The gunners swung their cannons round to point directly at the skiff and fired. A hole appeared above the little vessel’s waterline, and the skiff began rapidly to take on water. One of the pirates stood up and jumped overboard just before the skiff tilted sharply to one side, dumping the rest of the crew into the sea. Then it sank beneath the surface.

What fools, thought Thibault, taking on an armed naval vessel. What did they think they were playing at?

Two hours later he was none the wiser. Below deck, in the long low room that doubled as both mess and lounge for his crew, the prisoners sat ranged on two benches. They included the hapless pirate who had jumped for it from halfway up the side of the Aristides. It turned out he could hardly swim; he would have drowned if a crewman from the container ship had not thrown him a lifeline.

Thibault had ordered his men to search the prisoners for weapons, but the three Kalashnikovs seemed to be the extent of their armoury – and they were now lying at the bottom of the ocean.

The pirates were uncommunicative, merely shrugging when Thibault attempted to question them. From time to time they spoke to each other in short bursts of Arabic. Marceau, Algerian by origin and an Arabic speaker from childhood, spoke to them but they just ignored him. Though Arabic was one of Somalia’s national languages, these men were not Somali – their appearance was Middle Eastern rather than African. Thibault was puzzled; he’d expected them to be local pirates, operating from the Somalian coast.

As he watched them, he noticed that one of the seven looked more Asian than Middle Eastern, and saw too that the other men didn’t include him in their muttered exchanges. He seemed to be younger than the others: average height, lean, with the scraggly beginnings of a beard that gave away his youth. His eyes wouldn’t stay still, searching anxiously around the room, and where the others looked coolly indifferent to their plight, he appeared terrified.