“Yah!”
I doubted that. But whoever had sent the plane had wanted us to feel observed. I wondered if it was also a vague response to my (two-week-old) request for a helicopter. Maybe I should have jumped? My charging, unsteady mind tilted into a swamp of speculation. I could imagine several creative ways for the Navy to coax a surfer off a pirate ship. But a twin-engine without pontoons was not a rescue craft. It couldn’t hover. It couldn’t land on water. It couldn’t even impose a ceasefire—it had just drawn a hail of bullets—but it stirred my hope, and I think it raised every hostage’s morale to believe that a superpower had eyes on our ship.
XVI
Around this time, Big Jacket came downstairs to make a pot of tea. Pirates had been using our electric kettles for tea ever since Abdul set the precedent. Previously, they could choose from half a dozen electric kettles upstairs for their own tea, but somehow, by late July, they had all broken. So they came downstairs to use ours.
Big Jacket was thin as a corpse, with a sarcastic and contemptuous turn of mind, and while he waited for his tea to boil, he told us we were sitting here in Somalia to help pay for khat. He mimed chewing khat, then pointed at the sky and said “money-money-money-coming”; then he mimed eating more khat. “Okay!” he said, and held up his thumb.
The cycle of life, for a pirate.
“Mm-hmm,” I said.
“Tomorrow Ramadan,” he went on. “No chum-chum.”
I squinted at Big Jacket. “Adiga Muslim?” You are Muslim?
“Haa, yes.”
His kettle boiled. He pulled our can of powdered milk from under the conveyor belt, said, “Ano, okay,” and helped himself, spooning it straight into the kettle. Ano was powdered milk. We happened to be running low on ano. Rolly protested, “Big Jacket, this ano belong to us. Is not for pirates.”
Big Jacket poured his milky tea into a thermos and handed Tony the kettle to wash.
“Adiga, Jacketweyne,” I taunted him. You are “Big Jacket.”
“Aha—no!” he said.
It startled him to hear his nickname in Somali, and I think it made him self-conscious, because a few days later he took to wearing a different coat.
Another Somali came down the same afternoon with his mug, this time to cadge ano and coffee. He hassled Sosan and Taso, in the opposite corner. The guards knew it was against the rules to take advantage of our supplies; they even explained the rules whenever they set down powdered milk or mango juice, or even bottled water. “Somali, no!” they would say, meaning “just for hostages.” But a few days later the same guard would come begging. It was the simplest explanation for the pirate who had stolen my oatmeal in Hobyo. Pirate bosses short-provisioned the guards, so when stuff ran out, we had to defend our milk and coffee and juice.
Rolly and I watched the pirate mix everything in his mug, taste it, and make a face. Not up to his standards, apparently. He poured it over the rail.
“Hey!” Rolly shouted, standing up to appeal to the other pirates upstairs. He pointed his finger and hollered. I loved to watch Rolly lose his temper. He made a holy fuss until the Somalis had to respond. The coffee-thieving pirate retreated, intending to disappear toward the rear of the ship before Captain Tuure could punish him.
“Rolly! Adiga! Fucking!” he said.
“What that mean?” Rolly asked when he sat down again.
“I think it’s Somali for ‘Fuck you,’” I said.
Rolly grumbled and shook his head. At last he summed it up:
“They bring you here to their country, and they say you, ‘Fuck.’”
I chuckled.
“There is no ano among thieves,” I said.
XVII
The start of Ramadan, the next day, changed the mood of the guards, in the sense that most of them tried to fast. They lazed around upstairs in quiet misery, seeming to doze in the sun. Somehow it was redemptive in this world of thieves to observe a holy month. It still made no sense to me. Islam, for the pirates, remained a wellspring of respect and renewal, a sacred idea conveniently removed from their own behavior.
Four Indonesian men on the Naham 3 were Muslim, too, including a lanky kid with a mullet and a bashful smile, named Sudirman. He’d worked as a wedding DJ in Sumatra before joining this crew. I loved Indonesia, and I wanted to talk about the lush forests of Java, the banana plantations, the mosques, and the red-dust trails. But Sudirman—the most talkative of all the Indonesians—was extremely shy.
