The bridge was getting steamy. The temperature on the water in the Gulf of Aden can reach 100 and above. I knew we were going to get dehydrated quickly in that glass cage. The pirates had the bridge door, which was usually left open to let in a breeze, shut tight.

“Where are the crew?” the Leader asked again.

“I have no idea where they are, I’m here with—”

“Bring up crew NOW!” he screamed. “You have two minutes. If not, these guys are going to kill you.”

Suddenly the two pirates at the wings rushed in and raised their AK-47s and pointed them over the console at ATM and Colin cowering on the floor. They jabbed the barrels down toward their faces, screaming.

“You want to die?!” they shouted. “Two minutes, we kill you.”

“Calm down, calm down,” I said. “I’m doing my best.”

“Now minute thirty,” Tall Guy yelled, his eyes bulging. He pointed the gun at my belly.

“They’re serious,” the Leader said. “I told you this. Bad guys, bad guys.”

I got back on the PA system. “All crew, all crew,” I called. “Report to bridge immediately. Pirates want you on bridge now.”

The Leader looked at me, his eyes cold.

“Can you do something with these guys?” I said. “Before someone gets shot?”

He just looked at me and shrugged.

“I’m just a poor Somali,” he said. “But I tell you this. You better get somebody up here right now.”

“One minute!” said Tall Guy. “We kill everyone.”

I gestured with my hands, Easy, easy. My heart was racing, my hands felt like they were covered with porcupine quills. Was I going to watch my two crewmen die? If they shot one, I knew, they would go through the ship and shoot us all.

“Pirates threatening to shoot us,” I called on the PA and radio. “They want people on the bridge now.”

“Thirty seconds!” Musso shouted. “YOU HEAR ME? Thirty seconds and you die.”

Tall Guy and Musso rushed toward Colin and ATM and jabbed their AKs violently down, as if they were daggers and they were going to impale my crewmen. The look on Colin’s and ATM’s faces was pure terror. The Leader ran over and put his hands on Tall Guy’s chest and pushed him back.

“Dangerous pirates,” he said to me. “Bring someone now!”

“What else can I do?” I yelled at the Leader.

He shrugged his shoulders.

I keyed the radio. “If you don’t hear from us in one minute, we’ll be gone. You’ll get no quarter from them.” I wanted the crew to know they’d have to kill these guys if the shooting started. There would be no other way out of this. No surrender.

“Bring the crew up now,” the Leader said. “Bring them up to the bridge now or we’ll blow the ship up.”

I stared at him. Did he just say “blow the ship up?”

“Yes, we have a bomb. We will blow up the ship in thirty seconds.”

I didn’t believe them. I’d seen the bucket come up and there was nothing that looked like explosives in it. I began to sense they were bluffing for a quick end to the crew’s standoff.

Young Guy, watching me from the bridge wing, smiled at me. There was something odd in his face, as if he were enjoying what the Somalis were putting us through. As if he were watching this all on TV.

The deadline passed. I took a deep breath. It was our first hurdle—they weren’t willing to kill us just yet.

I was running around shutting off the alarms, which kept tripping and restarting. I would occasionally key my radio and send off a quick update on what was happening on the bridge. Or I would strategize.

I had an idea where the crew was—the aft steering—but I couldn’t be sure. Maybe there were guys still sleeping, maybe wandering the hallways. They were keeping their positions secret, so that the pirates wouldn’t storm down and take them hostage. Later I found out that at that moment, Shane was up in the forward crane, spying on us. And the chief engineer was walking around the ship. The other guys were in after steering, the backup safe room we’d discussed during the drill when the chief engineer brought up the idea of having one. I knew they must be suffering down there; it would be 100 degrees or above. And there were guys in their sixties and seventies on the crew. If I left them there too long, hyperthermia—heat stress—would set in. They would get dehydrated, then the symptoms would hit them: confusion, hostility, intense headache, reddening skin, dropping blood pressure. Then chills and convulsions as the condition progressed. And, finally, coma.

