A Captain's Duty (7 page)

On April 5, Andrea e-mailed me with some family news about her stepmother Tina and her husband, Frank:

T
he trip to Djibouti went smoothly. There was chatter on the radio about pirate boats being spotted, but we didn’t see anything on the radar or on the watch. We sailed southwest along the coast of Yemen and arrived on April 5. We spent an exhausting day off-loading cargo in the port there, and the next day, April 6, we left port and steamed due northeast. We were halfway through our Gulf of Aden run. We’d made it in. Now we had to get out alive, and around the Horn of Africa.

Every port in the world has a reputation. Sailors judge ports by a strict set of criteria that hasn’t changed for three hundred years: Is it cheap? Are there girls nearby? Is there beer? And is there something to do? That’s it. If the answer to all four is yes, sailors all over the world will be brawling in their union
halls to get there. Alexandria, Egypt, is a great port because it’s inexpensive and you can jump on a train for an hour and see the pyramids. Subic Bay in the Philippines has dirt-cheap beer and scads of pretty women with questionable morals. On the other hand, Chongjin, North Korea, is a god-awful port because you’re restricted to the ship and even if you got off it, the people there are terrified and poor. There are harbors in Colombia and Ecuador where you hear automatic gunfire at night, where you can watch stowaways shimmy up your ropes, and where you stand a fair chance of getting rolled or chopped up in the waterfront bars. But any sailor will take those little inconveniences over Kim Jong-il’s hellhole.

African ports have a mixed reputation. Mombasa, where we were headed next, was fairly secure, with armed guards patrolling the fences and very basic security measures in place. Locals would slip in under the cover of night and load their skiffs with twist locks, then sell them back to you for $25 apiece. No harbor in the third world is entirely safe.

I’d been to Sierra Leone during the civil war and watched people waving from the shoreline. You could see that their right hands had been chopped off by the rebels, because they’d voted. I was in Monrovia, Liberia, a week before they had the revolution and Charles Taylor took over the country. It was another world: as we glided into the port, we could see there was no electricity except for those places that had generators. The West African peacekeepers came onboard and immediately started shaking us down for bribes. There was no security at all, just hundreds of people on the pier waiting to hand us letters, some of them written on the backs of matchbooks. They would say,
Leave me, but take my family to
America
. I spoke to one guy who told me: “I’m a college professor, I can’t get any work, my family is starving. Can you give me something to do?” I felt just awful knowing there was so little I could offer people like him.

One time in Monrovia, there was a guy who desperately needed to work, so I said, “Okay, I need four workers. You pick out four guys, you’ll be the boss, and I’ll take care of you. If they don’t do a good job, I’ll get rid of you.” The standard pay at the port was $1 a day, which was actually a good wage in Monrovia. And this guy earned it, working hard for seven or eight days straight, no messing around, which I liked. On payday, he came to me and said, “I don’t want cash, I want plywood.” The country had been so devastated that there was no building material there, and plywood was like gold. I tried to talk him out of it, telling him cash was safer, but he insisted. I gave him a truckload, packed it down to the springs, and he was ecstatic. The next day he came to me and he was beaten to a pulp. The man could barely walk. As he’d left the port the day before, the peacekeepers started to steal the plywood from the truck, and he just lay across it and took a vicious beating so that he could keep a third of the stuff. I gave him money and clothes and we took care of him, but they’d nearly killed the poor bastard over some flimsy wood.

In Monrovia, Liberia, every day at one o’clock would be the Show. We would off-load the first pallet of peas and wheat and then, when it hit the deck, this huge crowd would converge. Hundreds of people milling around the pier would just pounce on it and policemen would lash them with heavy wooden clubs. Guys would heave these sixty-pound sacks of wheat through
holes in the pier and then dive in after them. And the security forces would come up behind them and stick their guns in the holes and blast away.

Any captain who sailed East or West Africa saw the desperation of the people there.

By 1 p.m., we were safely away from Djibouti without any incidents. As we made our way around the Horn of Africa and mirrored the Somali coastline, I knew we were still in the middle of the most dangerous part of the trip.

