34

THE ARMPIT OF AFRICA

GULF OF GUINEA, APRIL 2015

4 April. Operation Icefish is taking place somewhere nobody could have anticipated.

The heat wears down the crew’s concentration, energy and desire to work. A faint breeze is blowing from the southeast. A pod of Risso’s dolphins break through the surface of the water between the two ships.

A few minutes past half-four in the afternoon, the Thunder suddenly makes a 70-degree turn to the east and sails into Equatorial Guinea’s economic zone.

“All right, we are going somewhere,” Peter Hammarstedt says while keeping an eye on the electronic maps on the bridge.

Never before has the Thunder been so close to land. For the first time, the hunter and the hunted are less than 200 nautical miles from the mainland. If they stay the same course and continue at the same speed, they will be able to see the coast of the African continent within three days.

The unexpected change of course triggers new speculations on board the Bob Barker. Has the captain of the Thunder received new orders from land?

It could all be a diversionary tactic, whereby they will suddenly put about and sail south again – or in towards one of the small islands in the region, so more supplies and fuel can be brought on board. Do they have contacts on land? Will a boat come out and pick up the officers, leaving the Thunder and crew to their own devices and the whims of the ocean? Are they making their way to port because it is Easter, a holiday, with a diminished level of activity in the ports?

“They speak Spanish in Equatorial Guinea, don’t they?” Hammarstedt asks.

Adam Meyerson has just come up onto the bridge with his usual prediction that the Thunder is about to run out of both fuel and options.

“My prediction is that this is very near to being over,” he says, and continues: “Equatorial Guinea does have a navy so it’s possible they will come out and see what these guys are up to and hopefully arrest them. Equatorial Guinea has been building its naval fleet like mad men over the last two years. It has the biggest navy in Africa.”

Hammarstedt too has a sensation that the chase is approaching its end. He decides to alert the media in Equatorial Guinea about how the hunted vessel could be on its way into one of the nation’s ports. Media coordinator Michelle Mossfield googles “Equatorial Guinea” and “Media”, but the search engine does not give her any answers.

This is because in Equatorial Guinea there are no newspapers. In the capital Malabo, where the decay chews its way up along the walls of the old, pale yellow colonial buildings, giving them the colour of rancid flesh, there is not a single bookstore or newsstand. It is a coastal nation where fish is imported and the farmlands have been invaded by the creeping jungle − a country ravaged by torture, random arrests, ill-fated prisons, isolation, violence, discrimination and mind control. Not a vessel is to be seen in the waters abundant with fish that surround the tiny state.1

“What kind of place is this?” Peter Hammarstedt asks himself.

For Equatorial Guinea’s ruling family the ocean is a threat and an enemy. In the beginning of the 1970s, the country’s dictator, Francisco Macias Nguema, introduced a ban on all fishing. One hundred and forty-five days after he was elected president in the former Spanish colony, Macias appointed himself absolute monarch and called himself “the unique miracle”.

“The Miracle” was the son of a witch doctor. He had never passed an exam and was haunted by inferiority complexes, nightmares and delusions. In a state of combined intoxication and an accelerating psychosis, he made decisions inspired by his own nightmares. In a speech he called Adolf Hitler “Africa’s saviour”. He set the dinner table for dead guests and terrified servants saw Macias having conversations with the ghosts of men he had executed.

All positions in Equatorial Guinea were filled by members of his own clan. Priests were obliged to mention him in their sermons under threat of torture. He reintroduced traditional medicine, closed the hospitals and fired the doctors. He forbade use of the word “intellectual”, shut down the schools, burnt the books and fired the teachers.

On Christmas of 1975 he executed 150 of his adversaries in a football stadium in Malabo. The soldiers were dressed like Santa Clauses and shot their victims while an orchestra played the Mary Hopkins song “Those Were the Days”. Crucified corpses were hung up along the road to the airport as a terrifying warning to visitors. Macias wiped out families and eradicated villages; of a population of 380,000, 70,000 are believed to have been killed and one-quarter of the country’s residents fled the country. Russia, China and Cuba supported the regime of terror, while French diplomats flirted with the dictator to secure the natural resources of that which was called “the most evil place on earth”.

Agriculture operations collapsed, the small cities descended into darkness, and the island residents jumped into boats to escape. Then Macias ordered that all boats were to be sold or destroyed and the population was prohibited from approaching the beach.

