Dead Sea

by Peter Tonkin

  At Hunter College High, Liberty rose through Sophomore to Senior – from five-eight to a whisker under six feet tall – at the head of her class, captaining the girls’ lacrosse and fencing teams and the mixed debating team, easily holding her own against the boys. She fitted in with all sorts of ethnicities and backgrounds easily as a United Nations rep. On the side, she joined the Manhattan Sailing Club and continued to work her way up through the sailing classes and responsibilities towards keelboat skipper. Her academic studies in science, maths, languages and English were outstanding. But they paled beside her grasp of economics and business concepts examined in the social studies programmes, and in the summer schools she tried to fit into her busy schedule. And her SATs scores were simply phenomenal. She seemed destined to follow Meryl Streep to Vassar, Katherine Hepburn to Bryn Mawr or Elizabeth Arden and Oprah Winfrey to Harvard.

  But no. The irresistibly headstrong Liberty vanished eastwards once again to the London Business School, then ranked first in the world. Here, studying in classrooms overlooking Regent’s Park and safely bedded down in the familiar Greenbaum International company flat in Mayfair, the tall, slim bundle of Yankee energy enlivened her studies by starting the Americas Club, then joining the acting, business, wine and women’s touch rugby clubs. In the absence of an LBS fencing club, she joined the Central London Fencing Club in Westminster, where she polished up her skills with foil, epee and sabre. And she joined the LBS sailing club, thus reacquainting herself with the Solent and the Heritage Mariner facilities – and vessels – nearby. With Doc and with Florence. And with Katapult.

  Liberty graduated from the London Business School top of her class as usual, with grades that almost embarrassed her tutors. Consequently, she would have been welcome to take her MBA anywhere in the world – let alone anywhere in the States. But The Leland Stanford Junior University of Palo Alto, California, had always been part of the plan because of the sailing there. And also because, in the interim, Stanford had just pipped LBS to the position of top grad school for business in the world.

  Even had Liberty not been something of a legend, now, after whipping the Navy into second place and lifting the Rose Bowl last January, it would have been no trouble for her to make links between the Stanford and UBC Sailing Clubs, as the troupe of faithful UBC undergrads around her proved clearly enough. She hadn’t even needed to call on Greenbaum International’s Vancouver headquarters for help. In many of the circles she moved in now, her name carried more weight than her father’s.

  But, she had admitted during her speech to the Royal Yacht Club – and the media – that she felt she hadn’t done much since arriving in Vancouver. Nothing, in fact, beyond fitting and supplying Flint, shaking her down and pulling the four-woman crew into shape. Not that the crew had needed much pulling. Maya MacArthur was in the Stanford sailing club with her; Emma Toda and Bella Chung-Wolf were old adversaries from USC who knew their sailing inside out from fighting them through regatta after regatta, mostly across San Francisco Bay. But the fitting and supplying, chandlering and victualling had been slow work. In spite of all the careful pre-preparation, the chandleries, ships’ stores and supermarkets had fought to supply not so much what she needed, but what she needed in the quantity, size and weight required to ballast her temperamental command.

  Flint was unique. Her name arose out of the fact that her hull was made of specially strengthened and treated polystyrene. Like her famous precursor Plastiki, a twenty-metre, two-masted, three-man ketch with a hull made of plastic bottles, her name was to be a play on words. In Plastiki’s case an elision of Plastic Kontiki. In Flint’s case, the emphasis on POLYstyrene. And the most famous nautical polly the team could think of was Long John Silver’s parrot Captain Flint in R.L. Stevenson’s Treasure Island. So Captain Flint she had become. Then plain Flint for short. But her hull needed vary careful weighting and packing, for it was as buoyant as a Styrofoam coffee cup. And, when her sails were full, as unsteady.

  The weather had been bad enough to slow things further, and it showed no sign of easing now. But at least they were nearly at the Jericho Sailing Club. Liberty came striding past the tennis courts and round on to the sailing centre, with the bedraggled but buoyant students trooping after her. And as the crowd of youngsters came down through the centre itself towards the long single finger of the jetty, two things happened at once.

