Racing the Moon

by Alan Armstrong

  Alex peeled hers very carefully.

  “For a special treat when we get to Tangier, I’ve got these coconuts,” Ebbs said, hauling one up out of the hold. “Pete loves ’em. What you do is, you jam the point of your knife into these eyes to get at the milk and suck it out. Very nutritious. When they’re empty we’ll whack ’em open with the hatchet and eat the meat. Folks in the South Pacific can go for two or three days on a coconut.”

  As they licked orange juice from their fingers Ebbs showed Alex on the sea chart how they’d sail the next day, out across the upper bay. Working with the dividers from seamark to seamark, Alex figured the distance at seventeen miles. Ebbs had said it was close to twenty. Alex asked herself if she’d missed one of the small lantern-shaped symbols on the chart. She went back and checked. She had. What if I miss one out there?

  Up to now they’d been on the river, never far from shore. Alex knew she could swim to the bank if she had to. Tomorrow, though, it was going to be all open water.

  Chuck was crouched in front of his field radio. It looked like a thick, square suitcase covered in heavy dark green canvas against seawater and rain. Only the gleaming antenna showed what it was. He’d unsnapped the flap over the controls and was listening through headphones to what he could pick up from Wallops and anybody else transmitting within range.

  “There’s a lot of ship talk back and forth,” he reported. “Coast Guard and weather stuff, pilots announcing bearings, and a lot of gibberish that must be navy stuff in code to keep it from the spies. Or maybe it’s spies talking! Boy, if I could pick up one of them! I bet they’re transmitting to Russian subs off the coast.”

  “A few years ago you might have picked up a German submarine,” Ebbs said. “Hitler’s U-boat 1105 was operating around here, the Black Panther. Took a while, but we finally got her. Not before she’d sunk a couple of tankers, though.”

  The moon was full, “the sun of the wolves,” Ebbs said. There were frog calls, insects’ churring, now and then the sound of something hitting the water. There was a slight breeze, almost enough to keep off the mosquitoes. The katydids were big and noisy, but they didn’t bite.

  Propped up against a vine-covered pine, Alex looked out into the bay. There were flickering channel lights, now and then the brief loom of a ship cutting a phosphorescent swath. A spotlight on the opposite shore caught patterns of ripples on the water.

  A river is never silent. The water gurgles sounded like ragged breathing interrupted sometimes by slaps against the shore. It smelled of life. Ebbs told Alex that at its mouth the Potomac is about ten miles wide.

  Ebbs and Chuck came over and sat down beside Alex. “This place is called Smith Point,” Ebbs said. “Remember that boy, T, in the Smith painting? Well, T saved Smith’s life here once with his hat. They’d been ambushed. The natives had Smith cornered when T put his hat up on a stick and started waving it around, yelling as loud as he could. That little distraction got Smith out of his hole.”

  Suddenly Jeep started barking. He stopped mid-yip, squealed, then began a long yowl that sent them running for the flashlights. A minute later he came whimpering into the firelight, his muzzle stuck with quills. Chuck and Alex spent the next hour holding him down while Ebbs dug out a dozen dirty black points barbed like fishhooks. He squealed when she scrubbed the raw places with rubbing alcohol. “Poor dog,” Ebbs murmured. “VB would sympathize. When his first big test rocket blew up, the general in charge turned away saying, ‘So you learn, Wernher, it is not so easy to tickle the porcupine.’ ”

  19

  AT SEA

  It was first light. Alex was dreaming and drifting, half-asleep, half-awake, when the sound of a hummingbird working a dark orange trumpet vine blossom just overhead snapped her alert. It sounded like a giant wasp. The bird was the size of her thumb, its beak stitching fast among the flowers like a long black needle, its wings invisible. It never stopped to rest. It was so fast, so slight and magical it made her smile. A squirrel began dropping chips of the green pinecone he was gnawing. The sky was streaked with pink like the inside of a shell. Low-flying birds skimmed over water that looked like it had been combed in two directions at once. Dew had caught in the spiders’ webs in the grass, making them glow like pewter weavings.

  Crows calling and crying roused Jeep. His muzzle was swollen, his nose parched. He’d had a bad night, dozing and whimpering, too pained even to push his way to the foot of Alex’s bag, where he usually slept.

