Fire And Ice Read online

  "The sooner he's in hospital the better chance he has of surviving."

  "He's not going in the hospital."

  "We've done all we can," said Sarah. "I've counteracted the morphine overdose. Now he needs a hospital. I can't do any more. Let us go."

  "Can't do that. You're the only doctor the old man's got."

  "When will you let us go?"

  "Soon as Mr. Jack's issuing orders."

  "What about my husband?"

  "He's not going anywhere. You can sail back and pick him up when Mr. Jack says so."

  He ran an insinuating eye over her body. "Have yourselves a reunion."

  Sarah looked at her patient, pale as snow and barely breathing. His mutilated fingers twitched on the sheet. "You don't understand," she said. "You've got to get him into hospital."

  "Never happen, Doc."

  "What if he dies?"

  "He can't die. He's got him a doctor and a cute little nurse."

  THE TIDE HAD STRANDED THE OLD MAN'S CANOE.

  It took brutal minutes and all Stone's strength to wrestle the heavy plank hull into the lagoon. Then he saw the damage: the pillars that connected the outrigger to the pontoon had shattered when the canoe had struck the reef.

  He pawed frantically through the empty food baskets and hollow coconut shells that littered the floor of the hull, found the old man's spare rope in coils and lengths of cord neatly skeined. He wrapped the split pillars, and jumped aboard.

  The Dallas Belle was moving slowly, proceeding cautiously past the northern atoll.

  Stone sheeted out the sail and lowered the steering paddle, and headed for the narrow channel that cut the leeward reef. The little craft leaped lightly to the wind.

  But across the lagoon, the canoe staggered and began to lose speed. Stone—his eyes locked on the ship while he steered standing on the platform over the outrigger beams—finally looked down and saw that the hull was filling with water.

  In the scramble to launch, he had seen the obvious damage but had missed the more destructive consequence of the old man's crash landing. Plank lashings had parted, opening a seam from the bow to the forward outrigger beam—a split nearly six feet long, through which the lagoon poured as the wind pushed the canoe's nose into the smooth water.

  Stone ripped off his shirt, stuffed it into the gushing crack. Then he shifted his weight sternward to lift the bow, regained control of the boat, and sailed it through the short passage between the atoll and the barrier reef and into the pass through the reef itself.

  Outside, the sea tumbled a dozen rows of mangled surf. The canoe climbed sluggishly onto the first comber, fight-mg the weight of the water in her hull. The second wave slapped the little boat sideways. A third sluiced it back into the lagoon.

  The wind, beam on, banged into its flapping sail and wrenched the outrigger out of the water. As the canoe started to capsize, Stone slashed a stay with his rigging knife. The mast collapsed on the bow with a loud crack, and the canoe wallowed upright, sinking as the sail wafted around it like a shroud.

  Stone grabbed the steering oar and paddled for the shallows. Water poured over the gunnels. He jumped overboard and started pulling it toward shore, his lungs heaving, his heart pounding, his mind a blur of shock and despair.

  The ship was shrinking in the distance—already smaller than a toy on a boat pond. He'd been crazy to think he could catch it with a canoe. He had panicked, leaping to mindless action, and had nearly drowned himself—Sarah's knight on his charger, catching his neck on a clothesline.

  He grabbed his VHF radio, which he should have done immediately, and called on channel 16. "Dallas Belle. Dallas Belle. Dallas Belle. Come in Dallas Belle."

  There was no response. He called again, "Dallas Belle. Dallas Belle. Dallas Belle. Do you read me, Dallas Belle?" and pressed the radio to his ear. Mid-ocean static, a hollow, empty noise, barely distinguishable from the desolate roar of the surf.

  He switched to channel 5, which he and Sarah used to communicate when one of them was off the boat. "Sarah. Darling, can you hear me? Sarah! Can you hear me! Sarah!"

  He called again and again, until the Dallas Belle slipped below the horizon, trailing a smudge of smoke, which the wind scattered.

  He was a man of science—a doctor, a navigator, and a self-taught electronics engineer—who believed in God. But neither faith nor science could explain what had happened to his family. That the sand-colored ship had steamed away with his wife and daughter was impossible. A black curtain might more plausibly descend from the sky or thirty acres of farmland suddenly rise from the sea.