There were really three clocks ticking on us: how long before the arrival of the mother ship; how long before my crew was affected by heat stroke; and how long before the cavalry arrived. I tried to calculate all three in my head at once.

But I knew I had to get the pirates off the ship as soon as possible.

The minutes clicked by.

Musso and Tall Guy charged back onto the bridge.

“Two minutes!” Musso shouted. He stood above Colin and pointed the AK at his face from five feet away.

“Captain, bring up the crew,” the Leader said from behind them. “Pirates angry now.”

“I’m here with you!” I half-shouted. “What do you want me to do? I don’t know where these guys are.”

“Crew NOW!” yelled Tall Guy. “Or we shoot everyone.”

You can’t pull the same trick twice and expect it to have the same impact. As menacing as those automatic rifles were, I felt the Somalis were bluffing. If they wanted to kill us, they would have executed one of my men already. The sight of the guns still made my heart race, but I didn’t quite believe they were going to start shooting.

The Somalis counted down again, minute thirty, minute, thirty seconds, twenty…. ATM and Colin had their heads bowed. I felt the sweat roll down my forehead and sting my eyes.

Again, the deadline came and went. Tall Guy and Musso stared angrily at me before saying something to the Leader and walking off to the bridge wings. I felt my spirits lift. These guys were just businessmen, after all. Crooked, violent, thuggish businessmen, but they weren’t going to waste precious resources like human lives unless they had to.

All of a sudden I heard a knock. I couldn’t believe my ears. Someone was knocking on the bridge door looking to get in with the pirates. I thought to myself, I bet I know who that is.

The pirates didn’t hear a thing. They were too fixated on terrifying us. I prayed, Let him just go away.

Knock, knock. Louder this time.

The Leader looked at me.

“Do you want me to get that?” I said.

He nodded.

I walked over to the bridge door and swung it open.

It was one of my sailors. I pointed toward Colin and ATM. “Come on in,” I said. “You’re dead.”

The newcomer looked at me.

“Go sit over there with the rest of them,” I said.

“Okay, Cap,” he said, and walked toward his mates.

The sailor’s appearance seemed to give the pirates an idea. Instead of waiting for the crew to come to them, they would go track them down. After all, if this sailor was just wandering around the ship, knocking on doors, how hard could it be to find the rest of the sailors?

The Leader pointed at me.

“We want to walk around,” the Leader said. “You come with me.”

I keyed my radio and started talking.

“You want to go search the ship? Okay, fine. Let’s go. Let’s start on E deck. That’s a good place to look for the crew.”

 

I walked through the bridge door and the Leader backed off. He didn’t want me too close to him. I pointed to the door to the chimney and he nodded. I led the way down the stairs to E deck.

A ship that’s dead in the water on emergency power has a spooky feel. It’s just drifting, ghostly and very, very quiet.

A container ship like the Maersk Alabama can be compared to a skyscraper laid flat on the ocean. It has multiple rooms, thousands of square feet of space, passageways and service corridors to hide in. My knowledge of the ship itself was really the only tactical advantage I had over the Somalis. I began to think of how to keep the sixteen men hiding below me away from the pirates and how to get the three remaining men on the bridge into one of those rooms and to safety.

It was like a three-dimensional game of chess. I move my man here, you counter. I protect one player, you make a move on another. I just had to figure out the pirates’ strategy before they figured out mine.

The Leader had left his gun with Tall Guy, so he was unarmed. He was maybe five foot nine, 135 pounds. Even though he was young and spry, I could have tackled him and stuffed him in a room somewhere. But what would I have done then? I still had three crew on the bridge. My getting away solved nothing.

“Open up this room,” the Leader barked.

E deck held my room and the chief engineer’s. There should have been no one in any of the quarters up here. I took my key out and inserted it in the lock of the first door and swung it wide open.

The Leader stepped in. There was a TV and a bed with the bedspread tossed aside and some clothes and a desk with a chair. The place was quiet as a tomb.

