I called the chief mate. “You need to get some guys in the hold and secure that cargo,” I yelled. If one of those bombs blew, pieces of the ship the size of a quarter would be raining down on the Spanish coast for half an hour. He rounded up two ABs—the only ones out of twenty men not too sick or scared to go into the holds—and they went and wrestled the bombs and the barrels back into place.
Twelve hours later, the engine was back up and running and the bombs were on their way to being secured. Disaster averted.
There are a thousand ways to die on a ship. But when you run into one face-to-face and survive it, it teaches you how to think your way through the next one.
SEVEN
-1 Day
From here down to Mombasa, potential is high for a piracy incident. Keep a wary eye.
—Captain’s night orders, Maersk Alabama, April 7, 2000 hours
That night the crew gathered over the dinner table. You could feel the electricity in the air.
“Was that your first piracy situation, Cap?”
“Sure was,” I said, as I sat down to the meal. “Hope it’s my last, too.”
This wasn’t the first time the subject had come up. Just the other day Colin, the third mate, had asked, “You know what I was thinking?”
“What’s that?”
“What do we do if we’re taken hostage?”
I had stared at Colin then.
“You’re worried about that?”
Colin nodded. He seemed nervous.
“If you’re scared, Colin, you should never have gotten on this ship,” I said. “You didn’t know where it was heading?”
I didn’t want a crewman injecting a note of panic into our run. I needed the crew to be confident and to project confidence. If Colin was terrified of ending up in a Somali boat, he should have worked that out with me before we sailed.
Being taken hostage was sort of a taboo subject among sailors. Anything—even shipwreck—is better.
“Look, we’ve got to crawl before we can walk,” I said finally. “I want to make sure we master the antipiracy drills first.”
But I could sense his unease. Suddenly the problem of piracy wasn’t abstract anymore, it wasn’t a headline or a rumor they heard in the union hall. They’d seen the Somali ships with their own eyes and they’d felt pretty damn defenseless against them.
“I can give you the short version right now,” I said.
Colin nodded.
“That’d be good,” he said.
“It’s pretty simple,” I said. “First off, do not mention religion. It’s kryptonite. Don’t antagonize them by trying to talk about Allah or Jesus and whatever you do don’t try to convince them that your faith is better than theirs. Politics is out, too, especially the Middle East. They may try to antagonize you by saying America is the worst country in the world. You’re not there to defend the nation’s honor. You’re trying to survive. So let that pass.”
It was all we had time for at that moment. Later, Colin came up to me, still seeming nervous about the possibility of being intercepted by Somalis. There were other crew members around, so I continued my tutorial.
“Do whatever they tell you,” I said. “Give them as little information as possible. You’ve got giveaways, things that aren’t important that you offer up to build rapport, and hold-backs, which are things you keep to yourself unless you’re under severe threat.”
“What would constitute a giveaway?” someone asked.
I shrugged. “Showing them how to get fresh water. Getting them familiar with the safety equipment. You’ve got to make them feel they’re in control while all the time you’re guiding them away from the really important stuff, like radar or the engine controls. Not to mention the other crew.”
“Got it,” Colin said.
“And, last of all, humor helps.”
I looked at an AB.
“Unfortunately,” I said, “none of you guys are funny. So rule number one: don’t get taken hostage by pirates.”
I’d always felt if pirates got onboard, it was all over. We had to stop them before they got on the ship.
We were paralleling the coast of Somalia by now. I went back to my room and wrote up my night orders. Every captain has standing orders for the entire trip. They’re posted on the first day and never change. But night orders cover any special messages or duties that need to be addressed during each overnight shift. “We’re still in Apache country,” I wrote that evening. “We’re on our own, so we need to make sure we stay vigilant. All we have is each other out here.” You have to come at the crew in new ways to keep them interested. I knew the pirates had their attention now, so I kept it short.
I went to my room. At about 3:30 a.m., I was asleep on my bunk when the phone rang.
It was the second mate, Ken, who was on the 12 a.m. to 4 a.m., the “dog watch.”
“Cap, I think you better get up here.”
“What is it?” I said.
“Somali pirates,” he said.
“Where?”
“On the radio,” he said. “They’re talking on the radio.”
“I’ll be right there.”
I hurried out to the passageway and climbed the internal ladder up to the bridge level. Clouds scudded past a full moon as I emerged into the fresh air.
I pulled open the door on the bridge and there was Ken with an AB standing watch with him. I was about to say something when I heard a voice.
“This is Somali pirate,” it said. “Somali pirate.”
I looked at Ken. His eyes were wide as saucers. I looked down. The radio was tuned to Channel 16, the international hail and distress channel.
“Somali pirate, Somali pirate, I’m coming to get you.”
It was spooky. The voice was recognizably African. I hadn’t spent enough time on the continent to tell a Somali accent from a Kenyan one, but it sounded authentic. More than that, it sounded like the guy was serious.
“What happened?”
