Fire And Ice
Page 35
The pilot edged toward the curtain.
"Ronnie! Quick! The gun."
She darted to where it had slid and ran with it to Stone. "Go back in that bathroom, sir, and close the door. We'll take you in the boat when we're ready."
The pilot headed for the curtain. Stone squeezed the trigger. Glass shattered. The man covered his head with both hands and ran into.the cubicle.
"How you doing there, sweetie?"
"I'm okay. I think. You okay?"
"Wonderful. What time is it?"
"Fifteen forty-eight."
"You know your way to the lifeboat?"
"Yes."
"How long will it take us to get there?"
"Four minutes."
"Is it all ready to go?"
"Oh yeah. You just jump in and pull the lever." "Is the elevator here? Why don't you check?"
She ran through the curtain. Stone watched the monitor.
A very large ship was cutting across the Dallas Belle's
bow. Stone held the whistle down and stayed on course. "Mr. Jack? Can you hear me?"
"I hear you, you bastard."
"Can you walk?"
"No."
"We'll carry you."
"Let me die my way."
Stone looked down at the crazy old face. "I'm not leaving you anywhere near the helm."
Ronnie came back. "Elevator's here. It's fifteen fifty-one, Daddy."
He beckoned the pilot, who was watching from the glass bathroom. The man rushed out.
"Help him up," Stone said. "We're outta here."
Mr. Jack rose to one knee, moaning with pain.
"Hang on," said Stone, and locked the helm hard over. A warning siren shrieked. The Dallas Belle crash-turned to port, heeling like a destroyer. Stone hit the automatic emergency on the whistle again and they retreated from the bridge, fighting the steep incline of the circling ship.
Mr. Jack and the pilot struggled into the elevator. Stone followed, holding the gun in one hand, scooping Ronnie into his other arm as the car descended. When the door opened on the main deck, they again struggled against the steep incline as Ronnie led them out an aft hatch onto the afterdeck.
A ladder arced over the lifeboat, which hung from davits. The heel of the ship made it difficult to climb through the hatch in the canopy, but Stone's main problem was how to board without losing control of the situation. He and Ronnie had to enter the boat first. If they didn't, the pilot and Mr. Jack could launch without them. He looked at his watch.
Three minutes.
"In you go, sweetheart. Right behind you." He turned around and backed down into the boat, watching the pilot and Mr. Jack, who were mounting the ladder. "You first, Mr.
Jack."
The old man's face was a gray mask of pain and frustration. Behind him, the pilot was shoving, crying, "Hurry. Hurry."
"Fucking Jap."
"Come on," yelled Stone. "We're out of time. Ronnie, get your belt on."
The pilot shoved harder. The old man whirled in one fluid motion and kicked him in the face. The pilot fell to the deck. "I'm staying," Mr. Jack told Stone. "Screw all of you!"
They were out of time. Stone slammed the hatch and
buckled in beside Ronnie. Orange light seeped through the
canopy. She already had her little hand on the release. "Go!"
She yanked and screamed. Stone's stomach flew. They were falling. A second later, they hit the water with a bone-shaking impact. The boat rolled. Stone felt the backwash of the Dallas Belle's propeller hurl the lifeboat away.
He unbuckled and headed for the tiller and reached for the starter. The engine fired. But before Stone could put the propeller in gear, he felt a hard thump through the water and knew that he was too late. The explosive charges welded to the port side of the ship had detonated along its waterline.
He reached for Ronnie. One or two seconds would tell him whether submerging the charges by heeling the ship had smothered the explosion before it could ignite the supercooled gas.
THE LIFEBOAT STOPPED ROCKING SUDDENLY WITH A LOUD
cracking noise and lay at an angle as if it had run aground in the middle of the bay.
Stone opened the hatch.
A cold wind stung his face. The ship was a quarter mile away, sprawled on its side in a field of ice.
The ice was spreading rapidly.
It engulfed the helicopter carrier Admiral Yamamoto, which lay between the Dallas Belle and the lifeboat, and raced on another thousand yards, freezing the seawater into crystalline waves as hard and bright as glass. A smoky white fog rose from the rigid surface. Sea birds fell from the sky, their feathers sheathed in snow.
The fog was thickest around the ship, where the frigid gas continued to gush from the broken hull. Stone pulled Ronnie out of the canopy.
"What happened?"
"The cold gas froze the water. Come on! It'll blow up any second."
Her eyes widened in disbelief, then locked on the Dallas Belle. "Look at Mr. Jack. He's frozen."
A stick figure was spread-eagled to a ladder halfway up the superstructure.
Stone lowered Ronnie off the lifeboat, and they started running across the frozen bay, climbing ice hummocks and
sliding into troughs, their backs to the ship, their faces to the wind.
"Is it poisonous?"
"Only if it drives out all the air."
Around them was a strange silence broken by a tinkling sound like thousands of miniature wind chimes. Now and then the fog swirled away and they could see lights on shore, and ships fleeing the ice, which continued to spread.
"It's moving!" cried Ronnie.
