A Captain's Duty

after being harvested, so I guess it wasn’t a good choice for extended hostage-takings.
    The Somalis were going nuts. They searched high and low on the boat for another lighter but no luck. I didn’t tell them about the spare matches that are kept in all lifeboats. Finally, they broke open one of the flashlights and took out the reflective cone.
    “Oh, very smart,” I said. Everything that happened on the boat became the subject of consuming interest to me. If I let my mind focus on the heat and the passing of time, I wouldhave gone out of my mind. So the quest for fire became entertainment. These guys were getting the shakes and if they didn’t get nicotine, they were going to die trying.
    They placed the cone in direct sunlight and put some paper at the bottom of it as they chattered back and forth in Somali and English.
    “Move it over here. Tilt, tilt.”
    They stared at the paper, just willing it to light.
    “Got to get this going, oh yes.”
    I laughed, but I was leaning over to see what was happening too.
    “Not working,” I said after ten minutes. “Oh, that is a pity.”
    But they were committed. They just kept watching the paper at the bottom of the cone like it was going to reveal the secret of life itself. And after twenty minutes, smoke appeared. Musso and Tall Guy nearly pissed themselves with excitement.
    “Yes! Yes!” they yelled. The paper caught on fire and the two pirates took it and lit their cigarettes. After that they would just light the next smoke off the old one and keep a constant source of fire on the boat.
    But that was the only excitement. Everyone seemed to withdraw into themselves, myself included. I kept going over the escape in my mind, thinking, Should I have grabbed the gun? Or Should I just have kept swimming? And my other mistakes came back to haunt me: I should have dropped the fuckers forty feet into the water when we were deploying the MOB . Or I should have never transferred to the lifeboat . And, strangely, Where did they get that white ladder? That still mystified me.
    What really hurt, though, was the failed escape. I didn’t think I’d get another chance.
    One of the pirates came over and felt my hands. They were getting puffy and sore from being tied up. They’d pinch my fingers to see if I reacted, but I barely felt it.
    “Oh, that’s good, that’s good,” they’d say. Maybe they wanted to incapacitate me, or maybe they just wanted to inflict pain. I didn’t know. My mind was starting to drift. I was constantly moving my hands and trying to get some play in the rope. I even bent down and brought my hands up to my mouth and tried to chew through the strands. But it was high-quality stuff. It would take me a week to get through it.
    Musso caught me gnawing on the rope.
    “No, you can’t do that,” he said, springing up and rushing over to me. “That’s halal. You can’t put your mouth on it.”
    “Halal.” They started to use that word. I gathered it meant clean in a religious sense.
    “If you keep chewing that, we’re going to put a stick in your mouth and gag you,” he said. He was angry and kind of disgusted, too.
    “Okay, I won’t chew.”
    “Stop moving, too.”
    “I’m not going to stop moving,” I spat back at him. I could barely move as it was. They wanted me to lie there like a corpse.
    “No moving!”
    “What are you going to do?” I said. “Tie me up?”
    Musso hissed at me to shut up.
     
    As I was arguing with the pirates, 7,500 miles away, Andrea was getting calls from everyone she’d ever known. She evenheard from an old boyfriend she’d dated in her early twenties before we met. “He was my first real heartbreak,” Andrea told me. “We hadn’t really spoken since then, more than thirty years ago. When the person screening my calls said his name, I said ‘I’ll take it.’”
    Andrea got on the phone. “Oh, I get a phone call as soon as it appears I’m available…,” she said.
    “I saw you on TV,” the boyfriend said, laughing, “and I just had to call. I see you haven’t lost your sense of humor.”
    “He told me I looked good, which was a little surreal,” Andrea remembers. “He just wanted me to know he was pulling for me and my family. I knew it took a lot for him to call me out of the blue like that.”
    The support was overwhelming at times. There were people coming through the door crying hysterically and saying, “Oh my God, Andrea!” And she would say, “It’s going to be all