Fire And Ice Page 7

  "Where the hell would a Chinese kid get . '." his voice trailed off as the possibilities sank in.

  Sarah closed her coat. "Next time you beat up somebody, wear latex gloves."

  The black man mastered his fear with a cold resolve that Sarah found as frightening as his touch. "I'll keep it in mind. Next time I have to."

  "He's just a boy. Why did you hurt him? Are you demonstrating your authority? I'm already aware of your power over me and my child. I'm doing everything I can to care for Mr. Jack. What more do you want?"

  "Ah Lee left his post. . . . We don't allow folks desertin' their watch on this ship." He stared down at her. Sarah looked away, praying he wouldn't touch her again.

  "You been married long?" he asked, after a moment.

  "Twelve years."

  "The guy on the island is Ronnie's father?"

  "Of course."

  "She's near black as we are."

  "A mystery of genetics, Mr. Moss. My husband is Ronnie's father. I'd like to get back to Mr. Jack, now." "How'd you end up with a white man?"

  "He's not a 'white' man, he's my man."

  "Not at the moment he isn't. And you ain't his."

  "At the moment," she retorted evenly, "I am Mr. Jack's doctor."

  "And that little girl's mother. I got a word of advice

  for you, 'Mummy.' Watch your ass if you don't want her face lookin' like Ah Lee's."

  Sarah felt her will die. He knew about the satellite phone, her mind shrieked. But before she could control her terror, Moss asked, "You a smuggler, Doc?"

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "You on the lam?"

  "I don't follow you."

  Moss walked to the windscreen and stared down at the Swan. "Carbon fiber mast, Doc.

  Kinda funny on that old boat. Captain tells me that's totally tech. Says customs radar can'

  t spot you. You two runnin' a little dope?" He turned to gauge her reaction.

  Sarah failed to cover her smile of giddy relief. "I see. No, we are not drug smugglers."

  "What you laughing at?"

  "My husband salvaged the mast from a wreck. The owners told us we were welcome to it, but they didn't believe we could actually remove it from their boat and step it on ours.

  You see, it was just the two of us. Ronnie was only five. And the wreck was on a nasty bit of reef."

  "How'd you do it?"

  "Frankly, I don't know. He wanted it and we got it. He's quite ingenious."

  Moss had studied the guy through the sniper scope and wasn't impressed: a stocky little graybeard with the skinny legs you saw on sailing folk. Not much bigger than Mr. Jack, though he had some shoulders on him.

  "He wanted it for smuggling," said Moss. "Chinese art? Body parts? I hear mainland kidneys are hot this year."

  "We're not smugglers, Mr. Moss. We sail our clinic to the outer islands. We set broken bones, examine old people, and give children toothbrushes."

  "Hey, I'm not judging you. Maybe you run a little contraband to pay for the hospital."

  "No. We have benefactors."

  "U.S.?"

  "Mostly the Japanese. As you might know, they're very involved in the islands."

  "Again . . . Funny, I didn't find any weapons aboard."

  Sarah bristled. "You have no right to search our home."

  "How come no guns?"

  "We don't carry guns," Sarah answered.

  "I hear boat folks do, these days, what with pirates and all."

  "We don't believe in guns."

  "Doc!" The captain burst in. "The old man's awake."

  Moss stayed behind. He'd only get in the way down there. Better to wait till the doctor got him upright. Then he and the old man could claim some time alone. Funny. He had a grandmother who used to drag him to church in a dirty storefront and make him pray.

  Last night, scared the old man wouldn't make it, he had given it a whirl. Damned if Mr.

  Jack didn't wake up.

  He turned back to the OMBO monitor, put on the headset. Mr. Jack had once said to him—with that grin that promised they could walk through hell and come out brothers—

  "You don't know shit about technology, but you know what you like."

  That was the truth. The ship's computers were magic. Nothing happened aboard that wasn't on tape. All functions were logged, stored, and available for playback. Every rev of the propellers, every hiccup in the compressors, every change of temperature, every course alteration, every word spoken on every deck in the house, every radio signal in, and every radio signal out.

