The Desert and the Sea

by Michael Scott Moore

  We sat in the dining booth in the hallway, across from the captain’s cabin, to make the call. Pirates manning the bridge used this table for lunch and dinner. They ate with their hands, without napkins, so there were dried formations of scraped-off pasta and rice on the table’s edge.

  “These guys are disgusting,” Abdul said.

  He dialed a number and hesitated. “If he asks about your location, tell him you’re in the bush.” I nodded. He connected the call and spoke rapid-fire Somali, with the volume up loud enough for me to hear the other man. His Somali sounded as rapid and strong as Abdul’s, so it surprised me, when I took the phone, to hear a Scandinavian speaking fluid English. I’ll call him Anders.

  He asked a few basic questions, and I gathered that he was a private negotiator, just opening a file. “When we finish here,” he said, “I will talk to your mother. Do you have any message for your mother?”

  The false hope Abdul had sparked by lying about Anders incensed me. I blurted in German that I was on a ship. Abdul grabbed the phone and hung up.

  “Who was that guy?” he asked, and my eyes must have widened in astonishment.

  “He’s a mediator! I thought you said he was going to settle my case.”

  “He’s from the media?” Abdul said.

  Astonishing. I was ready to smash furniture. Abdul was a complete idiot.

  “A mediator, Abdul. Jesus. He’s a negotiator, just like you. He’s in your fucking line of work.”

  The general ignorance that had me stuck out here on the water made me want to punch him. My kidnappers weren’t even good kidnappers.

  “Did he ask your location?” he said.

  “No.”

  Which was true.

  I returned to my cabin but couldn’t sleep. The generator thrummed, and the Naham 3 rocked like a duck in a tub. I thought about Abdul’s concern over our location. He’d ordered me to mention the bush most likely because he wanted American planes to look for me inland from the Hobyo cell-phone tower—which would be traceable from Abdul’s number, but might have many miles of range—rather than out at sea. In German I had said “Schiff,” not “Naham 3” or “Hobyo.” But no other ships lay nearby.

  I’d said enough. Somebody could figure it out.

  Before I fell asleep I remembered my lighter from Tony. My porthole stared east, across the open ocean, so pulsing signals through it wouldn’t alarm Somalis in Hobyo. I rooted in my bag for a roll of toilet paper to shield and direct the light, as I had done on land, and started flashing SOS into the black intractable sky.

  IX

  A monsoon started to rock the ship in mid-June, a constant wind, which raised heavy chop on the water as well as storms of reddish dust over Hobyo. The sun set every evening like a white puck in a smudged ocher painting. “We call it the southeast,” Rolly said, which hinted at the mutability of the season across the Indian Ocean.* Trade winds shifted direction over the Seychelles during a summer monsoon, bringing drier weather; they dumped warm rain on Mumbai; they delivered cold nights and squalls of rain to Somalia. They also changed the ocean temperature. Until the monsoon our saltwater showers on the ship were almost luxuriously warm, but in the first days of summer, the stream pouring from the pump felt like snowmelt. My skin twitched, and I tried to imagine how it would feel to jump off the ship. The notion of escape was always there, and on some days during the monsoon I worried about hypothermia.

  “Is like South Africa,” said Rolly. “Summer is winter.”

  “But for a different reason,” I said.

  “Yes, but we got June now,” said Rolly. “In Somalia, is cold.”

  “Right, but it really is summer in Somalia. South Africa’s below the equator.”

  “Yes, but in summer, Michael, South Africa is also cold.”

  “Because it’s really winter.”

  “Is like winter now!” Rolly said.

  The Seychelles lay below the equator, too, but that didn’t matter—we enjoyed bickering. It passed the time. The Filipinos referred to us as “Tom and Jerry.”

  These petty, confrontational exchanges were also a way to ignore our situation, and in the afternoon I read in the Bible about the Unforgiving Servant, a man who found himself released by his king from a great debt. He walked from the palace to the street and collared another servant for not paying a much smaller debt. The king summoned him back to revoke his act of mercy. “So likewise shall my heavenly Father do unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses.”*

  It was a chastening, awful thing to read in captivity.

