THE RAINBOW WARRIOR

“Holy mother…,” Fatboy said, his body still halfway through the doorway from the bunk compartment. “Where the heck are we?”

Tane stirred uncomfortably. He had slept in the driver’s seat, and his back and neck now ached. He stretched, trying to work out the knots.

“Sorry about yesterday,” he said.

“We all have days like that.” Fatboy flashed a quick smile. “Don’t worry about it.”

Tane smiled. Fatboy picked his guitar out of a narrow locker, sat on one of the fold-down seats, and began to play. Music to soothe the savage beast, thought Tane.

Rebecca emerged silently from the compartment behind Fatboy and said nothing.

Fatboy asked, “Was it something to do with Rebecca? Do you not like that we—”

Tane interrupted, to avoid more pain, “I was just tired and grumpy, I’m okay now.”

He avoided Rebecca’s eyes.

“Where the heck are we?” she said at last, startling Fatboy, who dropped a chord but picked up the tune and continued.

Through the large twin glass domes of the Möbius, the rusted bow of a ship reached plaintively out toward them. The water was clear and still, and the early light of the morning washed the bow in cobalt hues. The seabed around the ship merged with the blue of the sea behind, in a soft vignette. The railings of the bow were intact but encrusted with green and brown marine life. In death, the ship was the foundation of life.

“The Rainbow Warrior,” Tane said.

“Wow,” Fatboy said, “it’s amazing.”

Beyond the prong of the bow, the rest of the ship lay on its side on the sandy bottom of the ocean, an artificial reef. The back of the ship was broken, and she lay twisted in her final resting place.

Tane wasn’t quite sure why he’d diverted the sub. It just seemed like the right thing to do. For Rebecca.

“We are a long way off course,” Rebecca said curtly.

“No,” Tane said, “only a couple of hours. I…just…felt like a diversion.”

“It’ll cost us a day.”

“But it’s only a couple of hours out of our way,” Tane protested.

“It means we won’t make Motukiekie today. We’ll have to stop over for an extra night, and do”—she hesitated—“the thing, tomorrow night instead. It’s cost us a day.”

“It’s just one day,” Tane mumbled. “I’m sorry.”

“Tane, something bad is going to happen. We don’t know what and we don’t know when. One day extra might mean one day too late. We already talked about this.”

Crap! Tane thought. Crap!

Rebecca’s eyes were frosty, but she shut them for a while, and when they finally opened, they were clear.

“What a tragedy,” she murmured, watching a school of colorful fish flit through the encrusted handrail on the point of the bow.

“The guy who died?” Fatboy asked.

Fernando Pereira, a Dutch photographer, had drowned when French secret agents bombed the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbor.

“That too,” she said softly.

         

They spent the third night at sea on the wave-washed bottom of a bay just south of Cape Brett, which they had flown over a few weeks earlier in the Grumman Super Widgeon with its underage-looking pilot.

The island was closer now, and in Tane’s mind it loomed large and frightening. Breaking and entering was against the law. And what if there was some virus loose on the island? The uncertainty and fear grew as a storm blew up overnight, and even on the seafloor, the ferocity of the crashing waves above thudded against the little yellow boat, seesawing them from side to side and shunting them small amounts across the sand of the bay.

By ten-thirty, when they were just bunking down for the night, the nerves and the uncertainty became overwhelming. I can’t do this, Tane realized. I can’t go onto an island in the middle of the night and break into a science laboratory that might be infected with a superplague.

He would be letting them down. He knew that. But what choice was there? I can’t go through with this, he thought again as another violent wave rocked the sub from side to side. He took a deep breath and held it for a moment before opening his mouth to speak. They’d think him a coward, but he had to let the others know.

“I’m really not sure if I can go through with this,” Fatboy said while Tane’s mouth was still open like a fish. He shut it with a snap.

“What do you mean?” Rebecca asked, emotion rising in her voice.

“I’ve done a few dodgy things in my life,” Fatboy said, “but I’ve never broken the law. Well, not a big law. Not the kind of law they put you in jail for. Maybe we should just wait and try to talk to Vicky again.”

Rebecca said in a small but determined voice, “That won’t help. And if we don’t do this, who else will?”

“I’m just not sure if I can go through with it,” Fatboy said again quietly.

“It’s gotta be done,” Tane said firmly, as if he had never considered any alternative. “And we’ve got to do it.”

There was a long pause.

“I know,” Fatboy said at last, reluctantly.

         

The next day they rounded the tip of Cape Brett, passing Motukokako Island and its famous Hole in the Rock, then into the Bay of Islands itself.

         

“Waewaetoroa Passage,” Fatboy said, looking at the chart. “That’s Waewaetoroa Island on the right and Urupukapuka Island on the left. We could go all the way around, but it would be quicker to go through the passage between the islands.”

“Any reason why not?” Rebecca asked.

