A Captain's Duty (13 page)

The elation I’d felt when the pirates’ bluff had failed drained away. These guys were committed. There was no way they were going to leave empty-handed.

By noon, we’d settled into the beginnings of a routine. ATM and Colin were sipping water occasionally, sitting on the deck on the
bridge on the starboard side aft. The third sailor was leaning against the wainscoting trying to keep cool. The Leader was alternating between the radar and the VHF, trying to find the mother ship, coughing and spitting every so often like he had TB. I was shutting off the occasional alarm and trying to think how to get my three crewmen down with their shipmates.

It wasn’t going to be easy. If I gave the guys the signal to make a run for it, the pirates would cut them down before they’d taken four steps. No, we’d have to get the pirates to
take
the men off the bridge. I started to formulate a rough plan.

“Ah,” the Leader said. I looked up. He was fiddling with the VHF radio.

Shit,
I thought,
he’s figured it out
. I walked over and looked at the readout. I’d tuned the set to Channel 72. He now had it on 16, the correct frequency for communications between the crew and the outside world.

“—
sk Alabama,
we’ve been attacked by pirates. Repeat, four pirates aboard.”

The Leader stared at the set. So did I. It was Shane’s voice, but what was he doing?

“Roger that, this is the guided missile cruiser USS
Virginia
. Helicopters are launching.”

“Thank you, USS
Virginia.
When will the helicopters arrive?”

I smiled. There was no USS
Virginia
on the frequency. Both voices were Shane’s. He must have made his way down to my room and taken the handheld VHF radio there. And he was doing the same routine I’d pulled yesterday, pretending to hail a navy warship and requesting help.

Now the Leader was truly perplexed. The entire crew had vanished into thin air but now one of them was talking to the U.S. Navy. Musso came over to investigate. His AK clanked against the console’s side as he leaned over to listen.

“Who is that?” the Leader said.

I just raised my eyebrows.

“I have no idea, I’m here with you.”

Shane’s voice came over the radio.

“This is the chief mate. Repeat, Somali pirates aboard. They’ve taken over the ship.”

“That’s the chief mate?” the Leader said.

I listened. “It does sound like him.”

Shane continued: “Four pirates aboard. All armed. All four stationed in and around the bridge…” And he continued his spiel with the phantom navy ship.

“Where is the other radio?” the Leader demanded. I saw real fear in his eyes. The last thing pirates want to do is negotiate with the U.S. Navy. They like to deal with ship owners only. Ship owners don’t have laser-guided missiles and sharpshooters.

“There are only two radios I know of,” I said. “The bridge has them both.”

The Leader looked like his brain was going to explode. We were turning his plans inside out. The Somalis had taken over the ship, but we had taken over the Somalis. For now.

“We go around again,” the Leader said.

I shrugged. “Whatever you say.”

Again, it was him and me. We made our way down to E deck, then down all the way to the main deck.

I walked down the darkened corridor, the ship dead and silent as a bombed-out city. The chief had cut the emergency power. We had only flashlights. I saw the door to the AC room open ahead of me. I knew the Leader would want to check that out. I brought the radio up. “Okay, entering the AC room. Starboard side door is open. You guys need to get that locked up.”

We stepped into the AC compartment. Its massive machinery cooled the entire ship. But the compressors were quiet now. Ahead was the engine room. I didn’t want to go in there unless I absolutely had to. If, for some reason, the chief engineer hadn’t gotten the message, we’d find him and his assistant waiting for us.

“Entering engine room,” I said. I stepped in.

A dead engine room is an eerie, eerie place. There was a little smoke wafting from inside and a bulb burning off to the right, but the place was in almost total darkness. You could hear the
drip drip drip
of water from pipes. You could feel the bulk of the enormous diesel engine in front of you, but you couldn’t actually see it. There are empty quiets and full quiets and this was the latter. I felt like we were going to be ambushed.

I led the way. Six steps in, the Leader called to me.

