Neil, in turn, showed rather too much curiosity about the liroshima A-bomb, and Mrs Saito felt obliged to reprimand him.
‘Neil! You have a disco mentality. Hiroshima was not a light Of course not, Mrs Saito.
My father was at Maralinga during British tests. ‘ a. How many people died there?’ v’ell… Ithink he did.’
‘on think? Yukio, he thinks. The boy… thinks.’ therwise, Neil mooned around the ship or played chess with i line, delighted to find that he could easily beat the pale-eyed merican. Generous in victory, he ignored the lectures on the true mentality. our play lacks any sense of strategy, Neil. You only win by rig for me to make a mistake.’ ut, David, you never make mistakes.’ it happens, I’ve made nothing but mistakes in my life, or so y wife and daughters like to tell me. That’s one of the reasons al here.’ ou don’t think this expedition’s a mistake?’)o you, Neil? You probably do. You’re a strange paladin for ara to have picked. I guess she has something special in mind you.’ Canine stared wistfully at the chess pieces as he set out nother game. ‘It may seem naive to you, but our cause isjust, and r’s within our grasp.’ Carline’s hopeful but plaintive smile reminded Neil of the secure grin he had been unable to erase from his face as the nconc pulled away from the quayside at Honolulu. Embarrassed by the sight of his despondent wife, Canine began to practise his backhand to himself. His forced good cheer depressed Neil, as did his self-appointed role as second-in-command to Dr Barbara.
Canine was forever striding around the ship, helping Captain Wu with the navigation, supervising the stores, eager to land on Saint-Esprit and find relief for the petty bunion of the heart that had sent him to Africa and South America on his missionary jaunts. During one of his inspection rounds he casually displayed to Dr Barbara the chromium-plated pistol in his suitcase. Seeing that he had horrified her, he promised to hurl it into the sea, but the next day Neil noticed that it still lay in its black German holster.
For all his high-minded sentiments, Carline was not above certain small deceits. Shortly before they sailed, his Waikiki hotel delivered a crate of expensive canned goods to the Dugong. This picnic hamper sat under his bunk, guarded by a conspicuous bronze padlock. Although he collected his full daily ration of food from the galley -alternating stew and corned-beef hash prepared by the Filipino chef, who had worked for the American navy at the Subik Bay base -
Carline smiled without embarrass ment when Dr Barbara caught him having a private snack of p t
� � and quails’ breasts. Her eyebrows almost touched her hairline as she pondered this display of a rich man’s easy arrogance, but like the Christian missionaries in their up-country stations she valued his energy and determination, and decided to tolerate this quirk of character.
Unsure of Carline despite beating him at chess, Neil tried to make himself useful to Monique, and helped her to prepare the daily commentary on the voyage which she recorded for a radio station in Toulon. However, her irritation with herself over the smallest slip of the tongue and her relentless attacks on her country’s ecological policies soon wearied Neil. Reluctant to join Kimo in his earnest pounding of the deck, he found himself in the chart-room with the Bracewells and Pratap, reduced to watching the endless video footage that the film crew had collected. Neil soon noticed that the camera went out of its way to stress his youth and gaucheness as he stared heavy-browed at the sky, a simpleton puzzled by his first sea-bird. Dr Barbara and nd down the bridge like a pair of tipsy spinsters.
‘Mark, are you going to show this film?’ he asked, wondering)ow Louise and his mother would respond to the footage. ‘It’s cally weird - we all look drunk, or brain-dead.’
‘Neil, come on…’ Bracewell joined in the laughter but lanced at his wife in a telling way. He and Janet were a pleasant ut secretive couple, always cheerfully on the move around the hip and rather more interested in the expedition members than the plight of the albatross. ‘We can’t dress you up in shining our.’ Why not?
Dr Barbara’s completely serious.’ We know that. Look, I admire her, but why pretend she’s Albert Schweitzer? Neil, the whole point of the trip is that you and the others are a cross-section of everyday life - seven people with practically nothing in common who meet up on a street corner and decide to stop a bully beating his dog to th.’ Exactly, Neil,’ Janet agreed, offering him an extra helping of vpaw as a pacifier. ‘The real story is right here on this ship. it’s you and Monique and the Saitos… Irving knows that.’
‘So you’re really making a documentary about us - not about he albatross?’
