The men were assured they would be home within weeks. “You are our guests,” the pirate boss said. “We are only interested in money.” Illustration by Marko Manev

Aman Kumar, a seaman on the M.V. Albedo, was asleep when an announcement came over the loudspeaker: “Pirates are approaching.” The Albedo was in the Indian Ocean, a thousand miles from the eastern coast of Africa. Kumar rushed up a narrow stairwell to the bridge, where most of the ship’s twenty-three-man crew had already gathered. His bunkmate, Rajoo Rajbhar, pointed to port. They could make out a distant silhouette on top of the waves: an open-bow skiff.

The Albedo’s captain, Jawaid Khan, had stored prewritten distress messages in his e-mail drafts folder. He entered the ship’s coördinates and sent messages to the European Union Naval Force, a regional maritime-security office, and a piracy-reporting center. Then he directed the steersman to maneuver the ship in a zigzag pattern. He called the engine room and ordered full steam, but the Albedo, a cargo ship on its way from the United Arab Emirates to Kenya, was old and sluggish.

It was the morning of November 26, 2010. The Albedo was west of the Maldives, closer to India than to Somalia, but Somali pirates were known to range broadly. So far that year, they had attacked more than two hundred ships, many of them in the central Indian Ocean. Before sailing, the crew had ringed the deck with barbed wire and affixed an electric wire to the gunwale, hoping to prevent anyone from boarding the ship uninvited.

Kumar and Rajbhar plugged in the electric wire. By then, the skiff was just a few hundred yards away. On board were four men wearing T-shirts and sarongs and carrying Kalashnikov-style rifles. Some commercial crews had deterred hijackings by spraying assailants with fire hoses, among other tactics, but Captain Khan had never received antipiracy training. The sailors watched helplessly as the skiff pulled alongside the ship.

The Albedo was weighed down with cargo, leaving its main deck close to the water. The pirates retrieved a long ladder with hooks on one end, hung it over the deck wall, and climbed it easily, without any shocks from the electric wire. (It may have malfunctioned, or the assailants may have been lucky and missed it.) The first pirate to reach the barbed wire pulled back for a moment, then charged through it, the metal cutting into his flesh. “I did not imagine people like these living in this world,” Kumar said.

The captain ordered everyone off the bridge, and Shahriar Aliabadi, the bosun, led the crewmen to the engine room. They heard gunfire and shattering glass above them. After a few minutes, a heavily accented voice came over the loudspeaker. “Come on bridge, Captain,” it said, in English. “Come on bridge with crew, otherwise we kill.”

Soon, they heard Khan’s voice ordering them to the bridge. They went upstairs. One pirate yelled and jabbed at them with the butt of his rifle, and the crewmen fell to their knees. Then another pirate silenced him and took over. Like the others, he wore a sarong and a T-shirt, but his clothes were cleaner, his hair more kempt. He introduced himself as Ali Jabin. “We want only company money,” he said. “If company pay money, no problem.” He ordered the seamen to collect everything valuable from their cabins—cell phones, cash, cameras—and pile it on the bridge. “Crew problem, Somalia problem,” he said. “Crew no problem, Somalia no problem.”

Jabin showed Khan a set of coördinates and told him to head in that direction. After a few hours, the ship came upon a fishing trawler. Khan was instructed to stop, and eight more Somali pirates, carrying heavy machine guns and rocket launchers, boarded the ship. From there, Khan continued toward Somalia.

Six days later, the Albedo came in sight of the Somali coast. Jabin told Khan to head toward the shore. Khan objected—with no charts of the area, he could not avoid shoals or reefs that might ground the ship.

“Do you want to live or do you want to die?” Jabin said, and Khan complied.

The Albedo anchored three miles from shore, and Jabin told the crew that they would wait there until the shipping company paid a ransom. He assured them that it wouldn’t take long. “No problem,” he said. “Soon you go home.”

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As an ordinary seaman, Aman Kumar—tall and a bit pudgy, with watchful, dolorous eyes—was the lowest-ranking crewman on board. He was also the youngest, at eighteen. Until the previous year, when he left his home in rural India to enroll in a maritime academy in Kolkata, he had never seen a body of water larger than the lake near his family’s farm. After graduation, a shipping agent told him that he could earn two hundred and fifty dollars a month on the Albedo. Kumar assumed this was a lie—he had never seen so much money. His trip to Dubai, where the Albedo was docked, was his first on an airplane. “I was afraid for everything,” he said later.

Rajoo Rajbhar had attended the same maritime academy before joining Kumar on the Albedo. They were the only Indian members of the crew, and they bonded quickly. They bunked together four stories above the deck, in a superstructure in the stern of the ship. They played cards, watched Bollywood movies, and helped each other with menial chores. The Albedo’s captain was from Karachi, and like most cargo ships it had a crew from several countries: in addition to the two Indians, there were six Pakistanis, seven Bangladeshis, six Sri Lankans, and one Iranian, Aliabadi, a relative of the ship’s owner. At twenty-six, Aliabadi had a widow’s peak and a stern countenance. Although he had little experience at sea, the owner had appointed him bosun, the highest-ranking non-officer on board.

Captain Jawaid Khan had worked on ships for four decades, giving up a home life to provide his family a home. He was away during the birth of his older daughter, Nareman, and had missed much of her childhood. By now, she had earned a university degree and had moved to Dubai to work as a consultant. When the Albedo was preparing to embark, Khan’s wife, Shahnaz, was visiting Nareman in Dubai, and they went to the dock to see him off. He admitted to them that he was worried about the Albedo’s course; he had requested armed guards, but the shipping company had refused. Shahnaz and Nareman asked him to stay behind. “I can’t just get off the ship,” he told them. “If I do, the whole crew will say that they’re not sailing.”

The Albedo was supposed to leave with twenty-four men. The day before it put out, an Egyptian electrician quit. He’d had a dream in which some unseen force plucked the Albedo from the water and flung it onto a desert shore. The electrician, certain that something terrible would befall the ship, left without collecting his pay.

On the day of the hijacking, Nareman tried to reach Khan on the ship’s satellite phone. When she couldn’t get through, she called a shipping agent who knew the ship’s owner. The agent told her that the ship had been attacked. Shahnaz, who was still with Nareman in Dubai, saw her daughter, cell phone against her ear, sink to her knees.