“Have the pirates given you any special treatment,” I asked him, “because you’re Muslim?”
He grinned—wide, ironic, bashful. “No!” he said.
The only special treatment came during Ramadan. The four Muslim hostages joined our daytime scrums for meals but saved their bowls of rice and meat in a little fridge, for after sundown. They fasted quietly in a corner of the sweltering work area. At the end of the day—to show enthusiastic solidarity with his captive Muslim brothers—Abdinasser the Sahib would come downstairs with bowls of pasta and fried tuna left over from the pirates’ fast-breaking iftar meals.
Abdinasser, alone among the pirates I met, had a deep-seated good nature. He was blustery and passionate, eager to pray and praise the Koran, but he didn’t mind the sight of Bibles. In his high, chesty voice he would fiercely defend our right to read what we wanted, the way he had defended my right to keep a journal on land. He also became our connection on the Naham 3 for a pain tablet called “Relief.” These vital tablets helped us sleep. I think Abdinasser bought cheap packets of them in Hobyo with his own spare change—in sharp contrast to the pirates who filched our provisions—and sometimes, when he approached the Naham 3 on a supply boat from town, Abdinasser would spot me on deck and yell, “SAHIB!” across the water, and I would squint and see him waving a tiny red cardboard package while the skiff bounced across the waves. “RELIEF!”
Meanwhile the twin-engine plane, which I very much wanted to be a helicopter, returned to the Naham 3 every week or so, unpredictably and at different altitudes. I almost never saw it. Whenever we heard its distinctive engines in the distance, our guards would jerk to attention and brandish their guns, long before I could assemble some unrealistic plan to leave the ship. Their twitchy nervous energy during plane visits was terrifying.
One afternoon, while I took a saltwater shower, Big Jacket leaned over the top rail to give me an order. “Michael! Sit down!” he said, and pointed at the tuna bench. From the panic in his eyes I could tell some kind of aircraft was on its way. I still had shampoo in my hair. I considered the water temperature—cold—and wondered how it would be to jump, stark naked, off the ship.
“Sit down!” Big Jacket repeated.
I took my time removing my towel from the laundry line and drying off.
“You mean don’t get dressed?”
“SIT DOWN.” He pointed again. “Go!”
I listened again. For a helicopter I would have jumped naked. But it sounded like a plane. I slipped on my shorts and soccer jersey and sat on the bench.
“Be quiet!” he ordered, unnecessarily.
“Jacketweyne,” I taunted him.
“Fucking!”
The plane flew about four hundred feet overhead, at an awkward angle, somewhere out of sight. I watched the Somalis track it with their guns. It seemed to move in a slow, tight circle behind the bridge. At last—still about four hundred feet up—it crossed a visible patch of cloud-marbled sky.
“Is a small plane,” said Rolly, who was in a better position. “It look like a drone.”
“It’s the same plane as before,” I said.
Most of the crew had retreated to the work area. They stared up in silence, maybe worried about gunfire. The plane didn’t cross again. It never came near the ship.
“How you know is the same?” Rolly said, and I shrugged.
“Just a hunch.”
XVIII
The Naham 3 kept a stash of bright orange parkas, overalls, and moon boots for deep excursions into the freezer hold.
The freezer consisted of different levels and rooms, and although crewmen liked to dart in and out of the shallowest part in just sandals and shorts (using the latched door by the shower), moving further inside needed heavy gear. One morning in August a group of pirates came downstairs and started pulling on parkas and boots. I had never seen anything like it. Bakayle, Big Jacket, Abdul the translator, and Abdinasser the Sahib spent half an hour in the Somali sunshine, suiting up like Arctic explorers.
“What do you think’s going on?” I asked Rolly.
“Look like a visit to the captain.”
The Taiwanese captain lay dead in a room near the stern, wrapped in sheets and plastic, according to Tony.
“Or they gonna count the fish,” Rolly said.
Arnel had to suit up, too. He would guide the Somalis through the frozen maze.
“Arnel,” I whispered, “what are they doing?”
He just shook his head.