  That day, or the next, a delegation of pirates came down to discuss a construction project with Li Bo Hai. Arnel translated while an old and damaged-looking Somali inquired about building a platform across the tuna tray from the middle of some unused stairs, at about chest height, like a bunk bed. Somali guards had complained about the cold at night. The idea was to let them sit halfway downstairs, out of the monsoon wind.

  I objected in passionate silence. The platform would take precious bench space away from the hostage crew.

  The damaged-looking man had ragged hair and a stoop. He acted mean and ruthless, and he looked near sixty, as old as Captain Tuure. I thought of him as a rough old soldier, because he seemed to have military training, but otherwise I knew nothing about him. He noticed my silent protest and gave me a filthy look.

  “That man not like you,” Rolly said.

  “The feeling’s mutual.”

  I objected to the wooden platform for another reason. I still wanted to jump. On the phone with Anders, I had missed my chance to request a helicopter, but I still hoped for the sound of chopper blades on some quiet morning. I felt guilt ridden and restless every day. I wanted to do something to make up for the grief and horror at home—I wanted to restore the lost harmony of my old life, of all the pleasures I had time to recall—and I knew that if Somalis sat down here on a new platform, they might shoot a leaping hostage even before he left the ship.

  The Chinese also saw this construction project as a threat to our seating arrangements. They responded with an act of passive-aggressive arts and crafts. They ripped up some pulp novels from their luggage and folded Mandarin-printed pages into little origami cranes. They tied the cranes to lengths of fishing line, which they strung along the steel wall and the overhead deck. Every Chinese man knew how to fold an origami crane, somehow, but it still took three days of diligent effort before the port wall of the deck bloomed with six rows of paper birds, all cream-colored and fluttering in the wind, like blossoms on a garden bower.

  “I see the Chinese make déco” was how Rolly put it.

  “I think it’s a protest,” I told him.

  He stared for a while at the strange and delicate creation.

  “Look like somebody gonna have a wedding,” he said.

  X

  Living on the Naham 3 made me weird in the head. Along with a quick temper, I developed a strange lassitude. The salt wind, the persistent rocking, the elements—the damp and the cold and the blazing sun—seemed to soften my hold on reality, and I fell under the hypnotic influence of the open sea. The idea of jumping to freedom was half-crazy. But was it crazier than staying on a pirate ship? I felt restless but salt eaten, and my reflexes had slowed, which could be dangerous, because as a hostage I sometimes had to think about enormous and sudden piles of vague information.

  Abdul returned to the Naham 3 at the end of June, and I asked how negotiations were going.

  “I haven’t heard anything new.”

  “Last time you said the man in Norway was going to wrap up my case.”

  “These guys on shore,” he said, nodding toward Hobyo and referring to the pirate bosses, “they’re not hearin’ what they wanna hear.”

  Money was on offer, in other words, but they had refused.

  “I see.”

  Abdul and I had to lie to each other with strategy and persistence. He was like a diabolical tax inspector who probed for
hidden income. It’s a mistake to mention any amount of money to a kidnapper, so I dodged his questions, but I nodded along with his cover story that he was “not a pirate.” He painted a picture of his role as a freelance negotiator, a man in business for himself, who drifted among gangs and tried to free hostages around Somalia. He provided a service. He did have more freedom than the pirate guards, possibly more disengagement from a single gang; but I believed Ferdinand’s story about the mock execution, and I knew very well that Abdul was a pirate.

  The same evening—a Saturday—after we retired to our cabins, I used the captain’s bathroom to brush my teeth. Abdul had slumped on the captain’s bunk to watch TV. When I came out of the tiny room, he said, “Sit down here. I wanna talk to you.”

  I leaned on the edge of the bunk while he snapped off the television.

