Drama on the high seas

Pirates in Somalia are at it again. Over the weekend they claimed their biggest prize to date: a Saudi oil tanker the size of three football fields, laden with $100 million in crude oil.

Before you summon romantic images of rum-soaked swashbucklers gallivanting "Pirates of the Caribbean"-style, consider this: The sophistication of the most recent attack has the attention of U.S. Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

On Monday Mullen said he's "stunned" at the pirates' ability to hijack a vessel in the open ocean so far from the coast (though most attacks occur closer to the Gulf of Aden, this one took place 450 miles off the coast of Kenya).

"[The pirates are] very well armed. Tactically, they are very good," Mullen said.

Indeed, the seizure of the Saudi tanker is the latest in a series of high-stakes incidents in recent months. Piracy has long plagued the waters off the Horn of Africa, but attacks this year have spiked 75 percent, according to this video from AP.

Just last week, the British Royal Navy got into a firefight with Somali pirates attempting to hijack a Danish cargo vessel. As the Times of London recounts:

Pirates caught redhanded by one of Her Majesty’s warships after trying to hijack a cargo ship off Somalia made the grave mistake of opening fire on two Royal Navy assault craft packed with commandos armed with machineguns and SA80 rifles.

In the ensuing gunfight, two Somali pirates in a Yemeni-registered fishing dhow were killed, and a third pirate, believed to be a Yemeni, suffered injuries and subsequently died. It was the first time the Royal Navy had been engaged in a fatal shoot-out on the high seas in living memory.

But the mother of all Somali pirate attacks this year has to be the seizure in September of a Ukranian ship carrying, of all things, weapons -- $30 million worth. And as Wired summed up, we're not talking small arms here, but tanks and anti-aircraft guns. American and Russian warships raced to surround the hijacked vessel, but nearly two months later, the standoff is ongoing.

That brings us to the key question: What happens after the pirates seize a ship? As many have pointed out, it's not as if they have the means to easily offload crates of Soviet-era weaponry or thousands of barrels of Saudi oil. To find out, the New York Times' Jeffrey Gettleman went straight to the source, interviewing a spokesman for the pirates aboard the hijacked Ukranian vessel, who said, "We just want the money":

"We don’t want these weapons to go to anyone in Somalia. Somalia has suffered from many years of destruction because of all these weapons. We don’t want that suffering and chaos to continue. We are not going to offload the weapons. We just want the money."

And many pirates do, in fact, get ransom money. The Christian Science Monitor reports:

Ransoms that used to be in the tens of thousands of dollars a few years ago can now be a few million dollars. And this has been a good year for pirates: Total ransom payments for 2008 could top $30 million....