rprisingly, no-one was guarding the base. The French en ‘rs were working on the eastern edge of the atoll, laying own a system of landing lights, and the few remaining soldiers d climbed the peak in order to observe the duel between the rvette and the Dugong.
As Neil switched off the monitor he noticed Canine standing hind him, watching the fire-ball of the fuel-tank flare against carded faces of the saboteurs. isappointed, Neil? It’s not exactly what you hoped for. ivid?’ oo bad…I guess there won’t be a nuclear test at Saint it. But maybe Dr Barbara can arrange a different kind of tr IC [Ail-I’ll party StooU by the open grave. laces!
lIddel1 by the adow of the prayer-shack, the captain of the Sagitta ire and two his
officers waited while the camera-men from the American ws agencies recorded the sombre scene. The lenses panned ross the runway, taking in the restive Frenchmen, the tong-chinned Dr Barbara and her party of protesters, and then gered over the rotting albatross on the beach below the ancient)ckhouses and towers of the nuclear test-site. Bracewell’s n had already attracted the attention of a small bush-rat, and I chaplain rapidly concluded his service. Soil flew through the air as the corvette’s captain spoke briefly to the dead man’s widow and parents.
With a last stricken gesture at the closing grave, the three relatives turned and set off along the runway towards the waiting Piper. The burial party dispersed.
Staring lightheadedly at the whitened trees, Professor Saito wandered towards the beach, followed by his scowling wife. With his bamboo cane he struck at the voracious gulls tugging at the carcasses of the albatross.
Monique ran after the Sagittaire’s captain, her caustic tones lost in the downdraught of the helicopter coming in to land. Within moments the captain had returned to the corvette, while a junior officer supervised the departure of the Piper.
It took off ten minutes later, leaving Dr Barbara still standing beside the grave, as if this trapdoor into eternity was now the expedition’s only refuge. The corvette’s launch was moored by the pier, its engine running, and the French soldiers were waiting for them to board the Sagittaire for the return journey to Papeete and whatever charges the Ministry of Defence in Paris chose to bring against them.
‘Dr Barbara…’ Neil tried to wake her, aware that all the blood had drained from her face. ‘What happens now? The French have won.’ Dr Barbara held his head to her shoulder, and wiped her wet sleeve against his cheek, tears perfumed with Monique’s borrowed mascara. ‘They can’t win, Neil. They can never win.
Remember that.’
‘We have to leave - Professor Saito and the French captain agreed. What will you do, Dr Barbara?’
‘I don’t know, I haven’t been able to think..
Neil could feel the air sighing from her chest. The bones that once carried her strong neck had been numbed by Bracewell’s death. Like Neil, she was aware that all her hopes of saving the albatross had been buried with the cameraman in this island grave.
‘We could work for Irving at the Wild-Water sanctuary,’ Neil suggested. ‘I can leave my big swim until next year.’
‘I’m sure your mother will want you in Atlanta, Neil. Are you going to miss me? Who will I have to boss around?’ ou’ll find someone, Dr Barbara.’,, -, spite himself, Neil felt responsible for her. The French idiers were eager to escort them to the launch, and the fatigue arty had given up the pretence of burying the dead albatross and ere throwing broken eggs at each other. The last of the press ianes took off, sending a cloud of coral dust through the trees. It cvelled out and circled the stranded Dugong, and then set course r Tahiti, soon losing itself in the steam from the corvette’s innel.
‘Dr Rafferty… ‘ Carline called out. He was decorating the arker cross with frangipani he had plucked from a shrub beside rayer-shack. ‘Ask everyone to come back. ‘ x’hat is it, David? We’re going now. ‘ J like to say a few words. I didn’t know Mark too well, but tilt the team to hear what I think - it might help them. ‘
All right - Professor Saito, Monique… David has some-. iing to tell us.’ They stood around the grave while Carline gazed at the angipani, waiting as Monique fondled the wound-red flowers.