‘You seven, and the albatross,’ Bracewell explained. ‘Let’s face you’ve got some pretty strange reasons for being here.’ Does that matter? The important thing is saving the birds.’ He was surprised to hear himself defending the albatross.
‘You make it sound like a sitcom - “The Dugong and the Albatross.” lanet, it isn’t a joke. The French-‘
‘Of course it isn’t ajoke.‘Janet touched his nose with a creamy ringer-tip.
‘You know that better than anyone else, Neil.’ They were fond of Neil, and happy to argue with him all day.
But Neil realized that Irving Boyd and the Bracewells saw the voyage to Saint-Esprit as a safari to save an endangered species, perhaps the most threatened of all - Dr Barbara Rafferty and her innocent enthusiasts.
Smoke rose from the island, lifting from the runway beyond the screen of palms. It drifted past the camera-towers and lay against the steam-drenched hill-slopes, stirring the shaggy leaves of the silence like a string of fire-crackers, and a vivid copper light shone through the palms, isolating the hundreds of tree-trunks.
A glowing wind moved across the atoll, and thrashed the dusty vegetation into a tempest of burning dust. A fuel tank had shock wave rolled over the swells and drummed against the Dugong, vibrating the rail between Neil’s hands. Carline and Kimo had broken off their harassment of the Champlain and sped towards the trawler.
‘Captain Wu! The Sagittaire is back!’
He pointed to the north-west horizon. The French corvette was the Dugong. On the bridge Captain Wu spoke to the engine room, hands resting palm-upwards on the rail as if he accepted the campaign, and would promptly lead to the seizure of the Du’oni and his own arrest. Kimo had sneaked ashore several airstrip depot where some thirty French soldiers lived in tents pitched under the palms, safely away from the stench of the clear purpose anchorage in the lagoon, leaving the corvette to deal with the Dugong. Neil sprinted along the deck to the stern hoist, and “
Filipino crewmen for the speedboat to reappear.
The fuel fire had subsided, and Saint-Esprit had drawn a curtain of tattered smoke around itself. Neil listened to the laboured churning of the trawler’s elderly diesels, and prayed that the Dugong’s hull-plates would be strong enough to resist the sharp prow of the Sagittaire.
The speedboat swerved sharply from the reef, escorted by the two inflatables.
Dr Barbara’s chalky face shone like a lantern He helped Vionique to vomit over the side. Within moments the three craft ostled alongside, everyone shouting at once, their cheeks flushed vith excitement, like a party of students returning from a rag-kjape.
Neil! I wish you’d been with us!’ Dr Barbara clambered up the way and seized his shoulders. ‘Monique blew up a fuel tank, vhole island’s on fire! Are you proud of us?’ am proud of you, Dr Barbara.’; ood - I want you to be. Remember, you and I were here I rs t.’ Still holding Neil around the waist, she stared in a happy daze to the smoke that hung over Saint-Esprit, a plague spectre, catching the palms. The Filipino crewmen swung the speedboat onto the deck, while Carline and Kimo waited their turn in the H tables, fists clenched over their heads.
But already eyes were turning towards the corvette, now only hundred yards away, its bows cutting brusquely through ric waves.
Annoyed with herself, Monique was still retching over her life-jacket, its yellow panels stained with the red wine Hie had drunk to bolster her courage.
> Professor Saito and his pale wife stood by the speedboat, clinging to its side as if aware that or the first time in their lives they had lost control of their c!
Jlotions. on ramming the Dugong. Diesel exhaust pumped from the rawler’s funnel as Captain Wu rang ‘ahead’ and ‘more ahead’ to He engine-room. Driven by the following sea, the vessel moved ut of the corvette’s path, but the French commander again mmcd his bearing, bows fixed on the Dugong.
Sirens blared from the corvette’s bridge and a signal lamp ished in their faces as the warship ran alongside, its heavy ui!! shouldering the trawler out of its way. It sheared past in a cream of iron, stripping away a section of the starboard rail id crushing the wooden gangway to matchwood. Its wake verturned Kimo’s inflatable, and the Hawaiian was swimming the seething water, trying to grasp Carline’s outstretched nc!.
Dislodged by the impact, a carapace of lead paint fell from the trawler’s funnel and shattered on the deck. Neil, Monique and the roar of the diesels and the harsh braying of the corvette’s ” The Bracewells were first to recover, their camera recording decking. Neil steadied himself against the satellite dish, wonder ing how long it would take them to swim ashore. At high water more than fifty yards?