We went down the corridor and inspected the chief’s room. I was chatting up a storm, in case one of the crew had somehow decided to lock himself in his quarters. My voice would act as a locator beacon, telling the men we were on the way. I also had the radio by my side with the key pressed down so anyone with a handheld set would know where we were.

I was scared. Really scared. But I had to maintain that appearance of control. Without it, I had nothing.

We went down, deck by deck. I unlocked another door and let the Leader pass by me to check it out. He let out a gasp. I thought, He’s found someone. I turned the corner quickly and rushed into the room.

The Leader was pointing down. There was a prayer rug on the floor. Above it, swinging from a desk lamp, was a pointer that read “Mecca” with an arrow.

“Muslim? Muslim?” the Leader said. He seemed happy and confused at the same time.

“Sure,” I said. The room was ATM’s.

We went back out to the corridor.

“That’s it for C deck,” I said. “You want to go to B?”

He nodded.

“Okay, let’s do it.”

As we went lower, I started to worry. On the ring I was using to open all the doors were keys for the engine room and the after steering, where most of the crew were supposed to be. If the Leader demanded I open them, the jig was up. I had to get him to skip over some rooms, even though all the doors had signs on them with their functions written on them: chief mate cabin, engine control room, whatever. I had to hope that the Leader’s English wasn’t that good, or that I could distract him with my banter.

We dropped down to B deck. The Leader pointed out a door.

“Oh, that’s just a locker, nobody in there,” I said.

“Open!” he said, and jabbed his finger at the door.

I smiled. I wanted to build trust with him so that when we got to the really important rooms, I could skip them. I opened the door, and indeed it was a locker filled with wrenches and other tools. He nodded. The same thing happened a few minutes later. “This one’s another locker, but I want you to be happy,” I said. I opened the locker. Nothing but janitorial supplies.

After that he trusted me. When we came to the engine control room door, I used another key and it wouldn’t work. I just waved at it and kept walking. “Locker,” I said. “Waste of time.”

We did seven decks and the main outer deck before walking back up through the chimney to the bridge. We walked in and the faces of Tall Guy and Musso registered shock. They started asking the Leader questions in Somali. He barked out short answers. They were clearly not happy.

I nodded to ATM, Colin, and the other sailor. I wanted them to know the crew was still hidden away.

“Captain, Captain come in.”

I pressed the portable radio against my leg, hoping to mute the sound. Then I brought it up slowly and turned down the volume. I walked over to the radar and pretended to be looking down at it, while I lifted the radio up and spoke into it.

“Shane, go ahead.”

I heard him breathe out. He sounded relieved.

“I’m down on E deck. Where are the pirates?”

I looked up. The four had moved back to their positions: one on each wing, the Leader with us on the bridge, and Young Guy on the flying bridge. I relayed that to Shane, while pretending I was working on the console.

“I think I can take them.”

Shane was a take-charge kind of guy. That I liked. But attacking the pirates was not a good idea. “Negative, negative,” I whispered, turning my back to the Leader. “Pirates all spread out. Automatic weapons. Do not attempt.”

Musso yelled from the bridge wing. The Leader hurried over to the door and tilted his head down. It seemed like he was listening.

“Shane, I think they heard you. Stay quiet.”

“Roger that.”

Two hours had gone by.

 

The Leader tried the radio again, calling out in Somali. I turned and looked out the bridge windows.

I noticed something white in the water, about five hundred yards off our starboard beam, near where the pirates had come aboard. At first I couldn’t make it out. It looked like a piece of flotsam that was half-submerged and drifting at the same rate we were. You see junk like that all the time, containers that get swept from ships during storms or floating piles of plastic. But something caused me to stare at this piece.

With a start, I realized it wasn’t a piece of seaborne junk. It was the Somalis’ boat. The skiff was floating upside down, most of the hull underwater, and the nice white ladder was next to it. They were slowly drifting along with us.

