April 14, 1912—11:30 AM, North Atlantic
RMS Titanic First Officer William Murdoch felt fear as icy as the obstacle that now threatened his ship strangling him like a great sea serpent. “Hard-a-starboard,” he barked to the helmsman. “Hard-a-starboard, aye,” the man affirmed, spinning the great wooden wheel that governed the ship’s bearing. Murdoch leaped to the engine telegraph and signaled “Full Astern” to the engine room. He looked desperately at the white mountain he could just begin to see emerging out of the darkness. Would it be enough? He watched the iceberg grow closer and closer, and knew with growing dread that it would not. They would strike it. He watched as the prow of the Ship of Dreams loomed over it, waited for the shudder…and then opened his eyes even wider in astonishment. The ship had somehow simply stopped. Murdoch was an experienced seaman. He knew that ships did not go suddenly from speed to inertia. As he tried to understand how such a phenomenon had occurred, he became conscious of a growing, dawn-like golden light on the horizon and a great beating noise from up above. Turning his eyes skyward, he saw a sight he could not place in any logical context. A massive black bat the size of a zeppelin was flapping its wings slowly above and looking down as the light grew brighter. But something was off…it wore a clear glass bubble around its head that seamlessly flowed into an all-encompassing white suit. The rig looked vaguely similar to fanciful cartoon depictions of moon men Murdoch had seen as a child. The last thing he saw before the light became too bright to bear and he closed his eyes was the unearthly creature’s wide grin. He heard a great voice boom, “Have fun in the future, lads!” before he felt a great rush of wind and the deck fell away beneath his feet.
April 8th, 2009—1:00, 200 Miles Off the Coast Of Somalia
Good God this sucks, thought Abduwali Muse as his skiff bounced like a superball on the wake of the merchant ship he was chasing in his skiff. He was getting seasick and his ass hurt bad from all this time in a small boat bobbing up and down. The shithead skippering the other boat had waved off in response to an obviously fake radio message in which some English speaker on the blue container vessel had tried his valiant best to pretend air support was about to arrive and said they were readying their guns for immediate action. Idiot. Muse had been in this game for a long time. He knew full well that western merchant ships didn’t carry guns and that help from the international naval force that lurked off Somalia’s shores wouldn’t arrive that quickly. But the other guy had decided to leave him and his three guys in the lurch to bring down and control this huge beast and its dozens of crew and get it to shore. Whatever. He’d do this himself. More ransom pay him and his crew. Muse sharpened his khat enhanced focus on his prey. The ship was a formidable target. It was lumbering away as fast as it could and dozens of high pressure water cannons were spaced equidistantly along the deck rails to capsize any raider’s boat it came too close. Muse’s eyes probed for an attack angle, a vulnerability that could be exploited, and then closed almost involuntarily as a blinding flash of light scorched his retinas. He kept his eyes closed for a few seconds after it subsided and then noticed a very odd sensation: frigid cold. It was as if he had somehow motored into a bubble in which the temperature had dropped twenty degrees in seconds. He curiously opened his eyes and looked around. What he saw boggled his mind. A graceful, four funnel steamer was sailing gracefully a quarter mile away on a parallel course to his quarry, the container vessel. A plume of black smoke, fading to brown as it dissipated more and the sunlight came through, gracefully trailed above and behind her black iron hull that faded to a superstructure and gunwales trimmed in white. Muse looked at the sight in pure confusion. What the actual fuck? How did that get there? His initial laser like, drugged focus on that blue whale of a freighter dissipated in a haze of befuddlement. One second…then another…how…Was something badly wrong with this khat, maybe? He looked at his three fellow pirates. Nour Najee, Walid Elmi, and Adan Bilal looked every bit as flabbergasted as he did. “Guys,” yelled Elmi cautiously over the engines, “Do you see it too?” Muse held up a hand. “Tell me what you see first!”, he yelled back. “An old ship, four smokestacks, like the one Leonardo DiCaprio was on,” yelled Najee impulsively. Elmi and Bilal nodded furiously. OK. That settled it. The ship was real. No way they were all having the exact same collective hallucination. “Uh…guys!”, yelled Bilal, the young rookie of the lot. The skiff drifted off course and the container ship began to gain distance. Muse thought quickly as the others shouted at him. He needed to make a decision. It came easily. He could see it was a passenger ship. There was no visible cargo. It had portholes. No firehoses spewed white streams from its promenade decks and railings. And it would clearly have more people than the container ship. Unlike pirates of a bygone age, Somali pirates did not look to plunder cargo, at least not primarily. Their wealth grew from hostages and the insurance money that would be paid for them. Accordingly, they looked to maximize the amount of people they could kidnap. A passenger ship would clearly have more.
But Abduwali Muse instantly felt something was off. Why would a passenger ship that could be a hundred be traveling here, completely alone, with no one around? What company would allow something so reckless? Then he felt a blast of panic. Could it be a bait for pirates? A trap like those old Q-ships, designed to draw people like him in and then blast them with cannons hidden beneath fake deck mounts? Did those staterooms not hold wealthy white vacationers but squads of armed men? But even as he thought it he quickly realized it didn’t change the calculus. If that thing was a fighting ship of some sort he was already dead. Still in the water with nothing between his boat and them and no hostages to use as shields he would be smoked either way. Better to take the chance it was a real target. If it wasn’t he would be dead anyway. “Ok boys!”, he howled over the twin engines of the boat. “Change of plan!” His crew howled their affirmation.
April 8th, 2009—1:05, 200 Miles Off the Coast Of Somalia, Maersk Alabama Bridge
Captain Richard Phillips was looking off his bridge in wonderment, which was quickly becoming a very common emotion in a certain grid square of the Indian Ocean. He looked through his binoculars at a relic of a bygone era that had somehow apparated beside his own command. He watched the skiff pull away and turned to his First Officer, Shane Murphy. “So…uh…I guess that just happened,” he stuttered unintelligently. Murphy didn’t look any less vapor locked than he did. They both turned towards the other ship and looked again through their binoculars. Phillips’s eyes swept towards her bow, looking for the name of the vessel. That can’t be. “The Titanic?!” both men said in thunderstruck unison. They each grew slightly worried expressions as both men doubted their sanity. “Did any of those projects to build a Titanic Two ever get off the ground?”, Phillips asked his second in command. “Not that I know of,” Shane Murphy replied. There was silence on the bridge of the ship, every crew member still there looking incredulous. Phillips spoke first. “Somewhere at the bottom of all this there is a logical explanation, and we will find out what it is eventually. Right now, it looks like those fucking assholes are going after them instead. Radio it in to London and tell them what’s going on.”
April 8th, 2009—1:05, 200 Miles Off the Coast Of Somalia, RMS Titanic Bridge
William Murdoch slowly flexed his hands and fingers, feeling the blood flow, taking in the input of his senses. He appeared to be alive and not in a dream. That was…this current situation was so outlandish that it seemed to transcend the parameters of being either bad or good. It just was. “Well I’ll be goddamned,” he muttered to himself. Murdoch slowly turned to the helmsman, another solid Scottish seaman named Robert Hichens. “Helm…” he trailed off. Hichens looked as bug-eyed as he did at the instant transformation of the night to day, of their circumstances, and of the temperature. Whereas Murdoch had shivered in his blue peacoat moments ago, now he felt very overdressed. This was almost tropical! Just then the distinguished whiskered face of Captain Edward James Smith stumbled onto the bridge. Murdoch groaned internally when he saw that red, urgent, desperate quality to the captain’s face. If a master had that look on him then shite was about to roll downhill. “Officer of the Deck, report”, he snapped. It was the only time since the HMS Hawke collision Murdoch had ever seen the older man look flustered. “Sir, I can only guess you want to know what the bloody hell just happened, pardon my language sir. I wish I had the slightest idea myself.”
April 8th, 2009—1:10, 200 Miles Off the Coast Of Somalia
Muse almost cackled in disbelief. What ship would sail in this part of the world so undefended? By Allah’s holy name, they deserved to be captured! The men were now directly alongside the passenger liner and had hoisted their hooked ladder up, catching the railing just aft of the Titanic’s forecastle deck where it was somewhat lower and close to the bridge. The four men climbed up and over the rail, AK-47s at the ready. The decks were devoid of passengers for some reason Muse could only guess at. Didn’t fancy Americans or whoever lounged on these things like to tan their pale skin lounging on the decks? Oh well, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. No panicked people to sort through. That was nice. Now to find their way to the bridge. The lanky Somalians swept the decks for hostile presences. There were none down here. They quickly scrambled inside through a completely unsecured door and found themselves in a long corridor paneled in white wood and gold furnishings. They scrambled up a staircase, then another, then another. Finally, being able to look straight up at the sky, Muse knew they were on the top deck. He crept quietly forward towards what he knew was the bridge. “Get ready brothers,” he whispered. They smiled back in apprehensive excitement. “Go!” he yelled. They burst in through the side, waving their guns and yelling at everyone to get down. Shocked figures in neat blue uniforms trimmed in gold braid greeted them.
April 8th, 2009—1:10, 200 Miles Off the Coast Of Somalia
Murdoch and his superior were having a spirited argument, each vocalizing their complete disorientation and talking loudly past the other. “Mr. Murdoch, perhaps it is customary for the sun to blaze at midnight in Scotland, but I am not familiar with it occurring in any other area of this planet!”, cried Captain Smith. “Sir, what has occurred here is completely beyond my ability to explain…”, began Murdoch. “Well, given that you are the Officer of the Deck and hold the power of life and death over my ship while I am away and that this all happened while you held it, I suggest you come up with an explanation *right* quickly! And what is that…that thing I am looking at outside?!” To a man raised on the distinguished paddle steamers and sleek Atlantic greyhounds of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the massive blue bulk of the Maersk Alabama did not even resemble a vessel so much as some alien object. Murdoch tried again. “Sir, with all due respect…” And then for the who knew which time that day all hell broke loose all over again. Four negro men in loose khaki pants and shorts tore onto the bridge, screaming in an exotic language the First Officer could not fathom and waving rifles unlike any he had ever seen. This latest assault on his senses made Murdoch blow up. “Now just what the bloody hell do you bastards think you’re doing up here?!”, he roared back, reverting in anger and bewilderment to the language of a common seaman. His words seemed to have some effect. One of the men chattered to the others in their strange tongue to be silent, or so he guessed since they calmed some. The man cautiously moved closer to him. “You the captain?”, he queried. Murdoch hesitated. He could not claim that title, but neither did he want to draw the attention of these brigands to the older and frailer man who it belonged to. Smith, however, spoke up. “No, I am,” he snapped. “And who exactly are you.”
The skinny black man took several steps closer to him, that strange rifle with the curving metal object in the bottom held at hip height.
“Look at me,” he said. “I am the captain now.”
April 8th, 2009—1:15, 200 Miles Off the Coast Of Somalia, RMS Titanic Bridge
Abduwali Muse sized up the man he was speaking to. On some level, he was impressed. The man had bearing and he had gravitas. His immaculately pressed uniform, ramrod posture distinguished white beard and hair, and lack of any apparent fear was classic ideal of a ship captain. “What is your name?”, Muse asked in accented English. “You may address me as Captain Smith,” the old man growled back. Muse laughed, showing teeth stained orange and black like a jack-o-lantern from the khat he chewed. “You got balls. I give you that. But a ship only has one captain, right? That’s me. So from now on, you English. I like that better.” The pirates chuckled and Muse continued. “What is this ship?” Smith turned red at the impudence of this…this…this damn kaffir! “This is the Royal Mail Steamer Titanic and I remind you, boy, that piracy is a felony offense punishable by hanging!” Muse’s demeanor changed. He stepped forward and pressed the muzzle of his AK into Smith’s lower abdomen. “You think I am stupid? You think all this is a joke? I know Titanic. It sank a hundred years ago. And you call me captain. No disrespect!” Smith’s stiff upper lip held but he became a little less aggressive. This black scoundrel did have him and his officers at gunpoint. “Well, captain,” said Smith, layering the title with the unique, dripping contempt only a British accent could achieve, “I think you must be thinking of a different Titanic, because since you and I are standing on it with daylight pouring in I am fairly certain is has not sunk.” Muse snapped the hard point of his muzzle into Smith’s solar plexus, causing his frame to contract slightly as he tried to catch breath. “No lying! WHAT IS THE NAME OF THIS SHIP!” Murdoch pushed Smith back and stepped in front, exciting the other pirates, who began waving their guns and yelling in their language. “Kill this infidel to make the point!” roared Nour Najee, the thickheaded muscle of the crew. “No you idiot!” Bilal, the youngest, yelled back. “We need them alive for ransom!” “Quiet!” screamed Muse. Murdoch broke into the pirates’ argument. “We are the Titanic! Look at the stationary”, he said, grabbing a notepad out of his pocket. “Look at the life preservers! Look over the edge at what’s stenciled on either side of the bow!” Abduwali Muse looked at the notepad Murdoch was shoving under his nose. It did say “White Star Line” and “RMS Titanic”, and it had an embossment that was clearly the ship’s profile. “Our company logo and the ship’s name are on everything all over the place! Look, for the love of Christ!”, Murdoch pleaded in his thick Scottish brogue. Muse paused. Like many others in the third world he was familiar with James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster movie, and this ship really did look very much like it. And now that he remembered, he thought he had seen a life preserver with “RMS Titanic” stenciled around its ring in thick black letters on his way up, he just hadn’t quite taken it in. Something was clearly getting lost in translation, some subtlety his English was not good enough to pick up. Whatever. They’d sort it out later. Maybe this was some nutty western theme park at sea.
