A Captain's Duty (11 page)

J
ust as I turned, the Somali shot off two rounds into the air.
POWWW. POWWW.
Up close, that weapon sounded a hell of a lot louder than from down below.

“We’re fucked,” I heard one of my crew say behind me.

“Relax, Captain, relax,” the pirate yelled at me. He was short, thin, and wiry. His face was tense. “Business, just business. Stop the ship, stop the ship.”

I was so shocked I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t believe he’d gotten up so fast. He’d gone through the piracy cages like they were child’s play.

It was 7:35 a.m. The pirates had taken about five minutes to board my ship and take the bridge.

I still had the portable radio in my hand. I turned my back to the pirate, pressed the key, and, in a low voice, said, “Bridge
is compromised, bridge is compromised. Pirates on the bridge.” This would let the first engineer in the after steering room know the pirates were in control. “Take the steering,” I half-whispered.

“No Al Qaeda, no Al Qaeda, no problem, no problem,” the pirate yelled, the AK-47 pointed at my chest. “This is business. We want money only.
Stop the ship
.” He was twelve feet away.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “It takes time, just relax.” When you stop a ship, you have to shift down gradually through a program. I pulled the ship back from our sea speed of 124 revs down to full ahead, which is the maneuvering speed we use in ports.

Different alarms were going off all around me,
brrrrrrrtt, brrrrrrttt, brrrrrrrtt, whoo, whoo, whoo
. The noise was incredible. I started dancing around the console, silencing them. I looked over at the phone. It was lying sideways on the desk where Colin had left it. I hoped to God UKMTO was on the other end listening to all this go down.

I realized the rescue center alerted by the security alarm hadn’t called and asked for the nonduress word. Did anyone know this was a hijacking and not just a malfunction?

I walked over to the stick and jiggled it. Nothing. The chief engineer had switched control over to his instruments in the engine control room. The first and third had control of the steering. They were now in control of the ship. They were on their own.

It was a small victory. Whatever happened, the
Maersk Alabama
wasn’t going to head to the Somali coast, unless the pirates hunted down my entire crew.

“Stop the ship, stop the ship,” I called into the radio. I left my finger on the key button so everyone could hear what the pirate was saying. I could feel the engineer kill the engines. That thrum that you grow so used to died away. We were now gliding through the water, going in circles.

That annoyed the pirate. “Stop this circling,” he called to me, and the muzzle of the AK-47 circled around as he talked. “Straighten the ship out.”

“Okay, no problem,” I said. I started working the stick and the wheel. Nothing happened, of course, because the first assistant engineer, Matt, was steering the ship down below. I gaped in astonishment and then looked over at the pirate.

“Ship broken, ship broken,” I said. I showed him how moving the wheel had no effect on the direction we were moving.

“What?!” he yelled. “Straighten out the ship.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I’d love to, but you broke the ship. You wanted me to slow down, and we did it too fast.”

I pointed to the console and tapped on the bow thruster reading. The bow thruster is another screw at the front of the ship that enables us to maneuver. The indicator read “0.” Then I pointed to the rudder angle indicator. It was dead, too.

“Ship broken,” I said.

The pirate didn’t like that. “Shut off the water, shut off the water, stop the ship.”

ATM went out to help the other pirates get up the ladder. I was going around the consoles, shutting off alarms. I killed the fire pump and the spray from the piracy hoses died away.

As I was moving around the consoles, I came to the radar set. I looked up. The Leader was distracted, barking orders to
ATM. The radar set has three knobs on it. The first is the gain, which controls the sensitivity of the radar to incoming data. I turned that all the way down. Then there were the anti-rain and the anti-sea-clutter knobs, which screen out things like ocean waves, swells, and precipitation. I turned those two all the way up. By doing so, I’d degraded the radar completely. You could have parked a battleship two miles away and the radar would have looked as clean as an empty dinner plate. I wanted to rob the pirates of an extra pair of eyes, in case the navy came calling.

I walked away, strolled to the VHF radio, and switched the channel from 16 to 72. No one used 72. If the pirates tried using the VHF, they might as well try calling the surface of the moon.

