Ships that sail without crews, and what haunts their decks.
Litterae ex Sepulchris
Author’s Note: The events described in this narrative are drawn from the ongoing U.S. naval operations against sanctioned oil tankers in the Caribbean and Atlantic, particularly the seizures conducted as part of Operation Southern Spear in late 2025 and early 2026. The characters are fictional, but the ghost fleet is quite real—a shadow navy of vessels flying false flags, transmitting false positions, and carrying billions of dollars in sanctioned crude across oceans that care nothing for international law. The sea, as Captain Marryat well knew, has its own jurisdiction.
The briefing room aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Munro smelled of coffee that had been warming since the Eisenhower administration and of the particular despair that accumulates wherever PowerPoint presentations are regularly inflicted upon sailors. Ensign Theodore Alcott—whom everyone called Teddy, despite his conviction that the nickname undermined his authority—sat in the front row with his notebook open and his pen at the ready, as he had been trained to do at the Academy.
He was twenty-three years old, and this was his first real operation.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Lieutenant Commander Rita Vasquez, tapping the screen where a rust-colored blob resolved itself into what might charitably be called a ship, “meet the Dorado. Or possibly the Esperanza. Or the Star of Panama. She changes her name more often than my ex-husband changed his story.”
A ripple of tired laughter moved through the assembled boarding team. Teddy wrote in his notebook: Target vessel: M/T Dorado (multiple aliases).
“She’s been spoofing her AIS since October,” Vasquez continued. “Last week she was transmitting from a position three hundred miles from where she actually was. The day before yesterday, she claimed to be a fishing trawler called the Happy Dolphin.” She paused. “She is, for reference, a Very Large Crude Carrier. Three hundred and thirty meters. About as much like a fishing trawler as I am like a ballerina.”
Teddy wrote: AIS spoofing. False identity.
Chief Boatswain’s Mate Kowalski, who had been with the Coast Guard since, by his own account, Noah was a deck hand, leaned over and whispered, “You don’t need to write that down, Ensign. The sea has a way of making notes unnecessary.”
Teddy did not know what this meant, but he suspected it was profound, so he wrote it down too.
“Current intelligence,” Vasquez went on, “suggests she’s carrying approximately two million barrels of Venezuelan crude bound for—well, we don’t know where, because she keeps lying about it. She was registered in Panama until Tuesday. Then she claimed to be Guyanese. As of this morning—” she smiled without any warmth at all—”she’s flying a Russian flag and calling herself the Moryak.”
“Sir,” said Teddy, because he had been trained to ask clarifying questions, “if she’s now under Russian registry, doesn’t that create a jurisdictional—”
“She’s not really Russian,” said Vasquez. “She’s not really anything. That’s why they call it a ghost fleet, Ensign. The flags are false. The names are false. The only thing that’s real is the oil, and the money, and the fact that both are going to people who’ve been sanctioned six ways from Sunday.”
Teddy wrote: Ghost fleet = false flags, false names, real cargo.
“Our job,” said Vasquez, “is to introduce the Dorado—or whatever she’s calling herself this afternoon—to the concept of consequences. We’ve been shadowing her for three days. She knows we’re here. She’s currently pretending not to notice, which is a difficult trick in a vessel that makes the Chrysler Building look portable.” She clicked to the next slide, which showed a helicopter. “Weather permitting, we board at oh-four-hundred tomorrow.”
The briefing concluded with assignments. Teddy discovered he was to be part of the first helicopter insertion team, which filled him with a complicated mixture of pride, terror, and the conviction that his mother would have opinions about this if she knew.
As they filed out, Kowalski fell into step beside him. The Chief was the sort of man whose face had been weathered into something resembling a relief map of the Rockies, and whose eyes contained the accumulated cynicism of three decades at sea.
“First boarding?” he asked.
“Yes, Chief.”
“Nervous?”
Teddy had been taught that officers should project confidence. “I’ve trained extensively for—”
“I’ll take that as a yes.” Kowalski clapped him on the shoulder with a hand like a boat hook. “Don’t worry. The sea will teach you what the Academy couldn’t.”
This was the second time someone had referenced the sea’s pedagogical capabilities, and Teddy still did not know what it meant. But he was beginning to suspect it was not entirely complimentary to the Academy.
The Dorado—which was, as of eighteen hundred hours, still calling herself the Moryak and transmitting her position as approximately the middle of the Sahara Desert—had apparently decided that being chased by the United States Coast Guard was insufficient entertainment. She had altered course toward the north Atlantic, making for what Vasquez grimly described as “somewhere she imagines we can’t follow.”
