Fire And Ice (37 page)

The white was water churned up by a squall line that

preceded the front like dragoons galloping ahead of infantry to draw first blood. Stone raised the storm jib. It hung limp in the suddenly dead air. He released the main halyard.

"Get the storm trysail," he called. Sarah was already on her way, down the companionway, racing through the main cabin into the forepeak where the trysail lay in its bright yellow bag.

She dragged it up on deck as he wrapped sail ties over the furled main, and clipped on the halyard, secured the clew, and bent sheets to the sail's tack. A gust swept the water, whipping the tops off the waves.

"Ready."

Stone heaved on the halyard. A second gust smacked into the little sail. Sarah sheeted it in. The jib filled, too, and the Swan jumped ahead.

The white line caught up with a loud hiss. The wind doubled. The Swan leaned over, buried her bow, but before she could fling the sea aside, the wind doubled again, shrieking in the rigging, solid as a wall. It slammed the boat, already staggering under the weight of the water pounding her bow. She fell on her side like a heart-shot elk. Stone and Sarah went flying, tumbling into the leeward lifelines, which were disappearing underwater. For an instant the only thought in his head was, Thank God for Ronnie's child netting or they'd be thrown through the lines. But instead of the netting, he smashed into one of the stanchions that supported the lines. He heard a loud crunch and both felt and saw a blaze of pain as if someone had opened his skull to shine a light inside. He teetered on the edge of consciousness. Then his mouth and nose filled with cold water and he convulsed in a half-drowned attempt to breathe. Something was tugging at his right arm. Sarah, struggling to free herself from the grip that had kept her from tumbling over the lines into the water. The boat uprighted itself with a whoosh of seawater pouring from the sails, and flung them both in another tangle of arms and legs back into the cockpit. Sarah recovered first. "Can you steer?" she yelled over the shriek of the wind.

"I'm okay."

"Steer. I'll get the kit."

She dove below, timing her opening of the hatch to keep the breaking seas from washing down with her, and reappeared in a moment with Surgipads and bandage.

"Are you hurt?" yelled Stone, hands full of the helm as he tried to put the boat on a course across the wicked chop. The sea was as ragged as rows of serrated knives, and the blowing spray and something that kept stinging his eyes made it almost impossible to distinguish waves from the bow of the boat.

Sarah faced him, braced herself by locking her legs around the binnacle post, and wiped his face with a hand towel that came away red. "Oh, it's me," he said stupidly. "Bad?"

"You're still standing." She covered the wound with a Surgipad. Stone could see better now that the blood was out of his eyes. Veronica looked undamaged by her knockdown. But the China Sea was a mass of wildly moving water. The sky was dark, the sails tight as drumheads, streaming spray, and banging every time the wind shifted.

"Go below," he yelled. "No sense in both of us getting beat up at the same time What are you looking at?"

Sarah had thrown her head back and was staring at the masthead. Stone felt a stab of alarm. What had he missed?

"Is the aerial all right?"

She meant the radio antenna, tomorrow's connection to Ronnie.

"Go below," he said. "Try the radio. Then get some sleep." Sarah tore her eyes from the masthead and stared bitterly at the raging sea. An hour of the chaotic wind drove the shallow sea into a frenzy. At the helm he was doing less steering than dodging. For the waves were growing steeper—slab-sided monsters that charged like bulls and collapsed suddenly, dropping tons of gray-green water that staggered Veronica, When they fell on the foredeck, they drove her bow under, pitching her so steeply that Stone fell against the helm. When they crashed behind her, they slammed into the cockpit, filling it to his knees and pummeling his shoulders. It was like a gang mugging, a sudden one-sided confrontation with mindless violence.

A lesser boat would have broken to pieces already. But the Swan was born on the Baltic—another malevolently shallow sea—and her hull could take a strong beating. Stronger than her crew.

The anemometer was measuring wind gusts near forty knots, a force 8 fresh gale building to a force 9. Wave crests broke apart, scattering long lines of dense foam across the lumpy sea. Tall waves started tumbling heavily, booming as they crashed beside Veronica. Blowing spray drove the oxygen from the atmosphere, and for long moments Stone couldn't draw a breath.

Should have gone around behind it, he thought. Too late now.