  Flint came in out of the grey misty rain, materializing like a ghost ship as she slid silently towards the outer end of the quay, the flapping of her big white mainsail lost beneath the cheer that the students gave now they had sight of her at last. And the familiar, world-famous figure of Nic Greenbaum materialized, equally ghostly, at the inner end of the pier. Liberty was distracted from the breathtaking sight of her command for the instant it took him to sweep her into his icy, sodden embrace. His short grey beard scraped comfortably against her cheek. ‘Hiya, Daddy,’ she said, her eyes suddenly prickling with an intensity of emotion she had not thought to feel.

  ‘You don’t think I’d have missed this?’ he teased, releasing her and twirling her round to slip a long arm over her shoulder.

  ‘I was beginning to wonder. Wouldn’t you have been happier at the Royal Yacht Club?’ She glanced back across Jericho Park to the distant golden glimmer of the building she had just left.

  ‘Naaw . . .’ He drew the negative out lazily. ‘This isn’t about the glad-handing and the publicity. You’ve taken care of that in spades. This is just about a proud Poppa wanting to wave bye-bye to his little girl. Mom sends her love. Sent this too . . .’ He hefted a case that looked promisingly nautical and practical. ‘Just what you need to slip under your Helly Hansen, I’d say.’

  As he spoke, Nic was hurrying his daughter down the quay towards the sailing boat as she swung against her mooring line, waiting for her skipper and high water. Ten minutes later she was aboard, having stopped off in the little quayside shower facility to empty the bag of the matched set of Helly Hansen sailing gear – several layers of it – and fill it with sodden haute couture and mud-smeared leopard-skin leather.

  ‘You on a Yachting Monthly photoshoot?’ asked Maya, as she scrambled aboard into the cockpit, almost as expensively attired here as she had been in the Royal Yacht Club.

  ‘Mother,’ explained Liberty, embarrassed. ‘But we could all be on some kind of photoshoot. I don’t trust my dad at all . . .’

  ‘We could cast off now and slip away,’ tempted Maya as she handed over the big yachting helm. ‘We’re all rigged and ready.’

  ‘That’d be cheating . . .’ Liberty hesitated uncharacteristically.

  ‘Too late anyway,’ chimed in Bella Chung-Wolf, calling up from her electronic equipment console down in the cabin. ‘We’re at high water now.’

  ‘Off we go, then!’ ordered Liberty with no further ado. Emma Toda cast off at the bows and Maya ratcheted the mainsail tight. The squall coming in past the Royal Yacht Club took Flint at once and the wheel kicked into life under Liberty’s hands while the kids on the Jericho pier cheered her away.

  Flint was maybe half a mile out into English Bay with Bella calling up headings, when the first of the press-packed Greenbaum International helicopters came swooping down into camera range.

  Tuvalu

  The helicopters thundered in low enough to make Richard look up from the shallow cavity of Katapult’s cockpit, where he was adjusting the aft anchors to hold her in the natural dock just deep enough to accommodate her three keels. ‘Now that,’ he called to Robin, ‘is what I call high water . . .’

  ‘Very funny,’ Robin retorted from the needle sharp bow of the central hull. She shaded her eyes with her right hand and looked up past the white tube of the tight-furled foresail, following his gaze up towards the New Zealand Air Force choppers which were laden with fresh water for the drought-stricken island.

  ‘NOT,’ added Florence Weary, also calling back from the slim, smooth whaleback of the forecastle, her gaze also reaching up past the tall main mast with its
cross-trees etched against the hard blue of the clear, hot sky. ‘The guys on the islands are dying of thirst, you know? It’s not a joking matter, Richard.’

  ‘Well it looks like the closest to high water we’ll get,’ Richard riposted cheerfully, if hardly sensitively, moving back beneath the light awning he had rigged as a sunshade earlier and gesturing over the side at Te Namo Lagoon which occupied the centre of the tiny island nation’s principal atoll. ‘If this water was any lower we could run the world land speed championships here instead of the flats at Salt Lake.’

  Rohini Verma looked up from the computer console to the right of the main cabin six steps down, behind and beneath the watertight doors that were designed to close below the main navigating position when the vessel was under full sail. She pushed her glasses back up her long nose and dabbed at the sweat beading her upper lip. The fitful breeze that cooled Richard and made the awning flap occasionally didn’t reach down there. ‘You know very well that high water will come. It is a tidal thing. Nothing to do with global warming or Doctor Tanaka’s plughole effect. To do with the moon.’

