Fire And Ice (36 page)

"What?"

"It's a joke, kid."

"But why?"

"Why not?"

He stared ahead, gloating like the happiest man alive, as the gigantic six-story piece of steel moved slowly over the gas carrier's foredeck. The whistle blew. The cranes stopped, the piece swinging gently. When the men with the guy ropes had stopped the swinging, the whistle blew again and the piece began to descend. Ronnie saw that a sort of steel foundation had been laid, and as she watched, the cranes jockeyed sideways, lining it up.

"Laser guided," said Mr. Jack. "You know how that works?"

"Sure."

"Here comes the tricky part."

The piece touched with a hollow boom, and Ronnie felt the deck move under her feet. Again, a boom. Now the crane cables slackened and workmen swarmed with chattering pneumatic drills.

In minutes, the cranes were swinging back over the

cruise ship, lining up the next piece. She saw now that the full length of the superstructure had been cut every twenty feet and that they were going to move it piece by piece onto Mr. Jack's ship.

"So what do you think?"

She tumbled the ship in her head to see how it would look head-on. Dazzled by the sight, she spoke without thinking, "It's like a mask."

"What do you mean?" he asked sharply.

"When it's facing you, it will look like it put on a mask." The old man chuckled. The kid was something else. He nodded toward the cranes, which were shifting a second six-story section of steel superstructure. "From the side, too."

"Why?"

"You figure it out, smarty-pants."

He watched her closely. She didn't get it, yet. Not yet. Smart kid, though. She would. Her eyes were everywhere. But she shrugged. "Are Mummy and Daddy really calling tomorrow?"

"We'll call them."

"I can't wait."

Moss hurried out onto the bridge wing, his breath steaming in the cold. He nodded at the kid.

Mr. Jack said, "Ronnie, run inside. I'll call you in a second." She edged past Moss.

Moss handed him an E-mail printout. "From the bean counters," he said, using their phrase for the executives who ran Mr. Jack's enterprises in his absence.

"I told you no communication."

"Sorry, Mr. Jack. I had to set up an emergency link in case something went wrong. The bean counters thought this was an emergency. I think so, too." Mr. Jack put on his glasses and read the one line: Inquiries received from Hong Kong and Australia. "That son of a bitchin' doctor."

Jack Powell felt old, for the first time in his seventy-eight years. Why, he wondered, had he let the parents go?

Roused by bells and whistles from deep sleep after raising hell all night with the generals, he had been disoriented—admit it, frightened—frightened by the fire. He had recovered pretty fast, that was for damned sure. But then the goddammed fireboats threw him again.

He knew the ropes in Shanghai—knew the ones to yank—but bureaucrats were bureaucrats, whether they were in Washington, Houston, Lagos, or China, and he had suddenly seen the whole scam fly out of control.

Reports were being filed by the hundreds: unauthorized construction; a gas ship where it had no business being on the Huangpu; the safety of the city; et cetera, et-goddammedcetera. It was being handled. Bureaucrats could be made to feel terror, if you could find the right ones, and his old friends were good at finding the right ones. But in the noise of battle all he'd been able to think was how in hell was he going to explain the black-and-white doctors screaming for their kid.

Face it, if the doctors had jumped onto a fireboat in the chaos—or if a fireboat commander had seen Moss shoot the sons of bitches or drop the grenade he had ready in their goddammed sailboat, there'd have been unexplainable hell to pay. And while it was being paid and explained, some busybody bureaucrat would have slapped a restraining order on the Dallas Belle and they'd be stuck in Shanghai for a year. Now, looking at Ronnie's sad brown face about to melt into tears for Mummy and Daddy, he wished he had nailed them on the spot and bulled through it. Hell, the fire was a big thing. The Chinese were as panicked as he had been in those first seconds. Son of a bitch doctor knew what he was doing. It would take more than one burning valve to breach her heavily-insulated tanks. She was built to survive fire, grounding, even collision. To blow her up, you had to crack her open with shaped charges. But how did the son of a bitch know? According to Doctor Mummy, Doctor Daddy was a self-taught engineer. Acoustics. Electronics. Maybe their buddy in the salvage business had taught them about gas carriers. Maybe he

read Professional Mariner. Or Safety At Sea. Brass-balled son of a bitch.

