Nearing 1 a.m., Sunday, Sept. 3., just beyond the French navy's 12-mile exclusion zone at Mururoa, the South Pacific atoll where France plans to test nuclear bombs. Light wind. Half-moon. Waves from a far-off storm swell under La Rebaude, a broken-engined, radio-dead ketch owned by Greenpeace. The crew hands two black-painted sea kayaks over the rail. They are then tethered to a Zodiac inflatable boat already pitching in the water.
Al Baker, 31, a veteran Greenpeace activist, starts the Zodiac's 15-h.p. motor, and Matthew Whiting climbs aboard from the ketch. Whiting, 36, is lately of the French Foreign Legion; for that matter, he is lately also of the British army, the Spanish Foreign Legion and the University of Hertfordshire, where he studies literature. The two men, both British, carry green fatigues in waterproof bags. They have short haircuts. Whiting, burly, with a broken nose, speaks fluent rough-and-tumble French that he learned in the legion while serving on Mururoa. Baker, a lean, hard mountain climber with a seen-better, seen-worse expression, speaks nothing but rich, working-class Sussex. Someone says, "Cheers," Baker revs the outboard and the little inflatable, low in the water, rocks away on the swell, towing the kayaks toward Mururoa. The air is still, and for 10 minutes more the whine of the Zodiac's engine can be heard on La Rebaude. Then, nothing.
Beyond Mururoa's reef, a high seawall protects the atoll from natural storms and from tidal waves occasionally heaved up by the underground nuclear explosions. A second, lower seawall also surrounds the atoll. The single entrance to the lagoon within is only a few yards wider than the beam of a medium-size oceangoing ship. Protest vessels have been aiming at this breach since 1972, and last month the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior II, a successor to the Rainbow Warrior blown up by the French at Auckland, New Zealand, in 1985, was rammed by a French warship as it tried to enter the lagoon.
But Baker and Whiting are not headed for the entrance. They will abandon their Zodiac four or five miles out at sea and negotiate the reef with the kayaks. Reaching land, they will hide the kayaks and climb both seawalls with grappling hooks. With luck they will have a day or so for mischief before they are caught. The men plan to tag Mururoa's buildings with Greenpeace stickers and graffiti, slip notes to some of the press people invited by the French to witness the explosions, write a few postcards of Mururoa and drop them into the PX mail slot, get the French to search for them, and perhaps stall the first test. The stunt is planned as a classic Greenpeace "action," a dead-serious, nonviolent prank executed at considerable peril.
The plan is, if the two infiltrators are about to be captured at sea or on the beach, they will fire a parachute flare to signal their comrades on La Rebaude. There is no flare. The lights of a French patrol boat appear to the north, at the 12-mile limit. It motors to within 300 yds. of La Rebaude, showing its presence. Then it falls away.