When he first entered the Arafura Sea from the Bay of Carpentaria, Gu Kun's mood was still a little excited.

Although scientific reason told him that it was more reliable to look at radar to find targets than to use telescopes, the habit he had developed as a fisherman and captain since he was a child still made him can't help but run onto the bridge and personally look around with a high-powered rangefinder, hoping that "some fishermen's small wooden boats are too small for radar errors to find."

Unfortunately, from 10 a.m. when he entered the Arafura Sea to the time for lunch, he found nothing, and could only go to dinner at the invitation of the female secretary and the female ministers.

After eating, he was bored, so he felt a little sleepy, and took a nap until three o'clock in the afternoon. When he went to sleep, he also commanded him to wake him up if he encountered a fisherman or a pirate.

That posture is like treating the pirate as an experience lump for killing monsters and upgrading.

"Why haven't you met pirates in this place yet?"

When he woke up from a nap, Gu Kun looked at his watch and realized that he had slept enough, and the female secretary didn't call him at all.

Putting on his clothes and opening the porthole of the bedroom to blow the sea breeze, and eating two Darwin mangoes to moisten his throat, Gu Kun heard footsteps behind him, and when he looked back, it turned out to be Tang Jia, the foreign minister of the Lan side.

"Why are you so sure that this place will definitely meet fishermen or pirates? can't it be bad luck last time?" Tang Jia handed him a bottle of mango juice, signaling that it was better to drink the juice directly than to eat the fruit.

Gu Kun took it and took a sip: "That's the situation you don't know about this generation - the maximum width of the Arafura Sea is less than 400 nautical miles. According to the width of the 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone of the 1975 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the entire Arafura Sea must be completely divided by Australia and Indonesia, and there will be no two areas in between.

But in fact, the Indonesians are already very weak in the easternmost part of the country, especially east of East Timor, which is so poor and far away from international commercial waterways, and the coast patrol is losing money. Over time, the Indonesians tacitly acquiesced to this place, and asked them to administer justice if there was a slight dispute, and they also pushed it to the Australians.

This situation has long been taken advantage of by the local fishing slave owners, who have already bought a lawless business environment by taking a little money from the proceeds to honor the relevant personnel of the Indonesian fishery administration and coast guard.

If something happens here, as long as there is no oil and water, the two countries will pass the buck to each other. In addition, we are prepared for 'freedom of navigation' and 'legitimate defense', and we are even less afraid. The islands here do not even have normal civilian networks and telephones. ”

In almost all coastal countries in Southeast Asia, the development of each region is extremely uneven.

For example, Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, and the rest of the economic core are near the Sunda Strait. Lee Kapo and Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, are on the shores of the Straits of Malacca, and even the top three cities in Malaysia (the other two being Penang and Johor Bahru) are also on the shores of the Straits of Malacca.

The rest of the core cities of East Malaysia, Kuching, Vietnam's ancient trading port Saigon, and Manila in the Philippines, all have a characteristic, that is, they are "located on the trade routes between ancient China and the Western world".

Leaving the trade routes between China and the West, the rest of Southeast Asia is a backward zone with poverty and blood, and to put it bluntly, Southeast Asia has only played a "passing" role in the trade between the East and the West since ancient times.

As long as you don't pass by, even in the 21st century, there are many places that don't care about the three.

In later generations, Chinese tourism companies created Internet celebrity tourist destinations, such as Boracay Island in the Philippines and Semboldra in East Malaysia, as long as you have really been there, you will know how poor the security of those places is. Staying at the Water House Hotel in Semporna, you nominally live in Malaysia, but it is not uncommon for rebels from the southern Philippines to come in speedboats and take ransom money.

The easternmost part of Malaysia and Indonesia, the southernmost part of the Philippines, the Sulawesi Sea and the Banda Sea, and the area up to the Arafura Sea, are almost impossible because they are far from international trade routes.

"Then you know a lot about the unspoken rules of the underground world here, it seems that I need to make up for the lessons, so far I only know the rules of the civilized world above the table. After listening to this, Tang Jia couldn't help but complain to herself, ashamed of her shallow experience.

"It's okay, you can learn slowly, in other countries, there will be no 24-year-old woman as a foreign minister, you still have to learn a lot, and your mind is calm. Gu Kun patted Tang Jia's shoulder encouragingly.

......

Passive waiting is doomed to be boring, so much so that the first afternoon into the Arafura Sea is so wasted.

Waiting for the imaginary enemy to send the head, how can the efficiency be as high as taking the initiative to attack and killing people and grabbing treasures.

In the evening, Gu Kun had no choice but to order the "Zhu Sen" to reduce the speed of the ship, and also remotely instructed the "Yonghua", which had only set sail from Port Moresby in the morning, to slow down on the grounds of "maintaining economic speed and reducing power system losses", so as not to rush to the scene as soon as it encountered trouble.

At such a low speed, it took only 100 nautical miles to drive all night, and the next day Foxiao finally stayed in the waters of the Arafura Sea and did not enter the Banda Sea - because once in the Banda Sea, most of the sea area is the undisputed Indonesian inland sea, and it is no longer the exclusive economic zone of Indonesia and Australia.

"If no one else causes trouble, I'll have to walk around the road two more times...... But will that leave too obvious evidence that it will be said to be fishing in the future?"

At dawn, Gu Kun walked to the bridge, looked around again with the rangefinder, and couldn't help sighing.

