Fire And Ice Read online

  HE SWUNG HIS SEXTANT TO THE SKY.

  Night ended abruptly in the equatorial Pacific. In the brief moments when first light revealed the horizon and the heavens still shone, he lowered mirrored pinpoints of Jupiter, Antares, and Capella to kiss the rim of the sea. And, with a careful look around, went below to reckon where he stood among them.

  She was asleep on a double berth, hip cocked, long limbs sprawled luxuriously. He plotted the celestial fix on a chart sprinkled with reefs and atolls, and extended the pencil track of their passage from the Marshall Islands.

  It was still cool in the cabin, so he crawled onto their berth to cover Sarah's shoulders.

  She smiled in her sleep, and when she arched invitingly, he kissed her, trailing his beard softly down her spine.

  The collision alarm began to scream.

  Sarah shot awake, scrambling from the sheets to work the boat. Michael Stone caught her in his arms, felt her frightened heart hammer her breasts. "I got it. I'll yell if I need you."

  He ran on deck, his own heart pounding.

  The sun had risen, already harsh.

  He saw neither land nor another vessel. But they were sailing in a deep valley between two trade wind rollers and lay far below the crests. Before he could see what had set off the alarm, he had to wait for the mountain behind to overtake and lift the boat.

  An elderly, sun-bleached thirty-eight-foot Nautor Swan, Veronica was small by modern offshore standards. Stone had rerigged her as a cutter, and she was inventively maintained wherever ingenuity could substitute for cash. The only high-tech element of the rig was an unusually tall carbon-fiber mast cannibalized from a racing boat, and, like a Stealth war plane, it made Veronica virtually invisible to radar.

  Their ten-year-old daughter padded up the companionway in her pajamas. "What's up?"

  She yawned. "Something spooked the radar."

  "What?"

  "We'll see in a minute."

  Ronnie swayed sleepily with the motion of the boat and wrapped one arm around his waist. With the other she clung to the threadbare Snoopy backpack in which she stashed her things. Stone bent to kiss her. "Good morning, sweetie. Here, maybe we better put on your life vest."

  Ronnie made her standard protest—that the child netting lashed to the lifelines that fenced the deck was insulting enough to a person her age.

  "Just till we see what's out there."

  He had the blue-water sailor's deep distrust of all equipment. Although he had built the warning system himself, and he was reasonably sure that the radar had simply acquired a target many miles away when Veronica had perched atop the previous crest, it would not come as a total surprise to discover the Third Fleet on the far side of the next wave.

  He hauled Ronnie's life vest from a cockpit locker, strapped her in, and debated calling Sarah up on deck. What could go wrong offshore would go wrong.

  The sea gathered astern, rising against the sky, muscling under the fiberglass hull. The boat rose like a gull on the wind, soared to the crest, and suddenly the Pacific Ocean spread for miles before Stone's eyes.

  He spun a fast circle, searching the horizon. Thin mist astern threatened changes, and a vagueness in the north hinted at the enormous reach of China's winter monsoon, but for now the sea looked benign and so completely

  empty that he and Ronnie and Sarah seemed to sail alone on the planet.

  His gut told him the warning system had sensed a large ship. He turned another circle before the wave raced ahead and Veronica sank into its trough. Strange place to find a ship. But the radar couldn't have signalled land. Not yet, although his celestial fix from the moving boat was open to error, especially as time was so critical with the planet Jupiter traveling independently of the stars.

  A white tern skimming the water promised they were within twenty-five miles of shore.

  But his decks and hull did not yet transmit to Michael the feel of waves reflected by land.

  So the atolls were somewhere between sixteen and twenty-five miles ahead..

  "Hey, sleepy face, where are we?"

  "We're here," Ronnie yawned.

  "Where?"

  Ronnie pulled her global positioning satellite receiver from Snoopy's belly. The GPS was a gift from a Japanese solo sailor whose appendix Sarah had removed.

  "Pulo Helena, dead ahead. Nice navigating, dinosaur."

  "Dinosaur," because Stone still navigated stubbornly by his star shots. He reminded Ronnie that batteries died and most sailboats that smashed into the fringing reefs and submerged mountaintops that grazed the surface of the Pacific Ocean ran aground courtesy of the latest electronics.

