A Captain's Duty

the middle of the ocean, I could only imagine what Andrea was going through.
     
    The American destroyer was playing cat and mouse with the pirates. They would come up real close to starboard, and then just drift away. Once they were half a mile away, they’d come charging at the lifeboat again and sweep by us and then drift. It was an aggressive way of saying, Any time we want to, we can take your boat down .
    The Maersk Alabama was back in the distance, maybe three miles away. I knew they were out of danger now that the navy had arrived.
    I heard a navy corpsman announce the destroyer’s name over the radio: the USS Bainbridge . The name brought a smile to my lips. The Bainbridge had to be named after William Bainbridge, a merchant marine who’d gone to sea at fourteen and eventually rose to be a dashing, impetuous commodore in the U.S. Navy. In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson sent Bainbridge to Tripoli, at the height of the Barbary pirates’ reign, to subdue the bandits. But instead, he’d run the USS Philadelphia aground on the Tripoli coast and was captured and imprisoned by the pirates. Now his namesake was here tohelp free me from the inheritors of the Barbary corsairs: the Somali pirates. It was a hell of a coincidence. But one detail disturbed me: Bainbridge had been held for nineteen months before gaining his freedom.
    The Leader climbed up into the cockpit and got the boat going. He resumed our course, doing no more than six knots. There was a magnetic compass up there, so he could steer a course to the Somali coast without too much trouble. And he obviously wanted to have the engine running in case the navy tried to raid the ship. The pirates’ normal routine in the lifeboat was to have two guys in the stern with AKs pointed at me, the Leader in the cockpit with the 9mm pistol, and the fourth guy on the bow, usually sleeping. They rotated back and forth to keep everyone rested. I radioed the Somalis’ positions to Shane. I’d been on the lifeboat for a little under twenty-four hours by now.
    Thursday passed in a daze of heat. And I hate heat. I’m one of those people who looks forward to the first snow in Vermont. I like that feel of cold on my skin. If it’s over 80 degrees, I’m miserable. And it was easily 105 in that boat at 0600. After that, it got really hot. The sweat was dripping off my forehead and stinging my eyes. The lifeboat’s engine was underneath the floor and an exhaust pipe came underneath the boat, so with the engine constantly running, that pipe and the engine were warming up the floor. It got to where you couldn’t even put your feet down because it was so hot.
    On any ship I’ve ever been on, you look forward to the sunrise. You really return to a kind of ancient calendar, where your time is measured out by the angle of the sun. But onboard the lifeboat, I dreaded the mornings, the sun coming up andstarting to heat the boat. I looked forward to twilight and darkness as a time when I might get some relief from the blistering temperatures.
    The navy came on the radio. They wanted to drop some food and water to us. The pirates okayed it. I couldn’t see how they got the stuff over, but they must have launched a Zodiac or something and as it approached—I could hear its engine—I thought, Freedom is twenty feet away from me right now. The navy dropped a box of food in the water. There was tension in the pirates’ faces. We circled around to the box and one of the Somalis opened the rear door and brought it in.
    The navy, in its infinite wisdom, had sent over handheld radios, batteries, water, and Pop-Tarts. Boxes of chocolate Pop-Tarts. And only Pop-Tarts. Andrea loves them but I’m not really a fan of the things and I couldn’t figure out why in the hell the commander of the Bainbridge chose them. Did they have some special nutritional secret I didn’t know about? Were they laced with sleeping powder?
    It was so hot, I couldn’t eat the stuff anyway. My stomach was growling and I was famished, but the thought of food didn’t interest me. I drank some water and picked up one of the military radios the navy had sent. I would find out it had one feature I’d never seen before. When you keyed the “Talk” button, the unit would beep. In civilian radios, beeping meant you were running out of power, and I thought that’s what was happening here. So I kept telling the pirates, “Change your batteries, they’re dying.” I was worried they’d lose power and my