Fire And Ice (7 page)

He decided to tear down the rig and rebuild it, using the Swan as a model. He struck the mast, removed the rice-bag sail from the boom, and cut a long triangle out of the cloth with his surgical scissors.

The gaff was the longest spar. With the sail still attached, he stepped it as a new, taller mast, standing it just ahead of the middle of the boat. He stayed it fore and aft and both sides with the old man's sennit rope. Then he fashioned a rope gooseneck to attach the stubby old mast horizontally as a boom. He stitched the triangular strip around the forward stay as a jib, attached lines to control both sails, and sheeted them in. The canoe heeled. He threw his weight on the outrigger, and she darted off on a starboard tack. He tossed another Dutchman's log. Four knots, he'd swear in any yacht club bar in the South Pacific. Nearly a hundred miles a day. He rigged the sheets to the rudder paddle so the canoe would steer itself and set a course at a sixty-degree angle to the seas. The tropic sun was nearing its zenith and sending down a brutal light that burned his skin and seared his eyes. He sorted through the items that had survived the swamping, and cobbled together a sun shade. Then he drank from a coconut and ate several chewy mouthfuls of salt fish the old man had stowed in breadfruit leaves. He ate and drank again before nightfall and stayed on the port tack until after the sun had plunged into the sea, and he was suddenly in the dark. A breaking wave he couldn't see overrode the primitive self-steering and knocked the bow upwind. The wind caught the boat aback, suddenly, and filled the sail from the other side. Stone ducked. The boom whizzed overhead, missing him by inches.

The canoe felt smaller and more vulnerable in the claustrophobic darkness. But as it deepened, the Milky Way grew brighter and brighter, until it illuminated the ocean like moonlight. When he could see the shape of his sail and the gleam of breaking seas, he began to feel hope again. If he could average only three knots north he would make seventy miles a day: Angaur in three days.

Hope, or at least the lessening of despair, opened his

mind to bleaker avenues he had not yet explored—the awful leisure to ponder why they had taken Sarah and Ronnie. If they were merely afraid of pursuit, of his radios, it would have been simple to tow Veronica behind and scuttle her. But they had taken trouble to hoist her aboard and set her carefully on a cradle. The old sloop had no value—but it was more than a sloop. It was a hospital with an operating room, far superior to a merchant ship's dispensary. Had the dead man shot back? Had he wounded someone who couldn't go to a real hospital?

If Stone was reasoning correctly, if the rambling and convoluted hopes, inferences, and " facts" led to the right conclusion, then Sarah was safe. And so was Ronnie. Safe while she treated her patient. As long as the patient lived.

A frail hope that let him rest. He dozed in five-minute catnaps. Suddenly the cold and the rising wind woke him. But as he rose groggily to drive the canoe harder, an unspeakable explanation suddenly rattled him to the bone.

Had she left him? Had Sarah taken Ronnie and made some deal with the captain to speed them away? He knew he was crazy. But "I want to go home," she had said. Crazy. Remember the dead man, he told himself.

But he couldn't put from his mind her increasing interest in the changes sweeping Africa, her obsession with Ronnie's studies. There wasn't a nation on the war-torn, disease-ravaged continent that wasn't begging for doctors. You hide from life, she accused. You're a natural fugitive.

Crazy. He got busy with the sail and tried to tether his mind to the night sky. Remember the dead man. Three bullets in the back. That was real. Real, but as inexplicable as the heavens, which were white with stars.

All his guides hung in place: Orion and Betelgeuse, Big Dipper, Southern Cross; Altair, the North Star. He planned to sail north to the latitude of Angaur, then west, downwind, until he found it. North and hang a left. The tricky part was knowing when to hang the left.

Angaur lay seven degrees north of the equator. He was currently somewhere in the vicinity of three degrees north. Each degree was sixty miles. Approximately two hundred miles separated him from Angaur's latitude. But it was impossible to clock those miles, so he needed a fix on the

zenith of a star whose high point corresponded with Angaur's latitude. A fanakenga star, the Pacific navigators called it, when at its zenith it pointed straight down at their target. The old guy who'd cracked up the canoe had probably memorized the zeniths of a hundred stars and corresponding islands. Stone knew a few by heart: Altair at nine degrees north promised Kwajalein in the Marshalls, and Yap in the Western Carolines; the high point of Hamal, in Aries the Ram, was close to the latitude of Hong Kong. And Beetlejuice, as Ronnie called Betelgeuse. Bright red Betelgeuse. He saw it now just north and east of Orion's belt—one of the first he had taught Sarah to identify and by whose light they had "courted" many years ago off the African coast. By some gift of God or Neptune, Betelgeuse's zenith nearly matched the latitude of Angaur. In theory he could establish Angaur's latitude when he found himself directly under the highest point that Betelgeuse crossed the night sky. But when he tried to practice, the ocean rolled and pitched the canoe; and it seemed impossible to determine the zenith of Betelgeuse as he lay on his back watching the mast arc back and forward like a demented pendulum.

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.

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 backto-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 killed 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.