Fire And Ice Page 6

  He heard a noise. It was a strange city noise, like a subway platform or a baseball game, so different from the soft sounds of waves and wind that he thought he was imagining it.

  A crackling sound, like a Japanese yelling in a loudspeaker.

  Stone sat up. A brightly lighted ship was coming up behind him less than a quarter mile to his right. A fishing trawler. She was moving fast, deck hands busy under blazing work lights.

  He dug his radio out of his bag and shouted, "Mayday. Mayday. Mayday." No reply. He cupped his hands and hailed them. The wind whisked his voice away. He opened his backpack, found his penlights, and waved them at the trawler. When it didn't respond, he shone them on his rice-bag sail.

  The ship was catching up. With his hands filled with the lights, Stone sheeted in the sail and altered course to cut it off.

  The loudspeaker boomed and crackled. The deck hands bent to their work, blinded by their own lights.

  "Help!"

  Stone yelled again and again, frantically waving his lights. The trawler passed close enough for him to hear the thunder of its engines. The wind whipped reeking diesel exhaust at him and suddenly backed the sail, flinging it across the canoe. Eyes locked on the fishing trawler, Michael Stone sensed the rush too late to duck.

  The wood boom struck him full in the temple.

  It knocked him to the floor of the canoe. A loud crunching sound resonated in his skull like breaking glass.

  He cried for help. He could only whisper. He tried to drag himself onto the outrigger deck, tried to stand, but he felt himself sliding down a slope of blood-red snow. The last thing he saw was the stern lights of the trawler, half a mile ahead and fading fast.

  IN STONE'S DREAMS THE TRAWLER LIGHTS MINGLED WITH

  stars he saw from Veronica the nights he and Sarah made love on the cockpit cushions.

  As she leaned over him her dark body blotted out the stars until the sky was black and the sea empty again. He sat up—not knowing where he was—and saw the trawler lights converge with a blinking buoy.

  He sank back, on Veronica, under her, and when he rose again the buoy was gone, the trawler a distant speck against the rising sun. Sarah was under him now, giggling, teasing. A whisper of pleasure. Soft laughter. "I'll be right back. . . ."

  His face was burning, his head aching, lolling painfully with the lurch of the drifting canoe. He heard the sail slat, flap hard. He tried to shield his face, to move to secure the sheet. Nausea struck like a fist.

  A cool shadow crossed his face. He sensed the sail moving across the hot white sun. It passed and again he burned. He knew he should shield his face, find the old man's taro leaf shade, but he couldn't move.

  "I'm back. You fell asleep."

  "Did not."

  "I've ruined you." Laughing. "Is there no cure . . . ?" She descended dark over him and his heart swelled with love until he felt he would explode.

  Hull down on the horizon, beating to windward under clouds of white canvas, a giant, many-masted ship sailed a course straight at his canoe. An enormous slab-sided hull painted an unusual light sand color. As it closed rapidly, he recognized the Dallas Belle, rerigged as an enormous staysail schooner. She had a bone in her teeth and tore by, laying down a wake that nearly swamped him.

  Stone brought the canoe about and sailed after her.

  Sarah appeared on the stern, calling down to him, waving, smiling. Ronnie jumped up and down, laughing, beside her. She leaped onto a rope trailing into the water, slid down it, then froze, afraid to let go. "Let go!" Stone yelled. "Let go! I'll pick you up."

  Ronnie looked beseechingly up at the ship. "Mummy!" "Tell her to jump!" Stone yelled.

  "Tell her to let go. Both of you. Jump. Jump."

  Sarah climbed onto the bulwark and began removing her clothes, baring her breasts and her long, slim legs, waving to Stone. She poised to dive. A rush of figures appeared behind her, sailors who grabbed her legs, her body, and bore her down.

  Stone's canoe put on a burst of speed and he braced to jump and climb up the trailing rope. But the ship turned even closer to the wind and angled swiftly away.

  He awoke in the dark, worrying he was a terrible father. He teased and kidded Ronnie, trolling for laughs when he should give her more; it seemed he should talk to her more, and listen more, or he would end up the remote, dramatic figure his own father had been.

  He resolved to do better. But still he felt anxious. Veronica seemed to be bouncing unusually hard.