  "You don't have to know shit about technology." Mr. Jack had laughed. –You just have to see the opportunity. And you do, Moss." Moss felt his whole body swell with pride at the memory. Mr. Jack had hired a flock of computer nerds who taught him how the machines made magic. But the fact was, he had an instinct how to use them, which was a hell of a lot more important.

  He punched up the audio.

  A recording he had listened to earlier played again.

  .. hope he doesn't hurt himself. You know how clumsy he gets. . . . He'll be fine. . . .

  Mummy? Do you suppose he might try to fix—"

  Should have shot the son of a bitch while he had him

  cross-haired in his scope. Moss played the recording through, but whatever she had whispered after she gagged the little girl was lost. But it was pretty clear that they expected "Daddy" to come after them. Moss had discussed it with the captain, who assured him that even if he did, by some miracle, he'd be way too late.

  He hit the speed dial on a satellite phone and activated the scrambler, superencrypting the call so that if the National Security Agency happened to be listening, they'd have to cluster a truckload of Crays to crack it. In his mind's eye, he watched the signal shoot like a bullet thousands of miles into space, ricochet off a satellite, and fall back to earth.

  A woman answered like she was standing in the door. Moss said, "I got a phone number for you. I want to know who owns it."

  While he waited, he pulled up the menu on the OMBO monitor, chose Ports from the first set of options, and from the ports listed selected Tokyo. The machine started with an overview showing a broad chart for the Sagami Sea.

  Moss hit the Simulator command.

  The ship icon appeared on the screen. Moving at sixty times real time, it passed 0-shima, the island at the mouth of the gulf, and crossed the Sagami Sea in two minutes. Then it entered the traffic separation lanes and swung into Uraga-suido, the channel to Tokyo Bay. Through the narrows. Past Kimitsu. Yokosuka. Yokohama. Around Tokyo Light, and into the harbor.

  Course changes were displayed numerically at each of the many way points as the electronic ship twisted and turned up the narrowing fairway, deeper and deeper into the heart of the city. Depth alarms started blinking as it closed on Takeshiba Passenger Terminal.

  "Banzai!" said Moss.

  The sat phone chirped.

  "Yeah?"

  The woman had a name and a dossier to match the telephone number the doctor had called. A Palau Islands politician.

  Surprised and somewhat relieved, Moss said, "I want to know every call in and out of every phone the sucker

  owns. Office, house, car, boat, plane, whatever he's got. . . . Number one thing I want to know about is calls to the U.S. Navy, to airlines, or travel agents . . . Say what? . . . Until I tell you."

  He stretched his powerful arms and stared out the windscreen at the sailboat's mast.

  Why, with one chance to call for help, had she chosen a private number in the Palau Islands? Why leave a message on an answering machine? Why not report the name of the atoll where they'd left her husband?

  Why didn't she just call the cops?

  She seemed to know her way around the ocean, so she would probably know that if she had sent a standard distress signal, or just tripped the automatic Mayday, they would have canceled it when the calls came in for confirmation.

  But their boat was registered in the United States. Why not
call the U.S. Navy? Or Interpol? It was a good question and he looked forward to asking her the second the old man didn't need her anymore.

  A BIRD DIVE-BOMBED STONE THE MORNING OF THE FIFTH DAY,

  a sure sign of land. By noon, terns and black-and-white noddies were diving and swooping, fishing in flocks. The water took on a peculiar chop between the swells, which themselves began to change shape and grow steeper, and Stone sensed a certain hesitation in the atmosphere, as if air and water were stumbling on an obstacle.

  The chop worsened and took on a particularly chaotic quality which, in his exhaustion, he had failed for too long to recognize was caused by a swift current setting to the south.

  He'd been driven south for hours.

  The canoe lurched, and around the sail he was suddenly startled to see Angaur—green and wooded, with a red water tower in the middle. A cluster of buildings at the north end marked an abandoned Coast Guard station.

  His chest filled with joy. He was less than two miles off. But his joy was quickly tempered by the realization that he was being swept toward a rock-bound shore.

  Soon he heard surf thundering and saw white eruptions as the great swells squeezed through blowholes and shot skyward to fall foaming on the rock. As he neared what looked like the corner of the island, he saw a reef. But it was a small outcropping, not the main reef that sheltered the harbor.