They were half a mile from the ship, and the ice sheet was growing thinner, undulating on the swells. A jagged crack suddenly came at them like an attacking animal. They dodged. Seawater erupted, spraying them. Stone slipped and fell. He scrambled to his feet and took Ronnie's hand and ran. With no warning, his foot broke through a soft spot, thin and treacherously invisible. He looked back. The ship was shrouded in fog, the orange lifeboat a barely visible dot. The trapped warship was ha loed in work lights, her decks a dense clutter of helicopters, her rigging stiff with frozen signal flags.
Another crack meandered their way, moving lazily with the sea swell. The surface was disintegrating into floes. They'd be swimming in another minute—miles from shore as night descended. But to go back to the lifeboat would be as deadly. Any minute, steel chilled brittle would crack in a spray of sparks and ignite the gas.
"There's Mummy!"
The Swan was heading straight for them, mainsail black, jib white as a gull. Sarah drove the boat through the slushy ice at the edge of the field and ramped it up onto a solid slab as Stone and Ronnie ran, leaping from floe to floe.
Ronnie broke through. Stone grabbed her, jumped a channel of open water, and landed hard near the boat. Both feet broke through the ice. As he fell, he swung Ronnie by her arm with all his strength.
He saw Sarah catch her hand and haul her over the safety line. Then the water dragged him under and mushy ice closed over his head. His boots filled, pulling him down. He reached up as if to tug air down to his lungs. Something banged into his palm and he closed his hand and held on for his life.
His head broke the surface and he saw Sarah braced on the deck with a boat hook, trying to pull him to the hull. He got his other hand onto the gunnel and there he hung, the cold water sapping his strength, vaguely aware that the sails were crashing like cymbals.
Sarah screamed to Ronnie. The child fumbled at the mast and led a halyard over the safety line. They worked it around him, under his arms. Then Sarah cranked the mast winch and Stone felt himself lifted slowly out of the water and over the side.
"Turn the boat around."
He crawled along the deck and into the cockpit and reached for the helm. The wind was west. The Dallas Belle lay east in the ice. He started the engine and used it to kick the stern around out of the ice. But instead of heading due south for the n
arrows and the Sagami Sea, he veered east.
"Gotta get that helicopter ship between us or the shock wave will blow us out of the water."
"There's a police patrol coining," said Sarah.
"They're not the problem." Any moment sparks from a shattering plate of the brittle, twisted steel would ignite a pocket of gas. Veronica caught a favorable slant of wind and picked up speed. At last, she reached the point where the helicopter carrier blocked their view of the Dallas Belle. He changed course and headed for the narrows, glancing back repeatedly to make sure he was in position to maintain the shield.
Suddenly a sunset seemed to break through the clouds above the gas carrier. And then the Dallas Belle exploded brighter than any sunset. A fireball rose roaring into the sky, painting Tokyo Bay ruby red from shore to shore.
The sea shook under the Swan like an earthquake. A shock wave slammed into the sails and knocked her on her side.
Before she stood again, the sky was bright as noon.
Ships and boats were steaming from the fire. Others, like moths, seemed drawn to it. The warship that had shielded them from the worst of the explosion suddenly blew apart, flinging fiercely burning helicopters onto the ships around it.
Ships began igniting across the crowded bay in a string of explosions, each setting off the next, like signal fires bearing a message to the harbor.
The wind turned hot. The ice vanished. Pillars of fire, twisting and spiraling like tornadoes, swooped toward the city.
On the outer breakwaters, glass buildings reflected the flames, then puffed open like red poppies scattering their petals to the wind. Cars and trucks flew burning from a suspension bridge, falling like glitter. A stand of power plant stacks toppled like fingers closing into a fiery fist.
Stone focused the binoculars on the Tokyo Tower, which stood over the heart of the city like a prisoner braced for punishment. A railroad train of tank cars on a pier exploded in a long series of sullen booms. They proved to be a coda. Overhead, the fire pillars flickered like candles in the wind. Slowly, reluctantly, they sank toward the water, and by their fading light, Stone saw that the harbor had absorbed the brunt of the destruction.
Tokyo Tower stood, a sentinel now for the city that survived.
Christmas morning, thirty miles south of Nojima-zaki, Stone folded his Japan chart and turned Veronica southeast to the open sea. He scanned the horizons, which were empty but for Orion's Belt setting dimly in the west, and went below.
Sarah and Ronnie were sitting under a blanket on the leeward berth in the main salon, surrounded by Ronnie's stuffed penguins and alligators and the gift-wrapped boxes purchased six weeks ago at Kwajalein.
"My hero!" Ronnie had been calling him that since she woke up.
Stone kissed Ronnie on the forehead and Sarah on the mouth. "Mummy's a hero, too, sweetie. Without her we'd still be swimming."
"Or fried. Mummy, when are we going to do presents?"
"After your father's had a nap." Sarah lifted the blanket. "Come here."
Stone squeezed in with them and opened their dogeared Ocean Passages for the World.
"Where are we going, Daddy?"
"Well, poor Veronica needs her starboard spreader repaired and a permanent patch on that hole in the galley, before some shark swims in for lunch. So first stop will be a nice warm beach."
"Then where?"
"Then your mother would like very much to sail home."
Ronnie looked puzzled and a little alarmed. She gathered her presents and pulled her animals closer. "Home? We are home."
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