  His mouth was dry as sand, the pain in his head sharp—pulsing with each beat of his heart. Then, like a garbled radio signal suddenly clear, he recognized his first rational thought since the boom had hit him: he was dangerously dehydrated.

  According to his watch, he had been semiconscious for twenty-four hours; baked all day by the tropic sun, seasick and wave tossed, he had passed beyond thirst into a state of muddled lethargy.

  Too bleary to make any sense of the sails, he fumbled around in the bilge for the net bag of coconuts, and sliced his hand trying to bore a hole in one.

  He sucked greedily at his blood. Eventually he pierced the soft eyes of the coconut, and dribbled sweet milk on his cracked lips.

  He drank it dry, counted two more, the last of the coconuts, and drank from one. It wasn'

  t near enough liquid. He debated opening the last. The starry sky meant no rainwater. He'

  d have to trail the old man's hooks and hope to catch a fish.

  Searching for a coconut he might have missed, he found his backpack tethered under the abbreviated foredeck, tore it open, and, with a cotton-mouthed croak of triumph, pulled out one of the saline bags he'd tossed in for the old man. He tied it to the mast, lay down and probed with the needle for a vein. He missed, licked up the blood, and missed, again, despising his weakness and cursing the pain.

  A vague memory of the Japanese trawler took shape, interspersed with recollections of crazy dreams of Sarah and Ronnie and the Dallas Belle, converted to a schooner. He could only hope that his concussion was a mild one.

  He pinched the saline feed, and detached it from the needle, which he left in his arm, and rose on shaky legs to trim the flapping sail and put the canoe back on a northerly course, with the east-rising sun hard on his right hand.

  He gnawed a moldy sweet potato and a chunk of hard poi. Then he lay down again to let more liquid into his veins. He pressed his watch to his ear and listened intently. The rapid ping raised his spirits like a second heart.

  But his head still ached, and a thin red haze hung before his left eye like a dirty window.

  The crazy dreams kept coming back. Sarah in the arms of the sailors. Ronnie deaf to his pleas. The Dallas Belle sailing closer to the wind than he could.

  Odd how the mind had chosen a staysail schooner rig with all those free-flying sails and not a boom in sight. . . . He looked up at his own boom, which had nearly killed him. Another unexpected gust, another mistake, and once again the heavy length of breadfruit wood would sweep the deck like a blunt scythe.

  He had always prided himself in the simple life he lived aboard the Swan, all his belongings tucked inside a thirty-eight foot hull. But, compared to the old fisherman from whom he'd inherited this canoe, he wallowed in equipment. Sextant. Radios. Three self-steering devices. Diesel generator, wind generator, pumps, engine, winches, blocks, lights, fire hose. He was wondering why he was mentally ranting like a latter-day back-to-the-basics hippie, when a truly radical idea occurred to him. Why not deep-six his boom?

  The crazy thing was it worked better without it. When he sheeted in the loose sail, the canoe leaped into motion and sailed a full point closer to the wind. He laughed out loud, razoring pain through his skull. With the wind veering more and more easterly, he could hold a course nearly due north.

  A fish struck the line he was trailing. Startled awake, Stone pulled it in slowly, the thin twine slicing his fingers. A small tuna that fought hard, and he was surprised he managed to land it without breaking the line. He kill
ed it with a scalpel thrust in its brain and cut thin strips of flesh, which he inspected closely for parasites before swallowing it raw.

  Fixing his position without charts and instruments was like trying to balance a checkbook from scribbles on a cocktail napkin. But Stone had to know exactly where he was before he turned west. The decision was momentous—the heart of any hope of rescuing Sarah and Ronnie—for the instant he turned west he was irrevocably committed.

  If he turned too soon—too far south—the trade wind and the rolling seas would whisk the canoe past Angaur deep into the Philippine Sea, where he would face an impossible voyage some five hundred lonely miles to the Mindanao Coast. Turn too late, and he'd be driven between Angaur and the northern Palau Island group or smashed on the fringing reef.

  He marshaled crude references, eyeballing the sun by

  day, the stars at night, estimating direction by the wind and the trades rollers. The canoe's leeward drift west, the counterequatorial current east, and his speed north he guessed from the trail of Dutchman's logs he dropped astern like abandoned children.

