A Captain's Duty

by Richard Phillips

  What just happened? I thought. Did he shoot and miss? Or did he just whack me with the butt of the gun? I couldn’t figure it out. The sensation was so much more powerful than the taps he’d been giving me before. He had to have fired.

  The Leader spoke up. “No action, no action. In three hours we will untie you.”

  I was happy to be alive. But I was pissed, too.

  “What did you do?” I yelled up to the Leader.

  “Shut up,” he said.

  “You tried to kill me?”

  The Leader turned his head and spat.

  “Shut up.”

  “Oh, you mean, ‘Please be quiet, Captain.’”

  I heard Musso snicker at that. Even the Leader cracked a smile. That was the first and last I’d get out of him.

  “You trouble, Irish,” said Musso. “Yeah. You a problem.”

  I didn’t know if they’d tried to kill me or if it was a mock execution. If it was a mind game, it’d been pretty damn convincing. My head was still ringing and the blood was still trickling down my face. But why bluff with me when I had no control over the ransom? And why was Tall Guy looking like he’d failed at something very important? It didn’t make sense.

  I decided I had to get ready in case they tried again.

  I started to stay my good-byes to my family. I called up Andrea’s face in my mind and I spoke to her like we were sitting at the dining room table at our farmhouse in Vermont. I could see everything—the view of the yard through the dining room window, which runs to a field of tall grass and then backs up to a hill covered with pine.

  I said, “Ange, I’m sorry for the call you’re going to get. The one that wakes you up at four in the morning and you already know what they’re going to tell you before they say a word.” I saw her answering the phone, afraid, and tears came to my eyes. I wanted to spare her that pain but I couldn’t. I said, “I love you. I know you’ll cry for a few days but you’ll be all right.” I knew Andrea was a strong person, and I thought, She’ll be okay. Maybe in a month or three months, she’ll be over the worst of it.

  Then I thought of Mariah. She is like her mother, emotional as an Italian opera but, deep down, independent and strong. “Be yourself,” I said to her. “Stay strong, because I’ll always love you.” I knew she’d cry a lot longer, and be deeply affected by it, but eventually she’d come through.

  I came to Dan. This was where I almost lost it completely. Dan is a lot like I was at his age, tough on the outside but still searching. He hides his pain. He’s not as open as his mother or his sister. And I heard his voice saying, “Oh, I don’t have a dad, my father’s never home. He’s always at sea. He doesn’t love me.” That just went through me like a sharp knife. Because I knew he said it to cover up the pain of my not being there. I worried about Dan more than anyone else.

  “God,” I said to myself, “please give him the strength to get through this.” Because I didn’t know if he could. I didn’t want that thought—“My father doesn’t love me”—to be his last thought of me before I died. I didn’t want him passing down to his kids the belief that his father didn’t care about him or mess up his relationship with his kids when he had them.

  I bowed my head. I didn’t want the pirates to see my face. I moved on to something more practical. “Ange, don’t sell the house,” I said. “Not until the kids finish college.” It’s amazing what goes through your mind as a dad. I thought of the unfinished repairs on the house. I wondered if there was enough money in my insurance policy for the kids to finish school. The basics.

  I began to see all the people I was going to meet in heaven. My father and my uncle and Tina, Andrea’s stepmother who had died just a few days earlier of cancer. I hadn’t gotten to see her before she passed. I was going to see James, my brother’s son, who’d died unexpectedly the previous October at too young an age. It was comforting. Each of their faces flashed in front of my eyes.

  And I was going to see the best-looking dog and the worst-acting dog in the world. Frannie. The dog that never came when you called her name…a real nutcase. Just thinking about her made me grin.

  I’ve always said that, when the time comes to die, if I can think back and laugh about what I’ve done and experienced, I’ve had a good life. It’s not about the money or fame or fortune. It’s how you live your life. And I’d had a lucky one.

  But I wasn’t giving up on it yet.

  I stared up at the green strut on the bulkhead that formed what looked like a cross, and I closed my eyes.

  Three hours later, the sun was just about to come up. The pirates started the chanting again. I started to think that they were on the Muslim schedule of praying five times a day, and that these death rituals were timed around that. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Young Guy looking at me. He could see I was emotional and he was really enjoying my grief and the pain I was about to cause my loved ones. In my peripheral vision, I saw the others watching me, too.

  That pissed me off.

  I wouldn’t let them see me cowering or quaking in front of them. I wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction. The anger washed away the faces of my loved ones. I had to deal with these bastards now.

  I looked Young Guy full in the face and then I looked away. I steeled myself. I emptied my eyes of emotion and made my face as hard and cold as I could and tried to look as fanatical as possible. I looked back at Young Guy, really projecting that mad dog look into his face. I started to laugh. Then I looked away again, smiling.

  “You think you’re in charge,” I said, “but none of us are getting out of this alive.”

  His face crumpled and he drew back. He looked at me as if I were some kind of lunatic.

  I cackled. In my peripheral vision, I could see the others looking at me like I had two heads.

  “You’re mad, you’re mad,” Young Guy said.

  “Me? Irate?” I looked at him. “No, I’m not mad. But I am crazy.”

