15^th May, 2011

Despite his strong nerves and character, the captain was as affected by this tension, as electrified by it, as the next man. Not much was needed to act as a spark-having his ship buzzed was enough. So it could be expected that the captain would slam the bridge door and spit after the plane in defiance. And his ship, loaded to the top with fish, would stay its course, not diverging from it a degree. No one could have accused him of bringing about the American pilot’s death. Rather, the blame would lie with the pilots of American planes, who had so often played on his and his colleagues’ nerves.

But events in the Pacific Ocean took a different turn. It seemed as though the plane had wagged its wings. Somebody thought one of the engines had been switched off. What had actually happened?

The captain went up to the open flying bridge. He had his own, special seafaring experience. In all the decades he had spent on the seas and oceans he had never been in distress. He had never gotten into a mess, only in a storm. He had never given command “Man overboard!” except during drills. Fires, holes, collisions-all that had happened to someone else, not to him. He was perhaps only captain who had never seen a single flying saucer. The merchant navy had given him an award “For 20 years of accident-free service.” But only because they had not come up with the idea of giving on “For 30 years.”

The plane seemed to be summoning him somewhere. Two times it flew off in one and the same direction. That was the only information he had. The radio was silent-magnetic storms could not be discounted. If they followed the plane they might run right smack into the typhoon. And how long would it take? An hour? A day? Two? And most importantly, for the sake of what?

The Americans flew away. Perhaps they decided they had been understood.

Life’s most unbreakable code- what and where? How and when? Who and whom? Why and where to?-presented itself to the captain in classical biblical from.

For everything that happens to man, no matter how unexpected it looks, and for everything he undertakes, no matte how inexplicable it seems, the ground has been prepared.

In the ocean that day there were all the latest achievements of modern civilization: a powerful refrigerator ship and a four engine airplane, both equipped with radar, automated systems and similar apparatuses. The technology worked, moved, did not stand still. But it passed a person by. Something else was decisive-the working of the human heart. Intuition and instinct were decisive now, as they had once been ages ago. The captain swung the ship round and pointed it in the direction of the typhoon, where the plane had headed.

From – No Man Is An Island

Written by Gennady Bocharov