I turned to call to the Somalis, but I caught myself. Did the Leader order them to scuttle the boat? I thought. They could have just tied it off and let it float alongside the Maersk Alabama. Losing a boat like that doesn’t happen by accident. They’d raised the stakes as they came onboard. Now I felt they were going to be even more desperate.

I wondered if the Leader had ordered the boat scuttled to intimidate his men. “Either we take the ship,” he would have said, “or we die on it.” Abandoning your only escape route meant the Somalis had to connect with the mother ship or take one of our lifeboats to make their getaway.

The elation I’d felt when the pirates’ bluff had failed drained away. These guys were committed. There was no way they were going to leave empty-handed.

 

By noon, we’d settled into the beginnings of a routine. ATM and Colin were sipping water occasionally, sitting on the deck on the bridge on the starboard side aft. The third sailor was leaning against the wainscoting trying to keep cool. The Leader was alternating between the radar and the VHF, trying to find the mother ship, coughing and spitting every so often like he had TB. I was shutting off the occasional alarm and trying to think how to get my three crewmen down with their shipmates.

It wasn’t going to be easy. If I gave the guys the signal to make a run for it, the pirates would cut them down before they’d taken four steps. No, we’d have to get the pirates to take the men off the bridge. I started to formulate a rough plan.

“Ah,” the Leader said. I looked up. He was fiddling with the VHF radio.

Shit, I thought, he’s figured it out. I walked over and looked at the readout. I’d tuned the set to Channel 72. He now had it on 16, the correct frequency for communications between the crew and the outside world.

“—sk Alabama, we’ve been attacked by pirates. Repeat, four pirates aboard.”

The Leader stared at the set. So did I. It was Shane’s voice, but what was he doing?

“Roger that, this is the guided missile cruiser USS Virginia. Helicopters are launching.”

“Thank you, USS Virginia. When will the helicopters arrive?”

I smiled. There was no USS Virginia on the frequency. Both voices were Shane’s. He must have made his way down to my room and taken the handheld VHF radio there. And he was doing the same routine I’d pulled yesterday, pretending to hail a navy warship and requesting help.

Now the Leader was truly perplexed. The entire crew had vanished into thin air but now one of them was talking to the U.S. Navy. Musso came over to investigate. His AK clanked against the console’s side as he leaned over to listen.

“Who is that?” the Leader said.

I just raised my eyebrows.

“I have no idea, I’m here with you.”

Shane’s voice came over the radio.

“This is the chief mate. Repeat, Somali pirates aboard. They’ve taken over the ship.”

“That’s the chief mate?” the Leader said.

I listened. “It does sound like him.”

Shane continued: “Four pirates aboard. All armed. All four stationed in and around the bridge…” And he continued his spiel with the phantom navy ship.

“Where is the other radio?” the Leader demanded. I saw real fear in his eyes. The last thing pirates want to do is negotiate with the U.S. Navy. They like to deal with ship owners only. Ship owners don’t have laser-guided missiles and sharpshooters.

“There are only two radios I know of,” I said. “The bridge has them both.”

The Leader looked like his brain was going to explode. We were turning his plans inside out. The Somalis had taken over the ship, but we had taken over the Somalis. For now.

“We go around again,” the Leader said.

I shrugged. “Whatever you say.”

Again, it was him and me. We made our way down to E deck, then down all the way to the main deck.

I walked down the darkened corridor, the ship dead and silent as a bombed-out city. The chief had cut the emergency power. We had only flashlights. I saw the door to the AC room open ahead of me. I knew the Leader would want to check that out. I brought the radio up. “Okay, entering the AC room. Starboard side door is open. You guys need to get that locked up.”

We stepped into the AC compartment. Its massive machinery cooled the entire ship. But the compressors were quiet now. Ahead was the engine room. I didn’t want to go in there unless I absolutely had to. If, for some reason, the chief engineer hadn’t gotten the message, we’d find him and his assistant waiting for us.

“Entering engine room,” I said. I stepped in.