“No, no, we’re done. We go.”

I turned, surprised. The Leader looked spooked. He turned and I followed him out.

We made our way around, poked our head in the dry storage room and everything was empty. Meanwhile, I was opening every external door I could. “Do you want to see out here?”
I would say, and then I would just leave the door open. This would give the crew a chance to move around fast if they needed to. It would also give any rescuers a chance to get inside the ship quickly.
Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst,
I thought.

But I still didn’t believe anyone was coming. What we were going through had never happened before in the modern age—a U.S. ship being taken by pirates. I had no idea if the navy would even be interested. I knew there were warships in the area, but there was no protocol for rescuing merchant mariners.

To me, the only one who was going to save us was us.

Again we found no one. I could tell the Leader was getting more and more unnerved. Every room we opened, there were clothes laid out as if someone was just about to get dressed, or a cup of orange juice sitting there as if someone had just poured it. We walked into the galley and on the cutting board were a knife and half a dozen slices of melon that looked like they’d been cut just a few minutes before. On the burner, a pot of coffee was sitting, steam coming out of its spout.

It reminded me of the famous case of the
Mary Celeste,
the ship found in the Atlantic Ocean back in 1872 with the crew’s hairbrushes and boots and shirts all in their places, the cargo all accounted for, but no men aboard. It became the most famous maritime mystery of all time, the ghost ship that lost its eight-man crew on the way to the Strait of Gibraltar. (Piracy was originally suspected, but there hadn’t been any reported in the area in decades and no valuables were touched or signs
of violence found.) The
Maersk Alabama
had that same abandoned air as we walked through one silent room after another.

“Where is the chief engineer?” the Leader said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “These guys are crazy. They could be anywhere.”

We entered the bosun’s room. I’d noticed before that the Somalis were wearing cheap flip-flops. The bosun had some nice leather sandals by his bed and now the Leader was staring at them.

“Look at those shoes,” he said.

It was like he was asking my permission.

“Go ahead!” I said. “The bosun doesn’t care. Try ’em on.”

The Leader kicked off his flip-flops and tried on the sandals. He nodded.

The next stop was the mess deck, which we’d been through on the first go-round. There was a long table with a blanket thrown across it. I stared at that blanket. I was sure it hadn’t been there the first time we’d walked through. I didn’t know it then, but Shane later told me he’d been roaming the ship when he heard us coming, and he’d dashed into this room just ahead of us. With him, he’d had the EPIRB (emergency position indicating radio beacon), which is a transmitter that can tell rescuers exactly where your distressed ship is. He’d taken it out of its housing, which activates the unit, before we came blundering down the hall. Panicking, he’d thrown the blanket over it, then turned and began searching for a hiding place. Right at that moment, Shane was in the next room, the hospital bay, crouched beneath the desk in the space where the chair usually slid in. We walked in and Shane could see my shoes, only three feet away.

If the pirates had gotten him, we’d have lost one of our best leaders. But I didn’t even hear him breathe.

We looked in a few more rooms and then headed back up to the bridge.

The crew and I were keeping one another safe at this point. I was alerting them to the pirates’ movements, and they were keeping a wild card in our hands by staying hidden. Even if the pirates shot a couple of us, they gained no advantage. They still had sixteen guys secreted all over the ship, keeping the vessel out of their hands. And the ship was drifting, powerless. It was a standoff. But the Somalis had reinforcements a lot closer than I did.

The ship was becoming a gigantic oven. The AC was off, and the fans that sent fresh air funneling through the rooms weren’t working. The heat was getting intense even when an occasional breeze moved through. I couldn’t imagine how the guys in the after steering room were suffering. How long could they hold out before they needed to get some fresh air or water?

The fear I’d felt when I saw the first pirate board the ship hadn’t faded. But I was just too busy to pay much attention to it. In some ways, ATM and Colin and the third sailor had it worse. They had to sit on the deck and imagine what could happen to them. I was constantly thinking of how to get us out of this mess alive.

