The O.D. Page 12

  ‘This accounts,’ the report continued, ‘for the island’s peculiar topography, in which the entire west coast consists of cliffs rising in some places to over three hundred metres, whereas in the east the land rises at such a narrow angle that even two miles inland it is still only a few feet above sea level.’

  The last item in the bulletin made Pilot choke on his coffee. ‘Political commentators are already predicting a major diplomatic wrangle between Britain and France as to who has legitimate claim over the new island. Another solution being promoted is that it be declared an international protectorate, similar to Antarctica.’

  Pilot summoned Odile Bartoli, a French woman from Aix, to the radio room. When she arrived, he asked McConie to find a French radio broadcast for Bartoli to translate.

  Seconds later, a torrent of French burst from the speakers. “They are talking about it. Shhhh,” Bartoli cautioned. When the newscast finished, she looked at Pilot in disbelief. “They say all about the wave damages and that there are many dead. Then they say about the island ... where it is… how big. There is no mention of us. Then they say its name− Ile de Bonne Fortune.”

  Pilot could feel his heart sinking. He never thought it would be easy, but neither did he suspect the French would stonewall so blatantly. Someone, somewhere must have received their declaration.

  “Incoming message from London,” McConie said. Pilot watched as line after line of indecipherable gibberish rolled up the monitor. When it stopped, McConie pushed a button and the letters relocated into English. Pilot squatted down and began reading Forrest Vaalon’s first communication in weeks.

  You made it. Five didn’t. Rebecca Schein only survivor of Shenandoah. French vessel Largesse also lost with all hands. Declarations made UN, Dublin, London, Madrid. Not in Paris. Good and bad news. I read your declaration. Wouldn’t have said it like that myself, but there’s no mistaking your presence. Well done.

  The Shenandoah deaths hit Pilot like a sledgehammer and he was composing a reply to Vaalon when a noise outside caught his attention. He stepped out on deck with McConie to investigate what sounded like a helicopter close by. In fact, it was coming in to land just outside the French cordon.

  He watched the heavy machine descend with a mixture of dread and hope− hope that it was carrying his North Ronaldsay sheep and not more troops. He was relieved to see that it wasn’t a military helicopter, but a private charter of some kind. The second it touched down, swarms of newsmen leapt to the rock like D-day troops at Juno Beach. They were halted by the French commandoes, and Pilot could make out the officer in charge being harangued by reporters. The standoff lasted five minutes before the French opened their human wall and let the reporters through.

  In The Psychology of Leadership Pilot had read that, in a situation such as this, the leader leaves it to his lieutenants to make the initial contact. So he sent his press secretary and Eydos’ deputy leader to meet the media.

  Mara and Bradingbrooke crossed over to the wreck of Earthmover II, descended the aluminium ladder that had been placed at her bow, met the newcomers ten metres from the convoy and were quickly engulfed. The reporters were all talking and shouting at once, swishing their microphones and cameras through the air like butterfly nets.

  “HOW DID YOU KNOW THIS PLACE WAS COMING UP?” “ARE THERE ANY CASUALTIES?” “WHICH ONE OF YOU IS L. PILOT?” “WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?” “DO YOU SERIOUSLY THINK YOU CAN LAY CLAIM TO THIS ISLAND?”

  Macushla Mara stepped forward to silence the mob, which was becoming unruly. “We’ll speak to one of you only,” she said, fishing the sea of faces before her. Pilot had briefed her earlier about the tactic President Reagan had employed when dealing with a White House press corps that had grown competitively obnoxious during Jimmy Carter’s more laid back presidency. “The tall man over there with the white hair and the safari suit. Austin Palmer. Does anyone object if he acts as your spokesman?” Mara had seen the man fronting television documentaries and knew him to be impartial, honest and well-respected. No one objected to the choice, so Palmer stepped forward.

  “L. Pilot, I presume,” he said, extending his hand.

  “I’m Macushla Mara, Pilot’s Press Secretary. And this is our Deputy Leader, Henry Bradingbrooke. We never thought you people would beat the Royal Marines here.”

