ROBBIE...................... The sea-green eyes beside me surveyed the scene from the back of the cliff-top crowd at Treyarnon Bay. The holiday-makers in front of us were distraught - some becoming hysterical. The dog that had been swept out in the rip had been paddling for over three hours now, and was getting mighty tired. It continued to fight calmly and doggedly against the relentless current, but it was obviously getting nowhere fast. The ten rear old girl who owned the mutt could only stand and watch with tear-filled baby blues whist trying to will the dog to try harder - but we could see that it was hopeless. The duty lifeguard had tried to paddle his rescue board through the massive waves, but the rising tide and the ever-increasing swell had forced him to abort the mission, and come panting up the beach to telephone for boat and helicopter assistance. The trouble was that it was a hectic day for the rescue service. The combination of fine weather, a freak swell, and strong off-shore winds had created a dozen incidents - all of which had to be responded to in some sort of prioritised order. Unfortunately the well being of a golden Labrador came well down in the list of things. The wailing girl suddenly realised that Robbie and me were standing beside her, looking the very epitome of the cool surfing fraternity. Sun bleached unkempt hair, baggies, tees, flip-flops - if anyone could rescue the pooch, we obviously could. Her big baby blues were fixed on me, pleading in that cute way that only curly-headed ten year olds can. Robbie turned his sea green eyes to me, and shook his head as if he read my thoughts. Dont even think about it man he muttered in his Californian drawl. you aint no Silver Surfer super hero dude. I continued to watch him as he turned his steely gaze back to the animals hopeless plight in the boiling sea below us. Robbie had always seemed to me to be the very epitome of the perfect surfer.. He was short and stocky with legs like little tree trunks. They all said that a bottom near the ground meant a low centre of gravity and hence - balance with a capital B. He had sun-bleached blond locks and what appeared to be permanently-tanned skin. He was never dressed in anything other than raggedy well-worn Quicksilver hoodie and baggies. Occasionally he would hide his striking sea green eyes with blue-tinted shades. This was usually as a sign to me that he had spotted the Feds and it was time for us to move on - pronto! .............................................................................................................. I had first come into contact with Robbie when I had been given a small summer vacation job with the Special Research Unit of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. My father was considered to be something of a top scientist by the British Government, and he was part of a swap of personnel to foster good relations between the two counties. I was reluctantly dragged along with the family, and as a favour to my dad, and as a way of keeping me occupied for the school vacation, the trusting yanks granted me special security status which allowed me to have a job sweeping up and making coffee in the SRU.....the saps knew not what they did! I accidentally came across Robbie in the High Security Unit right in the heart of the laboratory complex. He was busy absorbing top secret documentation on one of the computers in the central library. He was a trusted worker with access to all the security codes including security level Orange - the whole thermo-nuclear shebang! I immediately saw that there could be some real use made from his swatting ways. Hell, I was a non-affiliated founder member of Greenpeace, a fact that I kept well-hidden from my Establishment-employed father. If he, or my American benefactors got an inkling of that little fact of life, then they would have had me outa there like a shot - my butt would not have touched the ground. So I talked to Robbie over the endless cups of steaming, black java that I made for him (which he never drank) and whetted his appetite for my kind of life. We spent our leisure time watching my comprehensive collection of surf videos and Robbie really became stoked when he realised that I was showing him what he had been missing all his life. I encouraged the guy to hack into all the classified files and build up dossiers that could prove useful to my Greenpeace amigos. Getting the stuff off the campus could have been difficult. Robbie was my pal, but I dont think that he would have risked treason for me at that stage. The breakthrough came when I sneaked Big Al Hunts DVD Rom of every surfing magazine ever published onto the complex. Remember, this was the end of the eighties and the internet was still the sole preserve of the US army and Emailing was in its infancy - and just mysterious mumbo-jumbo to most of us. I fed the DVD into Robbies PC and stood back. I could tell the next day that he had