Fire And Ice (3 page)

"Hello, sir. How you doing?"

The old man stared past him at the sea.

Stone smelled the sweet odor of drying copra and he felt the ground reel, his first moment off the moving boat in nearly three weeks. Surf pounded nearby and the trade wind blew hard on his skin, rattling palm leaves.

"Beg pardon?" He leaned closer, smiling, kneeling, trying to put him at ease. He considered himself a barely competent doctor—not a gifted physician like Sarah—better with things than people.

"Too old." The old man opened his hands, revealing a fishing knife plunged into his body.

"Jesus!" Stone gasped. "What happened to you?" Suicide was one of the plagues of the far Pacific, right up there with drink and diabetes, though they saw it most often among the young. "Is that your boat?" he asked, trying to distract him so he could examine the wound. "What did you do? Sail home and find them all gone?"

"Not my home. I head for Tobi. Stupid old man."

Tobi lay a hundred and fifty miles southwest.

"From where?"

``Puluwat."

"Puluwat?" Puluwat was a thousand miles east.

The Carolinian navigators thought nothing of sailing five hundred miles without a compass for a carton of Marlboros or a good party. But the old guy had gotten himself good and lost, then compounded his shame by cracking up on the reef.

"Why you sail alone?"

"Sweet burial," the old man muttered.

The navigator's death at sea.

Gazing into the milky eyes that couldn't have seen any but the brightest stars, Stone guessed that this last voyage had been a test of do or die.

"Excuse me a moment . . . let me just move your hands." The old man had lost a lot of blood, and as Stone touched him, he fainted with a sigh. Stone quickly ran a saline tube into his arm, and another for glucose. The knife would have to wait for Sarah. Set up an operating room right here in the fale. He started to radio the ship to ferry in his Levine tube so he could drain the stomach fluids leaking into the old man's abdomen. But it was too late.

The navigator opened his eyes. A serene smile crossed his lips, when Stone brushed them with water. "Who you?" he asked in a hoarse whisper, even as he craned his neck again to see the sea.

"Just a Sunday sailor, compared to you, sir."

The weathered face rejected the compliment even as the light left his eyes. "Oh, goddammit," said Stone, hoping that Sarah was doing better. He walked among the fales, looking for a shovel. Nothing. Whoever had been here last had taken everything with them. Get a shovel from the Swan. Or maybe put the old man in his boat and sail him off into the sunset.

A pillar of smoke caught his attention, jetting thick

black from the Dallas Belle's massive funnel. The trade wind caught it and streamed it west. White water boiled behind the ship and it began to move.

"That was fast."

He walked toward the dock, watching for Veronica. But when the Dallas Belle had proceeded a thousand feet—its own length—he still couldn't see her.

"Oh, God!" A horrific thought crashed through him. Had the ship somehow run Veronica down? Or had its giant propeller dragged her under?

He ran to the old man's canoe. Sarah and Ronnie must have been wearing life vests. They might have been thrown clear, into the water. But as the ship wheeled, presenting a new angle of perspective, Stone slowed to a walk, stopped, stood, and stared in disbelief. He saw the Swan suspended sixty feet above the water in the sling of a deck crane. The crane swung the sloop inboard, over the gas carrier's main deck. While Michael watched, a party of seamen guided her copper red bottom onto a makeshift cradle and the Dallas Belle completed its turn and steamed away.

"MUMMY. WE'RE MOVING!"

"Shhhh!"

Sarah hunched over her stethoscope, every sense tuned to the old man's heart. He had not fallen, as they had claimed on the radio. He had been shot in the chest. Medically, it was the least of his problems. Attempting to remove the bullet, his shipmates had anesthetized the already unconscious victim with morphine. Now he was deep in a narcotic depression, blood pressure plummeting, respiration so faint his lungs barely lifted his ribs.

Sarah shot a half milligram of Narcan into his veins, then listened anxiously for the fibrillation that would tell her that the narcotic antagonist had aggravated some preexisting cardiac disease. He was old. The Narcan could as easily kill him as save him, but she had no choice. She had to get him breathing and increase his blood pressure.

"Mummy."

"Narcan!"

Ronnie slapped a fresh hypo into her glove. Sarah entered a vein, pumped a half milligram, massaged his faltering heart, and listened again.