“Alright,” said Muse. “You want to be Titanic, you can be Titanic. I don’t really care. All I want is the money. Turn this ship around and take it to Somalia.” Hichens, the helmsman, had been watching all of this bug-eyed from his post, hands still in a death grip on the ship’s wheel. The black man calling himself captain had given a navigational order, and somehow that cut through his trance. “What the hell is a Somalia?” he blurted out. Muse walked over to him, motioning to the other three to keep their guns on the Titanic’s officers. “You know, Somalia?” he said. “The country you’re passing by to the west? Turn ship that way.” It was all gibberish to Hichens. For all he knew a Somalia could be an African garment, delicacy, or jungle tribal leader’s title. But he understood one word. Their hijacker wanted him to turn west. He looked at the officers in pale silence, a vein pulsing in his forehead. “We’re not going anywhere with you, you bastard!” Smith yelled in red-faced anger. “Now get off my ship and go back to the jungle before…” Najee shot out every window on the front of the bridge with a mighty blast from his AK, firing for several seconds until every round was gone. Glass flew and sparkled in the Indian Ocean sun as it landed many decks below. He reloaded while visibly seething, the drugs making his eyes bulge and his breathing fast and shallow. “Stop it you idiot!” yelled Muse in Somali, whose eardrums had been just about blown out and who had been scared out of his wits by the outburst. “We need them to drive the fucking ship!” He turned around and decked the English sea captain hard in the face, feeling the man’s nose break (and a lot of pain in his own knuckles to boot). “Do I need to fuck kill someone before you get it! I’m the captain! You do as I say! TURN WEST!” Streaks of scarlet blood now clashing with his silver whiskers, Smith’s composure finally broke a bit. It was clear the man was serious, and he didn’t have many cards to play. For now. He turned to Quartermaster Hichens. “Alright,” he said. “Do as he tells you. West, dead slow”, he ordered, hoping the kaffir wouldn’t know enough to realize that although he was complying with the specified bearing he was dragging his feet as much as he could while doing it. “You go full speed!” snapped Muse. Spying the engine telegraph, he examined what was written on it. It had a very simple layout, being divided hemispherically into portions labeled “astern” and “ahead”, with various measures of speed from stop to full specified. Muse threw the indicator to the “full ahead” position himself. Feeling his heart sink, Smith’s thoughts raced, trying to find a way out of this predicament he now found his vessel in.
April 8th, 2009—1:25, 200 Miles Off the Coast Of Somalia, RMS Titanic Crow’s Nest
Reginald Lee and Frederick Fleet lay crouched on the metal floor of their position in the ship’s crow’s nest, each turned circular to fit in the cramped space. Both were on the edge of panic. As if the complete shock of the night being turned into glorious day were not enough, they had now been shot at and shot. Lee lay at the bottom of their post, stifling groans from a very unlucky ricochet that had made a wide, shallow impact on his ribcage. A brilliant stain of crimson lay on his uniform tunic beneath which the white of shattered ribs and the pink of torn flesh was visible. All that kept Reggie from screaming at the top of his lungs was the knowledge that something very, very deadly was aft of them, and he figured it would be a very bad idea to let the bastards know they were still alive. Fred Fleet was examining the mess and trying to cover it with torn strips of his own overcoat, now quite unneeded in the heat of this very unexpected daylight. “It looks right nasty but you won’t die,” hissed Fleet in a voice that belied his own panic. “There’s nothing spurtin’ or anything so the blood loss won’t get you, and it didn’t go deep enough to hit any organs. You’ll be back to your vigorously unpleasant self in no time.” The ministrations of Fleet’s rough seaman hands were none too tender and he pushed hard on some bone splinters as he tried to dry the wound, forcing Lee to suppress a mighty howl of pain. “That’ll be quite enough thank you very much, now sod off,” he hissed balefully at the other seaman. “I’m just trying to bleedin’ help,” Fleet yelped back. “Fine. Then why don’t you tell me what the hell is going on out there?” asked Lee, closing his eyes as a wave of pain dazed him. Fleet began to poke his head up very cautiously. “Not with your cap on, dummy,” Lee snapped. Fleet sheepishly laid it beside him and peeked above, looking around aft. He immediately noticed the shattered glass on the bridge, followed by the black men with rifles yelling at the officers. “There’s a few blacks with rifles on the bridge. So that’s where that came from. Looks like they’re trying to take over.” “Well how the hell did they get there?” demanded Lee. Fleet just looked at him. “Ok, you don’t know either. Silly Reggie I guess. Well, one of us has got to climb down from our perch and go for help and I’m thinking it’s not going to be me.” Fleet nodded grimly and narrowed his eyes. “Right then, see you later.” Fleet turned to the oval hole in the mast where the ladder down was located. But then something struck him. “Where do you think I should go when I get down? The bridge is taken over, and that’s most of the officers.” Lee furrowed his brow for a moment, then spoke. “Lightoller,” he said. “I think he was on watch right before it changed, so he’ll be in his cabin. Go find him and tell him what’s going on.” Fred Fleet nodded. “Ok. Goodbye for real this time.”
Fleet took a deep breath, stepped onto the ladder, and began scampering downward. After several minutes, he stepped out of the bottom of the mast on D Deck in the forward crew spaces, bent over and breathing heavily from the speed of his journey. He wracked his brain to try and find the quickest way to officer country. With the pirates being able to take the whole bow of the ship under fire, that left making his way along D deck through the First Class areas. He paused for a moment, reflexively thinking he couldn’t very well do that; average seamen couldn’t go into First Class areas uninvited, only properly attired stewards and valets could. Then he chuckled. The sun was rising at midnight and pirates had taken over his ship. Lord knew he had bigger worries than some toffee-nosed twit complaining to an officer that a lowly commoner had invaded his pristine personal space!
Fleet took off at a dead run, moving through the 3rd Class Lounge. A couple wops sleep would not come for paused from gesturing to each other to watch him move through their space, cigarettes dangling from their mouths. He kept on, heading to the crew-only access hatch used by the stewards to move about this part of the ship. Fleet found it and after a minute found himself in the wealthy part of the ship, running down a long hallway covered in plush dark carpeting and lit by soft golden light. At this hour it was deserted. Despite the harsh mid-day sun outside it was an hour and a half after midnight on the internal clocks of the Titanic’s crew and passengers and nearly all were still in their beds. As he neared the end of the corridor one male passenger came out in a paisley bathrobe and quizzically looked around. Perhaps someone who had seen the daylight streaming in through his porthole and felt something was off. He held up a hand, perhaps to query Fleet, who shot past, bellowing a, “Sorry, pressing business, sir!” over his shoulder. After a minute more of searching, he finally found the staircase he was looking for. Several minutes after that, he had made it to B Deck and was running along an open promenade deck covered in White Star lounge furniture that gave the ship’s wealthiest passengers a good view of the endless blue sea. Let’s see…Officer country is up on the very top, on the Boat Deck…there we are! Finally finding the last unobtrusive staircase upwards, Fleet arrived a minute later at the outside door of the officer staterooms gasping for air with his blue sailor suit dark with sweat. He stumbled inside and started looking for his final destination. With tremendous relief he finally saw the door with the words Charles Lightoller, Second Officer stenciled upon it. He ran up to it and began banging with both fists. “Sir, we’ve got an emergency sir!” he yelled. After about ten seconds and some thumping, a barefoot Lightoller opened the door in white pajamas with narrow, bleary eyes. “Yes, sailor?” he asked in a thoroughly threatening tone. “Sir begging to report, pirates have taken the bridge and the officers and shot Reggie Lee!” Lightoller cocked his head and gave him a look somewhere between nonplussed and concerned. “Son, we’re in the middle of the North Atlantic, and it’s the year 1912, not 1712. I highly doubt we have been boarded by pirates.” Fleet gestured to the blood he still had on his clothes from dressing poor Reggie’s wounds. “Sir, they shot the other lookout in the crow’s nest; he’s still up there wounded! You didn’t hear that great bloody burst of gunfire ten minutes ago?!” Lightoller paused. He had heard what his ear thought a sort of cracking, even thought of checking it out before end of the shift exhaustion won out, but…for that to be gunfire, it’d have to be a Maxim gun, for what else could fire in such a regular steady stream? And how would the pirates be able to board with such a great, heavy, unwieldy thing and the ponderous weight of the ammunition and tripods. Ah well. Either way he supposed he had better go check it out. Probably just some sort of disturbance and a sailor with an overactive imagination, though he couldn’t explain how the lookout might have come to be wounded. He said, “Wait a moment” and shut the door. He emerged moments later dressed in trousers and a coat over his nightwear and gestured for Fleet to follow him towards the bridge. Then he paused. “Alright,” he said, “If there is a disturbance maybe best to bring a gun of some sort just in case order needs to be reestablished.” Maybe some drunk with a gun he had brought aboard that he had accidentally discharged and the sailor had mistaken all this somehow? He tried to remember where they had put the shooting irons on board. Ah yes, in Murdoch’s cabin. He had never thought he’d need to get one of the things, considering them completely superfluous, but he stepped towards Murdoch’s door. “Let’s arm ourselves,” he said. He stepped into the First Officer’s tidy quarters and removed a heavy gray Webley Mk IV .455 revolver, sidearm of standard issue throughout the British Empire. He looked at the anxious young seaman standing outside his door. “Can you handle a gun, son?” Fleet had never shot one before but he figured he’d better. “Yes sir, I’ll be fine,” he said. Lightoller handed him another and pecked out a dozen rounds. “Alright, we should be fine,” he said. “Off with us, then.”
April 8th, 2009—1:25, 200 Miles Off the Coast Of Somalia, Maersk Alabama Bridge
“London, I’m telling you that’s what happened! They just split off and hit that other ship!” The watch officer on the other end replied, “You didn’t mention anything about any other ship in your initial distress call, captain.” Phillips replied, “It just appeared! There wasn’t anything to report when I first called!” Far away the controller in the piracy crisis center rolled her eyes. Not the brightest bulb in the bag this guy, she thought. Sails at half the distance he should be from Somalia, all alone, and forgets the minor detail of an ocean liner being right next to him when he makes the call! “Sir, can you identify the other vessel?” she tried. “Uh…not at this time,” stammered Phillips. “Sorry.” That was a lie. He could make out the lettering clear as day on her side through his binoculars but he could already this lady thought he was a hammerhead. Telling her the RMS Titanic had apparently decided it had rested long enough and decided to start sailing the seas again might just make her hang up on him. “I can describe it, though,” he lamely volunteered. “Alright, do that,” replied the voice on the other end. “She’s got four tall funnels, about a thousand feet long, black hull, white superstructure. She’s producing a lot of smoke, a lot more than I think is allowed. That’s the other thing. Maybe the pirates damaged her somehow?” Even the controller heard what happened next. Gunfire carries a strikingly long way. “London, London, shots fired!” screamed Phillips into the radio. “They’re firing…” “Roger Alabama,” replied London. “We read you. Sending assistance now.” Weird as this all was, something was definitely going on out there, the woman thought. She picked up another phone and made her next call.
April 8th, 2009—1:45, USS Bainbridge
Commander Frank Castellano read the encrypted telex and then handed it to his navigation officer. “Proceed to these coordinates at full,” he ordered. Then he made his way to the 1MC. “Crew, this is your captain speaking. We’ve received word of a possible hijacking of a cruise ship and a threat to another ship nearby. We are on our way to the location of all this now. Keep your heads up and do your jobs like you’ve practiced. Let’s get these people home.” He hung up and told the XO, “Get the ScanEagle up. We need eyes on all this.”
“Proceeding to coordinates at full,” called the navigator.
April 8th, 2009—1:35, 200 Miles Off the Coast Of Somalia, RMS Titanic Bridge
Lightoller strode down the boat deck towards the bridge, shiny black corframs striking the pine of the deck. He thought quickly as he walked. The Titanic’s Second Officer had both great strengths and great weaknesses. Extremely bold, headstrong, intense, and well-spoken, he had tremendous charisma and capacity for decisive action that made men follow him. He was also rigidly inflexible and prone to be impulsive when deliberating would have served him a good deal better. The latter traits had caused him to pull a prank simulating a raid in Sydney Harbor during the Boer War in his younger and more foolish days. That had come close to capping his career before it had even really started. His plan right now was to do a cursory poke around the bridge to determine what he was up against and then stride aboard and take control of the situation. Lightoller simply could not conceive of a force within the time or place and his own frame of reference that could take over the RMS Titanic. Accordingly, he and his one-man backup force had stopped and were peeking out from behind the forward-most funnel. They were standing on the raised roof above the boat deck that directly abutted the funnels and allowed the seamen to perform maintenance on them. The very front of it formed the roof of the bridge and wheelhouse. Lightoller felt a familiar force swaying his body as he peered towards it. Turning around behind him towards the stern, he saw it confirmed by the curve in the ship’s wake; Titanic was turning. He looked up at the sun’s position in the sky. The new bearing looked to be roughly west as opposed to the more southerly direction they had been going in before. Something was definitely not right up there. But that did not make Lightoller move with more caution. “Right then,” he said. “Here’s the plan. You stay here and cover me. If anyone comes up here and it looks like they may be trouble you tell them loudly to stop and fire a warning shot if it looks like real trouble. If they fire at you fire for real. I’m going to go forward, creep onto the roof of the bridge, and try to listen and maybe peek in and see what’s going on.” Fleet thought he could see some flaws in that plan. “But sir,” he began. “Enough,” said Lightoller, cutting him off. “Away I go.” He moved forward in a crouch, one hand on the pistol whose butt stuck out of his coat pocket. Lightoller tried to tread quietly as he came to the small square wooden area he knew was the roof the bridge. He was not quiet enough.
