Dead in the Water: Murder and Fraud in the World's Most Secretive Industry

by Matthew Campbell

During the trip back, Mockett contemplated what he’d seen. He’d concluded that the blaze probably began in the vicinity of the Brillante’s engine control room; almost all the spaces above it had been destroyed, while the damage farther down was much less severe. Beyond that assessment, he couldn’t quite make sense of it. The insurers had been told that the pirates had fired rocket-propelled grenades, and Stuart Wallace, Mockett’s client in London, had instructed him to locate and assess the damage from the RPGs. But there was none. Among all the debris and destruction, Mockett could find no sign of even a single RPG strike. Nor had he discovered evidence of the pirates’ having shot up the vessel with guns, which its captain, Noe Gonzaga, had described in his statement after the attack. Nor, as Mockett told Wallace in an email, were there indications that they had detonated hand-thrown grenades, which had also been posited as a cause of the fire. Mockett was a long way from being able to say what exactly had happened to the Brillante the night it was boarded. He did know that if he was going to find out, he had a lot more work to do.