been scanning it all night. His sea-green eyes were kinda hooded and glazed over. He carried himself in a different way too - sorta cool, you know what I mean. He purchased some blue-tinted shades that day, and I just knew that my boy was just ripe for the picking. I fished about a little at first, but I soon found out that my caution was unjustified. Hell, it was as if Robbie already knew what I had planned. He was as ready as I was to save the planet. He had acquired the true spirit of the surfer even though (as far as I was aware) he had never even dipped one pinkie into the ocean. We were a pair. Blood brothers. ............................................................................................................ We made our move soon after. As tea boy and chief broom hand, I was allowed off campus with no questions asked. Robbie, however, was a different kettle of save da tuna. He was considered to be a precious commodity, someone who would not be allowed to just wonder off without a pretty good reason, but I need not have worried about him. I distracted the marine guard at the gate, and Robbie snuck past like a slithering reptile. We were out in a twinkling - free as the wind. It could not have been many hours before Security knew that we were gone, and that we had some pretty sensitive stuff spirited away with us. But Robbie could smell those Feds a mile off. He spotted them at all the bus depots and railway stations well before they could spot us. As soon as he put on his blue-tinted shades, I knew that we would need to take immediate evasive action. At first I thought that it was a pretty neat game of cops and robbers, real James Bond stuff. That was before we finally got spotted at the airport and one of the Feds fired a warning shot over our heads as we sprinted out of the terminus and disappeared down a dark alley. The guy had meant business. This was no game - no doubt about it. At last I finally made contact with my Greenpeace buddies, and they sent a debriefing Agent to the seedy motel where we were holed up, to gather our information and (hopefully) to arrange our escape. Robbie amazed even me when he spilled the ol soyas to Rainbow man. The Shell Corporation, he said, was about to dump the first of their redundant oil rigs into a deep sea trench with oil and some real toxic stuff still on board. He blurted out figures and chemical names into the small Greenpeace tape recorder, as if he were reading them from an inventory. Greenpeace needed to visit the rig while it was still being towed to its dump spot, board the rig and protest to the world before Shell could carry out the dirty deed. The French government, he continued, were about to carry out a series of nuclear explosions on Muraoa Atoll in the South Pacific. He trotted out dates, times and even the size of the explosions, with specific depths below the coral and the exact sizes of the chambers that had been hollowed out. Hell, the only information that he did not give was the colour of the button-pushers underpants - but I got the impression that he could have, if he had been asked. The good ol Greenpeace vessel, he said, needed to drop anchor right on the reef, to thwart the Frogs, and prevent them from polluting the Earth. He then put the top hat on everything by disclosing that the National Laboratory was presently investigating the death of one Gloria Remirez, who had died whilst in the operating theatre of the Riverside Hospital. Whilst she was in the theatre all the operating staff had been overcome with symptoms closely akin to chemical warfare gases. Robbie was very instrumental in this investigation and it was him that had found a trace of DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide, is a sulfur compound used as a pain killer) in her bloodstream, Robbie himself then formulated a theory that she had been rubbing a DSMO-based liniment onto her muscles (a common proprietary-branded medicine), and that this had entered her bloodstream and had reacted chemically with the oxygen that she had been given whilst in the ambulance. This reaction, he speculated, then produced DMSO2 - not dangerous in itself, but just one small step away from a lethal nerve gas. Robbie said that he had been working on the theory that a dying body produces hitherto unknown chemicals, one of which reacted with the DSMO2 to create the lethal DSMO4 - science fiction or what! Livermore was currently instructing Riverside to keep schtum about Robbies frightening theory and to carry on with the official line that all the theatre staffs symptoms were caused by mass hysteria. No sense in alarming the plebs until the theory was proved under laboratory conditions. Sweeping the truth under the carpet had not sat easily with Robbie, who could see that if this strange chain of events had occurred once, then it was likely to happen again - and maybe next time there really would be gigantic fatal consequences. Robbie wanted further