I looked up. ATM came through the bridge door followed by three pirates. One of them was the tall guy who’d been shooting up at me, the other was the one I would come to know as Musso. He had an AK-47 slung around his shoulder and a bandolier of ammunition. He looked like he was ready to face down Rambo. He was limping; apparently, he’d injured his foot climbing up the ladder. There was the other bandit I came to know as Young Guy, just because he looked like he was a college student. But with his Charles Manson eyes, he would turn out to be one of the more sadistic of the pirates. And there was the other Tall Guy, who never made much of an impression on me. There was no question who was in charge—the first pirate on-board, the Leader, gave the orders and the others obeyed them.

The three older pirates were probably between twenty-two and twenty-eight. Young Guy was no older than twenty-two, I would say. Between them, they had two AKs and several ban
doliers of bullets. They also had what looked like a 9mm pistol, with a rope or lanyard hanging from the butt, and as I looked at it, I thought I saw a U.S. Navy insignia on the gun.
What the hell were they doing with a navy sidearm
?

That question would come back to haunt me later.

The pirates took up positions on the bridge. I could tell they had some experience. The Leader stayed with us. Tall Guy went to the starboard bridge wing, Young Guy went to the flying bridge, and Musso went to the port bridge wing. They told ATM and the third mate to sit on the deck, starboard side. Meanwhile, I was at the console, silencing alarms, because they were still going off continuously,
whoop whoop whoop
and
ding ding ding
. It sounded like a war had broken out and it just added to the stress.

The Leader gestured to me. “These guys are crazy,” he said. “They’re Somali pirates. I’m just interpreter.”

I looked at him, like,
You can’t be serious. The good cop, bad cop routine? Really?

“Dangerous guys,” the Leader shouted. “They will kill you. They’re crazy!”

No shit,
I thought. They looked dangerous. My heart was racing with adrenaline and fear.

But the Leader’s approach was very smart, I thought. He wanted us to trust him, and what better way of doing that than making himself our only salvation against the rampaging pirates?

“Call the crew,” the Leader said. I knew this was coming. The more hostages, the more leverage the pirates would have with Maersk. They wanted all hands on the bridge to prevent anyone from braining them with a wrench or garroting them
while they slept. But I’d be damned if I was going to give them any of my men. In fact, my plan was to get Colin and ATM out of harm’s way as quickly as I could.

“Okay,” I said, and I picked up the mike on the PA system and the handheld radio. “All crew, all crew, report to the bridge. Pirates want the crew on the bridge, repeat,
pirates
want the crew on the bridge.”

Nothing. I prayed that everyone stayed where they were.

The Leader was yelling at his men, so I keyed my handheld radio. “Four pirates aboard. Two on bridge wings, one on flying bridge, one inside the bridge. Two AKs on the wings, one nine-millimeter in the bridge.”

The Leader turned and snapped at me.

“Call them again,” he barked. I repeated the “come to the bridge” message.

Not a sound from below.

The bridge was getting uncomfortable. The crew down below hadn’t secured the secondary power supply yet, so most of the emergency lights were on—every third bulb was lit. And the air-conditioning was shut down, so we were beginning to broil up there. A deck is like a greenhouse. It traps heat. I felt the sweat just running down my back.

I wanted to open some kind of communication with the pirates, besides them barking out orders and me following (or pretending to follow) them. Any hostage training will tell you: don’t appear too confrontational or too meek.
Maintain your dignity
was a phrase I remembered. If you’re screaming at the boss or whimpering in the corner, you give your captors an extra, personal reason to put a bullet in your head.

I decided I was just going to be myself. It had worked for
me so far in life. I decided to trust my instincts and forget about trying to be the perfect hostage.

I needed to start a rapport with the pirates. They were very on edge, not wanting us to get close to them. Whenever you approached one, their eyes would get wide and they’d wave at you with the gun.

I looked over at the Leader. “Can we get these guys some water?”

He nodded. I motioned to ATM, and he stood up and walked to the water fountain by the port door, watched carefully by the pirates.

