Fire And Ice Page 23

  He felt suddenly, acutely, aware of the years that had passed since his first wife had been killed. If he could recall any of the characteristics of the man he had been then, it was his compulsion to act—ponder little, keep moving. He chose a door at random. Midday, it wasn't locked.

  He opened the top buttons of his raincoat to expose his white shirt and necktie, carried his backpack by the hand strap, and kept his eyes peeled for a hard hat. In that respect, he chose his door luckily, finding himself next to a wall hung with hard hats and fire extinguishers. He grabbed the cleanest red one he could find, polished it with his sleeve, and adjusted the headband so it fit him properly. Then he strode onto the pier that rimmed the slip, telling himself that with Western engineers crowding into Shanghai to partake in joint projects to build airliners, telephones, and farm tractors, a bearded American in a hard hat would not be that unusual a sight.

  He had entered near the middle of the building and found himself standing midships of the cruise liner's rust-streaked hull. Every hundred feet, free-standing construction elevators in bamboo-framed shafts rose to the main deck. He headed inland, toward the bow, figuring to walk around it to the gas carrier. The few people he encountered on the pier were laborers who took no notice. Judging by the noise level cascading down from overhead, the mass of workers were employed up on the superstructure. He walked briskly—a boss on a mission.

  All that stood between him and Sarah and Ronnie was the cruise ship. He saw no more obstacles, only opportunity. He would round the bow, continue past the gas carrier's bow, and find a gangway to board her. For a joyful moment it seemed that simple. But as he neared the bow, he saw a big work gang clustered around the feet of one of the cranes. The foreman noticed him, shouted into his walkie-talkie, and stepped forward to greet him.

  Stone turned abruptly to mount the nearest construction elevator. He jerked his thumb up. The operator engaged a hoist, and the platform clanked up to the main deck, which had been stripped to bare steel and was jammed with workmen wrestling cable.

  He stepped off, his eye already on a stairway up the side of the superstructure, toward which he moved quickly, brushing past the workers. He climbed it two steps at a time, spotted a doorway, and, checking to make sure he wasn't followed, shoved through it. He caught a glimpse of a cavernous, space. Then he was tumbling forward, falling headfirst into the dark.

  A SHOUT ECHOED HOLLOWLY IN HIS MIND, THE CRY ITSELF

  smothered by the rumble, clank, and roar of men and machines tearing up the ship.

  Below was blackness. Above, a constellation of work lamps, dim as stars in a cloud-shrouded sky, revolved majestically as they passed his eyes in heartbeats of slow motion.

  He seemed to have all the time in the world to realize he was falling. But the single thought, thank God for the hard hat, ended abruptly with a rip of pain in his side and another in his armpit. The limb felt torn from his chest.

  He started falling again, sliding off a cable stretched horizontally between unseen bulkheads. Stone seized it with his other hand, rasping his palm on the rough strands, and tried to see where he was. The work lights hung forty or fifty feet overhead. Space stretched to darkness. He'd been goddamned lucky. Below, his backpack lay on a deck.

  He didn't remember dropping it.

  He slid his aching arm over the cable, gripped the wire with both hands, and dropped to the deck, where he sat a moment, looking around while his heart slowed and his brain stopped pinwheeling.

  They had gutted the entire interior of the ship's superstructure. He could see several hundred feet aft and forty or fifty feet to the ceiling formed by the top deck. The shell—all that remained of cabins, decks, and public rooms—was riddled by long rows of portholes and windows. It looked like a planetarium projection of an unnaturally orderly sky.

  He crossed the space and looked out a glassless port at the Dallas Belle. Its main deck was higher than the cruise ship's. He climbed a ladder until he was looking down on several acres of pipework, gas manifolds, and fire stations. Aft loomed its house, from which he could almost feel emanations of Sarah.

  The yard workers had rigged catwalks between the ships, fore, midships, and aft, and were trooping across with tools and material. Forward, they were unrolling canvas, draping the cloth over the pipework, creating a tent across the deck. Then he saw that the gas carrier's fire stations were fully manned. Firefighters wearing hooded coats stood by the elevated high-pressure water guns and foam nozzles. He concluded that the canvas was fire-retardant to ward off sparks from the cutting torches which had started up again on the derelict cruise ship.