Teddy spent his watch on the bridge, observing the chase with what he hoped was professional detachment. The Munrowas fast, but the Dorado had a head start and the determination of a vessel whose captain knew exactly what awaited him in an American port.
“She’s trying to reach international waters where a Russian submarine can complicate things,” explained the Officer of the Deck, a cheerful young lieutenant named Park who seemed to find the whole situation amusing. “We’ve been playing this game for weeks. They run. We follow. They change their name. We pretend to be fooled. It’s very civilized.”
“And if the submarine intervenes?”
Park shrugged. “Then things get interesting. But probably they won’t. The Russians want deniability. Hard to claim you’re not protecting illegal oil smugglers when your submarine surfaces next to one.”
Teddy watched the radar return that represented the Dorado: a small green blip moving steadily away from them, falsifying its identity with every transmission. He had been trained in the legal frameworks governing maritime interdiction. He had memorized the relevant sections of the UNCLOS treaty. He knew, in theory, exactly how this was supposed to work.
The sea, it seemed, had not read the same textbooks.
By midnight, the weather had deteriorated. Teddy, who had experienced rough seas during his training cruises, discovered that “experienced” was perhaps too generous a term. The Munro pitched and rolled in ways that seemed personally vindictive. He spent an unhappy hour in his stateroom, lying very still and attempting to convince his stomach that equilibrium was merely a state of mind.
At oh-three-hundred, he was summoned to the hangar deck.
The helicopter—an MH-60 Jayhawk—looked considerably more fragile than it had during training. The wind screaming across the deck did not help. Neither did the spray that had frozen onto every exposed surface, creating a landscape of small treacherous ice sculptures.
“Conditions are marginal,” shouted the pilot, whose name was Martinez and whose expression suggested that “marginal” was optimistic. “Wind’s twenty-five knots gusting to forty. Visibility about a mile when it’s not raining.”
“Is it raining?” asked Teddy.
“Not at the moment. Give it ten minutes.”
Lieutenant Commander Vasquez appeared out of the darkness, already suited up in tactical gear that made her look like a very small, very determined refrigerator. “Change of plans. Helicopter insertion is scrubbed. We’re going in by small boat.”
Teddy had trained in small boat operations. In calm water. In daylight. In conditions that now seemed, retrospectively, to have been designed by someone who wished to give cadets an unrealistic optimism about the sea.
“Mount up,” said Vasquez. “We’ve got a tanker to catch.”
The rigid-hulled inflatable boat—called a “RHIB” by people who enjoyed acronyms and a “bouncing torture device” by people who had ridden in them—launched from the Munro‘s stern into what Teddy could only describe as chaos. The Atlantic Ocean, apparently offended by human attempts to navigate it, was producing waves that seemed unnecessarily personal.
There were eight of them in the boat: Vasquez in command, Kowalski because he was Kowalski, four Maritime Security Response Team operators whose names Teddy had immediately forgotten in his terror, and Teddy himself, who was present because junior officers were supposed to learn by doing and because, he suspected, someone had decided this would be educational.
It was certainly that.
The Dorado loomed out of the darkness like a floating cliff face. Teddy had read the specifications—333 meters long, 60 meters wide, a deadweight tonnage that required scientific notation to express meaningfully—but reading and seeing were different experiences. The tanker was not so much a ship as a mobile geography. Against its hull, their RHIB felt approximately as significant as a bath toy.
“She’s not stopping,” Vasquez said, unnecessarily. The Dorado‘s engines were still churning, driving her northward at a speed that made approach difficult and boarding nearly impossible.
“Standard procedure,” Kowalski muttered. “They always try to run.”
“There’s a ladder amidships,” said one of the MSRT operators—a woman named Harrison whose calm was either admirable or clinical, Teddy couldn’t decide. “If we can get alongside—”
“That’s a big if,” said Martinez over the radio. “I’m watching from up here. She’s making fifteen knots and turning into the swells. You try to board from that angle, you’ll get crushed against the hull.”
Vasquez swore creatively in what Teddy recognized as Spanish and possibly also Portuguese. “Any suggestions?”
“Wait for her to slow down.”
“She’s not going to slow down.”
“Then I’m out of suggestions.”
Teddy, who had been trained that junior officers should contribute to problem-solving, found himself speaking before his brain had approved the message. “What if we approached from the stern? The wake would provide some—”
Eight heads turned toward him with expressions ranging from incredulity to what might, in better lighting, have been pity.
