The Desert and the Sea

by Michael Scott Moore

  “Me, I very happy to see you here, Michael.”

  “I’m happy to be here.”

  We didn’t even mention the grief and gratitude we both must have felt in the meantime, the gratitude that was like a reminder to love “enough,” whatever that meant. During my week in the Seychelles, I tried to buy gifts for Rolly and Marc, but they returned them in the form of other gifts, and we wound up just having a big family cookout with grilled snapper and fresh octopus salad.

  “Well, now you in the Seychelles,” Rolly informed me, “I take you out in my boat tomorrow.”

  “Right, what are you fishing in?”

  “I got a friend, he let me take his boat,” he said. “Is like the Aride. ’Bout the same size. He the owner, not me, but he know I like to fish.”

  “I’d love to go out on the boat.”

  “Just around the harbor, Michael.”

  “Right, not out toward Somalia.”

  Rolly chuckled. “No, no.”

  “I think your family would kill us.”

  VIII

  If a debt was too large to pay back—ethically, practically, emotionally—then you paid it forward. That was my current working method: humility before the monstrous past. Near the end of October 2016, I waited with several people in the dull, overcast light at Nairobi’s international airport while Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Filipino diplomats talked on their phones. A group of Chinese embassy workers waited in a black van by the curb. The Naham 3 men had spent almost five years in Somalia, longer than any group of pirate hostages but one,* and I was here trying to put some of my gratitude into action.

  I’d sent some of my own money to the crew’s ransom fund. Then, out of frustration, I’d collected more from a small group of friends. The money amounted to a fraction of what the pirates expected, and I wasn’t eager for Bakayle or his clansmen to have more of my cash; but I had gathered that none of the six governments involved were planning to mount a military raid. There was no other way to set the men free.

  Journalists referred to the Naham 3 men as “forgotten hostages,” seafarers left behind from the peak days of Somali piracy. A British security firm called Compass Risk had negotiated their release for a sum that amounted to “covering the costs” of holding the men—that is, making sure Bakayle’s gang could repay its loans to the surrounding communities in Galmudug that may have provided food, water, or khat. A charity called the Hostage Support Partners, run by John Steed,* had coordinated the mercy mission. A maritime law firm based in London and Hong Kong, called Holman Fenwick Willan, helped with logistics and legal advice, and they’d been kind enough to fly me to Nairobi.

  The men emerged in two groups. First the Chinese diplomatic van closed its doors and hurried around to a distant airfield gate, followed by some straggling TV cameramen. When the van emerged again from the gate, with little red Chinese flags flapping on its front hood, a bus with curtained windows followed, shuttling part of the crew to the Chinese embassy. We never saw them. I heard a rumor that Beijing wanted to spirit away the Chinese-speaking crew—including Taso, from Taiwan—to control the story of their release and thwart the patriotic Taiwanese press.* A sturdier rumor held that Cao Yong had suffered a stroke almost a year before: he and several others needed quick medical treatment. The reedy, efficient, stern-seeming young man who had shut down my idea for a rebellion on the ship was now paralyzed along one side of his frame. A violent mutiny might not have ended any better; but it was a hard thing to hear.

  The rest of the men came out of the terminal building in a quiet mass, looking careful and gaunt. Arnel, who’d started as a skinny man, resembled a broomstick. Hen was no longer a squat Cambodian muscleman; he looked haunted and deflated. Sosan had lost a tooth, as well as the flowing, sarcastic anger I remembered in his eyes. None of them knew the officials and journalists who had turned out to greet them, and none of them expected to see me. All day long, I had wondered if they would be sour or wounded, or just antisocial—since I had felt antisocial on my first day out of Somalia—and I wondered if I had done enough to help.

  I tapped Sosan on the shoulder. His face lit up, and he shouted. The others noticed and said, “Michael!” They swarmed me and cried out in unbelievable pleasure; they almost knocked me to the ground.

