A Captain's Duty

boat, secured on B Deck.
    I told them what it was—a rescue vessel with its own engines and supplies.
    “This boat, it works?”
    “Sure it works,” I said.
    I wasn’t trying to hide the fact that they could escape on the MOB. I wanted them to take the boat. Hell, I’d drive it for them. Getting them off the Maersk Alabama and getting my men in the clear would be like winning the Super Bowl for me.
    “Show me,” Musso said.
    I walked out the bridge door and we made our way to the bright orange MOB. As I was walking around the vessel, I wastalking loudly and keying the radio to let the crew know where I was. The MOB was about eighteen feet long, an open design with no canopy, made of fiberglass-reinforced resin with a single outboard engine and three rows for seating. To get it down to the water, you had to winch it off its cradle, get it out over the water, lower it down, and pull a release bar, freeing it from its falls.
    I climbed into the MOB and hit the engine switch. I started it up briefly, then the pirates tried it. Each time the outboard roared to life.
    “We can take this boat?” Tall Guy said. Some of the tension seemed to have left his face. Obviously, the pirates wanted to know they could get away if they had to.
    “Sure,” I said. “I’ll even get it in the water for you.”
    He and Musso talked it over in Somali.
    Their radio crackled.
    “We have your buddy,” Mike Perry said. “You there, pirates? We have your buddy and will trade him for the captain.”
    Tall Guy keyed the button.
    “Who is this?”
    “Chief engineer.”
    “You have our man?”
    “Yeah. And we’ll do a trade for our captain.”
    This sparked another round of intense dialogue in Somali. Tall Guy looked at me.
    “We need money,” Tall Guy said. “We can’t leave without money.”
    I nodded.
    “I understand that,” I said. “I have plenty of money in my room. You can have it if you leave the ship.”
    “How much?”
    “Thirty thousand dollars.”
    They weren’t impressed. They were out on the Indian Ocean looking for a few million, not thirty grand. But I sensed it might be just enough to get them off my ship, if they still had hostages. Hostages would give them a shot at the big money.
    A deal was coming into focus.
     
    We climbed up to E deck and walked into my room. Little did I know that Shane had been monitoring our progress and had been caught in the passageway ahead of us. With nowhere else to go, he’d darted into my room and searched desperately for a place to hide. As I walked in with the two pirates, he was hiding in the closet not five feet away. “You don’t know how many times you saved my life,” he told me later. “I’d be walking around the ship and I’d hear you talking and I’d dive into the nearest opening.”
    Later, when I had time to reflect on these hours, I got a lot of satisfaction from the knowledge that I’d been able to keep Shane and the others safe. But I wasn’t thinking about it then—I was so immersed in the details of getting the Somalis their money and getting them off my ship that I wasn’t thinking of anything else, let alone whether a crew member was within arm’s reach. I went right to my safe, spun the dial, hit the combination, and then opened the safe door. I pulled out the $30,000, which was arranged into stacks of different denominations, and handed it to Musso. He and Tall Guy counted the money and nodded.
    All the while, the pirates were talking on the radio withMike, the chief engineer. They agreed that the crew would give up the Leader, and the pirates would hand me over at the same time. I wasn’t involved in the negotiations—I was too busy getting things ready for the Somalis to leave.
    We went back to the MOB and I began to raise it off its cradle with the davit, a small crane that lifts and lowers materials down to the water. I needed to lift the boat up, swing it over the side, and lower it to the water forty feet below.
    But there was still no power. So I started to hand-crank the son of a bitch as Musso and Tall Guy watched over me with their AKs.
    “Wait,” Tall Guy said. “We need more fuel.”
    “More fuel?” I said. “You can make it to Somalia with what you have onboard.”
    You couldn’t. With the two and a half gallons onboard the MOB, they’d make it halfway to the coastline and then be drifting. I knew that, but they didn’t.
    “More fuel,” Musso said. “You listen to us.”
    “How much do you