FAQ

Assuming Muse was telling the truth, it would have been received by his superiors. Very little would likely have been passed back to Muse.

Piracy off the East Coast of Africa became so endemic during the period that various countries came together to form Task Force 150, an international coalition using a fleet of dozens of powerful warships and aircraft to patrol the area and protect merchant shipping. However, the striking range of the pirates using "mother ships" (captured seagoing fishing vessels used to deploy the fast motorboats used in the actual hijackings) was huge, extending from the Maldives in the South Indian Ocean to the Straits of Hormuz at the entrance of the Persian Gulf in the North. Despite being one of the largest international fleets ever assembled in peacetime, this meant the warships were pitifully few to cover an area of nearly a million square miles.

Arming civilian sailors creates a multitude of legal and logistical difficulties for the ship's owners, because each ship would have to obey the weapons laws of the countries it is visiting (for instance, in the UK, handguns are wholly illegal in private hands). There have been several incidents of ex-military veterans employed as armed security guards being arrested in just these circumstances.

Attacks by pirates declined by 90% between 2012 to 2013 as a result of actions by the international naval task force, private armed security guards protecting merchant ships (avoiding legal restrictions by transferring to a privately charted mothership which stayed in international waters whenever they made port) and the military intervention in Somalia by neighbouring African countries. By 2016 the problem had virtually disappeared.