"Narcan!"

On the third dose, the old man woke up vomiting. "Quickly." Ronnie helped her sit him up so he wouldn't choke on his vomit. But just as they had his torso erect he passed

out, swallowed, and began to choke. Sarah cleared his airway.

"Captain," she called to the men watching from the sick bay door. "I need the respirator from my boat. And the intubator."

The Texan shouted down the corridor. In moments the mess boy ran in with the gear. The captain's companion, a tall, powerfully built black American, said, "What about the bullet?"

"Would you step outside and close the door, please?"

"Let's get something straight, Doc. Neighborhood I come from every man my age is dead or locked up. Mr. Jack is the only reason I'm not."

"If I can't stabilize your friend he's a dead man. Get out." From what she could tell without X rays, a small-caliber bullet had entered at an angle, ricocheted off the gladiolus, plowed along the fourth rib toward his shoulder, tearing the subclavius, and lodged deeply in the lesser pectoralis.

Lucky. Until his panicked numb-skull shipmates took it in their collective heads to remove the bullet. A mess boy who had served as a hospital nurse had been drafted to perform the wholly unnecessary operation. Morphine was prescribed to anesthetize the already unconscious victim. . Generous in the extreme, they had emptied the ship's dispensary into the old man's veins and set about butchering the remains of his shoulder. The bullet was in deep, and eventually they gave up and left it where they should have in the first place.

That the overdose hadn't killed him outright was either a miracle or a testament to a constitution of titanium alloy. Judging by his harsh features, Sarah was inclined to believe the latter. His face might have been chiseled from igneous rock: sharp brows, hawk nose, square chin, cropped white hair and nary a jowl or a sag in the skin. And he bore the marks of torture from long ago—his back was crisscrossed with ancient scars, his fingernails and toenails had been ripped out.

Yet whatever luck had kept him alive then and deflected the bullet today had held. The crew had heard on the ham radio cruiser network that the hospital yacht Veronica was bound for Pulo Helena. And who should hove over the horizon but Doctor Mike and Doctor Sarah?

"Mummy, we're moving."

The ship was definitely moving, heeling into a turn. "I know," said Sarah.

"Where's Daddy?"

"I don't know. Help me with this."

"But—"

"First things first—our patient. Don't cry, dear, I need you." She got him tubed and on the respirator and listened to his heart again. He seemed stable, the Narcan taking at least temporary effect.

"Okay, darling, now we'll find out what the devil is going on here." She called for the captain. He came, accompanied by the black American.

"How's he doing, Doc?"

"Where is my husband?"

"On the beach," said the black.

"What? You left him on the beach? Where's our boat?" "We got her cradled up, safe on the main deck."' - "You shipped our boat? You can't—"

"Done deal, Doc."

Sarah tried to absorb the impossible. Ronnie looked ready to cry. Sarah put her arm around her automatically. She was aware that they had in essence been kidnapped, but all she could think about was Michael and the miles the ship's propellers were already churning between them. "You've stranded my husband," she said angrily. "He'll be frantic with worry. You can't just leave him there!"

"You can go back and get him as soon as the old man's on his feet."

"On his feet?" she echoed. "He needs to go in hospital." The black man shook his head.

"The sooner he's in hospital the better chance he has of surviving."

"He's not going in the hospital."

"We've done all we can," said Sarah. "I've counteracted the morphine overdose. Now he needs a hospital. I can't do any more. Let us go."

"Can't do that. You're the only doctor the old man's got."

"When will you let us go?"

"Soon as Mr. Jack's issuing orders."

"What about my husband?"

"He's not going anywhere. You can sail back and pick him up when Mr. Jack says so." He ran an insinuating eye over her body. "Have yourselves a reunion." Sarah looked at her patient, pale as snow and barely breathing. His mutilated fingers twitched on the sheet. "You don't understand," she said. "You've got to get him into hospital."

"Never happen, Doc."

"What if he dies?"

"He can't die. He's got him a doctor and a cute little nurse." THE TIDE HAD STRANDED THE OLD MAN'S CANOE.

It took brutal minutes and all Stone's strength to wrestle the heavy plank hull into the lagoon. Then he saw the damage: the pillars that connected the outrigger to the pontoon had shattered when the canoe had struck the reef.

