A Captain's Duty

to open all the doors were keys for the engine room and the after steering, where most of the crew were supposed to be. If the Leader demanded I open them, the jig was up. I had to get him to skip over some rooms, even though all the doors had signs on them with their functions written on them: chief mate cabin, engine control room, whatever. I had to hope that the Leader’s English wasn’t that good, or that I could distract him with my banter.
    We dropped down to B deck. The Leader pointed out a door.
    “Oh, that’s just a locker, nobody in there,” I said.
    “Open!” he said, and jabbed his finger at the door.
    I smiled. I wanted to build trust with him so that when we got to the really important rooms, I could skip them. I opened the door, and indeed it was a locker filled with wrenches and other tools. He nodded. The same thing happened a few minutes later. “This one’s another locker, but I want you to be happy,” I said. I opened the locker. Nothing but janitorial supplies.
    After that he trusted me. When we came to the engine control room door, I used another key and it wouldn’t work. I just waved at it and kept walking. “Locker,” I said. “Waste of time.”
    We did seven decks and the main outer deck before walking back up through the chimney to the bridge. We walked in and the faces of Tall Guy and Musso registered shock. They started asking the Leader questions in Somali. He barked out short answers. They were clearly not happy.
    I nodded to ATM, Colin, and the other sailor. I wanted them to know the crew was still hidden away.
    “Captain, Captain come in.”
    I pressed the portable radio against my leg, hoping to mute the sound. Then I brought it up slowly and turned down the volume. I walked over to the radar and pretended to be looking down at it, while I lifted the radio up and spoke into it.
    “Shane, go ahead.”
    I heard him breathe out. He sounded relieved.
    “I’m down on E deck. Where are the pirates?”
    I looked up. The four had moved back to their positions: one on each wing, the Leader with us on the bridge, and Young Guy on the flying bridge. I relayed that to Shane, while pretending I was working on the console.
    “I think I can take them.”
    Shane was a take-charge kind of guy. That I liked. But attacking the pirates was not a good idea. “Negative, negative,” I whispered, turning my back to the Leader. “Pirates all spread out. Automatic weapons. Do not attempt.”
    Musso yelled from the bridge wing. The Leader hurried over to the door and tilted his head down. It seemed like he was listening.
    “Shane, I think they heard you. Stay quiet.”
    “Roger that.”
    Two hours had gone by.
     
    The Leader tried the radio again, calling out in Somali. I turned and looked out the bridge windows.
    I noticed something white in the water, about five hundred yards off our starboard beam, near where the pirates had come aboard. At first I couldn’t make it out. It looked like a piece of flotsam that was half-submerged and drifting at the same rate we were. You see junk like that all the time, containers that get swept from ships during storms or floating piles of plastic. But something caused me to stare at this piece.
    With a start, I realized it wasn’t a piece of seaborne junk. It was the Somalis’ boat. The skiff was floating upside down, most of the hull underwater, and the nice white ladder was next to it. They were slowly drifting along with us.
    I turned to call to the Somalis, but I caught myself. Did the Leader order them to scuttle the boat? I thought. They could have just tied it off and let it float alongside the Maersk Alabama . Losing a boat like that doesn’t happen by accident. They’d raised the stakes as they came onboard. Now I felt they were going to be even more desperate.
    I wondered if the Leader had ordered the boat scuttled to intimidate his men. “Either we take the ship,” he would have said, “or we die on it.” Abandoning your only escape route meant the Somalis had to connect with the mother ship or take one of our lifeboats to make their getaway.
    The elation I’d felt when the pirates’ bluff had failed drained away. These guys were committed. There was no way they were going to leave empty-handed.
     
    By noon, we’d settled into the beginnings of a routine. ATM and Colin were sipping water occasionally, sitting on the deck on thebridge on the starboard side aft. The third sailor was leaning against the wainscoting trying to