Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia — NOEL CHOONG was working late the night he got the distress call: Just off the Malaysian coast in the darkness, a Japanese tugboat and barge were being attacked by a dozen pirates armed with AK-47s and rocket launchers.
The 154-man crew aboard the barge Kuroshio was frantic. As the vessel churned slowly northward through choppy waters of the Strait of Malacca, headed for Myanmar, it had suddenly been surrounded by three fishing boats.
The armed men stormed the little tug. Shots were fired. The captain and two others were taken hostage. The desperate barge crew plotted a rescue mission to free their shipmates, who were being held with guns to their heads.
A slender, tough-to-ruffle figure in his mid-40s, Choong urged the crew not to try anything stupid. "The pirates had high-powered weapons," he said later. "We told them: 'You're unarmed. You can't fight guns.' "
As his staff radioed for help from Malaysian marine police, Choong stayed on the phone with the terrified seamen. Pirates may be oceangoing desperadoes driven by poverty or greed, he assured them, but they usually are not killers.
Unless, that is, they were cornered or provoked.
"For that crew, this was a night from hell," Choong recalled. "I was just trying to be their friendly voice of reason."
Choong is a pirate catcher, a maritime crisis negotiator who handles the high-anxiety drama of modern-day pirate attacks in real time. He's also a detective, a high-seas sleuth with a host of shadowy shipping industry informants he uses to run down hijacked ships.
In the outlaw Strait of Malacca, whose waters are considered the most pirated in the world, his services as director of the International Maritime Bureau's Piracy Reporting Center are in near-constant demand.
The 550-mile-long channel, flanked by Singapore and Malaysia to the east and the Indonesian island of Sumatra to the west, is one of the world's most strategic international waterways and its busiest shipping lane. Each year, 60,000 vessels, the equivalent of nearly half the world's entire merchant fleet, negotiate the funnel-shaped shortcut between the Pacific and Indian oceans. They range from mammoth supertankers as large as city skyscrapers to tugs and barges.
Such seaborne commercial traffic attracts a sophisticated brand of piracy that has moved far beyond the scabbards and cutlasses of the 17th century.
