A Captain's Duty

by Richard Phillips

  Musso nodded.

  “Okay, big guy, you go down and find them.”

  I smiled. With two other sailors still under their command, the pirates apparently felt safe letting Colin search out the rest of the crew by himself. I was so close to my goal of clearing the bridge of everyone but pirates and myself.

  The pirates were watching us closely, so I didn’t have a chance to whisper to Colin as he walked off the bridge alone. I just hoped he had enough sense to lose himself in the ship.

  With another man off the bridge, I felt a little lighter. It was like a weight was slowly being lifted off me.

  I looked at the aft bulkhead, where we have something called the “watertight door indicator” that tells you which doors and hatches are open and which are closed. That way you can tell which parts of the ship are sealed off from onrushing water. But it also has another use. By watching the door indicators go from red (closed) to green (open) and then red again, I could chart which doors Colin was opening, walking through, and then locking behind him. Every time he opened a door, the indicator gave a little click and changed color.

  Where’s he going? I thought. There are places on a ship like the Maersk Alabama where you can hide and no one will ever find you. I’ve had stowaways onboard container ships for days and the crew never knew. I just hoped Colin would find the right hideaway. I thought he’d head to the after steering room, but then realized he didn’t know about the secondary safe room—he’d been on the bridge during the drill critique.

  Click. He was in the number one hole. Click. Now he was in the main passageway. Colin was heading down to the bowels of the ship, away from the crew’s quarters. Click. He entered the emergency fire pump room. It was a little cubbyhole, rarely used and even harder to find.

  I watched the screen. There were no more reds turning green. He’d found his hideyhole.

  I smiled. Good man, I thought. Stay down there.

  Now it was down to me and one sailor. Not the first guy I would want to plot an escape with, but you work with what you’re given.

  I sidled over to him.

  He looked up.

  “We might have to make a break for the bridge door,” I said. “Try and slide yourself closer.”

  He nodded. One of the pirates leaned over and glared at us, suspicious. The pirate’s head disappeared.

  “Just be ready,” I said to the sailor, and walked back to the middle of the bridge.

  I keyed the radio. “Three pirates on the bridge, all with weapons,” I said. The radio beeped. I looked at the radio’s power indicator. It was running low.

  The Leader and ATM had vanished into thin air. It wasn’t until days later that I found out what happened.

  ATM had led the pirate down into the bowels of the ship, toward the engine room. Mike Perry, my chief engineer, was already down there—he’d headed toward the power plant at the first sign of the pirate attack. As ATM and the Leader made their way through the snaking corridors, Mike was checking on some equipment. “It was pitch black, not a photon of light,” he recalled. The Maersk Alabama was sitting in the equatorial sun, the water reflecting the heat back onto the steel hull. The temperature inside was climbing toward 125 degrees. “We were starting to feel like we were dying,” said one crew member. And Mike could hear the increasing desperation of the pirates—and how they were directing their rage and confusion at me. “I can tell [Rich] is in danger,” he said, “just by the tone in people’s voices.”

  Mike walked through the engine room, carrying a knife in his hand for safety, when suddenly a beam of light swept across his face—the Leader, just yards ahead in the darkened corridor, had spotted him. Mike turned and dashed down the passageway, with the Leader racing after him, screaming loudly, the words bouncing off the steel walls. Mike came to a spot where the passageway took a ninety-degree turn, and he quickly rounded the corner, then pressed his back up against the wall. Waiting in the darkness, with the crazy flickering of the Leader’s flashlight drawing closer, Mike thought, Is this sane, what I’m going to do? His mind flashed back to the stories he’d heard of pirates forcing crew members to play Russian roulette in the bellies of their captured ships. “In my mind,” he says, “right there, the question was answered.”

  Mike heard the footsteps approaching, the knife with its razor-sharp serrated blade gripped in his right hand. The screaming voice was coming closer and closer. When the Somali’s face flashed around the corner, Mike snapped forward. “I lunged up at him,” he said. Grabbing him around the neck, Mike brought the edge of his knife up to the pirate’s throat. “All I had to do was move my hand sideways; it would have cut his throat wide open.” Mike body-slammed the pirate to the floor and the Somali, feeling the blade on his jugular, immediately stopped resisting.

