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.

"THE BANDIT 6"

HOBART, AUSTRALIA, DECEMBER 2014

The Shadowlands. There is no evidence of it on any map, but Captain Peter Hammarstedt sets the ship's course for this region on the afternoon of 3 December 2014. He sails the MY Bob Barker down the River Derwent, towards the capricious Storm Bay and out on a 15-day voyage to an out-of-the-way purgatory with the worst winds and the highest waves of all the oceans in the world.

He is headed into no man's land. There he will bring down a mafia operation. There are very few people who believe he will succeed.

His boyish haircut and reluctant beard growth make the Swedish-American shipmaster seem younger than his 30 years. Despite his youth, he is already a veteran of the militant environmental movement Sea Shepherd. The target is a fleet of vessels that are poaching the Patagonian toothfish, a deep sea delicacy that can be just as profitable as narcotics or human trafficking. The trawlers and longline fishing vessels operate in a region so inhospitable and inaccessible that the chances of locating them are negligible. Should he find the vessels, he will chase them out of the Southern Ocean, destroy the fishing gear and hand the crew over to the coast guard or port authorities.

Before setting out from the Tasmanian capital of Hobart, Hammarstedt studied the target of his search in depth. He scrutinized the maps of the regions where the fleet of illegal fishing vessels had formerly been observed by research vessels and surveillance planes. Now he is trying to think like a fisherman, studying the underwater topography and the banks where large concentrations of Patagonian tooth-fish might be found. In the Ross Sea, the bay cutting into the continent of Antarctica, there are a number of legal fishing vessels. The area is also regularly frequented by Navy vessels, which makes it less likely that fleets of poachers will be found there. Instead, he decides to sail towards the Banzare Bank – an underwater plateau jutting up out of the plunging depths of the Antarctic. It is this region that Hammarstedt calls the "Shadowlands". He is pleased with the term; he came up with it himself. It sounded edgy, almost a little Pulp Fiction-ish, he thinks. It will take him two weeks to sail there. From there he will start the search.

Eventually, as the Bob Barker nears the 60th parallel and the northern border of the Southern Ocean, he has the crew of 31 men and women do training drills. In "the Screaming Sixties" the clear blue surface of the ocean can rise up without warning and transform into deep green, ferocious walls of water and hurricanes are so common that they are never given names. The volunteer crew practises "man overboard" procedures, evacuation, confrontation tactics and the use of shields in the dinghies.

When Hammarstedt engaged in close combat with Japanese whaling ships, he met with aggressive resistance, but he knew that they would not undertake any actions leading to the loss of human lives. With a pirate fleet he can't anticipate what lies in store. The illegal fishing activity taking place in the Antarctic constitutes one of the most lucrative fish poaching operations in the world and Hammarstedt has prepared the crew for the possibility that the pirates can resort to the use of weapons.

On the starboard side of the bridge he has posted a laminated sign in A4 format. The words "Wanted – Rogue tooth-fish poaching vessels – The Bandit 6" are printed on it in blood-red letters against a sandy-brown...