A Captain's Duty (21 page)

“Why do you need a body bag? Over.” It was the navy.

“We had to kill a woman here. She was not halal. She went against the preaching.”

Pause.

“Okay, we will throw over a body bag.”

I thought I was hallucinating again.

“Put the body in the body bag and we will pick it up. Over.”

I’d had enough. “This is Richard Phillips of the
Maersk Alabama
!” I yelled.

The Leader put the radio down.

“Crazy navy guys,” he said. “I’ve been working with them for years.”

I ignored him.

“This guy is an idiot. This lieutenant commander. I’m going to kill him, he’s such an idiot.”

“That seems to be your solution to everything,” I said.

He nodded.

“The Leader,” said Tall Guy. “He would love to get a woman to kill.”

Were they trying to impress me, the sensitive American, with how bloodthirsty they were? All they were doing was increasing my disgust.

“I can’t help him with that,” I said.

Around sunset, the pirates resumed the death ritual. The Leader began to chant, the others answered him, and Musso came over to complete the knots on my ropes. They stopped offering me food or water, which is what they’d done before the last time they strung me up. Any time they were getting ready to have a go at me, they cut off my rations.

My gut clenched up.

They began with the halal crap:
You can’t touch this rope, don’t touch your mouth, you must stand up, you must stand on the
orange exposure suit.
I was hopping around trying
not
to stand on the orange suit and Musso, as usual, was getting fed up with me.

“Just stand on the orange!” he shouted. “You are crazy one.”

He pulled on my hands, trying to stretch my arms out.

“Be a man!” he cried. “Military posture! Military posture! Sit up!”

I was sitting on the edge of the inboard seat. They were shining a flashlight from behind me so I could see a silhouette of my head on the far bulkhead. Tall Guy kicked my legs, trying to get my feet on the orange exposure suit. And every time the boat rolled to starboard, I heard the
click
of the gun, timed to the rocking of the ship.

I was scared to death. I was hiding it pretty well but it takes only one time for that
click
to become a
boom
and you’re dead. I felt a rush of emotion and then a surge of strength, a totally primeval desire for more life. Nothing else, not food, not friends, nothing else. Just ten more minutes of life.

Saturday was the hardest day for Andrea, as well. From what the State Department had told her, she’d expected to hear some big news on Friday. She’d geared herself up for that call. But it never came. That hit her hard, she told me later. She couldn’t even eat. When Paige and Amber tried to make her oatmeal, she joked about being on “the hostage diet.” There was more food than she’d ever seen in our house but she couldn’t swallow a bite of it.

Our son, Dan, came home Saturday and Andrea wanted him and Mariah to keep their lives as normal as possible. Andrea was amazed by how strong the kids were. Surrounded by their friends, they kept up a brave front, without tears or hysterics. She told me a story about Dan that made me smile: Andrea was sitting on the couch early in the evening when my son, in his very Irish way, came and put his head on her shoulder. That’s just something he does. It’s his trademark.

“Mom?”

“Yes?”

“Do you think Dad’s going to be okay?”

“Yes, Dan, I do.”

He jumped up. “Good, I’m going to Luke’s.” Luke is a friend who lives down the road.

Andrea just laughed. “Of course, Dan. Go ahead.”

Off he went.

But that was about her only moment of relief the whole day. Andrea was getting bulletins all Saturday: “The pirates want money and they want to go to land.” Those were their two main demands. And she would say, “Can’t you just give them those two things and get my husband back?” And the officials would say, “Well that’s what we’re working on. Because the fear is, if they get him on land, we may never find him.” Andrea wanted to know if the company was going to pay up and, if the ransom was available, why not just hand it over right away? But she couldn’t get an answer to that—things were too chaotic.

Andrea didn’t care about the firepower or the money or the political message we were sending by negotiating with pirates.
She just wanted me back. But it didn’t seem to be happening. And people kept sending her e-mails about previous hostage situations in which the hostages always got killed. That’s what the subject line on the e-mails said: “6 Hostages Killed in Bloody Shootout,” “Grim End for Hostages as Kidnappers Open Fire.” And Andrea was like, “Do you not realize what you’re sending me?” She finally sent back an e-mail: “Happy thoughts only, please.”