"Son of a bitch!"

"What, Mr. Jack?"

"What's your name, kid?"

"Huh?"

"Your name."

"Ronnie. You know."

"Your whole name."

Her eyes slid aside for just a second, before she answered, "Veronica Margaret Soditan Samuels."

"Yeah? Where'd you get the Margaret?"

"Both Mummy and Daddy's mothers' names were Margaret. And they both died when they were very young." "Handy coincidence. How about the Soditan?" "Mummy's maiden name. From her father."

"Who made up the Samuels?"

"Mummy and Daddy —I mean, that's Daddy's name." "Sure, kid." She looked terrified. He let her stew a moment. "Seen enough?"

"Yes, Mr. Jack."

"Run down to the cabin and ask Ah Lee for some hot cocoa." But she stood rooted to the deck like a little bush. Old and dumb, he thought, old and dumb.

"Moss," he yelled. "Front and center."

Then he took pity. "Hey, don't cry, little girl. I won't tell on your daddy. I'm a bad guy too."

"He's not bad."

"Well, neither am I, really."

Stupid, though. Should have made the connection right off—but it had happened after he had bailed out of Nigeria, just before it became a total nuthouse. . . . A general had been murdered. Mummy Doc's father? The cops had charged a white American. Daddy Doc?

Scuttlebutt had said it was a bullshit story to cover a CIA screwup. Whatever. They never did catch the white guy. The American had escaped. Was he the loose cannon headed for Tokyo? Mr. Jack shrugged. God knew, so many crazy stories came out of Africa.

"Go on, kid. Get outta here. I gotta talk to Moss." Moss hurried in from the computer room. "What's up, Mr. Jack?"

Ronnie circled Moss like a rabbit around a snake and made a beeline down the corridor. Jack Powell waited until he heard her sneakers slapping on the stairs. "Beep the captain." The captain responded a minute later.

"Mr. Jack wants you. Now."

"Ah got my hands full up here."

"On the bridge. Now."

They waited in silence, Moss wanting to ask but knowing not to, Jack Powell ruminating on his shortcomings.

"Captain," he said, when the Texan clumped in looking pissed off. "I want you to plot the route that Doctor S. and her hubby are sailing to Tokyo."

"East China Sea. Osumi Strait. Philippine Sea. Hang a left at Tokyo Bay."

"That much I can figure out on my own. What matters is the wind. It's a sailboat. I want the exact route."

"Any objection to my chief mate crunching the numbers? I'm kind of busy. Those bozos on the cranes make One false move and they'll blow us to hell." Jack Powell's expression turned wintery. "Captain—and I use the title loosely, since you'

ve already had your master's ticket revoked for blowing your last command to hell—"

"That weren't my fault."

"I believe in you, Captain. Hell, I'm paying you a lifetime's wages for one voyage. Unless you want me to promote your chief mate . . ."

"No, sir."

"Huddle with the computers and the goddammed weather fax and tell me where the man'

s going to sail. And you," he shot at Moss, who was grinning at the captain's discomfort,

"you work out where you're going to stop 'em. What, Moss?"

"You going to let the kid radio them tomorrow?" "Yes."

"Maybe we can triangulate their signal."

Mr. Jack beamed. "Captain, you should have thought of that."

"Didn't have to. Been watching the weather."

The captain walked to the weather facsimile machine and tore off the latest chart.

"There's a doozy of a cold front moving off the continent onto the East China Sea. Brand-new undisturbed front, wedging under this warm air mass." He waved the chart in Moss's face. "And this here puppy's a depression." He traced the depression—a tight whorl that resembled a knot in hardwood—with a work-scarred finger. "Dropping a millibar an hour, deepening like a bastard. Keeps doing this it's going to build into what the weather boys call a 'bomb,' and bomb the shit outta the doctors. They got no weather fax and there's no way the plain language forecast is going to pin the puppy down. Any luck, it'll sink 'em by lunchtime."

shot. But while he brought his sextant up to the cockpit, he studied the sky less with an eye to navigation than to the weather. He knew approximately where they were by dead reckoning—a respectable hundred and forty miles east of the Huangpu, averaging seven and a half knots over the bottom, the eastward setting current making up for the boatslowing chop. And with the chart showing nothing to crash into between here and Japan, they could wait for a celestial fix.