  We spent several days together in a clean, glass-sided hotel that must have seemed miraculous to the men after so much misery. Tony Libres teased me for being “fat”—I’d gained back my forty pounds—and over meals they told me horrible stories in sudden, collective gusts. They talked about living in “the Forest,” a wooded valley that sounded not too different from the valley where Rolly and I had lived in 2012. Sosan had lost his tooth when he bit into a piece of field-cooked ostrich. Korn Vanthy was recovering from a gunshot wound.

  They’d lived on the Naham 3 until late June 2013, when the Albedo started to sink in a monsoon sea. It went down over several days, while the pirates ignored warnings from the crew. The rusted hull took on water near the bow and truck-size steel containers started to clang and slide. On its final night, in early July, the ship tilted in rough waves, the containers tumbled into the ocean, and seven of the Albedo hostages leaped and swam for the Naham 3. Four drowned. But Nguyen Van Xuan, the Vietnamese fisherman, jumped into the dark water with a roped life preserver attached to his wrist by a fishing line. He swam it to a struggling crewman. The Naham 3 men, holding the rope on deck, pulled the Albedo hostage up the side of the ship the way they had rescued me; then they tossed the preserver back to Xuan, in the water, and by this method he saved three lives.

  “That’s amazing,” I told him.

  Xuan shrugged, with extreme Asian modesty.

  “For me, it is ordinary,” he said.

  The Albedo tugged on the Naham 3 while it went down, but the water was shallow. The cables and tethers remained intact, and the Naham 3 didn’t sink. Pirates had moved several other Albedo hostages to shore in a skiff, alive, and after a night of terror and confusion, the massive cargo vessel rested on the seabed, with its high bridge tower lifting over the surface, and from then on it functioned as a pier. The Naham 3 stayed moored to it for a month. Members of both crews lived in crowded, filthy conditions on the work deck until the Naham 3’s half-repaired generator finally rumbled to a halt. Then, with everyone on board, the pirates detached the tethers and let the fishing vessel drift on the long northerly current. It stranded at Idaan, lodging its deep keel in the sand a few hundred yards from the beach I had seen with Ashwin and Gerlach. The pirates ferried everyone ashore in skiffs.

  From there the crew members split up. The Albedo men moved to Adado, a town well inland from Harardhere. The Naham 3 crew spent most of its time in the Forest, where pirates improvised a shelter from a tall thorn tree. To keep rain off, they patched together some thickets and tarps. “We called this our ‘House,’” Arnel said, and they lived in it for most of their three years on land, although sometimes the pirates stashed them in real houses in Budbud. They lived on anjero, tea, rice, and beans. To bulk up their diet, they hand-tied traps for rats and small birds out of rope and tree bark. “We put rice on the ground,” said Arnel, with a sad, twisted smile, “a bird came down to eat it, and we pulled the rope.”

  They roasted the meat in secret, because the pirates didn’t trust them to catch their own food. (The pirates who’d placed them in such a dire situation evidently worried about disease.) “When they caught us, they punished us; they tied us up,” Arnel said. “So we hid the meat.”

  One afternoon a pirate ordered Korn Vanthy, the young Cambodian, to cook a pot of rice. Korn Vanthy was playing a card game. He refused. They argued, and the next time Korn Vanthy stood up to pee, the pirate fired a rifle round through his bare foot. The other men closed up the tree shelter for twenty-four hours in protest, keeping the pirates outside while they mounted a hunger strike. “Rebellion!” Tony said with a smile. “Twenty-four hours, only. We were very angry.”

  I noticed no international resentments among the
crew in Nairobi, no whiff of old tensions from the ship. From what they said about the Chinese, I gathered that the whole group had consolidated against the pirates. It was odd and wonderful to see them together. By now they were even more accustomed to living as a crew than I was to thinking of them that way; but the arrangement was artificial, constructed by staffing agencies like Step Up. They had homes and families all across Asia. After a few days’ recuperation, they would never meet again in one place, in such a complete gathering. So going home was also melancholy.

  “Did Step Up pay you?” I asked Ferdinand.

  “No, Michael.”

  “Not at all? Not even wages for your families?”

  “No.”

  But Steed’s organization had raised a small amount of money for all the men to start new lives.

  I mentioned Jie, the Chinese kid, and asked Tony how he had died.

  “Jie did not die, Michael! It was Wang Zhao.”

