A Captain's Duty

on theorange exposure suit. I was hopping around trying not to stand on the orange suit and Musso, as usual, was getting fed up with me.
    “Just stand on the orange!” he shouted. “You are crazy one.”
    He pulled on my hands, trying to stretch my arms out.
    “Be a man!” he cried. “Military posture! Military posture! Sit up!”
    I was sitting on the edge of the inboard seat. They were shining a flashlight from behind me so I could see a silhouette of my head on the far bulkhead. Tall Guy kicked my legs, trying to get my feet on the orange exposure suit. And every time the boat rolled to starboard, I heard the click of the gun, timed to the rocking of the ship.
    I was scared to death. I was hiding it pretty well but it takes only one time for that click to become a boom and you’re dead. I felt a rush of emotion and then a surge of strength, a totally primeval desire for more life. Nothing else, not food, not friends, nothing else. Just ten more minutes of life.
     
    Saturday was the hardest day for Andrea, as well. From what the State Department had told her, she’d expected to hear some big news on Friday. She’d geared herself up for that call. But it never came. That hit her hard, she told me later. She couldn’t even eat. When Paige and Amber tried to make her oatmeal, she joked about being on “the hostage diet.” There was more food than she’d ever seen in our house but she couldn’t swallow a bite of it.
    Our son, Dan, came home Saturday and Andrea wanted him and Mariah to keep their lives as normal as possible. Andrea was amazed by how strong the kids were. Surrounded by their friends, they kept up a brave front, without tears or hysterics. She told me a story about Dan that made me smile: Andrea was sitting on the couch early in the evening when my son, in his very Irish way, came and put his head on her shoulder. That’s just something he does. It’s his trademark.
    “Mom?”
    “Yes?”
    “Do you think Dad’s going to be okay?”
    “Yes, Dan, I do.”
    He jumped up. “Good, I’m going to Luke’s.” Luke is a friend who lives down the road.
    Andrea just laughed. “Of course, Dan. Go ahead.”
    Off he went.
    But that was about her only moment of relief the whole day. Andrea was getting bulletins all Saturday: “The pirates want money and they want to go to land.” Those were their two main demands. And she would say, “Can’t you just give them those two things and get my husband back?” And the officials would say, “Well that’s what we’re working on. Because the fear is, if they get him on land, we may never find him.” Andrea wanted to know if the company was going to pay up and, if the ransom was available, why not just hand it over right away? But she couldn’t get an answer to that—things were too chaotic.
    Andrea didn’t care about the firepower or the money or the political message we were sending by negotiating with pirates.She just wanted me back. But it didn’t seem to be happening. And people kept sending her e-mails about previous hostage situations in which the hostages always got killed. That’s what the subject line on the e-mails said: “6 Hostages Killed in Bloody Shootout,” “Grim End for Hostages as Kidnappers Open Fire.” And Andrea was like, “Do you not realize what you’re sending me?” She finally sent back an e-mail: “Happy thoughts only, please.”
    Andrea asked the State Department if they could get a message to me. They said they would try. So she wrote something out quickly. Someone in the U.S. government must be convinced that my wife is a nutcase, because what she wrote was “Richard, your family loves you, your family is praying for you, your family is saving a chocolate Easter egg for you unless your son eats it first.” I knew why she wrote that. Dan would eat my Easter egg or anything chocolate, and she knew if she injected some humor into the note, I would know she was okay.
    Andrea told me that one thought kept running through her mind that day: Where do these pirates think they’re going to go? That really worried her. The pirates had three enormous navy ships surrounding them and they were still holding out, which told her how desperate they really were. So either they were going to give up or it was going to be a murder-suicide. That was the 50/50 in her mind. And the longer it went, the likelier the second outcome became.
    “The feelings seemed to come in cycles,” she said. “For a while, I’d believe I