We climbed back to the bridge, sweltering in the afternoon heat. The pirates were getting hinky. Why couldn’t we find the crew? I just shrugged. “I don’t know where they are,” I told them again and again. “I’m here with you.”

The Leader wanted another search. This time, Musso and Tall Guy came with me, both armed. Again, I entered the engine room, trying to keep them away from the half-hidden door to after steering, where I thought the crew was. Our flashlights were darting here and there, and we’d get flashes of equipment: lube tanks, dials, pipes. Musso and Tall Guy made it a few steps farther than the Leader before calling, “Enough!”

Even pirates are scared of the dark. It made me grin—they had the guns and they were frightened.

I took them to the mess deck and their eyes lit up when they saw the melons. “You want fruit?” I said. “It’s all yours.” I helped them load up their arms with juice boxes and melon slices. I headed back to the bridge and as I climbed the outside ladder on the house, I could see the Somalis two flights below, struggling with all their loot. I waited for them.

“You need some help?” I said to Musso. I held out my hands. “Here, let me carry the gun.”

He laughed.

I took some of the juices and the fruit and went ahead.

Just as with the Leader, I could have escaped at any time. But the thought never really crossed my mind. Three of my men were in imminent danger. I couldn’t leave them to the pirates. It didn’t solve anything. Besides, it’s just not possible to do something like that and remain the same person you were before. I wanted to be able to look myself—and the crew members’ families—in the eye after all this was over and say, “I did my duty as a captain.”

Like I said, you take the pay, you do the job.

Back up to the bridge. We filed in and the pirates took up their normal positions. It was past noon. The pirates were
fidgety, agitated. Their jubilation at taking an American ship was souring. They were constantly chattering to each other in Somali, and their conversations were becoming more abrupt. A note of panic had crept in.

I grabbed a drink of water, then wiped my forehead and took a few breaths.

The Leader handed me the phone. He barked out a number. It was like a broken record now, the pirates endlessly repeating the same tactics: search, call, threaten. But the threats were wearing thin. After the second ultimatum, when they told us they would start killing us in two minutes, they gave up that tactic.

The Leader had stopped looking at the LED on the phone, so I just entered random numbers and hit the pound button. The phone dialed, then buzzed.

“This phone is the worst. Seriously, I wish I could get it working for you.”

One of the crew took this opportunity to start talking to the pirates. And despite my hostage advice the night before, the first thing he brought up was religion.

“Assalaamu ‘alaykum,” he said. He nodded at Musso.

Musso just stared at him.

“I’m African,” he said. “We are Muslim brothers.”

The pirates looked at one another. Musso began to laugh.

I tried to catch the sailor’s eye. Next he’d be telling them to chop off the heads of the Christian infidels and take him back to Somalia.

But the pirates didn’t care if he was directly descended from Mohammed himself. He was a pawn in their game.

The Leader looked at me. “We search again.”

I’d been expecting this.

“No way,” I said. “I’m tired of walking around.”

I pointed at ATM. “Take him. He can show you whatever you need.”

I knew if ATM could walk out, guarded by only one pirate, he might get away. One man knew the ship, the other didn’t.

The Leader looked at ATM and seemed to be considering the offer.

“Okay,” he said. “We go now.”

ATM stood and came walking toward me. The Leader turned to give the other pirates some instructions in Somali.

As ATM passed me, I whispered to him, “He’s not armed. Take him to the guys.”

I couldn’t catch his face as he slipped by. I don’t know if he even nodded.

But I could feel the tables turn just a bit. It was our turn to take a hostage.

A
TM and the Leader left. I went back to shutting off alarms, but in my mind I was willing ATM to somehow ditch the pirate and find a safe place to hide. The remaining Somalis alternated scanning the horizon with watching us.

