Fire And Ice (4 page)

Overwhelmed, exhausted from his battle to beach the canoe, he sank to its gunnel and stared. The weather he had noticed earlier was filling the eastern horizon. He looked north, dreaming he would see the Dallas Belle steaming back with a perfectly plausible explanation.

A dark spot on the horizon set his heart pounding. It grew, too quickly, and materialized into a flock of black noddies searching for fish. His gaze descended to the lagoon again. A hundred yards down the beach, something large and white was drifting ashore. A dead shark? He watched it, puzzled, as it turned slowly with the current. A frigate bird spiraled toward it and circled tentatively.

A body? Had the navigator sailed in company?

Stone ran. The bird pulled up with an angry shriek. He waded into the shallows, grabbed a cold hand, and pulled it ashore.

It was a man. He was not a Pacific Islander but a pale white European, naked except for boxer shorts and one rubber flip-flop stuck between his toes. He wore a wedding band and a watch. His face had been battered on the reef. But that alone had not killed him, Stone discovered when he turned him over and saw three bullet holes in his back.

"Oh, Sarah."

Stone cast a professional eye on the wounds: small-caliber weapon, the slugs still in him, no single wound instantly fatal. He could have been thrown off the Dallas Belle still alive or jumped. Young and powerfully built, he might have drowned before he bled to death. At that moment Stone seized upon a single truth, the only fact he knew: he had to get off the atoll.

The old navigator's supplies that had floated out of the sinking boat bobbed on the surface of the lagoon.

Stone waded out and quickly gathered baskets and leaf-wrapped bundles of food, coconuts for drinking, sodden rope and twine, bailers, a gourd of palm wine. He dragged two spare spars ashore as well and several huge taro leaves which the old man would have used for shelter from the sun. He bailed the flooded hull and found some yams and breadfruit, a moldy square of canvas, and a long breadfruit twig coated in a sticky substance that stuck to his hands.

Stone sorted what he salvaged into piles and shook his head. The little boat had carried everything a Micronesian navigator needed on the open sea—food and water, shelter from the tropic sun by day and the cold spray at night, and materials for repairs. But unlike Stone, the old Pacific islander had had no need to carry a compass or a sextant or almanacs or a chart. He had held the star paths in his mind, the currents and swell patterns in memory, and had honed his land-finding instincts with a lifetime of close observation of birds, fish, and clouds.

Stone would have surrendered his arm for Ronnie's GPS.

Maybe at night, his own memory of the stars and constellations . . . surely he could hold a course at night . . . and he had learned a trick or two during ten years in these waters. Suddenly his heart flew: he remembered a minicompass he kept in his medical bag to take a bearing if he got caught in the fog in the inflatable dinghy. It was a magnificent break, brilliant luck that energized him for the primary task of making the canoe seaworthy. It would never swim until he found a way to repair the hull. He looked up at the sun, then checked his watch. Another lucky break. Incredibly, it was only two o'clock.—My beautiful wife . . . Daddy!—Taking refuge in the things he knew, he vowed to set sail before dark.

His jury-rigging of the outrigger had pretty much fallen apart, while the split in the hull had been worked wider by the tumbling in the pass. He saw immediately a better way to brace the outrigger, so he put that job aside and concentrated on the split seam. The hull was carvel-built, the long planks meeting flush at their edges. Where a Maine boatyard would have joined the planks with nails, however, the Puluwat canoe makers lashed them together with coir, an elastic coconut fiber. It was the coir—stitched through holes drilled every four or five inches—that had

Popped.

Stone worked his way along the seam, plucking broken strands out of the holes, and praying that no plank had split. They were all right, until he reached the dent that marked the impact with the reef.

"Son of a bitch."

It had hit right on the seam and both planks had split, right along the line of holes, which meant he would have

to drill new holes, without a drill. He thought of his orderly tool chests aboard Veronica, and felt his heart suddenly pierced with fear.

All the tools he had now were in his medical bag, the backpack he had hung on a peg in the corner post of the fale where the old man had died. He had scalpels and spare blades to cut the coir, his Swiss Army knife, surgical scissors and his rigging knife, some disposable cigarette lighters that he carried as gifts, but nothing resembling a drill. If he could find a nail, he could drive it through with a rock and pull it out with his dental pliers. But a nail was not likely on an island where the coconut was the source of every building material.