April 8th, 2009—1:35, 200 Miles Off the Coast Of Somalia, RMS Titanic Bridge
Abduwali Muse’s lanky black frame walked the floor of the bridge from wing to wing, trying to think of how to skin this very large, lion of a cat as he paced. Truth be told he did not plan on hijacking a cruise ship when the day started. Four men with AK’s were sufficient to control a crowd of a few dozen mariners but this ship could have thousands and thousands aboard. That meant there was no way for him to control all of it or any more than a fraction of its people at once. And given that this state of affairs could last a while until they got to Somalia, he might have to start rotating his men in shifts, which would reduce their effective strength at any moment to even less than four. Not for the first time he cursed the other coxswain for bailing when that phony baloney radio message went out from the container ship. Four extra trigger pullers would have made this easier, if not exactly easy. But there was no use in idle wishing. He turned back to his manpower problem in his head. I can control the bridge, but not anywhere else, he thought to himself as he grew more agitated. Once somebody figures out we’ve got the ship, and word starts to spread…yes, that could be quite a problem. Let’s see: how long would it take to get to Somalia, anyway? He looked over at the Titanic’s de jure captain. “English,” he barked, startling the old man. “Who? I,” asked Smith. “Yeah, you. English,” said Muse. “How fast do this ship go?” Smith drew himself up and said, stiffly and with a note of pride, “The RMS Titanic can make 23 knots.” Muse nodded. “Ok,” he said. He thought some more to himself. So about…what, 30 kilometers an hour? He did the math in his head. Ten, maybe eleven hours until we hit Somalia. Ok…it’ll suck but we can do that without shifts. Good. The thing to do here is to try and keep the passengers and the rest of the crew in the dark for as long as possible. Abduwali Muse had not yet seen any indication the rest of the ship knew they had been hijacked. Eventually someone would try to enter the bridge, and they would take them hostage one by one. It would probably be too much to assume they could keep them in the dark all the way to the Somali coast, but they might be able to maintain the illusion of normality for another few hours if they were lucky. These people are civilians. They’ll be surprised, totally off guard. They’ll eat up at least a few hours rousing everyone and trying to work out a plan. We can threaten the hostages to try and keep them off their other guard. Yeah, we can make this work.
Then he jerked his head up as heard a subtle tapping on the roof. Muse frantically gestured to his other three pirates, waving from his ear upward. Could somebody be up there? He gestured furiously to Nour Najee to move outside the bridge onto the port bridge wing while he tried to move. Najee looked at him in confusion, brow furrowed. He aimed his AK at the ceiling and moved his finger to the trigger. Muse virtually jumped through the roof to get him to stop it, frantically waving his hands over each other in an -x in the cutoff motion while shaking his head. This completely brain-dead idiot! Najee looked at him with a defensive, questioning look. Muse just shook his head disdainfully and walked tensely out onto the starboard bridge wing, AK-47 turned skywards. He took a deep breath as he walked backwards, looking to get a better angle of view over the top of the bridge.
Even being tensed up, he still reared in shock when he saw the small, dark, disheveled British officer creeping along on the roof. “Shit!” he exclaimed. The man’s head shot around and Muse saw his eyes widen like a kudu in the headlights. The man stumbled back, trying to draw his handgun from his blue coat in a panicked, jerky motion. He was bringing it up one-handed when Muse ripped off a long burst from his rifle. It missed the Brit over his right shoulder. The man fired back, looking almost as frightened by the revolver’s report as Muse imagined he did from being shot at. He managed to get off three shots, firing them in less than a second and a half. Even with his senses degenerating into the characteristic crazed blur of a gunfight, Muse could tell he had missed by a ludicrously large amount. If any of those rounds had come within ten feet of him he’d be shocked. Muse heard Najee yell from the other side. The officer looked frantically towards port, then ran as fast as he could. He made it about ten feet before slipping on the smooth white pine in his dress shoes, falling straight over and landing flat on his ass. Muse cursed again and fired another burst, partly to keep the man’s head down but mostly to make himself feel better. He heard a sound like a large animal flopping about and knew the man was desperately crawling away, trying to escape. He heard Najee perform his signature move of uselessly ripping off the better part of a magazine on his side of the ship, then heard several more revolver shots answer him. Had to be from someone other than the officer on the bridge. Those were fainter, coming from too far astern to be from the same source. So this fucker has backup. Terrific. He stood still for five seconds or so, frantically trying to think of something useful to do, when he heard a noise like pounding from the top of the superstructure above him. He knew what it was. The officer had crawled away out of his line of sight and upon getting enough distance between him and Muse had started running again. He heard someone call “Seaman, retreat, they’ve got us outgunned!” before the man popped into view again. He had been forced to come to the edge of the superstructure again as the funnel took up the center space. This brought him into Muse’s view again, but the officer had managed to anticipate this. He turned around and squeezed off another two shots. These were aimed a little better and Muse reflexively dropped into a crouch. He brought his AK up again and…Damn! The man had managed to sprint around the funnel again. Muse slammed the butt of his AK on the deck in frustration. Well, he thought grimly to himself, If they didn’t know we’d taken them before they do now.
April 8th, 2009—1:45, 200 Miles Off the Coast Of Somalia, RMS Titanic Boat Deck
Lightoller bent over and tried to restore his composure, his prior cockiness completely vanished. He felt a simultaneous urge to vomit and urinate in fear. Whatever else could be said of him, he was no coward, but he had been utterly unprepared psychologically for what had taken him. It was true! Pirates, on a British ship in the North Atlantic! And by bloody God almighty, what the hell kind of guns were those?! Lightoller screamed in his head. Nothing had prepared him for this. Of all the dangers and issues that an officer could be confronted with, never in even the darkest and weirdest recesses of his brain had the ship’s Second Officer thought he might one day have to deal with a pirate attack. Fleet stood beside him, revolver trained toward the bow, covering in case those bastard munts with their terrible rifles tried to follow them. “You get that little peek you were looking for sir?” Fleet couldn’t resist asking sarcastically. “Careful, seaman,” said Lightoller, venomously stressing the man’s rank and reminding him who was in charge. Nonetheless, he had clearly been right. “Alright,” he gasped through the adrenaline. “So it appears we have been pirated. Noted. We need to get back and try to organize. Grab whatever guns, officers, and crew we can get and try to keep them out of the passenger areas and bottled up in front. Let’s go!” Fleet nodded his affirmation and the two men ran further astern in a crouch.
April 8th, 2009—2:00, 200 Miles Off the Coast Of Somalia, USS Bainbridge
Commander Frank Castellano got out of his swivel chair on the starboard corner of the bridge. “XO’s deck,” he called out. “XO’s deck,” his immediate subordinate chimed back, acknowledging he was in charge until Castellano came back. The ship’s captain walked quietly back to the real nerve center of the ship: her Combat Intelligence Center, or CIC. Every part of the room was crammed with screen, monitors, and control panels monitored by a force of dozens of coffee-fueled petty officers, chiefs, and officers of every description. “Atten-shun!” the first person to see him called. Everyone shot out of the chairs. “As you were,” he replied quickly. Castellano walked over the young Lieutenant Junior Grade who was operating the ship’s Boeing ScanEagle Drone. The small, gray, unmanned UAV was a dead useful beast. Forty pounds soaking wet, it could be launched and recovered from a mast, had a decent endurance of twenty-four hours, a service ceiling of around twenty-thousand feet, and could about make ninety miles an hour in a dead sprint, though that would hurt the endurance. Best of all, it could beam back crystal clear video footage of whatever its human masters wanted it to while it was in the air.
“We receiving okay?” Castellano queried the junior officer. “Yes, sir” the man replied, turning the camera to the drone’s rear to show the ship small in the distance. “For a few minutes now. I’ve got her running as fast as can, about ninety miles an hour. She should be there in a few; this’ll about cut her endurance in half but by the time she runs out of gas we’ll be on site.” Castellano nodded. “Ok, good. Just get her there. We’ve gotta get an eye in the sky on this mess.” “Yessir,” the JG enthusiastically agreed.
April 8th, 2009—2:25, 200 Miles Off the Coast Of Somalia, RMS Titanic
Second Officer Charles Lightoller was holding a council of war in the ship’s 1st class reading and writing room. Beside him were the two Masters at Arms, Thomas King and Henry Bailey, Third Officer Herbert John Pitman, Fifth Officer Harold Lowe, the ship’s builder Thomas Andrews, and the ship’s owner Joseph Bruce Ismay. The final member was not a nautical man but was among the most valuable in Lightoller’s corner. Major Archibald Butt was the influential and experienced U.S. Army aide of both Teddy Roosevelt and Big Bill Taft. The men were engaged in a frantic, huddled conversation in the richly upholstered Victorian chairs around a well-set table with an embroidered cloth. The scene struck several as being ludicrously out of touch with the events occurring around them. Lightoller had sent stewards and Frederick Fleet to retrieve these men from their cabins when the direness of the situation became apparent. The hurriedly dressed and disheveled men were now desperately trying to come up with a way to resolve the crisis.
“Alright,” said Major Butt, his fingers steepled in front of him. “So we have been pirated. That much is indeed clear. Do you have any idea the numbers we are up against?” Lightoller was leaning back in his chair with his hands planted stiffly on his knees. The extent to which the previous events had rattled him betrayed itself in the unnatural deliberation with which he moved and spoke, without fillers and after pauses, each word measured out. He was a man struggling to keep his composure in a very intense situation, and doing a reasonable job of it. After a pause, he said, “At least two. That was all I saw, the ones that shot at me. One on each side of the bridge. I did not actually see any more, but Seaman Fleet told me he saw around four or five on it when he was looking in from the crow’s nest. I suspect it is more. I cannot imagine such a small number of men trying to take over a vessel as sizable as this one.” Butt leaned back and nodded. “That is indeed very likely. And the rest of the ship’s officers?” Lightoller gestured to the rest at the table. “This is all we have been able to find. Everyone else is assumed captured on the bridge. As of this moment, I appear to be in effective command of Titanic.” Lightoller’s dark, piercing eyes widened in disbelief at his own words. Butt, recognizing how overwhelmed the Scotsman across from him must be, smiled through his whiskers and said, “Yes, and a fine job you are doing, sir. We’ll sort this out. Chin up.” The Second Officer returned a weak smile. “Thank you, Major.” Butt’s face turned business-like once again. “Alright. Now you say that they turned the ship?” Lightoller replied, “Indeed. I saw the curve in the wake myself.” “Then we need to find a way to stop the vessel. I have no idea where these negroes plan on taking us but if they want to go somewhere then we need to make sure we don’t go wherever that is.” Andrews raised his hand from the table where it lay. “If the wheelhouse and bridge are taken, the logical answer is to go straight to the engine room and tell them ourselves. There isn’t another outlet on the phone system from the bridge, so we’ll have to send a runner.” Ismay, who had remained quiet until now piped up. “Should we turn off the lights as well? They don’t know the ship. If we deny them that we should be able to prevent them from easily finding their way into the passenger areas.” There was a moment of pause while everyone considered the suggestion. Then Lightoller answered carefully, “I think not, at least not for now. They could cause a panic, and the darkness is a double-edged sword. It would make it very difficult to coordinate and any evacuation would be impossible.” Butt nodded while stroking his gray moustache. “I agree,” he said. Lightoller turned to the Third Officer. “Herb, go down there and tell them to come to a dead stop until instructed otherwise. Everything else runs as normal.” The younger man sprang up. “Yes, sir,” he said as he dashed off. “That being done,” said Butt, “I agree with your earlier inclinations. The key thing is to evacuate people from around the bow and forward superstructure to keep them from gaining any more hostages and try to deny them the rest of the ship. You sent stewards to do this, yes?” “After they got you I told them to get some more seamen and start spreading the word. They should be going towards the stern now,” replied Lightoller. “Alright with that taken care of we need to hem them in at the bridge.” This made the Titanic’s acting captain twitch uneasily. “We have very few guns, sir. I will man that line myself but all we have that I know of are some more Webleys.” Butt grinned slightly. “Well, if that’s what we have then that’s what we’ll just have to use,” he said.
April 8th, 2009—2:35, 200 Miles Off the Coast Of Somalia, RMS Titanic Bridge
Muse leaned against the ship’s wheel and pondered his assets. He had the helmsman, the ship’s captain, and its Chief, First, Fourth, and Sixth officers hostage. The most important crew. So that was nice. The problem was that the rest of the ship was still not in his hands. And now they knew they’d been hijacked. He took another opportunity to curse at himself for not killing that fucking guy who had been creeping about. He’d had the opportunity. And boy had Najee made sure he knew it. What, you can’t shoot straight? he’d taunted. Do I have to do everything here? The smirks on faces of his prisoners rubbed further salt in the wound. Let your men speak to you in such a way, captain? For shame they seemed to say. His finger had itched to shoot someone to put the fear of God back in them but he wasn’t that petty. God, why did I bring this prick along he groaned internally. Not even from my village! Now he had to decide what to do. And indecision was killing him. The shock from the gunfight seemed to have boggled his wits and frozen his synapses.
Najee walked back up to him. “We need to go deeper into the ship. Kill some people to make the point maybe, take more hostages.” Muse held up a hand to stop his fourth or fifth reiteration of this same point. He turned to Smith. “Ok, English,” he said. “Time for the truth. What other kind of guns you carrying aboard?” Smith looked up and lied purely out of instinct. It seemed like a time to bluff. “We are carrying a couple of hundred Enfield rifles for shipment to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Canada along with thirty-thousand rounds of ammunition. About the same in Webley revolvers, and also the rounds for those.” Smith’s heart pounded and he stared down his captor with all the bearing he could muster. The Somali leader looked at him hard to see if he would look away or fidget, searching for any sign of untruthfulness. Then he turned back to Najee. “The old guy says they’ve got an armory aboard and a lot of guns. They’ve definitely got at least some, because two different guys shot at us. They know the ship, we don’t, and now they’ve got warning. There’s places in there that they could ambush us. As long as the ship is moving towards Somalia, we’re good. If that stops, then we sort it out from there.” Najee turned around and went back to the corner of the bridge to sulk. I should be running the show, he thought. Not this skinny little pussy! Then he noticed a subtle sensation in his legs, a difference in the way his weight felt. He thought he knew what it was. Najee walked over the bridge wing, looking cautiously around in case any seamen with revolvers were waiting to nail him. He looked down at the water and realized it wasn’t his imagination. The wake of disturbed white water the ship cut through was narrowing in width. It was now barely as wide as the hull, and the height of the wake was growing visibly shorter.