My searches with the leader had taken about twenty minutes. Fifteen minutes after ATM and the Leader left, my radio sputtered to life. “Attention, pirates, atten—”

I grabbed it and turned the volume down. I turned and looked aft. I could hear Mike Perry talking on the radio. With the alarms going off and their shouting at one another and us, the pirates hadn’t noticed anything. I brought the radio up closer to my ear.

“—one pirate. Repeat. We have your buddy. We will exchange him for the captain.”

I gripped the radio and smiled.
Damn it, we’d done it.
But it was way too early to celebrate. I went back to shutting down alarms. I didn’t want a confrontation yet. I wanted to keep things slow.

After thirty minutes, the pirates started getting fidgety.

Tall Guy came into the bridge and pointed his gun at me. “Hey. Where is he? Where is this guy?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m here with you.”

“Get the guy,” he said.

I pointed to the radio. “Lot of interference. Too much metal in this ship.”

He frowned, but he went back up to the bridge wing.

Fifteen minutes passed. Then another thirty. I could see the pirates shooting glances to one another and hear them asking questions in Somali. Tall Guy shouted over at me.

“Where are they?”

“I wish I knew,” I said. “You have to send someone down to look.”

Musso thought about that.

“Okay, you go.”

“I’m tired of walking around. Why don’t you send the big guy?” I said, pointing to Colin.

Musso nodded.

“Okay, big guy, you go down and find them.”

I smiled. With two other sailors still under their command, the pirates apparently felt safe letting Colin search out the rest of the crew by himself. I was so close to my goal of clearing the bridge of everyone but pirates and myself.

The pirates were watching us closely, so I didn’t have a chance to whisper to Colin as he walked off the bridge alone. I just hoped he had enough sense to lose himself in the ship.

With another man off the bridge, I felt a little lighter. It was like a weight was slowly being lifted off me.

I looked at the aft bulkhead, where we have something called the “watertight door indicator” that tells you which doors and hatches are open and which are closed. That way you can tell which parts of the ship are sealed off from onrushing water. But it also has another use. By watching the door indicators go from red (closed) to green (open) and then red again, I could chart which doors Colin was opening, walking through, and then locking behind him. Every time he opened a door, the indicator gave a little click and changed color.

Where’s he going?
I thought. There are places on a ship like the
Maersk Alabama
where you can hide and no one will ever find you. I’ve had stowaways onboard container ships for days and the crew never knew. I just hoped Colin would find the right hideaway. I thought he’d head to the after steering room, but then realized he didn’t know about the secondary safe room—he’d been on the bridge during the drill critique.

Click.
He was in the number one hole.
Click.
Now he was in the main passageway. Colin was heading down to the bowels of the ship, away from the crew’s quarters.
Click.
He entered the emergency fire pump room. It was a little cubbyhole, rarely used and even harder to find.

I watched the screen. There were no more reds turning green. He’d found his hideyhole.

I smiled.
Good man,
I thought.
Stay down there.

Now it was down to me and one sailor. Not the first guy I would want to plot an escape with, but you work with what you’re given.

I sidled over to him.

He looked up.

“We might have to make a break for the bridge door,” I said. “Try and slide yourself closer.”

He nodded. One of the pirates leaned over and glared at us, suspicious. The pirate’s head disappeared.

“Just be ready,” I said to the sailor, and walked back to the middle of the bridge.

I keyed the radio. “Three pirates on the bridge, all with weapons,” I said. The radio beeped. I looked at the radio’s power indicator. It was running low.

The Leader and ATM had vanished into thin air. It wasn’t until days later that I found out what happened.

ATM had led the pirate down into the bowels of the ship, toward the engine room. Mike Perry, my chief engineer, was already down there—he’d headed toward the power plant at the first sign of the pirate attack. As ATM and the Leader made their way through the snaking corridors, Mike was checking on some equipment. “It was pitch black, not a photon of light,” he recalled. The
Maersk Alabama
was sitting in the equatorial sun, the water reflecting the heat back onto the steel hull. The temperature inside was climbing toward 125 degrees. “We were starting to feel like we were dying,” said one crew member. And Mike could hear the increasing desperation
of the pirates—and how they were directing their rage and confusion at me. “I can tell [Rich] is in danger,” he said, “just by the tone in people’s voices.”