  ‘It’s the sun that’s worrying me now,’ riposted Richard from the safety of the awning’s wind-cooled shadow. ‘What’s the temperature down there with you, Rohini? Forty-five Celsius? Goodness knows what it must be out on the beach there.’

  ‘Hot enough to cook shrimp,’ called Flo feelingly from the unshaded bow. ‘Without the barbie.’

  ‘Then I’m surprised it isn’t barbecuing Akelita’s toes,’ concluded Richard. ‘Because she’s strolling out across it now.’

  The fourth and last member of the all-woman crew approached almost lazily, carrying a palm-frond bag full of goodies from the Jimmy Store on Tuvalu Street. Like the town it supplied it sat well behind the crest of the golden slope behind her, invisible from here.

  ‘She’s a local girl,’ observed Robin enviously, watching her wade out into the lagoon, scarcely more than paddling out to where the multihull sat restlessly, ready to sail at high water. ‘Acclimatized. You’re the one I’m worried about, Richard. Did you bring sandals with you when you came aboard this morning? We cast off when Rohini calls high tide and you’re not coming with us.’

  ‘I have my O’Neills,’ he assured her. ‘Wet or dry they’ll see me through. And it isn’t that far up to town.’

  Katapult was anchored on the lagoon side of Fongafale Island, largest of the circular chain of islets that comprised Tuvalu atoll. Beyond the white sand slope of the beach, there was a fringe of vivid green palms, then a short, shaded walk between beachside shacks and houses through to Fongafale Street, followed by a slightly longer stroll past the banana plantation to Tuvalu Street, and, on the ocean side of that, the buildings at the start of the International Airport runway, the Matagigali Bar and JY’s Ocean restaurant.

  Halfway down the runway on the ocean side were the airport buildings themselves – where the NZ Air Force chopper boys would be signing in, Richard suspected, before unloading their precious freshwater cargo and heading up towards the Matagigali for a different sort of liquid refreshment entirely. And on the lagoon side of the runway opposite the Airport buildings, south of the banana plantation, stood the National Bank, post office with its new cell phone mast and the government and municipal buildings beside it. There was a hospital, a couple of schools and the Vaiaku Lagi Hotel, one of whose wonderful upstairs double rooms currently contained what little was left of the Mariners’ luggage now that Robin had moved what she needed for a thirty-day cruise into her skipper’s accommodation aboard Katapult.

  As Richard reached this point in his thoughts, Akelita climbed aboard, mounting the aft ladder like Venus rising from a shallow ocean, one-handed, with the palm-frond bag on her shoulder. She stepped lithely down into the afterdeck well, beside Richard, filling his nostrils with the heady scents of sea salt, coconut – and of the foo yung she had purchased for the crew’s last dirtside lunch.

  Akelita heard Richard’s tummy rumbling. ‘Not for you,’ she warned severely. ‘For girls only. You eat ashore, Capting.’ Then she relented with a dazzling Polynesian smile. ‘They expecting you in three-quarter hour. They make extra, with special fried rice. Man-size.’ Then she disappeared below, squeezing past Rohini and her equipment. ‘Lunch!’ she called. ‘Eight bells. Noon watch!’

  It hit Richard then. The immediacy of his parting with the beautiful vessel, her lovely crew and her beloved skipper. He squared his jaw. ‘How long to the top of the water, Rohini?’ he asked, his voice quiet and his tone serious at last.

  ‘Thirty-three minutes,’ she answered.

  Richard nodded once and reached into his shorts for his cell phone. ‘Better get ready, Willy,’ he said as soon as contact was made.

  Like Nic Greenbaum, Richard had the publicity planned both for maximum impact and for minimum intrusion. The cutting edge of media here was Willy, the lead reporter for Radio Tuvalu. But Willy was more than just a small island radio hack. As well as a pencil and reporter’s pad, a microphone and a recorder, he had a top of the line digital video camera. And he had an adapter that plugged his camera straight into the most powerful computer at the Motolalu Internet Cafe less than fifty metres from Richard’s hotel.

