Fire And Ice (31 page)

He fell again, stood up, moved ahead, and ran into something hard that banged his knee and scraped his brow. He felt in the dark. It was a wall of brick or stone. Brick—the mortar lines were straight and close. He looked up and felt with his hands. It was about six feet high, and gradually he made out strands of wire across the top. The wall of the execution ground, he realized—Shanghai Peoples' Court Project. Behind him, he heard a familiar clatter—the trigger-happy helicopter was back, searchlight blazing like an angry eye.

Stone swung his backpack high, up over the wire, tugged hard on the shoulder strap until it caught on the barbs, and hoisted himself up.

and the radio pressed to her ear. She had the volume turned down so that all she heard was faint static and the occasional muted squawk of ship-to-ship traffic on the Huangpu. It sounded like the river was breathing in the bed beside her.

The ship's clock in the lounge chimed eight bells. Midnight. Laughter through the door. Mr. Jack's cronies had come aboard at ten, and if the previous nights were any guide, they'd be hard at it until three in the morning.

There was a steady din of machinery outside the ship and occasional shrieks of tortured steel. Suddenly the bed shook and the entire ship trembled. It had happened twice earlier in the evening, a sudden jolt and the resounding boom of something enormously heavy dropped on the deck.

She wished she knew where Moss was.

The captain—who seemed somewhat overwhelmed by the turmoil of shipfitting, the nature of which work Sarah could not see from the stern-facing owner's suite—was sound asleep in his cabin. He had come to her for, as he put it, "A Valium or something," so he could catch up on his sleep. Earlier in the week she had answered the request with sample Valiums or black market Halcions. Tonight she had prescribed the secobarbital she ordinarily used to sedate a patient facing surgery. Five hundred milligrams. The captain would sleep until noon.

Unfortunately, Moss took no drugs and no alcohol, his addictions confined to worshipping Mr. Jack, working out on the Nautilus machines, and net surfing in the computer room. She feared he was there, now, and she could only pray that he was not eavesdropping on radio signals.

Armed only with a basic knowledge of radio systems—she left the electronics to her husband—Sarah reckoned that the ship's computer had been alerted to her satellite telephone call, revealing their position to Marcus in Palau, by a constantly listening radio scanner. (If it had automatically recorded her conversation, then the only reason Moss hadn't searched for her GPS was a mistaken assumption that she had taken her position from the instruments on the temporarily deserted bridge.) Such a signal monitor would work fine at sea, but on the Huangpu River, in the heart of the busiest port in the world, the hundreds and thousands of transmissions would overwhelm the system. That, she hoped, meant Moss had shut it down.

Ah Lee, too, was awake five decks below, carousing with his cousins in the crew's lounge. They were waiting for the bosun to go off watch so they could raid his storeroom for a fifty-yard coil of nylon line. After desperate internal debate—and tormented by Mr. Jack's hideous slave threat—Sarah had approached him directly. Though Ronnie had befriended him, and expanded his English, Sarah did not trust her daughter to be able to conceal the news that her father was near.

Mr. Jack, she realized bitterly, had outfoxed her, seducing Ronnie far more effectively than the child had seduced him. God knew how confused she was and how skewed would be her loyalties. She blamed herself: attempting to insulate Ronnie from fear and use her as a wedge into Mr. Jack's heart, she had abandoned her daughter to a deeper maelstrom of emotion than a ten year old could be expected to understand. Click-click. Click-click.

She lay still, not daring to believe.

Click-click.

She pressed a trembling finger on the Transmit switch, breathed a prayer. On-off. On-off.

"Darling!"

She pressed Transmit and shifted the radio to her lips, vividly aware that the thin, unlocked door was all that stood between her and Mr. Jack, and that Moss's microphones were embedded in the ceiling. "I'm here," she whispered. "Don't board the ship. We'll lower a rope to Veronica. Choose a time."

He waited a full minute before he answered. "Half an hour after the morning fog. Thirty minutes. Do you copy?" "Thirty minutes after the fog."

"Out."

He would have traded a year of life to talk to her a minute longer. A year to hear her whisper that she loved him, that Ronnie was well, that soon they would have their life again. It was her whisper that threw him—a throaty, intimate sound, yet fraught with the danger staring them both in the face.