Strong arms crossed over his chest, hands shielding his testicles, he ccrned to be back among his native congregations in Africa or ii America, his voice barely audible in the wind. efore we go, let’s think of Mark, first, and then think of clves. Contrary to the general belief, no-one’s death dimin us. Nature in its wisdom created death to give each of us unique sense of life. We’re not part of the main. Each of us an island, every bit as real as Saint-Esprit, and death is the price ” irno here, we’re all island people - Barbara and Monique, rofessor Saito and Miko, and especially young Neil, dreaming out another kind of island. Mark
Bracewell lived for twenty yen years, and his island still floats in the sea of time and ace…
Embarrassed, Neil waited for Carline’s homily to end. Flurries emotion plucked at the American’s voice, and he wondered if rline had joined the missionary fathers in order to indulge a rious graveside hobby. Perhaps those who died from sleeping rellow fever and malaria made this insecure Boston aristocrat feel momentarily confident, fully aware of himself for the first time. In his way he was colonizing, not the living of the third world, but the dead within their graves.
As a French petty officer strode up to them he felt Dr Barbara nudge his arm.
‘Right, Neil, we’ll go now. I think David’s finished. But we’ll be back.’ She spoke bravely, shaking her head over the dead albatross and the camera-towers as they walked towards the waiting launch.
Neil visualized the muted reception that would greet them in Honolulu, and could already see her trying to rally her failed crusade, abandoned by supporters who would soon move to other causes. Kimo would commit himself to the quest for a native Hawaiian kingdom, and Monique would campaign for her doomed bears. He imagined Dr Barbara in her threadbare dress, haunting the Waikiki hotels with her satchel of faded leaflets.
He took her hand, touching the calluses on her worn fingers.
He inhaled the tired scent of her skin and thought again of the notion that had been forming in his mind. Perhaps he could marry Dr Barbara, if only to keep her out of harm’s way.
‘Dr Barbara..
‘Yes, Neil?’
‘There’s something I wanted to say… about us.’
‘Go on. I know you’ll surprise me.’ Neil searched the horizon for inspiration, avoiding the grey threat of the Sagittaire’s bows, its paintwork scarred by its collision with the Dugong. Beyond the trawler he noticed a white triangle leaning on the rollers as they swept towards the reef. Behind it were three more masts, jib-sails pointing towards Saint-Esprit.
‘Come on, Neil. Time to leave the island.’
‘Perhaps not, Dr Barbara…‘Neil pointed to the approaching craft. Already a signal lamp flashed from the bridge of the corvette. The helicopter rose from its landing platform and turned towards the sea.
Everyone searched the wind. Kimo stood in the launch, fending off the French sailors who tried to seat him, and threw his baseball cap into the lagoon. Monique broke off her embittered harangue of the soldiers on the pier, and Professor Saito steered his wife’s rue reef. A flotilla of small craft had materialized On! the sun-lit mist and was advancing upon Saint-Esprit.
‘Neil, wake up!’ Canine ran past them, gesturing like a ‘ranged magician at the sea. ‘Barbara, open your eyes, for s sake.’
What is it, David?’ You’re not alone now. Look - the world’s come to save the albatross!
The View from a Camera-Tower
‘Neil, stand clear! She’s going now!’ Far below, David Canine was shouting through the roar of the bulldozer’s engine as Neil ran down the path which the French engineers had cut in the hillside. He was breathless after climbing the radio mast with the tow-rope around his waist, and stumbled over a rotting palmetto. He pressed his rust-stained hands against his knees and gasped at the air, waiting for his lungs
to catch up with him. Canine was reversing the bulldozer across the airstrip, and the rope stiffened above the forest canopy, frayed threads snapping and spinning. After working all morning with a hacksaw, Kimo had severed three ofthe steel struts supporting the tower, but the first attempt to topple the mast
-the visible symbol of French dominion over Saint-Esprit - had ended in fiasco when he failed to secure the rope, fearing that his huge body would buckle the weakened
structure.
Keen to impress Canine, who had commandeered the bulldozer and christened it his ‘dune buggy’, Neil promptly volunteered to take Kimo’s place. Ignoring his bloody shins, he climbed to within a few feet of the aircraft warning light and fastened the rope to the metal shroud.
‘Kimo, where’s the boy? Neil, she’s coming down..
