Fire And Ice (11 page)

"Been sitting there three days," said Marcus. "Watch the blond guy with the binoculars." Stone couldn't quite see his face, but the man Marcus indicated had the rugged looks of the summer diver and winter skier. A diamond or gold earring glinted as he casually scanned the sea and the hills between sips from a champagne glass. He swung the binoculars toward the land and raised them to the top of Marcus's hill. For an instant the binoculars locked on the telescope.

The blond man waved.

Stone shrugged. He was so tired, he could barely stand. "Somehow," he said to Marcus, " I've got to track the Dallas Belle."

Marcus shook his head. " 'Fraid not. I already asked around. There's a Dallas Belle chemical carrier operating in the Gulf of Mexico, where's she's been for years. Looks like Sarah's right about false registry."

"I'm going to Hong Kong," said Stone. "Take my chances with the American consulate, if I have to." "How are they going to track a ship?"

"The Navy used to have a worldwide acoustical tracking system to keep tabs on the Soviets during the Cold War—hydrophone buoys and subs and satellites to record ship noise. Prop wash and engine and driveshaft noise is unique to each vessel, and everything they recorded was stored in a library. Like a fingerprint file. Supposedly, they can call up the files for a ship heard that day in the vicinity of Pulo Helena. Crossreferencing that, the computer will identify who she is. And the files for the days since will tell us where she's gone."

"Assuming the system is still working," said Marcus, "and assuming they don't toss you in the hoosegow for piracy."

"My friend Captain McGlynn's got a brother in the Australian Navy. Stands to reason the navies share data. Maybe he'll help. McGlynn's always had a thing for Sarah."

"Imagine that." Marcus smiled.

"So maybe he'll help, if I can just get ahold of him. Meantime, I've got shipowner friends in Hong Kong, too. Either way, Hong Kong's my best bet. . . . And there's a guy I can see in Manila."

Stone rewound the tape and played it again. He drifted on Sarah's voice, the cool, strong sound and the dispassionate language: These are the facts. This is what I know. All else is empty speculation. . . . He shivered. It was no news to him that his wife was a strong woman, but this was proof of a strength that frightened him, a bloodless quality that he deliberately avoided acknowledging. If she ever decided that he was not for her anymore, she would cast him adrift and never look back.

"Michael, you're falling over dead. Come on, we'll eat some fish and put you to bed."

"McGlynn's calling me from Australia."

"Joanna, give me a hand."

Stone was vaguely aware of Marcus's burly form leaning close.

"Wake me if Captain McGlynn calls."

"Open the bed, Joanna."

"And book me Manila to Hong Kong."

He felt Marcus pick him off the couch like a sack. He smelled Joanna's perfume and then he was gone.

He dreamed the canoe was sinking. He felt weight on his chest and when he raised his head for air, a hand covered his mouth. Lavender soap. Coming awake, he felt Joanna's breasts on his skin and her firm legs entwined with his. Her lips brushed his ear.

"Daddy says don't move," she whispered. "Someone's in the house." Her body was shaking.

In the glow of the outdoor security light, he saw her dark eyes track movement. A shadow moved across the curtain. The sliding screen door ground softly in its track, opening inch by inch until the shadow slipped through, and into the room. Steel glinted in the light.

Fully awake now, adrenaline flowing, Stone flipped on top of Joanna, threw the pillow, and grabbed the bedside lamp.

The intruder was covered head to toe in a glistening black wetsuit. When he dodged the pillow, Stone was ready and hit him hard with the lamp. The figure staggered. From the hall came the steely clatter of a pump shotgun being cocked. Stone threw the lamp, connecting again, and the intruder whirled and ran out the window as Marcus Salinis burst in the door, sweeping the room with a gun barrel yawning like a sewer pipe.

"Get down!"

Stone pinned Joanna under him. Marcus's shotgun roared and gushed flame. The curtains and screen disappeared. Marcus ejected the shell and peered down the hill.

"Missed, goddammit—"

"Get back from the window," Stone yelled.

"Naw, he's still running."

"Daddy, you should have seen it! Doctor Mike faked the guy with a pillow and then pow!

with the lamp. You were great, Michael."

Marcus looked at his daughter sprawled under the doctor. "Get out from under him. Get some clothes on. Get some beers—And you," he turned on Stone, who appeared oblivious of the naked young woman as he rose from the bed to stare in bewilderment at the dark sea. "You want to tell me why a guy coming to kill me goes for the guest room?

