February 21, 2009
The pirates had no fear. We fired everything we had but in the end we had to jump overboard
Martin Fletcher
Carl Mason and his two colleagues decided that they had no choice. Six heavily-armed and intoxicated Somali pirates had seized the tanker and crew that the three British security guards were supposed to be protecting. The guards were hiding on the roof of the bridge. They had no weapons. A French military helicopter that was shadowing the vessel would soon have to leave to refuel. More pirates were probably on the way.
Dodging bullets, the trio scrambled down four flights of stairs and flung themselves over the side into the waters below, leaving 28 Indian and Bangladeshi mariners to their fate.
Mr Mason has no regrets. “If there was anything we could have done to help the crew we’d have done it,” he told The Times this week. “Unless you are in that situation you can’t sit in an armchair and say, ‘Look what those w***ers did’.”
Mr Mason, 44, a former Marine, together with Mike Kelly, 36, a former paratrooper who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and another former Marine who declined to be named, are probably the only Britons to have fought Somali pirates and lived to tell the tale — and quite a tale it is.
Last November they were employed by a company from Poole in Dorset called Anti-Piracy Maritime Security Solutions (APMSS) to protect an American-owned tanker, the MV Biscaglia, as she sailed up the Gulf of Aden with a cargo of palm oil bound for Barcelona. Since the beginning of 2008 96 ships had been attacked off Somalia.
The guards joined the vessel in Oman. They were not allowed to carry guns but they fortified the ship with lines of hoses and water cannon down both sides, hessian netting to obstruct the pirates’ ladders — and the pièce de résistance that APMSS was hyping as the ultimate deterrent against pirates: a box called a long- range acoustic device (LRAD), which supposedly warded off attackers with ear-splitting noise. They set up the LRAD on the rear of the bridge, believing that the low-lying stern was the weakest point, but they had to leave ten feet unprotected on either side for lack of hoses and hessian.
The Biscaglia was meant to sail with a French convoy, but by the second morning it had fallen 25 miles behind. At 8.40am a lookout spotted a skiff with two powerful outboard engines idling in the water three miles to port. “It seemed like it was waiting for us,” Mr Mason said.
Within minutes it was speeding towards the Biscaglia, making straight for those ten unprotected feet at the front. Inexplicably, after issuing a mayday call, the Indian officer on the bridge slowed down instead of speeding up and zig-zagging as instructed.
The British security men lugged the LRAD to the front of the bridge and directed it straight at the skiff but, said Mr Mason, “it had no effect whatsoever. If we’d had ten of them it would have made no difference.” Mr Kelly concurred: “It was rubbish. It didn’t do a thing. They were laughing at it.”
With no other weapons the security guards tried to defend the ship with flares, and with two scaffolding pipes that they pretended were rocket launchers. The pirates landed a rocket-propelled grenade on deck and opened fire with their AK-47s, but appeared so high on the local drug qat that they were scarcely capable of aiming. They scaled ladders and were on board within minutes. They were barely out of their teens, wore T-shirts and shorts, and “were literally ambling up the deck . . . they had no fear whatever”, Mr Mason said. “We fired everything we had for 30 or 40 minutes but we had bugger all left.” As the pirates made the crew kneel at gunpoint, the security men hid on the roof. By that time the French helicopter was hovering overhead and the three men signalled that they wanted weapons, but none was forthcoming.
They knew that other crews captured by Somali pirates had not been harmed but that they — as Westerners — would be high-value hostages. They also knew the helicopter would shortly leave to refuel. “It was a really hard decision,” said Mr Mason, but they concluded that their only option was to jump overboard.
They signalled their intention to the helicopter, which mounted a diversion. The three men then tumbled down the stairs as bullets bounced off the metalwork around them. “My heart was coming out of my chest,” said Mr Mason. Mr Kelly jumped overboard first, and as the others hung from the railings, preparing to drop, he shouted: “Watch out for the sharks, boys” — the previous day they had spotted several near the ship.
The pirates continued taking pot shots at the men. Then they started turning the ship, as if to run them down. Finally a German military helicopter arrived and winched the three men to safety. They were flown to a British warship, then flown home from Djibouti. The crew were held on board the Biscaglia for 56 days and were released last month after the ship’s owner, Industrial Shipping Enterprises of Connecticut, had a small aircraft parachute a container with more than $1 million in $100 notes into the sea nearby. The pirates retrieved it in minutes, divided their loot and departed, leaving five goats behind on the vessel.
APMSS never recovered. When the Biscaglia was attacked it had ten teams protecting ships off Somalia, each earning £14,000 for a few days’ work. Today it has just one. “When it whistles around the world that at the first sign of pirates your guys jump off the ship it doesn’t install confidence in ship owners . . . it destroyed the business,” said Nick Davis, a former army pilot who founded the company last July.
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