amnesty to be declared before they could even write back to their families. A third brother was a submariner. He died just after the First World War from brain damage, probably caused by lack of oxygen in the submarines. He left four children, two of whom – Arthur Buck and his younger brother Bertie – joined the navy at the start of the Second World War. They were posted to HMS Hood – an Admiral-class battle-cruiser, the largest warship the British possessed and the pride of the Royal Navy.

  This was early in the war, and Britain was in a precarious situation. France – her closest ally – had fallen, and although the Americans had been helping out with weapons and other supplies, they were still months away from entering the fray. As an island nation, Britain relied heavily on foreign imports to keep going and the only way these imports could arrive was by sea. The German navy – the Kriegsmarine – pulled out all the stops to ensure that these goods never made it. And the best way for them to do that was through the use of their submarines, or U-boats. The U-boats did their work with ruthless efficiency. Between September 1939 and May 1941 they sank something in the region of 3 million tonnes of shipping and it hit the country hard.

  Hitler had realized for a long time that sea assets were essential in a war against Britain and ordered the construction of a modern fleet made up of a new type of ship. To this end the Germans launched the famous battleship Bismarck on 14 February 1939. Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone. Bismarck was a mean machine. Sixty thousand tonnes of pure naval power, a symbol of German strength, and by the late spring of 1941 she set out on her first mission.

  When the war arrived, Hood had been in service for 20 years. When she had first been built, she had been state-of-the-art. During the interwar period, she had even been sent on a round-the-world tour, ostensibly to thank the Commonwealth nations for their help during the First World War, but also to remind the world that Britain still ruled the waves. She was world famous, a symbol of Britain’s maritime might, but had spent so much time showing the flag that she hadn’t been maintained, updated and repaired as well as she should. By the time of the Second World War she was out of date, and although still a fine ship wasn’t a match for vessels such as the Bismarck. In May 1941 the Bismarck was engaged by the Hood in the Denmark Strait between Greenland and Iceland. The Hood was sunk. Only three members of the crew survived; Arthur and Bertie were not among them. (The incident famously caused Churchill to order, ‘Sink the Bismarck.’ A few days later she was crippled by aircraft launched from HMS Ark Royal, and then sunk by Royal Navy ships.)

  As I prepared to embark on HMS Northumberland, I couldn’t help thinking about Pop, and about Arthur and Bertie. Would they have been surprised that seven decades after their deaths the transport of goods by sea continued to be of such importance? Probably not. Would they have been surprised that the British navy was once again hunting pirates? Perhaps. And what would they have made of the new breed of warship, with all its sophisticated and advanced weaponry, that was being tasked to patrol these waters?

  Ever since the risk of piracy in the Gulf of Aden started to increase, there has been a concerted international effort to curb the number of incidents. This effort has taken the form of several operations, including Combined Task Force 151 and Operation Atalanta. It was as part of Operation Atalanta that HMS Northumberland was patrolling these waters. It was the first time that a Royal Navy warship had been tasked to fight pirates since 1816, when the British finally quelled the threat of the Barbary corsairs.

  When the Somali pirates started hitting the headlines, the trouble was this. International military vessels patrolling the Indian Ocean would hear news of an attack and make chase. The pirates, though, were cute to the intricacies of international diplomacy. They would speed back into Somali waters knowing that, without permission from the interim Somali government, foreign naval vessels were unwilling to follow. The pirates would be home and dry before they were either home or dry. If the international community was to be of any help at all, the Somali government needed to make an official request, and allow military vessels from other nations to enter its waters. That request finally came in June 2008.

  Operation Atalanta is a joint naval patrol comprising around 20 ships from several member nations of the European Union, although it has its headquarters in Northwood, England. It operates alongside Combined Task Forces 151 – an American-led patrol – and 150. CTF-150 had in fact been patrolling these waters for some years in an anti-terrorist action. Large quantities of weapons are illegally transported through the Gulf of Aden; moreover, Somalia and Yemen are suspected hideouts for al-Qaeda, and Pirate Alley is their escape route. So that was another thing to worry about. Between them, Operation Atalanta and CTF-150 and -151 had put a lot of naval might in the Gulf of Aden, but there’s a hell of a lot of water to patrol, and the pirates still slip through the net.

  HMS Northumberland is a Type 23 frigate. There are 13 Type 23s in the Royal Navy, each of them named after British dukes, which is why they’re also known as Duke-class vessels. Originally designed as anti-submarine warships, they are now the mainstay of the navy’s surface fleet and can operate anywhere in the world. Type 23 frigates have two Rolls-Royce engines not unlike those that once powered Concorde, which are used to get the ship from A to B very quickly. They burn a lot of fuel, however, and are very noisy. If you’re hunting submarines, that noise is going to give you away, so in addition they have four quieter engines mounted on rubber to absorb the throb. So these warships might look big and cumbersome, but in fact they’re incredibly quiet and manoeuvrable when they need to be.

