I wasn’t looking forward to meeting Mr Fox. He and I were not going to get along.
I watched a few clips of him at the hustings. I recognised the stocky, belligerent man I’d seen entering New Zealand. He was about five foot seven, deeply tanned, with crew-cut fair hair. He looked like a military man. He might have worn his dog-tags round his neck, dangling across a synthetic hairy chest beneath the khaki shirt. It was a look that might appeal to blue-collar, red-neck America, the constituency that doesn’t bother to get a passport, because it has no use for the rest of the world. Left hand in the pocket again. Right hand good at making expansive gestures, but left hand kept rigidly under control. Parkinsonian? Maybe that was why he kept the left hand in the pocket, to disguise the pill-rolling tremor. But there was no hint of the facial akinesis, no rigidity, no cogwheeling, and if there was rapidity in his gait there was no festination.
He could scrub up well. In a dark blue, expensive-looking suit, white shirt, and colourful (yet not distasteful) tie he crossed the prairies, went back east to the New England states, and the Ivy League. The voice became more refined, even Anglified. He could assume a liberal air that the residents of New York and Massachusetts might find more appealing.
Yet he made no concessions to liberal sentiments. Indeed, he went out of his way to be as politically incorrect as possible. He was xenophobic, homophobic, and paranoid. A gas-guzzler peddling a top-down crumbs-from-the-rich-man’s-table model of welfare, a kind of safety net that comes with caveats. Pull yourself up by your boot straps, like I did. He was rude, argumentative, and bullying. He revelled in making all these famous gaffes. The more outrageous the gaffes were, the more people loved him. He seemed always to want to out-gaffe his last gaffe. Each time, people would say, that’s it. He’s in self-destruct mode. Nobody in their right mind could possibly vote for this guy. But his ratings just went up and up! He had become the front-runner for the Republican ticket. He was making me a bit moody.
But his popularity stopped at the US borders and didn’t stray into the wider world. Abroad, he was a monster. All over the Old World, exclusive clubs were black-balling him, academic institutions stripping him of his doctor honoris causa. Universities love to bask in the reflected glory of the rich and famous, but once you blot your copy book they will drop you like hot coals. They are as sanctimonious as Pharisees.
His latest gaffe was the one about women in the kitchen. You’d have thought that would have cost him half the vote, but not a bit of it. He was adored for his contempt for political correctness. Folks back home would say: the thing is, Fox tells it like it is, no bullshit. Just because the man likes home cooking and the missionary position …
I took a look at his reality TV show. I didn’t really get a handle on it. It seemed to be a mix of all the other reality shows I’d ever come across – boot camp for spoiled brats, survival in the bush, a talent show for entrepreneurs, culminating in a grilling of three contestants from the big bully Mr Fox himself, usually by video-link, followed by somebody being ejected from the show. There were survival ordeals, assault courses, mock interrogations, incarcerations, yomps, you name it. And something called the Wide Game.
The Wide Game?
Over the weeks, twenty dwindled on down until only the last man (or woman) stood. It was such a conglomerate of clichés I’m surprised anybody bothered. But apparently it was picked up by all the big TV networks and estimated viewing figures had rocketed past a billion. It occurred to me that this was what gave Mr Fox an edge over the other Republican Party candidates. The others might be rich, but they couldn’t match coverage like this.
Out of curiosity I Googled The Captain Cook. She was described as a ‘scientific research’ ship. As far as I could make out, she wasn’t a vessel of the Royal Navy. She sounded like the Royal Yacht Britannia. I wasn’t quite sure what her function was, nor what she was doing down this neck of the woods. If she was on the expense account of – what was it called again? – the committee sine nomine, then shouldn’t the British taxpayer know about it? When I got her up on the screen I was surprised at how substantial she was, at how swish were her lines. She was really a cruise ship. She had originally been built in the mid-eighties as a Russian research vessel – I think that was a euphemism for a spy ship – and sold and refitted at the end of the Cold War. She was reinforced for polar conditions. I absorbed the technical details – weight 1753 tonnes, length 71.6 metres, beam 12.8 metres, draught 4.5 metres, propulsion 2 × 1560 diesel engines, cruising speed 12.5 knots, crew twenty-six, twenty-four cabins with a capacity for fifty-two guests, Ice Class, LU(1)/Lloyds Register ID, safety – life vests and boats. There was a dining room, a lounge bar, a library, even a sauna. Five decks with the cabins mostly on decks three, four, and five, well-appointed with en-suite bathrooms and showers. The livery was pristine white aside from some rust staining around the anchor chain bay at the bow. There were two solid lifeboats in bright orange, a substantial crane at the stern, a stair gantry on the starboard side, and the upper deck was bristling with antennae and assorted navigation aids.