“I saw a ship go by about seven miles away. It was very well lit up.” I nodded. Fishing boats are always lit up like Christmas trees, to get some illumination on the men working the nets, and to avoid being run down by some tanker doing fifteen knots. A pirate ship would rarely have all those lights going. It burned up too much precious fuel and allowed them to be seen on the horizon, which they never wanted to happen.
“And then a few minutes later, I heard this,” Ken said, pointing at the radio.
I picked up the binoculars. There was a boat about seven miles away, astern, on our starboard quarter, its lights blazing like a typical fishing boat. But I looked closer and could see that it had a second boat tied to its stern.
“Somali pirate, Somali pirate,” the voice came over the radio again, filling up the dead silence of the bridge. The guy was almost chanting. What the hell was he playing at? The Somalis were known for their stealth; the last thing they would do is alert you that they were on the way. It didn’t make sense.
It could have just been a couple of fishermen having fun with us. Or it could have been pirates who’d swept past for a look at our security profile. They could be sitting up ahead, trying to unnerve us before gunning their engines and heading back to intercept our ship. Like I said, these guys were constantly innovating, constantly probing for weak points.
I studied the ship in the glasses. It wasn’t under way. It was drifting, which is a typical thing for a fishing boat to do.
“Let’s go to a hundred and twenty revs,” I said. We were doing our normal RPMs of 118.
“One hundred twenty revs,” the second mate called. He was on the EOT, the Engine Order Telegraph, controlling our speed.
“What’s our course?” I said.
“Two hundred thirty,” the helmsman said. Meaning a heading of 230 degrees.
“Bring it over to one eighty,” I said. I wanted to make a drastic course correction that the pirate—if that’s what he was—would recognize, to show him we knew he was up ahead waiting for
us. And I wanted him as far astern as possible.
“Left five to one hundred and eighty,” Ken called out. The quartermaster called it back and swung the wheel over.
The ship began to turn and thirty seconds later we were on the new heading. When you’re going fast, it takes only a flicker of the rudder to turn fifty degrees.
I watched the mystery ship through the glasses. He was drifting still astern us. But the boat behind him didn’t move out and head toward us. If they were going to mount an attack, it would be from that fast boat. As long as that skiff didn’t leave the fishing boat, we’d be all right.
I swung the glasses around the quadrants of the horizon: north, south, east, west. Sometimes what pirate gangs do is put a vessel in plain sight and trick you into focusing on it exclusively. While you’re fixated on that ship, they’ll come at you in three skiffs from the opposite direction, racing in from your blind spot. But the water was clear. No other boats were within range of the Maersk Alabama.
For thirty minutes, I kept an eye on the mystery ship. It didn’t attempt to follow us, and it didn’t launch the fast boat. Strange. But without any other partners within seven miles of us, he wasn’t going to try an attack.
“I think we’re good,” I told Ken. “If anything else comes up, call me right away. Make sure you tell the next watch about this. And stay on one hundred and twenty revs until I’m back up here in the morning.”
Pirates had never attacked at night, as far as I knew. (Since that time, pirate crews have attacked under the cover of darkness at least once.) But if I was a Somali bandit, that’s exactly what I’d do. Sneak up stealthily in the darkness and take the ship over before the crew had time to react. I had no idea why they hadn’t tried it yet—boarding would be more difficult, getting those grappling hooks up, but the payoff would be huge.
I didn’t want to be the first.
I went back to my room and collapsed into bed. I’d never had a confirmed pirate incident before and had just had two possible threats in the last twenty-four hours. It told me that the sea around us was swarming with these guys and that we were in an entirely new world. Forget that .04 percent that the statisticians threw around. It seemed like every other ship going through the gulf was being targeted.
As I lay in my bunk unable to sleep, I thought of an old merchant marine term. During World War II, convoys of one hundred or more ships would make their way across the Atlantic to bring desperately needed supplies to the GIs in Europe. The ocean was infested with German submarines and these cargo ships were sitting ducks out there on the water.
Not all of them, though. If you were in the middle of the formation, you were rarely attacked. But if you were on one of the four corners, you were exposed. Vulnerable. Bait.
They called them the “coffin corners.” I felt like the Maersk Alabama was sailing on one right now. And there wasn’t a destroyer in sight to keep the enemy at bay.
EIGHT
Day 1, 0600 Hours
“Once you have a ship, it’s a win-win situation. We attack many ships every day, but only a few are ever profitable. No one will come to the rescue of a third-world ship with an Indian or African crew, so we release them immediately. But if the ship is from a Western country… then it’s like winning a lottery jackpot.”
—Somali pirate, Wired.com, July 28, 2009
In the merchant marine, we have a saying—“sleep fast.” Sailors can drop off in ten seconds and be ready to work again in two hours. You either learn to do it or you don’t survive.
I slept like a dead man and awoke at 6 a.m. the next morning when the sun crept under the hem of my blackout curtains. Wednesday, April 8. We’d made it to another day.
I took a shower, the freshwater pumping up from our tanks down below. I toweled off, dressed, and looked at the weather update. Sunny again. Perfect sailing weather. I checked the incoming messages—more chatter about pirates. Tell me something I don’t know, I thought.