It was the start of Equatorial Guinea’s war against the ocean.

In 1979 Macias was overthrown by a coup d’état. Together with a group of his closest colleagues he fled into the jungle with the nation’s cash reserves, somewhere between 60 and 150 million dollars, which he hid in a bamboo hut.

In the subsequent skirmishes with the coup leaders, the hut was burned to the ground with the entirety of Equatorial Guinea’s currency reserves inside. Macias was finally tracked down, brought before a military tribunal and executed at the Black Beach prison in Malabo.

His nephew Teodor Obiang Nguema took the throne as the country’s new dictator. In the course of President Obiang’s more than 30-year reign, “members of the inner circle have amassed unparalleled wealth through corruption in the form of extortion, embezzlement and theft”.2

In the mid-1990s the country established an international ships register, probably to satisfy the Obiang clan’s insatiable appetite for foreign currency. The register, which was administered from Cyprus and Miami, swiftly attracted a small fleet of blacklisted vessels.

According to Lloyd’s List, as many as 40 ships were sailing around with forged papers from Equatorial Guinea. The US coast guard considered every ship with the country’s flag to be suspicious and immediately boarded such ships were they to sail into US waters. In an alarming number of cases, the coast guard found serious violations of international standards. But it was the tragic fate of the four-masted schooner the Fantome – “The Phantom” – which would make Equatorial Guinea’s shoddy flag of convenience famous all over the world.3

Built in 1927 by the flamboyant Duke of Westminster as the Flying Cloud, the ship was one of the last great traditionally-rigged sailing ships – and one of the most luxurious privately owned yachts in the world. The Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis purchased the yacht as a wedding present for Princess Grace of Monaco, but Onassis never received an invitation to the wedding, so instead he left the boat to rust away in an anonymous port in Germany. Finally, the Fantome ended up as a charter boat for luxury tourists in the Caribbean – and with a home port in Africa’s sweaty armpit: Malabo, Equatorial Guinea.

The last time anyone saw the proud rigging of the Fantome standing tall on the horizon was 28 October 1998. As the ship departed from port in Omoa, Honduras for a six-day cruise in the Caribbean, the tropical storm Mitch was building up more than 1,600 kilometres away, but it was moving with a violent and unpredictable force. The Fantome returned to port to let its passengers disembark before it plunged north towards the Gulf of Mexico in search of shelter from one of the most deadly and destructive storms ever to occur in the Western hemisphere. Ashore, it could risk being crushed while docked; the chances of managing the hurricane were greater at sea. But it was as if the hurricane was following in the wake of the schooner. The Fantome quickly ran into winds of 160 kilometres an hour, 12-metre waves ploughed across the bow, from the bridge the captain stared straight into the eye of the storm.

The ship and the crew of 31 were never found and the automatic emergency beacon was never activated. A few weeks later, after the hurricane had died away, some pieces of life rafts that had been torn to bits were found, along with parts of a wooden stairway and life vests with the inscription Fantome, Malabo.

After the wreck, the owner, Windjammer Barefoot Cruises in Miami, admitted that they had registered the ship in Equatorial Guinea for tax reasons. In Equatorial Guinea’s name, the captain and the officers had received a licence and the required certifications without having passed a single exam. Everything was handled by an agent in Miami.

It was the flag state’s responsibility to investigate the wreck; it was never done. Equatorial Guinea’s representative in Miami made reference to newspaper articles and a report from the American coast guard. That would have to do. In the years following the Fantome tragedy, the toothfish poachers began registering with the bandit regime in Equatorial Guinea. The Kunlun was added to the register in 2004, at the time under the name the Thule, before the ship disappeared again two years later. But the shipping company still continued to use the flag, in all likelihood because they did not believe that Equatorial Guinea would react. When the Sam Simon discovered the ship in the Southern Ocean, the name plate was clearly legible: Kunlun, Malabo.

For the investigators of Interpol and the bureaucrats following along with the chase from land, it will be a nightmare if the Thunder sails into Equatorial Guinea. Then the ship will very likely slip through the fingers of the judicial system once and for all.

For Hammarstedt, the nightmare has a different quality. The worst scenario would be to chase the Thunder into a port where he and the ship will be put under arrest, while the officers of the Thunder will be free to saunter away from the quay and board the first flight to Spain.