"I wish I had killed him when I had the chance," said Sarah. Stone barely heard her. Speed was all: he had to shape a course to find the best wind—

which was backing west and dropping—while avoiding getting beaten up by the storm headed their way. Not only would it slow them down, but also in the shallow East China Sea, steep waves could overwhelm even a boat as strong as the Swan. The barometer and the radio shipping reports painted a general picture. He had to know precisely what would happen within the radius of the ninety miles Veronica might sail in the next twelve hours.

He had thrown his weather fax overboard years ago, a victim of Pacific humidity. Lacking the upper air charts that weather stations broadcast four times a day, he had learned slowly and painstakingly to read the sky like a 3-D monitor. Jet cirrus clouds were invading the upper atmosphere, trailing streaks of ice crystals that thickened into broad banners. It was usually hard to judge their speed without fixed references on the empty sea, but these were shooting between the horizons, indicating ferocious temperature differences between the retreating warm front and the advancing cold.

Strong jets meant severe weather.

So did their flight path from northwest to southeast.

So did the cumulus clouds, lower down in the sky, that were traveling on a different course from the west: Watts's "crossed-winds" rule said that if you stood with your back to the surface wind and the upper wind came from your left, things were going to get worse before they got better. "Low weather from the left hand." To put "right weather" on his right hand, all he had to do was turn around and go the other way. Were time and speed less important than safety, he would do just that. But now time was everything, and the only question was did he want to run before the storm or cut across its path and try to squeeze through the canyon between the advancing and retreating systems?

Ocean Passages noted a peculiarity of the northeast monsoon: it slackened ahead of a depression. Stone felt it happening already, the wind dropping, and he wondered whether it would cut their speed too much for them to make it across the storm. The only good news was that the broken sky was growing increasingly clouded: heavy cloud suggested a smallish low. And, promised Ocean Passages, the monsoon would come screaming back as soon as the low passed.

He ran below to look again at the color-smeared chart he had drawn. The cold front was relatively near its breeding ground; young and active, it might shove the depression by quickly. Maybe. He looked again at the sky and imagined the clifflike face of the young front.

He decided to take a chance. Instead of cutting across the low or retreating behind it, he would run with the son of a bitch and hope for the best.

Sarah concurred, which Stone found a little unsettling. She was never a risk taker on the boat. But since they had

lost Ronnie, she was driving herself and the boat way beyond the edge.

"My watch," he said. "Get some sleep."

Sarah went below. But instead of climbing under a blanket, she began methodically cleaning the galley, only vaguely aware that she had cleaned it spotless two hours earlier. She had never felt so trapped on the boat. It was like drowning in a cage. For every breath of wind that pushed them ahead, a wave shoved them back. For every two hours at the helm, an eternal two hours below unable to sleep, her mind in knots. She kept trying to tell herself that Mr. Jack was enchanted by Ronnie. Everyone was, everyone who met the child. But the old man was completely unpredictable. And totally unrestrained.

Who would challenge him? Moss? Not bloody likely. The captain was hopeless, the ship'

s crew isolated from Mr. Jack's throne room. Whatever occurred in the Dallas Belle's palatial owner's suite was Mr. Jack's to decide.

She was rubbing a frayed sponge on the corroded stainless steel saltwater tap—back and forth, back and forth—when she began to realize that the boat was heeling less. The noise of cutting water had quietened to a dull murmur. The wind had died. Impossible. They lived by the trade winds and the monsoon.

She darted up the companionway, slid open the hatch. "Michael!" He had shipped the dodger and lashed it down. And to her astonishment, he was hanking the storm jib onto the inner forestay and had already taken a third reef in the mainsail.

"What are you doing!"

Without bothering to look up, he nodded astern.

Now she saw in detail what she had registered only as darkness when she ran up the companionway. The horizon had moved in close. Hard-edged and randomly crenelated, it looked like streets of old buildings in a city made of stone. Cloud formed this apparition, cloud that plummeted sheer gray from a gray sky, blackening as it fell to a thin, bone-white line that edged the rim of the sea.