  Well, fuck them. Both sides can play mind games.

  That afternoon, the Leader was on the radio with the navy interpreter, speaking in Somali.

  “How’d it go?” I said, after he’d finished. I wanted to get any information I could.

  “With those guys?” the Leader said. “Oh, I work for them.”

  I was surprised he answered me but even more surprised by what he’d said.

  “You work for the U. S. Navy?”

  “Of course,” he said nonchalantly. “This is a training mission. I do these all the time. We take ships and then see how the navy responds. Your company hired us. There are no pirates out here anymore.”

  “You’re serious?”

  He nodded.

  “I know these navy guys a long time. We’re friends!”

  My brain seemed to go in two directions at once. My first thought was That’s ridiculous. But then I thought, Well, he does seem friendly with the navy guys. And there was what looked like a navy insignia on the butt of the 9 mm along with the kind of lanyard navy personnel use. How did they get that? And why hadn’t the navy rescued me when they had the chance?

  Crazy thoughts were flying through my head. I could feel the beginning of paranoia creeping up on me.

  “We told your chief mate,” the Leader said. “He knew this was a test.”

  “Uh huh,” I said.

  “And your chief engineer. The navy and your company gave us this job.”

  I remembered the faces of Shane and Mike when we were getting the MOB ready. There had been real fear there. The Somalis had to be lying.

  “Right. And was trying to kill me part of the job?”

  He laughed. Then he coughed and spit.

  “Kill you? When did we do that?”

  “You almost killed me on the ship. And in the lifeboat you fired an AK about a foot above my head.”

  He waved the gun in front of him.

  “Warning shot. Part of the training.”

  I was incredulous.

  “And was what happened back there part
of the training, too?”

  “What you mean?”

  “When your boy fired the pistol at my head.”

  He scoffed. “He didn’t fire! He just hit you in the head.” He snorted with laughter.

  I thought about that. He could be right.

  “Hey, Phillips, after this job, I’m going to work on a Greek ship,” the Leader said.

  “Oh yeah? How nice for you.”

  “Yeah, I’m going to be a sailor there. After that I go to work on U.S. ship.”

  “You on a U.S. ship?” I said, laughing. “You’d never cut it.”

  That got the whole boat riled.

  “What! You think American sailors better than Somalis?” Musso cried out. “Ha! All Americans do is sit in their rooms and watch TV and drink beer. Lazy, lazy. We’re Somalis, we’re twenty-four/seven sailors. We can do anything.”

  He threw a length of rope at me.

  “Here, tie the rope like I did.”

  I looked at the rope.

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “To show you are real sailor.”

  “I don’t need to tie a knot to show I can sail a ship. I’ve been doing it for thirty years. I can get by with three or four knots.”

  Musso scoffed. “You baby, Phillips, you baby. Somalis the real sailors.”

  “American sailors are the worst,” Tall Guy chimed in.

  I ignored them and tried to get some rest. I was dozing off when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the pirates do something that snapped me out of my stupor.

  The navy was getting more aggressive, shooting water from fire hoses at us and sending helicopters (which I could hear but not see) to hover near our bow. They were trying to keep the pirates from heading to the Somali coast. Frustrated, the pirates opened up the caps on some of the spare fuel buckets. The fuel didn’t spill out, but they lined them up ready to tip over on the deck, which was hot as hell, even with the engine off.

  It looked to me like they were going to respond to an assault by burning down the boat.

  The Leader looked up at me. “Ha, you see? You are going to die in Somalia and I am going to die in America.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You die here. I die in your home.”

  What he meant was they were going to kill me in Somali waters, so my soul would never be able to leave here. And the Americans were going to kill him. So our souls would switch places. He’d die by an American bullet and I’d die by a Somali one.

  “But I fix them,” he said. “If they try anything, we do suicide attack.”

  I looked at him and then back at the buckets of diesel. Holy shit, I thought. Maybe they didn’t want the fuel to get back to Somalia. Maybe they wanted it to blow up a navy warship, like Al Qaeda did the USS Cole.

  After that, any time they felt threatened, they would open up more gas cans.

  The Leader fired up the engine and we got back under way. After a couple of hours, sparks were flying from the outboard’s exhaust. The thing was overheating. The pirates argued back and forth about what to do. Finally, they cut away some of the insulation that surrounded the exhaust and started to pour water on it.

  If they get the fuel buckets near that, I said to myself, I won’t have to worry about a bullet in the head. This thing will go up in a fireball.

  “I kept going back to the moon,” Andrea told me of this time in the ordeal. “It was the only thing I had that I knew you were looking at, too. I’d say, ‘Richard, you’re under that moon and I’m here with you.’” Friends in Florida called Andrea on videophone and all of them toasted the moon with glasses of champagne under the night sky, saying, “This is for Rich.” Every night from the time I was captured, Andrea would search out that white shape in the night sky. From our bedroom window, she could look out and the moon was right there. “Richard, I’m here with you,” she would say. It was the last thing she did at night.

  Halfway around the world, I could catch only a glimpse of the moon through the lifeboat window.