Andrea asked the State Department if they could get a message to me. They said they would try. So she wrote something out quickly. Someone in the U.S. government must be convinced that my wife is a nutcase, because what she wrote was “Richard, your family loves you, your family is praying for you, your family is saving a chocolate Easter egg for you unless your son eats it first.” I knew why she wrote that. Dan
would
eat my Easter egg or anything chocolate, and she knew if she injected some humor into the note, I would know she was okay.

Andrea told me that one thought kept running through her mind that day:
Where do these pirates think they’re going to go?
That really worried her. The pirates had three enormous navy ships surrounding them and they were still holding out, which told her how desperate they really were. So either they were going to give up or it was going to be a murder-suicide. That was the 50/50 in her mind. And the longer it went, the likelier the second outcome became.

“The feelings seemed to come in cycles,” she said. “For a while, I’d believe I was going to see you again. And then the darker thoughts would come. A voice in my head would say, ‘He could die, these things don’t turn out well.’ I would have to push those thoughts away, but they always came back.”

By late Saturday night, the pressure and the disappointment got to Andrea. As much as she loved my sisters, the songs and the humor were wearing on her. Finally, she couldn’t do the jokes anymore. She couldn’t play along with the laughter. It just wasn’t funny. One of my sisters said to her, “Oh, you’re going to make so much money from this, you’re going to retire.” And Andrea snapped. “Do…you…really…think,” she said, “that Richard got on that lifeboat so we could be
millionaires
?”

Saturday was a huge letdown for Andrea and the rest of my family because nothing happened. Now Sunday seemed like the last chance.

Back on the boat, all of a sudden I heard this electric sound, like a humming. It sounded like a drone or an electric engine. The tension in the boat ratcheted up in an instant. The pirates scattered and ducked away. I looked over at Young Guy and there was just abject fear in his eyes.

The pirates ran up and slammed the hatch doors closed.

It’s coming,
I thought.
They must see boats on the water aiming at us. Maybe whatever the navy ships had lined up to hide…

The Leader barked something to Young Guy in Somali. He came over and sat across the aisle from me. That seemed to alleviate the fear in his eyes. He began clicking the AK-47 trigger and smiling with mad-dog eyes. Tall Guy began opening the gas cans and tying the hatch latches with bits of rope. Musso ran over with a rag and tied it around my eyes. I brought the side of my head down to my shoulder and managed to pull the blindfold down.

The Somalis were peeking through the hatches. I heard noises outside—the electric motor sound and engine noises. The pirates were getting their guns ready, pulling out the clips, checking them, slamming them back in. They clicked off the safeties. Fear was like a physical presence in that boat.

The Leader stayed away from the cockpit and all the pirates slunk back as far into the rows of seats as they could, pushing their backs up against the hull. They were trying desperately to get out of sight. Occasionally they would look out the windows, but almost immediately they’d duck back into their hiding places, as if they were afraid of being picked off.

Musso pulled into the shadows and saw me with the blindfold off. He slapped me, hard, across the face.

“You do that again, you be sorry!” he shouted.

My cheek was stinging, but I was happy to get a rise out of him. I smiled.

“What are you going to do,” I said, “shoot me?”

We heard the noises again. Musso glared, but he was too scared to mess with me right then. He ducked down and slunk back into the second row of seats. Now all the pirates were out of sight, except for Young Guy. He didn’t want to leave me. He was giving me serial-killer looks, with the gun pointed right at my chest. He put the blindfold on and again I pulled it down. The gun muzzle was within two feet of me.

I was in the third seat from the rear, port side, on the aisle. With the ropes, I couldn’t get out of harm’s way. I felt like a piece of beef in a butcher shop window. My fear was spiking. If the pirates were scared, there had to be a reason. It’s strange to see people with guns show abject terror.

All of a sudden, I heard quick shots. It sounded like an AK. I couldn’t see who was firing, but it was close.

