Chapter 3

The promenade deck, set aside for passengers to enjoy the sun and get a little exercise, was just forward of the superstructure. The bare steel of the deck was covered with what looked to me like nothing more than cheap green outdoor carpeting, but I guess it was better than plain grey paint slapped on cold metal.

From where I was lying on the surprisingly comfortable lounger, I could look aft and see the ship’s bridge and watch the officers and crew as they went about the task of navigating big freighter around the Pacific Ocean. The ship was of Danish registry and many of the officers, including the Captain, were Danish. The crew was largely Filipino, with a smattering of other ethnic groups. The most senior of the crew—they called him “The Bosun.” He was an enormous Samoan who had muscles on his muscles and I never heard him addressed by his surname—I don’t even know if he had one. When he relayed an order to the crew from one of the ship’s officers, no one even considered talking back to him.

The morning was well advanced; it was almost time to begin thinking of moving toward the single restaurant-like facility on board for the passenger’s use. The crew had a crew mess collocated with the galley, the officers and passengers dined in the restaurant/café. It wasn’t terribly democratic, but everyone seemed to accept it.

My eye was caught by a sudden flurry of activity up on what I’d learned to call the “port” side of the bridge—I’d have called it the “left” side if left to my own devices. For several days now, crewmen with heavy binoculars had watched the far horizon from both wings of the bridge, both fore and aft. I didn’t know why; there were two rotating radar disks which I’d been presuming would meet the requirement to search the open sea for other solid objects coming too close. But for the past two days, binocular-equipped men had supplemented the electronic surveillance.

Abruptly the port lookout began shouting and pointing at something a few points off the bow. A moment later, he was joined by an officer dressed in whites who carried his own pair of binoculars. The two of them intently studied whatever it was that had captured their imagination, and neither liked what they saw. The officer disappeared inside the bridge and I could just make out a flurry of activity in there. There were groups of officers apparently discussing something major at the top of their lungs.

The purser, a young and ambitious officer by the name of Emil Pedersen came on deck and approached us. “Please, sirs and madams, it is necessary that you go to your cabins now, quickly as you can,” he told us in slightly accented English.

Emil was young and good-looking enough to have captured some initial interest from my teenaged daughters, but that faded when we found out all he could talk about was his lovely wife and baby boy back home. His deportment was correct at all times, as was the behavior of the entire contingent of ship’s officers and crew, actually. He’d been seated at the same table as my daughters, Danielle, and I several times.

Now, he was clearly agitated and only just hanging on to his composure. I wondered what could so unnerve him and the rest of the crew on such a bright, clear morning.

“Emil,” I said, getting his attention, “what is happening, my friend?”

He shot a quick glance up at the bridge and then back to me. Turning to present his back to the bridge officers, he told me in a low voice, “Pirates, mein herre ... pirates! They are coming.”

Silly me. I thought pirates were something that existed in storybooks and history classes. I knew about the ragtag Somali pirates of some years ago, but that was half a world away.

“Please go below, sir,” Emil continued. “You must go below.”

One of the things I hate about mass transportation is that the people driving the thing, be it a bus, an aircraft, a ship, or whatever—none of them ever want to admit they’re out of their depth in any crisis. An engine catches fire on a Boeing 737 and the captain comes on the intercom and remarks there is a slight difficulty ... please fasten your seat belt. Pirates attack, and all passengers must go to their cabins and don’t get in the way. Great!

I wanted to go to my cabin actually, but only as a first stop. I’d brought my Glock on board, sneaking past the rather superficial security check with my daughters’ help. The officer and two crewmen who’d been manning the checkpoint had been only too happy to help two young American teenage girls when one of their suitcases unexpectedly burst open. While the crew helped Evelyn stuff feminine clothing back into her luggage, I slipped past with the duffle bag with our pistols and ammo. My daughters had had a ball acting the part of two distressed girls, and I had a cache of weapons.

My daughters, Danielle, and I waited in my daughters’ cabin—it was the largest—for more than an hour before my patience wore out. “I’m going to go find out what the ... is happening!” I ground out. I put my Glock behind my belt in back where the fall of my sportcoat would hide it and left the room to find someone in authority who knew something about what was going on. I shut the cabin door behind me and strode off down the corridor. I made three steps before it opened, then closed again.

I turned to see my two young daughters and Danielle exiting the cabin and striding along behind me. Megan was stuffing her 9mm inside her purse and Evelyn was dropping her .32 into a pocket in her slacks. Danielle didn’t have a firearm, but she clearly wasn’t going to remain in the cabin by herself.

We got lucky. The ship’s Captain and a couple of his officers were already setting up in the passenger dining room, apparently to give the non-crew individuals a briefing of sorts. There was a blare of intercom noise, inviting all the passengers in several languages. As the four of us watched, our fellow passengers trooped into the big café area.

“My friends,” the Captain began, “we have seen boats are coming to us with many pirates on them ... three boats of many pirates. They will be here ... eh ... soon, they will be here. They will take the ship, but not to worry, please. They will hold the ship for ransom and for all of us, also. So there is not something to worry about, please.”

I was confused. The Captain was talking as if this was a done deal, and the pirates had yet to set foot onboard.

