A Captain's Duty

Introduction
    T he heat in the lifeboat had become completely unbearable. The last drops of cool ocean water from my escape attempt had evaporated off my skin hours ago and, even though it was two in the morning, the heat was radiating off the hull and pressing down on me. I felt as if I were sitting on top of the equator. I’d stripped down to my khakis and socks, but I couldn’t even put my feet on the deck because it was boiling hot. My ribs and arms were aching, too, from the beating the pirates had given me, absolutely batshit furious that their million-dollar American hostage had almost gotten away.
    I could see the lights of the navy ship through the aft hatch, dipping up and down on the ocean swells astern, about half a mile away. I’d almost made it. If the moon hadn’t been so bright, the pirates would never have spotted me. I should have been drinking a cold beer in the captain’s quarters rightnow, telling my adventure story to half the crew and waiting for my call home to go through.
    The ship looked gigantic out there. It was like a piece of home floating so close it seemed unreal. It appeared to be a destroyer, which meant they had enough firepower to blow a thousand pirate ships back to Mogadishu. Why hadn’t they done anything?
    The hard plastic of the molded seats was digging into my back and causing my legs to cramp. I hung my head back, trying to relieve the stress on my neck. I was now trussed up like a deer in the middle of the lifeboat. The Somalis had lashed my hands to a vertical bar at the top of the lifeboat’s canopy and bound my feet together. I couldn’t even feel my fingers. The lanky pirate, the one I called Musso, had pulled the ropes so tight I’d lost sensation in less than a minute. My hands were starting to swell up like a pair of clown gloves.
    I’d been better.
    I stood there, panting, counting the minutes go by. I could hear the creaking of the boat and the slap of waves against the fiberglass hull.
    Then, suddenly, the whole atmosphere in the boat changed. Nobody said a word, nobody moved. I couldn’t see much anyway, just the eyes of the Somalis and their teeth when they smiled or spoke. There was a little moonlight coming in through the hatches, fore and aft, but I could feel the atmosphere change in a split second. It was like an electric switch had been flipped from positive to negative. When someone has a loaded AK-47 pointed at your face, you get to know his mood really well, believe me. If he’s happy or annoyed, if his nose itches, if he’s thinking about breaking up with his girlfriend, whatever. You know. And my skin just felt a change in the air—like something dangerous had slipped into the boat and was sitting right next to me.
    I could catch glimpses of what was going on, but mostly it was what I heard. The first thing was a click . The sound was coming from the cockpit of the boat, where the Leader was sitting. Click. Silence. Click. Silence. Click, click. He was pulling the trigger of his 9mm, dry-firing it. In the darkness, I couldn’t see if the gun was pointed at me, but I felt a cold sensation creep across my chest. The little bastard didn’t have a clip in the gun, or my head would have exploded in a big red spray against the hull. No bullets in the chamber, either. Yet.
    And then out of the darkness I heard the chanting. From the cockpit, the Leader called out something in this droning voice and the other three—Tall Guy, Musso, and the crazy-eyed Young Guy—answered him. I leaned forward, trying to figure out what they were saying. It was obviously some kind of religious ceremony, like a Latin Catholic Mass back in Massachusetts when I was growing up. A few hours ago these guys had been laughing and telling jokes and boasting how they were “real Somali sailors, twenty-four/seven.” You could almost forget they were pirates and I was their hostage. Now everything was different. It was like we’d gone back ten centuries and they were asking Allah for his blessing for what they were about to do.
    I knew what was happening. But I didn’t have to sit there and take it.
    “What are you going to do now, kill me?” I yelled up to the Leader. In the darkness, I could hear him laugh—I saw the flash of his teeth—and then he coughed and spit. Then the fourof them went back to the chanting. I tried to move my hands and loosen the rope, but I had to give it to Musso. He could tie a goddamn knot like nobody’s business.
    The prayers came