Escorted by the mosquitoes, they set out to locate the airstrip, and followed the narrow beach under the overhang of palms. Kimo took the lead, machete in hand, pausing without comment whenever Dr Barbara stopped to rest. Waiting for her, Neil was aware of the radio mast high above the island, its antennae trailing them through the breaks in the forest canopy. A concrete blockhouse sat in a grove of tamarinds, a forgotten totem of the nuclear age that seemed more ancient than any Easter Island statue.
Rainwater leaked down the hillside, seeping between the moss-covered trees. After hiding among the ferns, a small stream fanned into a delta of silk-smooth ash and vented itself into the sea.
Neil bathed his feet in the cool shallows, the first fresh water he had felt on his skin since leaving Papeete. Dr Barbara knelt beside him and washed her arms and face. From a hip pocket she took a leather make-up pouch and combed her hair into damp waves. Dissatisfied with herself, she grimaced into the mirror and sucked the sores on her lips.
‘Not very good, but never mind.’
‘You look fine.’ Neil spoke sincerely, intrigued by the way in which this often scruffy middle-aged woman hovered on the edge of glamour. ‘Everyone will be impressed.’
‘You’re impressed, Neil. But that’s not what I meant. I want everyone to see how serious we are.’
‘You are serious.’ Tempted to tease, he added: ‘I’ll film you from your best side.’
‘Have I got a best side? What a dreadful thought.’
Neil filmed her as she followed Kimo through the forest, feet sinking into the spongy ground. The Hawaiian slashed at the ferns, exposing the rusty steel sections of a small-gauge railway. Everywhere lay the debris of Saint-Esprit’s earlier occupations. Wooden huts leaned on their worm-riddled stilts, roofs open to the sky, hibiscus and morning glory flowering between the floorboards. A prayer-shack of corrugated iron stood on a headland above the lagoon, surrounded by the graves of an overgrown cemetery laid out by the Catholic missionaries. The forest had long since reclaimed the modest farm plots. Breadfruit trees, jack and eucalyptus crowded together among the taro plants, wild yams and sweet potatoes.
Imposed on this smothered realm was the refuse left by the French engineers, a moraine of abandoned military equipment. Kimo rested on an empty fuel tank beside the railway line, hacking at the lianas that snared it to the ground. Cloudy wine bottles lay in a wooden crate at his feet, surrounded by truck tyres and coils of telephone wire. A second camera-tower stood among the deep ferns, its window-slits staring at nothing.
They crossed a drainage ditch and stepped through the screen of palms. The airstrip swept past them, freshly surfaced with pulverized coral, its eerie geometry forming the outlines of an immense white altar among the trees. A camouflaged radio-cabin stood in the undergrowth fifty yards from them, aerials pointing to the empty sky. At its southern limit the airstrip ended in a barrier of dunes, where an army bulldozer sat with its scoop sunk in the sand.
Swinging the machete in his hand, Kimo walked to the bulldozer and tapped its metal tracks. An empty beer can rested on the driver’s seat. Head raised, he stood stiffly in the strong wind as the sunlight flashed on the machete’s blade. Lost in some reverie of his Hawaiian kingdom, he at last turned and gave a dismissive wave, like a travel courier warning a party of visitors from an uninteresting site.
‘What is it, Kimo?’ Dr Barbara called. ‘Can you see anything?’
‘Albatross, doctor … just albatross.’
‘Albatross …?’ Dr Barbara seized Neil’s arm and hurried him across the runway. ‘Neil, the birds are still here! Get the camera ready.’
They reached the dunes and clambered up the slopes of churned sand, sinking to their knees in the black ash. Dr Barbara shielded her eyes from the wind and peered at the sky as Kimo strode down the beach to the headland beside the prayer-shack.
‘Kimo! Where are the albatross? I can’t see a single one.’
‘There are plenty, doctor.’ Kimo gestured in an offhand way at the hillocks of sand and beach-grass. ‘Every albatross you need.’
‘Kimo …?’
‘Over there.’
‘Dr Barbara …’ Neil lowered the camera, unsure whether to film her when she was caught off-guard. ‘They’re all around us. They’re not in the sky any more …’
A colony of albatross had nested among the hillocks, taking advantage of the wind that rose from the surface of the dunes. Their nests were little more than hollows in the sand, crudely lined with feathers and grass, but every one of them had been kicked apart. The heel-marks of heavy boots had stamped themselves into the rain-sodden ash. Fragments of broken shell trembled in the cool air, blurs of down quivering on their serrated edges. Dead chicks lay in the crushed grass, smeared with the yellow stomach oil that their parents had vented over them in their panic. Wings outstretched, dozens of the great birds rested at the water’s edge, clubbed to death as they tried to escape. The ruffled plumage glared against the black sand like ice-white blossoms thrown into a refuse pit.
‘Thirty-eight … nine …’
Kimo wandered among them, a stiff smile masking his face. The machete hung loosely in his hand, as if he were tired after cutting down the sky. Listening to his flat voice, Neil realized that the Hawaiian was counting the dead birds, and that in some way a finite number of fatalities would diminish the atrocity committed against the creatures.
‘Kimo …. why are they killing the birds?’
‘They need to extend the runway.’ Kimo spoke matter-of-factly. ‘On Midway the Air Force killed thirty thousand goonies last year. They get into the jet intakes.’
‘What about the French soldiers?’ Neil scanned the empty runway, as white as the feathers of the albatross. ‘They must be here somewhere.’
‘Maybe they’re bored. Killing is slow work …’
Unable to console the Hawaiian, Neil returned to Dr Barbara. She stood among the dead birds, hair floating from her forehead like threatening vapour above a volcano. As the wind stirred the plumage of the dead birds the beach seemed to shiver under her gaze. But her mouth was set in a curious grimace that was almost a smirk of satisfaction.
‘Neil, I want the world to see this. Make sure you include every bird. Especially the chicks.’
‘There are too many, doctor.’ Reluctantly, Neil raised the camera and searched for the wide-angle button. ‘They look like chrysanthemums …’
‘All of them! They deserve to be remembered. And don’t forget Kimo.’
But the Hawaiian had lost interest in the birds, and was walking towards a camera-tower that looked out over the lagoon to the detonation zone four miles away. The iron-grey cement, and the hieroglyph formed by the camera slits, reminded Neil of the gloomy bunkers that he and his father had explored at Utah Beach on the Normandy coast, remnants of the Nazi West Wall that outstared time.
At the northern end of the runway the French engineers had set up their camp. A wooden pier jutted into the lagoon, a cargo lighter moored against its landing stage. Crates filled with signals gear sat under the trees beside a storage shed, from which a set of landing lights and an aluminium water tower had been unloaded. But there was no sign of any nuclear or chemical warfare equipment. Saint-Esprit, Neil guessed with some disappointment, was no more than a refuelling stop on the air-run between Mururoa and Tahiti.
After filming Dr Barbara among the dead birds he wiped the chick entrails from his running shoes and followed her down the airstrip. She strode through the powdered coral, white dust rising at her heels,