Fire And Ice Read online

  Scoop of water. Over the side. Scoop of water. Over the

  side. Again, and again, and again. Counting each scoop. A moment's rest between each hundred .. .

  The canoe skidded on the crests—lurching and sliding. Gusts shrieked against the mast, whistled through the shrouds. When the bigger ones lifted the outrigger from the water, the little boat threatened to turn turtle.

  Thunder pealed. Lightning split the dark like a million arc welders, and suddenly the sea and storm were illuminated—the water milk white, the waves jagged, the sky a sickly gray. A powerful blast of wind blew the tops off the waves and sent them scudding along in a dense froth. For a long, impossible moment there was more water than air, air too thick to breathe.

  Lightning exploded again—a long, sinuous, liquid bolt toppling slowly, lazily from the sky. By its broad, bright light Stone saw the canoe still half full of water and an enormous wave, double the height of any around, traveling toward him at speed. He threw his arms around the mast and held on for his life. The wave tumbled over the outrigger deck, staggered the boat, pounded his back, and tore at his hands.

  The wind grabbed the mast like a handle, levering the boat over as the water punched hard from below. Stone leaned out and muscled the outrigger down with his body. But he knew he had won only a temporary victory. The next lethal wave-and-gust combination could flip the canoe like a leaf.

  He felt in the dark for the shrouds and stays, and lowered the mast to reduce windage and stabilize the tiny craft. By the time he tied down the heavy spar he was trembling with exhaustion, while the breaking seas, the rain, and spray had flooded the hull again.

  A hundred scoops, rest. A hundred scoops—scraping his hands on the rough wood, salt stinging the cuts—wondering how the frail old man who'd sailed before him had the strength to bail the open boat hour after hour. How could a man in his eighties have fought the sea as hard as he was fighting now?

  Suddenly he guessed what the old guy had done. He hadn't fought the sea, he'd embraced it. As he had lowered

  the mast to avoid the wind, he had sunk the canoe, submerging it to protect it from the waves.

  Easy to think, a bitch to do, when every instinct said that to float was to survive. Stone reflected briefly, weighed his dwindling options, and accepted that he had no choice.

  With a sense akin to revulsion, he stopped bailing and emptied the coconut shell back into the canoe.

  Quickly, he made sure that his food and gear were tied down. Then he seized a second coconut shell and scooped seawater into the hull with both hands. Breaking seas helped fill it. When a big comber roared out of the dark, it drove the boat under, snapped Stone's lifeline, and swept him away.

  Suddenly he was alone in the ocean. In that moment all thoughts of Ronnie and Sarah and the Dallas Belle were driven from his mind. The Pacific was miles deep and thick with sharks.

  Something brushed his hand. Fear screamed pull away. Survival whispered grab it.

  It tugged hard, like something alive. He battled his senses, got them under control. It was a sennit line trailing from the canoe. He tied it around his waist and pulled himself onto the half-submerged bridge, and fought to keep his chin above the wind-whipped water.

  He awakened, shivering with cold, startled that he had slept. The wind had changed. It had moderated. More important, it was blowing rock-steady from one direction. And, judging by the orderly condition of the waves, it had been for some time.

  It wasn't quite as dark, either. He could actually see the wave tops breaking. Overhead, an occasional star flickered dully through the thinning clouds.

  He felt the first glimmer of hope. December storms in the equatorial western Pacific were short-lived, and the trade wind quickly restored order to the seas. On the heels of hope came reason, the loss of his compass less catastrophic. The night chart of the skies would help him navigate. Already there were tantalizing glimpses of a bright threesome that was surely Orion's belt descending toward the west. Then the Southern Cross anchored her horizon.

  Soon after, a strong star burning white rose to the left of the wind: brilliant Vega rising in the north, pointing the way to Angaur.

  Stone lowered himself into the warm water to lighten the canoe, and began bailing. The sea settled quickly—easing his task—and by three in the morning the hull was riding high. At four he was able to climb aboard. He stepped the mast and raised the sail. Vega had risen too high to shape his course, but the sky had cleared sufficiently for him to see the Big Dipper pointing up the North Star.

