Impossible Odds

small boats to sail far from shore and stage attacks so one-sided and absurd they would be comical if not for their deadly consequences.
    And once in a while a comedy of errors ended up with a bamboozled shipping company breaking down and paying out millions of dollars to get back its vessels, their crews, their cargo. When such a massive payout actually went through, it landed as a giant pile of cash in a region where men of working age would fight to the death over a fistful of khat leaves. Word traveled at light speed: The casino is open, boys.
    Soon after the era of big ransoms began, hidden alcoves dotting the Horn of Africa played host to a variety of boats, ships, and tankers lying at anchor and awaiting ransom payouts. Captured crews were often held below decks in medieval conditions for months at a time. Many were killed in the initial attacks and others succumbed in captivity.
    In the minds of their attackers, the victims’ collective guilt was simple; no matter what country a captive hailed from, it had to be a place with more opportunity than anything available in Somalia. After all, the captured crews came from places capable of building and steaming seagoing vessels across international waters, while the Somalis watched them sail by from the beaches of a stagnating homeland. The desperate attackers couldn’t concern themselves with the laws of other nations; they endured existence every daywith no law greater than that imposed by whoever had the weapons and the cohorts to use them.
    But by this time in late 2011, the beleaguered insurance companies and shipping companies were finally starting to follow the lead of the crews themselves, who had begun to arm up and fight back. The prospect of a military-level private shooting war between pirates and the entire shipping industry attracted various governments, and those governments sent military forces to get things “stabilized.”
    The whole world knew about the piracy case of the tanker Maersk Alabama, in which three Navy SEAL sharpshooters saved the imprisoned ship captain. Those SEALs spent a full day lying in wait with their weapons trained on the pirate boat, waiting for the kill command. When the order came down, they instantly fired their sniper rifles, with their own vessel bobbing at a different rate from the pirates’ boat, having no room for error if the captive was to survive. The snipers took out all three pirates in a single shot while sparing the kidnapped victim. Captain Richard Phillips was freed unharmed from the close quarters of that little boat, while the dead bodies of the three armed pirates slumped around him.
    Details of DEVGRU training are not available to explain this feat of timing and marksmanship, but the results testify to its deadly effect. SEAL Team Six founder Richard Marcinko has said that his budget for ammunition for his men’s training was greater than that of the entire Marine Corps. The comment might be dismissed as braggadocio if not for undeniable results produced under intense and deadly pressure.
    Consequently, by the time Jessica Buchanan was being marched into a pitch-black desert to her own mock execution two years later, the same people at the White House who took note of her disappearance had reason to wonder if it might be time for another visit to the region from the men you don’t see coming.
    The Somali attackers knew they had reason to fear such a thing. They kept their eyes on the international press. Even in a land of nearly nothing, anyone who can mug a tourist can get his hands on a smartphone with satellite and internet capabilities. Then he will engage in that great irony so unique to the twenty-first century: sleeping on straw, dining on garbage, and surfing the internet’s endless images of everything a heart can desire.
    Even if the websites are entirely religious or politically based, there are those darn ads, those pop-ups, those little typos that cause unpredictable sites to appear. In this fashion even a faithful man of religion with no desire to see the internet’s baser temptations may find his bitterness steadily increasing while he encounters products, so many products, every single thing he might dream of, and more—much more than he ever imagined. A fountain of temptation squirts into his eyes through hypnotic imagery, while the sexuality employed to sell, sell, sell it all fills him with rage because it affects him so strongly.
    The battery on that device will die, of