Sarah opened the hatch a crack, crawled over the washboards and across the cockpit to hand Stone a pair of scuba-diving goggles. She held the helm while he put them on, then crawled below. When she next appeared, she had a squeeze bottle filled with sweetened cocoa.

Stone sensed shadow behind him as he reached for the cocoa. Sarah's eyes filled with disbelief. He looked back to see a square-faced sea reaching halfway up the backstay. It was racing after the boat, blocking the sky like a two-story building. He tried to swing the stem at right angles to the advancing face.

She wouldn't answer the helm. The rudder moved too easily as the wave sucked water out from under the stem. The hull staggered, clumsy, started to broach. A slant of wind filled the jib and pushed the bow around just as the wave crashed aboard. Tons of water, heavy as lead, black as night, drove Stone to the cockpit sole, flattening him, his knees collapsed, his legs a-tangle. It ripped his right hand from the wheel and scrabbled at his left. Flailing with his right, he felt his fingers close on the slippery softness of Sarah's sea boot.

The stem plummeted, the bow pointed at the sky. Water filled his pants, his jacket, his boots. It rushed past his head and then suddenly the deck thrust up under them, flinging them into light and air. He grabbed a stanchion

and tried to orient himself. For a long moment the cockpit resembled a bathtub. Then water drained out the scuppers and the Swan was afloat, bobbing on the surface, sails rattling like machine guns. He was still holding Sarah's foot.

She lay on her back, staring up at the mast.

"You okay?" he yelled. One of his gloves had vanished, flayed from his hand.

"The aerial?" she pointed.

He pulled the goggles from his eyes, shielded his face from the spray. Still there. The cockpit was a snakes' nest of sodden rope. The sheets had been stripped from their winches. One of the lifeline stanchions was bent, and the torrent had shredded the child netting like strands of seaweed. But both sails were intact. He sheeted them in and set the boat back on course, stern to the thundering seas.

"Steer. I gotta douse the jib. We're going too fast." He clipped his safety harness onto the jack line he had led over the coach roof, crawled to the mast, fumbled in the near darkness for the storm halyard. The wind seized the sail when it descended the inner forestay, the heavy Dacron banged and crackled like sheet metal. Stone fought it to the deck, attempting to smother it with his body. Fingernails were broken from his bare hand. A five-minute job stretched to twenty. Once the sail ballooned under him and threatened to throw him over the lifelines. He bagged the sail and lashed it down and crawled at last back to the cockpit.

The boat began to resonate with a low, deep moaning sound. The wind was rising again, howling through the rigging. And despite the lowered storm jib, Veronica was picking up speed, lunging and surfing from wave to wave, plummeting dangerously into the deepening troughs. The air was liquid, a wind-driven mix of spray, spindrift, and icy rain racing horizontally across the decks.

Stone cast a weary eye on the storm trysail. He was exhausted from dousing the jib. But the trysail, a minuscule triangle of heavy cloth, was driving the boat too fast. Sarah nodded. It had to go. She stepped behind the wheel again. Stone crawled forward. An hour had passed before he returned to the cockpit.

Sarah tried to send him below. But that he could not do, although he could barely stand. Veronica was crashing ahead under a bare mast. Without a scrap of sail flying, she was making eight knots. And Stone's gut told him that if the wind blew any harder or the waves climbed any steeper, she would be fighting for her life.

The moan in the rigging sharpened to a shriek.

It was a sound he had heard only twice before: once in the Roaring Forties, a thousand miles from Capetown, and once in a typhoon that had wiped out half the Philippines.

of the depression. Time seemed to stop. He grew vaguely aware that he had ceased to care, that exhaustion and incipient hypothermia were separating mind and body. It didn't matter. If anything, he felt warmer. All he needed was a nice long sleep. Just close his eyes and sleep.

"Michael!"

"What? What? Ow!" His lips were burning.

"Drink this. Wake up!"

Hot, sweet tea, thick with sugar, like warm syrup. How she had managed to make it with the boat crashing side to side, he would never know. Nor where she got the strength to scream in his face until he remembered who he was. And where he was.

"Don't die!" she screamed. "Look at me!"

He drank. She came back with more. He drank half, then forced the rest on her. "Okay. I'

m okay."

