He was getting too old for this robbery and killing routine. He had spent the majority of his life as a simple fisherman, plying the waters off Java for tuna and other huge pelagic fish. However, foreign trawlers from China and India had destroyed the local fish populations in the past decade. The giant factory ships had vacuumed the ocean clean and left nothing for him to harvest to feed his family. Then the Preman, organized crime bosses from the city, had come to his village looking for local sailors who could handle small boats and weren’t afraid of the sea. Men who needed money to keep their family from starving and would do anything for it. The next thing he knew, he was a member of a seagoing gang of hijackers who crept aboard ships in the middle of the open ocean, and hijacked the vessel. Typically, they raided the ships for cash, robbing the crews of their personal belongings and rifling through the ship’s cash box. If the cargo was anything valuable they would hijack the ship, take it to an isolated inlet where the local naval police were paid to look the other way, and ransom the ship back to its owner for a sum of gold or foreign currency.
