During the spring and summer of 2012, the pirates kept Moore aboard a tuna vessel, the Naham 3, which they had hijacked on the open sea. The ship stood at anchor just off the town of Hobyo.

In August, the generator sputtered. A team of Chinese mechanics made near-daily trips to the rear of the vessel to keep it running, but the Naham 3 was a dwindling resource.

When the ship ran out of rice in August, the pirates delivered new twenty-pound sacks from Hobyo, which the East Asian crew regarded as a deep misfortune. They were chauvinists about rice and preferred the fluffy, short-grained white stuff common in their part of the world. Now they had to eat brownish basmati imported from Pakistan. Nguyen Van Ha, from Vietnam, pulled a face when he tried his first bowl. He shook his head in disgust.

Near the end of August, water flowing from our shower hoses felt warmer, which meant the monsoon season had started to turn. Abdul the translator came aboard to question Li Bo Hai, again, on behalf of the pirate bosses, and again I overheard the conversation. How much life was in the generator? How much oil, how much fuel? Answer, about a month. Somehow we had a reprieve. But Abdul acted vague about whether the bosses would preserve the ship.

Later the same day, Abdul carried a round-screened instrument down from the bridge, trailing electric wire. "I want this working again," he ordered. "If you need parts from that ship over there"—he pointed across the water at the Shiuh Fu 1, a tuna long-liner similar to the Naham 3, once hijacked by pirates, leaning wrecked on the Somali shore —"we can get 'em. But we can't stay on this boat without a radar."

One by one the men squatted to inspect the colorful soldered guts of the radar monitor. Taso and Cao Yong fiddled the longest, with an air of resignation, under the warm shade near our conveyor belt. For the first time, Abdul had mentioned the ship on the beach. He'd named our worst nightmare. Our mood plummeted, but the radar wouldn't come on again. Arnel explained the problem to Abdul. Finally someone piled the parts into a box and shelved it in a closet.

Word went around the next day that the generator would have to shut down to save fuel. We ate breakfast in morbid silence. Afterward we rushed the electric kettles to brew coffee and tea and save it all in thermoses. Around 8:00 a.m. the motor quit, with a long and terrifying shudder that vibrated the hull and left us alone with ourselves. For the first time we noticed the desertlike silence on the water. The generator had not only powered a surprising number of instruments, including the TV, the kettles, the trickling seawater hoses, and the sizzling woks—it had muffled Somali voices, meaning it had sheltered us from an unbroken awareness of living at their mercy. We tried to play cards, but during the long afternoon the tropical heat mounted, and we had little to keep us from remembering our status as prisoners, or the tons of rigid tuna in the freezer, or the captain, who had been shot dead when the pirates boarded, now stored in there like a fish. We wondered if he would decompose. A smell rose from the corner grate we used for a latrine.

Abdul ended this day without power by four in the afternoon, I think because he wanted tea. But the threat had not been lost on the crew. The pirates had wanted to warn us about living on shore, and the shock of the silent ship was linked to a fierce rumor of freedom that had circulated for several days.