A Captain's Duty

by Richard Phillips

  Young Guy had been just an afterthought up until then. He wasn’t running anything. He was taking orders. Now he came and sat across the aisle from me. I was in the number-three port seat and he was in the number-three starboard. I watched him sit down and then I looked away.

  Click.

  I looked over. He had the AK in his lap and he was looking at me.

  Click.

  He was pointing the gun at me. I guessed there was no clip in it. Still, hearing a gun fired while it’s pointed at your gut is a nervous feeling. I twitched the first few times.

  Young Guy was looking at me like I was a laboratory rat. Just studying me with these cold, cold eyes. They were dead. I’d never seen eyes like that before. It was like a kid who doesn’t really know what he’s doing, who has no idea what life and death mean. Young Guy wouldn’t have done that before the escape attempt but now it was as if he had permission to treat me like a piece of garbage. Something had changed in him. Something had changed in me, too.

  I’m a big John Wayne fan and I remembered a line from one of his movies, The Searchers. A cowboy has apologized for shooting a desperado. And John Wayne says something like, “That’s all right. Some men need killing.”

  I’d never met a man who needed killing. But right then, Young Guy did. He was like an assassin toying with his victim before he put him out of his misery. He was enjoying it to all hell.

  He went on that way for a good twenty minutes. I tried to ignore him, but every so often I’d look over at him. He loved that. But there was no emotion in his eyes. He was just prodding me, looking for a reaction, wanting to see terror up close.

  The sun came up and the broiler switched back on. The pirates were talking with the interpreter on the radio and I heard a launch approach again.

  Great, I thought. More Pop-Tarts. And it was. Pop-Tarts and fresh radio batteries and water. I couldn’t believe it.

  I looked out one of the hatches and saw that the Maersk Alabama wasn’t in the same spot it had been yesterday. It had been behind the navy ship by a mile or two, but now it was gone. As we turned, I scanned the horizon and realized they’d sailed off. I was so relieved to see that the guys were on their way back to safety.

  Later I found out that Shane had fought leaving me. He said he would have rather done anything than sail off without me aboard. But the navy insisted, as there were still pirates in the area and they didn’t want another hostage situation on their hands. Eighteen armed servicemen went aboard the Maersk Alabama and they turned their bow for our original destination, Mombasa.

  The Leader stayed up in the cockpit, occasionally hacking and spitting like an old man with TB. The pirates were smoking cigarettes continually. They were agitated as hell. The good times were over for good.

  “That stuff will kill you,” I said.

  There was no banter back. Young Guy just stared at me with those dead eyes.

  “Bad for your health.”

  Nothing.

  And then the lighter they’d all been using broke. They’d either run out of fuel for it or it had just broken down from overuse, but the thing wouldn’t light up. And that struck me as incredibly funny. Because the look in their eyes was one of panic.

  “What’s the matter?” I said. “Can’t get it to light? Oh, that’s too bad.”

  I was still trussed up and the ropes were painful. They’d stopped letting me urinate off the side of the boat. They’d given me a bottle to piss in. And they were rationing my water, even though we had gallons to spare. Sometimes they’d give me a bottle, other times they’d refuse.

  In short, they were doing everything they could to make me miserable. So to see them suffer just a little bit was a bonus.

  “Maybe you should break out the khat,” I said. Khat is a narcotic leaf that everyone in Somalia uses. But it has to be chewed immediately after being harvested, so I guess it wasn’t a good choice for extended hostage-takings.

  The Somalis were going nuts. They searched high and low on the boat for another lighter but no luck. I didn’t tell them about the spare matches that are kept in all lifeboats. Finally, they broke open one of the flashlights and took out the reflective cone.

  “Oh, very smart,” I said. Everything that happened on the boat became the subject of consuming interest to me. If I let my mind focus on the heat and the passing of time, I would have gone out of my mind. So the quest for fire became entertainment. These guys were getting the shakes and if they didn’t get nicotine, they were going to die trying.