Then, gradually, he began to realize that he was worrying about Ronnie again. It was as if his mind had registered a minute change in the storm, a lessening of the danger. He listened. The wind shriek had dropped a decibel. The sea was still chaos. It mauled them for hours. But the wind was veering northwest, north, northeast, and at last he and Sarah allowed themselves to share a look of hope.

Dawn, two days east of Shanghai: steep waves jumping at a gloomy sky; cold rain rattling on the sails.

Veronica beat to windward, logging seven knots under reefed main and a tall, narrow slab of heavy Dacron hanked to the inner forestay. The East China Sea was gray; the horizon ragged, oppressively close; and the sky so dark that when Sarah came up at eight o'clock to relieve him, Stone was still steering by the red glow of the compass light.

"I wish," she said, "I had killed him when I had the chance." She spoke as if the thought were new. But she said it at each watch change—the only time they saw each other—and often they were her only words. He reached to take her hand, but she wouldn't let him.

"It wouldn't have made a difference," he said. "It was the other one who grabbed her."

"Moss is a machine. He's nothing without the old man." Stone could not agree that Moss was nothing; blazing through his mind was the recurring image of the black man swooping down like a bird of prey. "Four hours to go," he said, hoping to calm or at least distract her with happier thoughts.

Sarah looked up at the radio antenna on the masthead. "Will you check the radio?"

"Soon as I go below." He had tuned in the weather every two hours. The radio was fine.

"Where are you going?"

She had started forward. "Shake out the reef."

"No," said Stone. "She'll just heel too much and slow down." Sarah returned reluctantly to the cockpit. He stepped away from the helm. "I'm going to get some sleep. Give me a yell if the wind starts screaming." Already the western sky was getting lighter. Sarah eyed it hungrily.

Stone woke an hour later to feel the boat laboring under too much sail. He went up on deck. The rain had stopped, but the wind and the spray pelting the dodger were colder. Sarah, shivering at the helm, tracked him with a defiant stare as he took a second reef in the main.

"Head up a little," he called. "We've got to go to the storm jib."

"No. You'll slow us down."

She was suffering, and he was trying to be gentle with her. But the interrupted sleep and the cold he felt so sharply stirred his own anger. "Don't tell me what'll slow this boat. Head up!"

Sarah gripped the helm like a weapon.

"Goddammit! I love her too!" Stone yelled. "Trust me to sail the boat, for crissake."

"You think I can't?"

"You're not doing a great job of it at the moment." "Aye, aye, Captain."

"Head up!"

Sarah's lips set hard. Only a spasm flickering under her cheek betrayed her confusion. " My child needs me."

"Read the knot meter," Stone yelled. "What is it? Six-eight?" He couldn't see the speedometer from the mast, but everything he felt—from the noise in his ears to the wind on his face, to the minute vibrations of the deck beneath his feet—told him that the Swan was sailing at 6.8 knots and should be doing 7.1.

Sarah tore her gaze from him to the knot meter. Then, with a strange look—a look that tore his heart—she did as he demanded and steered the boat closer to the wind. Stone dropped the heavy forestay sail and raised the storm jib in its place. Sarah wouldn't meet his eye as he went below.

He sprawled on the leeward berth in the main cabin and closed his eyes, sleep impossible. He thought he would give his arm to have his child back. But after listening to the hollow, wet noise of the bow crashing through the steepening seas, he admitted he would give his other arm to see his wife smile again. Neither seemed likely to happen. He fine-tuned the self-steering gear so that he could join Sarah below when Ronnie radioed. While a close-hauled windward beat was among the best of the Swan's points of sail, the same was not true of the self-steering, particularly in choppy seas. The waves kept knocking her bow

off course, devouring speed. He started the generator and reluctantly switched on the electric autopilot, which had a dangerous habit of shorting out with no warning. At five minutes before noon, he took a careful look at the horizons and then went below into the relative warmth and quiet of the cabin. Sarah was at the nav station, the radio on, the mike in her hand. Stone braced himself on the companionway steps, wondering what stratagem Jack Powell would use to ensure their privacy on the open radio waves. The answer came in Ronnie's voice.

"Ronnie calling Veronica. Ronnie calling Veronica." "Oh!" Sarah gasped. "Oh, Michael." She felt blindly for his hand, her gaze locked on the radio.