After that, any time they felt threatened, they would open up more gas cans.
The Leader fired up the engine and we got back under way. After a couple of hours, sparks were flying from the outboard’s exhaust. The thing was overheating. The pirates argued back and forth about what to do. Finally, they cut away some of the insulation that surrounded the exhaust and started to pour water on it.
If they get the fuel buckets near that, I said to myself, I won’t have to worry about a bullet in the head. This thing will go up in a fireball.
“I kept going back to the moon,” Andrea told me of this time in the ordeal. “It was the only thing I had that I knew you were looking at, too. I’d say, ‘Richard, you’re under that moon and I’m here with you.’” Friends in Florida called Andrea on videophone and all of them toasted the moon with glasses of champagne under the night sky, saying, “This is for Rich.” Every night from the time I was captured, Andrea would search out that white shape in the night sky. From our bedroom window, she could look out and the moon was right there. “Richard, I’m here with you,” she would say. It was the last thing she did at night.
Halfway around the world, I could catch only a glimpse of the moon through the lifeboat window.
Andrea’s best friend, Amber, lay down with her on the bed that night. Their joke was that it’s hippy Vermont, so they could do that without any controversy. They spread my fleece jacket over them and were just talking back and forth about everything except the crisis around them: the fond memories they had of the days they’d roomed together in Boston, the cars I used to pick them up in when they were student nurses, the romantic boat rides Andrea and I would take on Lake Champlain, skinny-dipping at night. Then in the early morning before the sun came up, Amber would wake up with Andrea and they’d talk about her fears. “She became my rock, my Richard substitute,” Andrea joked.
The one disagreement they had came when Amber wanted to sleep on my side of the bed. Andrea said, “Amber, there’s no way! I’m not going to fight you over that. I’m his wife, I win.” They laughed about it. But mostly they tried to imagine what I was going through at that exact moment on the other side of the world. Nobody had any clue, actually. I could hardly fathom it myself.
Predawn was always Andrea’s lowest point. That’s when she would have her “alone thoughts”: What if he doesn’t make it? What will I do? Saturday morning was no exception.
Amber woke up and they started talking: “What if he doesn’t make it, Amber? What am I going to do? I don’t know if I can live without him. He’s my ground. And what about the kids? Could I keep the house? And, my God, I’d have to work full time!”
Amber laughed.
“He’s got to be so tired, so hot,” Andrea said. She knew how much I hated being hot. It just drained my strength and sent me right up the wall. “How much longer can he keep going?”
“Rich is stronger than you think,” Amber said. “He’ll never give up.”
She did her best to reassure Andrea. Finally, they dropped off to sleep for another hour.
Later Jonathan and Alison told Andrea that the people at the Defense and State Departments told them around this time: “You need to prepare Andrea for the worst. You need to be ready to break it to her that her husband is dead. Because these things usually don’t end well. They end up with a phone call to someone who can’t bear to hear the news they’re about to get.” But by then, I think, Andrea had faced the facts. “I got it,” she told me. “The ship was safe and the crew was safe. Rich was just one man. You can’t expect to save everything.”
SIXTEEN
Day 3, 1900 Hours
The pirates on the lifeboat sounded desperate. “We are surrounded by warships and don’t have time to talk,” one said. “Please pray for us.”
“The situation will end soon. Either the Americans take their man and sink the boat with my colleagues, or we will soon recover the captain and my colleagues in the coming hours. But if the Americans attempt to use any military operation I am sure that nobody will survive.”
All Friday, they kept trussing me up with these intricate series of knots. Musso explained to me how they worked. The white line you could touch only with the right hand. The red line you could touch with either hand. The white lines are the “halal ropes.” You tie it on here. So you have to tie this knot and then this knot and you connect it over here. The ropes could never touch the deck. And if I was going to touch one of the halal ropes with my mouth, I’d have to clean it first. It was very important to them to keep those special knots clean and not to touch them with anything except my right hand. The purpose of all this knot-tying was to prove how superior the Somalis were as sailors, and also to be a pain in the ass.
Musso kept trying to get me to tie some. I played along for a while. Finally, I gave up. It would take months to get as good as Musso, and I wasn’t planning on being with them that long. I stopped tying the knots.
“You baby, Phillips. Lazy American.”
I thought about how different this was from the ship. That had been a battle of nerves and wits. Like chess. The crew and I had won because we’d prepared to win, because we’d been ready for the unimaginable. And because we knew the ship and its systems. We’d outsmarted the bastards.
But that wasn’t going to work on this lifeboat. This was something rawer. It was a battle of wills. The pirates were constantly trying to wear me down, to confuse me, to humiliate me, to turn me into a child instead of a man. I was trying to persevere. To prevail.
This was making what happened onboard the Maersk Alabama look easy.
The sun sank down. It was Friday night. I dozed off to sleep and I must have been out a couple of hours when, suddenly, I snapped awake. It was dark in the boat. We were into Saturday morning now. The moonlight filtering in showed me that the four Somalis were in the lifeboat. The hatches were all closed. Then I heard voices outside. Up near the cockpit, the Leader was talking with someone. There were two people talking Somali from outside the cockpit window. Not on the radio. These voices were actually outside the boat. I could see the silhouette of two heads through the cockpit window. All the pirates were debating with these strangers on the deck.
Who the hell is that? I thought. The Leader and the strangers were arguing about something in Somali. I could hear the words “Sanaa” and “Palestinian” and “Fatah” mentioned again and again. A chill went through me. Sanaa is the capital of Yemen, a real Al Qaeda stronghold. Tourists and aid workers were being kidnapped left and right there. Some had been murdered.
Yemen was my ultimate nightmare.
I leaned forward and strained to hear what they were saying. All the pirates were talking, and each one seemed to be giving his opinion, like they were weighing in on what should happen next. The more I listened, the more I realized they weren’t only saying “Fatah”—the Palestinian group—but “fatwa,” a decree from an Islamic scholar. They were talking urgently, as if they were negotiating, and occasionally one of the pirates would say, “Oh, fuck” as if they weren’t hearing what they wanted to hear.