"

"MUMMY? . . . Mummy! I'M READY FOR MY TEST."

"What test?" Sarah turned from the window, which framed the same monotone tableau of rain-spattered sea it had since Mr. Jack had ordered the engines stopped. Adrift, the Dallas Belle rolled slightly on the East China Sea groundswell, a regular motion that set the airplane models swaying. Mr. Jack had given no indication why they had stopped. Nor did the small crew seem to be working on repairs. This morning the captain had launched an inflatable Zodiak from the accommodations door at the waterline and motored around the hull. But Sarah attached no special meaning to that, as captains generally enjoyed any opportunity to inspect the trim of their hulls. Her eye kept locking on the emergency life raft canister on the afterdeck. The deeply laden ship was drifting with the current at two knots, according to her latest GPS reading. But a life raft, which floated on the surface like a feather, would drift with the wind. And the ragged tops of the small waves indicated that the wind was shifting, starting to blow opposite the current. The night could put thirty or forty miles between them and the ship if she could find the opportunity and the nerve.

Her patient was sitting up in bed, a cashmere robe covering his bandaged chest and shoulder, his mutilated fingers clutching his omnipresent coffee mug. Moss stalked about the suite, in and out of the sleeping cabin, menacing as a cheetah, casting dark looks at Ronnie, who sat crosslegged at Mr. Jack's feet. All but lost in a wool sweater from the ship's store, she was holding one of the models, enthralled, as the old man taught her its parts.

"Mr. Jack's going to ask me all the parts of the plane." "And what happens if you get them right?"

"I win a prize."

"What prize, Mr. Jack?"

His voice was still weak. He had a cutting accent that Sarah associated with IrishAmerican actors in black-andwhite movies about New York City. "First prize: she gets '

em all right, she keeps the plane."

"Really? Mummy, can I?"

Sarah nodded, concerned her daughter was exhibiting the classic signs of Stockholm syndrome, in which the captive fell in love with the captor. Yet she was also aware that the more the child charmed Mr. Jack, the less likely the strange old man would hurt her. Or so she hoped.

"Second prize—if you only get most of them right, I'll tell you a story about the plane. True story. Ready?"

"Ready."

But before Mr. Jack could ask his first question, Moss barged into the sleeping cabin. " About time for some sleep, Mr. Jack."

"Naw, I'm fine."

"Isn't that right, Doc? Shouldn't he sleep?"

"As long as he works hard at deep breaths—deep breaths, Mr. Jack—he can stay up a while longer."

"When I'm done with her, Ronnie's going to know more about World War II than any ten kids her age. Ready, kid?"

Moss folded his arms and glowered from a corner. "Okay, we'll start easy," said Mr. Jack, holding the plane aloft. "What's this plane called?" Ronnie sat up primly and answered, "It's a North American B-twenty-five."

"It's got another name."

"A Mitchell."

"And what kind of plane is it?"

"A medium bomber."

"This is the easy stuff, kid. Wait for it. It's going to

get a lot harder." He inclined the model toward Ronnie. "What are these little things on the wing?"

"Ice eliminators."

"How fast she go?"

"Three hundred miles an hour."

"How about her engines?"

"Wright Cyclone double-row . . ."

Sarah listened with half an ear as Ronnie gleefully answered every question.

"Who sits here?"

"Bombardier."

"And here?"

"You."

"What did you say?" asked Sarah.

"Mr. Jack was radio operator-gunner, Mummy. He fought the Japs."

"He fought the Japanese— You must have been very young, Mr. Jack."

"We all were."

Ronnie rattled off the statistics he had taught her. Finally he said, "Well, you did pretty good, kid. A little off on the bomb load."

"No, I wasn't."

"You said twelve tons."

"Oh, I meant two. It's twelve tons fully loaded, gross weight. You know what I meant."

"Rules are rules."

"I'll take second prize."

"You're no fun. You give in too fast."

"But the rules."

"You don't want the plane?"

"I do want the plane. But I missed a question. Maybe next time." Mr. Jack looked at Sarah. "She get that from you?" "And her father." Ronnie's face fell.

Mr. Jack shot Sarah a wintery scowl. "Give the kid a break, Doc." The scowl evolved into a sly, challenging smirk. "Listen close, Ronnie. The story you won is about the time I took off in that plane from an aircraft carrier."

