10:20 a.m. Gulf of Aden. The motor vessel Central Park was moving eastward under a Liberian flag with civilian cargo. Tanks of liquid phosphoric acid. No visible indication that this ship would interest anyone. Except for one detail. The ship was operated by Zodiac Maritime Limited, British registration, headquartered in London.
But the ultimate beneficiary, the family of an Israeli ship owner. On the horizon from the direction of the Yemeni coast, a fast motor skiff appeared. Course, straight for Central Park. Speed, around 18 knots. That is not a fisherman’s pace. Fishermen don’t race to their nets at the speed of an interceptor.
On board the skiff, five men. Each with a Kalashnikov. At least one RPG-7 in the group. A grenade launcher designed to punch through the armor of an APC from 200 m. In open water against a civilian chemical tanker with thin steel plating, it makes a hole the width of a man and ignites anything flammable within a 15-m radius.
It’s not designed for boarding. They bring it for one simple reason. So that nobody on deck argues with what’s happening. The skiff pulled alongside. Standard Somali technique. Approach at speed, throw a grappling hook with a rope ladder onto the railing, climb onto the deck in 30 seconds. In the very second the Somalis are climbing the rope ladder, the captain of Central Park presses the Uqbar emergency alarm and gives the command over the loudspeaker.
The crew runs the scenario rehearsed before every passage through a high-risk zone. All 23 sailors leave their stations and move quickly to the citadel. An armored compartment inside the superstructure with autonomous communications, water, and a backup Uqbar console. The doors lock from the inside and you can’t simply break them open from the outside.
Uqbar operates as the single point of contact between civilian shipping and all military vessels in the region. A distress signal sent from Central Park is instantly relayed to everyone in response range. The signal was received by the American destroyer USS Mason, by a Japanese destroyer transiting the same area, and by two Chinese destroyers of the 45th escort task force of the PLA Navy based in Djibouti.
The same Djibouti where China spent hundreds of millions of dollars building its only overseas naval base, officially to participate in counter-piracy operations. The Japanese and American destroyers responded immediately and changed course to the signal. Aboard Mason, general quarters was sounded at once. The captain set the destroyer to full combat readiness.
And spy-1D radars opened up an air picture out to hundreds of miles. SPQ-9B began scanning surface targets. The crew took battle stations. On deck, gunners stepped up to the mounts. The Mark 38s had their barrels trained and firing data entered into the fire control system. The Chinese ships, by contrast, did nothing.
They did not respond, did not request additional data, did not volunteer to support the response. They simply continued on their course as if the signal had never existed. This is not a violation of formal rules. China’s counter-piracy participation does not entail any legal obligation to respond to a UKMTO signal, but it is a violation of the unwritten rule that the entire coalition architecture in the region rests on.
If you’re closer, you go. Meanwhile, on the deck of Central Park, the five Somalis ran into an expected but deeply inconvenient problem. The deck under control, the bridge empty, the engine room empty, and a locked steel door behind which sits the entire crew together with everything this operation had started for.
The pirates tried to force the door, but their attempts were futile. The citadel was well protected and getting through it required a specialized tool the pirates did not have. Soon a silhouette appeared on the horizon. Long, low profile, the distinctive superstructure, two turrets. The silhouette of an Arleigh Burke on the horizon is not mistaken for anything else.
The Somalis made the only logical decision in the situation. They broke off, left the deck, climbed down into their skiff, and fled on a northbound course. About 50 nautical miles remain to the Yemeni coast. USS Mason, DDG 87, Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, 9,000 tons displacement, 90 vertical launch cells, full Aegis suite, two helicopters, anti-submarine station, two Phalanx systems, a 127-mm main gun.
A ship built for war against a peer adversary in open ocean. Designed to see ballistic missiles at 200 miles and to take cruise missiles in their cruise phase. Today, it will be hunting five Somalis in a wooden boat. This is where it could have ended. Signal received, vessel saved, attackers off the deck, mission accomplished.
Many European fleets in this situation would have limited themselves to a report on a successful response and moved on. The Gulf of Aden is vast, warships are few, and there is no resource to chase down every skiff fleeing toward the shore. But Mason is not a European fleet.
Mason belongs to a navy that since 2011 has systematically changed its approach to counter-piracy operations. If attackers leave a vessel, they get caught and processed according to law. That rule does not get bent. Mason began the pursuit. An MH-60R Seahawk lifted off from the flight deck. A multi-role naval aviation aircraft used for anti-submarine warfare and for chasing down moving small tonnage surface targets.
