A Captain's Duty

by Richard Phillips

  Matt Lauer called the house, his third try at an interview. Andrea took the phone. “Matt, this is totally off the record,” Andrea told him, “but I’ve always liked your show, so I’ll say hi.” And he asked her what I would think about all the attention the story was getting. Andrea said I’d probably laugh and say, “Andrea’s got it harder. I’m only dealing with four pirates. She’s got the whole media.” (True.) And Matt laughed and said, “We’re that bad?” And she told him, “Yeah, you are!”

  Andrea paced from room to room, completely numb. She told me later that, for moments at a time, she would feel like she was having an out-of-body experience. You never expect to be the person on the cover of People magazine. You think, This can’t be happening. This only happens to other people. Not just the tragedy, but the media saturation, the disembodied voice from the TV talking about the most intimate details of your life. Andrea would see a picture on TV and say, “Oh my God, it’s Richard.” What was happening was intensely personal, but now everyone was watching it unfold like it was a made-for-TV movie.

  She began to notice odd things: that in times of crisis, people sent enormous amounts or food: lasagna, bars of chocolate, tins of cookies, brownies. Friends she hadn’t heard from in twenty years called, but people she spoke to just last week never did. Some people around her resented not being at the center of the story, even if that story was a tragedy. And Andrea realized that when you’re under so much pressure, you tend to lash out at people close to you. “When I got frustrated, I would snap at a family member,” she said. “You had to be stoic with everyone else, so my family took the brunt of my anger.”

  It was hard for her just to get out of the house. But Thursday afternoon she managed to sneak away and walk back across our fields to visit an elderly neighbor who lives alone. Andrea knew she’d be worried about me and the kids and she wanted to let her know that everyone was okay. That little walk was one of the few times she could clear her head and be alone—except when she was in the bathroom.

  The press frenzy was growing more intense. Andrea could see reporters from every window in our house as she paced from room to room. They were blocking the two-lane road in front—the only road into town—and barricading our neighbor’s driveway. So when the governor, Jim Douglas, called and asked, “What can we do for you, Mrs. Phillips?” she told him, “Send the state police and get these people off my front yard!” The town clerk offered to have everyone up in the parking lot of the town hall and finally the family asked the reporters to pack up and go there. That took an enormous weight off Andrea’s mind.

  Later in the week, a neighbor told Andrea she was talking with a female television reporter while this whole circus was under way. This journalist said, “You know, I saw Andrea sitting out on the back porch and I so wanted to run up there and get a scoop, but this woman just looked so serene. She had a moment of peace and I didn’t want to take that away from her.” Andrea was so thankful that the journalist let her have those few minutes alone. Some of the reporters showed real humanity.

  She kept getting updates throughout the night from the company and the two FBI women: the navy was on the scene and they’d had a visual of me, which, she later learned, in a hostage situation, they refer to as “proof of life.” “What’s he doing, getting a suntan?” Andrea joked to her friends. They understood that Andrea’s offbeat sense of humor was a coping mechanism. She was really thinking, What the hell was Rich thinking, getting on that lifeboat? But deep down she knew I was smart enough to do what was needed. There was also a report that the navy had had some communication with me and actually heard my voice. So she was getting some straight information and she was really grateful for that. And Thursday night, they gave her this cryptic message: “It’s either going to be a very good Friday, or it’s going to be a Happy Easter.”

  “I went to sleep dreaming of you,” she told me.

  FOURTEEN

  Day 3, 0200 Hours

  More Warships Head to Scene of Hostage American Ship Captain: Somali pirates and their hostage American sea captain were adrift Friday in a lifeboat off the Horn of Africa shadowed by a U.S. destroyer, with more warships on the way in a U.S. show of force.

  —FOX News, April 10

  As we passed into the early hours of Friday, I was able to catch some sleep, just sitting up in the seat. Other times, I would pretend to be dozing and see what the pirates were up to. Would they let down their guard? No such luck. The Leader in the cockpit would snap on his flashlight and shine it on me, to see if I was making a move toward one of the hatches.