  “Neither did we, “Palmer said, “and I’m surprised, given the presence of the French troops here. The Government knows about you, but have their reasons for not admitting to it.”

  “You got our press release, “Mara said. “Everyone must know we’re here.”

  “We got it, but we needed physical confirmation.”

  “I can understand that, Austin. Well, here we are. Will you publish now?”

  “I gave the go-ahead the second I saw your convoy from the helicopter window. By the way, your declaration’s all over the internet, but only one broadsheet ran it. The Morning Journal went ahead and printed your statement in their early edition and by the look of things here, they’ve stolen a march on all of us. Give them a copy, Len.”

  A small man in his thirties stepped forward with a rolled up newspaper, which Mara and Bradingbrooke retired into a huddle to read. The press release/declaration was printed in full below half a page of reports on the amazing happenings in the Bay of Biscay. The speech by the MP from Falmouth in support of Eydos had also been printed. The gist of Len Wenlight’s account was as follows: With the British Parliament on holiday, and the summer recess not due to finish for another month, a handful of sour cabinet ministers had been rounded up to handle the necessary business of government in the wake of the tsunamis devastating the southwest coast of England. Sixty-eight-year-old Hugo Gramercy, the soon-to-retire MP for Falmouth, had arrived at Westminster at 7pm, purportedly to represent his constituents’ needs in the disaster. [Not in Wenlight’s report was the fact that shortly after 8pm the MP’s pager, activated by a signal from The Bay of Biscay, had gone off in his pocket.] To the bafflement of everyone present, Gramercy had begun making a speech supporting a claim of sovereignty on behalf of L. Pilot and his followers over a new land mass which was at that moment breaking the surface of the sea in the Bay of Biscay. For an hour the man had been humoured by his parliamentary colleagues, who thought him quite mad, until first reports of the emergence of the island reached Westminster at 9pm.

  Further down the page, another headline caught Mara’s eye:

  CORNISH MP’S STORY BOLSTERED BY UN CLAIM

  The article stated that, during a debate in the United Nations General Assembly on Third World Labour Exploitation, the Ambassador for Iceland, Fridrik Geirsson, had interrupted proceedings to deliver a statement echoing that of Gramercy. Addressing the assembly in his capacity as an expert in maritime law, Geirsson advised that if reports of a landing proved to be true, then the colonisers could indeed have a legal right to sovereignty over the island.

  ‘There is no denying,’ the paper concluded, ‘that, simultaneous with the raising of this new island in the Bay of Biscay and Geirsson’s statement at the United Nations, claims to it on behalf of L. Pilot and his or her followers were also being made by their representatives in Britian and Ireland. Improbable and impossible as it sounds, the new land may already have secured its independence under international law. It only remains to be seen whether the settlers’ physical presence on the island is a reality or merely an elaborate hoax.’

  “Did you write this?” Bradingbrooke asked Wenlight.

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you. Elaborate hoax we are not. Nor is L. Pilot a her.”

  “Can we talk to him?” Palmer asked, pointing to the convoy.

  “No.”

  Palmer turned to look at his fellow journalists, then asked Bradingbrooke, “You seem very well prepared – as if you knew in advance that this island would be surfacing. This was not an accident. Can you explain?”

  “I used to work at the IGP in London as a meteorologist,” Bradingbrooke began. Although he had rehearsed the stor
y many times with Vaalon, he had never done so in front of ninety journalists and his discomfort was noticeable to all. “For several years we had been researching and measuring the movement of pyrocoagula in the Earth’s magma –”

  “Pyro what?” a voice asked.

  Bradingbrooke spelt the word and went on to explain in laymans’ terms the science behind magmatic pulses, the new measurement methods developed by the IGP, the theory of Solar Tides, and how their computer model had predicted the ascension of the island.

  “So, the IGP knew all along that this was going to happen?” Palmer said with a note of pique in his voice.