He shivered, partly from emotion, partly from the damp cold emanating from the ground and the icy brick wall. The square it enclosed was enormous, with room for a baseball diamond and spectators. If the dark corner into which he wedged his back was center field, then home plate diagonally opposite was a good five hundred feet away. A light in that corner silhouetted what he had thought, when he first scaled the wall, was a squad of soldiers standing at attention. But as he watched in silence, crouched where he had landed, he gradually realized that they were too still. Now they looked like sawed-off trees, six or eight feet of trunk shorn of their branches. The rest of the enclosure was as black as the dark corner where he hid.

Suddenly there was activity at the entrance. He thought he saw a person pass before the light. Then a gate swung open on a moving clump of light. The search party. He heard conversation—brusque exchanges that sounded military or hierarchical in tone. The soldiers were demanding entrance. He rose on aching legs to vault back over the wall. There was a shouting match, and then the guard sent the patrol away and shut the gate. But a minute later, possibly reconsidering his position, the guard commenced a sweep of the grounds himself, walking the wall with a flashlight. Starting from home plate, he walked toward first base and on into right field. Stone followed his progress by his light and when it veered toward his corner in center field, he loped quietly in the dark toward second base and doubled behind the searcher, settling back into his corner as the man explored the edges of left field. He dozed and woke shivering. Dozed some more, starting awake with anxious looks at his watch. The hours crept by—two, three, four. He thought of the chances he must take and grew crazy with doubt. He slept from five to five-thirty and woke feeling little refreshed, his stomach alive with hunger, his mouth dry, craving coffee. He was gazing across the enclosure, studying the wooden posts that studded the distant ground, before he realized that dawn had already broken, casting enough light through the overcast for him to see the far walls. The posts—for that was what they definitely were, wooden posts sunk in the ground—stood like the sentinels he had imagined in the dark. Warily, he stirred, studying the walls to the left and right. The light revealed a scruffy field of uncut grass and very little cover. If anyone at the home plate end were to study the far walls carefully, they'd spot him.

The light grew stronger.

He cursed himself for waiting too long. He should have awakened earlier. On the other hand, what fog there was lay thinly on the ground. Was it the same beyond the walls, or did the walls block the fog on its route from the river? Sarah would make her move half an hour after the fog was thick. Only by climbing the wall could he see, and if he tried they would surely spot him. Yet better to try now before more people came. He focused his binoculars on the far corner. A wooden shed sat beside a wide gate in the brick wall. It had a door and a window, and a stovepipe which emitted a curl of white smoke. The guard had disappeared. He scanned the area one last time. Empty. Not even a face at the

window. It was the best chance he would get and he started to his feet. Pain shot through his knees and lanced up and down the stiff muscles of his legs. He forced himself to stand and felt a bone-deep ache in his feet the instant they took his weight. Then his knees collapsed and he sank half falling back to the ground, virtually paralyzed from yesterday's long run through the fields, the leap from the train, and the night in the cold damp. In his bag he found three ibuprofen, which he swallowed dry, and started massaging his leg muscles and working his knees and ankles, loosening up to try again.

Suddenly the shed door banged open. The guard rushed out and put his shoulder to the gate, sliding it open for a white truck. Behind it came a line of canvas-covered-stake trucks. The white truck stopped by the wooden posts. The other trucks parked haphazardly. Soldiers jumped down, shouting, brandishing rifles. Stone counted twenty prisoners descending awkwardly from beneath the canvas covers. Chained wrist and ankle, they were shivering in light cotton shirts and trousers. Their cuffs had been tied with cord.

The soldiers herded them toward the wooden posts.

Stone clenched his binoculars in shock and amazement, his eye riveted by a familiar cocky stance. The prisoner's fine clothes were ripped and stained, his face puffed with bruises. But he was still Ronald, his gaze turned hopefully skyward, sure that some old friend would send a helicopter.

They forced him to his knees and removed his handcuffs to chain his arms behind him around the post. Ronald shouted something with a grin. They looped wire around his neck and the post and twisted it tightly so he could no longer speak. The squad leader blew a whistle.