Already the mast was straining against the sky, its lattice emitting a medley of plaintive cries. Neil reached the foot of the path and sprinted through the ferns towards the runway, flakes of rust from his hands speckling the lilies and morning glory that flowered around the perimeter of the camp. Led by Dr Barbara, a crowd had gathered on the beach. They cheered and clapped as the tiled from its plinth, and urged on the bulldozer when its icks slewed in the milled coral.
Carline stood at the controls, orking the brake levers with his frantic hands like a fairground rganist grappling with a berserk calliope. His cotton fatigues ere covered with oil and sweat, but the same high gleam shone iom his eyes that Neil had seen when Carline first mastered the ulidozers controls and crushed the French storage huts.
Neil reached the camera-tower by the runway as the mast cgan its free fall across the sky. Hurling the trees aside, it swept uwn the wooded slope in a storm of dust and insects, struck a va outcrop and broke into two sections. Baseball caps and “iuamas rose into the air as Carline dragged the upper segment: ross the runway like the carcass of a vanquished giant.
Everyone ran towards the mast, taking turns to stamp on the rcraft warning light and shatter its quartz lens, determined to put out this cyclopean eye that had gazed down on them during 1c three-week occupation of Saint-Esprit. Toppling the radio ast, Neil well knew, was more than a moral victory. They had uW blocked the runway, preventing any fixed-wing aircraft orn landing a surprise commando force.
Unsettled by the mast’s demolition, a dozen wandering batrossircled the peak, keeping a safe distance from the crowd histling to them. Neil was glad to see that the great birds had un to return to Saint-Esprit. He lay back on the warm uicrete roof of the camera-tower, smiling at the albatross as cy soared effortlessly on the thermals. When they swooped er the reef, where the Dugong lay impaled, he searched the lipty sky for any high-level aircraft, and then turned to watch - c hectic activity on the beach.
Faking their cue from Dr Barbara, the volunteers were wing back to the tasks she had assigned them. There was no)rtage of helpers - more than twenty yachts and ocean cruisers: re now moored in the lagoon, their crews eager to defend the And against the imminent naval landing.
No-one was sure when the French military would return, but lost certainly they would put on a show of force intended to cr mv future environmentalists from coming to Saint-Esprit. mipathizers who had sailed from Tahiti and the Marquesas were themselves French, which made them even more attractive targets for the soldiers’ truncheons and tear gas.
Heads would be cracked, and some of Dr Barbara’s older supporters might be seriously injured. Twenty feet from Neil, wearing their identical straw hats, were Major Anderson and his wife, a gentle Australian couple in their late sixties, quietly laying the cement bricks of the miniature aqueduct that would carry water from the stream to the reservoir beside the runway. They worked silently in the heat and mosquitoes, never complaining though always glad to talk to Neil. They had sailed their small sloop from Papeete, loaded with food and medical supplies for the albatross expedition. Neil feared for them, wondering how they would survive the violence which the French activists from the schooner Croix du Sud would do their best to provoke.
Six well-muscled men and three voluble young women, they were working beside the pier, filling the steel cargo-lighter with rocks and cement blocks that they moved in a makeshift cart from the beach. They intended to sink the craft in the largest of the reef entrances, so excluding the Champlain if it tried to return to Saint-Esprit.
It still puzzled Neil that the French naval force had left at all. In the first uneasy week after Bracewell’s burial a grudging truce had prevailed, tempers on both sides calmed by the huge oil slick that spilled from the hull of the Dugong. After two days of heavy seas its fuel tanks had ruptured, but by then the old shrimp trawler had done its job. The three yachts that arrived as Dr Barbara was about to be ferried to captivity aboard the Sagitfaire were followed that afternoon by a further half-dozen protest craft. A sit-down demonstration took place on the beach, each of the crews protecting a member of Dr Barbara’s team from the confused soldiers, arms locked together against the raised batons, while other yachtsmen relayed to the world’s air-waves a moving eye-witness report of the incident. The crackling short-wave message, reminiscent of the last transmissions from the besieged Dien Bien Phu, depicted Dr Barbara and her beleaguered group clinging to the oil-soaked beaches among the bodies of the poisoned albatross, threatened by the impatient guns of the corvette.
Suprisingly, the exhausted captain ot the Sagaitarius made no attempt to seize the protesters, and the soldiers returned to their ivouac beside the runway.