“Oh my great captain,” he called sarcastically towards the ship’s conn, “Our vessel seems to be coming to a stop.”
April 8th, 2009—2:45, 200 Miles Off the Coast Of Somalia, RMS Titanic Bridge
If human thought were an audible sound, if the contents of the head could be broadcast to the ears of others without speaking, then the volume on the bridge of the RMS Titanic would have been that of a KISS concert. Every person there, hostage and captor alike, frantically tried to out plot the other, to play the hand dealt to them as best as possible, and to find a way to turn the tables on their enemy. Nour Najee and Abduwali Muse shoved Captain Edward Smith and the granite-nosed Fourth Officer Joseph Boxhall to their feet and forced them in broken English and the universal language of the angrily waved rifle to raise their hands over their heads and walk forward. Muse and Najee were planning to get this great smoky iron beast lumbering towards Somalia again or kill some Englishmen in the attempt. Muse was pondering whether to swap out the hot-headed Najee for Elmi or Bilal, but decided that the only thing that scared him more than having this asshole watching his back in a high-pressure situation with the rest of the ship’s passengers and crew was the thought of leaving him at the controls to mind the ship. Smith and Boxhall tried to think of a way to overpower their captors, their thoughts being governed by their respective physical capabilities. The younger Boxhall’s bloody thoughts were of how to lead the Somalians past fireaxes that could be grabbed and swung or places where they could be pushed overboard. Smith struggled to find a way to lead them forward to a place where the rest of the crew could cut them off, or into a dark place where they could slip away. Perhaps, he reasoned, if they could lead them through the engine room, they could get the stokers to rush them with their heavy shovels from the innumerable nooks, crannies, and void spaces down there. He was no coward, but neither did he think that he had the strength in his sixth decade of life to overpower two young men with rifles. Meanwhile, the others who would remain on the bridge coldly planned on how they would neutralize each other. Walid Elmi and Adan Bilal nervously moved to areas of the bridge where they thought they could cover all the hostages if they were rushed. James Moody, William Murdoch, and Henry Wilde glowered at their captors and pondered a way to rush them. None was able to come up with any reasonable plan. The bridge of the Titanic was a bare, wide space, offering little opportunity to get close to the pirates and even fewer loose objects that had any potential of being used as weapons. Despite their best designs, fate, luck, and the flow of events would dictate the outcome more than any grand schemes.
Muse prodded Smith forward with the muzzle of his AK. “OK, English,” he barked. “Take us to other crew. We’re going to get this bitch going again.”
Smith bristled internally at the insult to the honor of his command even as he recognized the petty uselessness of the feeling. “Right this way, then”, he replied flatly. The men set off aft of the bridge down one of the Titanic’s innumerable white paneled corridors. Smith struggled mentally with where exactly to take them. The engine room was the obvious place, as it was chock full of places where these bloody pirates could be waylaid. The trick was that he also had to avoid bringing them through passenger areas where they could pose a danger to the men and women in his charge. Leading them straight down from the top deck of the ship to the bottom without passing through at least some such places would be…tricky. Alright, master, thought Smith. Time to see how well you know your ship. He thought he saw a way. They would go aft towards the Marconi rooms, officers’ quarters, and gymnasium. There would likely be other crew there, revolvers were stored in the officers’ quarters, and he knew they had forewarning. Hopefully they would find friendly faces who could fight back. If not, he could get them down lower from there. Then four men continued walking, Smith and Boxhall with their hands on their heads, Muse and Najee a few feet behind them, automatic rifles held loosely at their hips. They were around the corner from the Marconi Room when a tidal wave of blue uniforms and tweed suits crashed around it, screaming and waving revolvers. Smith’s heart leapt with savage joy.
April 8th, 2009—2:40, 200 Miles Off the Coast Of Somalia, RMS Titanic Marconi Room
CQD This is the Royal Mail Steamer Titanic Stop We are being pirated Stop Four men armed with rifles on the bridge Stop Assistance urgently required Stop Any nearby navy ship please respond Stop Last measured coordinates 41°46' N, 50° 14' W CQD
Harold Bride turned to the Second Officer. “This is the message you wish me to send, sir?” he asked.
“Yes, as quickly as possible,” replied Charles Lightoller. “Click like lives depend on it, because you had better bloody believe that they do.”
The pale, ectomorphic radioman turned to his machine and began to send the message. Lightoller pondered the large black metal rig in silence. Amazing thing, technology he thought. What a strange device to be putting our hopes in. And then a panicked seaman came tiptoeing around the corner. “A group of people’s comin’, sir”, the man whispered. “At least a few of them.”
There was only one group of people that would be likely to be coming their way from the bow of the ship. Lightoller took his Webley back from the seaman (they had so few he’d had to give it up to the sentry, who he doubted could use it well anyway) and looked at Major Butt, Master-at-Arms Thomas King, and Fifth Officer Harold Lowe. Butt smiled and gave a small nod while removing the .45 Army Colt he had luckily been carrying on the voyage. He held a finger to his lips and beckoned the men out of the Marconi Room. They tiptoed up the corridor, their shaking hands grasping gray gunmetal. When they reached the corner, Butt held up a hand to stop. Ever so quietly, he poked one eye around the corner. He quickly moved it back. “Yep, it’s them,” he said. “Two negroes, rifles, and they’ve got Captain Smith and one of your other officers walking in front of them. Get ready. We’re going to try and give them a shock.”
Lightoller gulped. He felt like he was riding a car full speed over the cliffs of Dover and the edge was a second away. It was time to face those hell-sent guns again. Hopefully this time would go better than the last. The Second Officer held his breath, then felt a sensation like a blast of wind as Butt waved for them to go and charged around the corner, revolver held out straight in front of him. The other three men shot forward. “Drop your weapons and put your hands up!” roared Archibald Butt.
It was extremely lucky that the pirates’ instinct was to yank their hostages closer and press their guns into their backs rather than to fill the entire corridor with sixty rounds of 7.62 x 39 mm Chinese rounds on full auto. At that range everyone would have almost certainly killed each other. Instead they simply screamed, each man vocalizing his fear and determination in a shouted cacophony.
“Shut fuck up and get floor we kill you all!,” Abduwali Muse howled back, raw adrenaline making his normally imperfect English wholly unintelligible.
“Calm, calm, calm down!” Smith bellowed.
“Drop your guns!” snarled Lightoller, he and Butt repeating the command as many times as they could. After what felt like a standoff of hours but was only about twenty seconds, the noise quieted down. The two sides settled into a Mexican standoff, the pirates with their arms tight around their captives’ necks and rifles pressed into their backs.
Muse finally spoke, struggling to consider his words amidst the khat and the human rocket fuel that was the neurochemicals in combat. “You make the ship go again,” he said. “Full speed. If you don’t I start killing. You get it?”
Butt summoned up all the military bearing he could and barked back, “Let’s get one thing clear between us, boy. If you start shooting, or if I even think there is a strong probability you will start shooting, I will pull the trigger first, and these men will follow my lead. You will kill them and probably us, but at ten paces like the ones we’re at, at least a couple of our rounds are going to get each of you, too.”
Muse knew he was right. He also had no idea what else he could do. He needed to get this fucking ship moving! “Ok,” he said. “No killing. But you gotta drop the guns and come back with us. Ok?” He knew even as he said it that it was a fool’s request. The large, barrel-chested, icy-eyed white man in front of him was not stupid. He answered more or less as Muse had expected.
“I’d shoot myself or any other man on this ship before I gave you bastards a single other hostage,” replied Butt. “And furthermore, I’m getting impatient. You are not pirating this ship. Drop your guns.”
Unsurprisingly, the pirates did not comply. A proper Mexican standoff we have here, thought Archibald Butt. The men stared at each other, quivering from adrenaline, sweat beading on their visage. There was silence for fifteen seconds, a silence that roared in the ears of every man in the corridor like a runaway train. Then Butt had an idea. He began sliding forward, purely on instinct. His chest felt like it was pulling apart from fear. It was like committing suicide. But onwards he crept, revolver in front of him, moving towards the smaller black pirate. Another five feet and not even a blind man could miss. There was no hiding behind a hostage at that range. “Stop! STOP!” screamed Muse.
Onwards the Major kept, a foot a second. Then Lightoller began to shuffle forward, moving towards the bigger pirate off to Butt’s right. Butt kept his focus on the smaller one. His entire world shrank to the five feet between him and his quarry. He could smell the man’s sweat, see it on his upper lip, count the stains on his tattered cotton shirt. And then Muse folded. He knew the score as well. He could not shoot his hostage. If he did there was nothing to stop the others from blasting him with their revolvers. His power was an illusion. He could not actually kill Captain Smith. There was, in fact, only one thing he could do. Muse began to scuttle backwards, sandals of chopped rubber tire thudding on the deck, hauling with him the white-haired sea captain whose face was now turning dull scarlet from the grip of Muse’s arm around his neck. Nour Najee began to slowly follow. Lightoller and Butt quickened their pace. The pirates answered with a quick walk; Lightoller crouched to sprint ahead and they began to run backwards. Both their hostages fell to deck and they hauled them backwards, crouched down to try to use them for cover. Butt held out his left arm, the one that to stop Lightoller. “We can’t push them too hard,” he whispered sideways out the corner of his mouth. “They might panic.” Lightoller slowly came to a stop. A few second later, the pirates disappeared around another corner, their hostages now frantically twisting the ground to try and get some oxygen as they were pulled along.
“We can’t let them get away,” said Lightoller quietly, pressing against Butt’s outstretched arm.
“Yes, we can”, said Butt firmly. “If we press them too hard they might panic and kill them anyways. We won this round, Charles. Don’t lose sight of that.” He thought for a moment and then fired a shot at the very end of the corridor, startling all present. “To give them a little extra reminder not to try that again,” he said with a grim smile. Ears ringing, Butt pulled the Second Officer back towards the Marconi Room. He could still see the pain in the man’s eyes from having to watch his friend and his mentor be dragged back by these brigands, though. “We’ll get them,” he said. “Food and water are going to start running out on that bridge, and someone will come for us. Their position is hopeless. Make no mistake of that. We’ve just got to press gently and eventually they’ll get back on whatever boat they came here on.”
Lightoller nodded slightly. “Thank you, sir,” he said. “You’re handling this much better than me.”
Butt laughed. “All part of being a soldier, m’boy.”
April 8th, 2009—2:40, 200 Miles Off the Coast Of Somalia, USS Bainbridge CIC
Eyeing the drone feed from the corner of the room, Frank Castellano attention snapped on it as he saw the image of the clear blue see dissolve in a haze of gray. “Dammit,” its operator grumbled, tapping at the keyboard. Castellano bounded over.
“What’s going on?” he demanded urgently.
The JG scratched his head. “We’re getting some kind of weird interference. It’s full-spectrum and it covers every damn frequency. The only thing I know of that do this is a really, really intense thunderstorm, too intense to even think of flying it.” Castellano stared back. It was a brilliant, sunny blue day outside.
“She’ll fly fine on her own,” volunteered the JG. “Keep going right to the coordinates I put into her, just like a missile. It’ll probably resolve at some point.”
The Commander eased back. “Ok, get it back up,” he said. “We need that drone. Need it bad.” Then the JG sat up straighter.
“Sir…” he trailed off. “Look at the pattern of the static.” Castellano stared at him, wondering what on earth there was to see in the gray bee swarm of static. “Watch how it pulses in and out,” clarified the younger officer.
Castellano watched quietly, focusing on the waves of gray. He began to see it. They seemed to change somehow, getting…busier, somehow, at random intervals. Then as he watched for a few seconds and the pattern built in his head, it hit him. Those weren’t random intervals. They were dots and dashes. “Morse code!” he cried.
The JG nodded. “Somebody wants to have a chat. A very loud one.”
Castellano shot away, moving towards the Comms station. “I see it, sir,” said the chief sitting at a monitor. Let me run that through a computer for you.” He pulled up a program, specified the time at which the bizarre static code had begun, and clicked, ‘Run.’ It was as fast as a Google search. The message wasn’t done yet, but Castellano watched as it took shape, his brows furrowing more and more. Finally, after a minute and a half, it lay in front of him.
CQD This is the Royal Mail Steamer Titanic Stop We are being pirated Stop Four men armed with rifles on the bridge Stop Assistance urgently required Stop Any nearby navy ship please respond Stop Last measured coordinates 41°46' N, 50° 14' W CQD
“The drone’s back up,” its operator called out as the static faded out.
The chief guffawed before seeing Castellano’s reddening face. “You sure this is right?” the Commander growled.
“Uh…yeah sir. Definitely. I promise I wouldn’t screw around like this if that’s what you mean.”
Castellano shook his head angrily. “Well, clearly someone else would. Some shithead thinks hammering us with a prank message on a full spectrum emitter during a crisis situation is a good idea.” He continued, “Can you tell where it came from?”
“From ought-ought,” replied the chief, referring to the bearing that lay dead ahead. “Range and direction is from the reported position of the ships, exactly where we’re headed.”
“Which fucktard is doing this?” demanded Castellano. “Somebody on Maersk think this is funny?” The chief shook his head.
“Sir, whatever it is, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t them. Whatever this came from is *powerful*, sir. To block out the entire spectrum you’d need to pour electricity straight into the antennae. You couldn’t do it with anything satellite-based and it wouldn’t be a setting on any maritime radio. And you’d need a lot of power. Be a hell of a rig.”
Castellano rubbed his chin, considering. “Might be the pirates screwing with us somehow. Whatever. We’ll figure it out and thump ‘em extra hard.”
Then he started. “Aren’t those coordinates…”
“Yeah, somewhere in the North Atlantic I think,” laughed the chief. “They must have brought some weed brownies along to think up something this stupid.”
