World View : Pirates Setting Sail for New Plunder : They are part of the growing maritime crime industry, which steals about $13 billion a year.

It was just past midnight, and the cargo ship Marta was 24 hours out of Bangkok, Thailand, steaming north to Korea, when pirates suddenly appeared on the aging vessel’s bridge.

Two men aimed pistols at the captain’s head, handcuffed him and forced him to his cabin. Four others quickly overpowered the six-man crew, locked them in the hold and took over the Cypriot-registered freighter.

The pirates rapidly repainted the ship’s smokestack, stenciled on a new name, the V-Tai, and hoisted a new flag. After two days at sea, they dropped anchor and carefully unloaded $1.8 million worth of tin plate onto a waiting barge. Before leaving, they destroyed the ship’s radio and drugged and kidnaped the ship’s captain. He was released a week later.

While 2,000 tons of tin hardly sounds the stuff of swashbucklers, the well-planned plunder of the Marta in August is, in fact, increasingly the story of modern piracy. From the South China Sea to the Caribbean, from the east Mediterranean Sea to the west coast of Africa, the scourge of ancient mariners is thriving in the 1990s.

Maritime crime, including piracy, costs an estimated $13 billion in losses each year, according to Eric Ellen, director of the International Maritime Bureau in London. Hundreds of sailors and fishermen have died in attacks in the past decade, or are missing and presumed dead.

And by all accounts, the problem is growing.

Armed gangs have seized 40 to 50 ships and boats off Lebanon in the last two years, Ellen said. Pirates have boarded and robbed at least 25 oil tankers and freighters near Singapore this year, up from three last year. One hapless ship, the Stella Lykes, was boarded at least three times in Guayaquil, Ecuador. The even more hapless M/V Sea Wolf was boarded at least five times in various Brazilian ports.

In Lagos, Nigeria, ships steam endlessly offshore, afraid to anchor in the pirate-infested harbor while awaiting a berth. In the Philippines, pirates have stolen at least five entire freighters in the last two years, turning them into “phantom ships” that roam from port to port stealing cargoes.

“The pirates’ harvest probably never has been richer,” said Daniel J. Dzurek, a maritime expert at the East-West Center in Honolulu.

The U.S. Maritime Administration in Washington reports more than 70 cases of piracy against oceangoing ships around the world since 1986, not including attacks on thousands of yachts and small fishing boats.

“No one thinks that list is anything like complete,” conceded Kevin Takarski, an analyst who compiled the list. “I figure that may be 40% of the total. But it may be worse than that.”

It is. The list does not include the continuing terror faced by Vietnamese “boat people.” Although the number of pirate attacks has fallen sharply, the atrocities have not. Children have been clubbed into the sea, women raped and abducted and men shot and stabbed. Their boats have been burned, rammed and sunk.

Indeed, despite a 10-year joint Thai-United Nations anti-piracy program, the number of known dead and missing refugees from boats reaching Thailand and Malaysia jumped from 92 in 1987 to 750 last year. At least 348 are dead or missing this year.

The horror may be far higher, said Pierre Jambor, Bangkok representative for the U.N. high commissioner for refugees. “No one has any idea if a boat and its passengers disappear completely,” he said. “Only survivors can talk.”

The danger is less severe for the world’s 20,000 merchant ships. But most are unarmed, and frustrated international shipping associations and insurance groups can only plead for greater protection from port police and coastal countries--often developing nations least able to patrol vast ocean areas.

“Quite honestly, we don’t have a good response to vessels that are under attack,” the International Maritime Bureau’s Ellen said. “There is no maritime police service that can get to you in time. . . . Unless law enforcement gets involved, it’s going to get worse and worse.”

Shipping officials warn captains to alert their crews, post extra night guards, hang floodlights over the side and prepare fire hoses to repel boarders. Radar is usually useless since pirates often approach in small wooden speedboats or motorized outriggers.

“They view these ships as easy targets,” Takarski said. “One reason is technological advances. Crew sizes are greatly reduced. At night, they only have one or two crew on deck. And speedboats give them (pirates) a fast way onto the ship and a fast way off.”

No one knows the real cost of piracy since shippers often do not report crime, being wary of higher insurance premiums. There is also a question of definition. Most attacks occur in coastal waters or in disputed boundary waters, outside the reach of international law. Under the Law of the Sea treaty, piracy is technically defined as an act that occurs on the high seas for private gain.

However it’s defined, modern piracy is surging in Southeast Asia. The Singapore Shipping Assn. reports 25 attacks on oceangoing vessels this year--up from only three last year and 10 in 1988.

Most were cases of theft or armed robbery as ships passed through busy, narrow channels between Singapore and Indonesia. The ships are forced to slow down because of dangerous rocks and reefs, making them vulnerable to attack.

The most recent attack came on Nov. 11, when four pirates boarded the 80,000-ton U.S.-flagged oil tanker Ocean City. A crew member was bound and gagged, and the pirates ransacked several rooms and stole the captain’s safe. It was at least the third giant tanker attacked in recent months.

“I worry about one of these tankers and chemical carriers running aground or colliding because the captain has a gun to his head,” said Michael Grey, who writes for Lloyd’s List International, a daily shipping newspaper based in London. “It could be the most colossal environmental disaster.”

Daniel Tan, executive director of the 164-member Singapore association, said he can’t explain the piracy boom. “Perhaps they feel shipping is more lucrative than it used to be,” he said.

The pirates who hit the 20,000-ton Australian-registered TNT Express on Sept. 21 clearly thought so. Roaring alongside in a speedboat about 20 miles south of Singapore, they tossed a grappling hook and rope to clamber aboard. The pirates--one wore a ninja -style mask--held a knife on the captain, ransacked his cabin and stole $11,000 from the ship’s safe.