  They placed the cone in direct sunlight and put some paper at the bottom of it as they chattered back and forth in Somali and English.

  “Move it over here. Tilt, tilt.”

  They stared at the paper, just willing it to light.

  “Got to get this going, oh yes.”

  I laughed, but I was leaning over to see what was happening too.

  “Not working,” I said after ten minutes. “Oh, that is a pity.”

  But they were committed. They just kept watching the paper at the bottom of the cone like it was going to reveal the secret of life itself. And after twenty minutes, smoke appeared. Musso and Tall Guy nearly pissed themselves with excitement.

  “Yes! Yes!” they yelled. The paper caught on fire and the two pirates took it and lit their cigarettes. After that they would just light the next smoke off the old one and keep a constant source of fire on the boat.

  But that was the only excitement. Everyone seemed to withdraw into themselves, myself included. I kept going over the escape in my mind, thinking, Should I have grabbed the gun? Or Should I just have kept swimming? And my other mistakes came back to haunt me: I should have dropped the fuckers forty feet into the water when we were deploying the MOB. Or I should have never transferred to the lifeboat. And, strangely, Where did they get that white ladder? That still mystified me.

  What really hurt, though, was the failed escape. I didn’t think I’d get another chance.

  One of the pirates came over and felt my hands. They were getting puffy and sore from being tied up. They’d pinch my fingers to see if I reacted, but I barely felt it.

  “Oh, that’s good, that’s good,” they’d say. Maybe they wanted to incapacitate me, or maybe they just wanted to inflict pain. I didn’t know. My mind was starting to drift. I was constantly moving my hands and trying to get some play in the rope. I even bent down and brought my hands up to my mouth and tried to chew through the strands. But it was high-quality stuff. It would take me a week to get through it.

  Musso caught me gnawing on the rope.

  “No, you can’t do that,” he said, springing up and rushing over to me. “That’s halal. You can’t put your mouth on it.”

  “Halal.” They started to use that word. I gathered it meant clean in a religious sense.

  “If you keep chewing that, we’re going to put a stick in your mouth and gag you,” he said. He was angry and kind of disgusted, too.

  “Okay, I won’t chew.”

  “Stop moving, too.”

  “I’m not going to stop moving,” I spat back at him. I could barely move as it was. They wanted me to lie there like a corpse.

  “No moving!”

  “What are you going to do?” I said. “Tie me up?”

  Musso hissed at me to shut up.

  As I was arguing with the pirates, 7,500 miles away, Andrea was getting calls from everyone she’d ever known. She even heard from an old boyfriend she’d dated in her early twenties before we met. “He was my first real heartbreak,” Andrea told me. “We hadn’t really spoken since then, more than thirty years ago. When the person screening my calls said his name, I said ‘I’ll take it.’”

  Andrea got on the phone. “Oh, I get a phone call as soon as it appears I’m available…,” she said.

  “I saw you on TV,” the boyfriend said, laughing, “and I just had to call. I see you haven’t lost your sense of humor.”

  “He told me I looked good, which was a little surreal,” Andrea remembers
. “He just wanted me to know he was pulling for me and my family. I knew it took a lot for him to call me out of the blue like that.”

  The support was overwhelming at times. There were people coming through the door crying hysterically and saying, “Oh my God, Andrea!” And she would say, “It’s going to be all right.” They were taken aback, of course. They’d say, “You’re not supposed to be comforting me—I’m supposed to be comforting you!”

  By Friday afternoon, our little farmhouse was full. My sisters came up and added their own special flavor to the mix. The Phillips are a wild bunch with our own brand of humor, which not everyone gets, including Andrea sometimes. One example: that night, my sisters were joking with Andrea about Hollywood making a film about the hostage-taking and began casting all the parts: “Hmm, maybe George Clooney for the lead role.” Then my sister Dawn, God love her, for a reason known only to herself, brought out a framed prom picture from high school and placed it next to Andrea’s pillow on our bed. Andrea came into the bedroom and saw it sitting there, and she said, “Dawn, what in the world…”

  “Isn’t that hilarious?”

