A Captain's Duty

shot. Part of the training.”
    I was incredulous.
    “And was what happened back there part of the training, too?”
    “What you mean?”
    “When your boy fired the pistol at my head.”
    He scoffed. “He didn’t fire! He just hit you in the head.” He snorted with laughter.
    I thought about that. He could be right.
    “Hey, Phillips, after this job, I’m going to work on a Greek ship,” the Leader said.
    “Oh yeah? How nice for you.”
    “Yeah, I’m going to be a sailor there. After that I go to work on U.S. ship.”
    “You on a U.S. ship?” I said, laughing. “You’d never cut it.”
    That got the whole boat riled.
    “What! You think American sailors better than Somalis?” Musso cried out. “Ha! All Americans do is sit in their rooms and watch TV and drink beer. Lazy, lazy. We’re Somalis, we’re twenty-four/seven sailors. We can do anything.”
    He threw a length of rope at me.
    “Here, tie the rope like I did.”
    I looked at the rope.
    “Why would I want to do that?”
    “To show you are real sailor.”
    “I don’t need to tie a knot to show I can sail a ship. I’ve been doing it for thirty years. I can get by with three or four knots.”
    Musso scoffed. “You baby, Phillips, you baby. Somalis the real sailors.”
    “American sailors are the worst,” Tall Guy chimed in.
    I ignored them and tried to get some rest. I was dozing off when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the pirates do something that snapped me out of my stupor.
    The navy was getting more aggressive, shooting water fromfire hoses at us and sending helicopters (which I could hear but not see) to hover near our bow. They were trying to keep the pirates from heading to the Somali coast. Frustrated, the pirates opened up the caps on some of the spare fuel buckets. The fuel didn’t spill out, but they lined them up ready to tip over on the deck, which was hot as hell, even with the engine off.
    It looked to me like they were going to respond to an assault by burning down the boat.
    The Leader looked up at me. “Ha, you see? You are going to die in Somalia and I am going to die in America.”
    “What the hell are you talking about?”
    “You die here. I die in your home.”
    What he meant was they were going to kill me in Somali waters, so my soul would never be able to leave here. And the Americans were going to kill him. So our souls would switch places. He’d die by an American bullet and I’d die by a Somali one.
    “But I fix them,” he said. “If they try anything, we do suicide attack.”
    I looked at him and then back at the buckets of diesel. Holy shit, I thought. Maybe they didn’t want the fuel to get back to Somalia. Maybe they wanted it to blow up a navy warship, like Al Qaeda did the USS Cole.
    After that, any time they felt threatened, they would open up more gas cans.
    The Leader fired up the engine and we got back under way. After a couple of hours, sparks were flying from the outboard’s exhaust. The thing was overheating. The pirates argued back and forth about what to do. Finally, they cut away some of theinsulation that surrounded the exhaust and started to pour water on it.
    If they get the fuel buckets near that, I said to myself, I won’t have to worry about a bullet in the head. This thing will go up in a fireball .
     
    “I kept going back to the moon,” Andrea told me of this time in the ordeal. “It was the only thing I had that I knew you were looking at, too. I’d say, ‘Richard, you’re under that moon and I’m here with you.’” Friends in Florida called Andrea on videophone and all of them toasted the moon with glasses of champagne under the night sky, saying, “This is for Rich.” Every night from the time I was captured, Andrea would search out that white shape in the night sky. From our bedroom window, she could look out and the moon was right there. “Richard, I’m here with you,” she would say. It was the last thing she did at night.
    Halfway around the world, I could catch only a glimpse of the moon through the lifeboat window.
    Andrea’s best friend, Amber, lay down with her on the bed that night. Their joke was that it’s hippy Vermont, so they could do that without any controversy. They spread my fleece jacket over them and were just talking back and forth about everything except the crisis around them: the fond memories they had of the days they’d roomed together in Boston, the cars I used to pick them up in when they were student nurses, the romantic