RMS Titanic First Officer William Murdoch felt fear as icy as the obstacle that now threatened his ship strangling him like a great sea serpent. “Hard-a-starboard,” he barked to the helmsman. “Hard-a-starboard, aye,” the man affirmed, spinning the great wooden wheel that governed the ship’s bearing. Murdoch leaped to the engine telegraph and signaled “Full Astern” to the engine room. He looked desperately at the white mountain he could just begin to see emerging out of the darkness. Would it be enough? He watched the iceberg grow closer and closer, and knew with growing dread that it would not. They would strike it. He watched as the prow of the Ship of Dreams loomed over it, waited for the shudder…and then opened his eyes even wider in astonishment. The ship had somehow simply stopped. Murdoch was an experienced seaman. He knew that ships did not go suddenly from speed to inertia. As he tried to understand how such a phenomenon had occurred, he became conscious of a growing, dawn-like golden light on the horizon and a great beating noise from up above. Turning his eyes skyward, he saw a sight he could not place in any logical context. A massive black bat the size of a zeppelin was flapping its wings slowly above and looking down as the light grew brighter. But something was off…it wore a clear glass bubble around its head that seamlessly flowed into an all-encompassing white suit. The rig looked vaguely similar to fanciful cartoon depictions of moon men Murdoch had seen as a child. The last thing he saw before the light became too bright to bear and he closed his eyes was the unearthly creature’s wide grin. He heard a great voice boom, “Have fun in the future, lads!” before he felt a great rush of wind and the deck fell away beneath his feet.
April 8th, 2009—1:00, 200 Miles Off the Coast Of Somalia
Good God this sucks, thought Abduwali Muse as his skiff bounced like a superball on the wake of the merchant ship he was chasing in his skiff. He was getting seasick and his ass hurt bad from all this time in a small boat bobbing up and down. The shithead skippering the other boat had waved off in response to an obviously fake radio message in which some English speaker on the blue container vessel had tried his valiant best to pretend air support was about to arrive and said they were readying their guns for immediate action. Idiot. Muse had been in this game for a long time. He knew full well that western merchant ships didn’t carry guns and that help from the international naval force that lurked off Somalia’s shores wouldn’t arrive that quickly. But the other guy had decided to leave him and his three guys in the lurch to bring down and control this huge beast and its dozens of crew and get it to shore. Whatever. He’d do this himself. More ransom pay him and his crew. Muse sharpened his khat enhanced focus on his prey. The ship was a formidable target. It was lumbering away as fast as it could and dozens of high pressure water cannons were spaced equidistantly along the deck rails to capsize any raider’s boat it came too close. Muse’s eyes probed for an attack angle, a vulnerability that could be exploited, and then closed almost involuntarily as a blinding flash of light scorched his retinas. He kept his eyes closed for a few seconds after it subsided and then noticed a very odd sensation: frigid cold. It was as if he had somehow motored into a bubble in which the temperature had dropped twenty degrees in seconds. He curiously opened his eyes and looked around. What he saw boggled his mind. A graceful, four funnel steamer was sailing gracefully a quarter mile away on a parallel course to his quarry, the container vessel. A plume of black smoke, fading to brown as it dissipated more and the sunlight came through, gracefully trailed above and behind her black iron hull that faded to a superstructure and gunwales trimmed in white. Muse looked at the sight in pure confusion. What the actual fuck? How did that get there? His initial laser like, drugged focus on that blue whale of a freighter dissipated in a haze of befuddlement. One second…then another…how…Was something badly wrong with this khat, maybe? He looked at his three fellow pirates. Nour Najee, Walid Elmi, and Adan Bilal looked every bit as flabbergasted as he did. “Guys,” yelled Elmi cautiously over the engines, “Do you see it too?” Muse held up a hand. “Tell me what you see first!”, he yelled back. “An old ship, four smokestacks, like the one Leonardo DiCaprio was on,” yelled Najee impulsively. Elmi and Bilal nodded furiously. OK. That settled it. The ship was real. No way they were all having the exact same collective hallucination. “Uh…guys!”, yelled Bilal, the young rookie of the lot. The skiff drifted off course and the container ship began to gain distance. Muse thought quickly as the others shouted at him. He needed to make a decision. It came easily. He could see it was a passenger ship. There was no visible cargo. It had portholes. No firehoses spewed white streams from its promenade decks and railings. And it would clearly have more people than the container ship. Unlike pirates of a bygone age, Somali pirates did not look to plunder cargo, at least not primarily. Their wealth grew from hostages and the insurance money that would be paid for them. Accordingly, they looked to maximize the amount of people they could kidnap. A passenger ship would clearly have more.
But Abduwali Muse instantly felt something was off. Why would a passenger ship that could be a hundred be traveling here, completely alone, with no one around? What company would allow something so reckless? Then he felt a blast of panic. Could it be a bait for pirates? A trap like those old Q-ships, designed to draw people like him in and then blast them with cannons hidden beneath fake deck mounts? Did those staterooms not hold wealthy white vacationers but squads of armed men? But even as he thought it he quickly realized it didn’t change the calculus. If that thing was a fighting ship of some sort he was already dead. Still in the water with nothing between his boat and them and no hostages to use as shields he would be smoked either way. Better to take the chance it was a real target. If it wasn’t he would be dead anyway. “Ok boys!”, he howled over the twin engines of the boat. “Change of plan!” His crew howled their affirmation.
April 8th, 2009—1:05, 200 Miles Off the Coast Of Somalia, Maersk Alabama Bridge
Captain Richard Phillips was looking off his bridge in wonderment, which was quickly becoming a very common emotion in a certain grid square of the Indian Ocean. He looked through his binoculars at a relic of a bygone era that had somehow apparated beside his own command. He watched the skiff pull away and turned to his First Officer, Shane Murphy. “So…uh…I guess that just happened,” he stuttered unintelligently. Murphy didn’t look any less vapor locked than he did. They both turned towards the other ship and looked again through their binoculars. Phillips’s eyes swept towards her bow, looking for the name of the vessel. That can’t be. “The Titanic?!” both men said in thunderstruck unison. They each grew slightly worried expressions as both men doubted their sanity. “Did any of those projects to build a Titanic Two ever get off the ground?”, Phillips asked his second in command. “Not that I know of,” Shane Murphy replied. There was silence on the bridge of the ship, every crew member still there looking incredulous. Phillips spoke first. “Somewhere at the bottom of all this there is a logical explanation, and we will find out what it is eventually. Right now, it looks like those fucking assholes are going after them instead. Radio it in to London and tell them what’s going on.”
April 8th, 2009—1:05, 200 Miles Off the Coast Of Somalia, RMS Titanic Bridge
William Murdoch slowly flexed his hands and fingers, feeling the blood flow, taking in the input of his senses. He appeared to be alive and not in a dream. That was…this current situation was so outlandish that it seemed to transcend the parameters of being either bad or good. It just was. “Well I’ll be goddamned,” he muttered to himself. Murdoch slowly turned to the helmsman, another solid Scottish seaman named Robert Hichens. “Helm…” he trailed off. Hichens looked as bug-eyed as he did at the instant transformation of the night to day, of their circumstances, and of the temperature. Whereas Murdoch had shivered in his blue peacoat moments ago, now he felt very overdressed. This was almost tropical! Just then the distinguished whiskered face of Captain Edward James Smith stumbled onto the bridge. Murdoch groaned internally when he saw that red, urgent, desperate quality to the captain’s face. If a master had that look on him then shite was about to roll downhill. “Officer of the Deck, report”, he snapped. It was the only time since the HMS Hawke collision Murdoch had ever seen the older man look flustered. “Sir, I can only guess you want to know what the bloody hell just happened, pardon my language sir. I wish I had the slightest idea myself.”
April 8th, 2009—1:10, 200 Miles Off the Coast Of Somalia
Muse almost cackled in disbelief. What ship would sail in this part of the world so undefended? By Allah’s holy name, they deserved to be captured! The men were now directly alongside the passenger liner and had hoisted their hooked ladder up, catching the railing just aft of the Titanic’s forecastle deck where it was somewhat lower and close to the bridge. The four men climbed up and over the rail, AK-47s at the ready. The decks were devoid of passengers for some reason Muse could only guess at. Didn’t fancy Americans or whoever lounged on these things like to tan their pale skin lounging on the decks? Oh well, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. No panicked people to sort through. That was nice. Now to find their way to the bridge. The lanky Somalians swept the decks for hostile presences. There were none down here. They quickly scrambled inside through a completely unsecured door and found themselves in a long corridor paneled in white wood and gold furnishings. They scrambled up a staircase, then another, then another. Finally, being able to look straight up at the sky, Muse knew they were on the top deck. He crept quietly forward towards what he knew was the bridge. “Get ready brothers,” he whispered. They smiled back in apprehensive excitement. “Go!” he yelled. They burst in through the side, waving their guns and yelling at everyone to get down. Shocked figures in neat blue uniforms trimmed in gold braid greeted them.
April 8th, 2009—1:10, 200 Miles Off the Coast Of Somalia
Murdoch and his superior were having a spirited argument, each vocalizing their complete disorientation and talking loudly past the other. “Mr. Murdoch, perhaps it is customary for the sun to blaze at midnight in Scotland, but I am not familiar with it occurring in any other area of this planet!”, cried Captain Smith. “Sir, what has occurred here is completely beyond my ability to explain…”, began Murdoch. “Well, given that you are the Officer of the Deck and hold the power of life and death over my ship while I am away and that this all happened while you held it, I suggest you come up with an explanation *right* quickly! And what is that…that thing I am looking at outside?!” To a man raised on the distinguished paddle steamers and sleek Atlantic greyhounds of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the massive blue bulk of the Maersk Alabama did not even resemble a vessel so much as some alien object. Murdoch tried again. “Sir, with all due respect…” And then for the who knew which time that day all hell broke loose all over again. Four negro men in loose khaki pants and shorts tore onto the bridge, screaming in an exotic language the First Officer could not fathom and waving rifles unlike any he had ever seen. This latest assault on his senses made Murdoch blow up. “Now just what the bloody hell do you bastards think you’re doing up here?!”, he roared back, reverting in anger and bewilderment to the language of a common seaman. His words seemed to have some effect. One of the men chattered to the others in their strange tongue to be silent, or so he guessed since they calmed some. The man cautiously moved closer to him. “You the captain?”, he queried. Murdoch hesitated. He could not claim that title, but neither did he want to draw the attention of these brigands to the older and frailer man who it belonged to. Smith, however, spoke up. “No, I am,” he snapped. “And who exactly are you.”
The skinny black man took several steps closer to him, that strange rifle with the curving metal object in the bottom held at hip height.
“Look at me,” he said. “I am the captain now.”
April 8th, 2009—1:15, 200 Miles Off the Coast Of Somalia, RMS Titanic Bridge
Abduwali Muse sized up the man he was speaking to. On some level, he was impressed. The man had bearing and he had gravitas. His immaculately pressed uniform, ramrod posture distinguished white beard and hair, and lack of any apparent fear was classic ideal of a ship captain. “What is your name?”, Muse asked in accented English. “You may address me as Captain Smith,” the old man growled back. Muse laughed, showing teeth stained orange and black like a jack-o-lantern from the khat he chewed. “You got balls. I give you that. But a ship only has one captain, right? That’s me. So from now on, you English. I like that better.” The pirates chuckled and Muse continued. “What is this ship?” Smith turned red at the impudence of this…this…this damn kaffir! “This is the Royal Mail Steamer Titanic and I remind you, boy, that piracy is a felony offense punishable by hanging!” Muse’s demeanor changed. He stepped forward and pressed the muzzle of his AK into Smith’s lower abdomen. “You think I am stupid? You think all this is a joke? I know Titanic. It sank a hundred years ago. And you call me captain. No disrespect!” Smith’s stiff upper lip held but he became a little less aggressive. This black scoundrel did have him and his officers at gunpoint. “Well, captain,” said Smith, layering the title with the unique, dripping contempt only a British accent could achieve, “I think you must be thinking of a different Titanic, because since you and I are standing on it with daylight pouring in I am fairly certain is has not sunk.” Muse snapped the hard point of his muzzle into Smith’s solar plexus, causing his frame to contract slightly as he tried to catch breath. “No lying! WHAT IS THE NAME OF THIS SHIP!” Murdoch pushed Smith back and stepped in front, exciting the other pirates, who began waving their guns and yelling in their language. “Kill this infidel to make the point!” roared Nour Najee, the thickheaded muscle of the crew. “No you idiot!” Bilal, the youngest, yelled back. “We need them alive for ransom!” “Quiet!” screamed Muse. Murdoch broke into the pirates’ argument. “We are the Titanic! Look at the stationary”, he said, grabbing a notepad out of his pocket. “Look at the life preservers! Look over the edge at what’s stenciled on either side of the bow!” Abduwali Muse looked at the notepad Murdoch was shoving under his nose. It did say “White Star Line” and “RMS Titanic”, and it had an embossment that was clearly the ship’s profile. “Our company logo and the ship’s name are on everything all over the place! Look, for the love of Christ!”, Murdoch pleaded in his thick Scottish brogue. Muse paused. Like many others in the third world he was familiar with James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster movie, and this ship really did look very much like it. And now that he remembered, he thought he had seen a life preserver with “RMS Titanic” stenciled around its ring in thick black letters on his way up, he just hadn’t quite taken it in. Something was clearly getting lost in translation, some subtlety his English was not good enough to pick up. Whatever. They’d sort it out later. Maybe this was some nutty western theme park at sea.