  The only constant would be the zenith of Betelgeuse, if he could see it. By the fourth night—when the tuna had gone rotten and Stone had tapped the final coconut and finished all but a few ounces of taro—he hoped the bright red star was standing directly overhead. And it probably was—he cursed aloud—several thousand light years above the cloud bank that had rolled in at sunset like the sliding roof of an all-weather stadium.

  At midnight, God favored him with a thin smile. A hazy opening appeared in the clouds, and Betelgeuse glared down through it, orange as a pumpkin. Stone lay on the bridge deck and stared aloft. The little orange dot seemed to be overhead, but the canoe was pitching in the choppy seas stirred between the counterequatorial current and the trade wind rollers. Before he could be sure, the clouds closed in again.

  Devastated, afraid to commit, he stared, cold and tired and hopeless, at the sea. There was light in the water. He looked up, but there was still no starlight to reflect. Then with excitement thickening in his throat he realized it sparkled deeper than reflections.

  Backwash streaks—long streaks of green light that pointed west like arrows.

  "The glory of the seas," the islanders called them. Phosphorescence kicked up by backwash waves. And backwash streaks only occurred between eighty and a hundred miles upwave of an atoll.

  Stone cast loose the sheets, set the mainsail over the port side and the jib over the starboard, and turned west. Sailing wing and wing, he began bashing into the counterequatorial current, on the long run downwind to Angaur.

  SARAH LEANED OUT THE SLEEPING CABIN PORT, TO MAKE SURE

  no one was watching from the bridge or the main deck, before holding Ronnie's GPS

  under the sky. Far below, she could see the life raft canister on the afterdeck. It gleamed white in the morning sun, beckoning. Escape, if she dared. Suicidal, until she knew for sure they were near the shipping lanes.

  "They're coming!"

  The GPS hadn't been out long enough to lock onto the satellite signals, and its screen was a riot of moving numbers. One and a half days after they had capped the gas leak, she could only guess by the sun that the ship was still making for Shanghai. And only hope they'd enter trafficked waters soon.

  "Hurry!"

  Sarah shoved the GPS back in Ronnie's Snoopy backpack and was dog-latching the port when the captain of the Dallas Belle flung open the door without knocking. His quick eyes noted her at the port, Ronnie backing from the door, and Mr. Jack, still as stone in his bed.

  "You're needed down in sick bay, Doc. We got an injured man."

  Sarah picked up her bag and reached for Ronnie's hand. "Leave the kid."

  "She comes with me," said Sarah.

  "Not in sick bay."

  "Ronnie has assisted me since she was eight years old,"

  Sarah said firmly. "She's the best qualified nurse on the ship.-

  The captain blocked the door. "Take my word for it, Doc. You don't want her down there. Not this time."

  Sarah hesitated. Something grave and troubled in the captain's expression made her believe him. "All right. Ronnie, stay with Mr. Jack. I'll be back soon."

  "But—"

  "It's okay, hon. Your mom'll be fine. She's just gotta help somebody."

  "I'm hungry."

  "Cook's pullin' muffins outta the oven. He'll rustle you up some breakfast right away.

  Let's go, Doc."

  Mystified, Sarah followed him out of the owner's suite and into the elevator. They descended four decks to the dispensary.

  "How's the old man?"

  "He should be in hospital," she said automatically. In fact, he appeared to be gaining strength. But her best hope was still to convince them he could not survive on the ship.

  "It ain't going to happen, Doc. Better get used to it."

  She was frantic for Michael and missed him terribly. The three days felt like weeks. She missed him beside her in bed and longed to hear his voice. To live together on the small boat, they had developed habits over the years that insured each other's privacy. Yet his presence, if only a silhouette in the corner of her eye, was a constant she took for granted. Now she felt as if the air had grown thinner.

  But she at least had Ronnie—an active presence and a piece of him—while he was desperately alone. Assuming he had repaired the little lagoon canoe, he was far at sea, perhaps as much as a hundred and fifty miles from Pulo Helena. She tried to close her mind to the danger. Every time Ronnie asked how she thought he was, she whispered that he was a splendid sailor, and if anyone could sail a wooden canoe across two hundred and fifty miles of open Pacific it was Michael Stone. Ronnie would nod, bravely, but she knew as well as Sarah that was an enormous if, on an unforgiving ocean.

