A Captain's Duty (20 page)

The Leader looked up at me. “Ha, you see? You are going to die in Somalia and I am going to die in America.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You die here. I die in your home.”

What he meant was they were going to kill me in Somali waters, so my soul would never be able to leave here. And the Americans were going to kill him. So our souls would switch places. He’d die by an American bullet and I’d die by a Somali one.

“But I fix them,” he said. “If they try anything, we do suicide attack.”

I looked at him and then back at the buckets of diesel.
Holy shit,
I thought.
Maybe they didn’t want the fuel to get back to Somalia. Maybe they wanted it to blow up a navy warship, like Al Qaeda did the USS
Cole.

After that, any time they felt threatened, they would open up more gas cans.

The Leader fired up the engine and we got back under way. After a couple of hours, sparks were flying from the outboard’s exhaust. The thing was overheating. The pirates argued back and forth about what to do. Finally, they cut away some of the
insulation that surrounded the exhaust and started to pour water on it.

If they get the fuel buckets near that,
I said to myself,
I won’t have to worry about a bullet in the head. This thing will go up in a fireball
.

“I kept going back to the moon,” Andrea told me of this time in the ordeal. “It was the only thing I had that I knew you were looking at, too. I’d say, ‘Richard, you’re under that moon and I’m here with you.’” Friends in Florida called Andrea on videophone and all of them toasted the moon with glasses of champagne under the night sky, saying, “This is for Rich.” Every night from the time I was captured, Andrea would search out that white shape in the night sky. From our bedroom window, she could look out and the moon was right there. “Richard, I’m here with you,” she would say. It was the last thing she did at night.

Halfway around the world, I could catch only a glimpse of the moon through the lifeboat window.

Andrea’s best friend, Amber, lay down with her on the bed that night. Their joke was that it’s hippy Vermont, so they could do that without any controversy. They spread my fleece jacket over them and were just talking back and forth about everything except the crisis around them: the fond memories they had of the days they’d roomed together in Boston, the cars I used to pick them up in when they were student nurses, the romantic boat rides Andrea and I would take on Lake Champlain, skinny-dipping at night. Then in the early morn
ing before the sun came up, Amber would wake up with Andrea and they’d talk about her fears. “She became my rock, my Richard substitute,” Andrea joked.

The one disagreement they had came when Amber wanted to sleep on my side of the bed. Andrea said, “Amber, there’s no way! I’m not going to fight you over that. I’m his wife, I win.” They laughed about it. But mostly they tried to imagine what I was going through at that exact moment on the other side of the world. Nobody had any clue, actually. I could hardly fathom it myself.

Predawn was always Andrea’s lowest point. That’s when she would have her “alone thoughts”: What if he doesn’t make it? What will I do? Saturday morning was no exception.

Amber woke up and they started talking: “What if he doesn’t make it, Amber? What am I going to do? I don’t know if I can live without him. He’s my ground. And what about the kids? Could I keep the house? And, my God, I’d have to work full time!”

Amber laughed.

“He’s got to be so tired, so hot,” Andrea said. She knew how much I hated being hot. It just drained my strength and sent me right up the wall. “How much longer can he keep going?”

“Rich is stronger than you think,” Amber said. “He’ll never give up.”

She did her best to reassure Andrea. Finally, they dropped off to sleep for another hour.

Later Jonathan and Alison told Andrea that the people at the Defense and State Departments told them around this time: “You need to prepare Andrea for the worst. You need to
be ready to break it to her that her husband is dead. Because these things usually don’t end well. They end up with a phone call to someone who can’t bear to hear the news they’re about to get.” But by then, I think, Andrea had faced the facts. “I got it,” she told me. “The ship was safe and the crew was safe. Rich was just one man. You can’t expect to save everything.”