  What were they doing to his child and his beautiful wife? He tried to rewrite events in his mind. They had put to sea to steady the ship while Sarah performed a difficult operation.

  Or they were making an emergency dash to a hospital in the Philippines. Events that made even less sense than the event he couldn't believe. But there was no answer he could bear, no fact he could understand.

  The phrase, my beautiful wife, started racing through his mind. For a second he thought he heard Ronnie scream, Daddy! It was a sound so real, so like her frightened shriek the last time she had fallen overboard, that he turned his head to look for her.

  His incredulous eyes swept the empty lagoon, the deserted circle of beach that rimmed it. High overhead, the trade wind clattered in the palm leaves. The Pacific Ocean stretched forever in every direction.

  He was a hundred and fifty miles northeast of Tobi, which had a radio station. Opposite the direction Dallas Belle had disappeared. The Sonsorols, Merir, and Pulo Anna lay far west. But on any of the radio islands, the generator might be broken or out of fuel—with a month to wait for the next state cargo boat.

  Angaur, on the other hand, the southernmost of the Palau Islands, had a World War II runway, where he could get a plane to Koror, the capital city. And in Koror was a friend: Marcus Salinis, the president of the tiny Palau Republic. But Angaur was two hundred and fifty miles across the ocean.

  Overwhelmed, exhausted from his battle to beach the canoe, he sank to its gunnel and stared. The weather he had noticed earlier was filling the eastern horizon. He looked north, dreaming he would see the Dallas Belle steaming back with a perfectly plausible explanation.

  A dark spot on the horizon set his heart pounding. It grew, too quickly, and materialized into a flock of black noddies searching for fish. His gaze descended to the lagoon again.

  A hundred yards down the beach, something large and white was drifting ashore. A dead shark? He watched it, puzzled, as it turned slowly with the current. A frigate bird spiraled toward it and circled tentatively.

  A body? Had the navigator sailed in company?

  Stone ran. The bird pulled up with an angry shriek. He waded into the shallows, grabbed a cold hand, and pulled it ashore.

  It was a man. He was not a Pacific Islander but a pale white European, naked except for boxer shorts and one rubber flip-flop stuck between his toes. He wore a wedding band and a watch. His face had been battered on the reef. But that alone had not killed him, Stone discovered when he turned him over and saw three bullet holes in his back.

  "Oh, Sarah."

  Stone cast a professional eye on the wounds: small-caliber weapon, the slugs still in him, no single wound instantly fatal. He could have been thrown off the Dallas Belle still alive or jumped. Young and powerfully built, he might have drowned before he bled to death.

  At that moment Stone seized upon a single truth, the only fact he knew: he had to get off the atoll.

  The old navigator's supplies that had floated out of the sinking boat bobbed on the surface of the lagoon.

  Stone waded out and quickly gathered baskets and leaf-wrapped bundles of food, coconuts for drinking, sodden rope and twine, bailers, a gourd of palm wine. He dragged two spare spars ashore as well and several huge taro leaves which the old man would have used for shelter from the sun. He bailed the flooded hull and found some yams and breadfruit, a moldy square of canvas, and a long bre
adfruit twig coated in a sticky substance that stuck to his hands.

  Stone sorted what he salvaged into piles and shook his head. The little boat had carried everything a Micronesian navigator needed on the open sea—food and water, shelter from the tropic sun by day and the cold spray at night, and materials for repairs. But unlike Stone, the old Pacific islander had had no need to carry a compass or a sextant or almanacs or a chart. He had held the star paths in his mind, the currents and swell patterns in memory, and had honed his land-finding instincts with a lifetime of close observation of birds, fish, and clouds.

  Stone would have surrendered his arm for Ronnie's GPS.

  Maybe at night, his own memory of the stars and constellations . . . surely he could hold a course at night . . . and he had learned a trick or two during ten years in these waters.

  Suddenly his heart flew: he remembered a minicompass he kept in his medical bag to take a bearing if he got caught in the fog in the inflatable dinghy. It was a magnificent break, brilliant luck that energized him for the primary task of making the canoe seaworthy. It would never swim until he found a way to repair the hull.

