A Captain's Duty (9 page)

“Yeah,” she said. “I guess you should.” And I did.

But I never did get down on one knee.

As different as we were, we had a lot in common. We both came from big families, and we were comfortable in that crazy atmosphere. I’m very Irish and steady-nerved and Andrea is Italian and emotional. When she’s flipping out over something
like not being able to find her keys, I’ll sit there and say, “Okay, let me know when you’re done.”

“Rich grounded me,” she says. “He laughs at me when I should be laughed at and he pays attention when I need him to pay attention.”

Andrea likes to say that I became her rock. “I know it’s right out of a movie,” she tells people, “but he does complete me.”

Sailors are superstitious by nature. Seeing dolphins at sunrise, for example, means you’re going to have a good day. Redheads, priests, fresh flowers, and stepping onto a boat with your left foot first are bad luck. Your life is controlled by the weather, by the pull of the moon, by storms that are brewing in some corner of Africa. And every sailor has his unlucky places. Until I started sailing the Gulf of Aden, mine had always been the Bay of Biscay, a hellacious gulf that lies between France and Spain. The continental shelf runs out under the bay, which makes for shallow water all across it, and shallow water means one thing: rough seas. I was cursed in that damn patch of ocean. Nearly every time I sailed through it, I hit a storm that gave me something to remember.

One time, I was making my way from Nordheim, Germany, to Sunny Point, North Carolina, with a load of ammo for the U.S. Army. Down below I had millions of rounds of bullets and five-hundred-pound bombs and crates of ammo and who knows what other kinds of explosives. The ship itself was a wreck; the sheathing that prevents the cargo from slamming into the steel hull during rough weather was shredded and useless, the starboard anchor was out of commission, and every
other damn thing on that boat was either falling apart or broken. The owner had slashed wages on the ship and the crew was bitter and underpaid. It was a bad situation, but that’s when you learn how to handle disaster.

So we were making the run out of the bay and a storm whipped up and at the same time we lost power. Our engine stopped dead. I couldn’t steer the ship. We were being thrown around the bay like a cork and down below I could hear these enormous thuds. I could actually feel the vibrations all the way up at the top of the bridge. Something was loose in the hold.

The storm intensified by the minute. The ship began to pitch until I looked down at the inclinometer, a pendulum that tells you the degree of roll, and saw that we were at 40 degrees. I’d never seen that number before. Never. We were close to turning turtle and going over completely and sinking to the bottom of the bay. The loose cargo was shifting the center of gravity on the ship. A couple more degrees of tilt and the entire load could shift port or starboard and send us to our eternal rest.

I started for the engine room. Running down the central passageway, I spotted something odd to my right. I stopped, turned around, and went back. It was part of my crew, seven guys in life jackets huddled together, looking like they were the last men onboard the
Titanic
. They were staring at me from the darkness, their lips quivering, all of them scared out of their minds.

I was, too, but I couldn’t show it.

“What are you doing?” I said, incredulous.

The sailors looked at each other. The din was even louder down there.

“Well, Cap,” one sailor finally said. “We’re preparing to abandon ship.”

I looked at them.

“You’re telling me,” I said, “that you’re getting ready to get off this big ship to get into a tiny boat, in this weather? Is that what you’re telling me?”

They looked at one another. I don’t think that had occurred to them.

“It doesn’t seem like a smart bet to me,” I said. “This is what we’re going to do. Anyone who can work, come with me. Anyone who can’t, go to your rooms. You’re scaring the rest of the crew.”

Four of the guys came with me and the others scattered to their quarters.

I raced to the engine room. Our chief engineer was working furiously on the power plant.

“Get me a status report,” I said. He nodded. He was what we call “fully tasked,” that is, working like hell on six different things that needed doing immediately.

I hurried down to the cargo holds. Opening the door, I shone my flashlight in to the enormous half-lit space. What I saw wasn’t encouraging. Six inches of viscous motor oil was slopping around the floor. Fifty-five-gallon drums were reduced to the size of footballs by the constant pounding on the hulls. Five-hundred-pound bombs, stacked twenty to a pallet and two pallets high, were tipping back and forth and slamming against one another and the hull.

I called the chief mate. “You need to get some guys in the hold and secure that cargo,” I yelled. If one of those bombs blew, pieces of the ship the size of a quarter would be raining down
on the Spanish coast for half an hour. He rounded up two ABs—the only ones out of twenty men not too sick or scared to go into the holds—and they went and wrestled the bombs and the barrels back into place.