Dr Barbara climbed onto a life-raft in the bows, screaming abuse at the corvette as it overtook them.
She brushed the spray-drenched hair from her mouth, exposing an ugly bruise above her lip, and helped Monique onto the raft beside her. Vocal chords numbed by her anger, the life-jacket whose harness she had demonstrated so many times in the aisles of her flung the jacket onto the deck. Raising her cotton shirt, she exposed her right breast to the bored sailors who looked down from the corvette’s bridge.
The Sagittaire swept past, its commander signalling to Captain Wu to cut his engines, and Monique turned to the helicopter that young pilot.
Ignoring the corvette, Captain Wu was heading for the open sea, dragging the inflatables across the steepening waves. When dinghy passed Kimo he seized the dented float, righted the craft with his huge arms and wrestled himself aboard. He and Carljne straddled their outboards as they leapt through the his balance, but the years of competitive power-boating at Determined to make a third attack on the trawler, the Sagit- ” captain bore down on them, and the corvette swept towards Dugong on a fast sea. Mark Bracewell steadied docking-bridge,)I1 blasts from the sky.
,‘ell! Get back! Leave the film!’ r Barbara was shouting as the two ships sheared past each icr in a clamour of sirens and signal lights. The corvette’s stern ose on the trawler’s bow-wave, and the outer edge of the clicopter platform scythed along the starboard deck of the)iiong and struck the docking-bridge from its steel mounting.
wall of surging water threw Bracewell between the colliding ulls and hurled him into the broken wake of the trawler. hrough the roar of sirens and the erratic flashing of the signal imps Neil saw the shattered camera strike the stern of
the)rvette and plunge into the sea.
Captain Wu stopped his engines and let the Dugong drift wards the reef.
Everyone stood on the rolling deck among the ctions of twisted railing, staring into the torn water a hundred irds behind the trawler, where Bracewell’s deflated life-jacket v slackly on the dark sea. Professor Saito and Pratap seized the istraught Janet when she tried to clamber over the stern. The clicopter withdrew, as if the pilot no longer wished to involve mself in the confrontation, but on a signal from the corvette he turned to the scene and hovered over the floating jacket.
While Monique comforted the weeping woman, pressing net’s head to her exposed breast, Kimo and Carline started their itboards and set off for the circle of water dented by the iwndraught of the helicopter. Through the seething air, stained smoke and engine exhaust, Neil could smell the stench of ad albatross from the beaches of Saint-Esprit and see the inera-towers of the nuclear lagoon, giant pieces ready to play cir roles in an even more deadly game.
Re searched for Dr Barbara, worried that she too had been lost erboard. But she was standing alone by the satellite dish below c bridge, her back to the helicopter and the speeding in tables. Bandeau raised above her pale forehead, she stared at c captain of the Sagittaire with the same expression that she had 1lflfl t!c Frcnc!i crc 5 Island People THE TWIN-ENGINEI) PIPER was preparing to land, circling the lagoon as the pilot inspected the coral-surfaced runway and the ruptured fuel tank still leaking a sooty smoke among the trees. A platoon of French soldiers waited at the runway’s edge, gazing at the dead fish and albatross which a work party from the Sagittaire were burying in the sand. They stepped back as the Piper swept in, clouds of dust blanching the parasols of the palm trees with an arctic whiteness that might have been spray-painted for this funereal occasion.
Standing outside the prayer-shack between Kimo and Dr Barbara, an albatross banner draped over his arm, Neil listened to Monique as she sobbed and swore, pushing away the Saitos and Carline when they tried to comfort her. He watched the Piper come to rest at the far end of the runway, aware like everyone else that its arrival at Saint-Esprit marked their own departure.
A few feet from Neil, the American cameraman lay in his open grave, coffin draped in the Stars and Stripes and intricately decorated with albatross wing-feathers. Neil had helped Mrs Saito to fold the pleats, and was glad that Bracewell was being laid to rest among the wild yams and sweet potatoes, on this quiet headland overlooking the dunes where the albatross had once reared their young. He remembered his father’s funeral and the eerie non-denominational service in the north London crematorium, with its sliding coffin and remote-controlled curtains, and his mother gasping as the teak doors briefly re opened before closing for the last time.