  Today the Motolalu, thought Richard, tomorrow the world. In this case, literally. Richard had called in a range of favours everywhere from NewsCorp to the BBC and once it was uploaded on to the Internet, Willy’s footage was due to be out worldwide within hours of Katapult’s departure. Running in tandem, in fact, with Nic Greenbaum’s much more in-your-face plans for coverage of Flint’s departure from Vancouver.

  These thoughts filled the mere seconds between Akelita’s call and the arrival of the hungry women. Had Richard felt sentimental before at the thought of parting from Katapult, her crew and his wife, he felt positively isolated now. Underfoot indeed, as Robin and Flo shoved rudely past him, all too well aware that foo yung does not hold its heat for long. And that a fresher, larger batch would be waiting for him as they tacked across the lagoon and out through the Te Ava Tepuka Vili channel immediately south of Tepuka Island at the north-west of the atoll itself, in an hour or so’s time. ‘Right,’ said Robin as she heaved past him as though he no longer existed, ‘we’ve just got time for a final briefing as we eat. We need to get ready for a slow start, I’m afraid . . .’

  The winds were light and variable, thought Richard, frowning. They would in all probability get a much less decisive start than Flint in stormy Vancouver. But they would stick to the rules and use what wind they had. Certainly, they would not use Katapult’s motors in anything less than an emergency. Especially as, if Dr Tanaka was correct, they might well need their motors in ten days’ time when they hit the Sargasso of plastic he predicted would be accumulating around the good vessel Cheerio in the middle of the Great North Pacific Gyre.

  Richard looked down into the fragrant darkness of Katapult’s cabin where Robin was already leading the brisk discussion and decided it was time for him to go ashore. He and Robin had said ‘goodbye’ in their favourite fashion last night, christening yet another bed in the process. There was nothing to be gained from fond farewells now, he thought. If there was anything important Robin needed to say, there was the ship-to-shore. That would have to do, no matter how intimate the message. Privacy, in any case, would be a happy dream for the next thirty days. For Robin and her crew at least. Just as he had been something between a diversion and a hindrance all morning, he would only be a distraction now. He stepped up on to the transom above the well of the afterdeck, placing his foot on to the wet patch left by Akelita as she stepped aboard. The cool on his left sole reminded him about his O’Neills and he stooped to grab them before he swung himself outboard and climbed down the ladder into the surprisingly warm and welcoming water.

  Richard was in the shallows at the derisory surf line, hopping on one leg as he pulled his O’Neills on when Willy arrived. ‘Are they ready to set sail?’

  Richard consulted his Rolex Oyster Perp
etual Yachtmaster. ‘Fifteen minutes,’ he said. ‘They’ll want to set the sails and get everything ship shape first.’

  ‘That should make good copy,’ said Willy eagerly, unfolding the side-section of his camera to get the beautiful vessel in frame. ‘What are they doing now?’

  Richard decided that foo yung would not make good copy. ‘They’ll be having a final briefing,’ he explained shortly, coming erect with his feet now sand-proof.

  Satisfied that he could get a newsworthy picture of Katapult, Willy pulled a digital sound recorder out of his pocket and connected it to the camera’s built-in sound system. ‘This is Willy Fatato, reporting for the Tuvalu Media Corporation,’ he announced. ‘I’m talking to Captain Richard Mariner as his wife, Captain Robin Mariner, prepares to set sail on the race across the Northern Pacific which has gripped the news channels worldwide during the last few days. Captain Mariner,’ he said, full-voice and formal, ‘can you explain to the audience what precisely is going on aboard Katapult during the final moments before she sets sail on her epic voyage?’

  Although Willy’s camera was clearly pointing at Katapult once more, Richard automatically drew his hand back over his wind-tousled hair. ‘The skipper, Captain Robin Mariner, will be giving the crew their final briefing,’ he answered formally. ‘As well as crucial details about race strategy, she will be discussing how best to get a good start, given the current conditions. Captain Mariner will no doubt be aware of the need to tack across Te Namo Lagoon with the utmost care and precision if she hopes to exit northwards as planned through the Te Ava Tepuka Vili channel, which is extremely narrow. It is a series of manoeuvres that would test the most seasoned skipper and crew . . .’