A Captain's Duty (17 page)

The mood in the boat was light. The pirates were nonchalant. They felt they still had the upper hand. They had a hostage and they didn’t have to deal with an enormous boat or watch their backs thinking a hidden member of the crew was going to come up and brain them. In fact, I’m sure that pirates will intentionally do this in the future—board a ship, drop the lifeboat, and take the captain and another seaman off the main vessel. It’s an effective strategy, from their point of view. It’s far more manageable to have one or two hostages instead of twenty. I believe it’s only a matter of time before we see the lifeboat strategy put into action off the coast of Somalia.

I was happy the navy was there, but I didn’t think it changed my situation that much. The pattern that other hostage-takings had followed was clear: pirates take ship, pirates take hostages, pirates bring them to shore, and pirates work out a ransom. Any ship from the French or British or whatever navy that trailed them to Somalia was there only to make sure that the hostages weren’t unloaded and driven to a safe house. Other than that, they kept their distance. They weren’t in the rescue business.

It didn’t occur to me that the navy would try to intervene. In my mind, I was still alone in a lifeboat in the middle of nowhere and it was going to be up to me to rescue myself. The idea that CNN would be flashing updates on my situation and that the president would be tracking the progress of the negotiations was beyond my imagination.

The conversation in the boat was mostly banter. The pirates weren’t threatening me—yet. The main topic of conversation was what a bunch of mule-headed sons of bitches I sailed with.

“That crazy engineer,” one of them would say. “Chief mate, too. What a pain in the ass. What is the matter with them?”

It was like the engineer had broken some code of the sea that said you must assist pirates in taking over your ship. The other Somalis were cracking up about how the crew had deceived them, but the Leader was genuinely angry.

“Why did your crew attack me?” the Leader said, accusingly. “They stabbed me!”

I almost laughed. You take my ship with AK-47s and threaten to kill everyone and you’re offended that someone gashed your hand?

“Well, you were shooting at them,” I said. “You scared them! What did you expect?”

As time went on, I showed the pirates where everything was on the boat: the first-aid kit, water, survival equipment, flashlights, food. Eager to see what supplies we had onboard, they started opening plastic bags and tossing the contents out, ruining the stuff they wanted to use and that we might need later. As they tore through the bags, I noticed the Leader
was holding his injured hand in his other palm and every so often I saw him grimace in pain.

“Hey,” I said. “Did you clean that wound out?”

He shook his head.

“Better do it. If that thing gets infected, it’s going to get nasty.”

The pirates opened the first-aid kit and started passing bottles and packages around. Obviously, Somalia doesn’t have a first-rate medical system, because they were looking at these medicines like they were Mayan artifacts.

“What is this? What do you do with this thing?”

I said, “Give me that.” Musso piled everything back in the box and brought it over to me and I told him what I needed: eyewash, saline water, bandages, and tape. I rolled out a length of bandage and reached in my pocket for my knife. I pulled it out, unclasped the blade, and started cutting lengths and laying them on my knee.

It had gotten quiet in the boat. I looked up and found the pirates all staring at me.

“What?” I said.

“Where did you get that?”

“This?” I said, holding up the knife. I’d completely forgotten they didn’t know I had it. “Oh, you want my knife?”

I laughed and Musso and Tall Guy joined in. I handed the knife to Musso. The Leader also demanded my watch, so I un-strapped it and gave it to him. He already had my flashlight.

The Leader was whining like my kids when they fell off their bikes. I unwrapped the dirty rag and saw some minor gashes across his palm. He sucked his breath in.

“Oh, it’s not too bad,” I said. The Leader was acting like the hand was nearly amputated. I couldn’t believe how quickly this pirate had turned into a whimpering baby.

I dashed some saline eyewash on the wound, and cleaned all the grime and dirt out. Then I put some balm on the gashes, applied some antiseptic, wrapped the hand up in fresh bandages, and taped it up nicely. Then I gave him some ibuprofen and told him to take two every eight hours.

“You need to do this every day,” I said.

The Leader nodded.

I thought I’d built a little good will.

I began to get a better sense of the pirates’ personalities. Tall Guy and Musso smiled the most. They were easy-going, eager to talk, and in charge when it came to any sailing questions.
Maybe these guys were sailors,
I thought. They sure knew their way around a boat.

The Leader rarely cracked a smile. He was smart, always staring at me and trying to figure out what I was up to. It was beyond him that my fellow Yanks had fouled up his plans. Frankly, he reminded me of a few captains I’d sailed with. The world revolved around him and nobody else. But I’ll admit: he was a good leader. He ran a tight ship and his men followed his instructions to the letter.

One incident that first day confirmed my opinion of the Leader’s priorities. After he’d gotten familiar with the controls, he came down from the cockpit and demanded to see the money. One of the other Somalis handed him the bag, and
he took out the cash: two stacks of hundreds, one of fifties, then twenties, fives, and tens. He began dividing the money into piles, one for each of the pirates.

It was as if he were saying, “Here’s one for you, one for you, one for you, and one for me.” But he was putting most of the hundreds in his pile and the others were getting the tens and fives. I laughed to myself.
You son of a bitch. There really is no honor among thieves.
The other pirates didn’t say a word. I never saw the money again. Later, when they gave me a sack to lean against, I felt the stacks of money inside, but I never spotted the cash out in the open again.

Young Guy was just that. Young. He seemed less hardened than the other three. I could see him giving up the piracy business and becoming a solid citizen in Mogadishu or wherever he was from. Either that, or he could become a Charlie Manson type. Every so often I caught him looking at me as if I were a turkey in a cage on Thanksgiving morning, and he was feeling the axe blade with his thumb. He had the potential to be a maniac. But he wasn’t there yet.