investigation and possibly the withdrawal of the proprietary muscle rub/degreasing liniment that he was speculating was at the heart of this unfortunate ladys demise........but Livermore had their own agenda and Robbie was over-ruled. ............................................................................................................ The Greenpeace boys did their bit. Robbie and I were smuggled back to GB aboard a private yacht and were ordered to lie low in the rural depths of North Cornwall. I surfed up and down the coast while Robbie always tagged along, posed, and looked the part. He might have been a whizz kid blood specialist researcher at Livermore, but it seemed to me that he was actually scared stiff of the ocean. He was always there to watch, browsed the right shops, read the right mags - but he would not dip so much as one little toe into the water. I couldnt figure the guy. The newspapers reports of Greenpeaces successes were spectacular. They put a spoke in the Shell Corporations wheel preventing the Brent Spar oil rig from being dumped at sea. Shell could not figure out how Greenpeace had got onto them so fast, and chained a team of activists to the structure, even before their intentions had been made public.........but the Feds knew and they must have been furious. .......And the Green guys were anchored right there on the atoll (thanks to Robbies timely information) when France was forced to announce that did indeed intend to carry out a series of nuclear test explosions in that particular area of Pacific paradise. The battle was long, hard and bitter, but the French eventually got their way - but never recovered from the negative publicity that was generated. .........Even the ever-secretive Livermore realised that they would have to come clean with what they suspected had turned poor Gloria Ramirezs blood system into a chemical warfare plant - and much to the Riverside Hospitals embarrassment, the Livermore Laboratory went public before Greenpeace could expose them. All the operating theatre staff who had been accused of mass hysteria, were exonerated and compensated. Our friendly neighbourhood Greenpeace agent told us that they were receiving information that the FBI were still actively sending out feelers to try to discover our whereabouts. They said that the word was out that we were to be captured at all costs! The green man wanted to know what other information we had that would provoke such a Red Alert reaction from the Bureau. Of course I didnt know diddley-squat about nothin, and Robbie just put on his blue shades, shrugged his muscular shoulders, and grinned his best lop-sided surfers grin. Stay out of sight was the best advice that Greenpeace could give us - and for the most part, that was just what we did. But every time that I could see a swell from our hotel window, caution was thrown to the wind. I went surfing, and Robbie tagged along to watch. Hell, after all, we were blood brothers! ........................................................................................................... So here we were on the cliff top at Treyarnon. The swell was growing by the minute, the pooch in the water was tiring by the second - and little miss blue eyes was gazing at me as if she just knew that I was the type of guy to do something heroic (and stoopid). I turned to Robbie and was just about to tell him that I bequeathed him my surfboard if I didnt come back again - when he put on his blue shades and nodded at some figures at the far end of the cliff-top path who were rapidly approaching. Even at that distance they stuck out like sore thumbs amongst the casually-dressed holiday-makers. Two burly men in blue serge suits with short cropped haircuts, black sunglasses and grim expressions. Each with a magnum-sized bulge under his jacket and a look on his face that said - mess with me buddy, and I will bite your friggin head off! A quick glance to the opposite end of the footpath told us that there were two more spooks approaching from that direction. Trapped! The only way out appeared to be the slippery clamber down the rocks to the slither of sand left on the beach due to the incoming high tide. It would then be just a short dash up the little inlet to the car park. Hopefully some sap would have been dumb enough to have left the keys in the ignition of one of the parked cars. Robbie handed me his shades and told me to make out like I was part of the crowd. We would stand a better chance, he hissed, if we split up. He would lead them off, and we should meet up later in the bar of the Harlyn Inn further round the coast. A simple plan, but it was all that we had. We locked thumbs and shook hands the way that blood brothers do - and then he was off. He half slid, half bounced down the boulders to the sand below with the ocean waves crashing against the cliff face trying its damnedest to drag him in and carry him off. The four blue-suited gorillas ignored