Fire And Ice (2 page)

"Good morning."

The progenitress of the minigoddess aloft was a tall, striking woman, a Nigerian of Ibo and Yuroban parentage, whose fine nose and delicate lips indicted the Arab and Portuguese slave hunters who haunted the African past.

She stood straight, an almost noble figure, heightened this morning by the towel she had wrapped like a turban around her hair, which she had just washed in preparation for landing. A yellow Yap Island lava-lava was draped around her torso, baring her shoulders, and a plain gold cross hung on a chain light enough to part if it caught while she was working the boat.

"And what are you smiling at?" she asked.

Stone was deeply in love with her, sometimes wildly. It had occurred to him that this morning he was deep in a wild phase. He stood up and kissed her.

"Single deckhouse aft," Ronnie called down. "I think I see fire stations and piping. It's an oil tanker." "Kid's got amazing eyes," said Stone. Sarah glanced at the silhouette. "Rather high in the water for a crude carrier. More likely a liquefied natural gas ship, wouldn't you say?"

Stone could still barely see the thing. He took up his binoculars, focused deliberately, and agreed it was probably an LNG carrier. "Big one. Fifty thousand tons."

"What on earth is an LNG vessel doing here . . . ?" The heavily insulated tank ships were like gigantic thermos bottles speeding gas—compressed and supercooled into liquid—

from oil fields to power plants. Fleets of them served Japan. "You don't suppose he's aground?"

"Radar says he's moving."

Both recalled their Australian friend's observation that the second mistake derelict masters often made was backing away from the submerged mountain peak they had just discovered with their bottom, thereby sinking in two miles of water. Sarah studied it in the binoculars. "Yes, he's all right," she agreed. "Thank God." Frozen in the hold of a fully laden LNG carrier was more thermal energy than a nuclear bomb.

"Ronnie, come down for breakfast, dear."

"But, Mum, it's a ship."

"Veronica."

"Yes, Mum."

Stone thought she had given in unusually quickly. The next instant he saw why, as Ronnie whipped off her pajama top.

"What is she doing?" asked Sarah. "Oh, good lord, Michael, stop her!"

"Too late."

Ronnie swayed into the sky, wrapped the cloth around the thin wire inner forestay Stone had rigged for the cutter jib, and slid down. Plummeting like a stone, she tightened her grip at the last moment and landed lightly on the foredeck.

"She learned that from you."

"I haven't felt up to that stunt in years."

Ronnie galloped back to the cockpit. "Did you see, Mum?"

"You will give me gray hair before you give me grandchildren."

"Did you see, Dad?"

"I'm impressed," said Stone. "When did you learn that?"

"Pictured it last night in bed. I could see it, so I knew I could do it."

"Please inform me first if you ever picture wings."

"Daddy— Do you see the ship, Mum? It's bigger than Pulo Helena. Maybe they'll invite us aboard and serve us lunch and—and show movies and have a swimming pool and video games and TV—I bet they have satellite TV!"

"Perhaps," Sarah said gently, exchanging a look with Stone. "But don't get your hopes up, darling."

"I think they're waiting for us," Ronnie ventured, then embraced her theory with vigor. " Bet you someone's sick and waiting for you to treat them." Just last spring in the Philippine Sea they had boarded

a Danish car carrier to doctor an engineer burned in a pump explosion. The comfortable crew accommodations had looked palatial to Ronnie, the ship a floating storehouse of modern treasures for a child who saw ice cream twice a year. Ever since, she hungered after passing ships like a privateer. Stone was presently at work building a decoder for her for Christmas, so she could watch satellite television.

"Well, if that's the case—and even if it isn't—we'll be landing soon. I want you to go below, eat your breakfast. And then have a nice shower and wash your hair—we'll water at Pulo Helena. See, Dad's trimmed his beard and I'm all spiffed. Call me when you're done and I'll brush it for you."

Ronnie cast a longing look at the ship and dove down the companionway. The three atolls that formed the Pulo Helena group came into view. The ship lay among them, in the lee of the main island, protected from the rollers, which the islands split. Its house stood higher than their feathery rows of palm trees.

The VHF rumbled to life with the drawl of South Texas. "Ahoy, sailboat flyin' the red cross. Sailboat flyin' the red cross. You all wouldn't happen to be the hospital boat?"

"They're waiting for us," said Sarah.

