A Captain's Duty

fucking want.”
    The Leader looked down at me from the cockpit. “Okay, that’s it, no more action tonight, no action.” The other Somalis relaxed and the tension drained away.
    But for the remainder of the night, they started a bunch of new rituals. They put the gun on me and told me to move from this seat to that seat, to pick up this object—a cloth, a hatchet—and place it over there. They hit me if my halal line touched the deck. And I couldn’t drag my ropes on the ground. All the while, they were calling me “animal…crazy…typical American.” It was like I was dirty and they were trying to get me clean through these ceremonies. I was hopping from one place to the other, still bound. At one point, I just toppled over onto the deck when a swell hit the boat.
    When morning came, I thought, I won’t make it through another day like this one. Something had to give.

SEVENTEEN
Day 5, 0300 Hours
    Now most of the hostage situations we’ve seen off the Horn of Africa have ended with the hostages being released unharmed, and ransom being paid. However, just yesterday, one of these standoffs had a deadly outcome. French hostages…were freed yesterday after being held for almost a week…. It was four adults and a child. They’d been held aboard their yacht as it was seized in the Gulf of Aden Saturday. Now one of those hostages and two pirates died during the rescue operation. Three pirates, in fact, were captured. The French military made its move after the pirates refused several offers, including one to swap an officer for the mother and child who were being held on board. The pirates had also threatened to execute the hostages one by one. It’s unclear if the hostage who died was caught in the cross fire or if the pirates actually killed him.
    —CNN, April 11
    W hen I woke up Sunday morning, the boat was dark, gloomy. It matched my mood.
    “Hey, Phillips,” the Leader said. “I have a new jobnow. I’m going to a blue Pakistani tug and check it out for the navy, make sure they’re not Al Qaeda.”
    I just grunted at him.
    “I’m going to help them, tell them where to get food and fuel.”
    The navy came calling again. They wanted proof of life, obviously. I saw them out the back door, floating by on a Zodiac about fifteen feet away, peering in at me. I gave them a wave. The pirates were grouped near the door, half shielded by the hull, their guns pointed outward at the navy guys.
    The corpsmen took a quick look at me and asked if I was okay, and I said yeah, and that was it. No James Bond stuff, because there were very tense and paranoid pirates standing three feet away from me. “Here’s our Al Qaeda contingent,” one of the navy guys said, almost joking with the pirates. The Somalis were putting on their tough-guy faces, really playing the part. That feeling of familiarity was so clear. I wanted to shout, “Do you know these guys?” But the Zodiac just passed back and forth a couple of times and left.
    The Leader left the ship. I couldn’t see where he went, or how he got there, but he claimed he was going to check out the blue Pakistani tug.
    Young Guy took the opportunity to talk with me.
    “When we get to Somalia, you want to go to the movies with me?”
    “Oh, sure,” I said.
    “I’m going out with my girlfriend,” Young Guy said. I looked over at him. The guy barely ever spoke, so this was new.
    “You’ve got a date?”
    “Yes, a date. With my girlfriend. And her mother’s there. You can go out with her mother.”
    I raised my eyebrows.
    “I will go with my girlfriend and you can go with the mother,” he said. “We will go to the movies.”
    He leaned over to me. “And then, to a hotel.”
    I laughed.
    I wondered, Where am I? Are we close to land, sitting in a little navy anchorage? It was strange to me that there were three navy ships and all this activity that the pirates were describing to me—tugs and other vessels—that wouldn’t occur three hundred miles from shore. I was disoriented. Nothing about what was happening around me made sense.
    All of a sudden, I saw a school of dolphins through the aft hatch. There must have been a hundred of them. I picked my head up and tried to track them through the water, but they were gone. A minute later, the dolphins reappeared right in front of the aft hatch. Surfacing and gliding through the water, spray shooting out of their blowholes.
    To see a school of them swimming together gave my heart a lift. Maybe this would