A Captain's Duty

shrugged.
    “I’m just a poor Somali,” he said. “But I tell you this. You better get somebody up here right now.”
    “One minute!” said Tall Guy. “We kill everyone.”
    I gestured with my hands, Easy, easy . My heart was racing, my hands felt like they were covered with porcupine quills. Was I going to watch my two crewmen die? If they shot one, I knew, they would go through the ship and shoot us all.
    “Pirates threatening to shoot us,” I called on the PA and radio. “They want people on the bridge now.”
    “Thirty seconds!” Musso shouted. “YOU HEAR ME? Thirty seconds and you die.”
    Tall Guy and Musso rushed toward Colin and ATM and jabbed their AKs violently down, as if they were daggers and they were going to impale my crewmen. The look on Colin’s and ATM’s faces was pure terror. The Leader ran over and put his hands on Tall Guy’s chest and pushed him back.
    “Dangerous pirates,” he said to me. “Bring someone now!”
    “What else can I do?” I yelled at the Leader.
    He shrugged his shoulders.
    I keyed the radio. “If you don’t hear from us in one minute, we’ll be gone. You’ll get no quarter from them.” I wanted the crew to know they’d have to kill these guys if the shooting started. There would be no other way out of this. No surrender.
    “Bring the crew up now,” the Leader said. “Bring them up to the bridge now or we’ll blow the ship up.”
    I stared at him. Did he just say “blow the ship up?”
    “Yes, we have a bomb. We will blow up the ship in thirty seconds.”
    I didn’t believe them. I’d seen the bucket come up and there was nothing that looked like explosives in it. I began to sense they were bluffing for a quick end to the crew’s standoff.
    Young Guy, watching me from the bridge wing, smiled at me. There was something odd in his face, as if he were enjoying what the Somalis were putting us through. As if he were watching this all on TV.
    The deadline passed. I took a deep breath. It was our first hurdle—they weren’t willing to kill us just yet.
    I was running around shutting off the alarms, which kept tripping and restarting. I would occasionally key my radio and send off a quick update on what was happening on the bridge. Or I would strategize.
    I had an idea where the crew was—the aft steering—but I couldn’t be sure. Maybe there were guys still sleeping, maybe wandering the hallways. They were keeping their positions secret, so that the pirates wouldn’t storm down and take them hostage. Later I found out that at that moment, Shane was up in the forward crane, spying on us. And the chief engineerwas walking around the ship. The other guys were in after steering, the backup safe room we’d discussed during the drill when the chief engineer brought up the idea of having one. I knew they must be suffering down there; it would be 100 degrees or above. And there were guys in their sixties and seventies on the crew. If I left them there too long, hyperthermia—heat stress—would set in. They would get dehydrated, then the symptoms would hit them: confusion, hostility, intense headache, reddening skin, dropping blood pressure. Then chills and convulsions as the condition progressed. And, finally, coma.
    There were really three clocks ticking on us: how long before the arrival of the mother ship; how long before my crew was affected by heat stroke; and how long before the cavalry arrived. I tried to calculate all three in my head at once.
    But I knew I had to get the pirates off the ship as soon as possible.
    The minutes clicked by.
    Musso and Tall Guy charged back onto the bridge.
    “Two minutes!” Musso shouted. He stood above Colin and pointed the AK at his face from five feet away.
    “Captain, bring up the crew,” the Leader said from behind them. “Pirates angry now.”
    “I’m here with you!” I half-shouted. “What do you want me to do? I don’t know where these guys are.”
    “Crew NOW!” yelled Tall Guy. “Or we shoot everyone.”
    You can’t pull the same trick twice and expect it to have the same impact. As menacing as those automatic rifles were, I felt the Somalis were bluffing. If they wanted to kill us, they would have executed one of my men already. The sight of theguns still made my heart race, but I didn’t quite believe they were going to start shooting.
    The Somalis counted down again, minute thirty, minute, thirty seconds, twenty…. ATM and Colin had their heads bowed. I felt the sweat roll down my