A Captain's Duty

over.
    The ship began to turn and thirty seconds later we were on the new heading. When you’re going fast, it takes only a flicker of the rudder to turn fifty degrees.
    I watched the mystery ship through the glasses. He was drifting still astern us. But the boat behind him didn’t move out and head toward us. If they were going to mount an attack, it would be from that fast boat. As long as that skiff didn’t leave the fishing boat, we’d be all right.
    I swung the glasses around the quadrants of the horizon: north, south, east, west. Sometimes what pirate gangs do is put a vessel in plain sight and trick you into focusing on it exclusively. While you’re fixated on that ship, they’ll come at you in three skiffs from the opposite direction, racing in from your blind spot. But the water was clear. No other boats were within range of the Maersk Alabama .
    For thirty minutes, I kept an eye on the mystery ship. It didn’t attempt to follow us, and it didn’t launch the fast boat. Strange. But without any other partners within seven miles of us, he wasn’t going to try an attack.
    “I think we’re good,” I told Ken. “If anything else comes up, call me right away. Make sure you tell the next watch about this. And stay on one hundred and twenty revs until I’m back up here in the morning.”
    Pirates had never attacked at night, as far as I knew. (Sincethat time, pirate crews have attacked under the cover of darkness at least once.) But if I was a Somali bandit, that’s exactly what I’d do. Sneak up stealthily in the darkness and take the ship over before the crew had time to react. I had no idea why they hadn’t tried it yet—boarding would be more difficult, getting those grappling hooks up, but the payoff would be huge.
    I didn’t want to be the first.
    I went back to my room and collapsed into bed. I’d never had a confirmed pirate incident before and had just had two possible threats in the last twenty-four hours. It told me that the sea around us was swarming with these guys and that we were in an entirely new world. Forget that .04 percent that the statisticians threw around. It seemed like every other ship going through the gulf was being targeted.
    As I lay in my bunk unable to sleep, I thought of an old merchant marine term. During World War II, convoys of one hundred or more ships would make their way across the Atlantic to bring desperately needed supplies to the GIs in Europe. The ocean was infested with German submarines and these cargo ships were sitting ducks out there on the water.
    Not all of them, though. If you were in the middle of the formation, you were rarely attacked. But if you were on one of the four corners, you were exposed. Vulnerable. Bait.
    They called them the “coffin corners.” I felt like the Maersk Alabama was sailing on one right now. And there wasn’t a destroyer in sight to keep the enemy at bay.

EIGHT
Day 1, 0600 Hours
    “Once you have a ship, it’s a win-win situation. We attack many ships every day, but only a few are ever profitable. No one will come to the rescue of a third-world ship with an Indian or African crew, so we release them immediately. But if the ship is from a Western country…then it’s like winning a lottery jackpot.”
    —Somali pirate, Wired.com, July 28, 2009
    I n the merchant marine, we have a saying—“sleep fast.” Sailors can drop off in ten seconds and be ready to work again in two hours. You either learn to do it or you don’t survive.
    I slept like a dead man and awoke at 6 a.m. the next morning when the sun crept under the hem of my blackout curtains. Wednesday, April 8. We’d made it to another day.
    I took a shower, the freshwater pumping up from our tanks down below. I toweled off, dressed, and looked at the weather update. Sunny again. Perfect sailing weather. I checked the incoming messages—more chatter about pirates. Tell me something I don’t know, I thought.
    I went up to the bridge. The sun was like a red-hot poker suspended above your face. I grabbed a cup of coffee and joined Shane, who was on watch. Immediately we started planning out what we needed to do that day. We were getting ready for Mombasa and that was going to be a very busy time. Pirates or no pirates, we had cargo to unload and supplies to take on and the million other things a merchant crew deals with as it approaches port: laundry, paying off, taking on new crew. Plus there’s all the unanticipated stuff that inevitably hits you: some