He pawed frantically through the empty food baskets and hollow coconut shells that littered the floor of the hull, found the old man's spare rope in coils and lengths of cord neatly skeined. He wrapped the split pillars, and jumped aboard. The Dallas Belle was moving slowly, proceeding cautiously past the northern atoll. Stone sheeted out the sail and lowered the steering paddle, and headed for the narrow channel that cut the leeward reef. The little craft leaped lightly to the wind. But across the lagoon, the canoe staggered and began to lose speed. Stone—his eyes locked on the ship while he steered standing on the platform over the outrigger beams—

finally looked down and saw that the hull was filling with water. In the scramble to launch, he had seen the obvious damage but had missed the more destructive consequence of the old man's crash landing. Plank lashings had parted, opening a seam from the bow to the forward outrigger beam—a split nearly six feet long, through which the lagoon poured as the wind pushed the canoe's nose into the smooth water.

Stone ripped off his shirt, stuffed it into the gushing crack. Then he shifted his weight sternward to lift the bow, regained control of the boat, and sailed it through the short passage between the atoll and the barrier reef and into the pass through the reef itself. Outside, the sea tumbled a dozen rows of mangled surf. The canoe climbed sluggishly onto the first comber, fight-mg the weight of the water in her hull. The second wave slapped the little boat sideways. A third sluiced it back into the lagoon. The wind, beam on, banged into its flapping sail and wrenched the outrigger out of the water. As the canoe started to capsize, Stone slashed a stay with his rigging knife. The mast collapsed on the bow with a loud crack, and the canoe wallowed upright, sinking as the sail wafted around it like a shroud.

Stone grabbed the steering oar and paddled for the shallows. Water poured over the gunnels. He jumped overboard and started pulling it toward shore, his lungs heaving, his heart pounding, his mind a blur of shock and despair.

The ship was shrinking in the distance—already smaller than a toy on a boat pond. He'd been crazy to think he could catch it with a canoe. He had panicked, leaping to mindless action, and had nearly drowned himself—Sarah's knight on his charger, catching his neck on a clothesline.

He grabbed his VHF radio, which he should have done immediately, and called on channel 16. "Dallas Belle. Dallas Belle. Dallas Belle. Come in Dallas Belle." There was no response. He called again, "Dallas Belle. Dallas Belle. Dallas Belle. Do you read me, Dallas Belle?" and pressed the radio to his ear. Mid-ocean static, a hollow, empty noise, barely distinguishable from the desolate roar of the surf. He switched to channel 5, which he and Sarah used to communicate when one of them was off the boat. "Sarah. Darling, can you hear me? Sarah! Can you hear me! Sarah!" He called again and again, until the Dallas Belle slipped below the horizon, trailing a smudge of smoke, which the wind scattered.

He was a man of science—a doctor, a navigator, and a self-taught electronics engineer—

who believed in God. But neither faith nor science could explain what had happened to his family. That the sand-colored ship had steamed away with his wife and daughter was impossible. A black curtain might more plausibly descend from the sky or thirty acres of farmland suddenly rise from the sea.

What were they doing to his child and his beautiful wife? He tried to rewrite events in his mind. They had put to sea to steady the ship while Sarah performed a difficult operation. Or they were making an emergency dash to a hospital in the Philippines. Events that made even less sense than the event he couldn't believe. But there was no answer he could bear, no fact he could understand.

The phrase, my beautiful wife, started racing through his mind. For a second he thought he heard Ronnie scream, Daddy! It was a sound so real, so like her frightened shriek the last time she had fallen overboard, that he turned his head to look for her. His incredulous eyes swept the empty lagoon, the deserted circle of beach that rimmed it. High overhead, the trade wind clattered in the palm leaves. The Pacific Ocean stretched forever in every direction.

He was a hundred and fifty miles northeast of Tobi, which had a radio station. Opposite the direction Dallas Belle had disappeared. The Sonsorols, Merir, and Pulo Anna lay far west. But on any of the radio islands, the generator might be broken or out of fuel—with a month to wait for the next state cargo boat.

Angaur, on the other hand, the southernmost of the Palau Islands, had a World War II runway, where he could get a plane to Koror, the capital city. And in Koror was a friend: Marcus Salinis, the president of the tiny Palau Republic. But Angaur was two hundred and fifty miles across the ocean.