I scheduled a “fire and boat drill” for 1300 hours. We were training the new guys, checking out the lifeboat and going through how to launch it. Then we went over to the MOB (the “Man Over Board” or rescue boat) on the starboard side and showed the new guys how to adjust the safety harnesses. Each man is assigned a position on the lifeboat, so we also practiced taking our places on it. Shane was running the drill, asking each sailor what he’d do in a particular situation and then correcting the answers. It was a blazingly hot day, with a little bit of swell on the water, caused by the first of the monsoon winds. The bridge was baking in 95-degree heat and visibility was seven miles.

I was up on the bridge alone, scanning the horizon and keeping an eye on the radar. About 1340, three blips came up on the screen, seven miles behind us on our port quarter and moving fast, at least twenty-one knots. I looked up and caught sight of a bow wave. At seven miles, you can never see the boat, just the wake it kicks up as it slices through the water.

My training kicked in and I steadied the 7 × 50 binoculars on the tiny white blip. I turned the little wheel at the top of the binoculars and saw the wake again. Another look at the radar. Now there were two other fast boats back there, plus a larger blip following eight to nine miles behind us, over the horizon and out of sight but visible on the screen. The mother ship. I checked his vectors; he was trailing us. Every move we made, he shadowed.

I thought I’d spotted a mother ship once before during my career, but now I was seeing a pirate outfit in full array. My heart pounded.

I radioed down to Shane.

“Possible pirate boats approaching, seven miles, port quarter,” I said.

“You want us to end the drill?” he called back.

I thought about it.

“Not yet. We may have to call it off, but right now I’m just keeping you apprised.”

I still wasn’t convinced it was pirates. Their normal time to attack was just after sunrise (5 a.m.) and just before sunset (7:45 p.m.). Those are the times when it gets hazy in the Gulf of Aden and visibility falls from seven miles to four or so. At 1 p.m., there was maximum visibility. It was a strange time for the Somalis to mount a sortie against a ship.

But they were closing fast. I called down to Shane to send up an AB named Andy. He was an old salt who had the best eyes on the boat. I’d been with him on the bridge previously and he’d called out, “I got a ship coming up on port side.” I’d looked at the horizon, saw nothing, then checked with the
binoculars and sure enough, there was a ship fifteen miles away. I couldn’t believe he’d caught it. So now I wanted his eyes on watch with me.

I moved the stick on the EOT—the engine order telegraph—sending the new speed down to the engine room. The RPMs began to pick up and the ship surged forward. I was pushing the speed up to 122 revs.

As I nudged the throttle higher, I called down to the chief engineer. “Chief, I need you in the engine room now, I’m increasing the speed.” I was bringing the revs up as fast as I ever had on this ship, eventually reaching 124. I wanted Mike down there to watch the engine computer and let me know if any of the indicators—engine load, exhaust temperatures, cylinder temperatures—veered into the red. The last thing you want to do is kill your power plant when the bad guys are on your tail. If anything looked like it was going to blow, the chief would let me know.

I ran over to the satellite phone and dialed up UKMTO. A voice with a British accent answered.

“This is the
Maersk Alabama,
” I said, and I rattled off our coordinates: position, course, speed. “We have three ships approaching at five to six miles, with a possible mother ship trailing one mile behind them. Potential piracy situation.”

The voice at the other end didn’t seem impressed. I’m sure they were getting calls from every ship off the Somali coast who spotted a fishing skiff or a floating barrel.

“We have a lot of captains who are nervous out there,” he said.

I’m not the nervous type,
I wanted to say.

“It’s probably just fishermen,” he continued. “But you should get your crew together, get the fire hoses ready, and you may want to get the ship locked up.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. First, he told me it was probably just a bunch of local guys chasing mackerel, and now he’s telling me to go to DEFCON 1.

“If I was that far behind the eight-ball, I wouldn’t be talking to you now,” I said, a little heated. “I’m just letting you know the situation.”

“Keep us posted,” he said.

“Will do,” and the phone was already down before he could answer.

There’s a U.S. emergency line for piracy and I dialed that next. If you’re going to be taken hostage, you want your own government to know. I watched the blips on the radar coming closer and closer. The phone was just ringing.

