Then I noticed the mother ship had dropped off our radar. What was going on? Had they given up on the attack?
One of the fast boats peeled off and headed away from us. I felt a tiny jolt of adrenaline. It was working. Then another. The swells were just too much for them. They were being tossed around like shoes in a washing machine. We were down to one pirate skiff. But he was coming hard.
I looked at the readout on the side of the radar: 0.9 miles away. Holy shit, that was fast. This bastard was really not giving up. And I knew that it took only one skiff to take a ship.
I saw the boat slam into a wave with a big sheet of spray. It stopped him dead in the water. The swells were getting even bigger, up to six feet, and even the Maersk Alabama was pitching through the waves. I could feel a slight thud in my feet when we hit, but after thirty years at sea, it was barely noticeable to me.
The last boat started up again and pointed his boat at our stern.
Finally, at 0.9 miles away, he peeled off. Then he was at 1.1, 1.5, 1.7. It was like being chased by a car full of thugs on the highway and watching them run out of gas.
The guys gathered on the deck let out a collective breath. “Hell, yeah!” someone yelled and laughter bounced off the bridge windows. I smiled, too. Our detection procedures had worked well. We’d dodged a bullet. But the pirates were still out there.
I brought the engine down to 120 revs. The chief called up and told me there was no problem pushing it to that speed. Now I knew we could do 124 without blowing the engine up. And the chief and I agreed once we went over 122, he’d head down to the engine room. We had a speed procedure for the next pirate attack.
The pirates had made a classic mistake. The mother ship had dropped the fast boats into the water too far away, and the flimsy little craft had been unable to negotiate the high seas. I didn’t want to think what would have happened if the water had been smooth.
As well as we’d performed, we’d gotten lucky. There was no other way to look at it.
SIX
-2 Days
“It’s that old saying: where the cops aren’t, the criminals are going to go. We patrol an area of more than one million square miles. The simple fact of the matter is that we can’t be everywhere at one time.”
What was it that Winston Churchill said about there being nothing more exhilarating than being shot at and escaping unhurt? The same goes for beating a pirate attack.
I felt elated. I felt I had done my job as a captain. We’d been vigilant, spotting the pirates at the edge of our visibility range, and we’d ramped up our speed in time to outrun them. The toughest part of defeating a pirate team is detecting them, seeing them while there’s still time to react. We’d passed that key test.
It’s a tricky thing to be in charge of a ship with nineteen other guys, most of whom you hardly know. The merchant marine is different from the navy or the army or the marines in that you don’t have a crew or a battalion that’s grown to know you over several months or even years. You walk on a ship and you have to earn instant respect, instant faith in your leadership, or the whole thing falls apart. You need to do on-the-spot appraisals of what every man is capable of and bring them up to their potential in a matter of hours or days.
Coming up, I’d made a study of how that was done. And how it wasn’t.
The first lesson I learned came from a merchant marine legend named Dewey Boland. Exhibit number one in how not to command a ship.
Dewey was a tall thin guy in his sixties, an Idaho horse farmer who’d taken to the sea for what reason, only God knows. He was well known and dreaded throughout the merchant marine. I’ve been in union halls where a sweet assignment has come up on a ship and a guy throws down his ticket to get a job on a ship. “Looks good. Who’s the cap?” “Dewey Boland.” And the guy would snatch up his card. “No thank you.”
Dewey never called you by your name, only by your job on the ship. “Hey, Third,” he’d yell, for “third mate.” It was a way to put you down. I was the third mate on one of his ships. Dewey really had it in for me because I graduated from the Massachusetts Maritime Academy and his son had just been thrown out of the federal academy, probably for being a carbon copy of his father.
Every day at 12 p.m. sharp, we’d do what is known as the “noontime slips,” where you chart your position, your average speed, your fuel consumption. Depending on how you did the calculations, there was a variance of a few miles or so on the number you’d come up with. So I’d get out my books and tables and calculator and I’d get the number. And here would come Dewey at 1300, climbing up to the bridge to compare notes. He did his own calculations by taking a divider—the two-legged compass used in geometry class—and sending it skittering across the map. In three seconds, he had a number. Who cared if it was completely inaccurate?
“Hey, Third, what do you say? What number did you get?”
“Cap, I got three hundred and ninety-four miles.” Meaning 394 miles from our last position.
Invariably, Dewey would blow a gasket. Invariably.
“Jesus Christ, what the hell are you talking about? I got three hundred and ninety-six.”
Two miles difference means absolutely nothing in nautical terms. But Dewey specialized in exploding over nothing. His aim was to make your life miserable, not for endangering the ship or steering it into a jetty, but for the most mundane stuff possible. I was ready to go back to driving a cab. You might be able to get away with being Captain Queeg in the navy, but not on a merchant ship.
Dewey taught me not to put the energy into screaming. I actually had a chief mate once tell me that I was too soft-spoken. “You need to yell more,” he said. I told him what I tell everyone: “It’s when I get quiet that you need to get worried.” That’s the truth.
I’ve learned as much from terrible captains as I have from good ones. I’ve had captains who stayed in their rooms all day and watched The Big Chill over and over. I’ve found captains hiding in the bowels of the ship, crying because they didn’t feel like the crew loved them. I’ve had captains who nearly capsized the boat by sailing straight into a typhoon because they didn’t want to get in trouble with the company by being a day late into port.
That happened to me coming out of Yokohama on a steamer. We hit thirty-five-foot swells going forty miles an hour and they put us into a synchronous roll, which happens when your natural motion is accentuated by the seas themselves. It’s a good way to flip a ship over. The captain’s reaction? He sidled up to me and, nervously chewing on the end of a cigarette, mumbled under his breath: “I better call New York and see what the weather is like.”
“We know what the weather is like, Cap,” I said. “It’s a typhoon.”
But this captain was such a company man that he was terrified, not of sinking, but of pissing off some bureaucrat back at headquarters. He was willing to endanger the lives of twenty men so that he could make his schedule. Meanwhile, I was holding on to the bulkhead for dear life and hearing chains snap down below and watching equipment fly off one bulkhead, shoot straight across the ship, and crash into the other bulkhead forty feet away, without once touching the deck.
That’s what you call a roll. And that’s what you call a failure in leadership.
Another time, I was on a tanker taking heating oil from the refineries in the Gulf of Mexico up the East Coast. We ran smack dab into a hurricane. In three days, we went minus twelve miles. We were just trying to keep the bow of the ship pointed into the wind while the ocean was exploding around us. I would stand in the bridge and watch this gigantic wave of black water come over the bow and roll straight toward me until it smashed against the windows ten feet in front of my face. The bridge would go dark, like you were underwater for a few seconds, which in fact you were, and then it would be past you and you’d see the next one cresting over the bow. I thought, Jesus Christ, I’m standing seven stories above the ocean and I just got buried by a wave. That was a seventy-footer. Those are the kinds of waves that eat tankers.