  Fearing he had already been blown west by the storm, he tacked, laboriously shifting the mast, and sailed east.

  He chewed sodden breadfruit and dozed, to wake with the sun in his eyes. It had just nicked the horizon. The sky was clear blue, except in the west, where the remnants of the storm were lit red. He stood up, stiff, chilled to the bone, grateful for the sun's warmth, and studied the sky. Clear east, south, clearing in the west. Clear in the north. A few tall trade wind clouds hung like Christmas ornaments.

  He turned a slow, careful circle, praying for a ship, a distant smudge he could hail on the VHF. East and a hair astern he thought he saw something, a wrinkle on the blue seam where the ocean met the sky.

  He shinnied up the mast. A wrinkle, a smudge, then a hardness with a feathery top. But not a ship, he conceded reluctantly. Maybe a sail. He gave that up too. It wasn't a sailboat, either. It was land—land he recognized with a sinking heart—the palm-crested Pulo Helena atolls from which he had sailed the night before.

  "MUMMY, WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT?"

  "Try to sleep, dear. Mummy's thinking."

  "What are you thinking?"

  She saw a life raft canister on the afterdeck, far below the porthole where she was watching first light etch the ship against the sea, and her mind leaped to possibilities. It looked like the standard abandon-ship emergency canister, made of white fiberglass, about four feet long and two in diameter, and designed to open automatically when thrown in the water. The raft would inflate to hold four men under a bright orange radar-reflecting canopy. If she and Ronnie could somehow sneak down to the main deck, could they muscle it over the high bulwark and jump after it into the sea?

  Sixty feet to the water? From a ship racing at twenty-two knots. They were both fit, both excellent swimmers. But what if they were separated? What if they were knocked unconscious on impact? What if the ship sucked them under?

  They could jump from the stern, behind the ship. They could steal life jackets. She would tie them together. But would they injure each other, smashing skulls?

  Once safely in the raft, then what?

  Drift. Pray their disappearance wasn't noticed immediately. Wait to be picked up by another ship. A speck on the ocean. Better nearer the shipping lanes.

  She climbed back into bed and drew Ronnie close.

  Escape was too risky. A last ditch. But a hope to cling to. Better, first, to try to radio for help. To that end she had devoted much of the night mapping the ship in her mind.

  She had sussed out five possible routes to the radio room: the ship's central elevator; central stairs; private stairs from the captain's cabin; private stairs from the owner's suite, where they were confined; and a narrow balcony aft, which led to a ladder up the outside of the six-story house.

  But who was at the top of the stairs, provided she could even climb them without being seen? In the rooms in which she was allowed, there were empty sockets where the satellite telephones had been removed. And the attentive Chinese steward, always ready to bring tea for her and Cokes for Ronnie, was always watching.

  "Mummy?"

  "Sleep."

  Sarah remembered her father as an enormous man, bigger than life, black as coal, as British as Eton and Sandhurst could make an African. Josiah Soditan had been a company sergeant major in the Royal West African Frontier Force before independence, a Nigerian brigadier after. In war, he once told her, women made "jolly good scouts."

  He had g
lanced at his mistress, according her the same honor. She was smoking irritably, anxious for Sarah to thank them for dinner and go home.

  "Chaps are natural hunters, don't you see? Focus like field glasses on the kill. Women go on defense: they see everything, threats as well as opportunities."

  Puffing his Havana, he had peered at her over his brandy, awaiting some answer. She recalled gazing back like a wary gazelle, wondering what he expected in return for this apparent compliment to her sex.

  "Of course," he confided, "this is not a general view in the Service. But I will tell you that women are as capable in the killing games as any man."

  "Thank you, Father," she had answered with only partial irony, because any compliment from him was rare and thus precious.

  "Not you, dash it all! You're a physician. Point is,

  women observe their surroundings more than men. Jolly good scouts .. ."

  "Yes, Father," she whispered, half aloud.