Twelve hours later, the engine was back up and running and the bombs were on their way to being secured. Disaster averted.

There are a thousand ways to die on a ship. But when you run into one face-to-face and survive it, it teaches you how to think your way through the next one.

T
hat night the crew gathered over the dinner table. You could feel the electricity in the air.

“Was that your first piracy situation, Cap?”

“Sure was,” I said, as I sat down to the meal. “Hope it’s my last, too.”

This wasn’t the first time the subject had come up. Just the other day Colin, the third mate, had asked, “You know what I was thinking?”

“What’s that?”

“What do we do if we’re taken hostage?”

I had stared at Colin then.

“You’re worried about that?”

Colin nodded. He seemed nervous.

“If you’re scared, Colin, you should never have gotten on this ship,” I said. “You didn’t know where it was heading?”

I didn’t want a crewman injecting a note of panic into our run. I needed the crew to be confident and to project confidence. If Colin was terrified of ending up in a Somali boat, he should have worked that out with me before we sailed.

Being taken hostage was sort of a taboo subject among sailors. Anything—even shipwreck—is better.

“Look, we’ve got to crawl before we can walk,” I said finally. “I want to make sure we master the antipiracy drills first.”

But I could sense his unease. Suddenly the problem of piracy wasn’t abstract anymore, it wasn’t a headline or a rumor they heard in the union hall. They’d seen the Somali ships with their own eyes and they’d felt pretty damn defenseless against them.

“I can give you the short version right now,” I said.

Colin nodded.

“That’d be good,” he said.

“It’s pretty simple,” I said. “First off, do not mention religion. It’s kryptonite. Don’t antagonize them by trying to talk about Allah or Jesus and whatever you do don’t try to convince them that your faith is better than theirs. Politics is out, too, especially the Middle East. They may try to antagonize you by saying America is the worst country in the world. You’re not there to defend the nation’s honor. You’re trying to survive. So let that pass.”

It was all we had time for at that moment. Later, Colin came up to me, still seeming nervous about the possibility of being
intercepted by Somalis. There were other crew members around, so I continued my tutorial.

“Do whatever they tell you,” I said. “Give them as little information as possible. You’ve got giveaways, things that aren’t important that you offer up to build rapport, and hold-backs, which are things you keep to yourself unless you’re under severe threat.”

“What would constitute a giveaway?” someone asked.

I shrugged. “Showing them how to get fresh water. Getting them familiar with the safety equipment. You’ve got to make them feel they’re in control while all the time you’re guiding them away from the really important stuff, like radar or the engine controls. Not to mention the other crew.”

“Got it,” Colin said.

“And, last of all, humor helps.”

I looked at an AB.

“Unfortunately,” I said, “none of you guys are funny. So rule number one: don’t get taken hostage by pirates.”

I’d always felt if pirates got onboard, it was all over. We had to stop them before they got on the ship.

We were paralleling the coast of Somalia by now. I went back to my room and wrote up my night orders. Every captain has standing orders for the entire trip. They’re posted on the first day and never change. But night orders cover any special messages or duties that need to be addressed during each overnight shift. “We’re still in Apache country,” I wrote that evening. “We’re on our own, so we need to make sure we stay vigilant. All we have is each other out here.” You have to come at the crew in new ways to keep them interested. I knew the pirates had their attention now, so I kept it short.

I went to my room. At about 3:30 a.m., I was asleep on my bunk when the phone rang.

It was the second mate, Ken, who was on the 12 a.m. to 4 a.m., the “dog watch.”

“Cap, I think you better get up here.”

“What is it?” I said.

“Somali pirates,” he said.

“Where?”

“On the radio,” he said. “They’re talking on the radio.”

“I’ll be right there.”

I hurried out to the passageway and climbed the internal ladder up to the bridge level. Clouds scudded past a full moon as I emerged into the fresh air.

I pulled open the door on the bridge and there was Ken with an AB standing watch with him. I was about to say something when I heard a voice.

“This is Somali pirate,” it said. “Somali pirate.”

I looked at Ken. His eyes were wide as saucers. I looked down. The radio was tuned to Channel 16, the international hail and distress channel.

“Somali pirate, Somali pirate, I’m coming to get you.”

It was spooky. The voice was recognizably African. I hadn’t spent enough time on the continent to tell a Somali accent from a Kenyan one, but it sounded authentic. More than that, it sounded like the guy was serious.

