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SOMALIA IS A failed state. Its landmass, which makes up the Horn of Africa, is stuck between Ethiopia and Kenya to the west, and the Indian Ocean to the east. Its northern coastline is on the Gulf of Aden, the other side of which lies Yemen, whose government had just taken to killing protesters. Talk about keeping bad company.

The piracy committed offshore is a direct result of the anarchy that rages on land. The same thing happens in other weakly governed states, like Indonesia and Nigeria, but it’s particularly bad in Somalia. The country has been caught up in civil war since the 1990s. Come to think of it, it can’t really be called a country any more.

In the early 1980s, Somali pirates were mostly unemployed youths who hung round the docks looking for work. The warlords, the clan leaders, bunged them in a couple of boats and sent them out to mug whatever they found coming from the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aden. As one of the choke-points for world shipping, it offered easy pickings.

Piracy grew into an industry. As Rudy had discovered, gangs now roved across thousands of square miles, as far east as the Seychelles, south to Tanzania, and north to the Arabian Sea and Oman. The turf was divided up. The waters of the Gulf of Aden might as well be the streets of Mogadishu.

A typical cell of a dozen or so men goes out into the open sea in two or three skiffs, small, cockroach-infested wood or fibreglass fishing boats, for three or four weeks at a time, taking only a couple of outboards. All other available space is filled with grappling irons, ladders, knives, assault rifles, RPGs and khat leaves, the local narcotic.

There’s nothing to cook with. They catch fish, which they eat raw. The plan is always to find and take over a larger vessel, then live on it and use it as a mother-ship. Which was what must have happened with the skiffs that captured the Maria Feodorovna. They’d have binned the fishing boat and would now be using the yacht as a control base, having taken the hostages back to shore because they were European and would be worth a few bob.

Why hadn’t they taken the crew as well? They were white, but maybe they were seen as fellow workers of the sea. Somali pirates had some rules. They didn’t attack all shipping. They left the Indian vessels that brought expensive goodies and food from the east, mainly because the clan warlords liked to buy the stuff with the proceeds of their crimes. If the supply dried up, the warlords wouldn’t be best pleased.

But the fact was, these pirates attacked anything of value that floated: oil tankers, freighters, cruise ships, private yachts, they’d have a go at anything. I found it quite funny that a dozen Somali fishermen could fuck global shipping magnates about, holding them, their crews and world trade hostage. I’d have laughed into my brew if it hadn’t been for Tracy and the boy.

Back on dry land, Somalia was still in shit state. The Americans had tried to intervene in 1993 when the warlords were hijacking food aid. They’d got hammered. Nobody had tried since. The clans were now at war with each other, and Islamic militants had gatecrashed the party for a slice of the action. There was no functioning government, or even a judicial system, just chaos and disorder. Small wonder a job as a pirate seemed such a fantastic opportunity to the average Somali. I’d have been having a go at it if I was up Shit Creek.

The economic impact of piracy was actually quite small as things stood, compared with the volume of international trade. Less than one per cent of the vessels in the Gulf of Aden had been approached by pirates, let alone attacked, and most of those were only shipping garden gnomes from China. But the statistics didn’t tell the full horror of what awaited victims like Tracy and Stefan.

And in the bigger picture, the nightmare scenario for Britain was that if one of the two liquid-gas ships we needed to dock here every day got lifted, we’d lose a major part of the energy supply that kept our power stations humming. If baby incubators couldn’t function and the lights went out, the government might find that uprisings weren’t confined to the Middle East.

Even the front-line pirates got fucked over. They received less than 30 per cent of the take. The bulk of the proceeds had to be handed over to the clan warlords, and those who had to be paid for the hostages’ food and board. There were also investors. Some were Somalis. Buying shares in piracy was better than going to sea. Easier money and conditions. But some were from international criminal syndicates based in the Gulf States, with links into Europe and London.

In fact, the whole thing was a fuck-up, with everyone taking a cut some way or another. There were a lot of noses in the piracy trough.