  Ronnie stirred and slipped out of the crook of her mother's arm and stood up on the bed so she could twirl the propellers on the model World War II airplanes hanging from the ceiling. There were dozens of them, swaying with the movement of the speeding ship.

  Ronnie knew the names of all. A child of the Pacific, she had snorkeled over the fifty-year-old wreckage of many a battleground.

  Dawn was lighting the cabin through the drapes, and Sarah watched Ronnie through slitted eyes. She had been Ronnie's age when the Nigerian civil war had broken out and her father had sent her and her mother to England, where Mother had died of pneumonia, and Sarah had been sent to a convent school.

  Ronnie seemed more mature than she had been in some ways, easier in the company of adults. "Ice when the shrapnel's flying," Michael said of her, "like her mother." But she was so young in other ways, much less sophisticated than the American and Japanese tourist children they'd occasionally meet. In the civil war, Sarah had seen her father kill with a sword two men who had attacked her mother. She felt a rage welling up in her that her child should have to endure this captivity, the yacht that was her home plucked out of the water, her father marooned on a deserted atoll, and the sheer terror of not knowing what would be done to them next. She had to control her anger. She feared it as much as she feared the men who held them, for she walked a fine line on the edge of violence.

  "I've been thinking," Ronnie said, caressing the belly of a twin-engine bomber. "Daddy's okay."

  "Of course he is."

  "No, I mean really, Mum. He's got fish to eat and crabs and mussels. Coconuts to drink—except he'll get too much cholesterol."

  "We'll put him on a strict diet when we get him back." "Absolutely . . . He can sleep in a fale. . . . I just hope the mosquitoes aren't too bad."

  "Very few mosquitoes at Pulo Helena."

  "I bet he's lonely."

  "Well, Daddy doesn't really get lonely." Truth. He was maddeningly self-contained, though in recent years he had become increasingly dependent on her as their marriage matured and she became less the sheltered girl and more the woman.

  "But he'll miss us."

  "Yes, he will."

  "And he'll worry, every second."

  "But he knows you and I can take care of ourselves."

  "I know we can. But I doubt he does— God, I wonder what he's doing. I hope he doesn't hurt himself. You know how clumsy he gets."

  "He'll be fine," said Sarah, though in fact she was deeply worried. She knew a Michael Stone their child had never seen.

  Ronnie tapped a Japanese Zero to set it swinging, then knelt suddenly beside Sarah. "

  Mummy, do you suppose he might try to fix—"

  Sarah clapped a hand over her daughter's mouth and whispered in her ear, "Careful.

  What if they're listening?" "Sons of bitches."

  "I will not tolerate that talk."

  "Daddy says—"

  "Not often."

  "Mummy," she whispered, drawing their faces nose to nose. "Are you really not worried?"

  "About us . . . ?" She and Michael had always been straight with Ronnie, but she had to censor every fear. "They'll let us go as soon as the old man is better."

  Mr. Jack, as they called the old man, lay in the bed next to theirs, attached to the wheezing respirator the ship's crew had brought up from Veronica. His respiration was still severely depressed, his blood pressure so low that he was, as Michael would say, two degrees north of death.

  -"Who do you think shot him, Mummy?"

  "I haven't the foggiest."

  "But what are they doing? It's so weird. Why won't they go to a hospital?"

  "Because they have us."

  "We're not a hospital. We're just a clinic."

  "Somehow I've got to convince them of that," Sarah agreed grimly. Ronnie's face fell, and Sarah kicked herself for frightening the child. She manufactured a big smile and whispered, "Hey, there. You listen at the door. I'll find out where we are."

  They had a big secret—Ronnie's GPS hidden in her Snoopy knapsack. Making a game of using it made things a little less frightening. Creeping around the cabin, touching fingers to lips, they listened at the door with Sarah's stethoscope, then checked that the old man was still asleep, and opened a port.

  Ronnie hunched over the stethoscope. Sarah turned on the GPS and held it outside for the moments it needed to touch base with the satellites.

  Sarah's heart fell when she read the distance they'd steamed from the Pulo Helena way point. The ship was now making twenty-three knots, over four hundred miles in the eighteen hours since they had left Michael behind.

