Rushing to Paradise. Rivka Galchen

the threatened bird while manipulating the emotions of her audience.

      All along, Neil assumed, she had hoped that the French soldiers on Saint-Esprit would seize them, while Kimo escaped with the video-camera and its precious footage. The Hawaiian had hidden for a few last moments among the waist-deep ferns, and had filmed Neil being shot down by the sergeant, a scene endlessly replayed on television across the world. The existence of the camera, a present from Colonel Stamford, had probably prompted their mission to the island. The French government insisted that it had no plans to resume nuclear testing on Saint-Esprit, but Dr Barbara and the albatross were launched and airborne. A defence committee was formed while Neil and Dr Barbara were held at Papeete, and protesters demanding their release marched through London and Paris. Donations flowed in, and environmentalists argued her case from a hundred pulpits and lecture platforms.

      By the time of her return to Honolulu, two weeks later, Dr Barbara was the new heroine of the ecological movement. Yet her real motives, like his own, remained a mystery to Neil.

       3

       The Dugong

      Defender of the albatross, champion of islands, and all-purpose media star, Dr Barbara Rafferty had far stranger sides to her character, as Neil discovered on the day before he left the hospital.

      Among the last of his mail was an anonymous get-well card attached to the latest issue of Paris-Match, which devoted its leading feature to the saga of Saint-Esprit. Bored by photographs of himself – his mother had tactlessly released a family snapshot of Neil, aged 4, in a paddling pool – he was about to slide the magazine into the waste basket when he recognized an unexpected face. Among the images of dead birds and camera-towers beside the nuclear lagoon was a grainy close-up taken in 1982 of a younger Dr Barbara.

      Dressed in a dark suit, eyes lowered to the pavement, she was leaving the London headquarters of the General Medical Council after being struck from its register of licensed physicians. A sharp-eyed journalist at Paris-Match, his memory nudged, perhaps, by the French security services, had raided the picture library and re-opened the celebrated case.

      Ten years earlier Dr Barbara Rafferty had been tried for murder in the British courts. Two of her women patients, elderly cancer sufferers in a Hammersmith hospice, had been eased from their last ordeal by a massive sleeping draught. This lethal cocktail of potassium chloride, chloroform and morphine was openly administered by Dr Barbara with the agreement, she claimed, of the patients and their relatives. But not all the relatives had been consulted. Contesting the will, a sister of one of the women visited the police and brought a complaint against Dr Barbara.

      The police seized the hospice’s clinical records and discovered that Dr Barbara had practised euthanasia on at least six terminal patients over the previous year. She freely admitted the charge, claiming that she had secured her patients’ consent after an extended period of bedside counselling. At their request, she had put an end to their pain, defended their dignity and their right to self-respect.

      Convicted on eight counts of manslaughter, Dr Barbara was given a two-year suspended sentence. An action group of sympathetic doctors and relatives rallied support, but she lost her appeal. Interviewed outside the High Court, she stated that her further behaviour towards her dying patients would be guided by her conscience, a scarcely veiled threat that led the General Medical Council to strike her from the register. A public debate ensued, during which she appeared prominently on television, arguing her case with a passion and stridency that to some observers verged on the self-righteous. Alienated by her chilling manner, even her closest colleagues turned away from her. From then on she was unable to practise as a doctor and became a director of a fringe company designing a female condom, but after six months she resigned and went abroad. Years of exile followed, in Malawi, South Africa and New Zealand, where clandestine medical work was inevitably followed by the exposure of her past, until she came to rest in Honolulu.

      Now Dr Barbara had discovered the animal rights movement, and devoted herself to life rather than death. Neil stared at her photograph propped against his pillow, almost dazed by the revelations. The slim, over-intense face of the guilty physician, shadowed by the dark tones of her suit, might have belonged to a war criminal or psychopath. Nonetheless, he felt a curious concern for this outlawed doctor. He realized that she had once been young, and wondered what the young Dr Barbara would have thought of him, or of her scatty older self and her dreams of facing down the French navy.

      When she arrived that afternoon, making her last visit to the ward, Neil left the magazine open on the bedside table. Brushing past Nurse Crawford, she swept into the room with her palms raised to the ceiling, and strode to the window as if only the sky was large enough to contain her excitement.

      ‘Neil – astonishing news!’

      ‘Dr Barbara?’

      ‘You won’t believe it. All I can say is that dreams come true. First, though, how are you?’ She picked Neil’s case notes from the foot of the bed and ran a brisk eye over them. ‘Good, they haven’t done too much damage. Over-prescribing, as usual, and all these tests – they must think you’re pregnant. How do you feel?’

      ‘Fine.’ Neil found himself smiling at her. ‘Bored.’

      ‘That means you’re ready to leave. I warn you, there’s a lot to do and not much time.’

      Neil let her hand brush his cheek. She sat on the bed, gazing at him with undisguised pleasure. When she was alone with Neil she usually turned down the volume control of her public persona, as if this teenaged boy touched some lingering need for the intimacy of private life. But today she was unable to restrain herself.

      ‘Listen, Neil – it’s what we’ve prayed for. I’ve found a ship!’

      Neil pulled her hands from the air and pressed them together, trying to calm her. ‘That’s great, doctor. But I’m out of training – I won’t be ready for the swim until October or even later.’

      ‘The swim? I’m not talking about that. We’re sailing back to Saint-Esprit! We have a real ship – the Dugong. It’s moored in Honolulu harbour.’

      ‘Sailing back …?’ Neil felt the veins throb in his injured foot. ‘You’re going back to the island? You’ll get killed, doctor.’

      ‘Of course I won’t.’ Dr Barbara smoothed his sheets and pillow, as if taming the white waves. ‘It’s everything I’ve worked for. This time we’ll have the whole world behind us. The French will have to listen.’

      Unable to sit still, she sprang to the window and gripped the sill, already on the bridge of her vessel. Neil listened as she told him of the billionaire benefactor who had joined the albatross campaign. This was Irving Boyd, a reclusive thirty-five-year-old computer entrepreneur now living in Hawaii. He had recently retired after selling his software company in Palo Alto to a Japanese conglomerate, and now devoted himself to wild-life causes.

      Neil had seen him in a rare television interview, a bespectacled and almost schoolboyish figure with a row of pens clipped to his breast pocket, an earnest reader of science fiction who in some ways had never needed to grow up. Rare species of aquatic mammals such as the manatee were his speciality, and his marine sanctuary on Oahu contained the only breeding pair in captivity. Impressed by Dr Barbara’s poverty and dedication, he had begun to support her with cash donations, and supplied her with an office and free telephone at his Honolulu television station. His most important gift was the Dugong, a 300-ton Alaskan shrimp-trawler which he planned to equip as a floating marine laboratory.

      ‘But first it will take us to Saint-Esprit.’ Dr Barbara blew the blonde hair from her eyes. ‘We leave in three weeks – that’s not much time, but I want to keep everything on the boil. There should be ten of us, including you and Kimo, and Irving’s television crew. We’ll set up our sanctuary, whatever the French do.’

      ‘They’ll torpedo you,’ Neil