Later they learned that the French rime minister and several members of his cabinet had beenjeered rid jostled at an election rally in Paris, and that the American State)epartment had recalled its ambassador to discuss Bracewell’s cath.
Meanwhile Dr Barbara and her companions sat it out on the each, gagging on the stench of diesel oil and dead fish, in a shanty wn of chart-room furniture, galley stores, dismantled bunks rid TV equipment which Kimo and Carline ferried from the “1)iigong. Monique restlessly stalked the runway, berating the)Idlers who read their girlie magazines and refused to be ovoked. Professor Saito catalogued the dozens of plant and riimal species which the oil slick threatened with extinction, hile his wife and Dr Barbara bathed the injured sea-birds in ickets filled with detergent.
Neil held the dying birds for them, lumps of greasy mucilage d feathers, aware that the exposure sores on Dr Barbara’s lips cl reappeared. After three cold nights on the beach, he crossed c runway to the lagoon and swam out to the nearest of the ichts, a ketch owned by a New Zealand engineer and his wife.
Concerned that the expedition had lost most of its supplies in the stricken trawler, they rowed Neil back to the beach with a large carton of fresh fruit, vitamin supplements and mosquito repellent.
But Dr Barbara was too distracted to thank them. She lay cntly on the black sand and picked at the calluses on her hands, if aware that her dream had ended, accepting that the French mId soon tire of their presence on Saint-Esprit and were merely iiting for the media hubbub to die down.
Even David Canine had lost heart, sitting on the ashy beach side his hamper, the dead birds at his feet. Avoiding Monique’s -IS, he unlocked the hamper and handed the last of his cans to Neil, who passed them around the expedition members.
Silently they consumed the pat s, truffles andfoiegras, the rare cheeses and
�
pickled eggs. Later, Carline set off for the pier, ostensibly to send a message to his wife by short-wave radio, but in fact to see if he cete. The next morning they woke into the cold mist that clung to the dripping parasols of the forest, and found that the French had gone.
Three yachts had arrived during the night, anchoring within the reef, and their crews stood on deck, searching for any signs of the corvette. Both the Champlain and the Sagittaire had raised steam and slipped away under cover of darkness. The engineers and soldiers guarding the runway had also vanished, taking their basset hounds, weapons and galley equipment with them.
Overnight Saint-Esprit
had become a stage-set whose cast had disappeared in mid-drama, carrying away every copy of the prompt-script.
Dazed by the sight of the deserted camp, Dr Barbara led everyone to the airstrip. Joined by the yacht-crews who were coming ashore, they wandered past the abandoned latrines, across the scuffed ground where the tents had once been pitched, now littered with old newspapers and cigarette packets. They tested the open doors of the empty storage sheds, and Kirno found a coil of telephone wire which he slung protectively across his chest, guarding the secret calls concealed
within these devious spirals. Like children in an empty school, they glanced uneasily at the eye of the radio mast high above them.
Neil broke the spell, aiming a stone through a window of a storage shed.
Monique and Mrs Saito joined him, and within a few excited moments every pane had been shattered. The women shouted each other on, and for an hour led a delirious rampage around the camp, destroying anything that might be of use to the returning military. Only when Carline started the engine of the bulldozer and began to flatten the storage sheds had Dr Barbara called a halt.
Flushed and happy, she pointed to the radio mast. A huge white bird with black wing-tips had approached the island from the sea and now soared in a wide circle around the peak.
The first of the wandering albatross had returned to Saint Esprit.
remembering this signal moment, the fruit of all Dr Barbara’s reams, Neil dozed on the concrete roof and watched the great irds sailing above the forest, their solemn eyes searching for the wished radio mast. Their reappearance across the empty skies the south Pacific had given a new confidence to both Dr irbara and the volunteers flocking to Saint-Esprit. A silver tilled ketch was entering the lagoon, a banner draped from its tivo Albatross! Bravo Dr Rafferty! Bravo Neil Dempsey!’: il listened to the rattle of the anchor chain. Aware that he the only person on the island not working to save the nctuary, he climbed from the roof of the camera-tower. Like; eryone else, he found himself repeatedly peering at the sky, iiting for a tell-tale vapour trail that might mark a high-altitude connaissance plane.
Rushing to Paradise Page 8