  Finally, I saw Musso make his way up the aisle from the aft end to the front of the boat. He put down his AK and lay down on the deck. After a while I thought I heard him snoring up there. The boat got very, very quiet. Pretty soon, I could hear two people snoring, Musso and Young Guy. The Leader was dozing in the cockpit; his head kept drooping as if he were at a bad movie. I was leaning out into the aisle to try to see if they were faking. They weren’t. That left Tall Guy.

  After a while, he stood up and stepped through the hatch. I saw he was going to the rear hatch to take a piss. And I saw him put his AK down right next to the door, so that he could have both hands free.

  Maybe this is it, I thought. My whole body was fully awake and I leaned forward and balanced on the balls of my feet. I felt my heart begin to race.

  I watched Tall Guy, standing in the open door with the moonlit water beyond him. The boat was rocking slightly in the swells. He reached out a hand to get a grip on the door frame. Then both hands were in front of him. It was calm enough that he didn’t have to hang on.

  Now, I thought. Quit stalling and take your chance. Do it! I tried to feel my feet. Were they asleep? I carefully put one down underneath me, trying not to make any noise, to see if it would support my weight.

  It seemed like hours, but I’m sure it was just a few seconds. I got up from my seat and moved toward the guy. In two strides, I was out of the hatch and at the same time I extended my arms and shoved Tall Guy. He turned halfway, falling, and I pushed him again, harder. He screamed—My God, it was so damn loud—and just as I was getting ready to dive into the water I looked down and saw the gun. For a split second, I thought of grabbing it and turning it on the pirates. I would have been just able to stop my momentum and grab it and turn and fire, but I thought, You have no idea how to shoot an AK. And with that thought, I swept forward and dove into the water.

  My first thought wasn’t Freedom or Swim like hell, it was just, Good Lord, this water is so deliciously cool. The pirates had never let me jump in and cool off and my body was so exhausted from the heat that I just had a sensation of pure refreshment. I almost wished I could lay back in the ocean and just relax and forget about the whole escape thing. The water felt that good on my skin. My second thought was: my glasses. I’ve lost them. They were mostly for reading, but I felt naked out there without them, exposed. I took a breath, dove under the water, and swam as far as I could. I did it again. I dove under the surface and swam, holding my breath for as long as I could. The water above me was surprisingly clear, with a greenish tinge to it, like swimming in a pool with a light above it. The moonlight actually shone through.

  My lungs were burning and I had to surface. I came up, broke the surface, and gulped in lungfuls of air. I spotted the pirates immediately, one hundred feet away. They had started the boat and were going around in circles, hanging out the door of the lifeboat with their AK-47s pointing at the ocean’s surface.

  Tall Guy was screaming in Somali and I could hear and see movement inside the boat. And I said to myself, Okay, what are you going to do now? I saw that there were clouds skidding across the sky but the moon was out and the Somalis would be able to spot my head, a white blob, in the dark water.

  The boat turned and now the bow was pointing straight at me. If I didn’t do something, I’d end up as propellor chum.

  I spotted the navy ship about half a mile away. I took a quick breath and began to swim
with all I had in me, doing the Australian crawl. I kept an image in my mind of what I’d just seen, and it hit me: Man, the pirates are pissed. They were angrier than I’d ever seen them, swearing and yelling at the tops of their voices. Without me in that boat, the navy could strafe the vessel and they’d have more holes in them than Bonnie and Clyde.

  I knew there were sharks off the coast of Somalia—great whites and tigers and even the ugliest of them all, the mega-mouth. Human smugglers had been known to toss their cargo off the sides of the boats in this area, and body parts would drift to shore with huge teeth marks on them. But I brushed aside any thoughts of getting eaten out there. If anything was going to kill me that night, it was the pirates.