“Alright,” said Muse. “You want to be Titanic, you can be Titanic. I don’t really care. All I want is the money. Turn this ship around and take it to Somalia.” Hichens, the helmsman, had been watching all of this bug-eyed from his post, hands still in a death grip on the ship’s wheel. The black man calling himself captain had given a navigational order, and somehow that cut through his trance. “What the hell is a Somalia?” he blurted out. Muse walked over to him, motioning to the other three to keep their guns on the Titanic’s officers. “You know, Somalia?” he said. “The country you’re passing by to the west? Turn ship that way.” It was all gibberish to Hichens. For all he knew a Somalia could be an African garment, delicacy, or jungle tribal leader’s title. But he understood one word. Their hijacker wanted him to turn west. He looked at the officers in pale silence, a vein pulsing in his forehead. “We’re not going anywhere with you, you bastard!” Smith yelled in red-faced anger. “Now get off my ship and go back to the jungle before…” Najee shot out every window on the front of the bridge with a mighty blast from his AK, firing for several seconds until every round was gone. Glass flew and sparkled in the Indian Ocean sun as it landed many decks below. He reloaded while visibly seething, the drugs making his eyes bulge and his breathing fast and shallow. “Stop it you idiot!” yelled Muse in Somali, whose eardrums had been just about blown out and who had been scared out of his wits by the outburst. “We need them to drive the fucking ship!” He turned around and decked the English sea captain hard in the face, feeling the man’s nose break (and a lot of pain in his own knuckles to boot). “Do I need to fuck kill someone before you get it! I’m the captain! You do as I say! TURN WEST!” Streaks of scarlet blood now clashing with his silver whiskers, Smith’s composure finally broke a bit. It was clear the man was serious, and he didn’t have many cards to play. For now. He turned to Quartermaster Hichens. “Alright,” he said. “Do as he tells you. West, dead slow”, he ordered, hoping the kaffir wouldn’t know enough to realize that although he was complying with the specified bearing he was dragging his feet as much as he could while doing it. “You go full speed!” snapped Muse. Spying the engine telegraph, he examined what was written on it. It had a very simple layout, being divided hemispherically into portions labeled “astern” and “ahead”, with various measures of speed from stop to full specified. Muse threw the indicator to the “full ahead” position himself. Feeling his heart sink, Smith’s thoughts raced, trying to find a way out of this predicament he now found his vessel in.
April 8th, 2009—1:25, 200 Miles Off the Coast Of Somalia, RMS Titanic Crow’s Nest
Reginald Lee and Frederick Fleet lay crouched on the metal floor of their position in the ship’s crow’s nest, each turned circular to fit in the cramped space. Both were on the edge of panic. As if the complete shock of the night being turned into glorious day were not enough, they had now been shot at and shot. Lee lay at the bottom of their post, stifling groans from a very unlucky ricochet that had made a wide, shallow impact on his ribcage. A brilliant stain of crimson lay on his uniform tunic beneath which the white of shattered ribs and the pink of torn flesh was visible. All that kept Reggie from screaming at the top of his lungs was the knowledge that something very, very deadly was aft of them, and he figured it would be a very bad idea to let the bastards know they were still alive. Fred Fleet was examining the mess and trying to cover it with torn strips of his own overcoat, now quite unneeded in the heat of this very unexpected daylight. “It looks right nasty but you won’t die,” hissed Fleet in a voice that belied his own panic. “There’s nothing spurtin’ or anything so the blood loss won’t get you, and it didn’t go deep enough to hit any organs. You’ll be back to your vigorously unpleasant self in no time.” The ministrations of Fleet’s rough seaman hands were none too tender and he pushed hard on some bone splinters as he tried to dry the wound, forcing Lee to suppress a mighty howl of pain. “That’ll be quite enough thank you very much, now sod off,” he hissed balefully at the other seaman. “I’m just trying to bleedin’ help,” Fleet yelped back. “Fine. Then why don’t you tell me what the hell is going on out there?” asked Lee, closing his eyes as a wave of pain dazed him. Fleet began to poke his head up very cautiously. “Not with your cap on, dummy,” Lee snapped. Fleet sheepishly laid it beside him and peeked above, looking around aft. He immediately noticed the shattered glass on the bridge, followed by the black men with rifles yelling at the officers. “There’s a few blacks with rifles on the bridge. So that’s where that came from. Looks like they’re trying to take over.” “Well how the hell did they get there?” demanded Lee. Fleet just looked at him. “Ok, you don’t know either. Silly Reggie I guess. Well, one of us has got to climb down from our perch and go for help and I’m thinking it’s not going to be me.” Fleet nodded grimly and narrowed his eyes. “Right then, see you later.” Fleet turned to the oval hole in the mast where the ladder down was located. But then something struck him. “Where do you think I should go when I get down? The bridge is taken over, and that’s most of the officers.” Lee furrowed his brow for a moment, then spoke. “Lightoller,” he said. “I think he was on watch right before it changed, so he’ll be in his cabin. Go find him and tell him what’s going on.” Fred Fleet nodded. “Ok. Goodbye for real this time.”
Fleet took a deep breath, stepped onto the ladder, and began scampering downward. After several minutes, he stepped out of the bottom of the mast on D Deck in the forward crew spaces, bent over and breathing heavily from the speed of his journey. He wracked his brain to try and find the quickest way to officer country. With the pirates being able to take the whole bow of the ship under fire, that left making his way along D deck through the First Class areas. He paused for a moment, reflexively thinking he couldn’t very well do that; average seamen couldn’t go into First Class areas uninvited, only properly attired stewards and valets could. Then he chuckled. The sun was rising at midnight and pirates had taken over his ship. Lord knew he had bigger worries than some toffee-nosed twit complaining to an officer that a lowly commoner had invaded his pristine personal space!
Fleet took off at a dead run, moving through the 3rd Class Lounge. A couple wops sleep would not come for paused from gesturing to each other to watch him move through their space, cigarettes dangling from their mouths. He kept on, heading to the crew-only access hatch used by the stewards to move about this part of the ship. Fleet found it and after a minute found himself in the wealthy part of the ship, running down a long hallway covered in plush dark carpeting and lit by soft golden light. At this hour it was deserted. Despite the harsh mid-day sun outside it was an hour and a half after midnight on the internal clocks of the Titanic’s crew and passengers and nearly all were still in their beds. As he neared the end of the corridor one male passenger came out in a paisley bathrobe and quizzically looked around. Perhaps someone who had seen the daylight streaming in through his porthole and felt something was off. He held up a hand, perhaps to query Fleet, who shot past, bellowing a, “Sorry, pressing business, sir!” over his shoulder. After a minute more of searching, he finally found the staircase he was looking for. Several minutes after that, he had made it to B Deck and was running along an open promenade deck covered in White Star lounge furniture that gave the ship’s wealthiest passengers a good view of the endless blue sea. Let’s see…Officer country is up on the very top, on the Boat Deck…there we are! Finally finding the last unobtrusive staircase upwards, Fleet arrived a minute later at the outside door of the officer staterooms gasping for air with his blue sailor suit dark with sweat. He stumbled inside and started looking for his final destination. With tremendous relief he finally saw the door with the words Charles Lightoller, Second Officer stenciled upon it. He ran up to it and began banging with both fists. “Sir, we’ve got an emergency sir!” he yelled. After about ten seconds and some thumping, a barefoot Lightoller opened the door in white pajamas with narrow, bleary eyes. “Yes, sailor?” he asked in a thoroughly threatening tone. “Sir begging to report, pirates have taken the bridge and the officers and shot Reggie Lee!” Lightoller cocked his head and gave him a look somewhere between nonplussed and concerned. “Son, we’re in the middle of the North Atlantic, and it’s the year 1912, not 1712. I highly doubt we have been boarded by pirates.” Fleet gestured to the blood he still had on his clothes from dressing poor Reggie’s wounds. “Sir, they shot the other lookout in the crow’s nest; he’s still up there wounded! You didn’t hear that great bloody burst of gunfire ten minutes ago?!” Lightoller paused. He had heard what his ear thought a sort of cracking, even thought of checking it out before end of the shift exhaustion won out, but…for that to be gunfire, it’d have to be a Maxim gun, for what else could fire in such a regular steady stream? And how would the pirates be able to board with such a great, heavy, unwieldy thing and the ponderous weight of the ammunition and tripods. Ah well. Either way he supposed he had better go check it out. Probably just some sort of disturbance and a sailor with an overactive imagination, though he couldn’t explain how the lookout might have come to be wounded. He said, “Wait a moment” and shut the door. He emerged moments later dressed in trousers and a coat over his nightwear and gestured for Fleet to follow him towards the bridge. Then he paused. “Alright,” he said, “If there is a disturbance maybe best to bring a gun of some sort just in case order needs to be reestablished.” Maybe some drunk with a gun he had brought aboard that he had accidentally discharged and the sailor had mistaken all this somehow? He tried to remember where they had put the shooting irons on board. Ah yes, in Murdoch’s cabin. He had never thought he’d need to get one of the things, considering them completely superfluous, but he stepped towards Murdoch’s door. “Let’s arm ourselves,” he said. He stepped into the First Officer’s tidy quarters and removed a heavy gray Webley Mk IV .455 revolver, sidearm of standard issue throughout the British Empire. He looked at the anxious young seaman standing outside his door. “Can you handle a gun, son?” Fleet had never shot one before but he figured he’d better. “Yes sir, I’ll be fine,” he said. Lightoller handed him another and pecked out a dozen rounds. “Alright, we should be fine,” he said. “Off with us, then.”
April 8th, 2009—1:25, 200 Miles Off the Coast Of Somalia, Maersk Alabama Bridge
“London, I’m telling you that’s what happened! They just split off and hit that other ship!” The watch officer on the other end replied, “You didn’t mention anything about any other ship in your initial distress call, captain.” Phillips replied, “It just appeared! There wasn’t anything to report when I first called!” Far away the controller in the piracy crisis center rolled her eyes. Not the brightest bulb in the bag this guy, she thought. Sails at half the distance he should be from Somalia, all alone, and forgets the minor detail of an ocean liner being right next to him when he makes the call! “Sir, can you identify the other vessel?” she tried. “Uh…not at this time,” stammered Phillips. “Sorry.” That was a lie. He could make out the lettering clear as day on her side through his binoculars but he could already this lady thought he was a hammerhead. Telling her the RMS Titanic had apparently decided it had rested long enough and decided to start sailing the seas again might just make her hang up on him. “I can describe it, though,” he lamely volunteered. “Alright, do that,” replied the voice on the other end. “She’s got four tall funnels, about a thousand feet long, black hull, white superstructure. She’s producing a lot of smoke, a lot more than I think is allowed. That’s the other thing. Maybe the pirates damaged her somehow?” Even the controller heard what happened next. Gunfire carries a strikingly long way. “London, London, shots fired!” screamed Phillips into the radio. “They’re firing…” “Roger Alabama,” replied London. “We read you. Sending assistance now.” Weird as this all was, something was definitely going on out there, the woman thought. She picked up another phone and made her next call.
April 8th, 2009—1:45, USS Bainbridge
Commander Frank Castellano read the encrypted telex and then handed it to his navigation officer. “Proceed to these coordinates at full,” he ordered. Then he made his way to the 1MC. “Crew, this is your captain speaking. We’ve received word of a possible hijacking of a cruise ship and a threat to another ship nearby. We are on our way to the location of all this now. Keep your heads up and do your jobs like you’ve practiced. Let’s get these people home.” He hung up and told the XO, “Get the ScanEagle up. We need eyes on all this.”
“Proceeding to coordinates at full,” called the navigator.
April 8th, 2009—1:35, 200 Miles Off the Coast Of Somalia, RMS Titanic Bridge
Lightoller strode down the boat deck towards the bridge, shiny black corframs striking the pine of the deck. He thought quickly as he walked. The Titanic’s Second Officer had both great strengths and great weaknesses. Extremely bold, headstrong, intense, and well-spoken, he had tremendous charisma and capacity for decisive action that made men follow him. He was also rigidly inflexible and prone to be impulsive when deliberating would have served him a good deal better. The latter traits had caused him to pull a prank simulating a raid in Sydney Harbor during the Boer War in his younger and more foolish days. That had come close to capping his career before it had even really started. His plan right now was to do a cursory poke around the bridge to determine what he was up against and then stride aboard and take control of the situation. Lightoller simply could not conceive of a force within the time or place and his own frame of reference that could take over the RMS Titanic. Accordingly, he and his one-man backup force had stopped and were peeking out from behind the forward-most funnel. They were standing on the raised roof above the boat deck that directly abutted the funnels and allowed the seamen to perform maintenance on them. The very front of it formed the roof of the bridge and wheelhouse. Lightoller felt a familiar force swaying his body as he peered towards it. Turning around behind him towards the stern, he saw it confirmed by the curve in the ship’s wake; Titanic was turning. He looked up at the sun’s position in the sky. The new bearing looked to be roughly west as opposed to the more southerly direction they had been going in before. Something was definitely not right up there. But that did not make Lightoller move with more caution. “Right then,” he said. “Here’s the plan. You stay here and cover me. If anyone comes up here and it looks like they may be trouble you tell them loudly to stop and fire a warning shot if it looks like real trouble. If they fire at you fire for real. I’m going to go forward, creep onto the roof of the bridge, and try to listen and maybe peek in and see what’s going on.” Fleet thought he could see some flaws in that plan. “But sir,” he began. “Enough,” said Lightoller, cutting him off. “Away I go.” He moved forward in a crouch, one hand on the pistol whose butt stuck out of his coat pocket. Lightoller tried to tread quietly as he came to the small square wooden area he knew was the roof the bridge. He was not quiet enough.
