Fire And Ice (16 page)

"If you want my help, mate; you better come up with a bigger nutshell."

"Give me a break, Kerry."

"No, you give me a break. You want me to believe you? Convince me." Stone took a deep breath. "We never told anybody. You'll see why. . . . Sarah's father—

the general—was assassinated in a coup attempt. When the coup collapsed, they got the idea of covering themselves by pinning the murder on me."

Kerry's reaction to the revelation was to ask coolly, "What were you doing in Nigeria?" Stone was still trying to form a careful answer, when suddenly he felt the old pain return as raw and startling as an explosion in his face. He took a moment to compose himself.

"My first wife's name was Katherine. We'd cashed in our shares of an ultrasound medical probe we'd developed, and gone sailing. Sort of a second honeymoon, since we'd been too busy for our first. Bought a big fat Halberg-Rassy centerboard ketch. Your basic first boat when you have more money than sense. Rolled our guts out crossing the Atlantic, and finally anchored up in London. That's where I met Sarah. She was interning at King's Hospital."

"Found yourself a new first mate?" Kerry smirked, but his voice trailed off when he saw Stone's eyes glisten.

"Kerry, there isn't a night on watch I don't grieve for Katherine. Or wonder what the hell I could have done different to save her life."

"Sounds like you still love her."

"I do."

"More than Sarah?"

"No. Of course not. If I had a thousand lives I'd never find again what I found with Sarah."

"Sorry, mate." The salvage man looked away. When he could finally face Stone again, he saw him fighting back the tears.

"Katherine and Sarah hit it off—the three of us became great friends. Sarah was younger than we, just surfacing from the drudgery of medical school, so excited to be alive again. It was fun to be around her. So when her old man ordered her home to Lagos, we promised to sail down to pay her a visit. Landed smack in the middle of what turned out to be a very short-lived coup. A gang of junior officers liquored up by our local CIA agent."

McGlynn stared down at a sea-battered PRC freighter

cutting off the Star Ferry. Stone took a long breath and struggled to get the details right.

"Sarah's father was one hundred percent committed to civilian rule, which made him their first target. What they didn't realize was that his units would remain loyal; he'd trained them like British soldiers, taught 'em to stay out of politics. When the coup went sour, the bastards got the bright idea of making the assassination look like a murder—a crime of passion—like I'd caught the general making love to Katherine and killed them both in a jealous rage."

"They murdered your wife too?"

"For verisimilitude. Shot her in her bed. Dumped the general's body on top of her. Stripped them naked. That's how we found them. . . . Sarah's father and my beautiful Katherine . . ." Bitter details, grounded in true loss. "The worst thing was the terror on Katherine's face. She must have woken up, seen them crowding into the room. I can never get out of my mind the fear she felt before she died. I would do anything to change that."

"Did it work?" Kerry asked. "Did they get away with it?"

"Yeah, it worked. If it weren't for Sarah, I'd have been shot 'resisting arrest.' But it worked anyway, and I was running for my life."

"Why didn't you run to the American embassy?"

"It was the CIA guy who told the Nigerians to frame the white American." Kerry looked skeptical. Finally he said, "How'd that turn into piracy?"

"The cops and the army impounded my sailboat and were tearing Lagos apart looking for me. They had roadblocks and the airport was impossible. Sarah said they would shoot me. I didn't care. With Katherine dead, I wanted to be dead too. But Sarah wouldn't allow that." Stone shook his head. "I can still hear her screaming at me—demanding I survive. By then, we'd figured out that the CIA front in Lagos was an outfit that ran offshore oil rig tenders. So I did a run up the middle and split in one of their tugboats."

"Sounds more like grand larceny than piracy."

"Yeah. But the CIA guy came after me. Caught up in a Nigerian patrol boat, about a hundred miles offshore . . ." "And?"

"I rammed the patrol boat."

"Did it sink?"

"I was driving a six-thousand-horsepower steel tug. Last I saw, their bow was drifting toward Africa, the stem toward Brazil."

"How many did you drown?"

Stone looked at him. "None."

"How do you know?"

"Both halves were raking me with machine guns." "How'd you get away?"

