The good news was that the giant life-and-death game of hide-and-seek we were playing with the Somalis was working. The bad news was they didn’t like it one bit.
I could see Tall Guy’s eyes bugging out as the minutes clicked by. Young Guy was up on the fly bridge, but Musso and Tall Guy kept checking on me and my seaman on the bridge. One of these guys is going to go off, I thought. It was like the ship was eating men, and it was starting to freak them out.
“Where is he?” Musso demanded.
“Listen, I don’t know. My crew is crazy. I don’t know what kind of game they’re playing.”
I wanted to play the dumb captain who couldn’t control his own men. But I knew that had a limit.
“What about the big guy? Why hasn’t he come back?”
I went back to the PA.
“All crew members, please report to the bridge. Colin, report back.”
The Somalis’ agitation increased by the minute.
“Why won’t the boat go? Make the boat go!”
I held my hands out to them. Calm down. I got back on the PA.
“Chief engineer, please obey the pirates and come to the bridge.”
Tall Guy and Musso were practically bouncing up and down with nerves. They’d found another handheld radio and were monitoring it. Mine was dying. I hadn’t heard Mike Perry or Shane in at least thirty minutes.
The pirates started looking over the deck. They spotted something and Musso turned to me.
“What is that boat?”
“What boat? Where?”
“Right there.” He pointed at the MOB, the Man Over Board rescue boat, secured on B Deck.
I told them what it was—a rescue vessel with its own engines and supplies.
“This boat, it works?”
“Sure it works,” I said.
I wasn’t trying to hide the fact that they could escape on the MOB. I wanted them to take the boat. Hell, I’d drive it for them. Getting them off the Maersk Alabama and getting my men in the clear would be like winning the Super Bowl for me.
“Show me,” Musso said.
I walked out the bridge door and we made our way to the bright orange MOB. As I was walking around the vessel, I was talking loudly and keying the radio to let the crew know where I was. The MOB was about eighteen feet long, an open design with no canopy, made of fiberglass-reinforced resin with a single outboard engine and three rows for seating. To get it down to the water, you had to winch it off its cradle, get it out over the water, lower it down, and pull a release bar, freeing it from its falls.
I climbed into the MOB and hit the engine switch. I started it up briefly, then the pirates tried it. Each time the outboard roared to life.
“We can take this boat?” Tall Guy said. Some of the tension seemed to have left his face. Obviously, the pirates wanted to know they could get away if they had to.
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll even get it in the water for you.”
He and Musso talked it over in Somali.
Their radio crackled.
“We have your buddy,” Mike Perry said. “You there, pirates? We have your buddy and will trade him for the captain.”
Tall Guy keyed the button.
“Who is this?”
“Chief engineer.”
“You have our man?”
“Yeah. And we’ll do a trade for our captain.”
This sparked another round of intense dialogue in Somali. Tall Guy looked at me.
“We need money,” Tall Guy said. “We can’t leave without money.”
I nodded.
“I understand that,” I said. “I have plenty of money in my room. You can have it if you leave the ship.”
“How much?”
“Thirty thousand dollars.”
They weren’t impressed. They were out on the Indian Ocean looking for a few million, not thirty grand. But I sensed it might be just enough to get them off my ship, if they still had hostages. Hostages would give them a shot at the big money.
A deal was coming into focus.
We climbed up to E deck and walked into my room. Little did I know that Shane had been monitoring our progress and had been caught in the passageway ahead of us. With nowhere else to go, he’d darted into my room and searched desperately for a place to hide. As I walked in with the two pirates, he was hiding in the closet not five feet away. “You don’t know how many times you saved my life,” he told me later. “I’d be walking around the ship and I’d hear you talking and I’d dive into the nearest opening.”
Later, when I had time to reflect on these hours, I got a lot of satisfaction from the knowledge that I’d been able to keep Shane and the others safe. But I wasn’t thinking about it then—I was so immersed in the details of getting the Somalis their money and getting them off my ship that I wasn’t thinking of anything else, let alone whether a crew member was within arm’s reach. I went right to my safe, spun the dial, hit the combination, and then opened the safe door. I pulled out the $30,000, which was arranged into stacks of different denominations, and handed it to Musso. He and Tall Guy counted the money and nodded.
All the while, the pirates were talking on the radio with Mike, the chief engineer. They agreed that the crew would give up the Leader, and the pirates would hand me over at the same time. I wasn’t involved in the negotiations—I was too busy getting things ready for the Somalis to leave.
We went back to the MOB and I began to raise it off its cradle with the davit, a small crane that lifts and lowers materials down to the water. I needed to lift the boat up, swing it over the side, and lower it to the water forty feet below.
But there was still no power. So I started to hand-crank the son of a bitch as Musso and Tall Guy watched over me with their AKs.
“Wait,” Tall Guy said. “We need more fuel.”
“More fuel?” I said. “You can make it to Somalia with what you have onboard.”
You couldn’t. With the two and a half gallons onboard the MOB, they’d make it halfway to the coastline and then be drifting. I knew that, but they didn’t.
“More fuel,” Musso said. “You listen to us.”
“How much do you need?”
“Plenty, we need plenty.”
Whatever it took. I went up to the deck to the Bosun locker and took out a hose, a pipe fitting, and a clamp. I cut the hose to the right length—the Somalis had never taken my three-inch jackknife off me—and brought it over to the tank for the emergency diesel generator. I knew there were a hundred gallons in there at the very least. I found some plastic five-gallon buckets, lined them up, attached the hose to the drain on the generator fuel tank, and let the diesel flow into the bucket.
Tall Guy came up next to me and looked at the panel on the emergency generator. He reached up and started flipping switches up and down. He probably thought he could get the damn ship running if he hit the right combination.
I yelled over to him. “Can you please leave those alone?”
He laughed and walked away. I went back to my fueling.
I’d chosen the buckets carefully. They were the dirtiest ones on that part of the ship, filled with grease and chemicals and the backwash that accumulates when you run a container ship. If that didn’t gum up the MOB’s engine, nothing would.
The buckets filled up quickly. The pirates helped me ferry them over to the deck near the MOB. Once we had the vessel in the water, we’d lower them down. With that much fuel, they could make it anywhere on the Somali coast.
As I was ferrying the buckets over, I passed the rope scuttle hatch sticking three feet above the deck. That particular hatch led down to the aft line locker, a little area where we kept all the rope for the Maersk Alabama. And the hatch was standing wide open, with a line running down into it. There’s only one reason that hatch would be open: the crew must have been down in the scuttle, lying on the ropes, trying to catch a breeze and escape the infernal heat of the ship.