I went up to the bridge. The sun was like a red-hot poker suspended above your face. I grabbed a cup of coffee and joined Shane, who was on watch. Immediately we started planning out what we needed to do that day. We were getting ready for Mombasa and that was going to be a very busy time. Pirates or no pirates, we had cargo to unload and supplies to take on and the million other things a merchant crew deals with as it approaches port: laundry, paying off, taking on new crew. Plus there’s all the unanticipated stuff that inevitably hits you: some government official decides to inspect your ship (that is, until you pay him a bribe) or a stowaway comes crawling up your line.
I was in the middle of this housekeeping when ATM, the Pakistani-born AB, interrupted us.
“Boat approaching, three point one miles out, astern.”
Shane and I swiveled to look out. There it was, a white skiff, approaching at twenty knots, at least. It looked like one of the boats that had chased us yesterday, maybe twelve meters long, with a powerful outboard engine. I could see his wake, white in the turquoise water. With the haze, visibility was down to three to four miles so ATM had gotten on it as quickly as I could have hoped.
I looked at the water. The winds had dropped down since yesterday, and the seas were calm. We weren’t going to get lucky again. We were in a race with a much faster boat and the waves weren’t going to stop them today.
“Mate, find out where the bosun has his people.”
Most of the crew would have been in their beds or just getting up and beginning their morning routine. But I knew that the bosun was working somewhere on the ship with a team and I wanted everyone accounted for.
“He’s on the bow,” Shane said.
“Make sure he knows what’s going on in case he has to pull his men in,” I said.
“Got it.”
“Course?” I called out.
“Two hundred thirty.”
“Set a course for one hundred eighty,” I said.
“One hundred eighty.”
The quartermaster turned the wheel and I looked through the glasses. The fast boat was closing at 2.5 miles. It shifted into our new course.
There was no question now. These guys weren’t out for tuna. They were coming after us.
“Call UKMTO right now,” I called.
I didn’t have time to mess with the Brits. Shane made the call.
I could hear him answering a barrage of questions: How many people in the boat? How many guns do they have? What color is the boat? What color is the inside of the boat?
Finally, he hung up.
“What did they say?”
“Call back when they’re within a mile.”
I didn’t have time to ask why. I grabbed a portable radio—it would be in my hand for the coming hours—and checked the radar.
“Where’s the goddamn mother boat?” We were over three hundred miles off the coast of Somalia. There was no way these guys had made it this far alone. There had to be a trawler out there with a leader calling the shots. But I couldn’t see it and nothing was showing on the radar. I thought, What if these guys are herding us straight toward the mother ship?
Shane had gone to the pyrotechnic box and taken out eighteen flares as soon as we spotted the Somalis. He started breaking out flares before heading down toward the main deck to get eyes on the crew. “I’m going down to get ready, I’ll send the third up,” he called out as he dashed off the bridge.
I knew the chief was up. Mike was an early riser, and right now he’d be sitting on his bunk reading the Good Book. I rang his room and he answered. “We’re in a piracy situation, I need you in the engine room,” I said and jammed the phone back down. I needed his eyes on the engine console as we ramped up speed.
The boat was two miles away. We were doing 16.8 knots, and they were doing 21. They were chasing us down.
At one nautical mile, I called to Colin, “Sound the intruder alarm.” He hit the ship’s whistle, long short, long short, long short. Then he ran to the wall and hit the general alarm, same code. That told every ma
n on the ship to head to his muster point immediately. I looked down over the stern and saw the spray from the pirate hoses shooting out water. At one hundred pounds of pressure per square inch, that stream would knock a man down. I called into the radio, “Switch to Channel One.” That was our emergency band. Colin started issuing a succession of orders. “Get the fire pump going, hit the lights, tell the bosun to bring his men in.”
I pointed to the pyrotechnic box. “Get ready to start shooting those flares,” I called to Colin. “When they get within a mile, fire your first one. Aim directly at them.” He nodded.
It was 7 a.m. ATM, Colin, and I had the bridge. The crew was mustering to the safe room. The engineers were locking themselves in the engine room. The first and third engineer were making their way to the after steering room. The chief engineer was already in the engine room. With him installed there, he could shut down the engines if he needed to, and the first engineer could take over the ship’s steering if the bridge was breached. They had a full set of controls down there, a way of bypassing the bridge.
Now I could see the top half of the men standing in the pirate boat. They were leaning forward, rocking with the bouncing of the vessel.
“Call back UKMTO,” I called to Colin. “Tell them this is real. And leave the phone line open when you finish so they can monitor what’s happening. Got it?”
“On it,” he called back. Colin made the call, then grabbed half a dozen flares and headed out to the starboard bridge wing.
I ran over to the SSA, the secret security alarm, and pressed it. That would alert the rescue center that we’d been hijacked. Colin also pressed the SSA.
All of a sudden I heard automatic fire. I could see the muzzle flashes from the pirate boat. They were strafing the ship from a quarter mile away. I heard the slap, slam, slap, slam of bullets hitting the metal house. Bullets were ricocheting off the smokestack.
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