As I sat trying to catch my breath, I thought, Either I’m getting out of here alive or they are. But not both.
We were a few hours away from sunrise on Friday. It felt like the escape attempt had taken half an hour, but I’m sure it was just five minutes, if that. I thought, Maybe I really am out here alone. If the navy was here to rescue me, if they had sharpshooters laid out on the stern waiting for their chance, they would have blasted these sons of bitches out of the water.
Why hadn’t they done anything? I thought. They must have seen me. They must have watched it all go down. But their ship had never budged.
Maybe they really are just here to observe, I thought. Some kind of no-shoot orders. I tried to think what the implications of taking down some Somali pirates would be on the world political stage, but my brain was too fogged from fatigue. Later, I learned that the crew on the Bainbridge had seen the incident unfold with their surveillance technology, but they thought it was the pirates taking a swim break. By the time they saw the white of my beard and realized it was me, it was too late to do anything.
Everyone was exhausted. I was trussed up like a pork roast, and the pirates were lying around, their guns pointed at me. The Leader had really thrown a scare into them. I couldn’t move an inch without one of them popping up their heads and shining a flashlight at me to see what I was doing.
Young Guy had been just an afterthought up until then. He wasn’t running anything. He was taking orders. Now he came and sat across the aisle from me. I was in the number-three port seat and he was in the number-three starboard. I watched him sit down and then I looked away.
Click.
I looked over. He had the AK in his lap and he was looking at me.
Click.
He was pointing the gun at me. I guessed there was no clip in it. Still, hearing a gun fired while it’s pointed at your gut is a nervous feeling. I twitched the first few times.
Young Guy was looking at me like I was a laboratory rat. Just studying me with these cold, cold eyes. They were dead. I’d never seen eyes like that before. It was like a kid who doesn’t really know what he’s doing, who has no idea what life and death mean. Young Guy wouldn’t have done that before the escape attempt but now it was as if he had permission to treat me like a piece of garbage. Something had changed in him. Something had changed in me, too.
I’m a big John Wayne fan and I remembered a line from one of his movies, The Searchers. A cowboy has apologized for shooting a desperado. And John Wayne says something like, “That’s all right. Some men need killing.”
I’d never met a man who needed killing. But right then, Young Guy did. He was like an assassin toying with his victim before he put him out of his misery. He was enjoying it to all hell.
He went on that way for a good twenty minutes. I tried to ignore him, but every so often I’d look over at him. He loved that. But there was no emotion in his eyes. He was just prodding me, looking for a reaction, wanting to see terror up close.
The sun came up and the broiler switched back on. The pirates were talking with the interpreter on the radio and I heard a launch approach again.
Great, I thought. More Pop-Tarts. And it was. Pop-Tarts and fresh radio batteries and water. I couldn’t believe it.
I looked out one of the hatches and saw that the Maersk Alabama wasn’t in the same spot it had been yesterday. It had been behind the navy ship by a mile or two, but now it was gone. As we turned, I scanned the horizon and realized they’d sailed off. I was so relieved to see that the guys were on their way back to safety.
Later I found out that Shane had fought leaving me. He said he would have rather done anything than sail off without me aboard. But the navy insisted, as there were still pirates in the area and they didn’t want another hostage situation on their hands. Eighteen armed servicemen went aboard the Maersk Alabama and they turned their bow for our original destination, Mombasa.
The Leader stayed up in the cockpit, occasionally hacking and spitting like an old man with TB. The pirates were smoking cigarettes continually. They were agitated as hell. The good times were over for good.
“That stuff will kill you,” I said.
There was no banter back. Young Guy just stared at me with those dead eyes.
“Bad for your health.”
Nothing.
And then the lighter they’d all been using broke. They’d either run out of fuel for it or it had just broken down from overuse, but the thing wouldn’t light up. And that struck me as incredibly funny. Because the look in their eyes was one of panic.
“What’s the matter?” I said. “Can’t get it to light? Oh, that’s too bad.”
I was still trussed up and the ropes were painful. They’d stopped letting me urinate off the side of the boat. They’d given me a bottle to piss in. And they were rationing my water, even though we had gallons to spare. Sometimes they’d give me a bottle, other times they’d refuse.
In short, they were doing everything they could to make me miserable. So to see them suffer just a little bit was a bonus.
“Maybe you should break out the khat,” I said. Khat is a narcotic leaf that everyone in Somalia uses. But it has to be chewed immediately after being harvested, so I guess it wasn’t a good choice for extended hostage-takings.
The Somalis were going nuts. They searched high and low on the boat for another lighter but no luck. I didn’t tell them about the spare matches that are kept in all lifeboats. Finally, they broke open one of the flashlights and took out the reflective cone.
“Oh, very smart,” I said. Everything that happened on the boat became the subject of consuming interest to me. If I let my mind focus on the heat and the passing of time, I would have gone out of my mind. So the quest for fire became entertainment. These guys were getting the shakes and if they didn’t get nicotine, they were going to die trying.
They placed the cone in direct sunlight and put some paper at the bottom of it as they chattered back and forth in Somali and English.
“Move it over here. Tilt, tilt.”
They stared at the paper, just willing it to light.
“Got to get this going, oh yes.”
I laughed, but I was leaning over to see what was happening too.
“Not working,” I said after ten minutes. “Oh, that is a pity.”
But they were committed. They just kept watching the paper at the bottom of the cone like it was going to reveal the secret of life itself. And after twenty minutes, smoke appeared. Musso and Tall Guy nearly pissed themselves with excitement.
“Yes! Yes!” they yelled. The paper caught on fire and the two pirates took it and lit their cigarettes. After that they would just light the next smoke off the old one and keep a constant source of fire on the boat.
But that was the only excitement. Everyone seemed to withdraw into themselves, myself included. I kept going over the escape in my mind, thinking, Should I have grabbed the gun? Or Should I just have kept swimming? And my other mistakes came back to haunt me: I should have dropped the fuckers forty feet into the water when we were deploying the MOB. Or I should have never transferred to the lifeboat. And, strangely, Where did they get that white ladder? That still mystified me.