with Dr Barbara he met the latest volunteers to join the expedition and realized that the Dugong would not only set out from Honolulu but had every chance of sailing straight into the French guns.
A film crew of three – Janet Bracewell, the Australian director, and the camera-man, her American husband Mark, together with the Indian sound-recordist, Vikram Pratap – were to be Irving Boyd’s ambassadors to Saint-Esprit. Detached from the Wild-Water sanctuary, they would record the progress of the expedition and transmit live pictures of any hostile French action to Boyd’s TV station in Honolulu and from there to the world’s watching networks. Already they were filming the reporters and animal rights activists who roamed the Dugong, interrupting the work of the Filipino crewmen and earnestly questioning them about their attitudes to nuclear testing and the environment.
Incited by the camera’s presence, the visitors turned the shrimp-trawler into the venue of a continuous party. Passers-by pilfered the unloaded stores and helped themselves to the bottles of donated wine. By the time Dr Barbara and Monique returned in the evening they found tourists dancing on the quay to the New Age tambourines, eco-banners floating on the cool harbour air and an amiable wraith of pot-smoke lifting through the Chinese lanterns. Delighted by this festive atmosphere, Dr Barbara danced with Monique while Captain Wu paced his darkened bridge and a disapproving Kimo sat with his paint store in the high bows of the Dugong.
But Kimo was not alone in being puzzled by Dr Barbara’s failure to control her sympathizers. As he watched from the pier of the inter-island terminal Neil had noticed a tall, white-haired American in his early forties standing beside his rented car on the quay. Driven by his wife, he usually arrived in mid-afternoon, stepped from his seat and spent an uncomfortable hour gazing at the ship. The sight of the unguarded stores and the three inflatables on their trailer seemed to unsettle him. While his wife sat stoically at the wheel he would pace around the rubber craft, wiping the wine-stains with his handkerchief, and only relaxing when the Filipinos finished their interviews and returned to work. Sometimes he would shout at the milling tourists, and then break off to practise his tennis backhand, sweeping his long arm in a compulsive way, as if trying to land a difficult shot in his opponent’s court.
Neil assumed that he was forcing himself to decide whether or not he should join Dr Barbara. On his fourth visit to the quay, the American saw her arrive after her last day’s work at the children’s home. He avoided her eyes when she strode past, leaned his elbows on the window sill of the car and stared at his patient wife. Before she could speak he turned with a nervous tic of his shoulders and followed Dr Barbara to the Dugong, counting her steps aloud to himself. Holding his arms above the heads of the Japanese tourists, he climbed the gangway, his eyes clear and all his doubts apparently resolved.
Neil soon learned that this was David Carline, the last volunteer to join the expedition. The president of a small pharmaceutical company in Boston, he had been on holiday in Honolulu when he learned of Dr Barbara and her mission to save the albatross. The family firm had for decades supplied its pharmaceuticals to the third world, and Carline had frequently taken leaves of absence to join American missionary groups in Brazil and the Congo, teaching in mission schools and delivering lay sermons at the open-air church services. Intelligent, rich and eager for hard work, he was the first sane presence on board the Dugong.
Neil disliked him on sight. From the moment that Carline came on deck, swinging his expensive, travel-worn suitcase up the gangway, Neil was certain that he would restore order to the ship, concentrate Dr Barbara’s wayward mind and see that the trawler set sail as planned. Sure enough, within little more than a day Carline had assumed the deputy leadership of the expedition. Both Monique and Dr Barbara were glad to defer to someone with the management skills needed to restore order to the crates heaped chaotically in the forward hold. Captain Wu welcomed him to the bridge, recognizing a fellow spirit, and Irving Boyd happily ceded his place to Carline and returned to his television station in Honolulu.
Carline soon set about trimming the ship. First he persuaded the Bracewells to save their film footage, and affably suggested that they join the other expedition members in the job of winching the silver-skinned inflatables from their trailer on the quay. Once the camera vanished from the scene many of the tourists and New Agers drifted away, taking the stall-holders with them. The work of loading stores resumed, and Kimo descended from his perch, eager to support Carline’s brisk new regime.
Carline greeted Neil with a testing handshake, sensible enough to ignore the English youth’s hostility.
‘Neil, you’re the reason I’m here, all the way from Boston. We’re proud of you and everything you did on Saint-Esprit.’ He gestured to Mrs Carline, sitting sombrely in the car parked by the gangway. ‘Even my wife respects you – a great deal more than she respects me, I can tell you. I’d like you to meet her, she admires your guts in sailing to Saint-Esprit and taking on the French. It might help her to understand why I had to join you.’
‘Why did you join?’
‘Hard to say, Neil. I guess I need to go to Saint-Esprit to find out. Of course, I want to save the albatross, but there’s more to it than that. In a sense I want to save Dr Barbara. The world needs people like her, people with conviction and faith in the rest of us. For so long we’ve behaved as if we’re all about to leave the planet for good, as if the Earth was some kind of dying resort area. We need more Saint-Esprits. I saw you and Dr Barbara on the TV news and, do you know, I left the hotel and drove straight down here. Anyway, enough of me. Are you fit for work? Kimo’s keen to get the outboards loaded.’
For the rest of the day, as they settled the heavy motors in the hold, Neil kept a careful watch on the American, a nightmare-come-true of integrity and good humour. He reminded Neil of the chaplain at his boarding school in England – always eager and understanding, always ready to make the first rugby tackle on the practice pitch. The chaplain had resigned after an affair with the sports master’s wife, and already Neil saw Carline as his chief rival for the attention of Dr Barbara.
‘Kimo tells me you want to swim across the Kaiwi Channel,’ Carline commented as they rested in the hold, surrounded by the engines and inflatables. ‘It’s a long way. Do you think you can do it?’
‘Maybe not. But it’s worth trying.’
‘Good for you. Now that’s no day-dreamer’s philosophy. How do you feel about going back to Saint-Esprit?’
‘It’s dangerous …’ Neil said nothing of his decision to remain in Honolulu even if the Dugong sailed. ‘The French have patrol boats and a corvette.’
‘You’re wary, and it’s sensible of you. Remember, though, you weren’t frightened to face that French bullet.’
‘I was running away.’
Carline laughed at this. ‘Well, at least you weren’t frightened to do that either.’
As he helped Carline to rope down the engines, it occurred to Neil that it would be surprisingly easy to sabotage the Dugong. Captain Wu had talked to Boyd and Dr Barbara about their contingency plans if the trawler was hit by gun-fire: they would either run her aground in the lagoon or scuttle her astride the reef. The cargo-hold and engine-room seacocks were never guarded, and at night only the Saitos and the Filipino crew slept aboard the ship. Carline returned with his wife to their Waikiki hotel, and Dr Barbara and Monique to their apartments in Honolulu. The quay was patrolled by a group of French students who had flown in from Tahiti, opposed to their government’s decision to end the moratorium on nuclear testing and suspicious of the treacheries of the Deuxième Bureau. They sat around a kerosene lamp by the gangway, handing out leaflets to any midnight visitors who wandered down the quay, while a lookout monitored the waters around the Dugong in a small dinghy.
The cabin that Neil would share with Carline and the Indian sound-recordist was a narrow steel box with three hinged bunks, barely six steps from the door into the forward hold. The Filipinos slept aft in the engine-room and would hear Neil if he approached, but a single open seacock would flood the Dugong and sink it to the harbour bed.
Neil watched the news bulletins at his rooming house, waiting for the French intelligence