A dead engine room is an eerie, eerie place. There was a little smoke wafting from inside and a bulb burning off to the right, but the place was in almost total darkness. You could hear the drip drip drip of water from pipes. You could feel the bulk of the enormous diesel engine in front of you, but you couldn’t actually see it. There are empty quiets and full quiets and this was the latter. I felt like we were going to be ambushed.

I led the way. Six steps in, the Leader called to me.

“No, no, we’re done. We go.”

I turned, surprised. The Leader looked spooked. He turned and I followed him out.

We made our way around, poked our head in the dry storage room and everything was empty. Meanwhile, I was opening every external door I could. “Do you want to see out here?” I would say, and then I would just leave the door open. This would give the crew a chance to move around fast if they needed to. It would also give any rescuers a chance to get inside the ship quickly. Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst, I thought.

But I still didn’t believe anyone was coming. What we were going through had never happened before in the modern age—a U.S. ship being taken by pirates. I had no idea if the navy would even be interested. I knew there were warships in the area, but there was no protocol for rescuing merchant mariners.

To me, the only one who was going to save us was us.

 

Again we found no one. I could tell the Leader was getting more and more unnerved. Every room we opened, there were clothes laid out as if someone was just about to get dressed, or a cup of orange juice sitting there as if someone had just poured it. We walked into the galley and on the cutting board were a knife and half a dozen slices of melon that looked like they’d been cut just a few minutes before. On the burner, a pot of coffee was sitting, steam coming out of its spout.

It reminded me of the famous case of the Mary Celeste, the ship found in the Atlantic Ocean back in 1872 with the crew’s hairbrushes and boots and shirts all in their places, the cargo all accounted for, but no men aboard. It became the most famous maritime mystery of all time, the ghost ship that lost its eight-man crew on the way to the Strait of Gibraltar. (Piracy was originally suspected, but there hadn’t been any reported in the area in decades and no valuables were touched or signs of violence found.) The Maersk Alabama had that same abandoned air as we walked through one silent room after another.

“Where is the chief engineer?” the Leader said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “These guys are crazy. They could be anywhere.”

We entered the bosun’s room. I’d noticed before that the Somalis were wearing cheap flip-flops. The bosun had some nice leather sandals by his bed and now the Leader was staring at them.

“Look at those shoes,” he said.

It was like he was asking my permission.

“Go ahead!” I said. “The bosun doesn’t care. Try ’em on.”

The Leader kicked off his flip-flops and tried on the sandals. He nodded.

The next stop was the mess deck, which we’d been through on the first go-round. There was a long table with a blanket thrown across it. I stared at that blanket. I was sure it hadn’t been there the first time we’d walked through. I didn’t know it then, but Shane later told me he’d been roaming the ship when he heard us coming, and he’d dashed into this room just ahead of us. With him, he’d had the EPIRB (emergency position indicating radio beacon), which is a transmitter that can tell rescuers exactly where your distressed ship is. He’d taken it out of its housing, which activates the unit, before we came blundering down the hall. Panicking, he’d thrown the blanket over it, then turned and began searching for a hiding place. Right at that moment, Shane was in the next room, the hospital bay, crouched beneath the desk in the space where the chair usually slid in. We walked in and Shane could see my shoes, only three feet away.

If the pirates had gotten him, we’d have lost one of our best leaders. But I didn’t even hear him breathe.

We looked in a few more rooms and then headed back up to the bridge.

The crew and I were keeping one another safe at this point. I was alerting them to the pirates’ movements, and they were keeping a wild card in our hands by staying hidden. Even if the pirates shot a couple of us, they gained no advantage. They still had sixteen guys secreted all over the ship, keeping the vessel out of their hands. And the ship was drifting, powerless. It was a standoff. But the Somalis had reinforcements a lot closer than I did.

The ship was becoming a gigantic oven. The AC was off, and the fans that sent fresh air funneling through the rooms weren’t working. The heat was getting intense even when an occasional breeze moved through. I couldn’t imagine how the guys in the after steering room were suffering. How long could they hold out before they needed to get some fresh air or water?