  Mike didn’t know the pirate was alone. He thought that the other pirates were going to come around that corner, AKs in hand, and light him up. “In my mind, I thought, ‘Where’s the gunfire? Why is there no gunfire?’” He looked down. The Somali’s hand was cut badly in the struggle and blood dripped onto the metal deck.

  ATM and Mike picked up the Leader and marched him to the after steering room. They knocked on the door and Mike hollered for the crew to open up. He shouted out the nonduress password and the door swung open.

  Fifteen exhausted but grimly determined faces stared back at the Leader from the darkness. He’d finally found the missing crew. Just not the way he wanted to.

  “I grabbed my radio and I called out to let the captain and everybody know,” Mike said. “And I just said, ‘One down.’”

  The good news was that the giant life-and-death game of hide-and-seek we were playing with the Somalis was working. The bad news was they didn’t like it one bit.

  I could see Tall Guy’s eyes bugging out as the minutes clicked by. Young Guy was up on the fly bridge, but Musso and Tall Guy kept checking on me and my seaman on the bridge. One of these guys is going to go off, I thought. It was like the ship was eating men, and it was starting to freak them out.

  “Where is he?” Musso demanded.

  “Listen, I don’t know. My crew is crazy. I don’t know what kind of game they’re playing.”

  I wanted to play the dumb captain who couldn’t control his own men. But I knew that had a limit.

  “What about the big guy? Why hasn’t he come back?”

  I went back to the PA.

  “All crew members, please report to the bridge. Colin, report back.”

  The Somalis’ agitation increased by the minute.

  “Why won’t the boat go? Make the boat go!”

  I held my hands out to them. Calm down. I got back on the PA.

  “Chief engineer, please obey the pirates and come to the bridge.”

  Tall Guy and Musso were practically bouncing up and down with nerves. They’d found another handheld radio and were monitoring it. Mine was dying. I hadn’t heard Mike Perry or Shane in at least thirty minutes.

  The pirates started looking over the deck. They spotted something and Musso turned to me.

  “What is that boat?”

  “What boat? Where?”

  “Right there.” He pointed at the MOB, the Man Over Board rescue boat, secured on B Deck.

  I told them what it was—a rescue vessel with its own engines and supplies.

  “This boat, it works?”

  “Sure it works,” I said.

  I wasn’t trying to hide the fact that they could escape on the MOB. I wanted them to take the boat. Hell, I’d drive it for them. Getting them off the Maersk Alabama and getting my men in the clear would be like winning the Super Bowl for me.

  “Show me,” Musso said.

  I walked out the bridge door and we made our way to the bright orange MOB. As I was walking around the vessel, I was talking loudly and keying the radio to let the crew know where I was. The MOB was about eighteen feet long, an open design with no canopy, made of fiberglass-reinforced resin with a single outboard engine and three rows for sea
ting. To get it down to the water, you had to winch it off its cradle, get it out over the water, lower it down, and pull a release bar, freeing it from its falls.

  I climbed into the MOB and hit the engine switch. I started it up briefly, then the pirates tried it. Each time the outboard roared to life.

  “We can take this boat?” Tall Guy said. Some of the tension seemed to have left his face. Obviously, the pirates wanted to know they could get away if they had to.

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll even get it in the water for you.”

  He and Musso talked it over in Somali.

  Their radio crackled.

  “We have your buddy,” Mike Perry said. “You there, pirates? We have your buddy and will trade him for the captain.”

  Tall Guy keyed the button.

  “Who is this?”

  “Chief engineer.”

  “You have our man?”

  “Yeah. And we’ll do a trade for our captain.”

  This sparked another round of intense dialogue in Somali. Tall Guy looked at me.

  “We need money,” Tall Guy said. “We can’t leave without money.”

