Fire And Ice

by Paul Garrison

  The captain nodded brusquely to Wang, but he and his wife and his coal-smudged sons and daughter carefully avoided looking Stone and William in the face. There was barely headroom in the wheelhouse. A half stair led down to the idling engine, which Stone recognized as a General Motors 4-71 that had to be forty or fifty years old. Behind the stair hung a curtain, and when the daughter, a startlingly beautiful child a couple of years older than Ronnie, slipped through it, he glimpsed mattresses and a cookpot on a gimballed coal stove.

  "So many children," whispered William, clearly astonished that the sampan captain had twice circumvented the one-child-one-family laws.

  The daughter passed through the wheelhouse again, sneaking a shy glance at Stone. She returned within a minute. Her father spoke sharply, and she ran out on deck to help her brothers cast off the lines, while he moved the long shift lever into reverse.

  The thumping diesel started, rattling the windows, and the boat backed into the stream.

  Stone took out his chart, which he folded to display this upper section of the river, and showed the captain two dry docks he wanted to see—the coal yard's immediate neighbor and the second a mile upstream.

  Neither dry dock, nor the deepwater piers between them, held the Dallas Belle.

  "Okay," he said. "Downriver. There!"

  The empty sampan swung through a broad turn. Stone indicated the long curve of the river from the coal yard past the Bund, and had the captain hug the right bank where numerous large ships were docked. Once past the Bund and his hotel, and the Suzhou Creek, he had the captain cross the river and continue down the left bank, which was lined with piers, including the Waihongqiau passenger terminal where the Tin Hau was still docked, looking, as Stone had predicted, like a Maserati in a junk yard.

  The weather was cooperating. The rain had stopped and the lower clouds had lifted. With the glasses Stone could see three or four miles. But the winter sky loomed heavy, and there remained, at most, two hours of daylight. They motored along another mile of piers: Gaoyanglu, Gonpinglu, Huishan, Huangpu. Suddenly his heart raced. Just past the Huangpu Pier was the dry dock of the Shanghai Shipyard West, and in it, a tan ship, sand-colored, square and boxy.

  The dry dock gates were closed. The ship stood high and dry, covered in scaffolding. He focused the binoculars with shaking hands. It seemed the size he remembered the Dallas Belle. Then Stone groaned.

  "Are you well, sir?"

  Stone shook his head. It was not the gas carrier, only a container ship with the square lines typical of modern freighters.

  Past the dry dock lay shallow water, the channel shifting east. "Other side."

  The sampan crossed to the right back, where the Shanghai Shipyard East sprawled along the shore. The captain

  hugged that bank for several miles, stopping the sampan suddenly for another false alarm. By now the night was coming down hard and lights were burning on the piers and in the yards and factories that lined the shore.

  The hitherto-silent captain spoke.

  "Dark," William translated.

  "Keep going."

  The boat made about eight knots and they covered four more miles in the next half hour.

  He got a good look at the refinery, which he had missed in the rain. But no gas ship. "

  Other side!"

  Again they crossed the channel, dodging ships and tugs. They were nearing Wusong when Stone saw the cruise ship under the shed that he had seen from the yacht early in the morning. He motioned the captain in closer. The berth beside the cruise liner was still empty. Arc welders and cutting torches lit the cavernous shed like black light in a discotheque. The sampan continued downstream past the yard, by which time it was pitch-dark.

  "Okay, let's turn around and work our way up this side." They retraced their wake, passed the liner again. It was a breaker's yard, he realized, where retired ships were cut up for scrap. Behind it were busy train tracks with switch engines shuttling boxcars and gondolas. Stone wanted to get closer, but the captain shook his head, and his wife, who had popped out from the curtain, looked grim and uttered a shrill, "Aaaiiyaa."

  "What's the matter?" asked Stone.

  William seemed reluctant to answer.

  "What is it?"

  "Shanghai Supreme People's Court Project Eighty-six." "What's that?"

  "The execution ground. Where prisoners are shot for being . . . convicted."

  Stone peered where he pointed. A dark space in the middle of nowhere, out beyond the railroad tracks. Appropriate neighbor for a breaker's yard.