  Lunatics. Literally playing with fire. Even though the pressurized cargo, compressed into heavily constructed tanks, was less vulnerable to accidental explosion than the oil in an ordinary tanker. In theory, you could toast marshmallows on her main deck. In theory.

  The sooner he got his family off the floating bomb, the better.

  Aft, work crews were assembling on the deck behind the gas carrier's house. The midships catwalk seemed the least active and Stone chose that one to cross, until he considered that he would have to walk some three hundred feet back to the house, all the way in clear view of the bridge and the big windows on the deck below it.

  Better to cover that distance inside the shell of the cruise ship. He picked his way aft, skirting heaps of rubble and the stumps of cutaway stanchions, crunching the cinder remains of burnt steel underfoot, ducking low girders and high-stepping the taut cables that spider-webbed the structure. Every fifty or sixty feet he stopped at a window or porthole to get his bearings and gaze up at the house of the Dallas Belle. The ports there glared back, like eyes as impassive and uncaring as Ronald's Mr. Yu.

  The ceiling grew lower as the decks of the wedding-cake superstructure stepped down.

  Stone reached the end

  and looked back at the remarkable space. He could see some four hundred feet forward, and out the front of the ship through the successive rows of front windows, from the main deck to the top and right up to the windscreen where the bridge had been.

  Opposite the Dallas Belle's house, less than a hundred feet from the catwalk to her stern deck, he moved into an open doorway. Foremen, he observed, wore the same quilted jackets as the laborers; bosses wore coats like his. Both carried walkie-talkies.

  Stone took his VHF hand-held from his backpack. He told himself again that a bearded Westerner in a red hard hat belonged in a Shanghai breaker's yard so long as he believed he did, and marched on deck flourishing the radio.

  He hurried through a maelstrom of shouting workmen and thundering machinery to the catwalk where they were leading orange compressed-air hoses across to the Dallas Belle.

  Suddenly he turned away. He might fool the Chinese but not the beefy American who was directing a work gang at the head of the catwalk.

  "You, you, and you," said Stone, gesturing emphatically at three Shanghainese. They looked up with universal who-me?-I-didn't-do-nothing expressions that transcended language. Stone returned a Yes, you glower and barked, "This way!"

  He herded them aft with more gestures and a stream of meaningless orders delivered authoritatively. "Grab that!" He pointed with the radio and two of them seized a keg of rivets. "And that!" The third hoisted a pneumatic drill to his shoulder. "Gangway!" He scattered a group of idlers squatting on the deck and led his men to the back of the derelict liner.

  "Hold it right there!"

  His Shanghaied crew squatted down on their heels.

  Stone put his radio to his lips for camouflage and looked up at the Dallas Belle's house, which stood almost as tall as the cruise ship's superstructure. Window by window, port by port, he surveyed the house, praying he would get lucky and paying particular attention to the upper levels

  officer country—where Sarah's patient, the injured "Old Man," would most likely be.

  Suddenly he saw her.

  She walked past a big window, fifty feet above the main deck. Stone blinked, wonderin
g whether he had imagined it. The window was on the starboard side of the back of the house, one level below the bridge deck. He watched and waited.

  He saw her again. She was looking down from the next window. He saw her first in silhouette, her strong, beautiful profile. When she turned toward him, full face, he felt his soul fly toward her and beat like a moth on the glass between them.

  Her gaze swept the bustling decks. Without thinking, Stone waved. She stood, pressed to the glass, as if every fiber in her body was yearning to be free. Her eyes drifted hungrily and he saw with awful clarity the lines of tension that scored her mouth and cheeks. An artificial smile tugged at her lips and she turned her head as if speaking to someone in the room. She stepped back, out of sight. A groan shook Stone's chest. The Chinese exchanged puzzled looks.

  Suddenly aware of exposure, Stone looked to see whether his wave had drawn attention.

  But there were a hundred men working on the two ships' stern decks, and no one—not even the American guarding the catwalk—had noticed.