On board, besides two pilots, was a gunner on a turreted GAU-16A, a modification of the aviation 12.7 mm M2 mounted in the side door on a turret with a lightened sight. Effective firing range, up to 2,000 m. At 300 m, the gunner could cut a wooden skiff in half with a single burst, but the task was different.
Mason’s captain did not authorize lethal force. The instruction:
“Take them alive.”
Permission to fire only in the event of active armed resistance from the attackers. This was not from humanitarian considerations, but pragmatic ones. Five detained Somalis on the deck of the destroyer are intelligence material and a means of tracking the Somali networks that coordinate these operations from shore.
The helicopter reached the skiff within minutes. Cruise speed of the Seahawk, around 145 knots. The skiffs, 18. This was not a race. This was geometry. The Somali saw above them the black silhouette of the aircraft with side doors open and the barrel of a heavy machine gun pointed directly at them. The gunner fired a warning burst into the water across the skiff’s bow.
Not two short ones, one long clear burst, the kind that leaves no room for interpretation. The skiff stopped instantly. The five men laid their weapons down on the bottom of the boat, Kalashnikovs, then the RPG, then the magazines. They raised their hands. The helicopter kept hovering above them, gun barrel pointed down, waiting for the boarding party to arrive.
Meanwhile, from Mason’s side, a team of Marines was lowered onto the water in a RHIB, the destroyer’s standing boarding party. Five sailors and Marines on a rigid hull inflatable in body armor with M4 rifles, a radio in direct contact with the bridge, zip ties, and search equipment. The team included a Boatswain’s Mate Second Class, an American of Egyptian descent, a native Arabic speaker, whose role as the ship’s translator turned out to be in constant demand in the Gulf of Aden.
The RHIB reached the skiff within minutes. Pulled into 20 m, then 10, then hull to hull. The detainees were transferred to the RHIB one by one, their wrists bound with plastic zip ties, then searched. The skiff with the seized weapons was taken in tow. At that point, it seemed the main part of the operation was over.
All that remained was to return to Mason, hand over the detainees, write the report. And then, at the moment the detainees were being brought aboard the destroyer, from the Yemeni coastline controlled by the Houthis, two ballistic missiles appeared. 8:41 p.m. local time. The destroyer’s radars registered the launches.
Aegis instantly calculated the trajectories. The two missiles were heading into the area where Mason and Central Park were operating. Whether this was a precision strike on the American destroyer, a demonstrative launch into the area of the operation, or an attempt to hit the Israeli vessel, is not known. The Pentagon would later officially state that technically it could confirm at least one launch, while the ultimate targets of the missiles remain unclear.
Both missiles fell into the Gulf of Aden roughly 10 nautical miles from Mason and Central Park. No damage. No injuries. The Marine team completed the apprehension under ballistic fire, not pausing it for a single second. Simply because pausing it would have been harder than finishing it. El Haroun would later describe the scene in an interview with Military Times as almost surreal.
On the steel deck of the destroyer, five Somali detainees with their wrists bound, Marines with rifles, the roar of turbines, voices on the radio, and somewhere beyond the horizon, two ballistic missiles that had just fallen into the water along the route you came from an hour earlier. A counter-piracy operation inside the ballistic fire envelope of a non-state actor.
Not contemplated by any field manual. There is no procedural instruction that explains what to do when in the middle of detaining Somali pirates ballistics from Yemen are flying overhead. The five detainees were identified as Somali nationals. Placed in USS Mason’s brig. 30 days. For all 30 days El Haroun acted as translator at interrogations, at medical examinations, in everyday communication.
After a month, US Marines transferred the detainees to Djiboutian authorities for onward transfer to Somali judicial bodies. And the question with which it all began, how exactly the Somali attackers could have known that Central Park was connected to the Al Ofer family has never been publicly answered. Zodiac Maritime is a British company.
The ship’s flag is Liberian. The United States Department of Defense, based on the results of the operation, drew no conclusion about a connection between Houthi controlled Yemen and the detained Somali group. Perhaps it was a coincidence. An ordinary Somali attempt that happened to fall on a vessel formerly connected to Israeli capital.
And happened to fall on the same day the Houthis decided to send a pair of ballistic missiles toward an American destroyer in the area of that very operation.