  Which was not to deny that Ronnie's little marvel had its uses.

  "Precisely how far ahead, sweetheart?"

  " 'Precisely' fifteen point nine miles." She showed Stone the screen.

  He grinned with pleasure. Damned near on the nose. But considering that the little sand and coral atoll group barely broke the ocean surface, it was still out of radar range. Had to be a ship. An enormous ship, standing tall in the water.

  "Where are you going?"

  "I'm going to check the radar," he said. "Want some orange juice?"

  Ronnie thought for a long time and concluded, "I don't know."

  "I'll bring you some juice."

  To the right of the companionway was a compact galley with a kerosene stove, a sink served by fresh and seawater foot pumps, and a freezer that ran off the main engine. To the left, tucked into a teak bulkhead was the nav station—radar, VHF short-range and SSB long-range radios, and a chart table. The sleeping cabins—Ronnie's forward, his and Sarah's aft—were paneled in teak, but the main cabin was painted an antiseptic white.

  Furnished as a compact medical clinic and operating room, its hatches, shelves, and cabinets contained most of the emergency equipment found in a fairly modern ambulance: an intubation unit, a defibrillator, tubing, catheters, and bandages as well as saline and glucose, plasma frozen in the freezer, a primitive anesthesia setup, a tray of operative instruments, plaster of paris for immobilizing broken bones, and a cache of antibiotics, painkillers, vasoconstrictors, anesthetics, Adrenalin, and insulin. Their respirator had served too many years, but compared to it, Stone's radar screen was a genuine antique.

  An anemic phosphorous green blip fifteen miles ahead was nearly lost in the sunlight knifing down the open hatch. The guts of his collision-avoidance system—the scanner spinning inside its radome, the transmitter and receiver circuits, and the wind and solar generators that powered it—were almost as old, bartered long ago in Chinese night markets for no-questions-asked medical services.

  He studied the flashing and fading echo with the intimacy of long experience and concluded that a large ship was, crossing their course at a right angle, steaming slowly from north to south. Plenty of room—two hours before they crossed its wake—by which time the ship would be long gone. Excellent. Stone relaxed a little, glad to have the ocean to themselves again.

  But when he took another look—after he had brewed a thermos of coffee, poured Ronnie's juice, and entered the radar contact and the dropping barometer in the log—the ship had changed course. It had doubled back, prowling slowly among the Helena atolls.

  Stone thought its behavior was as odd as its presence.

  Pulo Helena—a few wafers of sand and coral between the western Carolines and the New Guinea coast—lay south of the main transpacific Panama-Philippines shipping lanes, and far, far west of the Australia-Tokyo route. It was among the most remote of the stops on the Stones' floating hospital's circuit. They dropped anchor in the lagoon once a year to treat any of the half-dozen ,nomadic fishing families that happened to be living there at the moment, and now and then a Republic of Palau fishing patrol motored down from dist
ant Koror. But there was nothing there for a ship.

  He carried the short-range VHF radio handset, the thermos, and Ronnie's juice up to the cockpit. She sipped a half inch and consulted Snoopy. "Thirteen point eight miles to Pulo Helena—"

  Stone picked up a winch handle and headed forward. "Now where are you going? I want hugs."

  The Swan was running under twin headsails that spread either side of the bow like a pair of wings. The classic trade-winds rig was self-steering, but it was impossible to see directly ahead without ducking down to look under the sails or slewing off course. Stone raised his mainsail, sheeted it well out over the port side, and- secured the boom with a preventer. Then he furled the starboard head-sail. He lost a little speed, which was fine—give this thing more time to go away—and now with both sails over the left side of the boat and the right side clear, they could see ahead.

  Ronnie was waiting impatiently in the cockpit. She finished her juice at Stone's request, curled up in his arms after he had finished adjusting the self-steering vane, and dozed off with her head on his chest.

  The hot morning sun baked perfume from her hair. Stone breathed it in and wondered if he had ever been so happy. Once, on another ocean. He tugged Ronnie closer and searched the sea.

