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Though there was certainly no dearth of foreign fishing trawlers to attack, Gaben was set on an early retirement. “This is going to be my last ship,” he assured me, almost apologetically, referring to the Marathon.

“We treat the hostages very well,” he continued. “We bring them all the food and drink they want. They’ve become fat.” He smiled broadly. “Let me tell you,” he said, “they like it better on that ship than in the Ukraine.”

Could I go on board and ask them myself? Gaben shook his head perturbedly, rose, and stormed out of the hut. I later discovered from media accounts of the Marathon’s release that the ship’s welder, Serhiy Vartenkov, was already dead, shot and killed as the pirates boarded the vessel. The ship’s cook, Georgi Gussakov, had also been shot and was in critical condition by the time the Marathon was released.

After a few more sips of 7-Up I wandered out after Gaben, but he had disappeared. Nearby, I spotted a group of local bushmen reclining against a wall, grinning openly at me through rows of straight white teeth. Two of the men enthusiastically agreed to my request to film them. The first looked to be in his early sixties, short and dark-skinned, cotton-white hair receding in a horseshoe pattern around a bulbous scalp; like many Somali elders, he dyed his beard with orange henna. He cradled a herder’s staff between the loose folds of his ma’awis.

“We used to be fishermen, but we went back to the bush after it became too dangerous,” he said. “We didn’t become pirates. We don’t even know who these guys are,” he said, referring to my erstwhile tea companions. “We think they’re from very far away.”

“There are no soldiers here, and they know that,” the second herdsman added. “And we hardly have any weapons. So they keep coming. They even used to steal our goats, though that doesn’t happen as much anymore. There used to be more pirates here, but now there is only one ship left. This will be the last one, inshallah.”

As I chatted with the bushmen, Gaben returned, accompanied by the young men who had earlier been studying me by the cliff. Each was carrying his gun slung over his shoulder. The atmosphere had become perceptibly tenser, and the townspeople began to slink away into the maze of huts until the area around the kiosk was deserted. The pirates moved to their row of parked 4×4s and milled around them anxiously, as if leaving open either option of a fight or flight response.

“You really freaked them out by asking to see the ship,” Omar nervously explained. It was the same reaction I had provoked in Eyl, the only difference being that instead of moving their ship, the pirates were asking us to move. “There’s nothing more to be gained by staying here,” Omar advised.

The Colonel, meanwhile, broke into a wide grin and ordered me to follow his movements with my video camera. Out of habit I obeyed, tracking him in the viewfinder as he weaved his way through the crowd of posturing pirates. He returned after completing his round, winking and grinning at me.

“Eh, Levish? You said you wanted pictures of pirates,” he said. Stunned, I thanked him for his help.

Not being inclined to wait around to find out how pirates dealt with spies in their midst, I agreed to Omar’s request to leave. We quickly filed into our vehicles, and within a few minutes our mini-motorcade was out of Dhanane and back on the rocky trail.

It was time to go home.

* * *

The pirate board meeting onto which we stumbled had not been convened in vain. A few days later, on June 23, the Marathon was released for a reported ransom of $1.3 million.1 As previously mentioned, the ship’s welder had been killed by a stray bullet during the boarding operation; though initially denying that a death had occurred aboard a Dutch-flagged vessel, the government of the Netherlands soon issued a strongly worded promise to right the injustice. “I am shocked by the cowardly murder of a member of the crew,” Dutch foreign minister Mamime Verhagen announced in a statement. “The Netherlands will