April 8th, 2009—1:35, 200 Miles Off the Coast Of Somalia, RMS Titanic Bridge
Abduwali Muse’s lanky black frame walked the floor of the bridge from wing to wing, trying to think of how to skin this very large, lion of a cat as he paced. Truth be told he did not plan on hijacking a cruise ship when the day started. Four men with AK’s were sufficient to control a crowd of a few dozen mariners but this ship could have thousands and thousands aboard. That meant there was no way for him to control all of it or any more than a fraction of its people at once. And given that this state of affairs could last a while until they got to Somalia, he might have to start rotating his men in shifts, which would reduce their effective strength at any moment to even less than four. Not for the first time he cursed the other coxswain for bailing when that phony baloney radio message went out from the container ship. Four extra trigger pullers would have made this easier, if not exactly easy. But there was no use in idle wishing. He turned back to his manpower problem in his head. I can control the bridge, but not anywhere else, he thought to himself as he grew more agitated. Once somebody figures out we’ve got the ship, and word starts to spread…yes, that could be quite a problem. Let’s see: how long would it take to get to Somalia, anyway? He looked over at the Titanic’s de jure captain. “English,” he barked, startling the old man. “Who? I,” asked Smith. “Yeah, you. English,” said Muse. “How fast do this ship go?” Smith drew himself up and said, stiffly and with a note of pride, “The RMS Titanic can make 23 knots.” Muse nodded. “Ok,” he said. He thought some more to himself. So about…what, 30 kilometers an hour? He did the math in his head. Ten, maybe eleven hours until we hit Somalia. Ok…it’ll suck but we can do that without shifts. Good. The thing to do here is to try and keep the passengers and the rest of the crew in the dark for as long as possible. Abduwali Muse had not yet seen any indication the rest of the ship knew they had been hijacked. Eventually someone would try to enter the bridge, and they would take them hostage one by one. It would probably be too much to assume they could keep them in the dark all the way to the Somali coast, but they might be able to maintain the illusion of normality for another few hours if they were lucky. These people are civilians. They’ll be surprised, totally off guard. They’ll eat up at least a few hours rousing everyone and trying to work out a plan. We can threaten the hostages to try and keep them off their other guard. Yeah, we can make this work.
Then he jerked his head up as heard a subtle tapping on the roof. Muse frantically gestured to his other three pirates, waving from his ear upward. Could somebody be up there? He gestured furiously to Nour Najee to move outside the bridge onto the port bridge wing while he tried to move. Najee looked at him in confusion, brow furrowed. He aimed his AK at the ceiling and moved his finger to the trigger. Muse virtually jumped through the roof to get him to stop it, frantically waving his hands over each other in an -x in the cutoff motion while shaking his head. This completely brain-dead idiot! Najee looked at him with a defensive, questioning look. Muse just shook his head disdainfully and walked tensely out onto the starboard bridge wing, AK-47 turned skywards. He took a deep breath as he walked backwards, looking to get a better angle of view over the top of the bridge.
Even being tensed up, he still reared in shock when he saw the small, dark, disheveled British officer creeping along on the roof. “Shit!” he exclaimed. The man’s head shot around and Muse saw his eyes widen like a kudu in the headlights. The man stumbled back, trying to draw his handgun from his blue coat in a panicked, jerky motion. He was bringing it up one-handed when Muse ripped off a long burst from his rifle. It missed the Brit over his right shoulder. The man fired back, looking almost as frightened by the revolver’s report as Muse imagined he did from being shot at. He managed to get off three shots, firing them in less than a second and a half. Even with his senses degenerating into the characteristic crazed blur of a gunfight, Muse could tell he had missed by a ludicrously large amount. If any of those rounds had come within ten feet of him he’d be shocked. Muse heard Najee yell from the other side. The officer looked frantically towards port, then ran as fast as he could. He made it about ten feet before slipping on the smooth white pine in his dress shoes, falling straight over and landing flat on his ass. Muse cursed again and fired another burst, partly to keep the man’s head down but mostly to make himself feel better. He heard a sound like a large animal flopping about and knew the man was desperately crawling away, trying to escape. He heard Najee perform his signature move of uselessly ripping off the better part of a magazine on his side of the ship, then heard several more revolver shots answer him. Had to be from someone other than the officer on the bridge. Those were fainter, coming from too far astern to be from the same source. So this fucker has backup. Terrific. He stood still for five seconds or so, frantically trying to think of something useful to do, when he heard a noise like pounding from the top of the superstructure above him. He knew what it was. The officer had crawled away out of his line of sight and upon getting enough distance between him and Muse had started running again. He heard someone call “Seaman, retreat, they’ve got us outgunned!” before the man popped into view again. He had been forced to come to the edge of the superstructure again as the funnel took up the center space. This brought him into Muse’s view again, but the officer had managed to anticipate this. He turned around and squeezed off another two shots. These were aimed a little better and Muse reflexively dropped into a crouch. He brought his AK up again and…Damn! The man had managed to sprint around the funnel again. Muse slammed the butt of his AK on the deck in frustration. Well, he thought grimly to himself, If they didn’t know we’d taken them before they do now.
April 8th, 2009—1:45, 200 Miles Off the Coast Of Somalia, RMS Titanic Boat Deck
Lightoller bent over and tried to restore his composure, his prior cockiness completely vanished. He felt a simultaneous urge to vomit and urinate in fear. Whatever else could be said of him, he was no coward, but he had been utterly unprepared psychologically for what had taken him. It was true! Pirates, on a British ship in the North Atlantic! And by bloody God almighty, what the hell kind of guns were those?! Lightoller screamed in his head. Nothing had prepared him for this. Of all the dangers and issues that an officer could be confronted with, never in even the darkest and weirdest recesses of his brain had the ship’s Second Officer thought he might one day have to deal with a pirate attack. Fleet stood beside him, revolver trained toward the bow, covering in case those bastard munts with their terrible rifles tried to follow them. “You get that little peek you were looking for sir?” Fleet couldn’t resist asking sarcastically. “Careful, seaman,” said Lightoller, venomously stressing the man’s rank and reminding him who was in charge. Nonetheless, he had clearly been right. “Alright,” he gasped through the adrenaline. “So it appears we have been pirated. Noted. We need to get back and try to organize. Grab whatever guns, officers, and crew we can get and try to keep them out of the passenger areas and bottled up in front. Let’s go!” Fleet nodded his affirmation and the two men ran further astern in a crouch.
April 8th, 2009—2:00, 200 Miles Off the Coast Of Somalia, USS Bainbridge
Commander Frank Castellano got out of his swivel chair on the starboard corner of the bridge. “XO’s deck,” he called out. “XO’s deck,” his immediate subordinate chimed back, acknowledging he was in charge until Castellano came back. The ship’s captain walked quietly back to the real nerve center of the ship: her Combat Intelligence Center, or CIC. Every part of the room was crammed with screen, monitors, and control panels monitored by a force of dozens of coffee-fueled petty officers, chiefs, and officers of every description. “Atten-shun!” the first person to see him called. Everyone shot out of the chairs. “As you were,” he replied quickly. Castellano walked over the young Lieutenant Junior Grade who was operating the ship’s Boeing ScanEagle Drone. The small, gray, unmanned UAV was a dead useful beast. Forty pounds soaking wet, it could be launched and recovered from a mast, had a decent endurance of twenty-four hours, a service ceiling of around twenty-thousand feet, and could about make ninety miles an hour in a dead sprint, though that would hurt the endurance. Best of all, it could beam back crystal clear video footage of whatever its human masters wanted it to while it was in the air.
“We receiving okay?” Castellano queried the junior officer. “Yes, sir” the man replied, turning the camera to the drone’s rear to show the ship small in the distance. “For a few minutes now. I’ve got her running as fast as can, about ninety miles an hour. She should be there in a few; this’ll about cut her endurance in half but by the time she runs out of gas we’ll be on site.” Castellano nodded. “Ok, good. Just get her there. We’ve gotta get an eye in the sky on this mess.” “Yessir,” the JG enthusiastically agreed.
April 8th, 2009—2:25, 200 Miles Off the Coast Of Somalia, RMS Titanic
Second Officer Charles Lightoller was holding a council of war in the ship’s 1st class reading and writing room. Beside him were the two Masters at Arms, Thomas King and Henry Bailey, Third Officer Herbert John Pitman, Fifth Officer Harold Lowe, the ship’s builder Thomas Andrews, and the ship’s owner Joseph Bruce Ismay. The final member was not a nautical man but was among the most valuable in Lightoller’s corner. Major Archibald Butt was the influential and experienced U.S. Army aide of both Teddy Roosevelt and Big Bill Taft. The men were engaged in a frantic, huddled conversation in the richly upholstered Victorian chairs around a well-set table with an embroidered cloth. The scene struck several as being ludicrously out of touch with the events occurring around them. Lightoller had sent stewards and Frederick Fleet to retrieve these men from their cabins when the direness of the situation became apparent. The hurriedly dressed and disheveled men were now desperately trying to come up with a way to resolve the crisis.
“Alright,” said Major Butt, his fingers steepled in front of him. “So we have been pirated. That much is indeed clear. Do you have any idea the numbers we are up against?” Lightoller was leaning back in his chair with his hands planted stiffly on his knees. The extent to which the previous events had rattled him betrayed itself in the unnatural deliberation with which he moved and spoke, without fillers and after pauses, each word measured out. He was a man struggling to keep his composure in a very intense situation, and doing a reasonable job of it. After a pause, he said, “At least two. That was all I saw, the ones that shot at me. One on each side of the bridge. I did not actually see any more, but Seaman Fleet told me he saw around four or five on it when he was looking in from the crow’s nest. I suspect it is more. I cannot imagine such a small number of men trying to take over a vessel as sizable as this one.” Butt leaned back and nodded. “That is indeed very likely. And the rest of the ship’s officers?” Lightoller gestured to the rest at the table. “This is all we have been able to find. Everyone else is assumed captured on the bridge. As of this moment, I appear to be in effective command of Titanic.” Lightoller’s dark, piercing eyes widened in disbelief at his own words. Butt, recognizing how overwhelmed the Scotsman across from him must be, smiled through his whiskers and said, “Yes, and a fine job you are doing, sir. We’ll sort this out. Chin up.” The Second Officer returned a weak smile. “Thank you, Major.” Butt’s face turned business-like once again. “Alright. Now you say that they turned the ship?” Lightoller replied, “Indeed. I saw the curve in the wake myself.” “Then we need to find a way to stop the vessel. I have no idea where these negroes plan on taking us but if they want to go somewhere then we need to make sure we don’t go wherever that is.” Andrews raised his hand from the table where it lay. “If the wheelhouse and bridge are taken, the logical answer is to go straight to the engine room and tell them ourselves. There isn’t another outlet on the phone system from the bridge, so we’ll have to send a runner.” Ismay, who had remained quiet until now piped up. “Should we turn off the lights as well? They don’t know the ship. If we deny them that we should be able to prevent them from easily finding their way into the passenger areas.” There was a moment of pause while everyone considered the suggestion. Then Lightoller answered carefully, “I think not, at least not for now. They could cause a panic, and the darkness is a double-edged sword. It would make it very difficult to coordinate and any evacuation would be impossible.” Butt nodded while stroking his gray moustache. “I agree,” he said. Lightoller turned to the Third Officer. “Herb, go down there and tell them to come to a dead stop until instructed otherwise. Everything else runs as normal.” The younger man sprang up. “Yes, sir,” he said as he dashed off. “That being done,” said Butt, “I agree with your earlier inclinations. The key thing is to evacuate people from around the bow and forward superstructure to keep them from gaining any more hostages and try to deny them the rest of the ship. You sent stewards to do this, yes?” “After they got you I told them to get some more seamen and start spreading the word. They should be going towards the stern now,” replied Lightoller. “Alright with that taken care of we need to hem them in at the bridge.” This made the Titanic’s acting captain twitch uneasily. “We have very few guns, sir. I will man that line myself but all we have that I know of are some more Webleys.” Butt grinned slightly. “Well, if that’s what we have then that’s what we’ll just have to use,” he said.
April 8th, 2009—2:35, 200 Miles Off the Coast Of Somalia, RMS Titanic Bridge
Muse leaned against the ship’s wheel and pondered his assets. He had the helmsman, the ship’s captain, and its Chief, First, Fourth, and Sixth officers hostage. The most important crew. So that was nice. The problem was that the rest of the ship was still not in his hands. And now they knew they’d been hijacked. He took another opportunity to curse at himself for not killing that fucking guy who had been creeping about. He’d had the opportunity. And boy had Najee made sure he knew it. What, you can’t shoot straight? he’d taunted. Do I have to do everything here? The smirks on faces of his prisoners rubbed further salt in the wound. Let your men speak to you in such a way, captain? For shame they seemed to say. His finger had itched to shoot someone to put the fear of God back in them but he wasn’t that petty. God, why did I bring this prick along he groaned internally. Not even from my village! Now he had to decide what to do. And indecision was killing him. The shock from the gunfight seemed to have boggled his wits and frozen his synapses.
Najee walked back up to him. “We need to go deeper into the ship. Kill some people to make the point maybe, take more hostages.” Muse held up a hand to stop his fourth or fifth reiteration of this same point. He turned to Smith. “Ok, English,” he said. “Time for the truth. What other kind of guns you carrying aboard?” Smith looked up and lied purely out of instinct. It seemed like a time to bluff. “We are carrying a couple of hundred Enfield rifles for shipment to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Canada along with thirty-thousand rounds of ammunition. About the same in Webley revolvers, and also the rounds for those.” Smith’s heart pounded and he stared down his captor with all the bearing he could muster. The Somali leader looked at him hard to see if he would look away or fidget, searching for any sign of untruthfulness. Then he turned back to Najee. “The old guy says they’ve got an armory aboard and a lot of guns. They’ve definitely got at least some, because two different guys shot at us. They know the ship, we don’t, and now they’ve got warning. There’s places in there that they could ambush us. As long as the ship is moving towards Somalia, we’re good. If that stops, then we sort it out from there.” Najee turned around and went back to the corner of the bridge to sulk. I should be running the show, he thought. Not this skinny little pussy! Then he noticed a subtle sensation in his legs, a difference in the way his weight felt. He thought he knew what it was. Najee walked over the bridge wing, looking cautiously around in case any seamen with revolvers were waiting to nail him. He looked down at the water and realized it wasn’t his imagination. The wake of disturbed white water the ship cut through was narrowing in width. It was now barely as wide as the hull, and the height of the wake was growing visibly shorter.