  Seventy-five-foot palm trees could be expected to break the horizon at about twelve miles from the deck of a sailboat. The house of a big ship might stand taller, as might a hull stacked with cargo containers. He would see something soon.

  Veronica's sails, each marked with a huge red cross visible for miles, were stretched out from long, hard use, and yellowed to a state of dangerous fragility by the sun. But her splendid hull and towering carbon-fiber mast made up for their shortcomings, and she was fast.

  In less than half an hour she galloped atop a crest and showed Stone a blurred notch on the horizon. Reaching carefully for his Fujinons, anxious to prolong the moment before Ronnie tore into her day, he popped the lens caps and focused the binoculars on an immense, angular, sand-colored ship.

  Strange color, almost camouflage; it drifted in and out of sight like a mirage. A modern freighter's square lines. Some sort of bulk carrier, he reckoned, hoping its master knew his business. Their Australian friend Kerry McGlynn, a salvage tug driver who spun tales of groundings, sinkings, and fires at sea—swore there were ships in the far Pacific purchased with American Express cards. What the proud owners saw as a superhighway on the chart was in fact a cobweb of reefs ready to sweep them up.

  Ronnie woke up talking.

  "Mummy slept right through the collision alarm."

  Sarah had been schooled in Britain, and Ronnie echoed her English accent, her inflections, even her gestures. Her intense similarity to her mother was enough to make a man feel his genes were impaired. He was stocky, blue-eyed, and fair under his permanent suntan. Ronnie's skin was a cream-and-sugar blend of his complexion and Sarah's black-coffee black. But her cheekbones were as high as her mother's, her nose as elegant, her carriage as slim and regal.

  Occasionally, he did glimpse memories of his own father's level gaze in the child's coal-dark eyes, while she had inherited his blunt craftsman's hands and fingers. And Sarah assured him that Ronnie had his smile. But he watched her grow up with all the delight and awe of a stranger in a sculpture garden.

  "Mummy," he reminded her, "stood watch all night so you and I could catch up on our sleep. Now it's her turn." "But . . ."

  "But what?" He knew approximately what was coming next. Last night the two women in his life had a major battle over schoolwork—a book report on a Wole Soyinka tale of postcolonial Nigeria, which Ronnie currently found less interesting than the Hollywood-Coca-Cola-Big-Mac America she called "Daddy's country." This morning they'd be seducing allies.

  "Mummy can be a bit of a bore sometimes, don't you think?"

  "She's never bored me yet."

  Ronnie rolled her eyes.

  "And," Stone added, "I've known her a lot longer than you."

  "I hope so."

  "You did catch up on your sleep, didn't you? I mean, you didn't stay up half the night reading People magazines. That wouldn't be why you can't wake up this morning.

  N0000, of course not."

  At their last landfall, the Kwajalein Missile Range, the U.S. Army nurse, who'd slipped them sealed cartons of sterile needles and a generous batch of insulin, had given Ronnie a stack of old Peoples—a dazzling world of buildings, streets, movie stars, and, Sarah had noted, "Grinning Americans turning cartwheels in their gardens."

  Ronnie squirmed out of his arms and looked around.

  "A ship! Daddy, a ship." She grabbed the binoculars and focused expertly. "Oh, wow.

  She's big. She's huge. Daddy, look at him— Can I go up the mast?"

  "To the first spreader—And what do you remember?" "Both hands for the sailor."

  "Leave the binoculars."

  She climbed like a monkey, hand over hand up a halyard, toes gripping the mast, which, with the wind on the starboard quarter, inclined only slightly. Thirty feet above a deck studded with steel winches, she scampered onto the spreader and stood, shielding her eyes, straining toward the ship. A prepubescent African goddess. Stone smiled. Godette, the Japanese sailor had called her.

  "Both hands!"

  "Sorry— Look, Mummy, a ship!"

  Sarah had emerged from the cabin with an instinctive glance at the sails, a knowledgeable grimace at the weather astern, and a private smile for Stone.

  "Good morning."

  The progenitress of the minigoddess aloft was a tall, striking woman, a Nigerian of Ibo and Yuroban parentage, whose fine nose and delicate lips indicted the Arab and Portuguese slave hunters who haunted the African past.