  Andrea’s best friend, Amber, lay down with her on the bed that night. Their joke was that it’s hippy Vermont, so they could do that without any controversy. They spread my fleece jacket over them and were just talking back and forth about everything except the crisis around them: the fond memories they had of the days they’d roomed together in Boston, the cars I used to pick them up in when they were student nurses, the romantic boat rides Andrea and I would take on Lake Champlain, skinny-dipping at night. Then in the early morning before the sun came up, Amber would wake up with Andrea and they’d talk about her fears. “She became my rock, my Richard substitute,” Andrea joked.

  The one disagreement they had came when Amber wanted to sleep on my side of the bed. Andrea said, “Amber, there’s no way! I’m not going to fight you over that. I’m his wife, I win.” They laughed about it. But mostly they tried to imagine what I was going through at that exact moment on the other side of the world. Nobody had any clue, actually. I could hardly fathom it myself.

  Predawn was always Andrea’s lowest point. That’s when she would have her “alone thoughts”: What if he doesn’t make it? What will I do? Saturday morning was no exception.

  Amber woke up and they started talking: “What if he doesn’t make it, Amber? What am I going to do? I don’t know if I can live without him. He’s my ground. And what about the kids? Could I keep the house? And, my God, I’d have to work full time!”

  Amber laughed.

  “He’s got to be so tired, so hot,” Andrea said. She knew how much I hated being hot. It just drained my strength and sent me right up the wall. “How much longer can he keep going?”

  “Rich is stronger than you think,” Amber said. “He’ll never give up.”

  She did her best to reassure Andrea. Finally, they dropped off to sleep for another hour.

  Later Jonathan and Alison told Andrea that the people at the Defense and State Departments told them around this time: “You need to prepare Andrea for the worst. You need to be ready to break it to her that her husband is dead. Because these things usually don’t end well. They end up with a phone call to someone who can’t bear to hear the news they’re about to get.” But by then, I think, Andrea had faced the facts. “I got it,” she told me. “The ship was safe and the crew was safe. Rich was just one man. You can’t expect to save everything.”

  SIXTEEN

  Day 3, 1900 Hours

  The pirates on the lifeboat sounded desperate. “We are surrounded by warships and don’t have time to talk,” one said. “Please pray for us.”

  —Reuters, April 9

  “The situation will end soon. Either the Americans take their man and sink the boat with my colleagues, or we will soon recover the captain and my colleagues in the coming hours. But if the Americans attempt to use any military operation I am sure that nobody will survive.”

  —Da’ud, Somali pirate, Bloomberg.com, April 11

  All Friday, they kept trussing me up with these intricate series of knots. Musso explained to me how they worked. The white line you could touch only with the right hand. The red line you could touch with either hand. The white lines are the “halal ropes.” You tie it on here. So you have to tie this knot and then this knot and you connect it over here. The ropes could never touch the deck. And if I was going to touch one of the halal ropes with my mouth, I’d have to clean it first. It was very important to them to keep those special knots clean and not to touch them with anything except my right hand. The purpose of all this knot-tying was to prove how superior the Somalis were as sailors, and also to be a pain in the ass.

  Musso kept trying to get me to tie some. I played along for a while. Finally, I gave up. It would take months to get as good as Musso, and I wasn’t planning on being with them that long. I stopped tying the knots.

  “You baby, Phillips. Lazy American.”

  I thought about how different this was from the ship. That had been a battle of nerves and wits. Like chess
. The crew and I had won because we’d prepared to win, because we’d been ready for the unimaginable. And because we knew the ship and its systems. We’d outsmarted the bastards.

  But that wasn’t going to work on this lifeboat. This was something rawer. It was a battle of wills. The pirates were constantly trying to wear me down, to confuse me, to humiliate me, to turn me into a child instead of a man. I was trying to persevere. To prevail.

  This was making what happened onboard the Maersk Alabama look easy.

  The sun sank down. It was Friday night. I dozed off to sleep and I must have been out a couple of hours when, suddenly, I snapped awake. It was dark in the boat. We were into Saturday morning now. The moonlight filtering in showed me that the four Somalis were in the lifeboat. The hatches were all closed. Then I heard voices outside. Up near the cockpit, the Leader was talking with someone. There were two people talking Somali from outside the cockpit window. Not on the radio. These voices were actually outside the boat. I could see the silhouette of two heads through the cockpit window. All the pirates were debating with these strangers on the deck.

  Who the hell is that? I thought. The Leader and the strangers were arguing about something in Somali. I could hear the words “Sanaa” and “Palestinian” and “Fatah” mentioned again and again. A chill went through me. Sanaa is the capital of Yemen, a real Al Qaeda stronghold. Tourists and aid workers were being kidnapped left and right there. Some had been murdered.

  Yemen was my ultimate nightmare.

  I leaned forward and strained to hear what they were saying. All the pirates were talking, and each one seemed to be giving his opinion, like they were weighing in on what should happen next. The more I listened, the more I realized they weren’t only saying “Fatah”—the Palestinian group—but “fatwa,” a decree from an Islamic scholar. They were talking urgently, as if they were negotiating, and occasionally one of the pirates would say, “Oh, fuck” as if they weren’t hearing what they wanted to hear.