  Stone stepped out on deck and stared at the night-shrouded riverbanks. He told himself that he had covered some pretty good territory. And seen a number of places he had missed in the rain earlier, he added, fighting disappointment and exhaustion. Get some sleep. Early start tomorrow. He prayed there'd be no morning fog.

  The Bund—the building facades floodlit—came into view after an hour. Stone, chilled to the bone and dizzy with hunger—for he had ignored Mr. Yu's dim sum and had not eaten since breakfast—told William to ask the captain to drop him at the park across from the hotel. The sampan nosed against slimy stone steps. Stone left instructions to pick him up at dawn and, assuring the protesting William Sit he could negotiate his own way to the hotel, shambled through the brightly lighted park.

  Katherine was waiting in the lobby. Her face was drawn with tension. She had one hand deep in her bag. "Come to my room."

  "What's wrong?"

  "Security sucks."

  She had had the hotel change her room to a suite with two exits. Before she would let him eat or sleep, she painstakingly walked him through an escape plan, demanding he memorize routes to the nearby fire stairs. She had embedded slivers of mirror in the wall opposite the door so she could scan the corridor through the peephole. When room service delivered, she answered the door with a gun behind her back.

  When he awoke at midnight, she was sitting on the edge of her bed in a loose shirt staring at him.

  "You okay?" he asked.

  "Yeah. Great."

  "You want to talk?"

  "No, I don't want to. talk. I'm thirty-three years old, I never had a guy more than six months, all I know how to do is fuck and be a cop and they won't let me be a cop. I can't see what's going to happen next."

  "Well . . ."

  "You gonna tell me it's gonna work out?" she asked. "No. But I got some antidepressants in my bag."

  She gave him one of her quiet, empty laughs. "Thanks.

  I'll pass. I'm an uppers woman, myself."

  Stone closed his eyes. "Well, if you change your mind . . ."

  "How can you sleep, worrying about Sarah?"

  "Old habit from the boat. I sleep when I can. Doesn't mean I'm not worried sick. Every day I don't find them the ship could be steaming away or scuttled with them drowning inside."

  THE DALLAS BELLE WAS MOVING AGAIN, TOWED BY SMOKE-

  belching tugs. The murky, squall-spattered sky had swallowed the land moments after they had departed the generating station, and when night had descended on the water, Sarah felt totally disoriented. It would be many hours before Mr. Jack slept and she could risk checking their position and course with Ronnie's GPS.

  He was ensconced in his easy chair in the luxurious main lounge, drinking Canadian Club. His visitors had delivered a glossy brochure, which he pretended to read while he watched Sarah pace.

  She poured herself another Pellegrino water at the bar, sipped distractedly, and made the round of the windows again. Reflected in the black glass, she and her captor looked as dead as statues.

  He tossed the brochure on the coffee table. Sarah picked it up. The jacket showed a sleek black-and-white liner, the Asian Princess, registered in the Bahamas. It looked similar to the QE-2, which she had seen most recently in Singapore. The brochure was done up with four-color travel photos of Japan. The text was seductive, aimed at well-off passengers who preferred comfort to reality.

  Ordinary liners stop in Yokohama, a fiftee
n-mile traffic jam from downtown Tokyo.

  Your Asian Princess docks at Takeshiba Pier in the heart of Tokyo, where she remains as your luxury hotel a short walk from Ground Zero of the dynamically modern metropolis that twelve million Tokyoites call home.

  Within steps lies the famed Ginza, with its wealth of department stores; the Marunouchi District, whose banks contain much of the world's wealth; the gardens of the Imperial Palace, home to Japan's revered royalty; and Tokyo Tower, Japan's tallest structure, which surpasses the Eiffel Tower of Paris, France.

  Tired feet? Simply activate your personal pager to summon the Asian Princess's fleet of private limousines waiting to whisk passengers to the destinations of their choice.

  No overpriced, expensive hotels. No outrageous taxicab fares. No mob scenes at the airport. No crush to board public transportation. See Tokyo as it's never been seen before from your luxury stateroom aboard your floating hotel, the five-star first-class Asian Princess.

  "Are you booking a cruise, Mr. Jack?"

  "I bought the line. Whadaya think of my new ship?" "You do seem to guarantee your clients absolutely no contact with the real Tokyo."

