Dead Sea (5 page)

Liberty's earliest memories were a footloose mixture of maids and nannies, hotels and houses all over the world as she had followed her parents while they took over the reins of Greenbaum Oil, expanding it into Greenbaum Petrochemical and then Greenbaum International. An itinerant childhood centred on her grandparents' rambling old mansion in Hyannis Port, because it was here that Grandpa Greenbaum had taught her to sail in the long, lazy summer vacations she had enjoyed with him. At the ripe age of five she had skippered her first vessel – a tiny skiff – out on the seeming vastness of Nantucket Sound.

By the age of seven, the reed-thin, iron-willed Liberty was at Amberley, an exclusive little private school in the south of England. England, because her parents were now settled in Mayfair, where they oversaw the rapid expansion of the Greenbaum International into Europe and all points east. At Amberley she first met William and Mary, the Mariner twins, immediate friends though some years her junior. And, through William and Mary, she gained access to the Heritage Mariner facilities in Southampton where, over the years on the Solent, her grandfather's lessons in distant Nantucket had been expanded exponentially as first Doc Weary then his daughter Florence had taken her up from dinghies through Lasers to keelboats and yachts. Single, double and multihull. From simple little inshore sloops to ocean-going schooners.

By the time Liberty left Amberley for Hunter College High on E94th Street, New York, aged thirteen, she had crewed
Katapult
on her Fastnet trials around the Isle of Wight and risen from a pampered mascot to a valued team member. And she had sprouted from five feet in her socks to five foot eight with muscles as unyielding as her determination. Her progress had brought the Mariner and Greenbaum families and business empires together. She had also captained the school hockey team, the fencing team and the debating team during their most successful year in Amberley's history. But she had had enough of pampered private school life. She wanted to try a new mix of academic excellence and broad-based acquaintance. Her mother had been unhappy, but her father talked her round. Something he could not have managed with Liberty herself.

At Hunter College High, Liberty rose through Sophomore to Senior – from five-eight to a whisker under six feet tall – at the head of her class, captaining the girls' lacrosse and fencing teams and the mixed debating team, easily holding her own against the boys. She fitted in with all sorts of ethnicities and backgrounds easily as a United Nations rep. On the side, she joined the Manhattan Sailing Club and continued to work her way up through the sailing classes and responsibilities towards keelboat skipper. Her academic studies in science, maths, languages and English were outstanding. But they paled beside her grasp of economics and business concepts examined in the social studies programmes, and in the summer schools she tried to fit into her busy schedule. And her SATs scores were simply phenomenal. She seemed destined to follow Meryl Streep to Vassar, Katherine Hepburn to Bryn Mawr or Elizabeth Arden and Oprah Winfrey to Harvard.

But no. The irresistibly headstrong Liberty vanished eastwards once again to the London Business School, then ranked first in the world. Here, studying in classrooms overlooking Regent's Park and safely bedded down in the familiar Greenbaum International company flat in Mayfair, the tall, slim bundle of Yankee energy enlivened her studies by starting the Americas Club, then joining the acting, business, wine and women's touch rugby clubs. In the absence of an LBS fencing club, she joined the Central London Fencing Club in Westminster, where she polished up her skills with foil, epee and sabre. And she joined the LBS sailing club, thus reacquainting herself with the Solent and the Heritage Mariner facilities – and vessels – nearby. With Doc and with Florence. And with
Katapult
.

Liberty graduated from the London Business School top of her class as usual, with grades that almost embarrassed her tutors. Consequently, she would have been welcome to take her MBA anywhere in the world – let alone anywhere in the States. But The Leland Stanford Junior University of Palo Alto, California, had always been part of the plan because of the sailing there. And also because, in the interim, Stanford had just pipped LBS to the position of top grad school for business in the world.

Even had Liberty not been something of a legend, now, after whipping the Navy into second place and lifting the Rose Bowl last January, it would have been no trouble for her to make links between the Stanford and UBC Sailing Clubs, as the troupe of faithful UBC undergrads around her proved clearly enough. She hadn't even needed to call on Greenbaum International's Vancouver headquarters for help. In many of the circles she moved in now, her name carried more weight than her father's.