“The wake,” said Harrison, “would flip us over and drown us all.”
“Oh,” said Teddy.
“But thank you for participating,” said Kowalski, not unkindly.
They circled the tanker for another forty minutes, watching for an opportunity that refused to present itself. The Doradocontinued north. The weather continued to deteriorate. Teddy continued to feel that his Academy education had perhaps omitted some crucial elements.
And then, without warning, the tanker slowed.
“Engine trouble,” Harrison said, checking her tablet. “Thermal imaging shows a heat signature spike in the engine room. Something broke.”
“Or they’re faking it,” said Vasquez.
“Does it matter? We’ve got maybe ten minutes before they fix it or give up pretending.”
Vasquez made a decision so fast Teddy barely registered it happening. “Helicopter. Now. We’re going in.”
The helicopter ride was brief and, Teddy would later reflect, possibly the most terrifying seven minutes of his life. Martinez flew with the calm competence of someone who had done this many times before, which did not prevent the aircraft from bucking and swaying in ways that seemed incompatible with continued flight. The Dorado‘s deck appeared below them, illuminated by floodlights that made it look less like a ship and more like a small industrial district that had somehow become lost at sea.
“Fast rope in thirty seconds,” Martinez announced. “Green deck—we’re go.”
Teddy had practiced fast-roping. In a gymnasium. With mats beneath him. With instructors who shouted encouraging things and did not, as a general rule, attempt to shoot at him.
The Dorado‘s crew, he had been told, was unlikely to offer armed resistance. Oil tankers were not pirate ships. Their crews were sailors, not soldiers, and most of them would surrender peacefully rather than engage in a firefight over cargo that wasn’t even theirs.
This was comforting, in theory.
“Go go go!”
Teddy grabbed the rope and went.
The descent was approximately one second longer than eternity. Wind tore at him. The deck rose to meet him. He hit hard, rolled badly, and discovered that he was not, in fact, on the main deck where the rest of the boarding team was assembling.
He was one level down, on a narrow walkway outside what appeared to be the galley.
A small elderly man in a stained apron was staring at him with an expression of profound confusion.
Teddy’s training took over. He drew his sidearm. “U.S. Coast Guard! Do not move!”
The elderly man was holding a ladle. He did not appear to be moving, or indeed to have any intention of moving ever again. His mouth was open. His eyes were very wide.
“Put—put down the ladle!” Teddy commanded, aware as he said it that this was not, perhaps, standard boarding protocol.
The man dropped the ladle. It clattered against the deck with a sound that seemed inappropriately loud.
“Vy kto?” the man asked. Which Teddy did not understand, because Russian had not been part of his Academy curriculum.
“American Coast Guard,” Teddy said, more slowly. “You are—you are under—this vessel is being—”
Above him, he could hear shouting, boots on metal, the sounds of an operation proceeding without him. Below him, through a doorway, he could see a corridor leading—somewhere. Toward the engine room, perhaps. Or the bridge access ladder.
The elderly man—whose name, Teddy would later learn, was Yuri, and who had been cooking on tankers for forty-three years and had developed the philosophy that all armed boarding parties should be treated like bad weather: endured stoically and waited out—pointed at the doorway.
“Kapitan,” he said. “Tam.”
And then, because Yuri was a practical man who had seen many things and understood that the world was frequently absurd, he bent down, retrieved his ladle, and returned to the pot that was simmering on the galley stove.
Teddy, left alone in what felt like a very poor position, made a decision. He would find the captain.
The corridor was narrow and smelled of fuel oil and something that might have been cabbage. Teddy moved through it with his weapon raised, clearing corners the way he had been taught, his heart beating so loudly he was certain it could be heard in Moscow.
He found a ladder. He climbed it.
He found another corridor. He followed it.
He found a door marked, in Cyrillic letters that meant nothing to him but which he would later learn translated to “Bridge Access—Authorized Personnel Only.”
He opened it.
And came face-to-face with Captain Mikhail Volkov, who was standing with his hands raised, surrounded by four MSRT operators who had arrived by a more direct route.
“Ah,” said Vasquez, who was among them. “There you are, Ensign. We were wondering.”
Teddy holstered his weapon. He was breathing hard. His face was flushed. He had the distinct sensation that he had somehow missed most of the operation while simultaneously blundering through the middle of it.
“I landed on the wrong deck,” he said.
“We noticed.”