  The dispensary contained the ship's meager medical supplies and a single hospital bed.

  On it lay Ah Lee, his face battered. His eyes were blackened, his lips bloody. His nose looked broken, and one of his teeth had pierced his cheek. When she leaned over him, the boy flinched.

  Sarah laid cool fingers' on the back of his hand, and lowered her voice to soothe him. "It'

  s all right, Ah Lee. It's only Doctor Stone. I'm going to help you." Angrily, she motioned the captain into the corridor. "Who did this to him?"

  "Took a header down the companionway."

  "The devil he did. He's been beaten. Who did this—Moss?"

  "The sooner you fix him up, the sooner you get back to the kid, Doc."

  She examined the boy's eyes first. When she shone a light into the left, both pupils constricted simultaneously. Good. He probably hadn't suffered a head trauma. "This will hurt just a moment," she whispered, opening a disposable needle and gently injecting local anesthetic around his nose and the pierced cheek. Ah Lee followed her movements with tears in his eyes. .

  She stitched up his cheek, removed a broken tooth, set and taped his nose, and draped surgical gloves filled with crushed ice around his nose and over his eyes. Then she gave him a tetanus shot and penicillin.

  "Have someone replace the ice when it melts. I'll look in on him later." She touched Ah Lee's hand good-bye.

  The captain was watching from the doorway. "Handled yourself well, Doctor. Lotta class." The captain walked her to the elevator. "I've noticed you Africans know who you are. Problem with our blacks is they don't know and they don't give a damn."

  This was not the first of the captain's pronouncements. He had found it difficult at first to believe she was what he called a "real doctor," and seemed to admire her powers as something she had acquired in a jungle.

  "Have you discussed your racist insights with Mr. Moss?"

  "Moss is different."

  "You mean you're afraid of him."

  The captain seemed unperturbed. "I'm a seaman, Doc. I steer around heavy weather. And no storm lasts forever." A potential ally? She wondered. She smiled.

  The captain moved a little closer. "You're a good lookin'
gal, Doc."

  "Thank you, Captain. But as I've told Moss, I am married."

  "Well, hell, I'm married too."

  Sarah fingered her cross. "I took my vows in church." The captain pressed the elevator button for the bridge deck.

  "Moss wants to see you."

  He led Sarah through the curtain. Moss was at the helm, hunched over the big OMBO

  monitor. "Leave us," he said to the captain.

  "No rough stuff," said the captain.

  "She'll get what she asks for," said Moss. He rose to his full height and stepped close to Sarah. "Leave us," he repeated, and the captain backed out through the curtain.

  Sarah heard his footsteps down the stairs. Moss was standing too near her. She backed up. "What do you want?"

  "What do I want?" he echoed, mocking her accent. "You think you're better than me, Doctor? You think 'cause your rich African daddy sent you to college you're better than me. You think this white doctor coat makes you white?"

  He seized the cloth. Buttons tore loose, exposing her shoulder. He trailed his heavy hand over her shoulder, then under the cloth to her breast. "Black," he said. "Black like me."

  Sarah stiffened. His touch made her flesh crawl. But he was far too powerful to resist physically. She tried to contain her panic, looked desperately for something to defuse him. She could sense in him a deep bitterness that had the potential to build to uncontrollable rage. Were she a man he would beat her half to death. But against her it would explode in a brutal sexual attack.

  "Your friend needs me," she said. "I'm his only hope."

  "I don't see him gettin' any better."

  She stared down at his hand kneading her flesh—her fear turning to anger—imagining a scalpel with which she would amputate his fingers. The vision was so bright for a second, she thought she saw blood. Then she realized that her white coat was speckled red.

  "You're bleeding."

  "Cut my knuckle." He made a fist to show her a deep gash. "Gimme a tetanus shot."

  "If I were you I'd pray that Ah Lee isn't HIV positive." "Say what?" He backed away.

  "You've mingled your blood with his," she answered, and felt a deeply satisfying thrill at the raw fear that flickered in his eyes.