Pirate of the Caribbean
HAS SOMEBODY STOLEN YOUR YACHT? HERE’S A SWASHBUCKLER WHO’LL GET HER BACK FOR YOU. BY CAPT. BILL PIKE
WWhen Capt. Max Hardberger’s plane touched down at the nearly deserted Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, his old friend (and Haitian fixer) Ronald was waiting for him outside. Ronald was all smiles, in spite of the fact that Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s Haiti was in the midst of a very violent coup
d’état. Some parts of the country remained under Aristide’s control. Other parts were controlled by a variety of armed gangs, right-wing paramilitaries, rebels, and, according to reports Hardberger had heard, criminals freed from jails and penitentiaries by police fleeing for their lives. A rough-looking taxi driver standing next to Ronald opened the rear door of his cab. “Please,” he said, motioning toward the back seat. Hardberger’s immediate objective was simple—quickly get to a little, hole-in-the-wall port called Miragoane, some 50 miles west. Once there, he had to do some fast reconnoitering. Exactly how and precisely where was the 400-foot ship Maya Express tied up? Were her engines operable? Were there guards on board? And how about the crew—were they on board as well? And were they perhaps disgruntled? Unpaid? Unfed? Could they be turned into allies?
None of these questions were of particular importance to Hardberger’s employer, of course. The big-time Boston investment firm that had recently paid him an altogether whopping retainer simply wanted its ship removed from Miragoane and sailed to the Bahamas where a mortgagee’s rights—and an owner’s debts— could be legally dealt with. But things were seldom simple in Hardberger’s world: a motley collection of small, sleazy, poverty-stricken ports that encircled the Caribbean Sea like a string of iniquitous beads.
Miragoane, for example, was often considered a veritable den of thieves. Remote and essentially lawless, Hardberger knew it as a place that conveniently served the purposes of a shadowy host of modern-day pirates who hide ships and yachts from mortgage holders, or perhaps commandeer and sell them off to complicit third parties after radically unrealistic charges and fines are assessed and enforced by equally complicit judges and police agencies.
And the Maya Express was a perfect fit for Miragoane. Her problems had started with the death of her Greek owner, an event that promptly put an end to any payments on her $3.3 million mortgage, nixed wages, food, and travel-home money for her Russian crew, and pretty much voided all other pertinent financials. Then the crew, virtually marooned, had decided to steal the ship (with some prompting from an unscrupulous Colom-