A Captain's Duty

in.”
    I deepened my voice and tried to cut out my Boston accent. “ Maersk Alabama, come in, this is Coalition Warship 237,” I said. I was pretending to be a navy ship within radio range.
    I switched back to my natural voice. “This is the Maersk Alabama . We’re under attack by pirates. Position is two degrees two north by forty-nine degrees nineteen east. Course is one hundred and eighty and speed at eighteen knots. Request immediate assistance.”
    “Roger that, Maersk Alabama. How many people aboard?”
    “Twenty aboard. No injuries at this time.”
    “Roger that. We have a helicopter in the air. Repeat, we have a helicopter en route and he’ll be at your position at approximately fifteen hundred hours. Repeat, helicopter’s ETA to your position is five minutes.”
    I was almost laughing. What we were doing was probably illegal, and the navy guys would have rolled their eyes. They had their own codes, but any Somali bandit would have been damn impressed to know that a helicopter gunship was on its way to blow him to smithereens.
    Then I noticed the mother ship had dropped off our radar. What was going on? Had they given up on the attack?
    One of the fast boats peeled off and headed away from us. I felt a tiny jolt of adrenaline. It was working. Then another. The swells were just too much for them. They were being tossed around like shoes in a washing machine. We were down to one pirate skiff. But he was coming hard.
    I looked at the readout on the side of the radar: 0.9 miles away. Holy shit, that was fast. This bastard was really not giving up. And I knew that it took only one skiff to take a ship.
    I saw the boat slam into a wave with a big sheet of spray. It stopped him dead in the water. The swells were getting even bigger, up to six feet, and even the Maersk Alabama was pitching through the waves. I could feel a slight thud in my feetwhen we hit, but after thirty years at sea, it was barely noticeable to me.
    The last boat started up again and pointed his boat at our stern.
    Finally, at 0.9 miles away, he peeled off. Then he was at 1.1, 1.5, 1.7. It was like being chased by a car full of thugs on the highway and watching them run out of gas.
    The guys gathered on the deck let out a collective breath. “Hell, yeah!” someone yelled and laughter bounced off the bridge windows. I smiled, too. Our detection procedures had worked well. We’d dodged a bullet. But the pirates were still out there.
    I brought the engine down to 120 revs. The chief called up and told me there was no problem pushing it to that speed. Now I knew we could do 124 without blowing the engine up. And the chief and I agreed once we went over 122, he’d head down to the engine room. We had a speed procedure for the next pirate attack.
    The pirates had made a classic mistake. The mother ship had dropped the fast boats into the water too far away, and the flimsy little craft had been unable to negotiate the high seas. I didn’t want to think what would have happened if the water had been smooth.
    As well as we’d performed, we’d gotten lucky. There was no other way to look at it.

SIX
-2 Days
    “It’s that old saying: where the cops aren’t, the criminals are going to go. We patrol an area of more than one million square miles. The simple fact of the matter is that we can’t be everywhere at one time.”
    —Lieutenant Nathan Christensen, spokesman for the Fifth Fleet, New York Times, April 8, 2009
    W hat was it that Winston Churchill said about there being nothing more exhilarating than being shot at and escaping unhurt? The same goes for beating a pirate attack.
    I felt elated. I felt I had done my job as a captain. We’d been vigilant, spotting the pirates at the edge of our visibility range, and we’d ramped up our speed in time to outrun them. The toughest part of defeating a pirate team is detecting them, seeing them while there’s still time to react. We’d passed that key test.
    It’s a tricky thing to be in charge of a ship with nineteen other guys, most of whom you hardly know. The merchant marine is different from the navy or the army or the marines in that you don’t have a crew or a battalion that’s grown to know you over several months or even years. You walk on a ship and you have to earn instant respect, instant faith in your leadership, or the whole thing falls apart. You need to do on-the-spot appraisals of what every man is capable of and bring them up to their potential in a matter of hours