Off a long coral beach at the head of the bay lay a tall gray ship, flying the tricolor. Above its funnels shimmered a haze of smog. Mitch sniffed the Navy-smell of baking bread and stack-gas from half a mile away. A helicopter chomped from an upper platform and thrashed toward the beach. From every mast and deck level antennae poked skyward. She must be a communications vessel of some sort, probably up from the nuclear test area to the south, for R & R for the crew. A liberty launch crammed with pompommed sailors and officers in civvies sped toward a jetty of coral-rocks.

A village peeked through the palms behind the jetty. A dusty road skirted the beach. A motorscooter popped along the road and a red jeep bounced behind it. A loudspeaker on the ship crackled in French, bringing him back to Korea: only the language was different.

“Well,” Lindy said doubtfully, “it’s only one ship, anyway...”

“One’s enough, and look at the yachts!”

Off the village, anchored helter-skelter close to the shore, a dozen cruising sailboats bobbed in the wake of the launch. He studied them through binoculars. Four flew the Stars and Stripes. He identified a Swede, a French steel ketch with an orange hull, a yawl he took to be Dutch, a Dane, two Canadian boats, and one with the black, red, and gold colors of West Germany. A tired cutter with a Sidney sternboard swung alone before a scrubbed and separate little beach. The Australian flag hung downheartedly near a broken windvane at her stern. A white-haired man slumped in the cockpit.

Behind this smaller beach, which appeared to be private, the Governor’s mansion baked. From a flagpole before it, an immense tricolor drooped, exhausted, in the heat. Through the glasses Mitch could see two figures in white shorts batting a tennis ball on a shocking-pink court.

He swept the glasses back to the sea-gypsies clustered off the village. “Jesus,” he muttered, “there were less boats anchored in front of our house!”

They raised the quarantine flag to one yardarm and the French flag for courtesy to the other. They found a spot to drop their anchor. On one side lay a fifty-foot Columbia bathtub with the salty home-port of Las Vegas, Nevada. On the other was anchored the famous schooner Star of Peace, out of Auckland to protest the French nuclear tests.

With Lindy at the wheel, he eased the anchor down onto mushy mud, poor holding. Snubbed down, he looked around. It was hot and very sticky. They were practically landlocked, cut off from the trades by the craggy peaks. The mountains should have given him a sense of security. Instead, they seemed sullen and threatening. A drum pounded ashore, with a tom-tom rhythm. He felt oddly menaced. Melville, who had anchored here under French guns 130 years before, must have felt the same.