After ten rings, I slammed it down. Nobody home. Just unbelievable. The Brits were condescending as hell but at least they picked up the damn phone.

The ships were still closing. I could see them in my binoculars. The crew was going through its drills, but everyone was looking at our port quarter. They’d spotted the ships and any thoughts of fire had gone out of their heads. I could tell they were getting nervous.

Five miles away. Then four. I could see the lead boat now, not just the wake. It was a typical Somali pirate skiff: white, thin across the bow, and fast.

The seas began to pick up. As we got farther out into the gulf, the swells rose from two feet to four and five. I could tell that the fast boats were having trouble. They’d run flat out for a while
and then slam into a swell, which would twist them sideways and kill their speed. They’d have to turn, gun the engine, and start building up momentum again. The ocean was helping us. If we could get into heavy enough seas, we could outrun them.

The minutes ticked by. They were gaining, then falling back, gaining and retreating.

By 3 p.m., the fire drill was over. I realized with a start that we’d been racing with the pirates for over an hour. They were down to three miles now and gaining again. I spotted four men in the lead boat, with long black objects in their hands—automatic rifles, for sure.

I looked around and realized there were five or six guys on the bridge. They’d materialized there without my noticing and they were staring out at the port quarter, dead quiet. Usually, I would have ordered them off the bridge, but in a situation like this, the more eyes, the better. They weren’t panicked, yet, but the atmosphere on the bridge was electric.

An idea came to me. “Hey,” I shouted to the second mate. “Go ahead and talk on the radio to me. I’m going to pretend to be a navy ship.” If the pirates were monitoring our frequencies, which they often did, I wanted them to believe that we were in contact with a navy destroyer.

“What, Cap?”

I didn’t have time to explain.

“Forget about it,” I said. “Just watch me.”

I got on the radio and hit the mike. “Warship 237, Coalition Warship 237, 237,
Maersk Alabama,
come in.”

I deepened my voice and tried to cut out my Boston accent. “
Maersk Alabama,
come in, this is Coalition Warship 237,” I said. I was pretending to be a navy ship within radio range.

I switched back to my natural voice. “This is the
Maersk Alabama
. We’re under attack by pirates. Position is two degrees two north by forty-nine degrees nineteen east. Course is one hundred and eighty and speed at eighteen knots. Request immediate assistance.”

“Roger that,
Maersk Alabama.
How many people aboard?”

“Twenty aboard. No injuries at this time.”

“Roger that. We have a helicopter in the air. Repeat, we have a helicopter en route and he’ll be at your position at approximately fifteen hundred hours. Repeat, helicopter’s ETA to your position is five minutes.”

I was almost laughing. What we were doing was probably illegal, and the navy guys would have rolled their eyes. They had their own codes, but any Somali bandit would have been damn impressed to know that a helicopter gunship was on its way to blow him to smithereens.

Then I noticed the mother ship had dropped off our radar. What was going on? Had they given up on the attack?

One of the fast boats peeled off and headed away from us. I felt a tiny jolt of adrenaline.
It was working.
Then another. The swells were just too much for them. They were being tossed around like shoes in a washing machine. We were down to one pirate skiff. But he was coming hard.

I looked at the readout on the side of the radar: 0.9 miles away.
Holy shit, that was fast.
This bastard was really not giving up. And I knew that it took only one skiff to take a ship.

I saw the boat slam into a wave with a big sheet of spray. It stopped him dead in the water. The swells were getting even bigger, up to six feet, and even the
Maersk Alabama
was pitching through the waves. I could feel a slight thud in my feet
when we hit, but after thirty years at sea, it was barely noticeable to me.

The last boat started up again and pointed his boat at our stern.

Finally, at 0.9 miles away, he peeled off. Then he was at 1.1, 1.5, 1.7. It was like being chased by a car full of thugs on the highway and watching them run out of gas.

The guys gathered on the deck let out a collective breath. “Hell, yeah!” someone yelled and laughter bounced off the bridge windows. I smiled, too. Our detection procedures had worked well. We’d dodged a bullet. But the pirates were still out there.