“How big are the pirate’s boats?” I asked. “How many men on each of them? How are they armed—the boats and the men?”

“Ahhh ... thirty meters, perhaps little bit more, or maybe little less,” he replied, looking at me a little owlishly. “Some of them have machine gun on the boat and everyone has pistol or rifle too,” the Captain finished.

“So ... a machine gun or two, but no cannon?” I asked to pin him down.

“Not likely, mate,” interrupted one of the oldest of the male passengers. “The shaells ahh too expenseeve and hahd t’ foind.”

I didn’t speak Australian, but what he’d said sounded like the pirates wouldn’t normally have access to large caliber naval weaponry. Personal arms, yes, but not cannons, and thirty-meter boats would look like toys next to the enormous bulk of the freighter.

“Then, why aren’t we going to turn around and get the hell out of here ... or fight?” I asked the Captain. I thought it was a reasonable question.

“My sir,” said the Captain with a pained expression on his face. “You cannot turn this wessel around like a motor car, and ... trod on the petrol ... pedal. It all takes much time, and if we run away, it will make the pirates very angry,” he continued. “And if we try to fight with them, they will get very angry and peoples will get hurted,” he finished. The look on his face said he’d been very patient with me, but now I should shut up and not make waves.

“Dammme, this is a proper cock up. So you blokes plan to do bugger all, is that it?” asked a sixty-odd year old gentleman with a florid face and a strong British accent. “Bloody wankers!” he muttered under his breath.

I heard a number of murmured agreements among the passengers. Looking around, and judging from the expressions on their faces, there wasn’t exactly a unanimous agreement with the way the Captain saw things. The crewmembers present weren’t on board with the Captain’s plan either. Our friend, Emil, the purser, appeared about to explode. With a young wife at home, he wasn’t happy with the prospect of being taken prisoner and eventually ransomed ... maybe.

“How ‘bout we get this ship turned around and go back the way we came ... uh... , “ I began. I looked at Danielle. “What is ‘right now’?

“Tout de suite!” she shot back.

“Let’s get turned back and stomp on the go juice, tout suite!” I demanded. “If they take this ship, let’s make them work for it, dammit!”

“Sir ... please ... we cannot fight them. We have no, how you say ... ah ... we have no weapons,” the Captain remonstrated. “They will—”

“We have the ship!” I interjected. “This is a huge steel weapon,” I explained. “I have seen the wake when we were under full power, and we are much ... taller than their little boats. They cannot come up our sides if we choose to not let them!”

“Sir, we have no weapons ... and they have the machine guns!”

I hauled out my Glock and showed it to their shocked amazement. “We have weapons,” I retorted. But a .45 caliber semi-automatic is not a machine gun. He was right about that and what they had, or might have, outclassed anything I had available.

On the other hand ... fire was a weapon—a decidedly deadly one, in fact.

I’d had an idea. In one of my posts when I held the rank of Commander, the Detective Bureau came under my jurisdiction. One of the cases I became familiar with was an investigation into the sins of a certain young man who wanted to set fire to the house of a girl whose father made her stop seeing the young man.

The boy, instead of buying a box of matches, found instructions on how to mix homemade napalm from gasoline and ordinary soap. He wanted to stand back, throw his bomb against an outside wall and watch flames drip down the side. His only problem was he just had to talk about what he was going to do.

He boasted to a friend; he was overheard by a passerby he barely knew, and the passerby promptly called 911. For what he’d planned to do, and for other miscellaneous felonies, the guy was still in the Huntsville maximum security prison, serving a sentence of fifteen to twenty-five. I thought I could use his idea in the present circumstances though.

“We have Molotov cocktails!” I told the Captain, who looked perplexed. “We can throw bottles filled with gasoline with a fire wick down on them,” I explained imperfectly.

It took a moment.

“By Jove,” said the British gentleman from before, “spot on, that!”

Murmurs of agreement raced around the room, among the passengers at first but then crew members began chiming in. Remarkably, when the Captain saw what was happening, he decided to get out in front of it.

“Mr. Faaborg ... we have gasoline for the small boats in plenty?”

The emaciated man I knew to be the chief engineer nodded firmly.

“ ... And bottles?” the Captain required of the chief steward. I didn’t speak Danish, so the Captain was told something I didn’t understand, but it sounded positive. The nod that accompanied the report seemed to confirm that.

The Captain took a walkie-talkie from his belt and began to speak into the mouthpiece rapidly. We could all hear, and feel, the engine spooling up and shortly sensed the ship begin to change course.

The Bosun gathered all the crew in the room around him and began giving them detailed instructions. Their huddle began splintering as individual crew members raced out of the room to do the Bosun’s bidding.

I wound up chatting with a group of passengers, telling them what I knew and making suggestions as to how we could each contribute to the common purpose of defending the ship, and ourselves. Shortly, we broke up also, assigning ourselves tasks to complete.

The Captain looked around for a moment, then left in a dignified saunter toward the bridge.

The ship began to alter course away from the three small ships visible only from the height of the bridge. Instead of simply reversing our direction of travel, the Captain elected to make knots for an Australian destroyer that answered the initial mayday call. The warship was headed our way as fast as they could move.