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THE PIRATE

APRIL 2016

He hasn’t slept in the past 24 hours, he says.

The rain is beating down against the large window panes of the airport terminal. He is standing in the arrival hall and holding a sign bearing our names, as if we were meeting for a conference or a safari.

There is nothing distinguishing him from the cluster of taxi drivers battling their way through the tiny group of travellers who have just landed in the provincial town, the name of which he has asked us not to reveal.

“Who gave you my phone number?” he asks over and over again on our way out to the waiting car.

He feared it was a trap – that it was the past that had brought down the plane’s landing gear.

“These people are capable of murder to protect their name and their profits.”

His sole motivation for wanting to meet us is greed, the same motivation that sent him on mission after mission to the Southern Ocean. He is demanding a considerable amount of money for telling his story, along with the assurance that we will disclose neither his identity nor that of the city, the country or even the continent where we meet.

Every morning he arrives, trudging dutifully to the hotel, listing names and places, trying to untangle the various poaching expeditions, to remember details that time has erased from his mind. He is neither well-spoken nor particularly observant. Now and then the stories are choppy waves that suddenly break – and then spill out into a large, uniform mass.

As soon as he is done with his story, he hurries off to the day job that has kept him alive since he was forced to go ashore from the Thunder. His only friends appear to be some neighbourhood dogs and a young nephew.

When he signed on with the Thunder in Malaysia, the ship had been wanted by Interpol for one year. On the way from land in the dinghy that transported him through the darkness to the Thunder’s anchoring site, he had an uneasy feeling that something terrible was going to happen.