  Sarah reappeared. Her smile had vanished, her expression was wooden. Stone felt fresh anger rising: he had never seen her look so beaten down and hopeless. Had he the means at this instant he would kill whoever had done this. But even as he watched and prayed she would see him, he saw her begin to recover. Her gaze turned purposeful, her eyes busily soaking up details, seeking advantage. And then, quite suddenly and without warning, their eyes met.

  If when he had first seen her he had felt simple joy, now his joy was doubled by love. All their years, all their days and all their nights, all the oceans they had sailed, had come suddenly together in one precious moment of infinity.

  Sarah's eyes widened and her teeth gleamed in an astonished smile, which she covered a second later with a warning finger to her lips. Stone raised his radio in his right hand and held up the five fingers of his left. Channel 5. She nodded, her finger still to her lips, then whirled abruptly from the window.

  Stone ducked down beside his baffled crew. "Gentlemen, I'm outta here. I recommend you find your regular foreman before he finds you." He glanced up under the brim of his hard hat. A broad-shouldered black man was staring down from Sarah's window. Stone ducked his head again and spoke more nonsense to the Chinese. Then, motioning them to their feet when the black man had finally quit the window, he herded them toward the nearest door, through which he disappeared into the shell of the superstructure.

  He emerged cautiously, midships, port side, and commandeered another construction elevator down to the pier. He heard shouting behind him. Backpack in hand, radio pressed to his ear, he crossed the pier and exited the shed by the first door he came to.

  Out of the shadows and into weak winter sunlight, he ran.

  It was twenty yards to the leafless brush. He heard a second shout. He ran another hundred yards down the path before he looked back. The shed itself was barely visible through the twigs and branches. He listened, heard nothing beyond the pounding and clatter inside, turned and ran again.

  He continued across the brush field until he reached the clearing by the abandoned ferry pontoon. He checked his watch—one-thirty—backed into the brush, tuned his radio to channel 5, and clicked it on and off three times. No response.

  At five to two, he edged out onto the pontoon and scanned the river traffic for his coal sampan. He checked his watch at two, at five after, and again at ten after. By two-thirty he began to, admit to himself that they weren't coming back for him. At three, he started toward the new ferry dock, hoping to catch a bus there to the Bund.

  But he found he couldn't leave the area. Sarah was simply too close. He went back into the brush and tried

  his radio again. She had nodded when he signaled. That meant she had managed to keep her radio, as she had Ronnie's GPS. He tried again, again no response. He would wait.

  Darkness would fall in less than two hours. He would sneak back into the breaker's yard.

  Of the whistles and horns in constant song on the river, one sounded nearer and more insistent. He looked out from the brush. The coal sampan was back, the captain's sons holding her against the abandoned ferry pontoon, William and the daughter searching the crowds at the ferry. The captain was standing in the wheelhouse doorway, his face grim.

  William said, "We are all very sorry we are late, sir. There has been very much trouble."

  "Where's Wang?"

  "Gone."

  "What happened?"

  "Your associate from Hong Kong has been arrested by People's Armed Police."

  "Ronald? What for?"

  "Trade in cultural relics."

  "Smuggling?"

  "It is what you call a capital offense."

  No Ronald. No Wang. Who the hell could he turn to? "Are you implicated?"

  "I don't know," William said, shaking his head miserably.

  "Ask the captain if he is."

  William translated the captain's reply. "Triads never talk."

  The sampan reeked of fear. Her captain hoped that Triads never talked.

  "Can you get to Ronald's friends?"

  "All gone."

  The smoky winter sky cast a gray-green light on the busy river, the vast brush-covered field, the distant ship breaker's shed. Inland, a coal-fired steam engine billowed more smoke into the air as it made up a train of freight cars, while twinned diesel locomotives hauled a completed train toward Shanghai.

  Swift movement upriver caught his eye. He checked it

  with his binoculars. "Navy patrol. Tell the captain to get out of here. You run to the ferry."

  "What about you, sir?"

  "Get away. Lose yourself on the ferry." The captain was already backing into the stream.

