The retired British couple seized by pirates

After Somalis boarded the Chandlers' sailboat, says Jeffrey Gettleman, the couple spent a year waiting to die

IT WASN'T REALLY a pretty night," Rachel Chandler recalled. Small waves were coming from the southeast, and a trickle of wind blew from the southwest. There was no moon, and the stars were shrouded by clouds.

The boat was heading from the Seychelles archipelago to Tanzania, a two-week passage across the Indian Ocean. The wind was pushing them farther north than they'd planned. With no ships or land in sight, the Chandlers' 38-foot sailboat, the Lynn Rival, bobbed along all alone.

Rachel, who is 57, was on watch, and her husband, Paul, 61, was asleep below deck. It was about 2:30 a.m. Because the wind was so faint, Rachel turned on the sailboat's small engine, which was just loud enough to drown out other noise.

By the time she heard the high-pitched whine of outboard motors, she had only seconds to react. Two skiffs suddenly materialized, and when she swung the flashlight's beam onto the water, two gunshots rang out.

"No guns! No guns!" she screamed.

The crack of assault rifles jarred Paul awake.

Within seconds, eight scruffy Somali men hoisted themselves aboard, their rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers clanging against the hull. The men stank of the sea and nervous musk, and they jabbed their guns at the Chandlers.

"Stop engine!" they shouted. "Crew, crew! How many crew number?"

Then they demanded a shower.

This was Oct. 23, 2009. The Chandlers would be held for the next 388 days.

IN THE PAST few years, gangs of Somali pirates, kitted out with fiberglass skiffs, rusty Kalashnikovs, and flip-flops, have waylaid hundreds of ships and extracted ransom for their return. More than 20 ships have been seized this year, and the average ransom is now upward of $5 million.

Of all the thousands of people who have been held for ransom, though, few, if any, have endured as long an experience behind pirate lines as Paul and Rachel Chandler. The couple met in London in 1979. A few years after they married, they bought a share in the Lynn Rival. When they retired a few years ago, they began sailing full time, exploring the Adriatic, the Red Sea, Egypt, India, Sudan, Oman, and Eritrea.

They were fully aware that the Indian Ocean was a hunting ground for Somali pirates, but Paul, a Cambridge-trained engineer with a hyper-rational way of looking at the world, considered the risks of being hijacked to be very remote.

"It was a fluke of the wind that put us where we were," he said.

WE DIDN'T KNOW who these guys were," Mohamed Aden said of the pirates who took the Chandlers. "They were nobodies, people we call cockroaches, gangsters, new to the system. It was the first time they had brought anybody to land, the first time they had ever captured anybody. It took us six months to establish who they were."

Aden is the president of the Himan and Heeb administration, a small, clan-based government in central Somalia. Two decades of chaos have resulted in these tiny statelets popping up across the country. There are more than 20, formed by members of the same clan — the one fundamental element of Somali society that has not been totally eviscerated by civil war.

Aden works in Adado, a trading town about 200 miles from the coast. He is a naturalized American and lived in the U.S. for years before being drafted by elders in his clan to build a government from scratch, complete with a functioning police force, environmental laws, and schools. Technically, Himan and Heeb's jurisdiction extends to the coast, but Aden has no authority there; the area is controlled by pirate gangs.

"I don't have the firepower to take these guys on," Aden said. "I'd like to, but I can't."

All anyone in Adado knew was that an upstart named Buggas had taken the Chandlers to a town called Amara, near the coast, and that locals were backing him up. Local support is crucial, because holding hostages can become expensive. You need to keep them fed and, most important, heavily guarded — so a rival pirate gang or Islamist militia doesn't rekidnap them. Paul figures it cost Buggas nearly $20,000 a month to hold him and Rachel hostage.