  Alex wet a cloth from her canteen and bathed the dog’s nose. Ebbs produced a can of chicken broth. Alex spooned it into Jeep’s mouth sip by sip.

  Ebbs hustled them through breakfast, each one mixing his own bowl of cereal with hot water. The cereal was the blend of dried grains called Meals for Millions that Ebbs had fed the refugees in Europe. The formula was one part cereal to six parts boiling water, then you shook on powdered milk. Busy tending to Jeep, Alex forgot the one cereal to six waters proportion. She mixed hers one to two parts, like oatmeal. There was tepid coffee with cocoa and sweetened condensed milk; then they waded out to the boat, Ebbs carrying Jeep paws up like he was a baby. “Next landfall, Tangier Island!” Ebbs called as Alex hauled up the anchors.

  Alex had never been at sea before. Looking out over the open water, she couldn’t see anything. She shivered with what she told herself was excitement.

  Once they were under way, the morning sun glared off the water. The three sailors looked like desert travelers with smears of charcoal under their eyes and the hats and long-sleeved shirts Ebbs made them wear. Jeep groaned and nursed his hurt in his hammock under the deck.

  Alex began to feel thirsty.

  The water’s emptiness made her uneasy. She wished she had something to do, like climbing a tree. She figured if you’re not in the stern holding the tiller and running things, sailing’s a waste of time—unless, of course, that’s the only way to get where you’re going. She decided the sailing life wasn’t for her. She looked down at Jeep and nodded. The dog wagged feebly.

  Between sessions of leaning out when Ebbs ordered it, Alex pumped and marked their course on the chart from seamark to seamark. Then she glanced at the barometer mounted on the cockpit cowling. “Hey, Ebbs!” she shouted. “The barometer’s falling.”

  “Right!” Ebbs called back, glancing at the sky. “Weather’s coming.”

  Over the next hour the wind changed quarters, opposing now as strongly as it had favored them before. Ebbs tacked this way and that, battling the onrush, spume swishing over the bow and gunnels as she worked the lurching winds to their advantage. They were all leaning out a lot now. It was a rough ride under fast-moving clouds, first mares’ tails, then the slower, ominous low cumulus.

  Chuck called over. “Hey, Alley! How far from Tangier to Wallops?”

  Ebbs shook her head. “Can’t do it, Chuck. Can’t sail there in this. Anyway, Wallops is off-limits. No civilian boat can land there.”

  “OK, so never mind sailing to it,” Chuck countered, “but as the crow flies, straight line from Tangier to Wallops, Alley, how far?”

  Alex studied the map and worked the dividers. “Maybe thirty miles,” she answered. “Seventeen over water, then maybe twelve across the peninsula, over the bridge to Chincoteague, then to the channel next to Wallops. But I don’t see any bridge to Wallops.”

  “There isn’t one,” Ebbs snapped. “Put it out of your mind, Chuck. For security they keep it remote. The engineers and army folk live there in Quonset huts with no weekends off. You fly in or go by boat. No one is allowed to visit without prior authorization. It’s a military installation—they’re testing missile rockets there, so they’re real edgy about spies and saboteurs. They’ve got armed guards all over the place.”

  Chuck frowned. “So we’ll be watching the launch from thirty miles away? Heck! You can’t see anything from that far, and anyway there’ll be land humped up between us and them, so we won’t see the tracking radar at all.”

  “If you’re watching at the mome
nt of liftoff you’ll see the flame,” Ebbs said, “maybe even get a glimpse of the rocket itself before you hear it. It’s like a big rolling thunderclap.”

  “Yeah, but the tracking stuff,” Chuck pressed, “the radar—we won’t be able to see that.”

  “No.”

  “What does it look like?”

  “Two saucers angled up, each as big across as a man,” Ebbs said. “They’re called Dopplers. They measure how fast the rocket’s rising and track its direction. A technician stands beside each dish aiming it with a hand crank as the craft rises, if it rises. It’s dangerous work. If the rocket fails on liftoff the technicians risk getting hurt. Some have.”

  Alex handed Chuck the map. He was fidgety as he studied it. “We could get closer, Ebbs,” he said. “A lot closer. Like, we could go over to the peninsula and put in at Crisfield.”

  “Could,” said Ebbs, “but Tangier’s where we’re headed.”

  “How do folks get to the mainland from Tangier?” Chuck asked.

  “Most take the mail boat,” Ebbs said.