"Sarah—who was totally in the clear and could have stayed there—risked her life to empty one of her father's safe deposit boxes and hire a smuggler to pick me up. She stayed aboard to nurse me—I'd been hit. The smuggler took us to Moanda, to his Congo River friend, and Sarah bought the Swan. They were still after us, but she insisted on coming with me. Got pretty hairy."

He glanced at Kerry. The Australian was shaking his head. Stone said, trying to convey the nature of Sarah's selfless acts, the truly important thing, "Get this, Kerry. I was a mess. When I wasn't bleeding I was crying. So we're not talking about the heat of passion—that came later."

"Love?" Kerry interrupted.

Stone sighed. "You don't understand. Sarah and I fell in love the first time we even saw each other. At a distance. But it was the sort of thing neither of us would have ever acted on. I did truly love Katherine. You know, if you're happily married you accept that God plays jokes. You meet someone—your instant soul mate—but you honor your love and your commitments.

"Don't get me wrong, by the way, I'm not that noble. I wouldn't have stayed for commitment alone, but I really did love Katherine. . . . Still, Sarah and I clicked from the beginning. But nothing ever would have happened. . . . But what I'm telling you is, Sarah didn't stay only for love. She stayed for honor too. The right thing. Katherine was an innocent victim and so was I. Sarah felt responsible, even though she was as innocent as we were."

"Ever ask yourself why you deserve such a woman?"

"Every day." Stone smiled. "But I'm never giving her back. Never." Kerry's expression turned inward. "Somehow your story would ring truer if Sarah had stayed to avenge her father."

"Truer? You don't believe me?"

"And you, your wife."

"Oh, I wanted to kill them all. Hatched a plan to get the officers who did it. And that sonof-a-bitch spook. Sarah wouldn't hear of it. She's a Christian in the deepest sense."

"Turned the other cheek?"

"You could call it that. . . ." said Stone. "I wasn't as forgiving, but she helped me understand that all the killings in the world wouldn't bring Katherine back. And of course the Nigerians and the CIA were still coming after us with all four feet," he continued, spinning the story into its natural conclusion.

Pursued to Antarctica, then into the Drake Channel and around Cape Horn, they had disappeared among the islands of Micronesia, which were scattered like dust across eight and a half million square miles of ocean. Their trips to "civilization" for supplies and amenities were few, their stops brief and unpredictable. They felt reasonably safe, though they tended to avoid contact with the growing legion of American cruisers. The Japanese and Hong Kong Chinese who helped support the hospital boat had no reason to question their past, and they might have gone on as they had forever, had the Dallas Belle not happened upon them, needing a doctor.

"Hell of a story," Kerry said, again.

Stone ignored him.

"Point is, even though all this happened years ago and fifteen thousand miles east, the U. S. Navy isn't going to be any help— Now the way I see it, whoever grabbed Sarah had stolen the ship for the cargo. Somebody got hurt in the hijacking, and they took Sarah to doctor him.

Your unexplained Mayday fits right in with the dead guy on the beach."

"Maybe."

"Is the U.S. Navy acoustical tracking system still in operation?"

"SOSUS," Kerry McGlynn answered, "Sound surveillance system."

"If they could call up their files for the Pulo Helena vicinity, they could ID that ship and track it to where it is now."

"Possible," said Kerry.

"I can't go to the U.S. Navy. But I'll bet you could. Or your brother. I'll bet anything the Australian Navy can tap into the U.S. system."

McGlynn was shaking his head.

"Why not?"

"You're asking me to risk compromising his naval career."

"I'm asking you to help me get Sarah back."

"I don't see how you can without coming clean."

"I've got two problems with throwing myself on the mercy of the U.S. consulate. We have a child. If the price of getting my wife back means we'll both go to prison, what happens to Ronnie?"

McGlynn offered no answer.

"But even if I took that chance, there's no promise they'd search. I know this story sounds crazy. My friend Lydia Chin looked at me like I was out of my mind. And now you are. How would you like to persuade a bunch of bureaucrats to call in the Navy? Christ, it would take days, weeks. In the meantime, where the hell is she? What are they doing to her?"

McGlynn looked him hard in the eye. "Take a bearing on your story from my position."

"What do you mean?"

"It does sound crazy. Crazier than your pirate tale." "Crazy? Or don't you believe me?" Kerry sighed. "I'd like to. I wish I did. I've known you and Sarah a long time. On and off."