  It costs well over £10 million a year to keep Northumberland shipshape, but you get a lot of bang for your buck. The frigate is loaded with a formidable arsenal: two quad Harpoon surface-to-surface missile launchers, a vertical-launch Sea Wolf anti-missile system, a 4.5-inch Mark 8 naval gun, two 30-millimetre close-range guns, two antisubmarine torpedo tubes, a NATO Seagnat (a decoy system used to protect against incoming missiles) and DLF3 decoy launchers. It sounds like a lot – it is a lot – but the ship needs it: if she comes under attack from an enemy surface-to-surface missile, which whizzes across the water lik
e a skimming stone, she has the grand total of four seconds to react to the incoming fire.

  Northumberland also carries a Merlin Mark 1 helicopter. This helicopter is also primarily for anti-submarine operations, but its state-of-the-art sonics and sonar systems mean it’s ideally suited for anti-surface ops. The Merlin is designed to be used in adverse weather and ‘high-sea states’. It has a maximum speed of 167 knots (that’s about 190 miles per hour) and is armed with Sting Ray torpedoes or depth charges – a kind of underwater bomb. (‘Depth charges’ is also naval slang for a bowl of stewed figs – gives you an idea of the sort of effect the weapons have…) A general purpose machine gun (GPMG) can be mounted in five different locations throughout the cabin so that it can be aimed through the doors or windows. Merlin has enough fuel to operate within a radius of 200 nautical miles. All in all, a serious piece of kit. As well as its current maritime duties, it’s seen plenty of active service – both in Iraq and in the Caribbean on anti-narcotics and hurricane-support ops.

  I didn’t quite know what to expect when I met up with the frigate where it was docked in the port of Salalah on the coast of Oman – 100 miles from the coast of Yemen and at the eastern end of the Gulf of Aden. I’d spent plenty of time with the British army, but the navy was a new one on me. One of the first things I noticed was that the area of the port around the ship was blocked off by huge metal containers piled up on each other. This was to stop potential suicide bombers approaching the vessel. Oman might have been a low-risk location, but it brought home to me that our notions of safety are all relative: even here nobody associated with a Royal Navy frigate could fully relax.

  I was welcomed on board by the captain of the Northumberland, Lieutenant Commander Martin Simpson – a charming man with a clipped, British way of speaking. I was soaking wet as we met on the deck – not from seawater, but from sweat. Salalah is only a few degrees south of the equator, and the heat was almost crippling.

  It was explained to me how the naval hierarchy of command works. The second in command is the executive officer, or XO. He runs the ship. The captain makes all the decisions about what the ship is going to do and where it’s going to go. Martin was answerable to a Greek commander as Operation Atalanta involved an international fleet. The crew were nearing the end of a six-month deployment in the area. He told me that his greatest sense of achievement came not from hunting pirates, but from escorting food aid from the World Food Programme into Mogadishu – even though Northumberland could not actually enter the port itself for fear of being rocketed from the mainland.

  Introductions made, the camera crew and I started looking around this impressive ship. What we found was something like a floating city. Northumberland produces its own electricity; it can desalinate a certain amount of its own water; and, of course, it must accommodate its crew for large stretches of time. At no point, however, could you ever forget that you’re on a battleship. Below decks is like something from Blade Runner. No windows, just a maze of tiny metal corridors with flashing lights, ladders and buttons, a constant electrical hum in the air and the distant churning of the ship’s engines. There are wooden blocks all over the place. These are there in the event of water flooding into the boat and entrances needing to be blocked off. They are more effective than metal barriers because wood bends under force rather than buckles. You need to be incredibly careful and skilled at going up and down the ladders and moving around the ship – I was forever tripping up and bashing myself around, and to this day parts of me still ache from my clumsiness. Poor me. It took me four days to work out the route from our cabin up to the bridge. Those grey, metallic corridors all look the same. Some of the ladders lead somewhere, others lead nowhere – or at least nowhere I wanted to go. Or was allowed to go. I felt like the new boy at school, always getting lost on his way to class.

  I was barracked with five others in a warrant officers’ dorm – cramped and tiny by anyone’s standards, though hardly surprising given that the ship has a crew of about 200 men and women. At least in the army when you settle down for the night you’ve got room to dump your Bergen and spread out a bit. Not here. One bunk, one drawer and one little cupboard is all you have each. All your belongings have to be immaculately squared away and tied down so that they take up the minimum of space and don’t go walk-about should the ship hit a rough patch. Our cabin couldn’t have been more than six metres by six, and we were lucky: in a warrant officers’ dorm the bunks are only two high. Lower-ranking sailors have to put up with three or four bunks on top of each other. It makes a tin of sardines look positively roomy.

