Greenpeace Captain

Excerpt: Chapter One

"It's Over"

JULY 10, 1985

MARSDEN WHARF

AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND

PREPARING FOR AN ANTINUCLEAR ACTION IN FRENCH POLYNESIA

Whump!

A large shiver went through the entire ship and woke me from a dead sleep. I didn't so much hear it as feel it. Disoriented and in the dark, I tried to make sense of what had just happened. As the captain of the Rainbow Warrior I knew that whatever that whump was, it wasn't good. My sleepy mind slowly began to run through the possibilities. The adrenaline hadn't hit me yet.

Had we collided with another ship? Possibly. Were we at fault? I looked out the porthole in my captain's cabin. We were tied up at the dock—Marsden Wharf, in New Zealand—so if there had been a collision, at least it wasn't our fault. Well, that's a relief, I thought, glad to know that whatever had just happened wasn't my fault. Even though I was only partly alert, at least my career survival instinct was intact.

What had caused that sound? It definitely wasn't part of the routine noise of the ship. In fact, none of the normal sounds of the ship could be heard. The generator, which supplies electricity to the ship, was strangely silent. The comforting, ever-present hum wasn't there: another sign that something was seriously wrong. The generator is a lot like your pulse or breathing—a ship's basic sign of life. The Rainbow Warrior's heartbeat had stopped. Still, we were at the dock, so how bad could it be?

Strange ... I reached up in the dark for my glasses, which for the past four years had always been stowed on a small bookshelf just above my pillow. They were gone. That's really weird. They'd remained in that exact location through storm-tossed seas and all kinds of actions ("actions" are Greenpeace's term for engagements with the "enemy"), yet they had been dislodged by the whump. Another sign of something wrong, but what?

I reached for my clothes, which I had slung over the back of my chair next to my bed, but they weren't there either. I fumbled around in the dark looking for my clothes for a few seconds. I stumbled over the toppled chair. What the fuck? Earthquake? Clothes or no clothes, as captain I had to find out what was going on, so I grabbed a towel for modesty and dashed out of my cabin into the hallway.

The emergency lighting was on in the hall in the main companionway—another very bad sign. The five-watt bulbs cast a dull light that was just enough to see by. At the engine room door, a small group of the crew was standing near the doorway and looking down. Davey Edward—our chief engineer—was there. He had rushed to his engine room—right after what seemed to him to be an explosion—worried that something down there had caused it. As I came up to him, he said the last thing I expected—or wanted—to hear. "It's over, she done with, finished." When your chief engineer says that, you can be pretty sure it's a fact.

Looking down into the engine room, I could see water had almost filled the compartment, and was already rising dangerously close to the main deck where we were standing. It made no sense at all. The ship had a massive steel bulkhead door to prevent flooding between the hold (the wide, open cargo area belowdecks) and the engine room. At sea, that door was always closed as a safety precaution. At the dock, however, it was always left open, and something had caused massive flooding in an incredibly short period of time. I instantly snapped into a very alert state of mind.