  An airplane came skimming low from the north, buzzed out to sea in a lazy circle, and lined up with the island. The Koror flight. Had to be—couldn't be more than one plane every few days for an island with a population of two hundred. But by the time he beat around the island and picked his way through the fringing reef and into the harbor, the plane would be long gone. God knew when the next one went.

  The plane touched down less than a mile from him, a minuscule two-engine job floating down a World War II runway built for four-engine bombers, spun around, and buzzed back to the terminal shack. Stone threw the steering paddle hard over and aimed for the little reef, standing high as he could on the outrigger bridge to try to see a passage.

  The breakers appeared as a solid snowbank of foam. Then he saw a small, dark break and steered for it. The pass—if it was a pass—looked about six feet wide. The sea was smashing around it in a welter of tumbling water. Michael's boat was swept into the surf, spinning out of control. He fought the steering paddle with both hands, and when he swung his weight into it, it snapped.

  A huge comber lifted the canoe like a dart player lining up a shot, and he saw a black gleaming coral bank where he knew the canoe would land. Abandoning the useless paddle, he cut his backpack loose and got one arm through a strap before he had to jump.

  The canoe shot ahead, crashed onto the reef.

  Stone jumped a hair late. The mast cracked, snapped, and plummeted down on him, brushing his shoulder with a blow that knocked him into the water as the sea picked the canoe up again and threw it in splinters.

  He was tumbled, somersaulted, driven over jagged coral, found himself suddenly in deep water, swam, and just as suddenly felt sand under his feet. He staggered onto the beach, dazed and bleeding.

  A young couple carrying camper's ruck-sacks came running from the road that rimmed the beach, the boy forging ahead, wielding a camera and calling to Stone. Utterly astonished to find himself alive and standing on hard ground, Stone gaped back at them.

  "Okay, we take picture, Old One?" the boy asked in tourist-pidgin English, apparently convinced that the sun-blacked Stone was a native and his crash landing a local custom.

  The girl was staring, realizing what the boy didn't. "He's hurt."

  Stone broke into a dead run, working his arms into the backpack straps as he pounded along the crushed coral road that mirrored the sun and seemed to jump and leap under his boat shoes. He ran for half a mile, exhaustion vanishing in a burst of hope. The road turned inland. He saw a break in the trees—the clearing of the runway—and heard the plane rev its engines.

  "N0000!"

  He saw a tin-roofed shack flying a ragged wind sock, a man in a Budweiser T-shirt sitting in a rusty jeep with PARADISE AIR hand-painted on the hood, and a boxy De Havilland Otter with PARADISE AIR stenciled on its dented aluminum skin. The man in the jeep turned and watched Stone curiously. The propeller pitch rose to a harsh scream and the plane started rolling.

  "Stop him!" Stone yelled, his voice thin and shrill. The man in the jeep cupped his hands and shouted, "Where you going, man?"

  "Koror. Stop him."

  Stone jumped into the jeep. "Go. Get him!"

  The man shrugged, put it in gear, and chased down the runway after the plane.

  "Flash your lights."

  "Don't have lights."

  The plane was drawing away. Its nose began to rise. And then suddenly it slowed, stopped. The jeep caught up. Stone jumped down. The pilot stuck his head out the window. "What?"

  "Koror!" said Stone.

  "Got any money?"

  Stone suddenly saw himself in the pilot's eyes: warm blood streaming down his sunburnt arms, soaking wet, his shirt and shorts in tatters. He held up his backpack. "I got money."

  "Passport?" asked the pilot. "They'll hassle you at Koror."

  Stone nodded. He had several passports.

  "Where you come from?" asked the man in the jeep. "I don't see no boats." Angaurans were famous marijuana growers and notoriously suspicious of strangers.

  Stone ignored the question and pointed at the ticket folder on the floor of the jeep. "How much to Koror?"

  Having caught up with the plane, the Paradise Air ticket agent now returned to Island Time, slowly extracting a ticket from the folder, laboriously filling it out. Stone fished his wallet from the waterproof knapsack, handed over three American fives, and climbed aboard. The old bomber runway was so long that the pilot took off from where he had stopped.