“Oh my great captain,” he called sarcastically towards the ship’s conn, “Our vessel seems to be coming to a stop.”
April 8th, 2009—2:45, 200 Miles Off the Coast Of Somalia, RMS Titanic Bridge
If human thought were an audible sound, if the contents of the head could be broadcast to the ears of others without speaking, then the volume on the bridge of the RMS Titanic would have been that of a KISS concert. Every person there, hostage and captor alike, frantically tried to out plot the other, to play the hand dealt to them as best as possible, and to find a way to turn the tables on their enemy. Nour Najee and Abduwali Muse shoved Captain Edward Smith and the granite-nosed Fourth Officer Joseph Boxhall to their feet and forced them in broken English and the universal language of the angrily waved rifle to raise their hands over their heads and walk forward. Muse and Najee were planning to get this great smoky iron beast lumbering towards Somalia again or kill some Englishmen in the attempt. Muse was pondering whether to swap out the hot-headed Najee for Elmi or Bilal, but decided that the only thing that scared him more than having this asshole watching his back in a high-pressure situation with the rest of the ship’s passengers and crew was the thought of leaving him at the controls to mind the ship. Smith and Boxhall tried to think of a way to overpower their captors, their thoughts being governed by their respective physical capabilities. The younger Boxhall’s bloody thoughts were of how to lead the Somalians past fireaxes that could be grabbed and swung or places where they could be pushed overboard. Smith struggled to find a way to lead them forward to a place where the rest of the crew could cut them off, or into a dark place where they could slip away. Perhaps, he reasoned, if they could lead them through the engine room, they could get the stokers to rush them with their heavy shovels from the innumerable nooks, crannies, and void spaces down there. He was no coward, but neither did he think that he had the strength in his sixth decade of life to overpower two young men with rifles. Meanwhile, the others who would remain on the bridge coldly planned on how they would neutralize each other. Walid Elmi and Adan Bilal nervously moved to areas of the bridge where they thought they could cover all the hostages if they were rushed. James Moody, William Murdoch, and Henry Wilde glowered at their captors and pondered a way to rush them. None was able to come up with any reasonable plan. The bridge of the Titanic was a bare, wide space, offering little opportunity to get close to the pirates and even fewer loose objects that had any potential of being used as weapons. Despite their best designs, fate, luck, and the flow of events would dictate the outcome more than any grand schemes.
Muse prodded Smith forward with the muzzle of his AK. “OK, English,” he barked. “Take us to other crew. We’re going to get this bitch going again.”
Smith bristled internally at the insult to the honor of his command even as he recognized the petty uselessness of the feeling. “Right this way, then”, he replied flatly. The men set off aft of the bridge down one of the Titanic’s innumerable white paneled corridors. Smith struggled mentally with where exactly to take them. The engine room was the obvious place, as it was chock full of places where these bloody pirates could be waylaid. The trick was that he also had to avoid bringing them through passenger areas where they could pose a danger to the men and women in his charge. Leading them straight down from the top deck of the ship to the bottom without passing through at least some such places would be…tricky. Alright, master, thought Smith. Time to see how well you know your ship. He thought he saw a way. They would go aft towards the Marconi rooms, officers’ quarters, and gymnasium. There would likely be other crew there, revolvers were stored in the officers’ quarters, and he knew they had forewarning. Hopefully they would find friendly faces who could fight back. If not, he could get them down lower from there. Then four men continued walking, Smith and Boxhall with their hands on their heads, Muse and Najee a few feet behind them, automatic rifles held loosely at their hips. They were around the corner from the Marconi Room when a tidal wave of blue uniforms and tweed suits crashed around it, screaming and waving revolvers. Smith’s heart leapt with savage joy.
April 8th, 2009—2:40, 200 Miles Off the Coast Of Somalia, RMS Titanic Marconi Room
CQD This is the Royal Mail Steamer Titanic Stop We are being pirated Stop Four men armed with rifles on the bridge Stop Assistance urgently required Stop Any nearby navy ship please respond Stop Last measured coordinates 41°46' N, 50° 14' W CQD
Harold Bride turned to the Second Officer. “This is the message you wish me to send, sir?” he asked.
“Yes, as quickly as possible,” replied Charles Lightoller. “Click like lives depend on it, because you had better bloody believe that they do.”
The pale, ectomorphic radioman turned to his machine and began to send the message. Lightoller pondered the large black metal rig in silence. Amazing thing, technology he thought. What a strange device to be putting our hopes in. And then a panicked seaman came tiptoeing around the corner. “A group of people’s comin’, sir”, the man whispered. “At least a few of them.”
There was only one group of people that would be likely to be coming their way from the bow of the ship. Lightoller took his Webley back from the seaman (they had so few he’d had to give it up to the sentry, who he doubted could use it well anyway) and looked at Major Butt, Master-at-Arms Thomas King, and Fifth Officer Harold Lowe. Butt smiled and gave a small nod while removing the .45 Army Colt he had luckily been carrying on the voyage. He held a finger to his lips and beckoned the men out of the Marconi Room. They tiptoed up the corridor, their shaking hands grasping gray gunmetal. When they reached the corner, Butt held up a hand to stop. Ever so quietly, he poked one eye around the corner. He quickly moved it back. “Yep, it’s them,” he said. “Two negroes, rifles, and they’ve got Captain Smith and one of your other officers walking in front of them. Get ready. We’re going to try and give them a shock.”
Lightoller gulped. He felt like he was riding a car full speed over the cliffs of Dover and the edge was a second away. It was time to face those hell-sent guns again. Hopefully this time would go better than the last. The Second Officer held his breath, then felt a sensation like a blast of wind as Butt waved for them to go and charged around the corner, revolver held out straight in front of him. The other three men shot forward. “Drop your weapons and put your hands up!” roared Archibald Butt.
It was extremely lucky that the pirates’ instinct was to yank their hostages closer and press their guns into their backs rather than to fill the entire corridor with sixty rounds of 7.62 x 39 mm Chinese rounds on full auto. At that range everyone would have almost certainly killed each other. Instead they simply screamed, each man vocalizing his fear and determination in a shouted cacophony.
“Shut fuck up and get floor we kill you all!,” Abduwali Muse howled back, raw adrenaline making his normally imperfect English wholly unintelligible.
“Calm, calm, calm down!” Smith bellowed.
“Drop your guns!” snarled Lightoller, he and Butt repeating the command as many times as they could. After what felt like a standoff of hours but was only about twenty seconds, the noise quieted down. The two sides settled into a Mexican standoff, the pirates with their arms tight around their captives’ necks and rifles pressed into their backs.
Muse finally spoke, struggling to consider his words amidst the khat and the human rocket fuel that was the neurochemicals in combat. “You make the ship go again,” he said. “Full speed. If you don’t I start killing. You get it?”
Butt summoned up all the military bearing he could and barked back, “Let’s get one thing clear between us, boy. If you start shooting, or if I even think there is a strong probability you will start shooting, I will pull the trigger first, and these men will follow my lead. You will kill them and probably us, but at ten paces like the ones we’re at, at least a couple of our rounds are going to get each of you, too.”
Muse knew he was right. He also had no idea what else he could do. He needed to get this fucking ship moving! “Ok,” he said. “No killing. But you gotta drop the guns and come back with us. Ok?” He knew even as he said it that it was a fool’s request. The large, barrel-chested, icy-eyed white man in front of him was not stupid. He answered more or less as Muse had expected.
“I’d shoot myself or any other man on this ship before I gave you bastards a single other hostage,” replied Butt. “And furthermore, I’m getting impatient. You are not pirating this ship. Drop your guns.”
Unsurprisingly, the pirates did not comply. A proper Mexican standoff we have here, thought Archibald Butt. The men stared at each other, quivering from adrenaline, sweat beading on their visage. There was silence for fifteen seconds, a silence that roared in the ears of every man in the corridor like a runaway train. Then Butt had an idea. He began sliding forward, purely on instinct. His chest felt like it was pulling apart from fear. It was like committing suicide. But onwards he crept, revolver in front of him, moving towards the smaller black pirate. Another five feet and not even a blind man could miss. There was no hiding behind a hostage at that range. “Stop! STOP!” screamed Muse.
Onwards the Major kept, a foot a second. Then Lightoller began to shuffle forward, moving towards the bigger pirate off to Butt’s right. Butt kept his focus on the smaller one. His entire world shrank to the five feet between him and his quarry. He could smell the man’s sweat, see it on his upper lip, count the stains on his tattered cotton shirt. And then Muse folded. He knew the score as well. He could not shoot his hostage. If he did there was nothing to stop the others from blasting him with their revolvers. His power was an illusion. He could not actually kill Captain Smith. There was, in fact, only one thing he could do. Muse began to scuttle backwards, sandals of chopped rubber tire thudding on the deck, hauling with him the white-haired sea captain whose face was now turning dull scarlet from the grip of Muse’s arm around his neck. Nour Najee began to slowly follow. Lightoller and Butt quickened their pace. The pirates answered with a quick walk; Lightoller crouched to sprint ahead and they began to run backwards. Both their hostages fell to deck and they hauled them backwards, crouched down to try to use them for cover. Butt held out his left arm, the one that to stop Lightoller. “We can’t push them too hard,” he whispered sideways out the corner of his mouth. “They might panic.” Lightoller slowly came to a stop. A few second later, the pirates disappeared around another corner, their hostages now frantically twisting the ground to try and get some oxygen as they were pulled along.
“We can’t let them get away,” said Lightoller quietly, pressing against Butt’s outstretched arm.
“Yes, we can”, said Butt firmly. “If we press them too hard they might panic and kill them anyways. We won this round, Charles. Don’t lose sight of that.” He thought for a moment and then fired a shot at the very end of the corridor, startling all present. “To give them a little extra reminder not to try that again,” he said with a grim smile. Ears ringing, Butt pulled the Second Officer back towards the Marconi Room. He could still see the pain in the man’s eyes from having to watch his friend and his mentor be dragged back by these brigands, though. “We’ll get them,” he said. “Food and water are going to start running out on that bridge, and someone will come for us. Their position is hopeless. Make no mistake of that. We’ve just got to press gently and eventually they’ll get back on whatever boat they came here on.”
Lightoller nodded slightly. “Thank you, sir,” he said. “You’re handling this much better than me.”
Butt laughed. “All part of being a soldier, m’boy.”
April 8th, 2009—2:40, 200 Miles Off the Coast Of Somalia, USS Bainbridge CIC
Eyeing the drone feed from the corner of the room, Frank Castellano attention snapped on it as he saw the image of the clear blue see dissolve in a haze of gray. “Dammit,” its operator grumbled, tapping at the keyboard. Castellano bounded over.
“What’s going on?” he demanded urgently.
The JG scratched his head. “We’re getting some kind of weird interference. It’s full-spectrum and it covers every damn frequency. The only thing I know of that do this is a really, really intense thunderstorm, too intense to even think of flying it.” Castellano stared back. It was a brilliant, sunny blue day outside.
“She’ll fly fine on her own,” volunteered the JG. “Keep going right to the coordinates I put into her, just like a missile. It’ll probably resolve at some point.”
The Commander eased back. “Ok, get it back up,” he said. “We need that drone. Need it bad.” Then the JG sat up straighter.
“Sir…” he trailed off. “Look at the pattern of the static.” Castellano stared at him, wondering what on earth there was to see in the gray bee swarm of static. “Watch how it pulses in and out,” clarified the younger officer.
Castellano watched quietly, focusing on the waves of gray. He began to see it. They seemed to change somehow, getting…busier, somehow, at random intervals. Then as he watched for a few seconds and the pattern built in his head, it hit him. Those weren’t random intervals. They were dots and dashes. “Morse code!” he cried.
The JG nodded. “Somebody wants to have a chat. A very loud one.”
Castellano shot away, moving towards the Comms station. “I see it, sir,” said the chief sitting at a monitor. Let me run that through a computer for you.” He pulled up a program, specified the time at which the bizarre static code had begun, and clicked, ‘Run.’ It was as fast as a Google search. The message wasn’t done yet, but Castellano watched as it took shape, his brows furrowing more and more. Finally, after a minute and a half, it lay in front of him.
CQD This is the Royal Mail Steamer Titanic Stop We are being pirated Stop Four men armed with rifles on the bridge Stop Assistance urgently required Stop Any nearby navy ship please respond Stop Last measured coordinates 41°46' N, 50° 14' W CQD
“The drone’s back up,” its operator called out as the static faded out.
The chief guffawed before seeing Castellano’s reddening face. “You sure this is right?” the Commander growled.
“Uh…yeah sir. Definitely. I promise I wouldn’t screw around like this if that’s what you mean.”
Castellano shook his head angrily. “Well, clearly someone else would. Some shithead thinks hammering us with a prank message on a full spectrum emitter during a crisis situation is a good idea.” He continued, “Can you tell where it came from?”
“From ought-ought,” replied the chief, referring to the bearing that lay dead ahead. “Range and direction is from the reported position of the ships, exactly where we’re headed.”
“Which fucktard is doing this?” demanded Castellano. “Somebody on Maersk think this is funny?” The chief shook his head.
“Sir, whatever it is, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t them. Whatever this came from is *powerful*, sir. To block out the entire spectrum you’d need to pour electricity straight into the antennae. You couldn’t do it with anything satellite-based and it wouldn’t be a setting on any maritime radio. And you’d need a lot of power. Be a hell of a rig.”
Castellano rubbed his chin, considering. “Might be the pirates screwing with us somehow. Whatever. We’ll figure it out and thump ‘em extra hard.”
Then he started. “Aren’t those coordinates…”
“Yeah, somewhere in the North Atlantic I think,” laughed the chief. “They must have brought some weed brownies along to think up something this stupid.”