As an afterthought, I Googled my patient. Saskia Fox. Yes, she had a Wikipedia entry. Roedean graduate. Extreme sports, good-time girl, yet not without a hinterland. Rich and clever, poised to go to Oxford in the fall on a Rhodes scholarship. I didn’t even know such a thing still existed. There was a picture of her on a modelling runway at some fashion show. Tall, slim, waif-like, long dark hair, heroin-chic looks. She was staring into the camera with a look of disdainful hauteur.
Lastly, I checked my email. There was a note from Major Forster’s commanding officer. What was his name? Major General Iain Civil.
‘Dear Cameron-Strange,
Major Forster tells me you’re joining us at the Esplanade and on board the Cook. Bloody good show. We can have a noggin and a bit of a chinwag.
Yours aye,
Civil.’
I mentally shrugged, came offline, shut the computer down, chose a seven-foot-long berth, and went to sleep.
We made landfall, over the south-east corner of Espiritu Santo, at dawn. It was already raining heavily. There was a brief glimpse of rough dark seas, a beach, bush, and then agricultural land still monochrome in the twilight. We got down on the strip at Luganville in one piece and sought some shelter behind an aircraft hangar. The airport was deserted. The orange windsock was now tumescent and then detumescent, buckling and thrashing itself in the gale. The best possible outcome would be to do a quick refuel, grab Ms Saskia Fox and put an oxygen mask over her nose and mouth, and get the hell out of it.
But she wasn’t there. The co-pilot got out to investigate. We sat tight.
He was gone for about fifteen minutes. A jaundiced light came on up in the tower, and a truck pulled in through the perimeter fence. Then the hangar door opened and two men started pulling out a twin-engine prop job. A Beechcraft Duchess. The co-pilot came back.
‘D’you want the bad news or the really bad news? They’re pissed because we landed without permission. They say we’ve entered the country illegally. They don’t say we can’t refuel but we’re not going to get any help.’
‘Great. What’s the really bad news?’
‘The girl isn’t here. Apparently she self-discharged against medical advice and has gone to some shack on Champagne Beach.’
Champagne Beach was sixty kilometres away. This wasn’t going to be quite as straightforward as Trans-Global had envisaged.
Captain Fassbinder turned to me. ‘What do you think, doctor?’
I asked him how long it would take to refuel. He made a calculation. ‘Couple of hours at least. Sounds like we’re going to have to fill the tanks manually ourselves.’
‘OK, if I can get a vehicle and a driver I’ll drive up north, grab her, and get back as fast as I can. Worth a go.’
I love a mission.
II
Randy the co-pilot came with me. I thought we might have trouble with customs having purportedly entered their country illegally
, but someone in the chain of command must have been on our side. We found a taxi in the form of a battered old ute, and lugged a couple of oxygen cylinders into its rear. I took the doctor’s bag, an old Gladstone, and my overnight bag. We got going.
Randy loosened up a bit for the ride. I asked him how come he flew for Fox Holdings and he said he’d got bored crossing and recrossing the Pond for American Airlines, so he looked for something a bit more varied and maybe a bit less regulated. The Fox job came up. The money was good and Elmer was a great captain. And Fox himself? He pulled a face and said ‘Hmmm’ equivocally through pursed lips. ‘His bark’s worse than his bite. All that macho stuff is just for the cameras.’