  “We’re gonna do a phone call in a couple of hours,” he said. “I just wanted to explain. Every time I get an offer from your side, I gotta bring it to this committee of bosses on land. They’re crazy, you know. They’re mean guys. And they’re not gettin’ any offer that’s even close to what they want.”

  It sounded as if negotiations had nudged forward, so I said, “Well, how much is their demand right now?”

  “Twenty million.”

  “That’s completely insane.”

  “If I want ’em to come down,” he said, “I gotta hear something a little more in line with what they want.”

  “You haven’t done any work, have you? It’s been a month.”

  “Write down your email addresses for me,” he said. “And your passwords.”

  “What for?”

  “Aw, don’t be suspicious. I won’t give the passwords to anyone else.”

  “You are anyone else,” I pointed out.

  “I’m trying to help you.”

  I took the pen and made a show of trying to remember my details. “I don’t know everything by heart,” I said, and wrote down a fake address. “But the password’s obsolete. You guys’ve held me too long; it won’t work anymore.”

  Abdul glanced at the paper. The pretended friendliness vanished. “So you won’t give me your passwords,” he said ponderously. “Okay. When we talk on the phone later, you gotta beg for the money. Pour on the emotion, right? Because we’re not gettin’ the offers we need.”

  I went back to my cabin and rehearsed a clear description of my location at sea in German, as well as a request for a helicopter. I decided that whoever might listen to the call—military intelligence, the FBI—would need time to translate my German and work out a plan, so tomorrow morning might be too early; on the other hand we couldn’t wait too long, since Abdul might record the call. He might notice the German and have it translated. I tried to imagine the consequences. My panicked, sea-softened mind raced but came to no conclusion.

  I decided to request a helicopter for Monday morning. Abdul summoned me after an hour, and we dialed the number to Norway. The negotiator Anders asked about my health and my diet. I told him nothing had changed.

  “Okay, I’m going to connect you with your mother. We’ll all be on the phone together.”

  “Fine.”

  My mother answered the phone sounding deeply concerned for my welfare. “Michael, how are you?” By now she would have seen the Garfanji video, and I wondered if she’d seen pictures of Rolly hanging from a tree.

  “Are you eating enough?” she said.

  “Nothing has changed,” I said.

  This refrain, repeated with feeling, meant I’m still on the ship. “Can we send you a care package?” Mom said, and I almost lost my composure. Abdul made a rolling hand gesture, as if to say I should crank up the rhetoric, and I expressed alarm that no one had talked the figure down from twenty million. I grew emotional; I raised my voice and started to holler in German. Abdul grabbed the phone and clicked off.

  “No, you can’t do that,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “I was telling them I needed help.”

  “Say it in English.”

  He dialed Anders again and made the move-it-along gesture. I yelled about negotiations and money and my own desperation “on land” in Somalia. I added a quick line in German about the ship and glanced at Abdul. No response. The way to speak German, I realized, was to weave it into English. He couldn’t recognize short fragments. So I blew some more smoke in English and blurted: “Ich bitte um einen Hubschrauber, Montag morgen um halb sechs.” I’d like to request a helicopter for five thirty this Monday morning.

  “What was that? I didn’t understand,” my mother said.

  “I heard it, Marlis. I will tell you,” said Anders.

  “This line isn’t very good,” she complained.

  I’d poured my frustration into the role, all my nervous fear. I’d made passionate calls for help. I’d hollered like a murder victim, and in the middle of my yelling I had done a dangerous thing that I hoped would set me free. I couldn’t tell whether Abdul had noticed.

  “How was that?” I asked him.

  “That was much better.”

  XI

  Mom knew I was living on a ship even before I mentioned it to her. An FBI agent had visited one afternoon in the spring or early summer of 2012 with a blurry printed photo taken from high above the Naham 3 that showed me standing on deck in a red shirt not unlike my Manchester United jersey. “It was hard to make out, but I thought, from the stature, that it was you,” she said. “They said it was a satellite picture.”

