Free The Devil's Waters by David L. Robbins

could lock themselves away from pirates. This left the Somalis with no hostages, wide open to commando assaults to retake the ship. Shipping companies had begun to explore deterrent technologies like sonic or water cannons and blinding laser guns. Less commonly, but growing more frequent, the hijackers encountered men armed to defend the cargo.
    Warships, even submarines, prowled the gulf for pirate mother ships towing skiffs, doing no fishing, rusted, suspicious, sometimes with ladders blatantly in sight. These dhows were increasingly boarded bythe navies, even in international waters. When guns or grapples were found, they were thrown overboard.
    For years, most pirates had been released when caught. Who would try them in court, who could punish them, when the Somalis, from a lawless land, assaulted a freighter owned in one country, flagged in another, sailed by citizens of two and three countries, captured by another nation’s navy in international waters? Jurisdiction was a stew. The warships usually chose to disarm the pirates and put them back to sea with a stern warning. Today, the patience of the coalition nations was at an end. Kenya and the Seychelles received huge stipends from maritime countries to take charge of prosecuting pirates in their courts. Pirates swelled the sweltering jails in Mombasa, Victoria, Puntland, and Somaliland.
    But prison bars were for the luckiest of captured pirates. Yemen was now sentencing hijackers to death. Every day, stories flew up and down the coast of mother ships that never returned to land, sunk by the warships, crews gunned down by armed guards on freighters and tankers. Speeding skiffs were being sent to the bottom by helicopters. Some shipping companies had even begun to hire their own navies, private mercenaries to protect their shipments. While Yusuf did not disregard these tales, he suspected that the dead and missing pirates were probably victims of their own poor seamanship as much as the violence of guards and warships.
    Still, with hunger and poverty driving them, legal ways to provide for themselves and their families dwindling, and no government to secure them, the pirates’ attacks on shipping continued to grow. The year before, over four hundred ships had been attacked, fifty captured and ransomed. More than $400 million had been paid for their release. The pirates had expanded their hunting grounds far beyond the Gulf of Aden. Freighters, tankers, and commercial fishing boats were being attacked a thousand miles from the Somali coast into the Indian Ocean, as far southas Madagascar and Mozambique, east to the Maldives, west beyond Bab-al-Mandeb into the Red Sea. Yusuf had spent weeks bobbing in sun, star, and storm on his dhow, immense distances from his home waters, stalking prey that was increasingly expecting him and ready for him. He wanted no more of it. He was rich now; he preferred to die in a feather bed. He wanted no more of the blood of poorer men on his hands. The stakes were being raised every day. The bleakness in Somalia drove an ever-degrading quality of man to piracy, men who increasingly threatened to kill hostages or blow up ships, even sell off the organs and eyes of hostages when ransom demands went unmet or were too slow in negotiation. Torture of hostages remained rare, but was no longer unheard of.
    Hijacking had become the province of the most reckless.
    Suleiman had said it. Yusuf had no more taste for these risks and this life. He was finished. Until the visit today from Sheikh Robow.
    Yusuf could not hold his older cousin’s eyes with his half-truth.
    “It’s not about the money.”
    Suleiman let fall a palm on the arm of his chair. The gesture said this much was obvious.
    Yusuf related Robow’s thinly veiled threat. Either al-Shabaab or Hizb al-Islam would sooner or later make a move on Qandala and the other pirate strongholds. They’d already captured Harardhere, and they had designs on Eyl. The two factions’ rivalry and