  The plane hopped onto the trade wind like a trained poodle and banked north. Stone looked back at the tiny harbor, a few boats and the sprawling wreckage of a derelict phosphate conveyor disappearing into the jungle. He couldn't see the little reef where he had wrecked the canoe. Below was the blue channel between Angaur and the main Palau archipelago, which looked like a jeweled green dagger set in the filigree of the reef. To his right spread the dark Pacific, to his left the Philippine Sea, dappled in cloud shadows. He looked for a sand-colored ship.

  The pilot leveled the plane off at eight hundred feet, turned around and took off his sunglasses, and asked, "You okay, buddy?"

  Stone ran a hand through his salt-crusted hair. He opened his pack and wiped the blood off his arm and doused it with peroxide. It stung like hell, but he barely noticed. An old line of Conrad's was running through his head: The sea gave you a chance to feel your strength. He felt invincible.

  "YOUR RADIO WORK?" STONE SHOUTED OVER THE ENGINE

  roar.

  "Sure it works," the pilot answered, indignant despite the fact that a third of the dials on his instrument panel were blacked out with electrical tape, and his starboard engine was spraying oil on the windows.

  "Would you please radio your dispatcher to call President Salinis and ask him to meet me at the airport?"

  The pilot laughed: with a total population of fifteen thousand, the Republic of Palau's president was not a remote figure, but Stone was badly out of date. "He's Senator Salinis, again. He got voted out."

  When Stone had sailed from Kwajalein, a week-old copy of the Guam Pacific Daily News had predicted victory in the election. But politics in Palau were volatile—sometimes violent—to say the least, and Marcus, a hard-driving entrepreneur, had made several trips up and down the slippery slope.

  "Who I say wants him?"

  Stone gave the name on his primary passport: "Doctor Michael Samuels."

  "Hey, you the sailboat doctor?"

  "You got it."

  "I ain't seen your boat this year."

  "She's refitting in the Marshalls."

  "How'd you get to Angaur?"

  "C
an you call him, please?"

  Stone closed his eyes, and the next he knew the pilot was shaking him awake. "Koror."

  Stone looked around blearily.

  "Here." The pilot handed him a comb. Stone ran it mechanically through his salt-caked hair and combed some knots out of his beard, handed it back with thanks, and stepped out into the sun-blasted humidity of a Palau afternoon. A stylish, tall dark Palauan woman sauntered out of the terminal and intercepted him on the apron. "Doctor Mike?"

  "Hello?"

  "Do you remember me?" She was smiling as if she had a secret. "Joanna Salinis."

  Last he had seen her she'd been on a visit home from a Hawaiian boarding school.

  "Daddy asked me to collect you. He's up in Bobang. He won't be home till dinner. . . .

  Are you okay?" Stone's face had collapsed before her eyes.

  He felt suddenly destroyed. Expecting the sturdy bulk of Marcus Salinis, all warm smiles and crafty eyes, instead he found this child-woman, whose tall thoroughbred gait reminded him of Sarah, and who smiled like someone with neither a care in the world nor a brain in her head.

  "You look like you need a shower, clothes, and two weeks' sleep. Where's Doctor Sarah?"

  "On the boat. Can you take me to a hotel?"

  "Daddy said to bring you home."

  "I have to make an international call." There was a Comsat station on the island, and international connections in the bigger hotels.

  "Use ours. Daddy bought a sat phone.-

  Joanna drove a brand-new bright red Lexus with a crumpled front fender, already rusting. She drove with the same blithe innocence with which she had shepherded him through the immigration formalities—the self-assured smiles and casual impatience of the republic's elite. Her mother, Stone recalled, was high-caste, daughter of a chief. "

  Daddy" had overcome lower origins, carved himself an outwardly secure niche in the hierarchy by becoming one of the small crowd that excelled at funneling American aid and Japanese investment into his own pockets. He had

  built a popular base by fighting for Palauan sovereignty from the U.S. Pacific Trust Territories, and shared the wealth with shrewdly selected supporters.