“What happened?”

“I saw a ship go by about seven miles away. It was very well lit up.” I nodded. Fishing boats are always lit up like Christmas trees, to get some illumination on the men working the nets, and to avoid being run down by some tanker doing fifteen
knots. A pirate ship would rarely have all those lights going. It burned up too much precious fuel and allowed them to be seen on the horizon, which they never wanted to happen.

“And then a few minutes later, I heard this,” Ken said, pointing at the radio.

I picked up the binoculars. There was a boat about seven miles away, astern, on our starboard quarter, its lights blazing like a typical fishing boat. But I looked closer and could see that it had a second boat tied to its stern.

“Somali pirate, Somali pirate,” the voice came over the radio again, filling up the dead silence of the bridge. The guy was almost chanting.
What the hell was he playing at?
The Somalis were known for their stealth; the last thing they would do is alert you that they were on the way. It didn’t make sense.

It could have just been a couple of fishermen having fun with us. Or it could have been pirates who’d swept past for a look at our security profile. They could be sitting up ahead, trying to unnerve us before gunning their engines and heading back to intercept our ship. Like I said, these guys were constantly innovating, constantly probing for weak points.

I studied the ship in the glasses. It wasn’t under way. It was drifting, which is a typical thing for a fishing boat to do.

“Let’s go to a hundred and twenty revs,” I said. We were doing our normal RPMs of 118.

“One hundred twenty revs,” the second mate called. He was on the EOT, the Engine Order Telegraph, controlling our speed.

“What’s our course?” I said.

“Two hundred thirty,” the helmsman said. Meaning a heading of 230 degrees.

“Bring it over to one eighty,” I said. I wanted to make a drastic course correction that the pirate—if that’s what he was—would recognize, to show him we knew he was up ahead waiting for us. And I wanted him as far astern as possible.

“Left five to one hundred and eighty,” Ken called out. The quartermaster called it back and swung the wheel over.

The ship began to turn and thirty seconds later we were on the new heading. When you’re going fast, it takes only a flicker of the rudder to turn fifty degrees.

I watched the mystery ship through the glasses. He was drifting still astern us. But the boat behind him didn’t move out and head toward us. If they were going to mount an attack, it would be from that fast boat. As long as that skiff didn’t leave the fishing boat, we’d be all right.

I swung the glasses around the quadrants of the horizon: north, south, east, west. Sometimes what pirate gangs do is put a vessel in plain sight and trick you into focusing on it exclusively. While you’re fixated on that ship, they’ll come at you in three skiffs from the opposite direction, racing in from your blind spot. But the water was clear. No other boats were within range of the
Maersk Alabama
.

For thirty minutes, I kept an eye on the mystery ship. It didn’t attempt to follow us, and it didn’t launch the fast boat. Strange. But without any other partners within seven miles of us, he wasn’t going to try an attack.

“I think we’re good,” I told Ken. “If anything else comes up, call me right away. Make sure you tell the next watch about this. And stay on one hundred and twenty revs until I’m back up here in the morning.”

Pirates had never attacked at night, as far as I knew. (Since
that time, pirate crews have attacked under the cover of darkness at least once.) But if I was a Somali bandit, that’s exactly what I’d do. Sneak up stealthily in the darkness and take the ship over before the crew had time to react. I had no idea why they hadn’t tried it yet—boarding would be more difficult, getting those grappling hooks up, but the payoff would be huge.

I didn’t want to be the first.

I went back to my room and collapsed into bed. I’d never had a confirmed pirate incident before and had just had two possible threats in the last twenty-four hours. It told me that the sea around us was swarming with these guys and that we were in an entirely new world. Forget that .04 percent that the statisticians threw around. It seemed like every other ship going through the gulf was being targeted.

As I lay in my bunk unable to sleep, I thought of an old merchant marine term. During World War II, convoys of one hundred or more ships would make their way across the Atlantic to bring desperately needed supplies to the GIs in Europe. The ocean was infested with German submarines and these cargo ships were sitting ducks out there on the water.

Not all of them, though. If you were in the middle of the formation, you were rarely attacked. But if you were on one of the four corners, you were exposed. Vulnerable. Bait.

They called them the “coffin corners.” I felt like the
Maersk Alabama
was sailing on one right now. And there wasn’t a destroyer in sight to keep the enemy at bay.