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A 42-ft. ketch, La Rebaude had sailed from Papeete, the capital of Tahiti, at midnight 11 days earlier, without clearance from the French, and rendezvoused with the two kayakers at sea a few miles down the island's coast. Greenpeace bought the boat somewhat casually at dockside in Papeete and equipped it in four days, without sea testing and without including a long-range radio transmitter or receiver. (The diesel engine died four hours into the voyage, so the vessel also lacked electric power, except a little generated by solar panels, and thus had no functioning refrigerator or electric bilge pump.) A tiny shortwave radio occasionally brought in a scrap of intelligence. Somebody had reached the quarter-finals at the U.S. Open. An Australian-rules football team had lost.
During the long night watches as they sailed to Mururoa, La Rebaude's hands told Greenpeace stories, many of which shared the same moral: "The military lies. Corporations lie. We don't lie." Twilly Cannon, from Missoula, Montana, the boat's captain, endured months in 1990 stalking the Soviet navy as it prepared to ditch another spent nuclear reactor in the Kara Sea northeast of Murmansk. Michelle Sheather, an Australian, was on the Rainbow Warrior when the French blew it up, and had left the ship 15 minutes before the limpet mines went off.
And Whiting told why he was bitter enough to risk his neck. He is convinced--without any real evidence--that the French used the Foreign Legion troops on Mururoa as nuclear guinea pigs. They were a labor force, reinforcing the island's coral with concrete and rebuilding roads that buckled after bomb tests. But the legionnaires worked in areas contaminated by radiation, Whiting insisted. Someone not French had to clean up debris after explosions. Blood and urine samples were taken weekly, but no results were revealed. He was beaten up, he said, for asking a single question about the effectiveness of Geiger counters.
A few hours after dropping off Whiting and Baker, La Rebaude reaches a flotilla of protest boats at a spot in the open blue ocean--139.05 degrees W, 22.30 degrees S--about 15 miles off Mururoa. One-masters and two-masters crowd the site; the Manutea, a Greenpeace boat carrying journalists, heaves into view. French picket boats motor slowly at the line of the exclusion zone. A French jet labeled MARINE mock-strafes the boats one by one, diving from about 1,000 ft. to not more than 150 ft., then rising and diving again. Military helicopters buzz about, low enough for the mustaches of the harnessed, helmeted commandos to be visible through the open cargo doors.
Tuesday morning brings two developments. One is that Whiting and Baker have been caught. They evaded the French for two days. That is a victory. A bit later, the news comes that the French have exploded their first bomb, a small one about the size of the one dropped on Hiroshima.
Dave McTaggart, 63, sailed his boat the Vega into the exclusion zone in 1972 and '73, and was almost beaten to death by the French. Now he's returned with the Vega. Yes, he says, Greenpeace will stay on at Mururoa. He answers the radiophone. "Look," he says to someone in Papeete, "I need to know exactly which of those parliamentarians is prepared to violate the zone. Yeah, yeah, call me tomorrow."