  “Isn’t what hilarious?”

  “My prom date, he looks just like Richard at that age.”

  It was true. The guy had the beard and everything. But what was his picture doing next to Andrea’s pillow? “Everyone said I went to my prom with my own brother!” Dawn said, breaking into peals of laughter. “Oh, I just had to bring it.”

  Andrea’s friends Amber and Paige, who’d volunteered to fly in early from her Colorado snowboarding trip, were also at the house. They knew not to treat her like a piece of broken china. At one point, Andrea told me, she was sitting at the dining room table next to the kitchen, and her friends were in there moving things around: her dishes and her tea kettle, just moving them a few feet from where she usually kept them. Paige and Amber had taken over Andrea’s role of managing the house and knew she hated to lose control of her kitchen. Paige looked at Andrea and said, “It’s just killing you, isn’t it?” she said.

  “What?”

  “That we’re in your kitchen.”

  They were rearranging things around just to get at her. Which is what Andrea needed. If you treat someone like her husband is going to die any minute, you’re not doing her any favors. Humor helped.

  Friday Andrea finally got some professional help. Maersk sent a couple of representatives, Jonathan and Alison, to deal with the media. It just about saved her life. But she was a little sarcastic when Jonathan walked through the door. Andrea looked at him and said in a half-joking way, “You got your ship back. What do you care what happens to my husband?” He must have thought, Okaaaaay, here we go. But Andrea was hurting.

  Neither Jonathan nor Alison had any idea of what they were walking into before they arrived, whether it would be a house full of angry Vermont hicks or hysterical types. They were suprised by the warm, sympathetic atmosphere they found. Jonathan was a stable, no-nonsense guy, while Alison became my wife’s new best friend. Alison instantly became part of the clan and she could empathize with what Andrea was going through. But what also helped was that Jonathan and Alison could see things as they were. They told the family, “Okay, this is what we’re going to do: We’re going to shut the TV off. We’re going to put up a tripod and a big pad of paper and we’re going to write on it any information that we can confirm. And we’re going to have someone handle the phones and let Andrea take a call only if she really needs to.” Alison always had a poster board and for every issue that came up, she would write down how the team was going to deal with it.

  The constant pull of watching the news was hard to deal with emotionally. It was constantly the same news, over and over, without the breakthrough Andrea was hoping for. She kept seeing my picture on the screen and it would go right through her. So Alison turned off the TV and from then on, the family got their information from the State Department, from the Department of Defense, and from Maersk only, which got Andrea off the roller-coaster of waiting for the next bulletin to flash across the TV screen. Now she had people screening phone calls. She’d hear someone’s name and say, “Oh, I’ll take that” or “I just can’t right now.”

  There was one thing that was kind of eerie that day back at my home. That afternoon, my optometrist called Andrea and said, “I heard Rich jumped off the boat. I’m sure he lost his glasses in the process. I’ve made up a new pair and I’m sending them over.” Then, with all the people coming in and out of the house, the toilet stopped working. Finally, my neighbor Mike had to take it apart down to the seal and snake the thing. He discovered the thing causing the blockage was a pair of eyeglasses. My sister Nancy, who was at the house, said, “Oh my God, they’re probably Richard’s.” Everyone laughed. Just hours earlier, I’d jumped off the lifeboat and had lost my glasses and it was as if they’d traveled around the world and ended up in our sewer line.

  And Andrea was able to send me a message through the State Department: “Everybody in the ’hood is pulling for you. We love you.” The ’hood was our nickname for our closest friends and family. Andrea knew that would put a smile on my face.

  FIFTEEN

  Day 3, 1800 Hours

  The FBI is confirming its hostage negotiators have been included in by the Navy to assist in negotiations with the Somali pirates…. What they’ll tell you is, by all accounts, this is being done by remote communication. There are no FBI personnel on board U.S. Navy ships out in those waters at this time. So, it is most likely that what is happening is they are in some type of voice contact with the Navy, advising them on how to deal with this.