A
ll Friday, they kept trussing me up with these intricate series of knots. Musso explained to me how they worked. The white line you could touch only with the right hand. The red line you could touch with either hand. The white lines are the “halal ropes.” You tie it on here. So you have to tie this knot and then this knot and you connect it
over here. The ropes could never touch the deck. And if I was going to touch one of the halal ropes with my mouth, I’d have to clean it first. It was very important to them to keep those special knots clean and not to touch them with anything except my right hand. The purpose of all this knot-tying was to prove how superior the Somalis were as sailors, and also to be a pain in the ass.

Musso kept trying to get me to tie some. I played along for a while. Finally, I gave up. It would take months to get as good as Musso, and I wasn’t planning on being with them that long. I stopped tying the knots.

“You baby, Phillips. Lazy American.”

I thought about how different this was from the ship. That had been a battle of nerves and wits. Like chess. The crew and I had won because we’d prepared to win, because we’d been ready for the unimaginable. And because we knew the ship and its systems. We’d outsmarted the bastards.

But that wasn’t going to work on this lifeboat. This was something rawer. It was a battle of wills. The pirates were constantly trying to wear me down, to confuse me, to humiliate me, to turn me into a child instead of a man. I was trying to persevere. To prevail.

This was making what happened onboard the
Maersk Alabama
look easy.

The sun sank down. It was Friday night. I dozed off to sleep and I must have been out a couple of hours when, suddenly, I snapped awake. It was dark in the boat. We were into Saturday morning now. The moonlight filtering in showed me that the four Somalis were in the lifeboat. The hatches were all closed. Then I heard voices outside. Up near the cockpit,
the Leader was talking with someone. There were two people talking Somali from outside the cockpit window. Not on the radio. These voices were actually
outside
the boat. I could see the silhouette of two heads through the cockpit window. All the pirates were debating with these strangers on the deck.

Who the hell is that?
I thought. The Leader and the strangers were arguing about something in Somali. I could hear the words “Sanaa” and “Palestinian” and “Fatah” mentioned again and again. A chill went through me. Sanaa is the capital of Yemen, a real Al Qaeda stronghold. Tourists and aid workers were being kidnapped left and right there. Some had been murdered.

Yemen was my ultimate nightmare.

I leaned forward and strained to hear what they were saying. All the pirates were talking, and each one seemed to be giving his opinion, like they were weighing in on what should happen next. The more I listened, the more I realized they weren’t only saying “Fatah”—the Palestinian group—but “fatwa,” a decree from an Islamic scholar. They were talking urgently, as if they were negotiating, and occasionally one of the pirates would say, “Oh, fuck” as if they weren’t hearing what they wanted to hear.

But who were these Somali men talking to my kidnappers?

My first thought was
The Somalis have sent reinforcements
. That was a common tactic among pirates. They would call for fresh troops and boats would come out and relieve the original bandits. But how would they sneak a skiff past the navy and come right up to the lifeboat? I couldn’t believe that had happened. The
Bainbridge
would intercept anyone trying to approach our vessel, of that I was sure.

Then it had to be the navy’s Somali interpreter. But why were they talking about fatwas and Yemen? I thought again of the Leader’s claim that he knew the navy guys, and it sure sounded like he was familiar with these two. The tone of their voices was intimate, as if they’d known one another for years. The guys on the outside of the boat were pleading with the Somalis, trying to get them to see reason. But the pirates were having none of it.

The debate raged on. I could tell from their posture and inflection that Musso and Tall Guy were gung ho. I got the feeling that they didn’t want to give up for anything, that they wanted to fight to the death. Young Guy was just nodding, with an attitude that seemed to say,
Whatever you guys decide, count me in.
But he didn’t seem to have an opinion of his own.

The Leader was conflicted. Of all of them, I think he had the best sense of how much danger they were in.

I could see it was a desperate time. They talked about death; in English they would say “death.” And they would say “family.” And “fatwa” again. And then, “Oh
fuck
.”

I kept quiet. It seemed the interpreters were trying to negotiate for my release. When they left, I could hear them walk along the deck and get into a boat. I heard the engine start and then fade into the distance.

