Hopping out of the twin outboard speedboat and strolling down the shaky wooden pier in flip-flops and Hawaiian shorts, the pirate king points out other boats that, like ours, are small, weathered and unremarkable but for the monstrous engines weighing on their sterns. "That one's stolen from Melaka," he says, "that's from Singapore." A plump middle-aged prostitute calls out from the Skydog Karaoke and Lounge, a cavernous bungalow built on spindly stilts over the black mud shallows. "Howarrryoo? Howarrryoo?" she giggles. In the neighboring Babi Island Billiards Hall, a dimly lit overwater shack, boys break off from shooting pool on four new-looking tables to watch us pass. "Hey, you going out? You need anybody?" they ask. The pirate king ignores them and stabs at his cellular phone, a huge gold and diamond band gilding his finger. Around a corner on the plank walkway, three men huddle over beer cans at a battered table, escaping the midday sun under a corrugated overhang. One of them looks up and breaks into a gold-plated grin. "Hey," he shouts. "I thought you were dead."
When we join them, two full bags of cold beers arrive. All four men — modern-day pirate chiefs — headquarter their crews on the Indonesian island of Babi (meaning pig), a waterside refuge of stilted shacks in sight of the Singapore skyline, whose 1,000 or so souls get by almost solely on piracy and prostitution.
Indonesians are the world's busiest pirates. As they have for centuries, countless groups operate throughout the vast archipelago, raiding ships from Malaysia and the Philippines in the north to the waters off Australia in the south.
There were 469 pirate attacks worldwide in 2000. Two in five — 194 — were in either Indonesia or the Malacca Strait, the infamous narrows between Sumatra and Malaysia. Death, or even violence, is rare: unlike in other parts of the world, pirates have not killed anyone in Indonesian waters since 1998 and tend to flee at the first sign of resistance. But it can take a crew held at knifepoint years to recover from the trauma. And fear is spreading: in the past few years, as Indonesia's economy has crumbled, attacks have rocketed. The eye of this lawless storm is centered on the islands south of Singapore, on which age-old buccaneering values — a ruthless desire for adventure and fast, easy living — prevail.
The pirate chiefs on Babi are old friends and have shared raids, women and tattoos. Like the pirate king, they are short, middle-aged and tanned. Their wiry arms speak of a physical working life, their beer bellies and mustaches of the nightclubs and bars it pays for. The pirate king and a burly buddy with a buzz cut check to see if either has removed a forearm tattoo from their teenage robbery years that would link them to a third man recently shot and killed holding up a truck. As Feelings blares from the jukebox, the men start trading stories about the old days. Remember the time they boarded a U.S. Navy warship by mistake? Or the Russian tanker that turned out to be full of guns? Or when one group boarded a ship to find a hijack already in progress? The drinking is fast and enforced, each man handed a fresh can as he drains his last. Watch and wallet sellers hover nearby. A gray-haired man teases the pirate king for leaving his helmsman to guard the speedboat. "What are you so worried about?" he laughs, a gold watch jiggling on his wrist. "If it gets stolen, we'll just take another one." The talk turns to a Babi resident who just made nearly $9,000 on a raid. The gray-haired man, who tells the tale, guffaws uproariously one moment and turns narrow-eyed the next. You've got to expect mood swings, the pirate king remarks later, from a guy who lost a testicle sliding down a bamboo boarding pole.
The pirate king claims he has largely given up his old escapades when he and his crew would routinely hit 15 cargo ships on a moonless night for cash and whatever else they could carry. There is traffic enough — 300 ships a day pass through the four-km-wide east-west bottleneck of unpatrolled international waters between Singapore and Babi, half an hour to the south — but these days fewer and fewer ships carry cash. Much more lucrative, and safer, is mercenary work. Nearly all the Babi pirates are bajing loncat, or jumping squirrels, men from Palembang in south Sumatra who over the centuries developed an unrivaled reputation for hijacking and robbery, on land or sea. The Babi pirates are the Elite, specialist raiders hired to steal mammoth 100-m, 10,000-ton ships and their entire cargo. For as little as $5,000, up to eight masked men will drive a speedboat under a tanker's arched stern and scramble aboard using 20-m hooked bamboo poles, known as satang. After emptying the safe and taking whatever they find — computers, watches, refrigerators ("shopping," the pirate king shrugs) — they hand the ship over to a crew of professional seamen waiting in a second boat and leave — generally inside 10 minutes. "Same old work," says the pirate king, tapping the side of his head, "but now I'm using this." The men still carry machetes, cutlasses and homemade samurai-style swords like their forefathers before them. "You don't need guns," he smiles. "Indonesians are very skillful with knives."