  Stone ran across the rickety bridge that connected the pontoon to the riverbank and into the brush. When he looked back, William Sit was hurrying, head down, toward the ferry head and the sampan was chugging toward the channel, her decks deserted, her wheelhouse shuttered.

  He ran to the first rise, raised his head cautiously, and looked back again. Of William there was no sight in the jostling crowds. The patrol boat, an old wooden mine sweeper, was closing in on the sampan. But as Stone watched, it swept past, rocking the sampan in its furious wake, and made straight for the pontoon.

  He ducked and ran. The minesweeper slammed alongside the pontoon. A squad of soldiers stormed ashore.

  "Doc, YOU LOOK POSITIVELY RADIANT. IF I DIDN'T KNOW

  better I'd say you found a fella while I was sleeping." "I've come to take you and Moss down to your gymnasium."

  "I still hurt like hell."

  "I want you active," she said firmly, and waited with her arms crossed until he telephoned Moss.

  "May I come?" asked Ronnie.

  "With Mr. Jack's permission."

  "Come along, kid. Watch the old man bust a gut—Moss, Doc wants me on the machines.

  " The black American had glided silently into the sleeping cabin. Snakes of muscle rippled under his skintight T-shirt as he crossed his arms.

  "It's too soon, Mr. Jack. Way too soon."

  "Moss," said Sarah, "if you feel qualified to doctor Mr. Jack, perhaps you'll call a taxi to take me and my daughter to the airport."

  "Let's go, Moss. Something's got her fired up today." The old man lowered his bony feet cautiously to the carpeted deck, extended his good arm to Moss, and pulled himself erect.

  He stepped into his slippers and straightened his robe. "Coming, Doc?"

  "I'll come by after Moss has you started."

  She felt his sharp old eyes probing, seeking the lie. "Moss," she said, "remember, the rule is: if he can move it, move it more. We want you to stretch, Mr. Jack. And use those lungs. All right, off you go. Hold tight to Moss's arm, Mr. Jack. Ronnie, open the door."

  Ronnie, bundled like a bear cub in a wool sweater that hung to her knees, stood solemnly holding the door, then ran ahead to get the next. Sarah listened to the shuffling of Mr.

  Jack's slippers and Moss's vocal encourageme
nt until, when the elevator door closed, the cabin was enveloped in a silence no less deep for the clatter of machinery outside the windows and the rush of blood within her head.

  She took Ronnie's Snoopy backpack into the bathroom, turned on the shower taps, and locked the door. She had hidden the VHF radio in Ronnie's bag as Pulo Helena had faded astern, reasoning that their captors were less likely to search a child's belongings. In fact, as far as she knew, Moss had never searched her bag, either—the advantage, perhaps, of appearing to be a helpless mother and child. Which, she thought bleakly, wasn't that far off the mark.

  She lowered the volume knob before she turned on the radio and tuned to channel 5. The Battery Low indicator light glowed red. Hardly surprising, as it hadn't been charged in more than a week. She clicked the Transmit switch several times and pressed the radio to her ear.

  No reply.

  She clicked the switch again and listened some more. When she heard nothing, she tested the strength of the batteries by turning to Receive and scanning the other channels. It picked up faint signals of Chinese river traffic. She went back to clicking channel 5.

  "Doctor! Doctor!"

  She jumped. The door shook as someone pounded it. "Doctor!"

  She hid the radio, turned off the shower. "Who's there?"

  "Ah Lee, Doctor. Mr. Jack say tea."

  "Let me get dressed." She splashed water on her hair and opened the door while toweling it off.

  The Shanghainese steward was waiting there with a tea tray, sent, obviously, by Moss to watch her while he was busy with Mr. Jack. His bruises were fading, the cheek she had stitched almost healed, and she wondered if his fear was fading, too. Would he help them?

  "Can you take me to Mr. Jack?"

  Ah Lee responded with Ronnie's latest version of the affirmative, which she had picked up from the captain, "You got it, Mum."

  In the elevator she tried to picture where Michael was at this moment. It was absolutely surreal to think of him within a hundred yards, and terrifying to imagine the risk. He had no conception of the power that Mr. Jack wielded in Shanghai