When Chloé Lemaçon and her family were taken hostage in their yacht on the Indian Ocean, they thought the danger would be from their pirate captors rather than the guns of the French troops sent to save them
IT WAS LATE on the Friday afternoon – the sixth day since their captors had taken control and ordered them to chart course for the Somali coast – but the sun was still out, the ocean was calm and the waves were lapping gently against the old yacht. For a third day, three French warships were looming over them, but there seemed to be a lull in the negotiations, and life on board the Tanithad settled into its familiar, if surreal, routine. Chloé Lemaçon was in the rear cabin, reading a story to Colin, her three-year-old boy, when the first shot rang out.
“That’s it,” her husband, Florent, yelled. “Get down!”
He was gesturing to her and the child to get under the mattress, but it was heavy and their little room was in chaos.
“For f**k sake, get down!” Florent yelled again.
There were about 10 more shots, Chloé says, and every one seemed to zip by with a loud, sharp whistle. She held Colin close to her. Then, about 30 seconds after the first shot, they saw through a porthole that the commandos had made it on to the deck.
“Seeing this armed man, dressed all in black, just above us, I thought we were saved,” she says. Florent must have thought the same. He hoisted himself up towards the central open porthole above their bed and called: “The front, they’re all up the front.”
What Chloé heard next was a clear, familiar “Oooh!”, and with that the weight of her husband’s body fell back on her legs. Florent had been shot in the head.
LATE MAY IS a good time to visit Vannes. The town, on the Gulf of Morbihan, in southern Brittany, is rousing itself for the busy summer to come, but already there’s a balmy warmth in the air, and the old centre, with its preserved ramparts and half-timbered medieval buildings, is lit with sunshine.
It was here, a few kilometres from the village where she grew up, that Chloé Lemaçon and her husband first moored their beloved Tanit, the 14.5-metre yacht they bought with their €30,000 savings a few years ago to fulfil a longing for the open seas.
“When you become an adult it often happens that childhood dreams turn into regrets,” says Lemaçon, sitting in a quiet square near the fish market. She and Florent were determined not to let their dream fade away.
Chloé and Florent had known each other at school, but it wasn’t until May 2004 that they got together. The maritime community where the couple grew up was steeped in the legends of great voyages, and they had both dreamed of a long sailing trip. They were in their mid-20s, idealistic and largely unconstrained. Colin’s birth, in late 2005, only made them more determined: they wanted to open the world to him.
For two years they prepared for departure, Chloé selling Crocs at local markets while Florent focused on refitting the boat’s interior. When they got married, in 2006, their wedding doubled as a celebration of the open-ended adventure to come. Then, after living on the boat in the port at Vannes for a year, the family finally set sail in July 2008.
Ask Chloé Lemaçon to describe a typical day from those early months on board the Tanitand her eyes come alive. Small, blond and engagingly self-aware, she relishes memories of their stormy passage through the Gulf of Gascony and their languorous voyage around the Mediterranean.
“We’d wake up with the sun,” she says. “I’d get Colin’s bottle ready and we’d have our coffee and breakfast.”
They'd play games, cast a line for lunch, maybe take a siesta. "Colin was always happy," Lemaçon says. "Even today he talks all the time about his boat, asking me where she is. He tells me that when he becomes a daddy one day he'll head off to sea with Tanit."
Last spring, with two friends who had joined them for a few weeks, they sailed the Red Sea before reaching the Gulf of Aden. Of all the bilious personal criticism that was levelled at the Lemaçon family after the hijacking – much of it informed by news reports we now know were false on several important points – the most hurtful was that they were irresponsible parents who failed to heed warnings from the French military to alter their route. Chloé Lemaçon is adamant that she and her husband followed every instruction they were given.
While en route through the Gulf of Aden – a vital shipping route and the heavily policed centre of a major international military effort to contain the threat from Somali pirates – a French warship made contact and told them to keep clear of the main sea lanes, which they did. The frigate escorted them for three hours.
A few days later, with the endless expanse of the Indian Ocean opening up before them, they felt they had left the danger zone behind. “We were so far out that it was hard to conceive of being hijacked,” Lemaçon says. When it happened, at around midday on Saturday, April 4th, Chloé herself was at the helm, but by the time she spotted the small skiff and its five occupants – each wearing a ragged T-shirt and carrying an ancient Kalashnikov – it was only a few metres away. “A boat, it’s bad, they’re for us,” Chloé called to Florent. Recalling it now, she thinks she was surprisingly calm.
Contrary to media reports at the time, which suggested that the Tanitwas in the Gulf of Aden or close to the Somalian coast when it was hijacked, the yacht was more than 900km from the coast in an area considered until then to be safe from piracy.