  He looked up at the sun, then checked his watch. Another lucky break. Incredibly, it was only two o'clock.—My beautiful wife . . . Daddy!—Taking refuge in the things he knew, he vowed to set sail before dark.

  His jury-rigging of the outrigger had pretty much fallen apart, while the split in the hull had been worked wider by the tumbling in the pass. He saw immediately a better way to brace the outrigger, so he put that job aside and concentrated on the split seam. The hull was carvel-built, the long planks meeting flush at their edges. Where a Maine boatyard would have joined the planks with nails, however, the Puluwat canoe makers lashed them together with coir, an elastic coconut fiber. It was the coir—stitched through holes drilled every four or five inches—that had

  Popped.

  Stone worked his way along the seam, plucking broken strands out of the holes, and praying that no plank had split. They were all right, until he reached the dent that marked the impact with the reef.

  "Son of a bitch."

  It had hit right on the seam and both planks had split, right along the line of holes, which meant he would have

  to drill new holes, without a drill. He thought of his orderly tool chests aboard Veronica, and felt his heart suddenly pierced with fear.

  All the tools he had now were in his medical bag, the backpack he had hung on a peg in the corner post of the fale where the old man had died. He had scalpels and spare blades to cut the coir, his Swiss Army knife, surgical scissors and his rigging knife, some disposable cigarette lighters that he carried as gifts, but nothing resembling a drill. If he could find a nail, he could drive it through with a rock and pull it out with his dental pliers. But a nail was not likely on an island where the coconut was the source of every building material.

  He ran across the hump of land between the lagoon and the windward reef and searched for driftwood with a nail in it. Nothing but an ancient weathered tree trunk that might have ridden equatorial countercurrents from a Mindanaoan shore, or been pushed four thousand miles from Christmas Island by the tradewinds.

  He ran back, eyes everywhere, wondering if he could get away without lashing the planks where they'd split. Two holes. All he needed was two holes, double up on the coir and caulk the split with something. He hadn't considered caulking yet. But without it, water would geyser through the seam with every dip of the sailing canoe's nose and flex of its hull. Maybe palm sap. He jabbed a tree with the Swiss knife, but the sap ran thin.

  He went back to the fale for his backpack.

  The peg where he'd hung it, he noticed at last, wasn't made of wood. It was a brass bolt, tarnished a brown-green color, and he realized with a leaping heart that some long time ago someone had found it in a piece of driftwood and screwed it into the post. Stone gripped it with his dental pliers. Praying it wouldn't disintegrate, he gently screwed it out.

  With his bag in one hand and the precious bolt in the other, he ran back around the lagoon and knelt beside the canoe, studied the grain of both planks for the safest entry, and began screwing the bolt into the water-softened wood.

  He worked from the outside in, taking care not to make the hole too big, and then from the inside out until he

  joined the holes in the middle and saw light. He repeated the process on the lower plank, screwing in, pulling out, screwing in, pulling out. It took an hour to bore two holes.

  Sand kept sticking to his fingers; he finally tumbled to the realization that the sticky substance the old man had carried was breadfruit sap that the islanders used for caulking.

  They melted it with a piece of smoldering twine; Stone used his lighter. He coated both edges of the open seam and packed it with gauze. Then he stitched twine through the holes and, using his scalpel haft for leverage, twisted it tight.

  It was a very small canoe, barely fifteen feet long, designed to sail sheltered lagoon waters inside the fringing reefs, or, at most, a day run between neighboring atolls. That the old man had embarked on a thousand-mile voyage said much for his bravery; that he had almost made it said more about his skills than about his vessel. And yet, when Stone had it launched, rigged and reloaded, he felt his spirits rise on a tide of pride and affection.

  It straddled the water like a spider, balanced on a wide stance of hull and outrigger, while the bridge that connected them provided a riding deck high and dry above the water. The canoe might look small beside Veronica, minuscule next to the gas carrier, but only by comparison, for it was complete: self-contained, quick, and maneuverable. In the right hands.