He ran across the hump of land between the lagoon and the windward reef and searched for driftwood with a nail in it. Nothing but an ancient weathered tree trunk that might have ridden equatorial countercurrents from a Mindanaoan shore, or been pushed four thousand miles from Christmas Island by the tradewinds.

He ran back, eyes everywhere, wondering if he could get away without lashing the planks where they'd split. Two holes. All he needed was two holes, double up on the coir and caulk the split with something. He hadn't considered caulking yet. But without it, water would geyser through the seam with every dip of the sailing canoe's nose and flex of its hull. Maybe palm sap. He jabbed a tree with the Swiss knife, but the sap ran thin. He went back to the fale for his backpack.

The peg where he'd hung it, he noticed at last, wasn't made of wood. It was a brass bolt, tarnished a brown-green color, and he realized with a leaping heart that some long time ago someone had found it in a piece of driftwood and screwed it into the post. Stone gripped it with his dental pliers. Praying it wouldn't disintegrate, he gently screwed it out. With his bag in one hand and the precious bolt in the other, he ran back around the lagoon and knelt beside the canoe, studied the grain of both planks for the safest entry, and began screwing the bolt into the water-softened wood.

He worked from the outside in, taking care not to make the hole too big, and then from the inside out until he

joined the holes in the middle and saw light. He repeated the process on the lower plank, screwing in, pulling out, screwing in, pulling out. It took an hour to bore two holes. Sand kept sticking to his fingers; he finally tumbled to the realization that the sticky substance the old man had carried was breadfruit sap that the islanders used for caulking. They melted it with a piece of smoldering twine; Stone used his lighter. He coated both edges of the open seam and packed it with gauze. Then he stitched twine through the holes and, using his scalpel haft for leverage, twisted it tight. It was a very small canoe, barely fifteen feet long, designed to sail sheltered lagoon waters inside the fringing reefs, or, at most, a day run between neighboring atolls. That the old man had embarked on a thousand-mile voyage said much for his bravery; that he had almost made it said more about his skills than about his vessel. And yet, when Stone had it launched, rigged and reloaded, he felt his spirits rise on a tide of pride and affection.

It straddled the water like a spider, balanced on a wide stance of hull and outrigger, while the bridge that connected them provided a riding deck high and dry above the water. The canoe might look small beside Veronica, minuscule next to the gas carrier, but only by comparison, for it was complete: self-contained, quick, and maneuverable. In the right hands.

He took a practice run back and forth across the lagoon, trying to get the hang of the peculiar Carolinian way of tacking their double-ended canoes. Instead of coming about to change direction, the islanders changed ends, shifting mast and steering paddle to make the bow the stem and the stem the bow, always keeping the outrigger pointing toward the wind.

Standing on the tiny deck that bridged hull and outrigger, Stone stole a glance from the chaotic pass ahead and the reefs on either side, and saw that the seam he had repaired seemed to be holding. No longer leaking so much, less burdened, the canoe rose to each successive wave while the wind, which had not suffered the usual evening drop-off, drove it straight and true onto the open sea.

He noted the time—an hour to sunset—and looked back repeatedly at the atoll, trying to estimate the speed of the counterequatorial current. He kept the swells on his right and the yellow ball of the sun on his left, checking his handheld compass at frequent intervals.

Streams of black-and-white noddies and terns were flying home to their atoll. From a wave top, he glimpsed them flocking around the dead man on the beach. Then the sun teetered briefly on the rim of the water and dropped off quite suddenly. The wind grew cool, and cold spray began whipping across the open deck. He felt around in the bilges for a leaf-wrapped lump of breadfruit, which he chewed mechanically, and drank from a hole he gouged with his rigging knife in the soft eye of a coconut while he waited for the first stars to pierce the deepening blue. But cloud had entirely filled the eastern half of the sky, dooming any hope of catching Orion's belt on the rise. Ahead, north, the stars of the Big Dipper began to glow. He traced the pointers to the dim reddish North Star and fixed hungrily on that old friend, only to lose it to the advancing cloud. He looked back, glimpsed the small Southern Cross low in the south. But as he checked it repeatedly over his shoulder, it too began to fade behind the cloud scrim. He fished a penlight out of his backpack to read the compass.