Mike walked through the engine room, carrying a knife in his hand for safety, when suddenly a beam of light swept across his face—the Leader, just yards ahead in the darkened corridor, had spotted him. Mike turned and dashed down the passageway, with the Leader racing after him, screaming loudly, the words bouncing off the steel walls. Mike came to a spot where the passageway took a ninety-degree turn, and he quickly rounded the corner, then pressed his back up against the wall. Waiting in the darkness, with the crazy flickering of the Leader’s flashlight drawing closer, Mike thought,
Is this sane, what I’m going to do?
His mind flashed back to the stories he’d heard of pirates forcing crew members to play Russian roulette in the bellies of their captured ships. “In my mind,” he says, “right there, the question was answered.”

Mike heard the footsteps approaching, the knife with its razor-sharp serrated blade gripped in his right hand. The screaming voice was coming closer and closer. When the Somali’s face flashed around the corner, Mike snapped forward. “I lunged up at him,” he said. Grabbing him around the neck, Mike brought the edge of his knife up to the pirate’s throat. “All I had to do was move my hand sideways; it would have cut his throat wide open.” Mike body-slammed the pirate to the floor and the Somali, feeling the blade on his jugular, immediately stopped resisting.

Mike didn’t know the pirate was alone. He thought that the other pirates were going to come around that corner, AKs
in hand, and light him up. “In my mind, I thought, ‘Where’s the gunfire? Why is there no gunfire?’” He looked down. The Somali’s hand was cut badly in the struggle and blood dripped onto the metal deck.

ATM and Mike picked up the Leader and marched him to the after steering room. They knocked on the door and Mike hollered for the crew to open up. He shouted out the nonduress password and the door swung open.

Fifteen exhausted but grimly determined faces stared back at the Leader from the darkness. He’d finally found the missing crew. Just not the way he wanted to.

“I grabbed my radio and I called out to let the captain and everybody know,” Mike said. “And I just said, ‘One down.’”

The good news was that the giant life-and-death game of hide-and-seek we were playing with the Somalis was working. The bad news was they didn’t like it one bit.

I could see Tall Guy’s eyes bugging out as the minutes clicked by. Young Guy was up on the fly bridge, but Musso and Tall Guy kept checking on me and my seaman on the bridge.
One of these guys is going to go off,
I thought. It was like the ship was eating men, and it was starting to freak them out.

“Where is he?” Musso demanded.

“Listen, I don’t know. My crew is crazy. I don’t know what kind of game they’re playing.”

I wanted to play the dumb captain who couldn’t control his own men. But I knew that had a limit.

“What about the big guy? Why hasn’t he come back?”

I went back to the PA.

“All crew members, please report to the bridge. Colin, report back.”

The Somalis’ agitation increased by the minute.

“Why won’t the boat go? Make the boat go!”

I held my hands out to them. Calm down. I got back on the PA.

“Chief engineer, please obey the pirates and come to the bridge.”

Tall Guy and Musso were practically bouncing up and down with nerves. They’d found another handheld radio and were monitoring it. Mine was dying. I hadn’t heard Mike Perry or Shane in at least thirty minutes.

The pirates started looking over the deck. They spotted something and Musso turned to me.

“What is that boat?”

“What boat? Where?”

“Right there.” He pointed at the MOB, the Man Over Board rescue boat, secured on B Deck.

I told them what it was—a rescue vessel with its own engines and supplies.

“This boat, it works?”

“Sure it works,” I said.

I wasn’t trying to hide the fact that they could escape on the MOB. I
wanted
them to take the boat. Hell, I’d drive it for them. Getting them off the
Maersk Alabama
and getting my men in the clear would be like winning the Super Bowl for me.

