Miles frowned as he set down his iPad. There was a time when a “rara avis”—rare bird in Latin—meant he would have to amble around outside in the parking lot looking for the slightly less expensive rental car. This was not that, exactly, but it was enough to make him move the mug of Flat Yank away from the bright red Section Leader device in front of him.

(Nancy and her Daughter, AP Image).
The image of Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old kidnap victim who had been the topic of six days of discussion was on the flat screen at the end of the room. It shifted to a colorful one displaying a triumph of the publishing art. There had been a Socotra sale, a true rara avis!

Miles waved at the assembly gathered for the nine o’clock meeting that sometimes started around that time. The Boomers were represented by the Old Salts from that group who bunked in the two three-person racks aft of the Galley. That normally included Rocket, Splash, and Vic. If the Ladies group was convened, Melissa, Holly, and Grace had a place to stay if they were in Fairfax rather than the more spacious accommodations at the Big Pink Building in Arlington. They managed to keep things a little more organized there without the Salts draped over them.

“You heard what sold, didn’t you?” That was Rocket, who had lived part of the experience. The original one, not the one now. Splash waved at the screen. “Or maybe it is better said as the new book about the old one.”

There was the usual befuddlement that goes with the production meeting on a Friday that sometimes slides directly into a Free Fire Friday Lunch in which the formal lounge on the 6th floor is adjacent to the formal dining room. Young Michael works for the Building, not Socotra Publishing. They have worked an arrangement in which he keeps the bar closed until later afternoon—three rather than five—when he opens the building liquor license to drape around the hours of food service.

He is a thin, smooth Malaysian young man who seems to have an affinity for the Salts. Some of them, anyway.

Miles waved at the screen. “The Museum Distinguished Docent has notified us of a request from an actual veteran almost as old as you guys. He said he had found five or six installments of the USS Midway newspaper from late 1979.” He pointed at the corner of the slide to show the headline from an ancient sheet of the front page of the MultiPlex.

“This guy was one of the 4,000 or so sailors and aviators who were home-ported on the Midway in Yokosuka, Japan. They had been on a deployment in the Indian Ocean, expecting to be relieved by USS Ranger, who were rammed by a merchant ship in the Malacca Strait. They were able to get back to the Philippines and Japan for repairs, but Midway stayed out for another few months to start to deal with the Iranians.”

He stood and made a languorous wave around the edges of the slide on the screen. “Vic was working flight operations down in the Intel Center. The route from Ready Room Two down to the CVIC—the carrier Intel Center—was near the ship’s Public Affairs Office that ran the newspaper. We were all relieved there had been no injuries in the collision, but you can imagine morale needed a boost as we headed for Africa rather than going home from Australia.”

“The sailor who contacted the Museum had been overthrowing the Islamic Republic. He was interested in reading the detective stories Vic had provided each day of flight operations in the Indian Ocean. Memory had faded a bit over the last 47 years. Maybe it was the other way around. But we seem to be doing it again.”

That enterprise turned into something that defined Vic’s life. “I was tired of writing thirty or forty chapters in the life of a bold Swinging Dick private eye. I borrowed the name ‘Nick Danger’ from a great comedy group called the Firesign Theater. They borrowed the character from Hammett, and I borrowed the concept from them to apply to a mystery of what was happening to us now.”

Miles nodded. “The Chairman had four copies of the original thousand they sold on the ship. It kept them in San Miguel beer for a couple of months when they got back, and Roger flew them back from Korea in an A-7 drop tank to Atsugi.”

“And that is where things stood until now?” asked Holly, one of the Zoomers who tried to connect the world depicted on the north wall of the Conference Room.

Miles nodded. “The Chairman ran across some of the original artwork that was published along with the original Nick Danger episodes in the newspaper that did not match what the Koreans could do. So, when that box of old letters and papers showed up, he decided we could do something with them.”

The Zoomers who had been sucked into the revitalization project laughed. They remembered how the Salts had panicked over the prospect of actual work, but it had been sort of fun. The name of the private dick had been changed. Now it was Dick Ranger, to retain the cadence but recycle the Danger.

“While on the boat, he had been reading some of Dashiell Hammett’s old Sam Spade detective stories along with Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing surreal political epics. Walking along the passageway, stepping over WWII knee-knockers, he realized he could write new ones tailored to the situation. In Mission Planning, he fired up an IBM Selectric typewriter with a blank piece of paper. It was the kind of sleek, wide orange machine with the globular font ball that danced around in front as it clacked on the paper.”

“Anyway, the Museum only has a few paper copies of the stories that lived inside the steel sides of the ship, or hurtling high over the waves where the F-4J Phantom II jets sometimes intercepted the gigantic BEAR Deltas when they arced out from their bases in Kamchatka to challenge the Americans.”

You can see the intersection and ice bank taller than the kids that have to load buses down there. The electric ones don’t have the endurance to move the kids.)

Young Eddie, Holly’s pal, was looking out the east window down to the five-foot bank of concrete at what had been Farmer Tyson’s Corner, and the entrance to the Trillium Complex from a non-company individual who had just given up at the beginning of the accumulation of compact snow and sleet a week ago.

That was an example of the rara avis of good common sense.

Copyright 2026 Vic Socotra www.vicsocotra.com