The soldiers stepped forward, one to each post, and raised their rifles. The whistle blew again and they fired a ragged volley. The prisoners' heads jerked. The boom of the heavy weapons echoed around the walls. Ronald slumped against the wire, his body convulsing like a netted fish.

Stone felt his own body tense, bracing for the coup de grace. But no death shot was delivered. Instead, a photographer flashed a camera over each body and an official wearing white gloves removed the chains and wire. At the same time, a gang—the only word that the sickened Stone could apply—of white-coated hospital staff jumped from the white truck, which was, Stone realized at last, a large and gruesome ambulance. They listened with stethoscopes and, working quickly, carried some of the bodies, including Ronald's, to the ambulance.

Even the executioners seemed disgusted as the butcher's crew sorted out the temporary survivors whose vital organs were available for transplant. They stood to one side, smoking and staring at the ground.

When the ambulance was full, it lurched away, blaring a siren at the gate, which, when it opened, revealed a second ambulance truck waiting to come in, and fog thick as snow. Stone jumped for the wall, dug his toes into the slots between the bricks, grabbed the wire between the rusty barbs, and hauled himself up and out of the execution ground. The fog embraced him as he ran, but sporadically, like an unstable lover, dissolving without warning, thinning to a windblown mist. The ship breaker's shed loomed like a distant mountain or an unconvincing mirage. Suddenly lost when the fog billowed thick as cotton, he tried to puzzle out his position by the wail of a steam whistle; wind swirled and he was just as suddenly alone in the middle of a broad circle. A train rumbled into the circle. Stone veered away, running in the direction he thought he had seen the breaker's yard.

AT TEN TO SEVEN, WHEN THE LIGHT HAD GROWN STRONG

enough for Sarah to see the river traffic, the fog had rolled up the Huangpu and tumbled over its banks. It gathered like petticoat pleats around the vessels in the stream, doubling, lapping over, crumpling. When it had enfolded the ships entirely, she had begun timing Michael's half hour.

If the weather held to its usual morning pattern, they might have three, even four, hours before the fog lifted. But the wind, light and from the northwest, had started backing. If it backed all the way to the northeast, as it had yesterday morning, it would blow hard and disperse the fog.

At a quarter past seven, she clicked Transmit on her handheld. No response. At twenty past, she clicked again. And when Michael did not reply, she decided she had no choice but to stick to their plan. Ronnie was in bed. As Sarah paced from window to window, Ronnie followed her with her eyes.

The old man still hadn't come to bed.

Sarah leaned over Ronnie and whispered in her ear. "Daddy found us." Ronnie's face lit like the sun. "Daddy's h—" "Shhh!"

"He's here? Oh, Mummy, what will Mr. Jack—"

Sarah whispered, "We're going to escape with Daddy on Veronica. I'm going to go get Mr. Jack now. Get dressed. Your warmest things."

She felt for the hypodermic and opened the door to the lounge, which had grown quiet around five-thirty. Two leather-skinned People's Liberation Army generals were sprawled on the couches, collars open, shoes off. One was snoring. The other was so still he looked dead.

Mr. Jack was sleeping in his chair, his skull-like head slumped to one side, his thin lips shut, his breathing regular. As Sarah approached, his eyes glittered.

"Whadya want, Doc?"

"I'm putting you to bed."

"Good idea." His gaze swept the empty bottles and overflowing ashtrays. "Jesus." He rose unsteadily. Sarah took his good arm and steered him toward the bedroom. "You wanna check my pals for signs of life?"

"It's your signs I'm worried about, Mr. Jack. Are you trying to kill yourself?"

"Don't worry. I'm not jumping the gun."

She had already opened his bed. Kicking the door gently shut behind her, she guided him toward it, got him seated on the edge, and knelt to remove his slippers.

"You're good at this, Doc. Hubby a drinking man?"

She lifted his skinny legs and slipped them under the sheets. "My father drank, after my mother died."

"Thought you went to school in England."

She pressed him gently down, arranged a pillow under his head, and covered him, except for his right arm, which she held gently on top of the blanket. "After the civil war I went home on holiday. He was very lonely."

Her hands were shaking.