  I nodded.

  “I understand that,” I said. “I have plenty of money in my room. You can have it if you leave the ship.”

  “How much?”

  “Thirty thousand dollars.”

  They weren’t impressed. They were out on the Indian Ocean looking for a few million, not thirty grand. But I sensed it might be just enough to get them off my ship, if they still had hostages. Hostages would give them a shot at the big money.

  A deal was coming into focus.

  We climbed up to E deck and walked into my room. Little did I know that Shane had been monitoring our progress and had been caught in the passageway ahead of us. With nowhere else to go, he’d darted into my room and searched desperately for a place to hide. As I walked in with the two pirates, he was hiding in the closet not five feet away. “You don’t know how many times you saved my life,” he told me later. “I’d be walking around the ship and I’d hear you talking and I’d dive into the nearest opening.”

  Later, when I had time to reflect on these hours, I got a lot of satisfaction from the knowledge that I’d been able to keep Shane and the others safe. But I wasn’t thinking about it then—I was so immersed in the details of getting the Somalis their money and getting them off my ship that I wasn’t thinking of anything else, let alone whether a crew member was within arm’s reach. I went right to my safe, spun the dial, hit the combination, and then opened the safe door. I pulled out the $30,000, which was arranged into stacks of different denominations, and handed it to Musso. He and Tall Guy counted the money and nodded.

  All the while, the pirates were talking on the radio with Mike, the chief engineer. They agreed that the crew would give up the Leader, and the pirates would hand me over at the same time. I wasn’t involved in the negotiations—I was too busy getting things ready for the Somalis to leave.

  We went back to the MOB and I began to raise it off its cradle with the davit, a small crane that lifts and lowers materials down to the water. I needed to lift the boat up, swing it over the side, and lower it to the water forty feet below.

  But there was still no power. So I started to hand-crank the son of a bitch as Musso and Tall Guy watched over me with their AKs.

  “Wait,” Tall Guy said. “We need more fuel.”

  “More fuel?” I said. “You can make it to Somalia with what you have onboard.”

  You couldn’t. With the two and a half gallons onboard the MOB, they’d make it halfway to the coastline and then be drifting. I knew that, but they didn’t.

  “More fuel,” Musso said. “You listen to us.”

  “How much do you need?”

  “Plenty, we need plenty.”

  Whatever it took. I went up to the deck to the Bosun locker and took out a hose, a pipe fitting, and a clamp. I cut the hose to the right length—the Somalis had never taken my three-inch jackknife off me—and brought it over to the tank for the emergency diesel generator. I knew there were a hundred gallons in there at the very least. I found some plastic five-gallon buckets, lined them up, attached the hose to the drain on the generator fuel tank, and let the diesel flow into the bucket.

  Tall Guy came up next to me and looked at the panel on the emergency generator. He reached up and started flipping switches up and down. He probably thought he could get the damn ship running if he hit the right combination.

  I yelled over to him. “Can you please leave those alone?”

  He laughed and walked away. I went back to my fueling.

  I’d chosen the buckets carefully. They were the dirtiest ones on that part of the ship, filled with grease and chemicals and the backwash that accumulates when you run a container ship. If that didn’t gum up the MOB’s engine, nothing would.

  The buckets filled up quickly. The pirates helped me ferry them over to the deck near the MOB. Once we had the vessel in the water, we’d lower them down. With that much fuel, they could make it anywhere on the Somali coast.

  As I was ferrying the buckets over, I passed the rope scuttle hatch sticking three feet above the deck. That particular hatch led down to the aft line locker, a little area where we kept all the rope for the Maersk Alabama. And the hatch was standing wide open, with a line running down into it. There’s only one reason that hatch would be open: the crew must have been down in the scuttle, lying on the ropes, trying to catch a breeze and escape the infernal heat of the ship.

  I was hoping the pirates wouldn’t notice. The hatch door had been shut the first time we passed it. Now it was gaping open. But, sure enough, instead of walking by they stopped right in front of it. And after a few seconds of confusion, Tall Guy and Musso leaned over and peered into the darkness.