I’d suspected as much. There had been something staged and showy about that tirade down the phone.
The trip up the east coast of Espiritu Santo was rough going and there was very little to see beyond the howling wind and rain. We went through some huge puddles, displacing great tsunamis on either side of us. One was so deep that I thought we weren’t going to make it but we came out the other side with much steam and hissing, and the brakes went very squelchy. We might not make it on the way back. Then we were back by the sea with the stink of mangroves and the extravagantly swaying palm trees. I’d imagined we’d find Saskia Fox in some tourist paradise but we left the Champagne Beach resorts behind us and turned down a deserted rough track and pulled up beside an isolated clapboard beach hut that reminded me of my mum and dad’s place on Ninety Mile Beach, Nepenthe. In New Zealand we call it a bach, pronounced ‘batch’. I jumped down from the ute on to the bach’s deck, knocked on the rickety door jamb, and went inside.
She was alone.
It was the tall slim dark-haired girl whose picture I’d been studying a few hours before. She was sitting forlornly on the floor in the corner of a bare room with her knees drawn up and her arms clasped around them. She wore an ivory and blue striped linen shirt, and a crumpled pair of brown shorts. She was staring straight ahead and she didn’t alter her gaze.
‘Saskia?’
She darted a quick glance at me.
‘Who the hell are you?’ There was something fierce and combative about her. Like her father.
‘I’m Alastair. I’m a New Zealand doctor. I’ve come to offer you a ride home.’
‘Did Daddy send you?’
‘No. We just borrowed his aircraft.’
‘Then you’re working for him.’ She spoke in a low-pitched, hard-to-place mid-Atlantic accent. ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch.’
Maybe she was right. Maybe Trans-Global should have politely declined Fox’s offer and chartered another aeroplane. I let it pass.
‘How are you?’
‘I’m okay.’
‘You got any symptoms?’
‘Just some tingling down my right arm.’ She gave me a brief and succinct history. The dive had been about eighteen hours previously. Yes, she had had a dive buddy: Patti was still at the airport as far as she knew. Saskia told me how yesterday she had surfaced with some back pain, she had felt a bit confused, and her right arm was pretty useless for a couple of hours. And she had a fit of coughing and brought up a trace of blood.
The chokes.
But by late last night she felt so much better that she self-discharged from the hospital and came back here. She’d done that on impulse when she heard Daddy was sending the cavalry for her.
‘You still got pins and needles?’
‘A bit.’
‘May I take a look?’
I knelt down on the floor directly in front of her. The beautiful face was expressionless. The grey eyes watching me gave nothing away. She let me take her right arm. Apart from some skin marbling around the wrist, it examined pretty normally. Motor function grossly intact. I tried a finger-nose test. It was all over the place.
‘Pretty shitty, huh? What do you think?’
‘I think you’ve got decompression sickness. I think you should come back to Auckland and Devonport Naval Base will put you in a decompression chamber and you’ll be fine.’
‘And if I don’t?’
‘Well, I can’t say. This might not reverse. And you could have other sequelae.’
‘What’s that?’
‘After-effects. This condition can rebound. Pain. Maybe more breathlessness. Useless arm.’
She weighed it up. She shook her head. ‘I’m not going.’
This was all about her father. This was why she chased extreme weather events. She travelled to the ends of the earth and disappeared into the vortex of a cyclone to get away from her father.
I hadn’t heard Randy come in. His silhouette filled the doorway. The sky behind him was almost black. ‘Doctor, we’ve got to go. The driver’s getting very nervous. The puddles are getting deeper.’
Saskia looked up. ‘So go. I’m not coming.’
The co-pilot caught my eye and invited me outside with a barely perceptible backward tilt of the head. We stepped out into a warm monsoon on the deck.
‘Look. She’s just a slip of a girl. The two of us, we can scoop and run, no worries.’
‘You mean, abduct her?’
‘These are Mr Fox’s orders.’
‘Well, I don’t work for Mr Fox. And actually it’s none of his business. She’s 18 years old and, as far as I can tell, of sound mind. So that’s not going to happen.’