They disappeared through the door, which stood open, leaking fog. Akes,* a Filipino, sat on the tuna bench with a slight grin. He had straight hair in a mullet shape, wide-set eyes, and a quiet manner. The other men protected him from doing too much work, because his contract had ended a week after the hijacking. Everyone else, technically, was still on the job—some hoped to get paid through the end of their contracts if they survived—but Akes should have been home in the Philippines.
“What are they looking for in the freezer?” I asked him. “The captain’s body? Or are they doing a fish inventory?”
“Gold and jewels,” he said calmly.
“What?”
“Gold and jewels,” he repeated.
“You’re kidding.”
Akes finally laughed. “The pirates think we hid our valuables in the fish. They think they will find treasure in there.”
“In the freezer,” I said.
“In the fish.”
“Good God.”
The Somalis had stolen everyone’s phones and valuables, but now they wanted more, and for some reason they believed enough jewels would be stashed in the tuna carcasses to make a spelunking expedition worthwhile. I watched in mild amazement. The pirates were nuts; that was long established. But it got worse. The parka-suited Somalis returned after half an hour and gave some kind of order. We had to take our laundry down from the ropes. Two men opened the freezer portal, and more crew set to work moving a small crane arm from its retracted position near the bridge. Ferdinand and Taso guided a hook from the crane down into the hold, where someone attached it to the loop of rope in the tail of a frozen tuna.
The crane raised fish, one at a time, until a number of fat, iron-colored tuna lay defrosting in the tropical sun. To me it looked like an obscure omen of the ship’s demise, a stocktaking before the pirates moved us ashore. Rolly felt the same way.
“You think they gonna sell this tuna?” Rolly said.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Why they counting it?”
I told him what Akes had said about “gold and jewels,” and Rolly was incredulous.
“But—is crazy, Michael.”
“I know.”
“I not believe you.”
We kept watching. It seemed a tedious way to unload a hundred tons of anything—one piece at a time, on a swinging rope.
Ferdinand came to join us and lit a cigarette. He looked at the growing school of steaming, startled-looking fish, which would lie there pointlessly for an hour, only to move back before they defrosted.
“If they are really looking for treasure,” he said, “it is lying right here.”
“All the tuna,” I said.
“Yes.”
“How much is it worth?”
“Is a lot of money,” Rolly mumbled.
Ferdinand squinted. “Market rate, last year? When we leave Mauritius?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Biggest fish here, might be two thousand dollars.”
“I think the pirates got to sell it somehow,” said Rolly.
We wondered how a tuna-packing firm could buy the fish from pirates. It seemed impossible at first glance, not worth the risk, because anyone with a ship outfitted to accept so much frozen meat would have to sail it too close to Somalia. But I knew the story of an industrial fishing company from Thailand that had paid for peace and protection on the water off Puntland in exchange for fishing rights.* The Thai company anchored a canning vessel near Bosaso, a port town, and a Somali “coast guard” offered the foreigners Mafia-style protection, even shooting at small-time Somali fishermen who competed for fish within the twelve-mile limit. (Corruption, in some parts of Somalia, was total.)
“I think it’s complicated,” I said.
“I not understand,” Rolly said.
“It depends,” I said, “on whether Ali Duulaay knows anyone in the tuna industry.”
The crew piled two dozen tuna, like boulders, in a shaded corner of the deck, where they wouldn’t defrost so fast. They pulled more unofficial catch out of the walk-in freezer. Soon a whole ecosystem of frozen seafood lay on the deck, including clusters of little trevallies, dark and glistening sawara, silvery moonfish—which were flat and round, the size of manhole covers—and two or three blue sharks, nine feet long and magnificent with their jagged grins. Someone also hauled out a collection of roped shark fins, like an enormous set of clattering keys.
“Why so many fins?” I asked Akes.
He said that some of the crew had sliced the fins off accidentally caught sharks in the hope of supplementing their income when the ship returned to port.
“Side business,” he said.
“I see.”
Low wages and an appetite in China for shark-fin soup drove the destruction of sharks by vessels like the Naham 3. The crew wasn’t innocent. None of us were innocent. But innocence was no longer the point.
