“God,” I said to myself, “please give him the strength to get through this.” Because I didn’t know if he could. I didn’t want that thought—“My father doesn’t love me”—to be his last thought of me before I died. I didn’t want him passing down to his kids the belief that his father didn’t care about him or mess up his relationship with his kids when he had them.
I bowed my head. I didn’t want the pirates to see my face. I moved on to something more practical. “Ange, don’t sell the house,” I said. “Not until the kids finish college.” It’s amazing what goes through your mind as a dad. I thought of the unfinished repairs on the house. I wondered if there was enough money in my insurance policy for the kids to finish school. The basics.
I began to see all the people I was going to meet in heaven. My father and my uncle and Tina, Andrea’s stepmother who had died just a few days earlier of cancer. I hadn’t gotten to see her before she passed. I was going to see James, my brother’s son, who’d died unexpectedly the previous October at too young an age. It was comforting. Each of their faces flashed in front of my eyes.
And I was going to see the best-looking dog and the worst-acting dog in the world. Frannie. The dog that never came when you called her name…a real nutcase. Just thinking about her made me grin.
I’ve always said that, when the time comes to die, if I can think back and laugh about what I’ve done and experienced, I’ve had a good life. It’s not about the money or fame or fortune. It’s how you live your life. And I’d had a lucky one.
But I wasn’t giving up on it yet.
I stared up at the green strut on the bulkhead that formed what looked like a cross, and I closed my eyes.
Three hours later, the sun was just about to come up. The pirates started the chanting again. I started to think that they were on the Muslim schedule of praying five times a day, and that these death rituals were timed around that. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Young Guy looking at me. He could see I was emotional and he was really enjoying my grief and the pain I was about to cause my loved ones. In my peripheral vision, I saw the others watching me, too.
That pissed me off.
I wouldn’t let them see me cowering or quaking in front of them. I wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction. The anger washed away the faces of my loved ones. I had to deal with these bastards now.
I looked Young Guy full in the face and then I looked away. I steeled myself. I emptied my eyes of emotion and made my face as hard and cold as I could and tried to look as fanatical as possible. I looked back at Young Guy, really projecting that mad dog look into his face. I started to laugh. Then I looked away again, smiling.
“You think you’re in charge,” I said, “but none of us are getting out of this alive.”
His face crumpled and he drew back. He looked at me as if I were some kind of lunatic.
I cackled. In my peripheral vision, I could see the others looking at me like I had two heads.
“You’re mad, you’re mad,” Young Guy said.
“Me? Irate?” I looked at him. “No, I’m not mad. But I am crazy.”
Well, fuck them. Both sides can play mind games.
That afternoon, the Leader was on the radio with the navy interpreter, speaking in Somali.
“How’d it go?” I said, after he’d finished. I wanted to get any information I could.
“With those guys?” the Leader said. “Oh, I work for them.”
I was surprised he answered me but even more surprised by what he’d said.
“You work for the U. S. Navy?”
“Of course,” he said nonchalantly. “This is a training mission. I do these all the time. We take ships and then see how the navy responds. Your company hired us. There are no pirates out here anymore.”
“You’re serious?”
He nodded.
“I know these navy guys a long time. We’re friends!”
My brain seemed to go in two directions at once. My first thought was That’s ridiculous. But then I thought, Well, he does seem friendly with the navy guys. And there was what looked like a navy insignia on the butt of the 9 mm along with the kind of lanyard navy personnel use. How did they get that? And why hadn’t the navy rescued me when they had the chance?
Crazy thoughts were flying through my head. I could feel the beginning of paranoia creeping up on me.
“We told your chief mate,” the Leader said. “He knew this was a test.”
“Uh huh,” I said.
“And your chief engineer. The navy and your company gave us this job.”
I remembered the faces of Shane and Mike when we were getting the MOB ready. There had been real fear there. The Somalis had to be lying.
“Right. And was trying to kill me part of the job?”
He laughed. Then he coughed and spit.
“Kill you? When did we do that?”
“You almost killed me on the ship. And in the lifeboat you fired an AK about a foot above my head.”
He waved the gun in front of him.
“Warning shot. Part of the training.”
I was incredulous.
“And was what happened back there part of the training, too?”
“What you mean?”
“When your boy fired the pistol at my head.”
He scoffed. “He didn’t fire! He just hit you in the head.” He snorted with laughter.
I thought about that. He could be right.
“Hey, Phillips, after this job, I’m going to work on a Greek ship,” the Leader said.
“Oh yeah? How nice for you.”
“Yeah, I’m going to be a sailor there. After that I go to work on U.S. ship.”
“You on a U.S. ship?” I said, laughing. “You’d never cut it.”
That got the whole boat riled.
“What! You think American sailors better than Somalis?” Musso cried out. “Ha! All Americans do is sit in their rooms and watch TV and drink beer. Lazy, lazy. We’re Somalis, we’re twenty-four/seven sailors. We can do anything.”
He threw a length of rope at me.
“Here, tie the rope like I did.”
I looked at the rope.
“Why would I want to do that?”
“To show you are real sailor.”
“I don’t need to tie a knot to show I can sail a ship. I’ve been doing it for thirty years. I can get by with three or four knots.”
Musso scoffed. “You baby, Phillips, you baby. Somalis the real sailors.”
“American sailors are the worst,” Tall Guy chimed in.
I ignored them and tried to get some rest. I was dozing off when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the pirates do something that snapped me out of my stupor.
The navy was getting more aggressive, shooting water from fire hoses at us and sending helicopters (which I could hear but not see) to hover near our bow. They were trying to keep the pirates from heading to the Somali coast. Frustrated, the pirates opened up the caps on some of the spare fuel buckets. The fuel didn’t spill out, but they lined them up ready to tip over on the deck, which was hot as hell, even with the engine off.
It looked to me like they were going to respond to an assault by burning down the boat.
The Leader looked up at me. “Ha, you see? You are going to die in Somalia and I am going to die in America.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You die here. I die in your home.”
What he meant was they were going to kill me in Somali waters, so my soul would never be able to leave here. And the Americans were going to kill him. So our souls would switch places. He’d die by an American bullet and I’d die by a Somali one.
“But I fix them,” he said. “If they try anything, we do suicide attack.”
I looked at him and then back at the buckets of diesel. Holy shit, I thought. Maybe they didn’t want the fuel to get back to Somalia. Maybe they wanted it to blow up a navy warship, like Al Qaeda did the USS Cole.