Stone thumbed Transmit. "This is Veronica. What can we do for you?"

"Man, are we glad to see you. This is Dallas Belle. We're outta Surabaya bound for Tokyo. The old man's hurt. Took hisself a header. We need a doctor, bad. You want us to come out and meet you?"

Stone looked at Sarah. The Surabaya-to-Tokyo run lay hundreds of miles west of Helena.

"Not in these swells. We'll board you in the lee of the atoll. Just sit tight. We'll be there in forty-five minutes."

"You're the boss, Doc."

Sarah took the radio. "When was your captain injured?"

"Yesterday, ma'am."

"Is he conscious?"

"Sometimes."

"Is he vomiting?"

"No, ma'am. Folks on the ham net said you was coming this way. Thank God we lucked out."

Stone released the preventer, disengaged the self-steering, and altered course to swing around the south side of the main atoll. The water was turning confused as the land divided the swells, and he thought he could hear the first faint mutter of the surf that battered the fringing reef.

Sarah touched his arm as they headed toward the sound, and brought up a subject that they'd been debating for days now. "Have you thought about East Timor?" Stone looked away, scanned the roiled seas, the low round atolls, the reefs, and the sandcolored ship, which had a soft, hazy plume rising from its smokestack. "Darling, I still can't seem to make you understand—it is too dangerous." The Indonesians had invaded East Timor when the Portuguese colonists left and had for years waged a war of terror against the protesting Timorans. Sarah wanted to sail Veronica there to treat the wounded.

"Those people are helpless. The world doesn't care. The least we—"

"And what do I do when an Indonesian patrol boat catches us playing doctor in some rebel anchorage? We can't outrun them in a sailboat."

"The boat is plastered with red crosses. How would they know we're not an 'official'

mission? Besides, Ronnie won't be there. We're sending her off to school. We've agreed."

"Yeah, we agreed." Hiroshi, the Japanese sailor whose life Sarah had saved, had turned out to be scion of a wealthy industrialist; his grateful father had offered to send Ronnie to the Swiss school his daughters had attended.

They exchanged unhappy smiles. It had to be done, before Ronnie was cut off from her peers forever. And, in fact, she seemed to crave a larger world: when she wasn't mooning over ships, she would lie on deck for hours watching for planes, and at night for satellites on their purposeful courses through the stars.

"I feel an obligation to go to Timor," Sarah said firmly. "We are doctors." Stone looked away at the ocean again. Whether it was

middle-aged complacency or male aversion to change, he feared that he was more satisfied with their life than she was. He clung happily to a daily existence he enjoyed for its consistency. When he felt the need for additional excitement, the sea usually obliged with a squall that pumped the adrenaline and burned off excess energy. The endless repairs required by an old boat kept him busy, as did the simple but vital chores of navigation and piloting. But Sarah had grown increasingly restless, almost eager to move on.

He said, "Let's keep Ronnie one more year . . . please." Sarah stood up. "I promised to help her with her hair." Stone picked up his glasses and studied Pulo Helena's glassy, green lagoon. Clustered on the white sand beach under tall coconut palms was a tiny village of a half dozen fales—

open huts with thatched roofs.

-"Hey," he called down the companionway. "No one's here. There're no boats on the beach. . . . No, wait. . . ." Steadying the helm with his knee, he fine-focused on the shade under a thatched roof. "Someone's sitting in one of the fales." The next instant Veronica needed all his attention as they surfed and pounded through the chaotic intersection, where Pacific rollers with nine thousand miles of fetch smashed past the atoll and raced on toward the Philippines. On the leeward side was a cut in the reef, the pass which ordinarily Stone would have entered to shelter in the lagoon if he hadn't been heading for the ship.

Just past the reef, he seized the glasses again and focused tightly. The little village was deserted, but there was one boat, a minuscule sailing canoe beached askew at the edge of the lagoon. A lone figure slumped in the open hut. He tried to rise, but fell back, his head lolling on his chest.

"Coming about!" he warned Sarah and Ronnie, threw the helm hard over, and sheeted in the main. Both sails crashed and crackled across the deck as Veronica spun on her keel and shot at the reef. Stone leaned over the side searching for the submerged coral prong that was cited emphatically in the Sailing Directions, cleared it by a yard, and surfed into the deep lagoon.

Sarah ran up the companionway. "What happened?" "Old fisherman, all alone on the beach. I think he's hurt."