  "That's what the cruise business is all about. Ever go on one?"

  "I'm afraid that luxury cruises are a bit beyond our means."

  "Tell you what, when this is all over, let me comp you and your husband. Honeymoon cruise, on the house." "Perhaps we could embark this evening?"

  "Sorry, Doc." He drained his glass and motioned for a refill. "Say, tell the kid I got a surprise for youse, tomorrow."

  The small, dark, high-ceiled suite that Stone shared with Katherine had an ancient telephone that chirped like a cricket. Katherine answered and passed it to Stone. It was Ronald.

  "Hey, sailorman. Our Hong Kong friend say call friend in hospital."

  "I'll be damned."

  "Got it?"

  "Thanks."

  The Matilda Hospital operator switched the call through to Kerry's room, where the patient answered with, "Where the hell are you, mate?"

  "China," Stone answered cautiously, sitting on the bed. "How's your shoulder?"

  "I'll survive."

  The salvage captain sounded friendly. But he spoke in his clear, loud master mariner's voice, and Stone could almost feel his probing eyes. "I've had second thoughts lying here. About your story."

  Stone stood up, pressing the phone harder to his ear. "Did you speak to your—"

  "Never mind how. I checked out the SOSUS, and they don't have much in the way of fixed sonar arrays in the western Pacific. It was intended for tracking Soviet subs entering the open oceans."

  "I was afraid of that."

  "But subs and helicopters are still listening. And some of what they pick up goes into ADAC—the ship-noise library."

  "Good."

  "It's more than good, mate. A lot more. You got lucky. Twice. As near as I can reckon, this is what happened: one of our subs on a training cruise was near the Southwest Islands when some new recruit learning sonar picked up a ship. 'What's that?' Ì don't know, sir.' `Well, let's find out.'

  "They checked their recording against the sub's library," Kerry continued. "No match.

  So it wasn't a warship. But the instructor probably said, 'That's a mighty heavy ship for out here. He's two hundred miles from the shipping lanes.' Tells the captain, 'Hey, skipper, listen to this.' Skipper says, 'Check with HQ in Brisbane.' The Brisbane Library interfaced with your Pentagon and back came a match. Liberian-registered fiftythousand-ton LNG vessel, Amy Bowman."

  "Bodman?"

  "Bodman Line. Old petroleum fleet, bought up years ago, conglomerated fourteen times since then. But by the time the data came back, the ship was long gone and the sub had more important business. And that would be the end of that . . ."

  "Except?" Stone prompted.

  "Except that in the East China Sea the Japanese and the Australian Navy were holding a joint exercise—Aussie subs, Japanese Defense Force surface craft. Helicopters dipped sonar arrays and what did they pick up but Amy Bodman."

  "Where?"

  "About four hundred miles from Shanghai."

  "What course?"

  "Northwest."

  His heart leaped. She was here! "Straight for Shanghai. Like Sarah said."

  "There's more."

  "What?" Stone demanded. "Come on. Spill it."

  "Rushing this will not uncomplicate it. They heard a gas vessel right about where they'd expected to hear gas vessels, so it was no big deal. But with all the communications exercises, it got transmitted to Brisbane and automatically to the Pentagon. Amy is in the library."

  "So she's in Shanghai," said Stone, relief washing over him.

  "Not necessarily."

  "What do you mean?"

  "The ship stopped."

  "What do you mean, 'stopped'?"

  "Dead in the water. Midway between Okinawa and Shanghai. One minute engines. Next minute no engines, no propeller. I asked a mate to check out some satellite pictures for me. No go. Heavy cloud, fog, rain three days. No pictures."

  "Infrared?"

  "Nothing."

  A chill clenched Stone's heart. Scuttled. "They sunk her."

  "Maybe," said Kerry. "Maybe not. Four days after they recorded her, one of the helicopters was dipping arrays again and they recorded a strange noise. Not a screw, not an engine, not a whale. A heavy thumpthump-thump."

  "I don't get it."

  "Think."

  "Stop fucking around!" Stone shouted. "Tell me."

  "I don't want to put words in your mouth, Michael. I'm only guessing. The Navy didn't bother to analyze it. It was a commercial ship, they're busy with warships. I think I know what they heard. See if you think the same."

