'We had nothing to fight them off with'

Cloaked by the setting sun dipping into the Indian Ocean, a speedboat filled with Somali pirates armed with rocket launchers and assault rifles hastily closed in on the American freighter.

Aboard the Liberty Sun, Tom Urbik was winding up his 12-hour engineering shift unaware of the approaching danger.

The pirates had covered their boat with a blue tarp to help it blend into the seascape.

Suddenly, the startling and unmistakable sound of the ship's pirate alarm momentarily rattled Urbik, who at first tried to remember if he'd forgotten about a drill but quickly realized this wasn't one.

"We'd been preparing for this for several weeks," he said. "I ran to the engine room and secured the doors, and then I knew we'd need all the generators for the fire pumps, so I got to work on that."

Out for blood after U.S. Navy SEALs had recently killed some of their brethren during the daring rescue of another hijacked freighter, the pirates immediately began launching rocket-propelled grenades at the Liberty Sun.

"The first rocket hits sounded like someone slammed a steel door really hard," Urbik said. "The third one hit in the engine room where we were and it was unbelievable. We had nothing to fight them off with."

Without any weapons aboard, the crew of the Liberty Sun could only hope to outrun and outsmart their attackers.

For roughly 40 minutes the freighter carrying humanitarian goods for refugees in Darfur and Somalia was under siege. The pirates eventually ran out of grenades and began firing automatic weapons at the bridge of the ship in an effort to get the ship to stop.

"They were trying to kill us. They weren't interested in taking hostages," he said.

Unable to halt the massive ship, the pirates eventually gave up and slipped back out to sea. The Liberty Sun was left riddled with bullet holes and scarred from the grenades.

"Fortunately, no one was hurt," the 26-year-old Urbik said. "The main reason was because of our training and drilling. We'd been doing it for about five weeks because we knew it had been bad around the Gulf of Aden, but it had gotten worse."

The Wheaton-raised Urbik returned to his Batavia home Monday greeted by family and friends who had been fretting about his welfare since the April attack and the e-mail he sent his mother in the midst of the fracas.

"I realized after I sent it I was probably giving my mother a heart attack," he said.

He is expected to return to the Liberty Sun - now docked in Singapore - in about a month to help bring her back to the U.S. to load up for another run. But he and his parents are pushing for changes to maritime law to allow sailors aboard privately owned freighters like the Liberty Sun to arm themselves in the wake of the surge in pirate activity. Some ports won't allow armed cargo ships to dock, they said.

"Hopefully these attacks have brought enough attention to the problem that something will be done soon," said Urbik's mother, Katy.

Trips through the pirate hotbed around the Gulf of Aden in northwest Africa are inevitable, Urbik said. But he wants a fair fight.

"If we must go through the Gulf of Aden we must be armed," he said.

He said it took U.S. Navy rescue ships nearly six hours to catch up with the Liberty Sun after the attack. Urbik has no idea what became of the pirates who attacked his ship.

<div class="infoBox"> <h1>More Coverage</h1> <div class="infoBoxContent"> <div class="infoArea"> <h2>Video</h2> <ul class="video"> <li><a href="/multimedia/?category=9&type=video&item=351">Tom Urbik's story</a></li> </ul> <h2>Stories</h2> <ul class="links"> <li><a href="/story/?id=286607">Local man on ship attacked by Somali pirates <span class="date">[4/14/09]</span></a></li> </ul> </div> </div> </div>