I knew that no compromise had been reached. It had been a tense debate and when the negotiators left, the mood on the lifeboat was even more tense, more expectant.
Something is going down,
I thought.

Later, the navy swore to me that none of their personnel had ever been on that lifeboat. But I wasn’t dreaming. There
had been an attempt to reason with the pirates and it had failed.

The sun came up. I’d been on the boat for two days and three nights. The heat began to rise. The pirates were down to their underwear.

That morning, they began by discussing—mainly in English, I’m sure for my benefit—when they should kill me. They went to get the Leader, who was dozing in the aft end of the boat. I could see his thin legs on the floor. But they couldn’t wake the guy up. No matter how many times they prodded him, he kept snoring away. Finally, they gave up, saying, “Oh, we’ll kill him later.”

Man,
I thought,
they can’t even wake the guy up to execute me.

Time passed slowly. I was tensed up, waiting for the next try at a ceremonial killing. The episode with the negotiators—at least I thought they were negotiators—was lingering in my brain.

I heard helicopters approaching, that
whap whap whap
of the rotor blades. I could feel them settle above us, because the wash from their propellers buffeted the lifeboat. Spray flew into the lifeboat through the windows. I thought,
Wow, they must be close, to kick up this much water
. But later I learned it was the
Bainbridge
’s hoses—they’d pulled up right next to us and were spraying us, trying to keep us from heading toward the coast of Somalia. I didn’t care what the reason was. It was so refreshing, like being in a sprinkler on the hottest day of the year. I was like,
Oh, don’t leave. This is heaven.

The Leader got up. He was very nervous. “No action, no action,” the Leader was calling into the radio. “No military action, no military action.”

I looked out the aft window and saw a helicopter skid hovering there. It was surreal. It was maybe ten feet away and if I could have jumped and caught it, I would have been free.

“Okay, we’re going to kill the hostage now.”

I looked over at the Leader. He was on the radio. His face was taut.

The helicopters flew off. I could hear the noise of the rotors receding. I didn’t really expect Navy SEALs to rappel down and take the ship. That would have been suicide for them and for me. I just missed the spray, and so did the pirates. It died off as the helicopters left.

The pirates started with the bullshit again.

“There are no pirates in Somalia,” Tall Guy said. “That’s just media. We were hired by the navy and your company’s security officer and your chief mate and engineer knew about it.”

Tall Guy even told me the pirates were bidding on a navy contract to do Raycon work—operating what is essentially an electronic lighthouse off Somalia. He asked me to sign up. “Sure,” I joked, “I’ll work six months with you in the Gulf of Aden.”

As much as I knew it wasn’t true, there was that tiny sliver that wanted to believe. I thought,
Maybe this heat is causing me to hallucinate. Maybe this
is
a drill.

“Tell me something,” I said. “The night before you came, there was someone on our radio saying ‘Somali pirate, Somali pirate.’ Was that you?”

The Leader nodded.

“Yeah. That was me.”

“Somali pirate, Somali pirate, we are coming to get you,” he said, and it was the voice from the radio. He laughed, and the other pirates joined in.

“Nice,” I said.

“I love to see the ship speed up and run away. You guys scare so easy!”

“So you do this all the time?”

“Yeah, all the time. The ship goes into maneuvers, the hoses come on, the lights come on. We watch and laugh about it.”

The other pirates found this hilarious.

“So how much is the ransom you’re asking for?” I asked.

“What do you think?”

“I have no idea. But the Americans won’t pay anything for me. Not a dime. You should know that. You’re going to die on this boat with me. Unless you let me go.”

The Leader stared at me for what must have been a full minute.

“Not true. Americans pay the most.”

I shook my head. “They won’t pay you, but they will let you go. Americans are stupid. We keep our word, unlike you guys. We’ll let you go. If you release me, we’ll even let you keep the boat.”

The Leader just laughed at me.