  “Yes and no,” Bradingbrooke replied. “We know that this spot was last above water 5,000 years ago. The Director also knew it was due to resurface about a year from now. He was going to make a formal announcement this coming January. He was not aware that I had gone into the data the previous month and added a year to the predicted date of the event. The IGP is not the culprit in this. I am.” The pack of newshounds began to yelp and Mara raised her hand to silence them. “The only thing I doctored was the date of the island’s emergence,” Bradingbrooke said. “The fact that there has been minimal loss of life during this event is primarily due to the information and warnings the IGP began issuing back in May, long before the first tremors began.” Bradingbrooke looked beyond Palmer into the eyes of the other reporters and lied. “No one but I had prior knowledge that the island would be surfacing this year.” [Vaalon, Pilot and Bradingbrooke had agreed during their meeting in Bristol that this was to be the only untruth ever voiced in the name of Eydos.]

  “THAT, I cannot believe,” Palmer said. “L. Pilot’s declaration was time coded 2003 GMT, the exact minute your flotilla made landfall. How do you expla−”

  Palmer’s last few words were drowned out by the sound of another helicopter approaching from the east. Thirty French newsmen and women exited the hot machine, passed easily through the wall of their military compatriots and took their place next to the British contingency. Mara signaled Odile Bartoli over from the convoy to translate and asked the French to nominate a spokesman. There was much arguing and gesticulating, but no decision, so she asked a tall, middle-aged man with no shoulders and a face like a bloodhound to step forward. After fifteen minutes of conversation with him, it was clear to Bartoli that the situation in France was no better than that in Britain. Those few papers and radio and TV news services not attached to French government strings had given fair coverage and printed a translation of the press release. On the other side, those with the national interest at their throats and a lot more influence in the country, were already labeling it a conspiracy and a hoax. They went further, stating that if, indeed, there were already non-French nationals on the island, then they were trespassers on what was obviously and unquestionably French sovereign territory – part of France’s natural continental shelf. The journalist added that as far as he was aware, no representation had been made at a high level in Paris, as had happened in London, New York and Dublin. The French military presence, he explained, was natural, as this was French territory.

  Mara sensed that it was time to wrap up the meeting and report back to Pilot. “We have work to do,” she said to the reporters. “You’re welcome to stay here and film from a distance, but the talking is over for now.”

  As she and Bradingbrooke turned to walk back to the convoy, Mara called over her shoulder, “All of us on Eydos thank you for coming here to document our presence.”

  Pilot greeted them in Ptolemy’s wheelhouse and debriefed them. “It’s not a perfect situation, but it’s not a disaster either,” he said. “We’ve got allies in the media of both countries, the story is public and the timings of Gramercy’s, Geirsson’s and the others’speeches are on the record. The evidence, if nothing else, is on our side. Let’s just let those for us and those against us thrash it out for a week or two in the open. Public opinion will come down on our side in the end.”

  He almost convinced himself.

  By ten o’clock the media circus had set themselves up in little encampments around the convoy, their telephoto lenses aimed like siege guns at the flotilla. As a result, they were perfectly positioned to record every minute of the action when the French commandoes stormed the convoy at noon.

  IX

  The rough tactics used to round up and manhandle everyone into the barge’s mess room were uncalled for. People were arm-locked, pushed and shoved, rifle barrels pressed into their spines. “CECI N’EST PAS ADMISSIBLE,” Odile Bartoli called out. “OÙ EST VOTRE COMMANDANT?” The reply was a slap around her ear and a shove to the floor.

  The convoy’s camera operator, meanwhile, hearing the troops entering the jumbo, quickly switched off her equipment, removed the memory card on which she’d just recorded the invasion and concealed it in her panties just as the first commando appeared at the top of the steps. Two soldiers stayed behind to examine the video equipment and search the lounge and cockpit while half a dozen others frog-marched their prisoner down to the barge. Three females were rousted out of Bimbo’s Kraal, where they had been preparing the stalls for the sheep’s arrival, and two further crew members were plucked from their hiding place behind a rubber barrage.

  The round-up took a full hour, the colonel in charge demanding that every barge be thoroughly searched and all fugitives netted before ordering the next stage of the operation. When he was satisfied that no further ‘trespassers’ would be found, he said in English, “You will now be escorted to your cabins to retrieve your passports or identity papers, if you do not already have them on your person.” He shouted a command and the captives were hustled away, each accompanied by two commandoes.