  I was caught in a bind, though. I wanted to make enough noise so that the navy would see me and put the Bainbridge between me and the Somalis, or just take them out. I knew they’d be on heightened alert. I knew there was some sailor watching the lifeboat through high-powered binoculars or a rifle scope and I wanted them to be able to see it was me in the water and not one of the pirates. But if I made too much noise, the Somalis would run me down.

  I was gasping for breath as I swam. I was not in the best cardio shape. I could feel my heart pumping and I thought, Jesus, just let me make it to the ship.

  I turned and looked back. The moonlight lay across the ocean like a white tablecloth and I could see the pirates as clear as day. They were headed straight toward me, with Tall Guy clinging to the side—they hadn’t even bothered to pull him in. I didn’t know if they’d spotted me or if they just assumed I’d be swimming toward the navy ship, but they were fifty feet away and closing fast.

  I sucked in a breath and dove again, hearing the lifeboat approaching. Five feet down, paddling upward to keep from surfacing, I saw the wake of the boat above me, ghostly white. The pirates passed directly above my head, and then turned and did a full circle.

  The lifeboat stopped and the pirates killed the engine. They were right above me. They must have spotted me, I thought. No way they got that lucky.

  I started to drift up slowly. I surfaced near the stern of the lifeboat. I reached up and touched the side, then dove right back down. But there was nowhere to go. If I swam away, I’d surface and they’d be able to spot me in a second. I swam back toward the lifeboat and came up by the bow this time. I grabbed hold of the edge of the boat and just hung on for dear life, hoping the pirates wouldn’t see me. I hung there for thirty seconds and I could hear them running and screaming around the boat. I was in the shadow of the boat itself. To see me, they’d have to lean out and catch sight of me below.

  The lifeboat was rocking in the swell, and I had to hold on hard to avoid losing it and floating free. The Somalis started up the engine and began going around in slow circles. I grabbed the engine cooling pipes that come under the boat’s keel and I held on to them as I moved along with the lifeboat.

  The pirates stopped the boat and I came up on the other side of the bow. I heard footsteps and immediately dove back down into the water, swam under the hull, and came up on the other side. From playing hide-and-seek on the five-hundred-foot Maersk Alabama, I was now doing the same thing under a twenty-five-foot boat. I could feel my chances slipping away.

  I’d lost any hope of getting to the navy ship. I had no idea if they were steaming right at us under full power, or if they were still sitting dead in the water, but I knew I wasn’t going to make it. I made my way up to the forward port side. The pirates were running around the exterior of the boat, shouting at one another as they peered into the water.

  I heard footsteps coming toward me and dove to the other side of the boat, my hands going one over the other on the cooling pipe. I dove down, pulled myself along the pipe, and came up midship on the starboard side. As I surfaced, I came face-to-face with Tall Guy. He screamed.

  My heart stopped. I lunged at him, grabbing his neck and trying to force his head under the water. He was holding on with both hands to the safety rope that was tied to the boat and he had it in a death grip. I shoved his head under the water and his scream turned to a burble of air. He gasped and came up, his eyes and teeth bright white in the darkness. He kept screaming in Somali, spit and water flying out of his mouth. I was going to try to drown him but he had that safety rope so tight I couldn’t get him down in the water. He was unexpectedly strong. There was a rush of footsteps toward the starboard side. I could tell the other pirates were running toward us, their feet drumming on the fiberglass.

  I let go of Tall Guy’s neck and dove back down. The bastards knew I was under the boat. Will they shoot through the deck? I thought. They were fucking cowboys with those guns and I wouldn’t have put it past them.

  Now I was like a rat caught in a tiny room. I had nowhere to go. I came up on the other side but I saw a shadow and heard voices coming close to me. I took a ragged breath and slipped under the water again. When I came up on the other side, I saw a pirate right above me with the muzzle of an AK-47 a foot in front of my head. It jerked up and fired two shots—BOOM BOOM—that slapped into the water just above my head.