I realized the pirates had opened up the forward hatch and fired at a navy ship. The shots seemed to puncture the tension. Now they slowly came out of their hiding places. After a few minutes, Tall Guy even managed to fall asleep in the front of the boat.

I needed to take a piss.

“Hey, I need to go the bathroom,” I said to no one in particular. “I need the bottle.”

Ever since the escape attempt, they’d been making me piss in a bottle. They wouldn’t let me near the door anymore.

“No,” the Leader said.

“What did you say?”

The Leader waved his hand dismissively.

I screamed at the Somalis that they were going to pay for this, that they were going to die in this boat and they were nothing but pirates. They hated that word.

“Shut up, shut up!” the Leader screamed at me.

“I won’t shut up. You’re nothing but freaking pirates and that’s how you’re going to die.”

He started the engine and revved it high. It was clear he knew where he was going.

The Leader erupted, screaming at me to shut up. The other Somalis began chanting again, just a brief version this time, as the Leader pushed the throttle forward and the lifeboat lurched ahead.

“When we kill you, we’re going to put you in an unclean place,” the Leader said. “That’s where I’m taking you now.”

“What does that mean?”

They explained that they knew about this shallow reef where the water was stagnant. It wasn’t part of a tide pool that came in and washed the bay every twelve hours. Any body dropped there would rot and bloat and stink to high heaven.

“Very bad place,” Musso said.

I couldn’t hold it any longer. I felt a rush of wetness on my pant leg. They were letting me piss myself like a goddamn animal.

The rage just welled up in me. I felt degraded. I was screaming at the pirates, just cursing at them and telling them they were going to die.

The Leader yelled back, “Shut up! Shut up!”

The Leader arrived at our destination and killed the engine. I could see the
Bainbridge
out the aft hatch. It seemed like the navy ship was trying to catch up to us, but the pirates had outrun it.

Now the Somalis started giving me water and food. The Leader insisted I eat Pop-Tarts.

“Fine, I’ll eat the food,” I said. They were reversing their normal rituals. It appeared I wasn’t worthy of a clean death anymore.

“Eat more,” the Leader said, practically force-feeding me the Pop-Tarts.

“Fuck you,” I said.

“You’re not halal, you’re filthy, an animal,” he cried. He forced food down my mouth, to make me dirty. He laughed at me. He walked away and went back up to the cockpit. Turning dramatically, he took his right hand and made a cutting mo
tion, first across his throat, then both wrists and finally across his balls.

“You son of a bitch,” I said. “If you kill me, I’ll follow you. I’ll come back and haunt you.”

They tried to force my feet onto a blue bag lying on the floor. I was sitting on the outer edge of the seat arm, with my feet across the aisle on the opposite arm. I was still trussed up. It was too dark to identify who was doing what, but a pirate with an AK was behind me, shining a flashlight. All I could see was my head in silhouette against the far wall. There was another Somali lying by my side, another AK pointed up at my gut. The boat was really rocking in the swells.

“You can’t die a clean death,” someone said in the darkness.

I felt warmth on my leg again. I was pissing myself. It was so degrading, to have to sit there like a farm animal. I cowered, drained of strength, while the pirates were sniggering all around me.

This is the end,
I thought.
It’s over.
And something in me was happy about it. I wanted the navy to open up on the lifeboat with that .50-caliber gun and just end everything. I didn’t care if I died at that moment—I just wanted the whole thing over with. My frustration boiled over and I was ready for the end.

But then I thought of my family and I told myself I had to go on.

My thoughts were going in two different directions at once. I believed the pirates were going to kill me and I didn’t. I wanted this to be over and I wanted five more minutes of life. I think what was really confusing me was the pirates’ motives.
Why would they try to intimidate me?
I thought.
I have no power to give them their ransom. What is this about? Could it really be just a test?

I heard someone move behind me. It was so dark I couldn’t even tell which of the Somalis it was. He began dry-firing the AK-47 and he ordered me up on my feet. I staggered around, trying to stay upright. He was timing the click of the rifle to the starboard roll of the boat. It was this strange dance. It seemed to go on for three hours. “Sit,” they cried.