“Show me,” Musso said.

I walked out the bridge door and we made our way to the bright orange MOB. As I was walking around the vessel, I was
talking loudly and keying the radio to let the crew know where I was. The MOB was about eighteen feet long, an open design with no canopy, made of fiberglass-reinforced resin with a single outboard engine and three rows for seating. To get it down to the water, you had to winch it off its cradle, get it out over the water, lower it down, and pull a release bar, freeing it from its falls.

I climbed into the MOB and hit the engine switch. I started it up briefly, then the pirates tried it. Each time the outboard roared to life.

“We can take this boat?” Tall Guy said. Some of the tension seemed to have left his face. Obviously, the pirates wanted to know they could get away if they had to.

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll even get it in the water for you.”

He and Musso talked it over in Somali.

Their radio crackled.

“We have your buddy,” Mike Perry said. “You there, pirates? We have your buddy and will trade him for the captain.”

Tall Guy keyed the button.

“Who is this?”

“Chief engineer.”

“You have our man?”

“Yeah. And we’ll do a trade for our captain.”

This sparked another round of intense dialogue in Somali. Tall Guy looked at me.

“We need money,” Tall Guy said. “We can’t leave without money.”

I nodded.

“I understand that,” I said. “I have plenty of money in my room. You can have it if you leave the ship.”

“How much?”

“Thirty thousand dollars.”

They weren’t impressed. They were out on the Indian Ocean looking for a few million, not thirty grand. But I sensed it might be just enough to get them off my ship, if they still had hostages. Hostages would give them a shot at the big money.

A deal was coming into focus.

We climbed up to E deck and walked into my room. Little did I know that Shane had been monitoring our progress and had been caught in the passageway ahead of us. With nowhere else to go, he’d darted into my room and searched desperately for a place to hide. As I walked in with the two pirates, he was hiding in the closet not five feet away. “You don’t know how many times you saved my life,” he told me later. “I’d be walking around the ship and I’d hear you talking and I’d dive into the nearest opening.”

Later, when I had time to reflect on these hours, I got a lot of satisfaction from the knowledge that I’d been able to keep Shane and the others safe. But I wasn’t thinking about it then—I was so immersed in the details of getting the Somalis their money and getting them off my ship that I wasn’t thinking of anything else, let alone whether a crew member was within arm’s reach. I went right to my safe, spun the dial, hit the combination, and then opened the safe door. I pulled out the $30,000, which was arranged into stacks of different denominations, and handed it to Musso. He and Tall Guy counted the money and nodded.

All the while, the pirates were talking on the radio with
Mike, the chief engineer. They agreed that the crew would give up the Leader, and the pirates would hand me over at the same time. I wasn’t involved in the negotiations—I was too busy getting things ready for the Somalis to leave.

We went back to the MOB and I began to raise it off its cradle with the davit, a small crane that lifts and lowers materials down to the water. I needed to lift the boat up, swing it over the side, and lower it to the water forty feet below.

But there was still no power. So I started to hand-crank the son of a bitch as Musso and Tall Guy watched over me with their AKs.

“Wait,” Tall Guy said. “We need more fuel.”

“More fuel?” I said. “You can make it to Somalia with what you have onboard.”

You couldn’t. With the two and a half gallons onboard the MOB, they’d make it halfway to the coastline and then be drifting. I knew that, but they didn’t.

“More fuel,” Musso said. “You listen to us.”

“How much do you need?”

“Plenty, we need plenty.”

Whatever it took. I went up to the deck to the Bosun locker and took out a hose, a pipe fitting, and a clamp. I cut the hose to the right length—the Somalis had never taken my three-inch jackknife off me—and brought it over to the tank for the emergency diesel generator. I knew there were a hundred gallons in there at the very least. I found some plastic five-gallon buckets, lined them up, attached the hose to the drain on the generator fuel tank, and let the diesel flow into the bucket.