  “Okay,” I cried out. “You got me. You got me.”

  The pirates kept the gun on me while they screamed, “We kill you! We kill you!” They pulled Tall Guy into the boat through the hatch and then they came for me. They were helping me into the boat at the same time they were beating me. They were so out of their minds with rage that they couldn’t even wait until I’d collapsed into the lifeboat before they started whacking me with their fists and the butt of the 9 mm. As I raised my arms over my head, they whaled away at me.

  After about a minute of kicking and punching, they brought me over the side of the boat and tied me to a horizontal bar on the canopy. Musso did the knots and he trussed me up good. I was on my knees and he took my hands and tied them to the bar and then pulled my arms up until my shoulders creaked. He tied my feet to the base of the seat in front of me.

  And then they really went to work on me.

  If I’d been captured by some burly guys, I’d probably still be getting plastic surgery, because the Somalis wanted to tear me apart. They were spitting mad, stomping on the deck, spittle flying as they abused me. But they were thin guys and they didn’t have a huge amount of power behind their blows. Honestly, my sister Patty hits harder. I could feel my face and my ribs getting bruised up but I knew I could survive that. What really worried me was the gun. Young Guy was whacking me with it in the knee and every time he did, the muzzle would pass by my torso. He’s trying to beat me, I thought, but he’s going to shoot me instead.

  “We kill you now! Kill you!” They were like angry bees.

  They didn’t let up. One would take a break and pace up and down the boat and then come up and start slapping and kicking me again. But there wasn’t room enough for all four of them to get a shot at me. So they’d take turns.

  Finally they wore themselves out pounding on me. They were gasping for breath and so was I. And I was back in that oven. That hurt almost as much as the beating.

  “I’m losing sensation in my hands,” I yelled at them. “You have to loosen the knots.” I felt like the rope was going to sever my hands. The pain was excruciating, like pins and needles multiplied a thousand times.

  Musso came over, untied the knots, and retied them looser.

  They stopped beating me.

  The Leader screamed at his guys in Somali, but I could tell what he was saying from his gestures: “There will be two guys on him always. And one by the door. Always.” From this point on, the guns were always on me, a few feet away, pointed at my torso.

  That was the end of any joviality on their part. I’d killed the jolly mood but good. The mask had been torn off. They were shocked that I’d tried to escape. I wasn’t playing by the rules and I’m sure they felt I was endangering them by trying to save myself.

  Their attitudes toward me changed completely in that instant. I’d been their hostage before, but I’d been a human being. I’d joked with Mu
sso and Tall Guy and I’d even had some fun with Young Guy. Now that was broken. They looked at me like I was an animal, a thing.

  As I sat trying to catch my breath, I thought, Either I’m getting out of here alive or they are. But not both.

  We were a few hours away from sunrise on Friday. It felt like the escape attempt had taken half an hour, but I’m sure it was just five minutes, if that. I thought, Maybe I really am out here alone. If the navy was here to rescue me, if they had sharpshooters laid out on the stern waiting for their chance, they would have blasted these sons of bitches out of the water.

  Why hadn’t they done anything? I thought. They must have seen me. They must have watched it all go down. But their ship had never budged.

  Maybe they really are just here to observe, I thought. Some kind of no-shoot orders. I tried to think what the implications of taking down some Somali pirates would be on the world political stage, but my brain was too fogged from fatigue. Later, I learned that the crew on the Bainbridge had seen the incident unfold with their surveillance technology, but they thought it was the pirates taking a swim break. By the time they saw the white of my beard and realized it was me, it was too late to do anything.

  Everyone was exhausted. I was trussed up like a pork roast, and the pirates were lying around, their guns pointed at me. The Leader had really thrown a scare into them. I couldn’t move an inch without one of them popping up their heads and shining a flashlight at me to see what I was doing.