Captain Volkov—who was not elderly, precisely, but who had the weathered quality of a man who had spent most of his life at sea and had developed opinions about it—was looking at Teddy with an expression that might have been amusement. Or possibly pity. It was difficult to tell.
“Your ensign,” he said, in English that was accented but clear, “came up through the crew quarters.”
“Yes,” said Vasquez.
“He frightened my cook.”
“I’m sure he did.”
“My cook,” Volkov continued, with the air of a man making a philosophical point, “has been at sea for forty-three years. He survived a fire in the Persian Gulf. He survived pirates off Somalia. He once served a captain who was, genuinely, completely mad. And this boy with a gun scared him so badly he dropped his ladle.”
Teddy felt his face grow hotter.
“But,” Volkov said, raising one finger, “by coming through the crew quarters, he blocked the only other route to the engine room. My engineers were going to disable the fuel pumps. Make the seizure more difficult. They couldn’t, because there was a very nervous American in the corridor with a weapon.”
Vasquez turned to look at Teddy. Her expression was unreadable.
“You blocked the engine room access?”
“I didn’t know I was blocking anything. I was lost.”
“He was lost,” said Volkov, “in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.” He lowered his hands—the MSRT operators tensed, but he was only reaching for a cigarette. “This is what the sea does. You can plan everything. You can train for years. And then a foolish boy falls down a ladder and accidentally saves the operation.”
“I didn’t fall,” said Teddy, with what dignity he could muster. “I fast-roped to the wrong location.”
“The effect,” said Volkov, lighting his cigarette with the ease of long practice, “is the same.”
The Dorado—which had never actually been Russian, or Guyanese, or Panamanian, and which turned out to be registered in the Comoro Islands under a shell company that was itself owned by another shell company that was owned by a third shell company in the Cayman Islands—was taken under tow toward the United States. Her crew, including the long-suffering Yuri and his ladle, would be detained and processed. Her cargo would be seized. Her captain would face charges in a federal court, where his long career of maritime deception would finally reach its terminus.
Teddy stood on the deck of the Munro, watching the tanker recede into the distance. The sun was rising—pale and watery, as winter suns in the Atlantic always are—and the sea had calmed to something almost manageable.
Kowalski appeared beside him.
“So,” the Chief said. “What did the sea teach you?”
Teddy considered the question. He had been trained to provide concise, professional answers. He had been taught that officers should project competence and confidence at all times.
“That I don’t know anything,” he said.
Kowalski nodded slowly. “Good. That’s the first lesson.”
“What’s the second?”
“That nobody else knows anything either. We just pretend better.” He clapped Teddy on the shoulder again, with that boat-hook hand. “You did all right, Ensign. You scared an old man with a ladle, you got lost in a corridor, and you accidentally saved the operation. That’s about average for a first boarding.”
“It doesn’t feel like I did anything right.”
“You didn’t get killed. You didn’t get anyone else killed. And somehow, despite your best efforts, the mission succeeded.” Kowalski turned to go, then paused. “That’s what the sea teaches, in the end. You don’t have to be perfect. You just have to keep moving, keep learning, and keep your head down when things start flying around. The rest takes care of itself.”
He walked away, leaving Teddy alone with the sunrise and the sea.
Teddy thought about the Dorado—ghost ship, phantom, vessel of a hundred names and no true identity, finally caught and held and made to account for what she was. He thought about Captain Volkov, who had played the game with skill and cunning and lost anyway, because the game was larger than any one player. He thought about Yuri and his ladle, about the cabbage smell in the corridor, about the moment when he had opened that door and found himself exactly where he was supposed to be through no intention of his own.
The Academy had taught him procedures. Regulations. The proper way to fill out forms and file reports and address superior officers.
The sea, it seemed, taught something else entirely.
He took out his notebook—waterlogged, battered, barely legible after the night’s adventures—and wrote one final entry:
First lesson: I don’t know anything.
Second lesson: Neither does anyone else.
Third lesson: Keep moving anyway.
It wasn’t much. But it was a start.
Behind him, the Munro‘s engines thrummed as she turned toward home. Ahead, the horizon stretched endless and grey and full of ships that were not where they claimed to be, sailing under flags they had no right to fly, carrying cargo that belonged to no nation and every nation at once.
The ghost fleet was out there, still.
And somewhere, Teddy knew, there would be another boarding, another chase, another moment when all his training would prove useless and only the sea itself could teach him what he needed to know.
He closed his notebook and went below to write his report.
FINIS
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
Published by Centaurus Press · Universitas Scholarium · All rights reserved.