1d tried to protect, and in full view of a larger world. Four light rcraft were parked under the trees beside the Piper, chartered v French and American journalists. They waited with their meras, drinking the beer which two stewards from the Sait-served from a makeshift bar. ainbed by Bracewell’s death, no-one aboard the Dugong had prepared for the world-wide outcry. By chance, the ioirient of collision between the trawler and the corvette had en relayed live to Honolulu, and the desperate film, ending in a st explosion of spray and steel, showed all too clearly the wrderous intent of the Sagittaire’s captain. The film’s abrupt iiale, as the camera was snatched from Bracewell’s hands, had: a red the consciences of millions of viewers. With remarkable resence of mind, his tearful widow had ordered Pratap to bring reserve camera from the chart-room, and coldly insisted on: cording the search for his body. Standing beside her crushed usband as he lay on the deck, she filmed the Dugong when it ran round on the reef. Captain Wu had loyally followed the orders dioed from his billionaire owner in Honolulu, and the closing insmission showed the camera jolted from the widow’s mbling arms.
Wary though they were of the albatros expedition, animal hts groups in the United States and Western Europe greeted tragic television pictures with angry demonstrations that.-“! led the streets of Washington, Paris and London.
Embarrassed the over-zealous commander of the corvette, and reminded of ic threat
to tourist revenues, the French Defence Ministry dered the captain to allow the expedition members to remain Saint-Esprit until the American had been buried on the island, his widow insisted. In a last concession his parents - a nolulu dentist and his wife - were flown from Tahiti in ac bereaved couple stepped onto the runway, helped by another officer from the Sagittaire. They stared at the shabby palms idc the lagoon. already noticing the stench of dead birds. As Dr Barbara stepped forward, clearing her throat of the corrosive coral dust and oil fumes, Neil tried to hold her arm, worried that she might exploit the occasion for the benefit of the watching journalists.
But the death had calmed her. In the minutes after the fatal collision, when it was still not certain that Bracewell had drowned, she had done her best to reassure everyone on board the Dugong. Later, when a French boarding party arrested Captain Wu on the bridge of the grounded trawler, she restrained the an
gry Kimo from mounting a single-handed assault on the corvette. Carline had promptly volunteered to join him, offering the Hawaiian his chrome-plated pistol, but Dr Barbara seized the weapon from his hands.
‘That isn’t the way, David. I know how you feel, but we’ll lose everything we’ve gained.’
‘Barbara…!‘For once, Carline seemed baffled by her show of weakness. ‘We must do something - the French killed that poor fellow. God almighty, I gave up everything to come here.’
‘And you’ll have to give more! Far more than you imagine. We have world opinion on our side, so why throw it away?’
‘World opinion?’ Canine bared his expensive teeth, so unlike Dr Barbara’s snaggled incisors. ‘And another handy martyr.
Sometimes I think..
‘David?’ She handed him the pistol, the bruise flaring on her upper lip, but Carline had calmed himself. As if withdrawing into his money, he retreated to the chart-room, where he had moved his picnic hamper, bedding and suitcase from the water-filled cabin.
As the Dugong settled on the reef, splitting its keel-plates, the sea soon flooded the engine-room, and the Filipino crew joined Captain Wu aboard the Sagittaive. Monique and Dr Barbara stowed their kit in the bridge-house, while the Saitos camped in the galley with their precious taxonomic library, journals crammed among the skillets and saucepans. Kimo dozed in the cockpit of the speedboat, Captain Wu’s golf-clubs within reach, ready to deal with any midnight French boarder.
Sedated by Dr Barbara, an almost sleepwalking Janet Bracewell accepted the invitation of the corvette’s captain to rest aboard his ship. She took Pratap with her, leaving their equipment in the iart-room, and on the miniature, battery-powered monitor ell watched a recording of the film that her husband had taken f the raid on the island.
This showed the earnest saboteurs, led by Monique and Dr; arbara, racing across the runway like adventure-holiday corn iandos. They laid their incendiary flares outside the store oms, ignited the wooden armature of the fuel tank with the lolotov cocktails, and released two reluctant basset hounds ‘gimental mascots that Monique termed ‘experimental animals’ from their quiet kennels. Unable to cope with the noise and plosions, and frightened by the cannibal gulls devouring the: ad albatross on the beach, they returned to their shady dens at irst opportunity.
Rushing to Paradise Page 7
