The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [97]
Once in control of the Victoria, the pirates ordered the crew to hoist their attack boat aboard using the vessel’s deck cranes. Lacking the proper cables with which to secure the boat to the crane, the ropes snapped and it fell back into the sea. As the crew looked on in terrified anticipation, the pirates’ reaction was remarkably cheery. “No problem,” they said. “We’ll just buy another one.”
And what happened after that? Levenescu shot me a bemused look. “We go to Somalia,” he replied in English. For two days the crew stayed confined to the ten-metre-square bridge as the ship made its way to Eyl. Arriving towards the end of “pirate season,” they joined a fellowship of three hostage ships already moored in the harbour; for the next seventy-five days the crew watched other commandeered vessels come and go, until, finally, only the Victoria remained.
After the first two days, the crew was moved to the captain’s and owner’s quarters, where they spent the rest of their imprisonment in a world consisting of the two cabins, the ship’s mess, and the corridor linking them. The pirates, conversely, came and went freely, rotating between ship and shore in two- or three-week shifts.
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Frequent shore leave was a necessary pressure release valve to prevent tempers on the ship from flaring. Supply boats went to and from the shore two or three times per day, though this ferry service was later reduced to one evening transport as the hagaa season wore on and its winds became increasingly merciless.3 The pirates came and went with the transports, but there was an average of twenty on board at all times. Those not native to the Eyl area rarely left the ship, but the Romanian hostages observed that even the group’s Eyl residents were decidedly apprehensive about taking shore leave.4
“They had some problems in Eyl,” said Levenescu. “There was trouble between the pirates and the government, or other pirates … I don’t know.” Given the anti-pirate hostility I had witnessed from the local people while in Eyl—as well as the recent Puntland government crackdown—the pirates’ anxiety was hardly surprising.
The pirates treated him and his shipmates with decency, if not kindness, Levenescu asserted, and never resorted to physical violence against any crew member. All things considered, he was content with the lot that he and his shipmates drew. “The group that captured us was a good one,” he said. “In the south, the pirates are terrible. They do much more violent things to intimidate the shipping company into paying.” Levenescu’s (somewhat accurate) generalization stemmed from the brutal treatment of the crew of the Hansa Stavanger, whom the pirates subjected to mock executions in order to pressure the Hansa’s owners into paying a higher ransom.
Levenescu had few quarrels with his captors, and recalled that the only woman in the crew, Sarchizian, was treated with more respect than any other crew member. “They would sometimes call her name seductively, but nothing more than that,” said Levenescu. Of the Victoria’s complement, in fact, it was the Romanians who had the more lascivious inclinations. “We asked them to bring some women on board,” said Levenescu, sheepishly. “They said no.”
I laughed, and mentioned my own difficulties in dealing with the Victoria gang, partly owing to the fact that they had believed me to be a CIA operative. He nodded understandingly, “Yes, they are stupid. They are very stupid.”
But Levenescu dashed my solipsistic assumption that the Victoria had fled from Eyl, during my second night in the town, because Computer feared my meddling in his plans. By the time I reached Eyl, forty-four days into the Victoria’s captivity, the vessel’s vital supplies—fuel, water, and food—were critically low. She was completely out of fresh water, and the ship’s desalinator functioned effectively only in the