"I think when we came, those crumbs were very common, maybe this time because we were too close to the center of the exclusive economic zone between Australia and Indonesia, so we didn't encounter it much. This kind of gray industry is definitely easier to encounter the closer to Indonesia. Tang Jia comforted him beside him.

"That's right, although I haven't encountered it yet, but the further you go to the coast of Indonesia, the higher the probability. Gu Kun also plucked up confidence again.

The width of the western section of the Arafura Sea is still close to 300 nautical miles, and the exclusive economic zone of each country is 130~140 nautical miles wide. Those fishermen in small wooden boats and runabouts, if they are fishing for dragons, really don't need to be so far away - lobsters are attached to the seabed of coral reefs, not in the deep sea.

With this confidence, Gu Kun's heart was much more comfortable, and his hard work paid off, and at about seven o'clock in the morning, he finally saw a few small fishing boats of unknown origin, which began to observe around the "Zhu Sen", and then disappeared again.

Two hours later, at about 9 a.m., Indonesia's East Maluku and Aru Islands were already on the "Jusen's" sea search radar, which means that they were less than 50 nautical miles away from those islands.

At this time, more and more small boats finally began to appear, and it was no longer the kind of small broken wooden boat with an external diesel engine, but the kind of real aluminum alloy speedboat.

Seeing these goods appear in the rangefinder, Gu Kun secretly rejoiced in his heart: "Look at this equipment, I hope it is a fishing slave who makes a temporary cameo appearance as a pirate." ”

In just 20 minutes, some of the small boats had approached the vicinity of the "Zhu Sen" from the end of the field of vision, but they did not dare to make a second move, and the initial tentative move was still to drive back and forth around the ship, and then seemingly in good faith held some baskets and barrels to display, and shouted at the big ship with a megaphone.

"What are they talking about?" Tang Jia couldn't understand the Lao dialect and the Timorese dialect, so he just hid in the security of the captain's room.

Gu Kun actually didn't understand, but he knew the habits of these people, so he explained calmly: "I should want to buy and sell something." It's the same as those tour groups in Semporna, Boracay and Cebu. ”

Soon, a bodyguard who understood the local dialect came over and relayed the request of those small boats to Gu Kun, and it was as Gu Kun expected.

Tang Jia: "Then what should I do?"

Gu Kun showed a cruel smile: "Of course I talked to them, negotiated the price, and then didn't buy them because they were too expensive." ”

Anyone who has traveled in Southeast Asia knows that when you take a big boat, you will encounter a small boat with a snake coming up to sell it, and it will be okay directly, but if you ask the price and don't buy it, it will end up like cutting some local products and not buying them, which will anger the seller.

Those fisherman slave owners who originally just wanted to bring a little light weapons and collect some protection money may be enraged and turn into pirates without doing anything.

Don't think that those small boats don't dare to start when they see big ships, contemporary pirates are not the same thing as ancient pirates, go to Somalia to know that pirates are all driving small speedboats, and the besieged ships are tens of thousands of tons and hundreds of thousands of tons of large cargo ships.

They don't care about the size of the ship when they choose their targets, they only care if the ship looks armed or not.

Gu Kun's "Zhu Sen" seems to be just the fat of a rich man, not an armed combat ship, the more luxurious it is, the fatter it is, and the more ransom it can be extorted at that time.

And this kind of misunderstanding, if we had changed the sea area, maybe it would not have happened, because after all, the "Zhu Sen" has made frequent appearances on television recently, and it has long been the most famous ship in the world, and the people who eat melons in developed countries know more or less that the "Zhu Sen" has self-defense firepower.

However, these small Indonesian islands near the Banda Sea and the Timor Sea are notoriously inaccessible to the Internet, telephone, and television, and even the communication here is backward, which itself is a necessary condition for the slave owners to shackle their slaves.

Therefore, the degree of information blockage of people here is even more terrible than that of the "village communication network", almost to the extent of the Martians and "what?

The fearless blessings of the ignorant also give them the courage to be presumptuous.

"Lobsters, lobsters, Australian lobsters of at least 6 pounds each! It's inconvenient for a big boat like you to catch food by yourself, and Aolong is famous. ”

Before the conflict intensified, everything seemed to be in harmony for the time being, and the two small sales speedboats approached the side of the Zhu Sen, and the people on board were even willing to pretend to lower half of the gangway to negotiate with them.

Gao Jianxiong, the head of security on the ship and the president of the Blackwater Security Company, personally held a megaphone in a safe position and shouted and asked the price: "It looks good, how much is it?"

Naturally, there are translators to help with the translation.

"It's only $25 a pound, and it's $150 a piece — it's a great deal for such a big dragon. ”

"Just kidding! We went to Sydney to watch the Olympics a few days ago, and retail in ordinary restaurants in Sydney is not much more expensive than here! You have just caught the origin here, and you dare to sell eighty percent of the price in Sydney restaurants?" Gao Jianxiong immediately said something that angered the other party.

To tell the truth, $25 a pound, especially a lobster that big, is quite cheap in restaurants and even wet markets in developed countries. However, in the place of origin, it is indeed a little darker.

However, most of the people who intercept big ships and forcibly sell them in Southeast Asian tour groups will not really sell them cheaply according to the place of origin, otherwise there will be no protection money attached to them.

"What do you mean? It's a pastime? You've insulted us, brothers, and let them know that we're dignified!"