“Not really.” Fatboy frowned. “There are a lot of big rocks and shoals, and it gets quite shallow at the other end, but boats navigate through there all the time.”

“On the surface of the water,” Tane noted.

“Yeah, but I think we’ll be okay.”

Fatboy drove the sub, as he had proved the most adept at handling its idiosyncrasies, and in the confined space and currents of the passage, that might prove to be vital.

The mouth of the passage slipped past them before they realized it. Just two gradual upward slopes on the seabed that slowly resolved into the underwater sides of the two islands.

Beneath the surface of the water, the Waewaetoroa passage was far from a straight and clear path between the islands.

Rocks jutted out at odd angles from the sides of the islands, which were at times shoals and other times sheer vertical cliffs. Huge boulders on the seabed rose up to meet them, well beneath the keels of the pleasure boats that frequented the passage but big enough to stop larger ships from traveling this way. And certainly big enough to keep Fatboy on his toes.

He had to slam the boat into reverse at one point as they rounded a curve on the side of one of the islands and were confronted by an unexpected underwater ridge, almost a reef, teeming with fish of many kinds and colors.

Rebecca sat in the codriver’s seat and pored over the chart holder, marking rocks and sketching in ridges and rises with a pencil.

Huge fronds of seaweed reached out toward them from the sides of the islands and from many of the scattered boulders. At times the weed blocked visibility, and at other times it threatened to wrap itself around the main propeller and draw them into a watery grave.

It was a scary, underwater obstacle course.

“I’m glad we’re taking this slowly,” Fatboy said at one point.

“And in daylight,” Tane added.

Finally the massive shapes to each side began to fall away, and deeper water beckoned. They continued on for a while as Tane raised the buoy and opened the iris on the video camera.

A fuzzy green shape bounced around on the screen as the light chop above rocked the buoy about.

“That’s Motukiekie,” Tane breathed.

Motukiekie Island. Their second visit, but a vastly different trip from the first one in every possible sense.

Motukiekie. Professor Green. The Chimera Project. It was suddenly very real. Far too real. The dangers that lay ahead of them were exposed on the video screen in front of them, a fuzzy green shape on a blue ocean.

Rebecca heard it first. “What’s that?” she said.

It started off as a kind of far-off rumble, but quickly became a throbbing, whooshing sound that reverberated through the hull of the sub.

“I don’t know,” murmured Tane, twisting the joystick to spin the small camera around on the flat gray buoy above.

The answer was suddenly there on the screen before them.

“Dive, dive, dive!” Tane yelled. Fatboy had already rammed the controls forward and hit the manual override for the trim tanks, flooding them all at once to make the Möbius sink like a stone.

“What is that?” screamed Rebecca.

Tane grabbed at the switch for the winch that lowered the buoy, but his fingers slipped and it took him two goes to get the motor winding and the buoy lowering.

The bow of a Navy frigate looks large from any angle, but bearing down on you in the water, it looks like the end of the world.

“I hope it’s deep enough,” Fatboy muttered as the hull hit the sand and the ocean floor with a thud that jarred the vehicle.

The rumble of the engines in the ship grew louder as it closed in on them, and they could hear each individual rotation of the huge propellers.

The sound passed right overhead, shaking the hull and its terrified occupants, but then the ship, and the stark terror, passed them by.

“What the hell is a frigate doing here?” Tane wanted to know, raising the buoy again once he was convinced there were no more surprises like the first one.

The ship had slowed once it had passed them and was rapidly disappearing around the end of the island.

“What is it?” Rebecca asked. “One of ours?”

Tane nodded. The New Zealand flag was clearly visible on the short pole at the stern of the ship. “Must be the Te Mana or the Te Kaha.”

“Probably on exercises,” Fatboy said.

“Will that stop us?” Rebecca asked.

Tane and Fatboy looked at each other.

“I don’t see why,” Tane said after some thought. “They won’t be interested in Motukiekie. Just cruising past, I think.”

Even so, they stayed on the ocean floor for more than an hour, to make sure the frigate would not return, before resuming their journey to the island.

         

When the last rays of the sun were a long-ago memory, they took the wet suits off the top bunk.

“Who’s coming with me?” Rebecca asked, pulling the wet-suit trousers up over her bikini.

“I am,” Tane said.

Fatboy said, “I can go if you like, Tane. I’d be happy to do it.”

“No,” Tane said firmly, “I started this, and I’m going to help finish it.”

He put on his weighted belt, heavy enough to compensate for the buoyancy of the wet suit.

Fatboy helped Rebecca with hers, then handed them the oxygen bottles. Not full scuba gear, just small pressurized metal bottles, about the size of a small Coke bottle. There were no straps; they simply gripped the mouthpieces tightly with their teeth. Waterproof flashlights dangled from their wrists on flexible cords.

It was three a.m. when Tane and Rebecca slipped out through the open top hatch of the Möbius and slowly swam toward the island.