The Danish captain flinched when Samatar clucked a trigger sound with his tongue, pulling the gun away. The captain pressed his burned flesh, asking, “Box? You mean the safe?”
“Yeow, Cup.” Samatar slapped the captain across the back of the head, shoving him down the stairs toward the captain’s quarters.
Shocked, prodded, and goaded, the trembling captain gripped the handrail and stumbled down the metal steps. He gazed ahead to a couple of pirates chasing a squat Vietnamese sailor — the only other non-Filipino in the crew — across the main deck, where all the crude oil was stored underneath in massive vats. The quarry scurried toward the bow. A moment later another team of pirates climbed on board from the mothership skiffs, cutting off the sailor’s path of escape. Trapped, the sailor threw his hands in the air and surrendered. One pirate searched his pockets; the other pirate knocked him down with the butt of the rifle.
As the captain relived the Malay crewman being shot in the face at point-blank range, he knew that in the first minutes of boarding the escalation of violence had peaked. Why the shock of violence? Why the cold-blooded killing of a crewman? A dead hostage is not a bargaining chip.
In his quarters, the captain followed the advice of Peder to “submit.” He opened the safe without any tricks or resistance. He stepped back as Samatar stuffed stacks of US dollars, Swiss francs, euros, British pounds, and Norwegian kroner into a backpack. The haul netted more than sixty thousand dollars total from Åsgard Lines A/S.
Samatar zipped the backpack shut, slung it over his shoulder, and dragged the captain outside.
Chapter Ten
Out in the glare of the sun, the captain shielded his eyes. Samatar, donning mirrored sunglasses, dragged the captain past the housings covering the giant oil tanks that sprouted up from the double-hulled vessel.
Amidships, Samatar pushed the captain across the entire length of the tanker toward the bow, where pirates stood around a pair of captured sailors, who kneeled over the body of the Vietnamese deck mate.
At the bow, Samatar threw the captain on top of the felled sailor. He clicked a radio and spoke in rapid-fire Somali tongue, barking orders to one of his men: “No. Follow the plan. You see an American eagle watching… a boat off the tail… NATO ships… dump the black gold in the sea. Don’t let your father down.” Samatar listened for a moment. After a pause, a reply shot back: “Okay, Sama.”
Seven stories beneath the bridge, below the fuel tank that fed the ship power to travel across oceans, through the pump room at the base of the hull that separated the reservoir of oil tanks from the stern, sat the engine room. Tucked inside, the first mate and half the crew had barricaded themselves in with the three engines of the U-shaped stern. With the ducted propellers facing inward, the U, as opposed to the V-shaped design, made the screws churn the sea into a single vortex of power to propel the tanker to sail faster. The noise of the engines drowned out the shouts of the pirates banging on the walls and doors to breach the engine room.
Trapped, hiding in the rear of the room, where the shafts of the screws stuck out from the engines through the stern hull, the first mate and crew listened to the muted sounds of banging and braced for the worse. They couldn’t hear all the words of the pirates, but they did hear the broken English that cursed them, that spat out threats, that demanded they open the door or die.
As the escalating Darwinian battle between predator and prey of the pirate attacks ramped up, month-by-month, year after year, the Somalis had come newly prepared for the crewmen hiding behind barred steel doors. The young teen with two front teeth missing took out a wad of Slovakian plastic explosive — Semtex-H — and stuffed a blasting cap in the clay brick, formed the putty over the door handle, then ran a wire around a column. With a signal to other pirates, the teen set off the shaped charge connecting the wire to a mobile phone. He tapped a picture.
The door exploded open, shredding the steel.
The pirates charged in through the smoke, firing into the ceiling to avoid damaging the engines. Shrapnel from the blast ricocheted, wounding a couple of cowering crewmen. The first mate trembled, holding his ears in deafening pain. Behind him, other crewmen quivered with their chests on their knees, their hands raised in surrender.
The Somali teen with the missing teeth slapped the first mate hard. He pushed him into the arms of henchmen, who whisked him out of the engine room. The pirate took out a radio and called topside, telling Samatar that the engine room was secure and the remaining crew were now hostages.
Chapter Eleven
At the bow, Samatar received the radio message that the supertanker was under his control. He lifted the captain off the deck, turned to take him to a metal ladder to stuff him in one of the skiffs, when a gunshot cracked the heat haze.
A bullet ripped through the backpack and clipped Samatar’s shoulder. The shrapnel from the exploding shell blew open the backpack, scattering money, like leaves blown off a tree. With strength fading, Samatar spun around to see where the shot came from. In the pivot, he grabbed hold of the captain’s arm and pulled him into the line of fire. Before he could shield his body with the Dane, the next shot struck Samatar, blowing a hole in his stomach.
Samatar let go of the captain, twisted and hit the deck. The captain fell by his side. The Dane looked at the shock in Samatar’s eyes, then rolled away as the other pirates returned fire. Samatar held his entrails against his body to keep them from spilling out and gazed vacantly at the deck.
The pirates unloaded a volley of gunfire at the bridge.
On the roof of the bridge, bullets whizzed over Peder’s head. He flattened his body and fired one last shot that killed Samatar a quarter mile away. He knew it would be seconds before the pirates pinpointed the sniper nest. So he looked around, surveying the chimney stack rising above the bridge and figured that it was too big and bulky to climb down safely to the stern to abandon ship. Instead, he grabbed the rifle, rolled over, sprang up, and dashed across the roof toward the port stern.
A burst of shots whizzed by him — so close that he felt air molecules slice apart.
At the edge, Peder threw himself down and lowered his body onto the steel beam of an outrigger. He ambled across it, keeping his balance with outstretched arms. As Peder neared the end of the outrigger, extending over the sea, he tossed the rifle into the water and leapt off the superstructure. A swell broke fifty feet below… He fell in a controlled jump toward the wave, scissor-kicking the air, until his feet came together and plunged into the sea, like a fence post.
Underwater, the tanker’s massive wake plowed over him; the rumble of the triple screws forcing him down, churning, pushing him away. Counterintuitively he flapped his arms upward to sink deeper. When the pressure built up in his ears, he knew what to do from his days as an underwater welder: he pinched his nose, gently breathed out, popping the pressure in his ears. With his descent arrested, he looked up at the ship’s wake streaming overhead and fought the urge to surface and the need to breathe.
Peder floated upward, kicking, until he breached the surface like a cork, breathing hard and heavy, spitting salt water out of his mouth, choking, coughing over and over again.
Peder opened a Velcro flap and pressed a radio beacon, signaling to the NATO pirate response team for search and rescue.
Chapter Twelve