  "They're coming!" Ronnie called.

  She jammed the GPS into the knapsack, hung the sack over the chair where it had been, and shut the port as a soft knock sounded at the door. She exchanged looks with Ronnie and nodded. Ronnie opened the door. It was only Ah Lee, the Chinese servant, with tea and orange juice and breakfast on a tray.

  "Good morning, ladies."

  "Good morning, Ah Lee."

  He laid the table like a room service waiter at the Peninsula Hotel.

  Ah Lee was very young, no more than a boy, and hardly any taller than Ronnie, who was fascinated by him. Despite the fact that they had almost no language in common beyond

  "Good morning," "tea," and "Coca-Cola," she had learned that he was from Shanghai, had no brothers or sisters, and was saving his money to one day open a coffee shop for tourists. He left quickly, after a worried glance at the sleeping Mr. Jack.

  "I'm not hungry," Ronnie said.

  "Let's pretend there's a storm coming," Sarah told her firmly. "Best eat while we can."

  They sat opposite each other at the little breakfast table.

  The cool aroma of air-conditioned salt air, soap, and furniture polish, the reflected sunlight dancing on the ceiling, and the distant presence of engines many decks below could almost lull her into believing that she and her daughter had booked aboard a luxury cruise ship.

  A smile intended to reassure faded at the sharp knock on the door.

  "Soon as you got a minute, Doc."

  "We're busy," muttered Ronnie. "Come back tomorrow."

  "Do not provoke them."

  Sarah draped her stethoscope around her neck for the authority it gave her, took Ronnie's hand, and entered the incongruously luxurious main salon of the Dallas Belle's owner's suite, which had a spectacular view of the ship's wake.

  She saw immediately that the compass in the antique brass binnacle pointed the same NNW 330° it had for the past eighteen hours, then turned her attention to the two men in blue jeans, running shoes, and khaki work shirts, who had assumed the power of life and death over her and Ronnie.

  The captain of the Dallas Belle was a powerfully built Texan in his thirties. Though he had hailed them on the radio with a deceptively easygoing drawl, he was quick moving, decisive, and thoroughly in charge of the ship, if not of everyone aboard.

  That power belonged to the tall black American, Moss. Moss shouldered past the captain, causin
g Ronnie to edge closer to Sarah.

  "When you taking the slug out of him?"

  "I'd really rather not."

  "I don't give a damn what you'd 'rather' do," he mocked her English accent.

  "You've seen too many movies, Mr. Moss. The bullet is the least of Mr. Jack's troubles.

  What Mr. Jack needs much more is a hospital."

  "We got your hospital."

  "Try and think of my hospital as an ambulance, Mr. Moss. And a rather minimally equipped one at that. He

  needs a respirator. Our respirator is old and could pack in at any minute."

  "Chief engineer's standing by to fix it."

  Sarah ignored the interruption. "Mr. Jack is seventy-seven years old. If he is unable to fill his lungs properly, he will contract pneumonia. He will die—provided, of course, he doesn't die first of the morphine your people poured into him."

  "You said you were fixin' that."

  "He is not responding to the Narcan as I would like. Though I think he's come around."

  "So when he wakes up he'll breathe right. Right?"

  "Not only is his respiration depressed by the narcotic, but once it wears off, even awake, he will have to fight the pain of the bullet wound and your mess boy's surgical skills with every breath."

  "Then you got to get the bullet out."

  "No. He can't afford any more complications outside of a hospital. Had a man your age been shot I'd be delighted to operate—"

  "Without anesthesia," muttered Ronnie.

  Sarah squeezed Ronnie's arm so hard she felt her fingers bite the bone.

  Moss's mouth formed a wintery smile. "Maybe you want to watch me do your Mom without anesthesia?"

  Ronnie looked down at the carpet, and Sarah felt her melt. In the ugly silence, Moss's eyes sought hers. Sarah gazed past, tasting fear for herself as well as Ronnie. Moss seemed to resent the class gulf between them as if she had somehow betrayed their shared African heritage by not suffering poverty.