  She stood straight, an almost noble figure, heightened this morning by the towel she had wrapped like a turban around her hair, which she had just washed in preparation for landing. A yellow Yap Island lava-lava was draped around her torso, baring her shoulders, and a plain gold cross hung on a chain light enough to part if it caught while she was working the boat.

  "And what are you smiling at?" she asked.

  Stone was deeply in love with her, sometimes wildly. It had occurred to him that this morning he was deep in a wild phase. He stood up and kissed her.

  "Single deckhouse aft," Ronnie called down. "I think I see fire stations and piping. It's an oil tanker." "Kid's got amazing eyes," said Stone.

  Sarah glanced at the silhouette. "Rather high in the water for a crude carrier. More likely a liquefied natural gas ship, wouldn't you say?"

  Stone could still barely see the thing. He took up his binoculars, focused deliberately, and agreed it was probably an LNG carrier. "Big one. Fifty thousand tons."

  "What on earth is an LNG vessel doing here . . . ?" The heavily insulated tank ships were like gigantic thermos bottles speeding gas—compressed and supercooled into liquid—from oil fields to power plants. Fleets of them served Japan. "You don't suppose he's aground?"

  "Radar says he's moving."

  Both recalled their Australian friend's observation that the second mistake derelict masters often made was backing away from the submerged mountain peak they had just discovered with their bottom, thereby sinking in two miles of water.

  Sarah studied it in the binoculars. "Yes, he's all right," she agreed. "Thank God." Frozen in the hold of a fully laden LNG carrier was more thermal energy than a nuclear bomb.

  "Ronnie, come down for breakfast, dear."

  "But, Mum, it's a ship."

  "Veronica."

  "Yes, Mum."

  Stone thought she had given in unusually quickly. The next instant he saw why, as Ronnie whipped off her pajama top.

  "What is she doing?" asked Sarah. "Oh, good lord, Michael, stop her!"

  "Too late."

  Ronnie swayed into the sky, wrapped the cloth around the thin wire inner forestay Stone had rigged for the cutter jib, and slid down. Plummeting like a stone, she tightened her grip at the last moment and landed lightly on the
foredeck.

  "She learned that from you."

  "I haven't felt up to that stunt in years."

  Ronnie galloped back to the cockpit. "Did you see, Mum?"

  "You will give me gray hair before you give me grandchildren."

  "Did you see, Dad?"

  "I'm impressed," said Stone. "When did you learn that?"

  "Pictured it last night in bed. I could see it, so I knew I could do it."

  "Please inform me first if you ever picture wings."

  "Daddy— Do you see the ship, Mum? It's bigger than Pulo Helena. Maybe they'll invite us aboard and serve us lunch and—and show movies and have a swimming pool and video games and TV—I bet they have satellite TV!"

  "Perhaps," Sarah said gently, exchanging a look with Stone. "But don't get your hopes up, darling."

  "I think they're waiting for us," Ronnie ventured, then embraced her theory with vigor. "

  Bet you someone's sick and waiting for you to treat them."

  Just last spring in the Philippine Sea they had boarded

  a Danish car carrier to doctor an engineer burned in a pump explosion. The comfortable crew accommodations had looked palatial to Ronnie, the ship a floating storehouse of modern treasures for a child who saw ice cream twice a year. Ever since, she hungered after passing ships like a privateer. Stone was presently at work building a decoder for her for Christmas, so she could watch satellite television.

  "Well, if that's the case—and even if it isn't—we'll be landing soon. I want you to go below, eat your breakfast. And then have a nice shower and wash your hair—we'll water at Pulo Helena. See, Dad's trimmed his beard and I'm all spiffed. Call me when you're done and I'll brush it for you."

  Ronnie cast a longing look at the ship and dove down the companionway.

  The three atolls that formed the Pulo Helena group came into view. The ship lay among them, in the lee of the main island, protected from the rollers, which the islands split. Its house stood higher than their feathery rows of palm trees.

  The VHF rumbled to life with the drawl of South Texas. "Ahoy, sailboat flyin' the red cross. Sailboat flyin' the red cross. You all wouldn't happen to be the hospital boat?"