Fire And Ice

by Paul Garrison

  "I must say, Mr. Moss, among the many things I don't understand about all this is why you, who seem genuinely devoted to Mr. Jack, would risk his life to avoid a hospital. I don't know why you think you have to—and I don't care—but surely you could concoct some story, some plausible explanation how he got shot. It's your and the captain's word to the authorities. Say you were boarded by Indonesian pirates. Or say his gun discharged while he was cleaning it. No one will doubt a ship captain and its owner, particularly as he'll survive. As a physician, I must insist—"

  Moss crossed the room in a lightning step, looming, so that Ronnie shrank back.

  "Insist," Sarah repeated.

  Moss caught her arm.

  "Let go of me."

  He lifted her and stared into her face.

  The captain tried to intervene. "Come on, Moss. Ease up."

  Moss ignored him. "I owe that man. He dies . . . you die. Both of you." He flung her aside and pushed out the door.

  Ronnie's lips began to tremble. Sarah hugged her hard. "It's all right. Mummy's all right."

  The captain tried to smile. "Look here, hon. The sooner your mom patches up Mr. Jack, the sooner you sail back to your daddy. That's the deal, right?"

  "Are my daughter and I under your protection, Captain?"

  The captain looked uncomfortable.

  Sarah was not surprised. "What exactly," she asked, "is Moss's role aboard your ship?"

  "Well, Moss looks after Mr. Jack."

  "Bodyguard?"

  "Among other things."

  "Made rather a cock-up of it, didn't he?"

  "It's not making him any gentler, Doc. I wouldn't push him if I were you."

  "And you have no control over him?"

  "He answers to Mr. Jack. Moss is a regular lamb around the old man. So, Doc, if you're reading me right, maybe you realize your best bet is to put Mr. Jack in an upright mode."

  "Captain, this is insane. You'll be within helicopter range of Manila in a day and a half. If you don't trust Philippine hospitals, you're only eighteen hundred miles from Hong Kong.

  Three days to helicopter evacuation. Or in four days you could have Mr. Jack in Tokyo.

  Though my own recommendation is Manila. The sooner he's in hospital the better."

  The captain was staring intently. With a shrewd expression on his sun-freckled face, he glanced at the antique binnacle, then back at her. Sarah realized, too late, that she had foolishly admitted to knowing too much.

  "I've been a sailor many years, Captain. It doesn't take a genius to dead reckon our position."

  "How'd you know our speed?" he asked coldly.

  "This is a gas carrier. They're fast." She nodded at the broad, flat wake that the ship was grinding out of the ocean. "I estimate twenty-two knots."

  He stared hard. "Close. You got a good eye, Doc."

  "Let us go, Captain. You've already taken us more than a week's fast sailing from my husband. Take Mr. Jack to Manila."

  "Sorry, ma'am."

  -

  "Moss is a fool. The bullet means nothing. I've counteracted the morphine overdose.

  Now he needs a hospital. I can't do any more. Let us go."

  "Can't do that," said the captain. "You're the only doctor the old man's got."

  "Then when will you let us go?"

  "Soon as he's back on his feet issuing orders."

  Suddenly a fire alarm started clanging, and the ship's horn shook the deck with a series of short blasts that rattled the glassware in the mirrored bar.

  "Jesus H. Christ," said the captain. He bounded up the stairs, pawing the radio from his hip. The door at the top closed with a pneumatic sigh.

  "What happened?" asked Ronnie.

  "Something's wrong with the ship."

  The clanging grew louder, the whistle thundered a seven-note chant. They ran to the stern windows. Nothing burning on the afterdeck, nothing floating in the wake. The side ports showed the empty Pacific, the chaos of last night's storm erased by the trade rollers.

  "Veronica." She knelt before her child and took her face firmly in her hands. "I want you to go in and sit with Mr. Jack."

  "What about you?"

  "Do what I ask. Stay with him until I come back."

  Ronnie glanced at the stairs, then the door. "But what if Ah Lee comes?"

  "If Ah Lee comes, tell him your mum's in the loo and wants a fresh pot of tea."

  "What if Moss comes?"

  "He won't. They've got an emergency."

  "I want to come with you."

  "You're my lookout. If I'm going to get to a sat phone, you've got to watch my back."

  Ronnie looked terrified. Sarah said, "Remember what Daddy says in life-raft drill? . . .

  Come on," she coaxed, "what does Daddy say?"

  A smile emerged on Ronnie's frightened face. "Be British, boys!"

  "Be British" was supposedly the captain of the Titanic's last command to his crew, and the way Michael said it was usually good for convulsions, especially when accompanied by a solemn salute.

  "But no laughing! Or they'll hear us being British!"

  That was good for a grin. Sarah bundled Ronnie into Mr. Jack's cabin. The old man had shifted. His hands were twitching as the Narcan did its work. He could wake at any minute.

  "Be careful, Mummy."

  "Don't you worry, dear. I'll be very careful."

  She kissed her, closed the cabin door, and mounted the stairs with a pounding heart. The booming whistle shook the treads. The fire alarms changed. The cacophony—the sheer billowing noise—made it impossible to think. Yet it gave her a strange feeling of being almost invisible.

  She was guessing from the various ships that she and Michael had boarded over the years that this companionway would not open directly into the bridge itself but somewhat behind, as light from an entrance would blind the watch at night. At the landing, she opened the heavy door a crack and peered out cautiously and was relieved to find a sort of combination lobby-corridor, which served the captain's and owner's companionways as well as the main stair that rose the height of the house, and the elevator.

  To the right was an open door, inside a large computer

  room, lined with machines and racks of electronics. To the left was the chart room. She entered. Aft, she glimpsed the radio room. Ahead, a curtained entryway. She pulled the curtain an inch from the bulkhead and peered through.

