Fire And Ice (28 page)

But the captain pointed, and now Stone saw what he had missed while he was studying the breaker's yard in his glasses. Patrol boats were cruising a sort of picket line in front of the breaker's yard. Running slowly on opposite courses, they paralleled the frontage of the ship shed, turned around and passed each other again, clearly standing guard.

"Tell him to stick to the middle." He raised the powerful binoculars and studied the shore. The cruise ship had company, a vessel in the slip beside it. The new candidate to become scrap metal was acquiring a bamboo framework around its hull. All he could see was its stem and the back of its house. Oddly, the men on the scaffolding appeared to be painting the hull black.

Stone tightened his grip on the binoculars.

"Yacht!" said the sampan captain.

"The captain says he sees a yacht," said William Sit. Veronica lay in shadow, between the ship they were painting and the pier. He tried to fine-focus the glasses and only gradually realized he first had to dry his eyes. Her sails were furled and covered and she was tied expertly with spring lines and tidetensioned bow and stern lines. Studying the boat for signs of Sarah and Ronnie, he saw that the bow and spring lines were tied off aboard, which, if his eyes weren't playing tricks, meant that whoever had tied her had prepared to get under way instantly. Sarah. Had to be Sarah.

Suddenly frantic, he swept the dark pier for her and Ronnie, then the ship—the sandcolored ship they were painting black. He couldn't see her main deck behind the bulwarks, but he could see bridge wings and a sort of balcony on the back of the house one deck below the bridge.

"Tell the captain to hold her right there."

The captain replied, via William, that he was drawing the attention of the patrol boats by standing still in the channel.

"Remind him that I've got papers," Stone said as he commenced a porthole-by-porthole investigation of the gas carrier's house.

"The captain says, Not for those boats, you don't.' I believe you should believe the captain, sir. And Mr. Wang

says he too believes so. With great respect, sir, we both believe the captain should steer away."

"Slowly," snapped Stone, peering through the binoculars. The ship was less than a quarter mile away. He could swim to it.

The captain rammed his throttle forward and the coal sampan hurried downstream. Stone stared astern. So close. In seconds the shed wall had blocked his view of the Dallas Belle. Moments more and the shed itself grew small, blending with the riverbank until it was indistinguishable from the ferry head, the gray flats, and the heavy sky.

"We come back in one hour," William Sit translated.

The captain caught Stone's eye and nodded reassuringly. Obviously, there would be no yachtsman marina in the breaker's yard, but just as obviously, the American cared deeply about something there.

Stone unfolded the chart and studied the area again. Breaker's yard, bordered inland by the railroad. Further inland, the execution ground, which of course was not shown on the chart. He asked Wang if there was a road through the mud flats and marsh beyond. The taxi driver said there was. "But restricted," said William Sit. "Not allowed." The sampan proceeded downriver for several miles. To Stone each mile felt like a thousand. The captain's wife passed tea around. Stone's grew cold in his hand. Finally, the captain agreed to chance a run back up the river. But now the tide was going out. A strong current slowed the sampan, and she crept against it until Stone thought he would go insane from the waiting.

The captain tucked his sampan under the stern of a rusty Hanoi freighter and directly ahead of a Huangpu River excursion boat with a stridently amplified tour guide. At last the breaker's shed came into sight. The tour guide fell silent as they neared the execution ground. The double patrol was still prowling the river.

Stone raised his binoculars, his hands shaking in anticipation as his sight line cleared the wall of the shed. A corner of the Dallas Belle's house entered his field of vision, slowly widening until he could see the entire width

of it. He focused on the upper decks. The bridge wings were still empty, as was the balcony below the bridge.

He stole a quick look at the Swan—forlorn in the shadows, definitely unoccupied—then resumed his inspection of the deckhouse, scanning the round portholes and the several big windows on the uppermost decks. Lights were burning in some of the cabins. Not a sign of her.

He glanced pleading at the captain. Would he stop? The captain eyed the patrol boats and shook his head. Too soon, as the sampan continued upstream, the cruise ship began to block his view of the gas carrier. She swarmed with workmen in hard hats. But the fiery cascades and the brilliantly flashing welders' outfits that Stone had seen earlier in the week had ceased—sensible in light of the new arrival's volatile cargo—and the yard workers were occupied stringing cable and shifting cranes that rolled on rails along the pier.