“How much you worth, Phillips? Two million?” He literally spat. “I would as soon kill you for two million. That’s not even worth my time.”

“That’s nothing? You stole my crew member’s shoes!”

He shook his head.

“I hijacked a Greek ship. I killed the captain, because they only offered me two million.”

The Leader started giving me his whole pirating history. “I took a Lauritzen,” he said. Lauritzen is a French shipping company that specializes in refrigerated cargo. The Leader swore up and down that he’d hijacked one of their ships not too long ago. “I took six million off that.”

“Six million?” I said. “So what are you still doing here?”

I laughed in his face. But he went back into his spiel about going to work on a Greek ship as an AB. He was trying to confuse me, I knew, trying to make me think he was legit so the next time an opening came up, I’d hesitate.

I looked out one of the hatches and saw an inflatable zooming by. It looked like a Zodiac with a few men inside. I thought,
We must be near land.

“I see him,” said Tall Guy. “Who is this guy?”

“I am going to lure him onto the boat,” the Leader said. “And then we will kill him.”

“Yes, that would be good,” Musso said. “Get as many people here and kill them all.”

I heard more outboards, zooming this way and that around us. Musso ran over to one of the hatches with the glass broken out.

“Hey, navy man,” he shouted. “American seaman, you want a beer? Come on, we have beer for you.”

They laughed uproariously. The Somalis were convinced that beer was utterly irresistible to American sailors. They weren’t wrong, come to think of it.

The lifeboat was constantly rocking up and down with the swells. It was hard to get a fix on anything outside of it. But
suddenly the
Bainbridge
loomed into view out the aft hatch. I caught a quick glimpse of a sailor on a bow gun, a big .50-caliber monster. Next to him was a photographer shooting pictures, the lens of his camera pointed directly at me.

“Thanks a lot, guys,” I said, waving to them. “Why don’t you use that gun instead of that camera.” Later, as one of the Zodiacs full of navy corpsmen passed by on one of their checks, I yelled out, “Take these fuckers out.”

We were drifting, the engine turned off.

My head was hurting. What seemed so simple—a kidnapping for money—had turned weird. Yemen, suicide attacks, fatwas, Fatah, souls exchanging places. I had to fight to keep my mind right.

The real obstacle wasn’t the Somalis, I told myself. It was fear. Every time I pushed through it, I found that I could persevere.
This isn’t over until you say it’s over,
I said to myself.
I’m not going to give up. I will outlast these guys.

I looked out and saw the
Bainbridge
had been joined by two other navy ships, the USS
Boxer
and the USS
Arleigh Burke
. They were all coming broadside, perpendicular to us. It looked like they were maneuvering into a line. Now that is something ships do only when they’re getting ready to lay out their anchors. Which you normally do only in port.
Where am I?
I thought.
Are we near land?
Maybe they were trying to hide something on the other side. A strike force.

Nothing was as it seemed. But at least I could see the ships.
Those things are real. Those ships exist. They are my countrymen. That is true.

The mind games started again.

“There are no pirates,” the Leader said. “That’s all make-believe. I’ve been down to your ship. We’ve met before in Mombasa!”

I chuckled.

“I think I’d remember you.”

“I’m not even from Somalia,” he continued. “I live in Mombasa, in Kenya.”

“Yeah, I know it,” I said.

“Us three live in Mombasa,” he said. The Leader pointed at Tall Guy. “And he lives in New York City.”

“Really? What part?”

“Over near Times Square,” the Leader said before Tall Guy could say anything.

“He must be rich. It’s very expensive.”

I was playing with them as they played with me.

“Yes, we work security. Very good money.”

“But you nearly shot me when you took the ship! One of your bullets hit the ship six inches from my head. And when I tried to get away from the lifeboat, you were trying to shoot me.”

The Leader shrugged, as if to say,
All part of the drill, my friend
.

They even tried their mind-blowing routine on the navy.

“We need a body bag,” the Leader shouted into the radio. “Body bag now.”