The fear I’d felt when I saw the first pirate board the ship hadn’t faded. But I was just too busy to pay much attention to it. In some ways, ATM and Colin and the third sailor had it worse. They had to sit on the deck and imagine what could happen to them. I was constantly thinking of how to get us out of this mess alive.

 

We climbed back to the bridge, sweltering in the afternoon heat. The pirates were getting hinky. Why couldn’t we find the crew? I just shrugged. “I don’t know where they are,” I told them again and again. “I’m here with you.”

The Leader wanted another search. This time, Musso and Tall Guy came with me, both armed. Again, I entered the engine room, trying to keep them away from the half-hidden door to after steering, where I thought the crew was. Our flashlights were darting here and there, and we’d get flashes of equipment: lube tanks, dials, pipes. Musso and Tall Guy made it a few steps farther than the Leader before calling, “Enough!”

Even pirates are scared of the dark. It made me grin—they had the guns and they were frightened.

I took them to the mess deck and their eyes lit up when they saw the melons. “You want fruit?” I said. “It’s all yours.” I helped them load up their arms with juice boxes and melon slices. I headed back to the bridge and as I climbed the outside ladder on the house, I could see the Somalis two flights below, struggling with all their loot. I waited for them.

“You need some help?” I said to Musso. I held out my hands. “Here, let me carry the gun.”

He laughed.

I took some of the juices and the fruit and went ahead.

Just as with the Leader, I could have escaped at any time. But the thought never really crossed my mind. Three of my men were in imminent danger. I couldn’t leave them to the pirates. It didn’t solve anything. Besides, it’s just not possible to do something like that and remain the same person you were before. I wanted to be able to look myself—and the crew members’ families—in the eye after all this was over and say, “I did my duty as a captain.”

Like I said, you take the pay, you do the job.

Back up to the bridge. We filed in and the pirates took up their normal positions. It was past noon. The pirates were fidgety, agitated. Their jubilation at taking an American ship was souring. They were constantly chattering to each other in Somali, and their conversations were becoming more abrupt. A note of panic had crept in.

I grabbed a drink of water, then wiped my forehead and took a few breaths.

The Leader handed me the phone. He barked out a number. It was like a broken record now, the pirates endlessly repeating the same tactics: search, call, threaten. But the threats were wearing thin. After the second ultimatum, when they told us they would start killing us in two minutes, they gave up that tactic.

The Leader had stopped looking at the LED on the phone, so I just entered random numbers and hit the pound button. The phone dialed, then buzzed.

“This phone is the worst. Seriously, I wish I could get it working for you.”

One of the crew took this opportunity to start talking to the pirates. And despite my hostage advice the night before, the first thing he brought up was religion.

“Assalaamu ‘alaykum,” he said. He nodded at Musso.

Musso just stared at him.

“I’m African,” he said. “We are Muslim brothers.”

The pirates looked at one another. Musso began to laugh.

I tried to catch the sailor’s eye. Next he’d be telling them to chop off the heads of the Christian infidels and take him back to Somalia.

But the pirates didn’t care if he was directly descended from Mohammed himself. He was a pawn in their game.

The Leader looked at me. “We search again.”

I’d been expecting this.

“No way,” I said. “I’m tired of walking around.”

I pointed at ATM. “Take him. He can show you whatever you need.”

I knew if ATM could walk out, guarded by only one pirate, he might get away. One man knew the ship, the other didn’t.

The Leader looked at ATM and seemed to be considering the offer.

“Okay,” he said. “We go now.”

ATM stood and came walking toward me. The Leader turned to give the other pirates some instructions in Somali.

As ATM passed me, I whispered to him, “He’s not armed. Take him to the guys.”

I couldn’t catch his face as he slipped by. I don’t know if he even nodded.

But I could feel the tables turn just a bit. It was our turn to take a hostage.