He noticed that the liner was riding high—several feet below her waterline exposed—

emptied of fuel, water, stores, and furnishings before her final voyage to oblivion. The Dallas Belle, he realized a moment after he had lost sight of her, had looked a little light, too, as if they had unloaded some of her liquefied natural gas in order to cross the bar.

"William? Ask the captain if he knows why that gas ship is in the breaker's yard." The captain's shrug needed no translation.

"Please ask him if he has ever seen gas carriers in that slip before." William asked. The reply was simultaneously baroque and blunt. "The captain says he is a family man, with many mouths to feed, who carries coal and minds his own business."

"Tell him to drop me on the shore."

"Here?"

"By that ferry head—no, before it. On that old pontoon." William conveyed the order and the sampan swung out of the stream toward a pontoon apparently abandoned when a new ferry landing had been constructed two hundred yards upriver. The captain's sons ran forward and

scrambled onto the bow, where they stood peering intently into the murky water. A frantic arm signal caused him to jink the boat around an obstruction. He spoke to William Sit.

"He says to get ready to jump. And to be careful because the pontoon is very old and rusted."

"Tell him to pick me up in an hour. And if I'm not here, keep coming back every hour until I am." "Am Ito come in your company, sir?" Stone hesitated. Downriver, the patrols off the breaker's yard were converging. But this time as they met, they peeled out into the stream and headed in company upriver. He and the captain watched them intently, but they showed no interest in the sampan and continued past them, past the ferry, and on toward the center of the city.

"Yes. And tell Mr. Wang we'll need him, too." "May I ask whether you believe you have discovered an important yachtsmen marina location?"

Stone was already out the door, shrugging into his backpack. He ignored the question and said, "Grab Wang. Let's go!"

When all three of them were perched on the bow, the captain's sons guided him in. The bow kissed the rusty steel and when, to Stone's relief, it didn't collapse, he stepped onto it and reached to help William. Mr. Wang boarded under his own steam. One by one they crossed the rickety bridge that connected the float to the riverbank, where a footpath pointed the way toward the breaker's yard through a field of leafless brush. It was nearing noon, the winter sun about as high as it would rise, the cold wind insistent. Far ahead loomed the gigantic ship shed. Inland at some distance across the flat ground rumbled the switch engines shuttling frdight cars.

William Sit cast an anxious gaze at the bleakness and ventured a rare opinion: "It is not necessarily likely that the authorities will hurrah this place for a yachtsmen marina, because it is perhaps too close to Shanghai Supreme People's Court Project."

"I'll leave that to the powers that be," Stone replied distractedly as he scanned the path. Wang, too, appeared less than thrilled with their landing, and even less inclined to follow him. "Okay, gentlemen, let's just check out this open ground between here and the breaker's yard. .. . William, please tell Mr. Wang we're going to have a look around." He plunged through the brush without looking back and was relieved a moment later to hear them crunching after him on the dead leaves and broken twigs. He walked for a half mile. The path was on top of the bank, which was higher than the field, having been built up by repeated dredging of the river. Occasional higher humps offered views of the railroad tracks. From one such elevation he saw, with the binoculars, a wall of mud-colored brick which appeared to be topped with barbed wire. The wall was a full mile inland, and half a mile beyond the railroad.

A rail spur curved into the breaker's shed. A train of gondola cars stood on a siding at the foot of a huge mound of scrap metal. A crane was loading the gondolas, swinging a magnetic hoist that bristled with scrap.

Stone eyed the track. If they couldn't sail out of there on Veronica, the train offered the option of fleeing into Shanghai itself. Last ditch, but better than no ditch. The wind carried the bang and clatter of heavy machinery and pneumatic drills and hammers, and the thud of hoist engines straining. A steady stream of scrap issuing from the shed was added to the pile.

"William, I want to have a look inside that shed. See what the neighbors are like."

"Neighbors?"

"We'll want our letters of introduction ready."