He gave me a look as if to say, it’s your funeral. It crossed my mind that Saskia Fox was suicidal. Her lifestyle was the posh version of that of people who no longer give a toss. They start taking risks. They drive like hell, get careless with home appliances, and walk out in front of buses. Had her father driven her to this? Maybe Randy was right about ‘scoop and run’. Maybe I should section her under the Mental Health Act. What was the alternative? The alternative was to keep a suicide watch.
‘Wait here a sec.’
I went back into the bach.
‘The pilot’s got to go. Last chance, Saskia.’
‘Goodbye.’
But she looked so utterly lost, I couldn’t possibly leave her. I said to her, ‘I can’t abandon you like this. If you’re staying, I’m staying.’
It was another ‘it’s your funeral’ look. Then she shrugged indifferently. I went back out on to the deck.
‘She’s not budging. Look. You go, I’ll stay and look after her. I’ll talk her round. Hopefully that’ll mean your boss won’t give you grief. What will you do?’
‘Try to find some hangar space I guess. Or if we can’t, if we can get out we might clear off across to Queensland until this blows over, then ask Mr Fox for further instructions. What about you?’
‘Could you leave the oxygen cylinders here? I’ve got an idea.’
We left it at that. We went out into the wind and rain, and together wrestled the two cylinders off the ute and into the bach. I dragged the first one across the floor to her. I made sure the oxygen tubing was securely attached, and took the oxygen mask out of its cellophane wrapping and passed the tie over the back of her head. ‘Here. Breathe this.’ Rate of flow? High rate for a short time or low rate for a long time? I decided to use up the first cylinder, high flow, at 15 litres a minute, and maybe run the second at a gentler rate, depending on how she responded. ‘Sorted. Hope you don’t mind if I stop over.’
‘I couldn’t care less. Only one thing. Touch me, and I swear to God I’ll kill you.’ The eyes flashed at me. I raised a hand. ‘That’s fine.’
‘Sorry, I don’t mean … I know you’re doing your best. Don’t think I’m not grateful …’
Funny, mixed-up kid.
‘Where’s your diving gear?’
‘Next door.’
I went through and took a look at it. Her own stuff and, presumably, her diving buddy’s. There were plenty of spare tanks. That made possible a crazy idea that was brewing at the back of my mind. Why not dive her here? In-water recompression. It was said to be a big nono, to go back down with the bends, fraught with hazard. But then that was when it wa
s a given that you had options. This was an altogether unusual set of circumstances. The storm might as easily uproot this flimsy shack, and where would we be then? It would be lovely to get out of this wind – it crazed you after a while – and sit calmly on the sea bed a hundred feet below the turbulent surface. I went back through and put it to her.
‘Fancy a dive? Might save you a trip to Devonport.’
Her eyes lit up. ‘Would that work?’
‘Don’t see why not. But Saskia, you need to promise to do exactly what I tell you. No funny business.’
She nodded.
‘Promise?’
‘Promise.’
So that’s exactly what we did. We got kitted up and made the transit through a gale, slapping down the sloping white sand in our fins to the water’s edge. Into the water and down, and, at last, an escape from the elements.
She was a much better diver than I was. I’d had a brief flirtation with scuba in my teens and had done some courses in the Bay of Islands, but I never really felt at home under water. Actually, I find it a bit claustrophobic. It’s my private phobia. I hate confined spaces. I can’t stand being closed in. Maybe that’s why I love flying. Give me the wide open spaces. Let me die outside. I had my usual difficulty equalising the pressure round my eardrums, and tried a Valsalva manoeuvre and all sorts of facial contortions until the earache went away. You might say I was a fish out of water. It would just be the thing if I got into trouble and Saskia had to rescue me. Perhaps I would be like a do-gooder who jumps into a river to save a damsel in distress and ends up drowning himself. And another thing – I’d hopefully be flying home in under twenty-four hours. Another diver’s no-no. I’d have to share the oxygen cylinders with Saskia. All these thoughts and worries whisked around in my head.
The Seven Trials of Cameron-Strange Page 9