  He took a practice run back and forth across the lagoon, trying to get the hang of the peculiar Carolinian way of tacking their double-ended canoes. Instead of coming about to change direction, the islanders changed ends, shifting mast and steering paddle to make the bow the stem and the stem the bow, always keeping the outrigger pointing toward the wind.

  Standing on the tiny deck that bridged hull and outrigger, Stone stole a glance from the chaotic pass ahead and the reefs on either side, and saw that the seam he had repaired seemed to be holding. No longer leaking so much, less burdened, the canoe rose to each successive wave while the wind, which had not suffered the usual evening drop-off, drove it straight and true onto the open sea.

  He noted the time—an hour to sunset—and looked back repeatedly at the atoll, trying to estimate the speed of the counterequatorial current. He kept the swells on his right and the yellow ball of the sun on his left, checking his handheld compass at frequent intervals.

  Streams of black-and-white noddies and terns were flying home to their atoll. From a wave top, he glimpsed them flocking around the dead man on the beach. Then the sun teetered briefly on the rim of the water and dropped off quite suddenly.

  The wind grew cool, and cold spray began whipping across the open deck. He felt around in the bilges for a leaf-wrapped lump of breadfruit, which he chewed mechanically, and drank from a hole he gouged with his rigging knife in the soft eye of a coconut while he waited for the first stars to pierce the deepening blue. But cloud had entirely filled the eastern half of the sky, dooming any hope of catching Orion's belt on the rise. Ahead, north, the stars of the Big Dipper began to glow. He traced the pointers to the dim reddish North Star and fixed hungrily on that old friend, only to lose it to the advancing cloud. He looked back, glimpsed the small Southern Cross low in the south. But as he checked it repeatedly over his shoulder, it too began to fade behind the cloud scrim. He fished a penlight out of his backpack to read the compass.

  A full sea, shockingly cold, knocked him off the deck into the bilge and slewed the boat out of control. He felt his way in the dark back up to the outrigger deck, found the sheets and the steering paddle, and steadied the canoe by filling its sail with wind again.

  Quickly, he tied a length of sennit rope around his waist and secured it to the canoe as a life line.

  In order to get back o
n course, he tried to feel whether the swells were still moving from his right, but the wind, stirred by the weather coming from the east, had kicked up contrasting waves. The sky offered no clue either, dark from horizon to horizon.

  Were he sailing Veronica, he would switch on the binnacle light to confirm his course by its serene red glow. He raised the compass to read it by penlight. The sea reached out like a malevolent child and snatched it from his hand.

  He lunged for it, reaching desperately for his last connection to his modern world. But the compass was gone, and his heart sank with it.

  He was lost, blinded by cloud, bewildered by the jumbled sea. The wind was backing and veering—crazy shifts that thumped the sail, heeling the canoe, driving it forward, knocking it back. He could still sense the great Pacific swells breathing under the canoe, but the surface was too wild and the night too dark to distinguish their direction.

  He stood up, and, gripping a shroud, strained to pierce the gloom. He heard waves collide next to him, but he couldn't see their broken and foaming white crests. "Jesus," he muttered, or thought he did, but his curse transformed into prayer, "Sarah!" as he realized he hadn't sailed alone in a decade.

  His breath came shallow. He felt his chest constrict, a strangler's hand around his throat, a whisper in his ears that began to roar. When a prickling sensation numbed his lips, he braced for pain, fearing the first symptoms of heart attack. Then he realized with a giddy, choked laugh that it wasn't his body that was under assault, but his mind—tumbling in panic.

  A gust headed the sail, knocking the canoe backward, and Stone into the water. He pulled himself aboard by his lifeline. The air was cold. He crouched, shivering, collecting his spirit.

  He'd survived worse than this—wedged in pack ice in the Weddell Sea with a South Pole blizzard screaming their way. Now, as then, he heard Sarah's voice, both schoolmarmish and brave. "All right, Michael. Where do we stand?"

  Rain struck—a sudden downpour that sizzled icy cold across the sea and shocked him back to the present. He lowered the sail, which the wind was threatening to tear to pieces, secured the heavy boom and gaff. Then he felt in the hull for a coconut shell and started bailing the seawater that was pouring over the gunnels.