Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

When you’ve got the numbers, you draw an arc with a compass on a universal charting sheet, centered from the guessed position you marked on the sheet. I’m leaving out some nitpicking details, but essentially, where the arcs cross is your location—plus or minus a mile or so. John went below and drew the arcs. He came back up with the charting sheet. The arcs all crossed, but not at one point. The intersections made a triangle big enough for a dime. The space was the margin of error, about two miles, and ours was about as good as it gets on a small boat in a rough sea. “Here,” John said, pointing proudly at the chart. “We’re here. In this little fucking triangle!” We marked the spot on our map—about two hundred miles off the coast of Florida.

“Ali was right!” Ireland said. “We’re north of the sun, in the Atlantic ocean! What instincts, Ali.”

I grinned. “Guess I’m a natural navigator.”

By late that afternoon, the sea was calming. The winds were still pretty strong and the Namaste cruised smartly through the smooth sea at about five or six knots, fast for her. Knots, as I’d discovered reading the sailing books John had brought, meant exactly that. A hundred years before, sailors used to tie regularly spaced knots in a string, put a float on the end of it, and toss the float overboard. As the string played out, the sailors counted the knots that slipped through their fingers for one minute, and that would be how many knots they were going. Knots means nautical miles per hour, and we got it by timing ourselves between one position fix and the next. I wanted to try the counting-knots-on-a-string method, though.

Bob had cooked some chicken and rice on the alcohol stove. We had no designated cook. We took turns at irregular intervals, whenever the mood struck us. I cooked often—something Patience would have been amazed to know—because I enjoyed the challenge of making a meal against the adversity of the rolling and pitching boat. In a real storm it could take hours making a meal, but sailing provides lots of hours.

We sat in the cockpit at sunset and watched the sun sink into the sea. The red glow shimmered, a million flecks of red from a million moving facets on the sea. We checked the time when the top of the sun’s disk intersected the horizon, a free sighting we could use. As we ate, sunset became dusk. Night fell. The stars, following Venus’s lead, seemed to pop out of the sky. Before we finished eating, a brilliant dome of stars hovered over us. I stood up and looked around. The faint line of the horizon was a circle around us, the edge of a disk, the edge of the world floating in space. I sat down.

“What the hell’s that?” Ireland said, pointing west.

John and I looked. A green oblong shape hovered twenty degrees above the horizon.

“Hey,” Ireland said, “I don’t believe in these things, but what—”

“Yeah,” John said. “Look at that. It’s moving.”

It was growing larger, looking very much like it was approaching us. I watched it, thinking there was something familiar about it. It suddenly moved back, getting smaller.

“Jesus,” Ireland said.

“It’s not a UFO,” I said. “I mean it is—UFO means it’s unidentified—but it’s not a ship, a spaceship, or anything—”

“Why are you always such a fucking cynic?” John said. “Big, bright green thing, hovering, comes at us, goes back, and you know it’s not a fucking flying saucer. Why?”

“Because it doesn’t act like a spaceship—”

“Oh,” John said, turning to Ireland. “Doesn’t act like a spaceship, Ramon.” Then he turned back to me. “What the hell you talking about?” John said, disgusted.

“She’s coming again,” said Ireland.

The shape seemed to rush toward us, getting huge. You still couldn’t see a surface or a clean edge, but the fact was, it was something coming our way. I really wanted it to be a spaceship. It dropped lower and seemed to be rushing us at low level, like a fighter on a strafing run. Then it changed course and swooped north, disappearing up among the stars in just seconds. I could feel John and Ireland staring at me. “Still,” I said. “There’s something not right about the way it flies.”

“Awww,” they groaned.

“So que is it?” Ireland said.

“I’m not sure. But it started out due west, right over Cape Canaveral.”

“It wasn’t a fucking rocket, Bob,” John said.

“No. But maybe they were testing something. Maybe they let some kind of gas out real high up, to check dispersion or something, I don’t know. But it looked like a gas cloud to me. It wasn’t moving, it was just getting bigger and smaller—”

“And then it rushed us—” John said, laughing.

“And then it got real big and finally collapsed,” I said. “It looked like it shot away, but it would look the same if it was a gas cloud that just shrank to nothing.”

“Awww,” they groaned.