I was up on the bridge alone, scanning the horizon and keeping an eye on the radar. About 1340, three blips came up on the screen, seven miles behind us on our port quarter and moving fast, at least twenty-one knots. I looked up and caught sight of a bow wave. At seven miles, you can never see the boat, just the wake it kicks up as it slices through the water.
My training kicked in and I steadied the 7 × 50 binoculars on the tiny white blip. I turned the little wheel at the top of the binoculars and saw the wake again. Another look at the radar. Now there were two other fast boats back there, plus a larger blip following eight to nine miles behind us, over the horizon and out of sight but visible on the screen. The mother ship. I checked his vectors; he was trailing us. Every move we made, he shadowed.
I thought I’d spotted a mother ship once before during my career, but now I was seeing a pirate outfit in full array. My heart pounded.
I radioed down to Shane.
“Possible pirate boats approaching, seven miles, port quarter,” I said.
“You want us to end the drill?” he called back.
I thought about it.
“Not yet. We may have to call it off, but right now I’m just keeping you apprised.”
I still wasn’t convinced it was pirates. Their normal time to attack was just after sunrise (5 a.m.) and just before sunset (7:45 p.m.). Those are the times when it gets hazy in the Gulf of Aden and visibility falls from seven miles to four or so. At 1 p.m., there was maximum visibility. It was a strange time for the Somalis to mount a sortie against a ship.
But they were closing fast. I called down to Shane to send up an AB named Andy. He was an old salt who had the best eyes on the boat. I’d been with him on the bridge previously and he’d called out, “I got a ship coming up on port side.” I’d looked at the horizon, saw nothing, then checked with the binoculars and sure enough, there was a ship fifteen miles away. I couldn’t believe he’d caught it. So now I wanted his eyes on watch with me.
I moved the stick on the EOT—the engine order telegraph—sending the new speed down to the engine room. The RPMs began to pick up and the ship surged forward. I was pushing the speed up to 122 revs.
As I nudged the throttle higher, I called down to the chief engineer. “Chief, I need you in the engine room now, I’m increasing the speed.” I was bringing the revs up as fast as I ever had on this ship, eventually reaching 124. I wanted Mike down there to watch the engine computer and let me know if any of the indicators—engine load, exhaust temperatures, cylinder temperatures—veered into the red. The last thing you want to do is kill your power plant when the bad guys are on your tail. If anything looked like it was going to blow, the chief would let me know.
I ran over to the satellite phone and dialed up UKMTO. A voice with a British accent answered.
“This is the Maersk Alabama,” I said, and I rattled off our coordinates: position, course, speed. “We have three ships approaching at five to six miles, with a possible mother ship trailing one mile behind them. Potential piracy situation.”
The voice at the other end didn’t seem impressed. I’m sure they were getting calls from every ship off the Somali coast who spotted a fishing skiff or a floating barrel.
“We have a lot of captains who are nervous out there,” he said.
I’m not the nervous type, I wanted to say.
“It’s probably just fishermen,” he continued. “But you should get your crew together, get the fire hoses ready, and you may want to get the ship locked up.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. First, he told me it was probably just a bunch of local guys chasing mackerel, and now he’s telling me to go to DEFCON 1.
“If I was that far behind the eight-ball, I wouldn’t be talking to you now,” I said, a little heated. “I’m just letting you know the situation.”
“Keep us posted,” he said.
“Will do,” and the phone was already down before he could answer.
There’s a U.S. emergency line for piracy and I dialed that next. If you’re going to be taken hostage, you want your own government to know. I watched the blips on the radar coming closer and closer. The phone was just ringing.
After ten rings, I slammed it down. Nobody home. Just unbelievable. The Brits were condescending as hell but at least they picked up the damn phone.
The ships were still closing. I could see them in my binoculars. The crew was going through its drills, but everyone was looking at our port quarter. They’d spotted the ships and any thoughts of fire had gone out of their heads. I could tell they were getting nervous.
Five miles away. Then four. I could see the lead boat now, not just the wake. It was a typical Somali pirate skiff: white, thin across the bow, and fast.
The seas began to pick up. As we got farther out into the gulf, the swells rose from two feet to four and five. I could tell that the fast boats were having trouble. They’d run flat out for a while and then slam into a swell, which would twist them sideways and kill their speed. They’d have to turn, gun the engine, and start building up momentum again. The ocean was helping us. If we could get into heavy enough seas, we could outrun them.
The minutes ticked by. They were gaining, then falling back, gaining and retreating.
By 3 p.m., the fire drill was over. I realized with a start that we’d been racing with the pirates for over an hour. They were down to three miles now and gaining again. I spotted four men in the lead boat, with long black objects in their hands—automatic rifles, for sure.
I looked around and realized there were five or six guys on the bridge. They’d materialized there without my noticing and they were staring out at the port quarter, dead quiet. Usually, I would have ordered them off the bridge, but in a situation like this, the more eyes, the better. They weren’t panicked, yet, but the atmosphere on the bridge was electric.
An idea came to me. “Hey,” I shouted to the second mate. “Go ahead and talk on the radio to me. I’m going to pretend to be a navy ship.” If the pirates were monitoring our frequencies, which they often did, I wanted them to believe that we were in contact with a navy destroyer.
“What, Cap?”
I didn’t have time to explain.
“Forget about it,” I said. “Just watch me.”
I got on the radio and hit the mike. “Warship 237, Coalition Warship 237, 237, Maersk Alabama, come in.”
I deepened my voice and tried to cut out my Boston accent. “Maersk Alabama, come in, this is Coalition Warship 237,” I said. I was pretending to be a navy ship within radio range.
I switched back to my natural voice. “This is the Maersk Alabama. We’re under attack by pirates. Position is two degrees two north by forty-nine degrees nineteen east. Course is one hundred and eighty and speed at eighteen knots. Request immediate assistance.”
“Roger that, Maersk Alabama. How many people aboard?”
“Twenty aboard. No injuries at this time.”
“Roger that. We have a helicopter in the air. Repeat, we have a helicopter en route and he’ll be at your position at approximately fifteen hundred hours. Repeat, helicopter’s ETA to your position is five minutes.”
I was almost laughing. What we were doing was probably illegal, and the navy guys would have rolled their eyes. They had their own codes, but any Somali bandit would have been damn impressed to know that a helicopter gunship was on its way to blow him to smithereens.