Mr. Wang spoke, and William, already anxious, suddenly looked terrified.

"Mr. Wang reminds me that it was in front of this shipyard that the patrol boats were . . . patrolling. He respectfully wonders whether a proper introduction to the managers of the shipyard would be a wiser way to visit."

Stone saw that this particular party was over. Neither William nor the Triad driver offered the slightest indication that they could be persuaded, bullied, or even forced at gunpoint to enter the breaker's yard.

"Okay . . . William, here's what I want you to do. Go back to the boat. It's just past noon. Tell the captain to

come back to the pontoon every hour on the hour until you see me. Don't stop unless you see me. Okay?" "I am worried for you, sir."

"I'm fine. See you in an hour. Or two hours. Or three hours. Every hour on the hour, right?"

"Right."

"Tell Mr. Wang."

Stone turned away, ignoring Wang's protest, and hurried toward the shed, which loomed against the smoke-gray sky like an oversized jumbo jet hanger. There were numerous doors in its sheet metal side.

He felt suddenly, acutely, aware of the years that had passed since his first wife had been killed. If he could recall any of the characteristics of the man he had been then, it was his compulsion to act—ponder little, keep moving. He chose a door at random. Midday, it wasn't locked.

He opened the top buttons of his raincoat to expose his white shirt and necktie, carried his backpack by the hand strap, and kept his eyes peeled for a hard hat. In that respect, he chose his door luckily, finding himself next to a wall hung with hard hats and fire extinguishers. He grabbed the cleanest red one he could find, polished it with his sleeve, and adjusted the headband so it fit him properly. Then he strode onto the pier that rimmed the slip, telling himself that with Western engineers crowding into Shanghai to partake in joint projects to build airliners, telephones, and farm tractors, a bearded American in a hard hat would not be that unusual a sight.

He had entered near the middle of the building and found himself standing midships of the cruise liner's rust-streaked hull. Every hundred feet, free-standing construction elevators in bamboo-framed shafts rose to the main deck. He headed inland, toward the bow, figuring to walk around it to the gas carrier. The few people he encountered on the pier were laborers who took no notice. Judging by the noise level cascading down from overhead, the mass of workers were employed up on the superstructure. He walked briskly—a boss on a mission.

All that stood between him and Sarah and Ronnie was the cruise ship. He saw no more obstacles, only opportunity. He would round the bow, continue past the gas carrier's bow, and find a gangway to board her. For a joyful moment it seemed that simple. But as he neared the bow, he saw a big work gang clustered around the feet of one of the cranes. The foreman noticed him, shouted into his walkie-talkie, and stepped forward to greet him. Stone turned abruptly to mount the nearest construction elevator. He jerked his thumb up. The operator engaged a hoist, and the platform clanked up to the main deck, which had been stripped to bare steel and was jammed with workmen wrestling cable. He stepped off, his eye already on a stairway up the side of the superstructure, toward which he moved quickly, brushing past the workers. He climbed it two steps at a time, spotted a doorway, and, checking to make sure he wasn't followed, shoved through it. He caught a glimpse of a cavernous, space. Then he was tumbling forward, falling headfirst into the dark.

A SHOUT ECHOED HOLLOWLY IN HIS MIND, THE CRY ITSELF

smothered by the rumble, clank, and roar of men and machines tearing up the ship. Below was blackness. Above, a constellation of work lamps, dim as stars in a cloudshrouded sky, revolved majestically as they passed his eyes in heartbeats of slow motion. He seemed to have all the time in the world to realize he was falling. But the single thought, thank God for the hard hat, ended abruptly with a rip of pain in his side and another in his armpit. The limb felt torn from his chest.

He started falling again, sliding off a cable stretched horizontally between unseen bulkheads. Stone seized it with his other hand, rasping his palm on the rough strands, and tried to see where he was. The work lights hung forty or fifty feet overhead. Space stretched to darkness. He'd been goddamned lucky. Below, his backpack lay on a deck. He didn't remember dropping it.

He slid his aching arm over the cable, gripped the wire with both hands, and dropped to the deck, where he sat a moment, looking around while his heart slowed and his brain stopped pinwheeling.