Ship radio reports indicated that three other vessels were attacked the same day. Several days later, the TNT Express’ sister ship, the Brussel, was raided as it sailed out of Singapore.

Piracy is more traditional--and more violent--in the Philippines. At least a dozen oceangoing ships have been stolen in the last eight years, and an estimated 200 sailors and fishermen have been killed or are missing, according to Bob Couttie, Manila correspondent for Lloyd’s List International. Annual shipping losses in the Philippines, he said, are $100 million.

In January, 1988, for example, pirates seized the oil tanker Patrick G. in Manila harbor and threw the crew overboard. The captain and a crew member were rescued by fishermen, but another crewman drowned and two others are presumed dead. The ship was later recovered, drained of its cargo of bunker oil.

Most Philippine “phantom ships” usually just vanish, however. For fees ranging from $50,000 to $300,000, armed gangs steal cargo ships to order. Corrupt port and coast guard officials give them new names, papers and call signs, Ellen said. The most recent incident was on Oct. 15, when the 17,000-ton Zilwena, loaded with cement, disappeared from Manila Bay.

“The vessel is taken with its cargo, a new name is painted on, and it gets fake papers,” Couttie said. “There are probably five or six wandering the high seas right now, picking up cargoes and then vanishing again, doing a Flying Dutchman.”

In one remarkable case, a stolen Philippine cargo ship was renamed four times to avoid detection. Eight heavily armed pirates, reportedly disaffected Philippine naval officers, first hijacked the 5,350-ton Silver Med in Manila harbor on Sept. 15, 1988. Twenty-nine crew members and passengers were allowed to swim ashore near the island of Palawan several days later.

According to shipping reports, the Silver Med was sighted in Singapore territorial waters two weeks later with a new name, the Lambamba. It later appeared off Sabah, in north Borneo, but steamed off when an Indonesian police launch approached.

Heading south, the ship--now named Searex--then loaded plywood at a port in the Indonesian portion of Borneo. The cargo disappeared, but the once-more-renamed Star Ace sailed on. It finally ran aground--now as the Sanford--off western Luzon in the Philippines in January, 1989.

Seven months later, 18 gunmen hijacked the Isla Luzon, loaded with 4,500 tons of steel, off the southern Philippine port of Iligan. Three crewmen were taken hostage, and 27 others were set adrift in a rubber raft, before the ship sailed off and disappeared, reportedly into China.

“It seems incredible, in this day and age, that a ship can just disappear,” Ellen said. “If it was an aircraft, every airport in the world would be alerted. There is no such system in the maritime world.”

Philippine officials say they have formed an anti-piracy task force and arrested some pirates this year. But there is only so much they can do. Manila has one of the smallest navies in Asia, for example, though it is charged with guarding more than 7,000 often-isolated islands.

“You could make the Queen Elizabeth II vanish without too much trouble in this country,” Couttie said. “The Philippine authorities just don’t have the money or the manpower. And there’s really nobody in government who gives a damn about piracy.”

Small boats are the most common prey, particularly in the pirate-infested Sulu and Celebes seas. In mid-1986, officials estimated that pirates and Muslim rebels had hijacked about 560 motor launches and fishing boats in the previous 16 months.

“They are not the big-time pirates of yesterday. They are not the same as those men they used to picture in the movies,” said a Philippine navy official. “They are lawless elements.”

They are equally lawless in the Bay of Bengal. In July, 1988, about 20 pirates wearing animal masks attacked a ferry off Chittagong, Bangladesh. At least 20 people were wounded, and the pirates stole cash and ornaments worth $50,000 from the 300 passengers.

Piracy is also rampant in South America. At least seven ships have been boarded and robbed in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s main port. On the east coast, in Aratu, Brazil, six pirates armed with machine guns, pistols and knives boarded the chemical carrier Stolt Eagle last December. Three of the ship’s officers were wounded, and at least $15,000 was stolen before the pirates rowed away in a small boat.

Even the heavily patrolled Panama Canal is not immune. Last December, 17 pirates boarded and seized the Asian Senator, a Liberian-registered motor container ship, while it was docked in Port Colon, on the Caribbean side of the canal.

Another form of piracy, political terrorism, is a special problem off Cyprus, Lebanon and Syria, as well as Liberia, Ethiopia, Somalia and other parts of Africa. At least three ships were attacked off Ethiopia early this year.

On Jan. 3, for example, the Polish freighter Boleslaw Krzyzwusty was rocketed and sunk by rebels of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front in the Red Sea off Massawa, Ethiopia.

According to the U.S. Maritime Administration, another ship attempted to rescue the crew but was forced to retreat. The terrified crew managed to escape the blazing wreck in lifeboats.

“It seems a paradox that the Ethiopian authorities cannot ensure safe passage for ships carrying aid cargoes to their starving population,” Torben C. Skaanild, head of the Baltic and International Maritime Council, complained at the time.

“All these areas are depressed,” American analyst Takarski said. “People are looking for an opportunity. They see these merchant ships as easy prey. And unfortunately, most of them are.”

Where Modern Pirates Roam

The most detailed records of modern piracy are still woefully incomplete, say the experts. But they do pinpoint 10 areas where pirates are particularly active. Some are political insurgents; others prey on Vietnamese boat people. But the scores of incidents represented here all involved simple thievery at sea, and all occurred since 1986.

Frequent

Brazil

South Asia (Sri Lanka & India)

Thailand & South China Sea

East Africa (Ethiopia & Somalia)

Northwest Africa (Mauritania & Western Sahara)

High

Colombia, Ecuador & Panama

West Africa (Nigeria, Liberia & Senegal)

Very High

Middle East (Lebanon & Egypt)

Singapore

Phillippines

Source: U.S. Maritime Administration, Lloyds of London, International Maritime Bureau in London