  —CNN Pentagon correspondent

  It’s a very significant foreign policy challenge for the Obama administration. Their citizens are in the hands of criminals and people are waiting to see what happens.

  —Graeme Gibbon-Brooks, maritime intelligence expert

  The pirates were nervous. They avoided sticking their heads up in the horizontal hatch or getting too close to the vertical ones. They didn’t want to be picked off by a sharpshooter. They knew that if they were all visible at once, the navy could take them out. The doors were open but they didn’t stand out there for a marksman to get a bead on. Damn smart of them.

  But they knew the history, too. No one had tried to rescue hostages from Somali pirates. It just wasn’t done. Negotiation and ransom-paying was the order of the day. At that point, no military had attacked pirates operating out of Somalia. And they clearly didn’t want to be the first.

  The Leader frequently got on the radio: “No military action, no military action.” Whenever things got tight, he practically chanted it at the navy.

  The engine was running constantly. And the pirates were tensed up, as if they were expecting something. I wanted to ask them, What do you guys know that I don’t? But that wasn’t possible. The only times they spoke to me were to call me a “stupid American” or to order me around. The arrival of the Bainbridge had clearly altered how the pirates saw me. In their eyes, a rescue attempt had to be imminent, and so I now represented not only a payday but a very real threat to their lives.

  The navy demanded to speak to me on the radio. The Leader handed it to me.

  “Are they treating you okay?” came an American voice.

  “Well, they’re acting pretty strange but they’re taking care of me,” I said.

  “Okay, good. Let me talk to the Leader.”

  The hair on the back of my neck rose up. It was almost like he knew the pirates.

  Later that night, I was sitting there, and the Leader started dry-firing the pistol. And then the chanting began. The electric charge in the boat changed. It was in their posture, in the way they looked at me. I think I’m able to read people pretty accurately—it’s something you have to learn as a captain, when you’re giving assignments to guys who have your life in their hands, so my sixth sense is pretty well honed. Something evil came on the boat that night.

  The Leader was chanting. He gave the
pistol to Tall Guy, said, “You do it,” and whispered something to him in Somali. The others were answering, either with one word or with memorized stanzas that they chanted back together. The three pirates got up and approached me. Musso came back and held the ropes around my wrists, while Young Guy positioned himself at my legs. Tall Guy was behind me with the gun.

  “Stretch out your arms and your legs,” Musso said.

  I shook my head.

  “Do it!”

  Musso grabbed my wrists and Young Guy began pulling on my legs.

  I was fighting them. “You’ll never do it,” I said to Musso through my teeth. “You’re not strong enough.” This went on for about fifteen minutes—taking a break, then grabbing my hands. Or trying to make me laugh so they could catch me off guard.

  They rested. Musso looked at me like he was genuinely puzzled.

  “What’s your tribe?” he said.

  “What? What do you mean, ‘my tribe’?”

  He laughed, like How could someone not know what his tribe was?

  “Your tribe, your people.”

  I was still half-gasping for breath. Now you want to chat? But anything to keep his mind off murder.

  “I told you I’m an American.”

  He shook his head.

  “No, that’s your nationality. What’s your tribe?”

  “I’m Irish.”

  “Ah, Irish,” he said.

  He shook his head.

  “Irish, you trouble. You a pain in the ass, Irish.”

  I nodded. “You got that right.”

  He nodded. Then something changed in his eyes and he jerked up on the rope. I gasped, pulling my hands back down.

  All of a sudden, BOOOOM. There was a white flash of stars in my eyes and my head drooped forward.

  I thought I was dead. But I wasn’t. Blood was trickling down my hands and onto the rope. Musso flinched.

  “Don’t do it!” he screamed.

  Tall Guy emerged from behind me, the gun in his hand. His shoulders were slumping and his head was down. His whole body expressed total dejection. As Musso cursed me, Tall Guy went to the front of the lifeboat and just collapsed.