ATM and the Leader left. I went back to shutting off alarms, but in my mind I was willing ATM to somehow ditch the pirate and find a safe place to hide. The remaining Somalis alternated scanning the horizon with watching us.
My searches with the leader had taken about twenty minutes. Fifteen minutes after ATM and the Leader left, my radio sputtered to life. “Attention, pirates, atten—”
I grabbed it and turned the volume down. I turned and looked aft. I could hear Mike Perry talking on the radio. With the alarms going off and their shouting at one another and us, the pirates hadn’t noticed anything. I brought the radio up closer to my ear.
“—one pirate. Repeat. We have your buddy. We will exchange him for the captain.”
I gripped the radio and smiled. Damn it, we’d done it. But it was way too early to celebrate. I went back to shutting down alarms. I didn’t want a confrontation yet. I wanted to keep things slow.
After thirty minutes, the pirates started getting fidgety.
Tall Guy came into the bridge and pointed his gun at me. “Hey. Where is he? Where is this guy?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m here with you.”
“Get the guy,” he said.
I pointed to the radio. “Lot of interference. Too much metal in this ship.”
He frowned, but he went back up to the bridge wing.
Fifteen minutes passed. Then another thirty. I could see the pirates shooting glances to one another and hear them asking questions in Somali. Tall Guy shouted over at me.
“Where are they?”
“I wish I knew,” I said. “You have to send someone down to look.”
Musso thought about that.
“Okay, you go.”
“I’m tired of walking around. Why don’t you send the big guy?” I said, pointing to Colin.
Musso nodded.
“Okay, big guy, you go down and find them.”
I smiled. With two other sailors still under their command, the pirates apparently felt safe letting Colin search out the rest of the crew by himself. I was so close to my goal of clearing the bridge of everyone but pirates and myself.
The pirates were watching us closely, so I didn’t have a chance to whisper to Colin as he walked off the bridge alone. I just hoped he had enough sense to lose himself in the ship.
With another man off the bridge, I felt a little lighter. It was like a weight was slowly being lifted off me.
I looked at the aft bulkhead, where we have something called the “watertight door indicator” that tells you which doors and hatches are open and which are closed. That way you can tell which parts of the ship are sealed off from onrushing water. But it also has another use. By watching the door indicators go from red (closed) to green (open) and then red again, I could chart which doors Colin was opening, walking through, and then locking behind him. Every time he opened a door, the indicator gave a little click and changed color.
Where’s he going? I thought. There are places on a ship like the Maersk Alabama where you can hide and no one will ever find you. I’ve had stowaways onboard container ships for days and the crew never knew. I just hoped Colin would find the right hideaway. I thought he’d head to the after steering room, but then realized he didn’t know about the secondary safe room—he’d been on the bridge during the drill critique.
Click. He was in the number one hole. Click. Now he was in the main passageway. Colin was heading down to the bowels of the ship, away from the crew’s quarters. Click. He entered the emergency fire pump room. It was a little cubbyhole, rarely used and even harder to find.
I watched the screen. There were no more reds turning green. He’d found his hideyhole.
I smiled. Good man, I thought. Stay down there.
Now it was down to me and one sailor. Not the first guy I would want to plot an escape with, but you work with what you’re given.
I sidled over to him.
He looked up.
“We might have to make a break for the bridge door,” I said. “Try and slide yourself closer.”
He nodded. One of the pirates leaned over and glared at us, suspicious. The pirate’s head disappeared.
“Just be ready,” I said to the sailor, and walked back to the middle of the bridge.
I keyed the radio. “Three pirates on the bridge, all with weapons,” I said. The radio beeped. I looked at the radio’s power indicator. It was running low.
The Leader and ATM had vanished into thin air. It wasn’t until days later that I found out what happened.
ATM had led the pirate down into the bowels of the ship, toward the engine room. Mike Perry, my chief engineer, was already down there—he’d headed toward the power plant at the first sign of the pirate attack. As ATM and the Leader made their way through the snaking corridors, Mike was checking on some equipment. “It was pitch black, not a photon of light,” he recalled. The Maersk Alabama was sitting in the equatorial sun, the water reflecting the heat back onto the steel hull. The temperature inside was climbing toward 125 degrees. “We were starting to feel like we were dying,” said one crew member. And Mike could hear the increasing desperation of the pirates—and how they were directing their rage and confusion at me. “I can tell [Rich] is in danger,” he said, “just by the tone in people’s voices.”
Mike walked through the engine room, carrying a knife in his hand for safety, when suddenly a beam of light swept across his face—the Leader, just yards ahead in the darkened corridor, had spotted him. Mike turned and dashed down the passageway, with the Leader racing after him, screaming loudly, the words bouncing off the steel walls. Mike came to a spot where the passageway took a ninety-degree turn, and he quickly rounded the corner, then pressed his back up against the wall. Waiting in the darkness, with the crazy flickering of the Leader’s flashlight drawing closer, Mike thought, Is this sane, what I’m going to do? His mind flashed back to the stories he’d heard of pirates forcing crew members to play Russian roulette in the bellies of their captured ships. “In my mind,” he says, “right there, the question was answered.”
Mike heard the footsteps approaching, the knife with its razor-sharp serrated blade gripped in his right hand. The screaming voice was coming closer and closer. When the Somali’s face flashed around the corner, Mike snapped forward. “I lunged up at him,” he said. Grabbing him around the neck, Mike brought the edge of his knife up to the pirate’s throat. “All I had to do was move my hand sideways; it would have cut his throat wide open.” Mike body-slammed the pirate to the floor and the Somali, feeling the blade on his jugular, immediately stopped resisting.
Mike didn’t know the pirate was alone. He thought that the other pirates were going to come around that corner, AKs in hand, and light him up. “In my mind, I thought, ‘Where’s the gunfire? Why is there no gunfire?’” He looked down. The Somali’s hand was cut badly in the struggle and blood dripped onto the metal deck.
ATM and Mike picked up the Leader and marched him to the after steering room. They knocked on the door and Mike hollered for the crew to open up. He shouted out the nonduress password and the door swung open.
Fifteen exhausted but grimly determined faces stared back at the Leader from the darkness. He’d finally found the missing crew. Just not the way he wanted to.
“I grabbed my radio and I called out to let the captain and everybody know,” Mike said. “And I just said, ‘One down.’”