  “Oh!”

  He meant a young, quiet Chinese crewman who used to sit above us on the conveyor belt, a boy with full black hair cut in jagged angles, like a stylish mop. His large eyes had seemed to accept everything they witnessed—the Chinese karaoke, the Hong Kong action films, and the Tom and Jerry cartoons no less than the weird and violent behavior of the pirate guards—with a childlike equanimity. He died one day in 2013, during an outbreak on the ship of a bizarre blackened-skin disease, something like black gangrene. “They gave us medicine, but not the right one,” said Tony.

  Wang Zhao fell unconscious on deck after carrying a tray of cleaned fish to the kitchen. The crew attended to him for a night. But his neck had swollen, which obstructed his breathing. “Around ten o’clock in the morning, he lost his life,” said Tony. “The pirates said, ‘Take him inside the freezer.’ Like that! No other comment.”

  Wang Zhao was twenty-four. Contrary to Bashko’s report, he hadn’t starved himself. Several other men suffered for weeks from the fever and the blackened swelling, but no one else died until the spring of 2014, when the Indonesian, Nasurin, fell sick in the Forest. After a rainstorm, he complained of a fever and remained ill for two weeks. Arnel and Tony suspected malaria. “He said the inside of his body felt very hot,” Tony recalled. Pirates threw drugs at Nasurin—acetaminophen, antibiotics—but the young Indonesian died in their outdoor camp in May of 2014. “No medical treatment!” Tony said, with a look of disgust.

  So two human bodies, Wang Zhao’s and the captain’s, were lying in the freezer when the Naham 3 gave out. I asked what the pirates had done with the contents of the hold.

  “They dumped all the tuna!” Arnel said, in his high and musical voice.

  “All of it? A hundred tons or so?” I asked.

  “Yes, all of it,” said Tony. “But the other bodies stayed inside.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “The pirates are crazy, Michael.”

  I could imagine the final shudder of the engine, the silence on the water and the fear among the crew. On their last day at sea, they noticed a warship on the horizon, and some pirates arrived on a skiff, leaving it tethered to the rear of the doomed vessel. After sunset, Jian Zui—the most adventurous Chinese hostage, the sarcastic but good-humored man who’d mimed jumping into the water—pretended to fall ill and slept outside, on the work deck. Late at night he crept back to the skiff. Pirate guards had drifted off, and he wanted to motor out to the distant warship. He slipped over the side and cut the rope with a knife. But a wave knocked the boat away before he could climb in. Jian Zui panicked; he swam for the beach in the blackened water, against the tide. To reduce his weight he stripped naked. When he crawled up on shore—exhausted, thirsty, with a coral-sliced hand—he decided not to grope around in the dark; instead he went to sleep. He intended to wake up before dawn, Arnel said, “but when he wake up, the sun was shining”—Arnel laughed—“and he was nude!”

  “What did he do?” I said.

  He found dry clothes in an empty pirate skiff and walked a long way inland, without water. At last he came to a nomad’s hut, where he begged for something to eat and drink. A young woman offered him milk and goat. “But while he was eating, this woman call Bakayle on the phone,” Arnel said. “And Bakayle come in a car.”

  “With a gun,” said Tony.

  So Jian Zui answered a question lingering on the edges of my conscience ever since I had left Somalia. What if I’d escaped on land? Suppose I’d thrown myself at the mercy of strangers in Galmudug?

  “Bakayle beat him?” I said.

  “He say, only slapped,” Arnel answered. But a magazine report from China would later describe a long scar on Jian Zui’s scalp, from the butt of Bakayle’s rifle.

  I never saw Jian Zui in Nairobi. I could only guess at his condition. From proof-of-life pictures taken in the bush, I thought he looked no worse than the others. These Asian sailors tended not to complain, so in the muted-festive atmosphere of the hotel it was hard to find psychological wounds. But I recognized the long silences, the gaunt faces, the frozen anger and pent-up sorrow, and I could guess how long it would take them to recover.