At one point, while the other three pirates were occupied in the cockpit, I even started giving Young Guy advice. I don’t know what came over me, but he seemed like an immature kid who was getting in over his head. “You’ve got to get away from these guys,” I said. “They’re going to lead you down a road to some very bad places. You can choose another way.” He smiled and nodded, but I’m not sure the message got through.

By midday, the heat was so intense that the pirates decided to break the windows out on the lifeboat. Tall Guy went up to the cockpit and started swinging the AK-47 back and ramming
the bayonet into the Plexiglas above the Leader’s upturned face. Every time, the muzzle passed within a few inches of his face. And the clip was still in the gun.

Christ,
I thought,
these guys are idiots
.
They’re going to shoot someone by accident and then the navy will be charging in with guns blazing
.

“Hey, hey,” I shouted up to the Leader. “Tell him to take the clip out before he puts a bullet in your head.”

The Leader looked at me and said something to Tall Guy in Somali. Tall Guy took the clip out and started banging on the windows again. Eventually, he broke two of the panes out, but there was only a trickle of air coming through them. At night, we’d get a nice breeze but during the day we were just going to have to sit there and bake.

The navy had somehow found a Somali interpreter in record time and gotten him on the
Bainbridge.
He was speaking on the radio with the pirates. The Leader would key the radio and say, “Get Abdullah, get Abdullah, get Abdullah.” Once Abdullah got on, I couldn’t make out what they were saying, as they switched to Somali, but I’m sure they were demanding ransom and the navy was demanding to know my condition. Every so often I would yell something—“I’m Richard Phillips of the
Maersk Alabama
”—when the Leader keyed the radio, just to let the navy know I was alive.

I was down to my khakis and socks. I’d left my shoes in the MOB and it was too damn hot to have a shirt on. I was constantly wet from sweat. And I was starting to get frustrated, because I hadn’t had a chance to escape. I was getting mad and thinking to myself:
Don’t be a wimp, if you see a chance to get out, you have to take it.

I also prayed. “God, give me the strength and the patience to see my chance and to take it. I know I’m going to get only one shot. Give me the wisdom to know it.” I never prayed to get away, I just prayed for strength and patience and knowledge to know when to make my move. I believe God helps those who help themselves. Asking for Him to do all the work is just not my style.

But nothing helped my chances of escape. There wasn’t a single instant when I wasn’t under the Somalis’ watchful eyes. I began to wonder if I’d ever get my chance.

Back at home, Andrea wasn’t sleeping very well. She would lie down on my side of the bed just to have that closeness, with the Polarfleece jacket shared between her and Amber, each of them holding on to one arm. “I just wanted to connect to you so badly,” she told me later. “I would say to myself, ‘Rich, if you can hear me, if you can feel me, I’m okay and we’re going to get through this.’” That was what was so hard for her: every time I’d been sick or injured, she’d been right there beside me, always in full nurse mode. But now she couldn’t be. She couldn’t help me or comfort me or even know what I was going through. And that was the hardest thing of all. I really believe she had it tougher than I did.

Before dawn was hardest. That’s when she was all alone with no one else to take care of. So she would pray to God. “‘Why am I asking you?’” she remembers saying. “‘You know I’m something of a heathen.’ I have my beliefs but I don’t go to church regularly and when you see all the pain and misery that any ER nurse witnesses, it wears on your faith.” But
Andrea was still a believer and now she needed God more than at any other time in her life. And she let Him know that.

A couple of days later, Father Privé, the former pastor of St. Thomas Church near our house, now living in nearby Morrisville, was sitting at our dining room table holding Andrea’s hand. We both had a special relationship with him. Father Privé had brought us back to attending church regularly after we’d fallen away from going to mass. Andrea turned to him and said, “Father, you know we’re not the best Catholics. But I’m frightened, I really am. I just don’t want to lose Rich. You have a lot of pull….” He smiled. Andrea was serious, though. “Please pray that if there is anyone out there who can help my husband, for God to give them the strength to do it.” He promised to do that. “I just couldn’t imagine not having you by my side for the rest of my life,” she told me.

At the same time Andrea was holding Father Privé’s hand back in Underhill, I was thinking about him in that dark lifeboat. I’d always liked the guy. He had this way of telling a story about getting up early in the morning to make doughnuts and watching the cardinals arguing with each other at the bird feeder in the parish yard. “And that reminded me of Saint Thomas,” he would say, and he’d be off into a Biblical parable. Plus, he had balls. When the Vatican announced that altar girls would no longer be allowed, he climbed up into his pulpit that Sunday and told our congregation that he would be ignoring the order and would be keeping the altar girls in the church’s masses. He was a rebel, in his own way. Thinking about him and his homilies helped me through some bad moments as the hours dragged by.

Back in Vermont, my friends and family, even the agnostics, held a prayer circle for me with Father Danielson, our current pastor. They said a prayer to give me some strength. That’s what drove Andrea—providing strength to me. She’s always been attuned to other people’s needs, not her own. It’s the Italian mother in her.

But Andrea had her doubts. She would think,
Why do I think I’m so special? Other friends have gone through divorces, or watched loved ones die, or lost their homes. I’ve always been lucky.
Those were the questions she had for Father Privé, and for God. Because the alternative was too dreadful to contemplate: “I thought to myself, ‘What would I do if Rich died?’” she said. “‘How would I go on? How would my kids pull through losing their father?’” But deep in her heart, she still believed I was going to make it.

She didn’t have answers for those questions. All she could think was
We were planning to grow old together.
And she tried to avoid thinking about being alone for the rest of her life.

Andrea was desperate for news. At one point, she checked her e-mail and there was a message from Shane Murphy, my chief mate: