Once airborne, I passed out briefing sheets to all the participants, giving background on the Comoros and how we hoped to accomplish the project. Our mission to capture a hard to get fish on the far side of the world and return it alive and swimming to New York, seemed so exotic that in spite of everything I'd been through in the preparations, I was still genuinely excited. I watched the others in their seats, trying to read their moods. Judy and Josie hit it off immediately, chatting and joking. Lou and Rich, both seasoned veterans of collecting expeditions, were more reserved, though they too sensed at some level the drama and unpredictability of this undertaking.

                    Peter had flown from Toronto to Paris ahead of us. We rendezvoused with him at the Paris Aquarium, whose French director was amazed to suddenly meet Lou Garibaldi out of the blue. He had known of Lou's earlier work at the New England Aquarium. We had a quick behind-the-scenes tour of the facility, while Judy and Josie tracked down art exhibits they were interested in at Parisian galleries.

                   The group reconvened at Peter's hotel, where we contemplated our destiny before heading for the airport and the long flight south-south east over vineyards, deserts, savannas, and the Sea of Zing with its crop of volcanic outposts harboring our quarry.

                      In spite of those generous assurances from the Comoran Ambassador, there was no red carpet awaiting us at the airport when we landed in the Comoros. As before, the same scene of unbridled chaos unfolded, except this time Charly Hortoland of the US Embassy staff was there to expedite us through customs. All our gear arrived intact.

                     Two vehicles took us south from the airport. Peter, Josie, and I shared a taxi. On his own initiative, the driver decided to take us on an unwanted tour of Moroni. There it was again, the city on the volcano's shelf, with its massive, Arabesque, Friday Mosque fronting the harbor. Winding, dirty, crowded streets alternated with would-be modern boulevards and Sixties-style government buildings. The old market was splattered with colorfully clad squatting women vending fruits and vegetables from the interior plots, while the new "People's Market," beneath its umbrella of fanning concrete dish ceilings, was buzzing with sellers of fly-covered fishes laid out amidst dirty pots, bars of soap and the other simple necessities of a Comoran household. Small European cars, well beyond obsolescence, plied the roadways, honking as they brushed aside jaywalkers. So much intensive, purposeful activity on such a small island! I thought how all the businesses and purposes of humans come from merely being alive in one place. If an asteroid hit the Comoros the rest of the world would scarcely know about it, but here everything was very important.

                     The driver wanted to charge us for the tour. Charly, arriving with the others in his own vehicle, straightened that out with a few loud Comoran remarks. Soon we were ensconced, this time at the Ylang Ylang Hotel, as the few bungalows of the Coelacanthe were fully booked. The Ylang Ylang is an elongated two story luxury hotel on a spit of land by the sea south of Moroni. Something of a Holiday Inn affair, it was built in the Seventies, in hopes of housing business travellers and tourists in a coming economic boom that never materialized. Still the hotel with its Belgian manager, Monsieur De La Croix, French chef, outdoor pool, bar, patios and chessboard dance floor made do. In addition to a few of the anticipated visitors, it served as an afternoon swimming club for some of the island's white expatriates. That it was a passably attractive place seemed oddly irrelevant to our purposes.

                     The group picked roommates and settled in. I wound up alone, but with all the gear piled to the ceiling on both sides of my room. There was a controlled excitement among us. I focused on keeping things and people organized.
When we met again for dinner on the hotel's roofed-over dinning terrace, I began to realize what an ad hoc mix of people I had brought together on this quest. There was Rich, the curatorial assistant, trying to order in French with a heavy Brooklyn accent, laughing after every word; Judy, the self-made socialite, turning up her nose at the raw egg served with her fettuccine; Businessman Peter, veteran of the Comoros, reading the French menu with a not quite convincing air of deja vu; Assistant director Lou, cracking mini-jokes while holding us agape with tales of aquarium exploits; Josie scanning all nuances of the scene to feed her artistic sensibility; while I at least pretended to be present--the whole time my mind churning with logistical details and evaluations of how to do this, that, and the other now that Comoran support was obviously absent. Others on that terrace must have viewed us as a loud American tour group, quite an oddity for the Comoros. I could sense that this coalition would only hold together for so long before personalities began clashing. Would it be long enough?

                   Next morning, in the rush to get going, Rich and I were testing one of our portable generators on the terrace outside the sliding glass paneled door of my room. The noise brought the hotel manager, the burly Belgian, De La Croix, who spoke English with a thick Flemish accent. He said his own plant engineer could handle battery charging for us and that we'd better confine noisy activities to the strip of land along the shore, well away from the rooms. We did so, testing our cooler unit on the sandy floor of a palm grove by the sea, and it was here that we met the "Man." He introduced himself, and said he did security work for the hotel on Sundays.

                  When I say the "Man," I might as well say the "Men," for he had the girth of any two humans combined. His head perched on massive, neckless shoulders, which sloped in at the rear, forming a depression along his spine, and out in front, puffing into an enormous chest covered by a film of T shirt with the silk screened words: Coelacanth Research Mission under a drawing of the fish. His chest, in turn, was buttressed from below by a well fed gut, hanging over, like a dollop of honey, the wisp of a belt holding up his black gabardine slacks. I was almost surprized he walked upright rather than on folded knuckles, for he had in every aspect the build of a giant male silverback, the patriarch of gorilla families. His name was Rachad Ahmed, but he was known by one and all in the Comoros as "Mombassa," after the coastal city in Kenya where he had once lived and fought as a professional boxer: "The Lion of Mombassa." Mombassa was the first Comoran I met--after the Ambassador to the U.S.--who spoke English, and that made him instantly valuable to us. Yes, it turned out he had assisted the Japanese Coelacanth Research Mission, and knew the whole coelacanth scene rather well. What's more, Mombassa was also the head man of Charly Hortoland's work crew at the U.S. Embassy warehouse. So he already knew all about us. "Momba" and I hit it off right away, and I invited him to become our expedition expediter at a per diem of U.S. $40. At six feet I was actually taller than Mombassa, but skinny as a rail, and strength-wise far his inferior. His biceps were as big as my thighs, his forearm as big as my neck. We were at the exact opposite ends of the spectrum of human shapes. In time, we became friends and perhaps the oddest looking couple to appear on the Comoran scene in search of coelacanths.

                  Mombassa brought out the patrician in me. I somehow relished the idea of having a huge African at my "beck and call". He pretended to be the efficient army officer reporting for service and I pretended to be his C.O. But it was far too late in the century for colonial stereotypes. We were playing a game, and we both knew it. We were both too smart to take our roles any further. Besides, Mombassa was wary of my connections with his real bosses at the Embassy, and I was wary of his charm and cunning, for Mombassa knew how to work the white folk pretty damn well. It was an even 50/50 as to who was exploiting whom. And that, I guess, is called a working relationship.

                   Mombassa would give me a crisp, stubby salute, announcing in a deep, Anglicized Idi Amin grumble, "Reporting for service, Captain." I would ask if he would be able to arrange this, that and the other, check on so and so, find out about such and such. He would take all this in, then respond confidently in the same low voice. "Of course! I can make all the things for you." We were almost exactly the same age, yet how different our lives had been. Mombassa had had a checkered career on the East African coast. He said he had played a safari boy in two John Wayne movies, and been featured in a couple of other "Big Game" romance pictures shot in Kenya. He had worked in Zanzibar as a bodyguard for the president there until the revolution of '68 toppled that government. The revolutionaries imprisoned and tortured him and then exiled him by ship to the Comoros. "If Mombassa won't go to the Comoros, throw him into the sea," were the captain's instructions. Mombassa's usual village stunt was to hold a child sitting on the palm of one hand high over his head until everyone screamed and applauded, chanting "Mom Ba Sa, Mom Ba Sa." When he fought in street brawls, I found out later, his favorite trick was to grasp his opponent with both hands and bounce him off his own chest until the man collapsed, senseless. In time we became friends of sorts, the strings of our mutual destinies ravelling round the coelacanth, brooding dimly in its submarine chambers.

                   In the Comoros, as in most of the Third World there are two realities: the official "reality" of how to go about things, and the way things are actually done. The latter is a reality of arrangements. And the first thing Mombassa did through his network of wheeling and dealing was to arrange a car for us. The car had a tape player, and soon the mixed sensibilities of our group became evident from which tape had been left in the player. If Josie had been in the car it would be Kitaro's New Age Earth Music. If Peter, Bobby Darrin's songs of the "romantic Fifties." Eletronic riffs alternated with "Beyond the Sea." But the car could hardly contain all of us at once. So Mombassa procured an old Peugeot 404, canvas-covered pick up truck, the basic utility vehicle of the Comoros--which the French call a bashe, as in "Baa Shay." Naturally, "Momba" would do the driving.

                  Lou Garibaldi and Richard Crist set about unpacking and setting up the fish transporter, which had arrived the previous January and was stored at the Embassy warehouse. I found it odd that during the whole year no catches had been reported to us in New York. Our reward for a live fish had been in place since the submersion cage was built in February.There were now two new frozen coelacanths at S.O.C.O.V.I.A, the meat packing plant in Moroni. The Comoran Ambassador in New York had assured us of the highest levels of government cooperation in the Comoros. For him, the return of a live coelacanth to New York, would represent a whole new political opening between the U.S. and the Comoros. He was eager for our success. Yet now that we were here, no one in government seemed to know anything about us at all. It was a case of one hand not knowing what the other was doing. This led to some embarrassing moments when I was summoned before both the Ministers of Information and Production to explain our mission and arrange the proper permits. These included an agreement to pay a fee of $2,000 if we should succeed in capturing a coelacanth for export.

                 As there would be no government assistance in procuring boats for fishing, Mombassa also arranged them for us. We could use one of the Japanese Yamaha diesel fiberglass outriggers, a "Japawa," in the fishing village of Iconi for $80 a night plus gas. This rather steep price immediately skewed the plan to lease and operate two boats at the same time. Charly Hortoland had constructed, to our specifications, a wooden upside down "U" bracket to fit over the sides of the boat, with the legs of the "U" pointing down into the water. To each of these legs Rich and I fastened a sonar transducer. In this fashion the sonar could be removed from the boat after each use to guard against theft. We had some cause for alarm because only a few days into the expedition, Lou Garibaldi's passport had been stolen. Special arrangements had to be made with the Embassy in order to get him back into the States.

                I sought out Jean Louis Gerod, the S.C.U.B.A. diver, to introduc him to Lou and Rich. Jean Louis couldn't remember my name, but asked how Michael was doing. (Yes, Michael knew how to make an impression!) Through Jean Louis, Lou and Rich arranged a night dive in which they were able to collect several "flashlight fish," a colorless creature about an inch long with bags of luminescent bacteria under its eyes. By opening and closing a modified eye membrane, the fish appears to turn these lights on and off--whence its name. The lights are used for hunting and signaling in the dark. Lou took these back to New York with him via Madagascar, where they lived for several years, twinkling away in a darkened tank at the New York Aquarium. Collecting the flashlight fish, I learned about rogue waves. While the others were under water, I stood on the shore with the container for the flashlight fish at my feet, well beyond the reach of the waves. Suddenly a single wave, dwarfing the others crashed past us, drenching me and carrying the container out to sea on the backsurge. Lesson learned, and I've since heard of fishermen, casting from rocky butes, being drown this way.

               Jean Louis had tapes from the Fricke submersible coelacanth expedition, that we watched with great interest. I was awestruck by the beauty of the creature.The only sound on the track was rock and roll music playing gently in the background of the submersible's interior. The coelacanths on video moved around chunks of bottom coral, skulling their paired fins, with a slow motion gracefulness reminiscent of a dirigible hovering about its landing mast by angling its propellers. The white flecks were clearly noticeable, and the apparent calmness of the fish, even in the powerful spotlights of the submersible, made a sublime impression. What I also noticed was that the gills barely seemed to move in respiration, a stark contrast to the powerful gulping action, once every four seconds, in the dying fish I had observed the year before. Now we had a control. The gill action of a caught coelacanth would be a good indicator of its stress level. The less action the better--up to a point!

               When Lou Garibaldi departed for New York in just under a week, he left behind a group of impressed disciples, struck by his knowledge and capabilities as a man of fishes. In fact, Jean Louis took him to be the Director of the New York Aquarium, and agreed to supply small unusual reef fishes on demand, though in the end nothing came of the offer.

              On the eighth day of our Comoran sojourn we made a daytime run in the Japawa, fully loaded with all the gear and expeditionaires. The test was successful enough. I documented the event with a Sony 8mm Camcorder, contributed anonymously to the expedition. We were ready for the first night run, the first actual coelacanth fishing effort. Lou and I had early on agreed to a policy that whenever there was even the slightest chance of our catching a coelacanth, we had to be fully prepared with all our first step life-support equipment on hand. This meant a prodigious amount of loading and unloading every time we went to sea, for no gear could be left in the boat between trips. Here's the recipe for a night's coelacanth fishing excursion: First off, there were the 12 volt car batteries-- one for running the sonar and a light bulb via a power inverter, and the other for the power down-rigger, which also came along mounted transversely on a plank to straddle the gunnels of the boat. Next there was at least one of the portable, 19-pound, generators. These could charge the batteries, if need be, or power a utility light. Then came the power inverter and the utility lamp, together with flashlights and Cyalume glow sticks, followed by the sonar graph unit mounted on the "U" frame with the transducers at each end. Now, fishing rods with lines, leaders, hooks, and "starter" bait fish, fresh from the market, for catching roudi, the coelacanth bait fish. We also carried life jackets, a compass, and a water-filled five gallon folding plastic bottle, in case we got stranded at sea. Signal flares were for the same purpose. Next, one of Lou's plastic flotation chambers to isolate a coelacanth capture for oxygen therapy, and, for the same task, an oxygen tank with tubing and an electric bilge pump to use as an atomizer. We also brought a plastic duffel bag with tools and extra fishing gear, including wire cutters for snags or getting sharks off the line in case they chomped on the cannon ball and began to pull the down-rigger overboard. We needed one of the two-way radios--the other to be left on shore with Mombassa. I would toss in some snacks, to combat fatigue and blood sugar crashes, along with umbrellas for rain or sun if we became stranded. Then came two ten gallon fuel tanks for the boat, extra lead "cannonballs" for the down-riggers, a roll of extra graph paper for the sonar, fighting harnesses, a still camera with flash, a video Camcorder with underwater light. And finally, us, with whatever personal gear, knives and so forth we might bring along. I had rubber Wellingtons to wade in and out to the boat during loading, so I didn't sit on board all night with wet sandy feet. It was as if we were putting to sea for a high-tech, nighttime picnic.

          When all this was aboard the Japawa, on that first night, along with the Comoran boat operator, and a Comoran fishing "guide," Judy, Josie, Rich, Peter, and I pushed off in search of coelacanths. The boat was plenty crowded. Everyone was eager. We cruised out of Iconi harbor on calm waters angling towards the bluff formed by a crumbling volcanic crater rising above the town at its north end. Our wake gleamed with phosphorescence. I used the underwater video light as a spot to watch for fishing canoes ahead. Startled by the light, foot-long, tubular, fishes skated, on their tail fins, hundreds of feet over the silky undulating waves across our bow, in a frantic, iridescent, airborne ballet. The slight breeze was summer warm as it tickled through my light blue Channel Angler "T" shirt. A mile up the coast, ships in Moroni harbor gleamed under their mast lights as we neared the crater bluff, while above us, the starry equatorial sky opened like an umbrella, sheltering Kartala, and all the things and people beneath the volcano and on the sea. It seemed a time for magic.