"No," Ronnie piped up. "It's Army Air Force. Not Navy. Remember, Mr. Jack?"

"Absolutely right, kid. But still, I took off from a Navy ship. Want to know how?" She hunched closer, clutching the model, her dark eyes wide and steady on the old man's face.

It was, Sarah thought, as if the old man personified for Ronnie the sunken skeletons of the World War II planes and warships they snorkeled over. Or, she mused, as if a gladiator had stepped from the Roman ruins that she as a girl had explored in the south of England.

"Okay," said Mr. Jack. "Like I told youse before, I got outta basic right before Pearl and they sent me to radio school. Tops in my class. Got orders to join a squadron out in Washington State. We trained our tails off. Then one night flew to some godforsaken base in the middle of nowhere. My buddy, the bombardier, said it was Wisconsin.

"Should have known right off something was up, because security was real tight. No mail. No telephone. No leave. We practiced short takeoffs. Real short. They had this Navy officer showing our pilots how to do it. Well, all we needed was the goddammed Navy telling us what to do. Pretty soon we was taking off like rockets. So then we loaded up with dummy five-hundred pounders and extra fuel tanks till we was weighted down like freight trains and practiced some more.

"One day we flew west. Put down for fuel in Arizona and did our short takeoff. You shoulda heard the tower: `You guys nuts?' We kept going all the way to the West Coast.

"Coming in to land we swing over a harbor and there's a flattop, U.S.S. Hornet, sitting in the water like a postage stamp, and my buddy the bombardier, who's always doping stuff out first, says, 'That's our ship.' `Ship?' " Mr. Jack's eyes got wide and Ronnie laughed. " 'What ship? I thought I joined the Army.' Well, my buddy was right, and before you know it we've got sixteen B-twenty-five bombers sitting on her flight deck like a flock of gooney birds.

"By now, everybody knows something big is up."

"How did you move the planes down to the hangar deck?" Ronnie asked.

"Kid, you got a memory like an elephant." He called to Sarah, who was still staring down at water. "Hey, Mummy?"

Sarah was thinking that there would be less risk of injury jumping from a stationary ship, but a greater risk that someone on deck would hear the splash. Then floodlights and guns and a chase boat launched in seconds—the Zodiak! With an outboard motor near the accommodations door, several decks above the engine room. Could they

"Yo, Mummy?" Moss snapped. "Mr. Jack's talking to you."

"Yes, Mr. Jack?"

"Your daughter remembered that the Navy planes' wings folded so they could fit into the elevator to the hangar deck. Our wings didn't fold, so we had to lash 'em down topside. The Navy loved that. They couldn't launch their own planes with us blocking the runway. So the Hornet was a sitting duck for any Japs that spotted us." Ronnie glanced uncomfortably at Sarah, who said, "Once again, Mr. Jack. We say '

Japanese' in our family. We have friends in Tokyo who have been very kind to us, very generous. In fact, one gentleman has offered to send Ronnie to school in Switzerland."

"It's a free country," said Mr. Jack. "Call. 'em what you want. Having fought the bastards, I call 'em Japs. So anyhow, we go steaming out into the Pacific into some of the worst goddammed weather I've ever seen. Radio silence. Blacked out at night. Eighteen days at sea, sometimes so rough we couldn't see our escort. Weather got worse and the ocean really got mean. I was sick as a dog. You ever get seasick?"

"No."

"Lucky you. How about you, Mummy?"

"Not in years."

"Daddy does sometimes, when we've been ashore too long." Ronnie's face clouded again. And as Mr. Jack resumed his story, describing at length the rigors of the voyage and the myriad technical problems with the airplanes, she began to fidget. Mr. Jack noticed. His face hardened unpleasantly.

"Enough talk, Mr. Jack," Sarah intervened. "You need to rest. Ronnie, it's time for schoolwork."

"No, Mummy. Please."

The old man laughed, then turned pale and gasped from the pain in his chest that the sudden movement caused. "Mum," he said when he had caught his breath, "this is straight-A history. Hey, Moss, tell Mummy what Bob Marley said."

" 'If you know your history,' " Moss muttered sullenly, " 'then you'll know where you're coming from.' "

"Aces, Moss. See, Doc, I got a student, too. Moss, get outta here! You're moping around like a blue-bottom chimp."

Ronnie giggled.

Moss stared her down but did what he was told, heading out the door in venomous silence.