  She could see about half the bridge, including the helm—steady in the grip of the autopilot—and, beyond the front windows, an incongruous view of the wind cups spinning on Veronica's masthead. The captain was pressed against the glass, staring ahead at a white plume of escaping gas that soared skyward from a valve on the foredeck.

  Suddenly he whirled around, firing orders that she could not hear over the noise. His face was drawn taut in an expression that combined command and healthy fear. The whistle blasts stopped abruptly. An officer hurried into view and threw a switch on a control console that shut off the fire alarm. In the freshness of the silence, she heard the captain shout, "Get down on deck and give 'em a hand!"

  Sarah ran back into the radio room and hid behind a bulkhead as the mate pushed through the curtain and pounded down the stairs. She located a satellite phone. Her eye lingered on the single-sideband radio's automatic Mayday switch. But a broadcast call for help could be explained away as a mistake, long before any rescue hove over the horizon, and she would surely be blamed.

  She crept back through the chart room to the curtain. The ship felt as if it had begun to slow. The captain was shouting into his walkie-talkie.

  "Rustle up a mess of blankets, and soak 'em down good— Where in hell are those people going? Stop those gutless sons of bitches. Hold on, I'm coming down there. Any hand off station's going to get his butt whupped."

  Sarah ran back to the radio room and hid as the captain raced down the stairs. Before his curses and footsteps had faded, she pulled from her pocket a scrap of paper on which she had written a Palau Islands number
, and she punched it into the satellite phone. Holding it to her ear as she waited for the connection, she ran back through the curtain and onto the deserted bridge.

  Like the elaborate electronics and computer room, and the luxurious owner's suite, the bridge itself appeared to

  belong to a wealthier and more advanced ship than the Dallas Belle.

  The navigational equipment, the radar repeaters, the engine monitors and controls reminded her of an Australian missile frigate they had lunched aboard with the warship's captain, who was Kerry McGlynn's brother. But this, she realized was even more modem, the latest in technology, for the Dallas Belle was an OMBO ship—one man bridge operated.

  The giveaway was a glass-walled toilet, elevated with a clear view of the windscreen, and a computer station in front of the helm. OMBO was a cost-cutting experiment that allowed a single officer to stand watch as the fiftythousand-ton vessel steamed full speed, day and night, fair weather and foul.

  At the helm, the computer's thirty-inch monitor displayed course, speed, position, weather, and sea conditions; the Dallas Belle itself was represented by an icon of a ship steaming on a pale blue electric sea. If some virus struck down every living soul aboard, the fully automated gas carrier would steam forever on a course dead hands had entered into the computer.

  The instant Michael had caught wind of OMBO, he had begun plotting ways to replace Veronica's homemade collision alarm with a modem raster scan radar.

  The phone clicked, went silent, and then hummed a dial tone.

  Sarah dialed again and stepped to the windscreen, crouching so the men on the main deck sixty feet below wouldn't see her. The captured Swan was lashed to a cradle directly in front of the house. Someone knew their business, she was relieved to see: they had furled the sails and even fitted the sun cover over the boom.

  Two hundred yards ahead of the yacht, firefighters were spraying foam on the deck, while two men in gas masks and rubber suits were struggling with the ruptured valve.

  The rest of the crew—a half dozen men including their Chinese steward—were watching fearfully from a distance, ignoring the shouts and angry shoves of the bosun.

  The sea, as usual, was empty.

  Directly below her, she saw the captain and Moss run

  out of the house, arms laden with blankets. They climbed to a catwalk and raced forward, dropping down to the deck near the plume. Moss shoved a seaman off a fire station and directed the nozzle at the heaped blankets. The captain gathered one up, ran to the plume, and flung it over the broken. valve.

  To Sarah's amazement, the blanket froze solid instantly, like a sheet of metal. The gas jet blew it high into the air and it sailed away like a metal bird. Of course, she thought. To compress the gas into a liquid, it had to be supercooled, many degrees below zero.

  Moss ran up with his arms loaded with dripping blankets. The two men conferred, then darted in through the foam, hurling the wet blankets at the base of the plume. The bosun charged up with a water hose, spraying the blankets as they threw more on.

  The supercooled gas froze the blankets and hose water. The plume wavered, curled in on itself like a question mark, and dissipated into thin air. The ruptured valve was soon encased in a solid block of ice.

  Moss and the captain high-fived each other and headed back to the house, just as the satellite phone connected to the line Sarah had dialed. One ring. Two. Three. On the fourth ring an answering machine picked up and a recorded voice offered to take a message.

  A TALL SEA LIFTED THE CANOE. THE SUN HAD BURNED OFF

  the morning haze and the air was crystal clear. The triple strands of palm tops brushing the horizon were unmistakably Pulo Helena. Stone cursed the miles lost and the time he had wasted.

  How far had the Dallas Belle steamed in eighteen hours? Gas carriers were much faster than most freighters. Twenty knots service speed? Twenty-two? He conjured the chart in his memory, drew upon it a distance-madegood circle of three hundred and sixty sea miles. Were the ship still headed north, it had passed the Palau Islands by now—Angaur, his own goal, already a hundred miles in its wake.

  Well, Michael. Where do we stand?

  Up the same creek we started, sweetheart.

  Spilt milk.

  He turned his back on the atolls and headed north again.

  But when he tossed a coconut shell into the water to judge his speed, the Dutchman's log confirmed that the canoe was a pig upwind. For every mile he gained north he slipped an equal distance to the west. He'd be lucky to make twenty real miles a day.

  Built to run before the trade winds, the canoe carried too much sail forward to beat efficiently. The wind kept levering the bow off course. Slacking the sail made things worse: it flapped like laundry. But trimming it to stop the luffing promptly pushed the bow downwind again.

  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 ma
n, 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.