But, she had admitted during her speech to the Royal Yacht Club – and the media – that she felt she hadn't done much since arriving in Vancouver. Nothing, in fact, beyond fitting and supplying
Flint
, shaking her down and pulling the four-woman crew into shape. Not that the crew had needed much pulling. Maya MacArthur was in the Stanford sailing club with her; Emma Toda and Bella Chung-Wolf were old adversaries from USC who knew their sailing inside out from fighting them through regatta after regatta, mostly across San Francisco Bay. But the fitting and supplying, chandlering and victualling had been slow work. In spite of all the careful pre-preparation, the chandleries, ships' stores and supermarkets had fought to supply not so much what she needed, but what she needed in the quantity, size and weight required to ballast her temperamental command.

Flint
was unique. Her name arose out of the fact that her hull was made of specially strengthened and treated polystyrene. Like her famous precursor
Plastiki
, a twenty-metre, two-masted, three-man ketch with a hull made of plastic bottles, her name was to be a play on words. In
Plastiki
's case an elision of Plastic Kontiki. In
Flint
's case, the emphasis on POLYstyrene. And the most famous nautical polly the team could think of was Long John Silver's parrot Captain Flint in R.L. Stevenson's
Treasure Island
. So
Captain
Flint
she had become. Then plain
Flint
for short. But her hull needed vary careful weighting and packing, for it was as buoyant as a Styrofoam coffee cup. And, when her sails were full, as unsteady.

The weather had been bad enough to slow things further, and it showed no sign of easing now. But at least they were nearly at the Jericho Sailing Club. Liberty came striding past the tennis courts and round on to the sailing centre, with the bedraggled but buoyant students trooping after her. And as the crowd of youngsters came down through the centre itself towards the long single finger of the jetty, two things happened at once.

Flint
came in out of the grey misty rain, materializing like a ghost ship as she slid silently towards the outer end of the quay, the flapping of her big white mainsail lost beneath the cheer that the students gave now they had sight of her at last. And the familiar, world-famous figure of Nic Greenbaum materialized, equally ghostly, at the inner end of the pier. Liberty was distracted from the breathtaking sight of her command for the instant it took him to sweep her into his icy, sodden embrace. His short grey beard scraped comfortably against her cheek. ‘Hiya, Daddy,' she said, her eyes suddenly prickling with an intensity of emotion she had not thought to feel.

‘You don't think I'd have missed this?' he teased, releasing her and twirling her round to slip a long arm over her shoulder.

‘I was beginning to wonder. Wouldn't you have been happier at the Royal Yacht Club?' She glanced back across Jericho Park to the distant golden glimmer of the building she had just left.

‘Naaw . . .' He drew the negative out lazily. ‘This isn't about the glad-handing and the publicity. You've taken care of that in spades. This is just about a proud Poppa wanting to wave bye-bye to his little girl. Mom sends her love. Sent this too . . .' He hefted a case that looked promisingly nautical and practical. ‘Just what you need to slip under your Helly Hansen, I'd say.'

As he spoke, Nic was hurrying his daughter down the quay towards the sailing boat as she swung against her mooring line, waiting for her skipper and high water. Ten minutes later she was aboard, having stopped off in the little quayside shower facility to empty the bag of the matched set of Helly Hansen sailing gear – several layers of it – and fill it with sodden haute couture and mud-smeared leopard-skin leather.

‘You on a
Yachting Monthly
photoshoot?' asked Maya, as she scrambled aboard into the cockpit, almost as expensively attired here as she had been in the Royal Yacht Club.

‘Mother,' explained Liberty, embarrassed. ‘But we could all be on some kind of photoshoot. I don't trust my dad at all . . .'

‘We could cast off now and slip away,' tempted Maya as she handed over the big yachting helm. ‘We're all rigged and ready.'

‘That'd be cheating . . .' Liberty hesitated uncharacteristically.

‘Too late anyway,' chimed in Bella Chung-Wolf, calling up from her electronic equipment console down in the cabin. ‘We're at high water now.'

‘Off we go, then!' ordered Liberty with no further ado. Emma Toda cast off at the bows and Maya ratcheted the mainsail tight. The squall coming in past the Royal Yacht Club took
Flint
at once and the wheel kicked into life under Liberty's hands while the kids on the Jericho pier cheered her away.