  Twenty minutes later, all 81 crew were back in the mess room empty-handed. With no way of identifying his captives, the Colonel had no choice but to resort to Plan B. He barked an order to an aide who relayed it another step down the rung of command to a soldier who produced an indelible marker pen. Another soldier placed himself before a laptop at one of the tables.

  “You will come up here to be logged in,” the Colonel instructed. “You will give your name and nationality, be photographed and given an identification number on your forearm, which you must display at all times.” When a queue began to form in front of the registration desk, Pilot imagined a young Ruth Belkin taking her place in a similar queue.

  In his place near the back of the line with Jackson and Bradingbrooke, Pilot whispered an instruction that was passed down to the front of the queue just as registration commenced.

  One by one, the captives were processed and photographed. All but one gave a false, but believable, name. Aaron Serman was Ron Mann and Macushla Mara was Mary Cushing. For nationality, everyone said Eydosian. The atmosphere in the mess room was tense, but it reached boiling point at detainee number 57. “EMBARQUEZ LE,” the Colonel shouted. The crew looked on impotently as their compatriot was spirited out of the mess room and up the companionway by four commandoes.

  Several minutes later, the swishing of rotor blades announced the departure of a lone helicopter. “Tout va bien,” the Colonel said, “Monsieur Pilot will be asked some questions in Paris this evening and you will be our guests here on French soil until I receive further orders. Ne quittez pas le vaisseau, s’il vous plait. Do not leave this vessel.” With two hundred guns trained on them, they couldn’t have left if they tried.

  As the helicopter crested the escarpment above Nillin to begin its run to Paris, Kerry Jackson, unable to contain himself any longer, began to laugh, much to the puzzlement of his two guards.

  At the register, Lonnie Pilot gave his name and nationality−Ollie Bolling, Eydosian− and was photographed. The number 60 was then written on his forearm. He had always felt certain numbers to be special or significant, but couldn’t attach any meaning to this one. He sat down at the furthest table he could find from the French guards and, through some gravitational force of sexuality, locked eyes with Dubi Horvat, who was sitting at the far side of t
he mess room. She gave him a loaded smile. He gave one back. His tension immediately began to be replaced with a feeling of familiar helplessness. He recognized the signs− that tipping point when innocent eye contact between two people morphs into something more auspicious. But that something would have to wait. They were going nowhere.

  He studied the faces of their guards− some tense, some relaxed, some fearful, some bold. It was easy to separate the men from the boys. Then he turned to Jane Lavery, who had taken the seat next to him.

  “What do you think of the situation here, Mrs. Normal?” he asked.

  “Mrs. Who?”

  “Get in character, Jane. You’re Mrs. Normal from Normalton, Normalshire. You represent the status quo. I want to know what you think. Does France have the right to invade and occupy Eydos?”

  “Let me ask Average Joe,” Lavery said. “Get in character, Lonnie.”

  Pilot smiled. “Touché. It’s not our job to give an opinion, Norma. It’s to follow the lead of others.”

  “You’re right, Joe. The rights and wrongs of this invasion will be determined by our leaders, not by us.”

  “That’s the problem, Jane. A billion Mrs. Normals and Average Joes sitting on the fence, waiting to see which way the wind blows.”

  “So, here we are then,” Lavery said, removing her mask. “Becalmed in a sea of indecision and indifference.”

  Those were the last words Lonnie Pilot heard. In the confined space of the metal-walled mess room, the two gunshots that cracked the air ten feet from Pilot’s head caused instant deafness. Thinking they were about to be massacred, crew members began flinging themselves under tables and behind chairs. Others rushed for the exits, but were stopped by their captors. In the far corner, four French soldiers were holding a fifth one flat out and face down on the floor in a full nelson. One soldier had his knees in the assailant’s back, and two others were attempting to smother his flailing legs with their arms. Nearby, a body lay motionless in a pool of blood.