  I brought my radio up. “Guys, they see that hatch. Get away from it now. The pirates are right above you.”

  Musso brought out his flashlight and pointed it down. I held my breath. If they found the crew now, the deal was off.

  Tall Guy unslung the AK-47 from his shoulder and pointed it down the scuttle. They must have heard the guys moving around down there. Goddamn it, I thought. It’s over.

  He pulled the gun back and handed it to Musso. Tall Guy ducked down and put his head into the hatch and tried to see if he could wriggle through the opening. They were going to go down there and hunt my men down. But not even he was skinny enough to get his shoulders through the hatch.

  “Come on,” I called to Musso from about fifteen feet away. “Do you want this fuel or not? I need some help here or we’ll never get going.”

  Musso looked back at Tall Guy, who was wrenching his shoulders through the hatch opening.

  “Get out of there,” I whispered fiercely into the radio. “Pirates coming down.”

  Musso tapped Tall Guy on the side and said something in Somali. Tall Guy pulled his head out of the hatch and looked over at me.

  “Grab those two buckets,” I called out. “Quit fucking around already. Do you want to leave the ship or not?”

  Tall Guy took another look down the hatch, peering with his flashlight darting up and down. Then he turned and started walking toward me.

  I felt relief wash over me.

  I got in the MOB. The pirates wanted me to teach them how to start and kill the engine. I was more than happy to do it.

  Tall Guy and Musso were really warming up to the idea of sailing away. “We’ll just get off your boat,” Musso said to me, cracking a smile. “We’ll be done here.” Thirty thousand dollars wouldn’t buy them a Mercedes SUV and a mansion, but it was a hell of a lot more than most Somalis would see in a lifetime of working. Not bad for a day’s banditry. As far as I was concerned, they were welcome to it. It was a small price to pay for getting my ship and my crew back.

  By now, it was late in the afternoon. I was rushing to get the Somalis off the Maersk Alabama before nightfall. I was winching the MOB off its cradle, but the progress was painfully s
low.

  “Where are the engineers?” Musso said. “Pains in the asses, those guys.”

  “I hear you,” I said. I smiled to myself. I’d managed to create a little bit of reverse Stockholm syndrome with the Somalis. Tall Guy and Musso and myself were united in our disgust at the incompetence of my crew. Shit, they must have thought, how does he sail with these idiots? The two tall Somalis were competent sailors, I would find out later, and the Leader was as smart as they came. But I suspected they hadn’t stormed enough ships to learn the basics of hostage-taking. Believing that the captain couldn’t get his men on deck was an amateurs’ mistake.

  With $30,000 in their hands, the two pirates were satisfied. Still, Shane’s little trick of faking a distress call to the navy had clearly had its effect. They were continually sweeping the horizon for any sign of a destroyer. But their mood had improved.

  As had mine. This nightmare was almost over. I wouldn’t even allow myself to think we were nearly free. Too much Irish superstition, maybe—or my dad’s insistence on finishing the job. But that threat of spending the rest of my life in a black hole in bandit country seemed further and further away.

  “We can do this,” Musso said to me. “But now we need our guy.”

  “You can’t get your guy until we’re in the water,” I shot back. No way was I doing an exchange until these guys were off my ship.

  “Okay, okay.”

  My radio was beeping but it still had a little juice left. I walked over to the fuel buckets and pretended to fuss with one of them. Meanwhile, I called the chief engineer on the radio.

  “Chief, these guys are ready to get into the MOB. We’ll make the exchange once we’re in the water.”

  “Got it.”

  “As soon as they’re off the ship, get it ready to go. I want you to get out of here ASAP. When you see your chance, go. Don’t worry about me.”

  There was no false bravado here. Victory to me was separating my men and my ship from these bandits. The rest I’d worry about later.

  Now I saw Young Guy climbing down the ladders. I was ecstatic. That meant one seaman was up on the bridge, completely unguarded.