  “Does it go every day?” Chuck asked.

  “Every day except Sunday. It’s the island’s lifeline, brings in news, batteries, gasoline, everything.”

  “Today’s Saturday,” Chuck said. “The launch is maybe tomorrow?”

  “Maybe,” said Ebbs. “I hear it might be the new rocket. They don’t make it public, but they always cut back the mainland’s power beforehand. When I called Pete from the marina to say we were heading out, he said Crisfield Harbor had gone dark to send extra out to Wallops. I know what you’re thinking, Chuck, but put it out of your mind. Remember our deal: no more dumb moves. I’m working on our plan. Don’t mess it up.”

  20

  RESCUE!

  The wind had shifted again. The water was making a whapping sound against the No Name’s hull as she tacked and staggered a zigzag course through the bay’s chop, a mile this way, a mile that to make a half mile toward Tangier. The land they’d left was a faint green line now. Alex couldn’t make out the island. It was all empty, just sky and water, no left or right. Lost in space, just like Ebbs said.

  The sky was beginning to look like curdled milk. The boat was yawing, rolling from side to side in the heavy waves. Alex had been drinking a lot of water. She figured it was the Meals for Millions getting even. Now she was feeling queasy. “I don’t feel good,” she announced.

  Suddenly, like out of a bilge pump, the Meals for Millions surged up out of Alex. Without thinking, she bent over the side to throw up just as Ebbs yelled, “Coming about! Watch the boom!” Alex didn’t hear. The boom went swinging like a bat across the deck. It caught Alex in her life vest, whacking her overboard.

  She didn’t know what hit her. Shocked by the blow and the sudden cold water, she gagged on vomit and salt water as her face, hands, and legs caught fire from some oozy, stringy stuff in the water—jellyfish! She tried to rub off the slimy, burning strands, but the more she touched, the more she burned. It was going all over her body. She was terrified, drowning in fire, trying to scream but couldn’t—she was choking. The boat was moving away fast. It was all dark waves and emptiness around.

  Ebbs tossed out a line as Chuck and Jeep dived in. It took a while for Ebbs to maneuver the No Name back to where Alex was paddling. Ebbs fished them all out, stung and dripping.

  “Good timing, that jettison,” Ebbs announced as she daubed Alex with a paste of baking soda. “Your upchuck, I mean. Had you been sitting up, the boom would have sent your head off like a baseball.”

  Ebbs took off her poncho and wrapped Alex in it. It was warm. Alex felt better. Nausea’s the worst, she thought. Worse than the burn of the jellyfish, even. She was still wet and cold, but she wasn’t green anymore.

  Ebbs looked up and pointed. “There it is, that smudge over there. That’s Tangier.”

  At first the island appeared to rise up out of the water, but as they got closer it looked like they were higher and it was sinking, little humps of land and squares of buildings and thin things sticking up.

  “This is the tricky part,” Ebbs said as they got close. “The winds go all over the place, and the shore currents turn into swirls and eddies like whirlpools. We don’t want to come crashing in.”

  They didn’t. She brought them in without a bump. They docked near the mail boat. There were worn-looking fishing boats tied up close by, skiffs, some larger sailboats.

  A couple of men were wheeling drums of diesel off the Captain Sam; others were stowing gear in a locker on the wharf. It was one in the afternoon. There didn’t seem to be anybody else around.

  They staggered over to Pete’s shack like they were still on the boat’s rocking deck. Even Jeep lurched like an old sailor.

  Pete’s place was a weathered shingle cottage behind a forest of sunflowers gone to seed, their browned lower leaves looking like ragged patches on skinny legs. Boat parts, driftwood, rusty chain, and some old anchors were piled around the door.

  “Hello!” Pete said as they groped their way in. He gave Ebbs a hug. Coming in from the outside brightness, it was hard for Alex to see much at first. There was a hint of kerosene and good food smells.

  As her eyes adjusted, Alex made out a short, barefoot man, square faced, with curly red hair and large gray eyes. She recognized him—he was the man in the photograph on Ebbs’s card table. Spy training pays off again, she thought. Now to find out who he is.

  “Sit down, eat, and tell all,” Pete ordered.

  Jeep looked up hopefully, his big tail fanning up dust fogs.

  “You got something for him?” Alex asked.