"If I'm lying, where's Sarah?"

"I can think of two possibilities: One, she packed it in and left you; or, two, you left her."

"Left her? Where's my boat?"

"You tell me, mate."

In that instant, Stone saw the hidden cost of isolation. A true friend could not conceive of such a lie; but he had never made Kerry a true friend, only an acquaintance, like Marcus Salinis, like the others on their Pacific circuit, like Lydia Chin. He had one friend and one friend only, Sarah. The rest occupied the edges of his life. Where, he had to admit, he had placed them deliberately—or allowed them to drift, which amounted to the same thing. With Sarah at his side, it had never bothered him. Without her, he was completely alone.

"Why," he asked, "if I left her, would I come to you with this story that a gas carrier picked up my boat and took them away?"

Kerry sighed again. Cold-eyed captain or not, he seemed uncomfortable with his implications.

"Why?" Stone pressed. "Now you sound crazy. If I left her, why would I bother making up a story?" "Maybe you needed a story."

"What? For what?"

"To explain—"

"Explain what?" Stone demanded, with an awful feeling that he was a beat behind the salvage captain. "Explain why she and your daughter went missing." "You're losing me, Kerry."

"Look at me! If she left you, you'd have to have some story you could live with. Or at least tell your friends." "I swear she didn't leave me."

"Michael, I don't know if you left her or she left you or what." Kerry swirled the beer in his glass. When he spoke again, he was gentle. "People do some crazy things at sea. You get out there alone, you think weird stuff. Sometimes, you do weird stuff. I'd bet once a month some seaman just picks up a fire axe and kills his best mate. . . . Last year, bloke on a supertanker wanted to go home, so he wired a cutting torch to a valve on the foredeck, thinking a fire would get him helicoptered to Sydney. It did, in a coffin; ship was empty, so the tanks were filled with residual gas pockets. Blew the bloody bow off."

"Jesus Christ. You think I did something to Sarah?"

"It happens."

"I just told you what she means to me. I love her." "I heard you."

"And my daughter?"

"It happens."

"And then I scuttled the Swan?"

"Your words, not mine."

"I love them. But aside from that fact, I'm not capable of hurting someone. Christ, if I were, wouldn't your teeth be on the deck right now?"

Kerry reddened. "Try it, mate."

"Fuck this, you don't believe me." Stone bent to grab his pack. A heavy blow smashed the back of his neck. The force knocked him off his chair and under the table. He thought that Kerry had rabbit-punched him. But somehow the window had broken. Cold wind rushed in. A woman screamed. And Kerry was toppling from his chair, dragging the tablecloth and the dishes on top of him, bright red blood spurting from his shoulder. A wine bottle exploded musically on the next table and a bucket shattered, spraying Stone with ice. "Get down!" someone yelled. "They're still shooting!"

against the wound.

The salvage man was white as the table linen and gasping for air. "What happened?"

"They missed me."

All around the restaurant people were screaming-and diving at the floor. Others stood frozen, pointing at the holes in the window. A middle-aged American shoved Stone aside, yelling, "Get out of my way. I'm a doctor."

"Run for it, mate," Kerry whispered.

Stone sprinted for the door. The maitress d' was shouting into the telephone for an ambulance. Stone ran to the elevators, saw them suddenly as a trap, and fled down the stairs.

Fifteen flights down he heard the pounding boots and sergeant's shouts of a police squad storming up the stairwell. Stone pushed through a fire door, into a hotel corridor, hurried to the elevators, and waited anxiously for a car, praying that the police hadn't panicked and shut off the system. He heard the cops on the stairs.

The elevator arrived, doors opening on a frightened crowd fleeing the restaurant. Stone squeezed aboard. An Englishwoman stared at him. "I say, weren't you with the man who was shot?" Flustered, Stone shook his head and looked away. In the lobby, word of the shooting had people huddled by the windows, staring into the street, where police cars

and ambulances were stacking up around the entrance and blocking traffic. Stone went to the telephones and called Lydia Chin. The shipowner was in a meeting. " Get her out of it. This is urgent. . . ."

Lydia came on and before he could speak, said, "No one has any information about a missing gas carrier. No such ship is reported overdue. Anywhere in the world."