Andrea was in Boston when she got the phone call from Greenland. It was the captain on my ship. Even back then, she knew they never call with good news.
“What happened?” she said. “Tell me he’s alive.” The captain described the accident and said they were airlifting me down to Fort Dix. Andrea flew down immediately. Soon after I arrived, she was sitting on the corner of my hospital bed. My company, Central Gulf Lines, had flown her down and even found her a room at a local hotel.
She kept a close watch over me. One of the Fort Dix doctors kept inserting chest tubes—which was excruciatingly painful—without any narcotics. Being a nurse, Andrea knew things are done differently at different hospitals, but I was suffering so badly she couldn’t stand it. She went and chewed the guy out, really giving him hell. To this day, when I’m having trouble with a mechanic or something like that, I’ll look at him and say, “Listen, do I need to bring my wife in here?” And I’m only half-joking.
Andrea wanted me moved to Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where she was working, and my company had me airlifted there, since I needed special care on the way. Once I was installed in my bed, I jokingly told everyone Andrea was my wife: “Oh, don’t worry about cleaning that up, my wife’s coming in and she’ll do it.” On her dinner break Andrea would come to my room and sit on the edge of my bed. On one of those breaks, I told her about being in that stretcher and how she was the only thing I could think of. Finally, I said, “Well, I suppose I should ask you to marry me.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I guess you should.” And I did.
But I never did get down on one knee.
As different as we were, we had a lot in common. We both came from big families, and we were comfortable in that crazy atmosphere. I’m very Irish and steady-nerved and Andrea is Italian and emotional. When she’s flipping out over something like not being able to find her keys, I’ll sit there and say, “Okay, let me know when you’re done.”
“Rich grounded me,” she says. “He laughs at me when I should be laughed at and he pays attention when I need him to pay attention.”
Andrea likes to say that I became her rock. “I know it’s right out of a movie,” she tells people, “but he does complete me.”
Sailors are superstitious by nature. Seeing dolphins at sunrise, for example, means you’re going to have a good day. Redheads, priests, fresh flowers, and stepping onto a boat with your left foot first are bad luck. Your life is controlled by the weather, by the pull of the moon, by storms that are brewing in some corner of Africa. And every sailor has his unlucky places. Until I started sailing the Gulf of Aden, mine had always been the Bay of Biscay, a hellacious gulf that lies between France and Spain. The continental shelf runs out under the bay, which makes for shallow water all across it, and shallow water means one thing: rough seas. I was cursed in that damn patch of ocean. Nearly every time I sailed through it, I hit a storm that gave me something to remember.
One time, I was making my way from Nordheim, Germany, to Sunny Point, North Carolina, with a load of ammo for the U.S. Army. Down below I had millions of rounds of bullets and five-hundred-pound bombs and crates of ammo and who knows what other kinds of explosives. The ship itself was a wreck; the sheathing that prevents the cargo from slamming into the steel hull during rough weather was shredded and useless, the starboard anchor was out of commission, and every other damn thing on that boat was either falling apart or broken. The owner had slashed wages on the ship and the crew was bitter and underpaid. It was a bad situation, but that’s when you learn how to handle disaster.
So we were making the run out of the bay and a storm whipped up and at the same time we lost power. Our engine stopped dead. I couldn’t steer the ship. We were being thrown around the bay like a cork and down below I could hear these enormous thuds. I could actually feel the vibrations all the way up at the top of the bridge. Something was loose in the hold.
The storm intensified by the minute. The ship began to pitch until I looked down at the inclinometer, a pendulum that tells you the degree of roll, and saw that we were at 40 degrees. I’d never seen that number before. Never. We were close to turning turtle and going over completely and sinking to the bottom of the bay. The loose cargo was shifting the center of gravity on the ship. A couple more degrees of tilt and the entire load could shift port or starboard and send us to our eternal rest.
I started for the engine room. Running down the central passageway, I spotted something odd to my right. I stopped, turned around, and went back. It was part of my crew, seven guys in life jackets huddled together, looking like they were the last men onboard the Titanic. They were staring at me from the darkness, their lips quivering, all of them scared out of their minds.
I was, too, but I couldn’t show it.
“What are you doing?” I said, incredulous.
The sailors looked at each other. The din was even louder down there.
“Well, Cap,” one sailor finally said. “We’re preparing to abandon ship.”
I looked at them.
“You’re telling me,” I said, “that you’re getting ready to get off this big ship to get into a tiny boat, in this weather? Is that what you’re telling me?”
They looked at one another. I don’t think that had occurred to them.
“It doesn’t seem like a smart bet to me,” I said. “This is what we’re going to do. Anyone who can work, come with me. Anyone who can’t, go to your rooms. You’re scaring the rest of the crew.”
Four of the guys came with me and the others scattered to their quarters.
I raced to the engine room. Our chief engineer was working furiously on the power plant.
“Get me a status report,” I said. He nodded. He was what we call “fully tasked,” that is, working like hell on six different things that needed doing immediately.
I hurried down to the cargo holds. Opening the door, I shone my flashlight in to the enormous half-lit space. What I saw wasn’t encouraging. Six inches of viscous motor oil was slopping around the floor. Fifty-five-gallon drums were reduced to the size of footballs by the constant pounding on the hulls. Five-hundred-pound bombs, stacked twenty to a pallet and two pallets high, were tipping back and forth and slamming against one another and the hull.
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.
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?”