  Stone closed his eyes and sank to the bed, trying to order the thoughts whirling through his brain. Katherine knelt behind him and started massaging his shoulders.

  "Clue," said Kerry. "Remember she's a gas ship."

  "A compressor!"

  "Yes!"

  "The cooling gear, to keep the gas cold."

  "I looked her up. Amy Bodman's new enough to have cooling equipment. The old ones were just a thermos bottle, but she's new. So what they heard was a compressor going thump, thump, thump, while she sat in the rain for four days."

  "Why'd she stop?"

  "Repairs, probably."

  "Did she start up again?"

  "Don't know. Joint exercises ended, everyone sailed home to their respective beer and saki."

  "Well, has the Amy Bodman been reported missing?" "Not reported missing. Not reported overdue." "Who owns her?"

  "Hard to tell. She's been leased, unleased, and released. I've had my Admiralty lawyer on it for two days. There's a cat's cradle of interlocking companies and lease schemes. I do know she picked up her cargo in Surabaya."

  "We expected that."

  "You know the name Jack Powell?"

  "No."

  "Big petroleum shipper. American. Started up back in the days of Ludwig and Aristotle Onassis. Powell was the Ludwig type, secretive. My people think it could be his."

  "But why wouldn't he report it missing?"

  "Maybe he owns so many he doesn't notice. Maybe he's leased her out to somebody else."

  "Shouldn't be hard to ask."

  "He's not returning messages. Got offices in New York, but there's no reason why he'd respond to a lowly salvor's call."

  "He's certainly not going to answer mine. Have you talked to Lydia Chin?"

  "Lydia tried, too. Cold shoulder. She even got one of her mega-ship friends to try. They blew him off with assistants."

  "Maybe Jack Powell's on the ship."

  "Doubt that."

  "Of course not— Jesus, that close she could have come into Shanghai."

  "I wish you luck, my friend. It could all be nothing, all coincidence. But if they were trying to hide the ship from satellites, then they got stupid, forgetting the compressor, and you got lucky. I'll keep trying to find out who owns h
er and I'll also keep trying Mr.

  Powell."

  "God, I wish he were aboard." , "why?"

  Y•

  "My biggest fear is they'll sell the cargo and scuttle her with Sarah and Ronnie inside."

  "What would a guy like that want with your wife and daughter?"

  Stone hung up the phone and thought it through, isolating the good news, ignoring the unanswered questions, the doubts, and even the mystery of what the hijackers were up to.

  The ship had stopped near Shanghai, hidden under cloud. He was sure they had started up again. They wouldn't scuttle her with her cargo. And he knew she was laden because they were still running the gas coolers.

  Katherine kept massaging his shoulders. She had the strongest hands of any woman he'd ever known. "I can't wait for daylight," he said. "They've got to be here."

  There was a knock at the door. Katherine picked up her gun. She stood to the side of the door, checked the peephole with her makeup mirror. Then she called, "Step to your left," checked the mirrors across the hall, and opened up.

  Ronald sprang in, his eyes like pinpricks. "What's new?"

  Willing to bet money that the Triad had bribed the switchboard operator, Stone told him what he had learned. Ronald bounced around the room and Stone wondered what he was on.

  "Sound good. Hey, sailorman?"

  "I think so. Are you all right?"

  "Yeah, fine."

  Katherine said, "You got blood on your pants cuff." "My guys got chopped. No big deal."

  "No big deal?" Stone asked. "You were thin on the ground already."

  Katherine asked, "Is Michael safe here?"

  "No problem."

  She said, "I don't like this."

  Ronald whirled on her. "You no like? Fuck you-nolike."

  Katherine was still holding her gun. "He's my ticket outta here. I'm asking you, Is he safe?"

  Ronald moved to slap her. She raised the gun, not quite leveled at his groin, but no longer pointing at the floor. And this time, to Stone's surprise, the Triad backed off.

  Reaching for the door, he said to Stone, "You no worry, sailorman. I take good care."

  When he was gone, Stone asked, "What do you think?" "He's scared. I'll bet you Chang cut him loose." "We better move."

  "If they know we're here, they'll know where we move."