Flint
was maybe half a mile out into English Bay with Bella calling up headings, when the first of the press-packed Greenbaum International helicopters came swooping down into camera range.

T
he helicopters thundered in low enough to make Richard look up from the shallow cavity of
Katapult
's cockpit, where he was adjusting the aft anchors to hold her in the natural dock just deep enough to accommodate her three keels. ‘Now that,' he called to Robin, ‘is what I call
high water
 . . .'

‘Very funny,' Robin retorted from the needle sharp bow of the central hull. She shaded her eyes with her right hand and looked up past the white tube of the tight-furled foresail, following his gaze up towards the New Zealand Air Force choppers which were laden with fresh water for the drought-stricken island.

‘NOT,' added Florence Weary, also calling back from the slim, smooth whaleback of the forecastle, her gaze also reaching up past the tall main mast with its cross-trees etched against the hard blue of the clear, hot sky. ‘The guys on the islands are dying of thirst, you know? It's not a joking matter, Richard.'

‘Well it looks like the closest to high water we'll get,' Richard riposted cheerfully, if hardly sensitively, moving back beneath the light awning he had rigged as a sunshade earlier and gesturing over the side at Te Namo Lagoon which occupied the centre of the tiny island nation's principal atoll. ‘If this water was any lower we could run the world land speed championships here instead of the flats at Salt Lake.'

Rohini Verma looked up from the computer console to the right of the main cabin six steps down, behind and beneath the watertight doors that were designed to close below the main navigating position when the vessel was under full sail. She pushed her glasses back up her long nose and dabbed at the sweat beading her upper lip. The fitful breeze that cooled Richard and made the awning flap occasionally didn't reach down there. ‘You know very well that high water will come. It is a tidal thing. Nothing to do with global warming or Doctor Tanaka's plughole effect. To do with the
moon
.'

‘It's the
sun
that's worrying me now,' riposted Richard from the safety of the awning's wind-cooled shadow. ‘What's the temperature down there with you, Rohini? Forty-five Celsius? Goodness knows what it must be out on the beach there.'

‘Hot enough to cook shrimp,' called Flo feelingly from the unshaded bow. ‘Without the barbie.'

‘Then I'm surprised it isn't barbecuing Akelita's toes,' concluded Richard. ‘Because she's strolling out across it now.'

The fourth and last member of the all-woman crew approached almost lazily, carrying a palm-frond bag full of goodies from the Jimmy Store on Tuvalu Street. Like the town it supplied it sat well behind the crest of the golden slope behind her, invisible from here.

‘She's a local girl,' observed Robin enviously, watching her wade out into the lagoon, scarcely more than paddling out to where the multihull sat restlessly, ready to sail at high water. ‘Acclimatized.
You're
the one I'm worried about, Richard. Did you bring sandals with you when you came aboard this morning? We cast off when Rohini calls high tide and you're not coming with us.'

‘I have my O'Neills,' he assured her. ‘Wet or dry they'll see me through. And it isn't that far up to town.'

Katapult
was anchored on the lagoon side of Fongafale Island, largest of the circular chain of islets that comprised Tuvalu atoll. Beyond the white sand slope of the beach, there was a fringe of vivid green palms, then a short, shaded walk between beachside shacks and houses through to Fongafale Street, followed by a slightly longer stroll past the banana plantation to Tuvalu Street, and, on the ocean side of that, the buildings at the start of the International Airport runway, the Matagigali Bar and JY's Ocean restaurant.

Halfway down the runway on the ocean side were the airport buildings themselves – where the NZ Air Force chopper boys would be signing in, Richard suspected, before unloading their precious freshwater cargo and heading up towards the Matagigali for a different sort of liquid refreshment entirely. And on the lagoon side of the runway opposite the Airport buildings, south of the banana plantation, stood the National Bank, post office with its new cell phone mast and the government and municipal buildings beside it. There was a hospital, a couple of schools and the Vaiaku Lagi Hotel, one of whose wonderful upstairs double rooms currently contained what little was left of the Mariners' luggage now that Robin had moved what she needed for a thirty-day cruise into her skipper's accommodation aboard
Katapult
.