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.