  When I came out of Somalia, I had no tolerance for the broad ambitious tendency of the mind to dream up ideas and distant plans; I lived in a brutal animal-survival mode, and I had to let myself recover. Body and mind know how to do that, and they revive one fiber at a time. Animal survival is also not opposed to the dreaming world of ideas—we inhabit both selves at once, at the very least—but I mistrusted big ideas, and distant plans, for a long time. Ideas had gotten me into trouble. Ideas could easily go wrong. Even in Nairobi, more than two years after my release, I was wary of long-term plans. But I also had a glimpse of something I find both irresistible and hard to describe.

  I couldn’t speak Tagalog or Ilocano, the Filipinos’ main languages, and their English had rusted in Somalia. We had the old problem of finding the right words. I thought about the way Rolly and I had used “okay” as a stand-in for whole libraries of mutual language. It was a deep pleasure to see the crew again on the balcony of a sun-drenched Nairobi hotel, to watch them eat well and drink decent coffee, but the obstacles to recovery for men who have been captive for so long made it painful, too, and there was no contradiction, no cancellation of one extreme by the other—bleakness by joy, or vice versa. The opposites intensified each other. When I thought about my own swim in the black ocean off the Naham 3, I saw that disentangling the exhilaration of those moments of freedom from their lingering horror was impossible. Absolutely no way. And when the men talked about returning to rural jobs in Vietnam or Cambodia or the Philippines—the tattooed Buddhist, Phumanny, mentioned selling hot chilis from his parents’ farm—I sensed the ragged uncertainty of the future, blended with elation that we had one at all.

  “Jian Zui tried to escape, like you,” Tony said with a grin.

  “Yes. But, uh—”

  Oh, good grief.

  “He’s okay now?” I said.

  Arnel nodded and smiled.

  “Yes,” he said. “He’s okay.”

  Later we celebrated at the Philippine embassy in Nairobi: a church service, a buffet dinner, karaoke. We spoke ship’s pidgin to one another, and it felt awkward to use such a stunted language on land, in an almost formal setting. Of course I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. I’d lived on a thermal of happiness ever since the news of the men’s release, and the world felt ordered again, at least for a while. I sensed that core of inane excitement, the irrational “body of delight” I had gleaned in Galkayo, which pointed toward a durability of the soul that I had found so elusive on the ship. But I lacked the vocabularies to express this idea to anyone at the embassy. I could hardly express my gratitude—or not just gratitude but also rage, hunger and horror, the long paralysis of hope. Death, renewal, grief, and love. The parching sun on the desert bush, and the astonishing tonic of the sea.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks above all to my mother, Marlis Saunders, and the FBI agents who supporte
d her during the long and frustrating negotiations to get me out.

  Thanks to Lou Saunders, her husband, who suffered through everything, too.

  Thanks to Mathias Müller von Blumencron, Georg Mascolo, Holger Stark, Matthias Gebauer, and Wolfgang Büchner at Der Spiegel magazine, as well as Daryl Lindsey and Charles Hawley at Spiegel Online, for both moral and practical help.

  Thanks to Jon Sawyer and Tom Hundley at the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting for their engagement throughout the ordeal, especially supporting my mother in California.

  Thanks to Sara Miller-McCune at what is now Pacific Standard, to David Bradley at Atlantic Media, to Mel Leshowitz and Ellen Beaumel, and to John Keenan of Keenan & Associates.

  Thanks to Ashwin Raman, Derek Seton, Bob Klamser, John Steed in Nairobi, and of course to Joe for excellent logistical help.

  Thanks to David Rohde for all kinds of help.

  Thanks to Olivia Judson for introducing me to “Courage Under Fire,” James Stockdale’s fine essay about his time as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Stockdale’s ideas about Epictetus have informed mine, and I think it’s remarkable that we arrived at similar conclusions in captivity by very different paths.

  Thanks to Susanna Forrest in Berlin, and thanks to the rest of the cleaning crew—John and Aimee and Desmond—and to all my friends, in Berlin and elsewhere, who agonized while I was a hostage.

  Thanks to Nicole Busse, and thank you to Blanche Schwappach.

  Thanks to the circle of FBI and BKA agents who supported me just after my release, and for the memorable meal of Königsberger Klöpse in Nairobi.