As I worked the console, I sidled over to where the Leader was standing. “Hey,” I said. “You guys got cigarettes? We have some if you’re out.”

He nodded. I went to the GMDSS table and grabbed a few cartons that I always kept there to give the harbor pilots and problematic port officials. I distributed them around. From being in places like Mombasa and Monrovia, I knew how popular tobacco was in Africa, and the last thing I wanted was some gunman with a nicotine shake pointing a gun at my guys.

They lit up and a bit of the tension went out of the room. I grabbed some sodas and handed them over, too.

The Leader took a puff and pointed to me.

“What nationality?” he said.

“Me?” I said. “Or the ship? What do you mean?”

“The ship, the ship, what nationality?”

“U.S.,” I said.

His eyes lit up. I heard the other pirates whoop. Obviously, they’d hit the mother lode.

“What about crew? Nationality?”

“All different,” I said. “American, Canadian, African.”

Now that I had them in a good mood, smoking and laughing, I wanted to slow things down. I needed time to think.

The UKMTO knew we’d been taken by pirates. I was calculating in my mind how long it would be before help arrived, and I wanted to put the brakes on as much as possible. Any delay would give me time to strategize. I wanted to think out my moves a few steps ahead.

The Leader wanted me to stop the ship and he was getting agitated. I was going through my rigamarole—“Ship’s broken, you must have done something to it”—when he finally barked at me, “STOP NOW!”

I raised my eyebrows and, pretending I was trying to understand, dragged my index finger across my throat.
You mean, kill the engine?

I heard a voice behind me. “Will you
please,
” said Colin, “stop giving ’em the international sign for murder?”

I smiled. “Okay, okay.”

The next thing they wanted was a cell phone. “We want to make phone call.”

“Sell?” I said. “You want to do what?”

“They’re saying they want to make a phone call!” shouted Colin. He didn’t understand what I was doing, and he thought I was going to get myself—and him—shot.

“I got it,” I said out of the side of my mouth. “Relax. I know what they’re saying. Just let me talk to them. Just relax.” I was trying to slow every conversation down.

Finally the Leader pointed to the satellite phone on the
bridge and gave me a number to dial. It was a Somali country code.

The mother ship
, I thought.
They want to get further instructions
.

The Leader watched me closely as I walked over to the phone. I dialed the number and waited. The numbers appear as you punch the buttons, so I couldn’t misdial, but I didn’t complete the final step. On most sat phones, there’s a last key you have to hit to send the call when you’re done.

I didn’t do that. I showed the Leader the phone.

“No work,” I said. “Phone broken.”

He came over, glaring at me. “Let me see,” he barked.

I showed him the LED display. There was his number, but the call wasn’t going through.

I shrugged sympathetically.

“No cell coverage,” I said. “Bad phone.”

They gave me another number. Maybe it was their warlord or their backer in Somalia. Obviously they wanted to report they’d taken the ship and maybe get the ransom process started or get supplies or reinforcements out to the
Maersk Alabama.

That wasn’t going to happen. I kept dialing and the Leader kept glaring at me.

“Radar,” he called out.

I went through my usual “What? Excuse me?” routine before pointing him to the console. He waved the gun that I should go first. I walked over and he stood by me and peered down at the screen. It was blank.

“Seventy-two,” he said. “Seventy-two mile scale.” He wanted to increase the range of the radar. So he knew something about
navigation and onboard technology. More and more I was coming to believe that the Leader wasn’t a simple fisherman. This guy had a little training.

I did him one better. I turned the knob to ninety-six miles. He stared down.

“Nothing there,” I said.

He was perplexed.

“Where is that?” he said. “What is this showing?”

I knew by how surprised he was that the mother ship wasn’t out there. He was stunned that the radar didn’t show a nice comforting blip within a few miles of us. It was like his getaway car had disappeared off the face of the earth. By now he must have been convinced that he’d stumbled on the most broken-down, ramshackle ship in the U.S. Merchant Marine.
Nothing
on the entire ship seemed to work.