XIX
In August, the generator sputtered. A team of Chinese mechanics made near-daily trips to the rear of the vessel to keep it running, but the Naham 3 was a dwindling resource.
When the ship ran out of rice in August, the pirates delivered new twenty-pound sacks from Hobyo, which the crew regarded as a deep misfortune. They were chauvinists about rice and preferred fluffy, short-grained white stuff grown in Southeast Asia. Now they had to eat brownish basmati imported from Pakistan. Nguyen Van Ha pulled a face when he tried his first bowl and shook his head in disgust.
Near the end of August, water flowing from our shower hoses felt warmer, which meant the monsoon season had started to turn. Abdul the translator came aboard to question Li Bo Hai, again, on behalf of the pirate bosses, and again I overheard the conversation. How much life was in the generator? How much oil, how much fuel? Answer, about a month. Somehow we had a reprieve. But Abdul acted vague about whether the bosses would preserve the ship.
Later the same day, Abdul carried a round-screened instrument down from the bridge, trailing electric wire. “I want this working again,” he ordered. “If you need parts from that ship over there”—he pointed out at the Shiuh Fu 1—“we can get ’em. But we can’t stay on this boat without a radar.”
One by one the men squatted to inspect the colorful soldered guts of the radar monitor. Taso and Cao Yong fiddled the longest, with an air of resignation, under the warm shade near our conveyor belt. For the first time, Abdul had mentioned the ship on the beach. He’d named our worst nightmare. Our mood plummeted, but the radar wouldn’t come on again. Arnel explained the problem to Abdul. Finally someone piled the parts into a box and shelved it in a closet.
Word went around the next day that the generator would have to shut down to save fuel. We ate breakfast in morbid silence. Afterward we rushed the electric kettles to brew coffee and tea and save it all in thermoses. Around 8:00 a.m. the motor quit, with a long and terrifying shudder that vibrated the hull and left us alone with ourselves. For the first time we noticed the desertlike silence on the water. The generator had not only powered a surprising number of instruments, including the
TV, the kettles, the trickling seawater hoses, and the sizzling woks—it had muffled Somali voices, meaning it had sheltered us from an unbroken awareness of living at their mercy. We tried to play cards, but during the long afternoon the tropical heat mounted, and we had little to keep us from remembering our status as prisoners, or the tons of rigid fish, or the captain. We wondered if he would decompose. A smell rose from the corner grate we used for a latrine.
Abdul ended this day without power by four in the afternoon, I think because he wanted tea. But the threat had not been lost on the crew. The pirates had wanted to warn us about living on shore, and the shock of the silent ship was linked to a fierce rumor of freedom that had circulated for several days.
The source of the rumor was hard to locate, but a few days earlier Ferdinand had said, “I feel it in my heart. I think we’re gonna go free by the end of the month.”
“You mean August?” I said.
Which was almost over.
“Maybe September. I think the owners have started to negotiate.”
Then a friend of Ha’s—another Vietnamese man called Nguyen Van Xuan—told me that one pirate had told him the whole ship would go free “in five days.”
“Everyone?” I said. “Including Rolly and Michael?”
I wanted reassurance as much as everyone else. Xuan was a modest man who wore old tasseled loafers and had smiling, wide-set eyes. He looked troubled for a moment, then beamed with joy. In broken ship’s pidgin he answered:
“Hai dao speak, all ship. Michael and Rolly, okay!” The pirate said the whole ship, so Michael and Rolly, too!
I felt better for about three hours. But this gossip was pure sentimentality, nothing but junk food for the starving. I started to recognize the scam. In the scheme of the Five-Day Rumor, our day without power was Day Four. On the next morning, no one went free—the generator shutdown had been a scare tactic. Instead, Abdul presided over a long series of phone calls to Asia. Every crewman climbed the stairs to the bridge, to use the ship’s telephone, on a warm tide of hope. They were shocked to hear protests of helplessness from their bewildered families. On their way down they endured sarcasm from the pirates, who saw it as the families’ stubborn fault that the men would not go free.
The Desert and the Sea Page 21