"What about the ship captain?"

They looked back at the sand-colored, slab-sided ship, which loomed on the water with the anonymous force of an industrial city.

Sarah shivered. "Horrid looking thing, isn't it? Ugly as sin."

"Reminds me of one of those godforsaken backwater refineries."

"Yes! Like in the Bight of Benin."

"Listen, maybe I should do the captain," offered Michael. "You stay on the atoll here with this guy. What do you think?"

"I'd rather, but Ronnie's so excited. She just said to me, 'It's like we're going shopping at a mall.' "

Ronnie squeezed past her mother. "Are you ready, Mummy?" She was wearing a bright red lava-lava, her Snoopy backpack in hopes of presents, and ribbons in her hair. Her eyes were locked on the ship and when she saw they were inside the lagoon, heading for the rickety dock where the fales clustered on the beach, she howled, "Where are you going?"

"Let me check out the ship, first," Michael said. "No! I want to go with Mummy. She's all dressed and

pretty and she wants to go, too. Don't you, Mummy?" "Well, maybe Daddy's right."

"N000. We'll get all hot and sweaty on the atoll."

Stone laughed. "Okay, okay. You take your mother to the ship; I'll do this guy. Grab the helm, hon. I gotta get my bag."

"He'll be dehydrated," Sarah called down the companionway. "You'll want extra glucose and saline."

Stone stuffed the plastic glucose and saline bags into the waterproof backpack that served as his medical bag, and some plasma from the freezer, and plucked the backup VHF handset from its charger. On deck, he said, "You're going to board leeward side. Radio the ship, make sure they've got plenty of hands standing by to fend off."

"Yes, dear."

"Ronnie, run below and get Mummy's pack, then put out all the fenders, both sides. Sarah, don't forget to cut that coral real close on the south side."

"Yes, dear."

"Do I get a kiss?" he asked Sarah.

"Later."

"Careful boarding. Wear your life vest. You too, young lady."

"Yes, dear."

Sarah said, "If they're pleasant, I'll wangle an invitation to dinner."

"Tell 'em the charge for a house call is a raster scan radar."

"Here you go!"

The Swan was closing fast on the dock. Stone stepped over the lifelines, hesitated. The sea was quick. He stepped back into the cockpit, where Sarah had taken the helm. "I'll have that kiss, now."

He took her face in his hands. "I love you."

Her lips were cool, her dark eyes fathomless. "Michael, I want to go home."

"Home? What do you mean? Nigeria?"

"Africa."

"What happened to East Timor?" he asked, belatedly aware that East Timor was old news and that she had been building toward a major pronouncement for weeks. She returned a defiant stare. "There's plenty to do in Africa."

"We can't go home."

"I am aware that we are fugitives, thank you." "Strictly speaking, I am the fugitive."

"Don't be daft, Michael. Where you go, I go. Always . . . But has it ever occurred to you that being a fugitive gives you the excuse to hide from everything?"

"Dock!" Ronnie called urgently.

Stone swung outside the safety lines with his backpack. "We'll talk."

"No shortage of talk," Sarah shot back. Then she, too, remembered that the sea was quick, and she pulled him to her and kissed him again. "I love you, too. And I always will."

As Sarah steered past, two feet from the edge, he jumped, landed running, and jogged into the glaring white beach. He turned and waved.

Veronica danced across the lagoon, Sarah tall at the helm, Ronnie scurrying around with the fenders, both too busy to wave back. Stone paused a moment to drink in the rare and beautiful sight of his own boat under way, then hurried past the wrecked canoe with its flapping rice-bag sail and tangled sennit ropes.

Up the gently sloping beach, inside the fate, the fisherman lay with a dark lava-lava wrapped around his waist, his hands across his belly. His legs were swollen with infected coral cuts. He peered at Stone through milky cataracts.

Those Pacific Islanders who ate their traditional diet and avoided booze, sugared breakfast cereals, and radiation poisoning from the bomb tests, lived long. Stone often found it impossible to guess their age. But this guy had to be in his eighties. His thighs were tattooed with porpoises—the proud symbol of the Micronesian navigators—and like many of his generation, he had a Japanese rising sun tattooed on his belly. A crucifix gleamed on his leathery chest. A mission convert, which meant he might speak English. Pretty far off his regular track, way down here in the southwest islands, but they went where they pleased.