  You might be surrounded by all the water you can see, but on a ship you have to be very careful about how much you use. It’s not rationed, but everyone understands that the last thing a ship wants to do is run out, especially in the burning heat just south of the equator. At the end of the corridor was the toilet, or ‘head’, so called because sailors would traditionally do their business at the head of the ship, where the splashing water would naturally clean away their deposits (give me a bottle of Domestos any day). Now, though, it was below deck with us, its walls curved because it’s pressed up against the hull of the ship, and hot because that’s what modern ships are like.

  When I arrived at my bunk I found a copy of Private magazine under the covers. For those of you unfamiliar with this highbrow publication, it’s an intimate magazine for gentlemen, put there just in case the long lonely nights should prove too much for my libido. Thanks, lads. Much appreciated. Whether the lads themselves rely on such magazines, I couldn’t say. I do know, however, that although relationships certainly occur on board ship, there’s a strict no-shagging policy, and anyone caught in flagrante can expect a severe reprimand. I suppose you have to make sure that the boys and girls have their minds on the job in hand.

  My hosts had also stuck a picture of my former on-screen better half Sharon and Roly the dog onto the underside of the bunk above – ‘so you don’t get homesick’. By now, though, I was well used to the military sense of humour and while there was the same piss-taking I’d had to undergo whenever I got to know a new bunch of soldiers in Afghanistan, most of the guys and girls on Northumberland had seen those documentaries and had liked them. It helped to break the ice – the guys and girls on board had a great deal of respect for what the army were going through, even if there was a vague sense of rivalry between them. Unlike in Afghanistan, alcohol was allowed on the ship. There’s a limit of two cans of beer a day for regular sailors on their down-time, although they managed somehow to find enough supplies on one occasion to get me a little merrier than perhaps I should have been. After all, there’s nothing funnier than a bloke off the telly getting hammered…

  On a massive ship like this the biggest threat is not sinking – it is, after all, very hard to down a Type 23 frigate – but fire. If a fire somehow started on board, it could be disastrous, especially if it reached the network of corridors below deck. Fire needs oxygen to burn, so it will seek it out, causing deadly fireballs down those corridors. If you happen to be between the fireball and the oxygen it needs, you fry; and you can imagine the chaos and devastation a fire could cause when so many people are crammed into such a small place with no means of escape. Trouble is, a warship is packed to the rafters with things that cause fire: fuel, electrics, enough weaponry to take out a substantial chunk of north London. It means that fire regulations are of paramount importance. Everyone’s aware of these regulations, and they follow them to the letter. Smoking, obviously, is a no-no below deck, and every time you go above you have to seal the hatch in order to limit the possible entrance points a fire can take. Many members of the crew wore white fire-retardant suits over their uniforms.

  Even in the absence of fire, temperatures could be horribly high. Northumberland ’s cooling system was a network of pipes carrying cold water. Just before we joined the ship, this cooling system had broken down – not good in such a hot environment, and it meant that everyone was cooking in their cabins. The ship
never sleeps. Everyone on board is on a continuous rotation and there is a constant hubbub of activity as the crew goes about their business of keeping this floating town operational and, at the same time, performing their crucial military task: hunting for pirates.

  There was a palpable sense of tension as Northumberland prepared to leave the relative security of Salalah. Some of that tension derived from the fact that manoeuvring a frigate out of port is a complicated business. Get it wrong and you can do some serious damage to a very expensive ship. All hands were on deck, and anxious sailors looked nervously over the side to check that everything was going as it should. After all, scraping a Type 23 isn’t like scratching your mum’s car. But the tension wasn’t just down to the difficulty of moving this massive but strangely delicate ship out of harbour. Everyone was well aware that as soon as we moved out of Omani waters, we’d be in Pirate Alley. It didn’t matter that we were aboard a Royal Navy warship. We’d be searching for dangerous men carrying dangerous weapons and you could sense the ship was moving from a relaxed state to an operational one.

  As soon as we were out of harbour, I joined Commander Simpson up on the bridge. This is the hub of the ship, and it was alive with activity. Orders were given and carried out; information came in over the radio to be processed and disseminated; bearings were taken; and a lookout kept constant watch over the surrounding water through a set of powerful binoculars. It was a hard-working, utilitarian place, but not without its comforts. Martin Simpson had engaged a friend of his who worked at an Aston Martin garage to make a seat for him – not exactly standard navy issue, but more comfortable (and more slick) for the boss’s behind than whatever arrangement it replaced. The Aston Martin accessory took centre stage in the middle of the bridge. Simpson was chuffed to bits with it.

  As we stood together on the bridge, he explained to me what his operational priorities were. Number one: to protect World Food Programme ships delivering food aid into Somalia. Number two: to protect other vulnerable shipping in the Gulf of Aden. Number three: to arrest pirates.