  “How about some of what we’re having?” Pete said.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Jeep downed his bowl in two gulps as the others ate warm slabs of buttered bread and emptied bowls of Pete’s own make stew. After ten days of Ebbs’s stuff, real food tasted great.

  “So you’re the downstream crew,” Pete said as they all stretched back happily, bellies full. “I’m her crew for the upstream run. You get her war stories around the campfire?”

  “You mean about getting von Braun?” Alex asked.

  “There’s that, but what followed was what she got decorated for—what they called ‘the hidden war.’ ”

  “Lay off, Pete,” Ebbs said, shaking her head.

  “Tell us!” Alex and Chuck said in one voice so firmly it made Jeep woof.

  “They put her in charge of feeding the refugees,” Pete explained. “They knew there’d be a lot, but they never guessed ten million. With everything all torn up in Europe, and our own supplies stretched, it was touch and go, but if those people had starved it would have been worse than Hitler. I was her driver. She sent us tearing around all over, hunting stuff, moving stuff, even stealing where she thought the army had too much. She had a nose for where food was, sent out spies to find it. She even got two famous German cooks to put their names on a new recipe for corn—that’s what we had the most of—but the Germans said corn was pigs’ food and wouldn’t eat it. The name she made up for it didn’t mention it was corn—she called it by the names of those two famous cooks and made it popular. That alone probably saved a million lives. When it was all over they made up a special decoration for her,” Pete said, beaming at Ebbs. “And let me tell you, she earned it!”

  “Enough!” Ebbs ordered. Alex had never seen her blush before, didn’t know she could.

  Chuck was restive. “We gotta go exploring. We’ve been cooped up on that boat for more than a week; we’ve gotta get out and move around. I feel like I’m bobbing.”

  “Don’t get lost,” Pete said. “Tangier’s a mile wide and three long, and it’s filled with Methodists.”

  Chuck and Alex ambled down Tangier’s spine. Circling back, they found themselves at the main dock. They didn’t have a plan. Alex couldn’t have said why they’d headed over toward the mail boat, but there she was. It was a warm afternoon. Folks were snoozing off their lunches. There was no one around.


  The Captain Sam’s lifeboat was hanging above the deck under a canvas wrap. Just like in Smith’s journal, Alex thought. She knew what Chuck was thinking.

  “Alley!” he whispered as he pointed to the lifeboat. “If we can get up in there we can ride over to the mainland, maybe get to Wallops—just like John Smith did when he first took off.”

  Alex opened her mouth to say no like she’d promised Ebbs, but the chance was too tempting. It seemed like all of a sudden they were following Smith’s plan.

  Alex nodded. “Jeep too?”

  Chuck frowned and shook his head. “No. Leave him. He’ll find his way back to Pete’s.”

  Alex folded her arms across her chest. “If I go, he goes.”

  Chuck’s face darkened. “Then I’ll go alone.”

  Alex flinched like she’d been hit.

  “I take it back,” Chuck said quickly. “We’ll all go.”

  He boosted Alex up so she could loosen the cords securing the canvas cover. When there was enough of a hole, Chuck pushed her in. Nobody noticed when he lifted up the big brown dog and then hoisted himself in.

  They lay down inside. A little later there were voices, yells, ship horns tooting, rumbles and churning and the smell of diesel smoke as the ship pulled away from the dock. It settled into a long drumming and up-and-down rocking as she crossed the channel to the mainland. Anybody looking up from the Captain Sam’s deck as they went along wouldn’t have noticed anything strange, save for what appeared to be a panting dog’s muzzle sticking out from under the canvas as the lifeboat rocked on its davits.

  21

  SUSPICIOUS CHARACTERS

  The stowaways waited hot and sweating in their hide-hole until they didn’t hear any more voices. Then Alex pushed Jeep aside and lifted the canvas enough to peek out. She didn’t see anyone on the ship’s deck. The wharf where they’d tied up was a whole lot bigger than the one at Tangier, with boats for charter fishing, luxury yachts, a launch with FBI painted on the side in big black letters, fuel tanks, ice machines, a big refrigerator with a bluefish and a crab painted on it, old tires wound with rope for boat buffers, crates, nets, coils of rope, crab traps, a gas pump, water hydrants. The Captain Sam was just one of the larger ships moored there. Alex could hear voices, people loading ice, wheeling cargo down the planked dock, nobody close by.