A Captain's Duty

fast. He’d gone through the piracy cages like they were child’s play.
    It was 7:35 a.m. The pirates had taken about five minutes to board my ship and take the bridge.
    I still had the portable radio in my hand. I turned my back to the pirate, pressed the key, and, in a low voice, said, “Bridgeis compromised, bridge is compromised. Pirates on the bridge.” This would let the first engineer in the after steering room know the pirates were in control. “Take the steering,” I half-whispered.
    “No Al Qaeda, no Al Qaeda, no problem, no problem,” the pirate yelled, the AK-47 pointed at my chest. “This is business. We want money only. Stop the ship .” He was twelve feet away.
    “Okay, okay,” I said. “It takes time, just relax.” When you stop a ship, you have to shift down gradually through a program. I pulled the ship back from our sea speed of 124 revs down to full ahead, which is the maneuvering speed we use in ports.
    Different alarms were going off all around me, brrrrrrrtt, brrrrrrttt, brrrrrrrtt, whoo, whoo, whoo . The noise was incredible. I started dancing around the console, silencing them. I looked over at the phone. It was lying sideways on the desk where Colin had left it. I hoped to God UKMTO was on the other end listening to all this go down.
    I realized the rescue center alerted by the security alarm hadn’t called and asked for the nonduress word. Did anyone know this was a hijacking and not just a malfunction?
    I walked over to the stick and jiggled it. Nothing. The chief engineer had switched control over to his instruments in the engine control room. The first and third had control of the steering. They were now in control of the ship. They were on their own.
    It was a small victory. Whatever happened, the Maersk Alabama wasn’t going to head to the Somali coast, unless the pirates hunted down my entire crew.
    “Stop the ship, stop the ship,” I called into the radio. I left my finger on the key button so everyone could hear what the pirate was saying. I could feel the engineer kill the engines. That thrum that you grow so used to died away. We were now gliding through the water, going in circles.
    That annoyed the pirate. “Stop this circling,” he called to me, and the muzzle of the AK-47 circled around as he talked. “Straighten the ship out.”
    “Okay, no problem,” I said. I started working the stick and the wheel. Nothing happened, of course, because the first assistant engineer, Matt, was steering the ship down below. I gaped in astonishment and then looked over at the pirate.
    “Ship broken, ship broken,” I said. I showed him how moving the wheel had no effect on the direction we were moving.
    “What?!” he yelled. “Straighten out the ship.”
    I shrugged my shoulders. “I’d love to, but you broke the ship. You wanted me to slow down, and we did it too fast.”
    I pointed to the console and tapped on the bow thruster reading. The bow thruster is another screw at the front of the ship that enables us to maneuver. The indicator read “0.” Then I pointed to the rudder angle indicator. It was dead, too.
    “Ship broken,” I said.
    The pirate didn’t like that. “Shut off the water, shut off the water, stop the ship.”
    ATM went out to help the other pirates get up the ladder. I was going around the consoles, shutting off alarms. I killed the fire pump and the spray from the piracy hoses died away.
    As I was moving around the consoles, I came to the radar set. I looked up. The Leader was distracted, barking orders toATM. The radar set has three knobs on it. The first is the gain, which controls the sensitivity of the radar to incoming data. I turned that all the way down. Then there were the anti-rain and the anti-sea-clutter knobs, which screen out things like ocean waves, swells, and precipitation. I turned those two all the way up. By doing so, I’d degraded the radar completely. You could have parked a battleship two miles away and the radar would have looked as clean as an empty dinner plate. I wanted to rob the pirates of an extra pair of eyes, in case the navy came calling.
    I walked away, strolled to the VHF radio, and switched the channel from 16 to 72. No one used 72. If the pirates tried using the VHF, they might as well try calling the surface of the moon.
    I looked up. ATM came through the bridge door followed by three pirates. One of them was the tall guy who’d been shooting up at me, the other was the one I would come to know as