me completely and gingerly started their own slithering descent down the rocky face. It would seem that Robbie was the only one that they were interested in. As the whole crowd peered over the edge of the cliff at the blue suits slowly sliding down on their bottoms, the struggling dog was momentarily forgotten. I thought for one moment that Robbie was gonna make it - but realised in the same instant as he did, that the car park at the top of the beach was swarming with Feds who were popping up from behind every car. Robbie turned back, literally trapped between the devil and the deep blue sea. This time there was no escape. With Feds advancing on him from all sides, Robbie sprinted to the bottom of the cliff where the lifeguard had abandoned his rescue board before rushing off to telephone for assistance. Without hesitation Robbie ripped off his sweatshirt, picked up the big, yellow board, and flung it and himself into the boiling sea. Luck was on his side. The lull was only a slight one, but it was just long enough to allow Robbie to kneel on the board and power it over a couple of temporarily-diminished waves, out into the channel where the rip bore him away in triumph - leaving all the Feds fuming on the beach. Boy, steam sure was coming out of their ears!. It had all happened so quickly in that boiling maelstrom below us, that it seemed that Robbie had hardly even got wet. He continued to pump his powerful arms into the water, driving the board forward with a speed and a strength that even amazed me. Within seconds he had arrived outback, at the place where the dog was still mechanically and methodically treading water. Powerful hands grabbed the exhausted animals collar - and a great roar came from the cliff top crowd as the dog was whisked up onto the nose of the board where it squatted down facing its rescuer whilst wagging its soggy tail feebly. Robbie turned the board parallel to the shore and, still kneeling, dug those muscle-bound arms into the water once again to move away from the rip channel. By now the lull was well and truly gone. Set upon smoking set thundered in from their thousand-mile journey in order to throw themselves crashing upon the Cornish shore-line. Robbie never hesitated for one second. It was obviously too dangerous out there to even think about it. With the whimpering dog still clinging to the deck on the nose of the board, he continued to power it in without pausing to look behind him. If he had, he would have seen the gigantic wave that was about to break right on top of him. Hug the board man! I shouted from the cliff top, as if there was some chance that he could hear me. Lay down, hug the board and dont let go! As the wave began to collapse, I saw Robbie spring up at the last moment and plant his feet on the middle of the deck whilst striking a classic pose. Just for a millisecond he was steaming. Then the wave crashed down and they were gone. .......................................................................................................... The Feds were clearing people from the area and moving everyone on. But I broke through and charged down the beach. They must have recognised me as the accessory and figured that my presence on the scene did not really matter. The two halves of the rescue board were bobbing about in the shallows, and the exhausted dog was sitting protectively over Robbies grotesque form, as he lay where the Feds had left him after they had dragged him out of the sea. The dog growled menacingly at anyone who dared come close. Robbies body appeared to be locked rigid into the pose that he had assumed when he stood on a board for his first and last time. It was as if rigor mortis had taken hold of him. As I looked into the sea green eyes that had now rolled up into his head revealing what lay beneath, I suddenly understood. The spark of life had literally shorted out. A blue suit wrapped his arm around my drooping shoulders in a paternal fashion. There was no anger, and no sign of the reproach of the Authoritarian kind that I was half expecting. He crouched down and offered his hand to the bristling dog who was still guarding his saviour protectively. The dog responded to kindness and licked the proffered hand as if to accept the inevitable and release his precious charge without further protest. The Fed took off his own dark sunglasses and spoke, partly to me, and partly to the dog. Come on now son, Lets take this surfer home. He had assumed that I had realised the truth long ago - but I hadnt. I did not know that I had been totally responsible for Robbies free spirit, his kindness, his concern - his humanity. All this I had unwittingly programmed in.............but the Livermore robots were not yet designed to be waterproof. ......................................................................................................
Posted on: Tue, 30 Dec 2014 11:23:21 +0000
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