  When she mentioned a “care package” on the phone, I felt grief as well as filial guilt, and the knot of feeling that formed in me whenever I thought about my family and friends was not just grief but desperation; I felt the ridiculous insufficiency of my own love for the people who loved me best. A long kidnapping resembles a death, for the family of the hostage above all; but “resembles” can be worse than “equals” for relatives who have to wonder every day whether a wrong move might kill the hostage outright. I didn’t see this dynamic well in Somalia. On the Naham 3 I grew restless and impatient and strange enough in the head to regard suicide and escape as near-equal opportunities. I wanted my helicopter scheme to work because I could tell my mother was suffering. I wanted to redeem myself, to wrench myself out of this nightmare and ease her mind.

  I also thought the care-package idea was delusional. It wasn’t, exactly. Mom had found the phone numbers of NGOs in Kenya, including the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Médecins Sans Frontières, to ask whether their missions to Somalia could deliver a box to relief workers in Galmudug, who could hand it off to middlemen, who might hand it off to pirates, until the package reached me. She knew I was half-blind. So, with the help of friends in Berlin, she had found my optometrist, who had found my prescription on file. She wanted to send a pair of glasses. “A few NGOs thought they could reach you,” Mom said later. “But nothing ever happened. Most of them said it was too dangerous for their teams. I was just sitting there thinking, What can I do? So that was one thing I tried.”

  Ashwin, meanwhile, helped her correspond with people in Europe, including Anders, and he unearthed an eccentric side offer for my freedom. “It may sound a bit comical, but a serious contact from Galkayo has written to me saying the pirates are willing to release Mike in exchange for 400 camels!” he wrote. The cost of holding me for seven months apparently was equal to four hundred head of prime livestock. “I am forwarding this info because everything is possible in Somalia,” he continued. “Please forgive me if this sounds too silly. I also don’t know what a camel costs.”

  XII

  The morning after my phone call I sat with Rolly under the bower of fluttering cranes. To my right, on the tuna bench, sat Abdul and Li Bo Hai, with Tony between them, interpreting. Tony’s boyish face squinted with the seriousness of the conversation.

  “Ask him how much oil is left,” mumbled Abdul.

  Tony and Li Bo Hai conferred.

  “He says about thirty days,” Tony reporte
d.

  “And how much diesel?”

  “About sixty days,” Tony said.

  Abdul smoked a cigarette and rubbed his forehead with his thumb. “Okay, tell him we might have to start alternating days without the generator,” he said, and I had nightmare visions of a hobbled ship, with tuna starting to stink in the freezer while thirty of us waited for pirate-skiff rides to Hobyo. I also thought: My helicopter appointment’s well timed.

  Then again I was nervous to near panic about a leap from the rail. The notion of diving away from the Naham 3—exposing my back to a curtain of gunfire from pirate PKMs while I tried to swim for one of those helicopters—set my heart thumping through a swamp of adrenaline. The only consolation was the time I’d selected. In the half-dark around dawn, there would be more Somali grogginess, more confusion, and (I hoped) less gunfire.

  For most of Sunday, I watched the ocean chop and wondered how well I could swim. I’d started to do yoga in my room to keep in shape. But I still felt underweight, frightened, and skinny. From the cutaway rail I watched the fish, mainly trevallies and remoras, patrol the water where we threw baited lines as well as uneaten food. The current was strong: ocean swells rocking the boat moved at a consistent angle toward the shore. The fish struggled against it with sluggish, almost lazy swerves, then turned and shot twice as fast downstream.

  I kept washing my hands at the saltwater hose, to test the temperature. (It was cold, but not snowmelt cold.) During the afternoon, I saw a pod of dolphins move in glistening arcs to the north, and I admired the way they could disappear for whole minutes under the surface of the waves.

  After lunch, we sat under the conveyor belt, and I edged around the topic with Rolly. I didn’t ask for a straight opinion, because I knew what he would say, but I wanted to vent my anxieties.

  “Rolly, didn’t you go skin diving for sea cucumbers in the Seychelles?”

  “Long time ago, yah.”

  “How long could you hold your breath?” I said.