Each day they had telephoned their co-ordinates to their parents, who passed them on to the French navy's command centre in the region. They were probably just unlucky. The pirates who came across the Tanithad unsuccessfully chased a cargo ship far out to sea earlier that day and now found themselves in the middle of the Indian Ocean with no food or water. The Tanitwould be their lifeline. Within 24 hours, news of the yacht's capture had spread across the world. The French naval command centre in Djibouti immediately dispatched three warships and a team of special forces commandos to the scene.
ON BOARD THE Tanitthe pirates and their captors soon settled into something of a routine. They ate meals together and respected each other's privacy.
“For Colin and I life continued,” Lemaçon says. “We continued to move around freely, I baked a cake, we kept on with our lessons . . . My worry was an accidental shot. But they didn’t threaten us or come near us.”
Four of the pirates were in their early 20s and clearly inexperienced, but the fifth – a man in his 40s who kept in touch with his superiors by satellite phone – was more assertive. Lemaçon says the hostages quickly resigned themselves to having to spend time in Somalia while their captors negotiated a ransom for their release. “We knew that would be difficult. But, then again, no hostage had ever been murdered on land. Some people had died – stray shots or accidents – but no hostage was ever murdered.”
The atmosphere on board changed when a military plane twice flew overhead and the pirates became nervous. Then, three days after the seizure, the first of three French warships appeared. The pirates clearly didn’t know what to do. They kept calling their superiors on land, unaware that French naval intelligence officers were listening in.
And so began a three-day stand-off. The warship fired at sails and masts to immobilise the Tanitand buy more time, but the current was strong and the yacht kept inching towards the shore. Negotiations were intermittent and fruitless, with the pirates rejecting an offer of several thousand euro and a high-speed dinghy. ("They weren't stupid," Lemaçon points out drily.) At one point two younger pirates tried to surrender, but nothing happened, so they just picked up their guns again. By April 10th the yacht was less than 50km offshore.
In Paris, President Nicolas Sarkozy was being kept informed of the unfolding drama. Sometime that day naval commanders presented him with the following scenario: as soon as three of the pirates could be seen on deck at the same moment, snipers aboard the French frigate could "neutralise" them. Two motorboats carrying armed assault teams would then be dispatched and would reach the Tanitwithin 30 seconds. The president gave the order to proceed and, within hours, the crew of the Tanitheard that first whistling sound of bullets overhead. Two pirates lost their lives in the assault, and it was only when Chloé and Colin were being comforted aboard the French frigate that an officer confirmed that Florent was also among the dead.
FOR THE PASTyear Chloé Lemaçon has fought to establish just what happened in those 30 seconds, a campaign that has included a meeting with the commando who believes he shot her husband (see panel, below left). She turned down an offer from Sarkozy of €400,000 and a job in the public service because she feared it would compromise her efforts. Her aim was not to sue, she says, but simply to receive an official acknowledgment of what was admitted to her in private many times: that her husband was killed by a French bullet. Just this month, on the day her book was published, the state finally relented and admitted that one of its commandos had accidentally killed Florent Lemaçon.
Just before we end our interview, Colin arrives – his long blond hair and smile familiar from the photos – and Lemaçon wraps him in a tight embrace. She misses Florent badly, she says, when the boy has gone off to play, “but unfortunately I’ll carry that with me until the day I die”.
The Tanithasn't been returned to the family, and they probably won't see it until the trial of the three surviving pirates has taken place. But Lemaçon is adamant that she and Colin will sail aboard the yacht again. She is fond of a line from Plato about there being three types of people: those who are alive, those who are dead and those who are at sea. "There are so many places that Florent never saw and that we'd like to visit, so maybe he can be there with us, and we can keep going."
An apology from Florent Lemaçon’s killer
In her year-long campaign to establish the truth behind the Tanitoperation, Chloé Lemaçon met twice President Nicolas Sarkozy and had countless meetings with military leaders. Not long after her late husband's ashes were scattered in the Atlantic she found herself facing a 35-year-old man who greeted her with a bowed head and "eyes that shone with sadness". He was introduced to her as a special forces commando whose pseudonym was "Alain", and he believed he had shot Florent. "He apologised for intruding on my privacy in this way, but he had spent a lot of time reading our blog and looking through our photos," Lemaçon says. The commando explained that, when he jumped aboard the Tanit, he saw about 10 bullets coming from inside. So when he saw Florent raise his head to talk to him, he felt threatened and fired a shot. (Lemaçon is convinced the bullets "Alain" saw were coming from his own frigate, however, and says there was no shootout on board the Tanit.) But she feels no rancour towards him. Her quarrel is with those who ordered and prepared the assault. "We kept talking for two hours, but, more than the words that were spoken, we needed to be in each other's company. At least that's what I felt."