A full sea, shockingly cold, knocked him off the deck into the bilge and slewed the boat out of control. He felt his way in the dark back up to the outrigger deck, found the sheets and the steering paddle, and steadied the canoe by filling its sail with wind again. Quickly, he tied a length of sennit rope around his waist and secured it to the canoe as a life line.

In order to get back on course, he tried to feel whether the swells were still moving from his right, but the wind, stirred by the weather coming from the east, had kicked up contrasting waves. The sky offered no clue either, dark from horizon to horizon. Were he sailing Veronica, he would switch on the binnacle light to confirm his course by its serene red glow. He raised the compass to read it by penlight. The sea reached out like a malevolent child and snatched it from his hand. He lunged for it, reaching desperately for his last connection to his modern world. But the compass was gone, and his heart sank with it.

He was lost, blinded by cloud, bewildered by the jumbled sea. The wind was backing and veering—crazy shifts that thumped the sail, heeling the canoe, driving it forward, knocking it back. He could still sense the great Pacific swells breathing under the canoe, but the surface was too wild and the night too dark to distinguish their direction. He stood up, and, gripping a shroud, strained to pierce the gloom. He heard waves collide next to him, but he couldn't see their broken and foaming white crests. "Jesus," he muttered, or thought he did, but his curse transformed into prayer, "Sarah!" as he realized he hadn't sailed alone in a decade.

His breath came shallow. He felt his chest constrict, a strangler's hand around his throat, a whisper in his ears that began to roar. When a prickling sensation numbed his lips, he braced for pain, fearing the first symptoms of heart attack. Then he realized with a giddy, choked laugh that it wasn't his body that was under assault, but his mind—tumbling in panic.

A gust headed the sail, knocking the canoe backward, and Stone into the water. He pulled himself aboard by his lifeline. The air was cold. He crouched, shivering, collecting his spirit. He'd survived worse than this—wedged in pack ice in the Weddell Sea with a South Pole blizzard screaming their way. Now, as then, he heard Sarah's voice, both schoolmarmish and brave. "All right, Michael. Where do we stand?"

Rain struck—a sudden downpour that sizzled icy cold across the sea and shocked him back to the present. He lowered the sail, which the wind was threatening to tear to pieces, secured the heavy boom and gaff. Then he felt in the hull for a coconut shell and started bailing the seawater that was pouring over the gunnels.

Scoop of water. Over the side. Scoop of water. Over the

side. Again, and again, and again. Counting each scoop. A moment's rest between each hundred .. .

The canoe skidded on the crests—lurching and sliding. Gusts shrieked against the mast, whistled through the shrouds. When the bigger ones lifted the outrigger from the water, the little boat threatened to turn turtle.

Thunder pealed. Lightning split the dark like a million arc welders, and suddenly the sea and storm were illuminated—the water milk white, the waves jagged, the sky a sickly gray. A powerful blast of wind blew the tops off the waves and sent them scudding along in a dense froth. For a long, impossible moment there was more water than air, air too thick to breathe.

Lightning exploded again—a long, sinuous, liquid bolt toppling slowly, lazily from the sky. By its broad, bright light Stone saw the canoe still half full of water and an enormous wave, double the height of any around, traveling toward him at speed. He threw his arms around the mast and held on for his life. The wave tumbled over the outrigger deck, staggered the boat, pounded his back, and tore at his hands. The wind grabbed the mast like a handle, levering the boat over as the water punched hard from below. Stone leaned out and muscled the outrigger down with his body. But he knew he had won only a temporary victory. The next lethal wave-and-gust combination could flip the canoe like a leaf.

He felt in the dark for the shrouds and stays, and lowered the mast to reduce windage and stabilize the tiny craft. By the time he tied down the heavy spar he was trembling with exhaustion, while the breaking seas, the rain, and spray had flooded the hull again. A hundred scoops, rest. A hundred scoops—scraping his hands on the rough wood, salt stinging the cuts—wondering how the frail old man who'd sailed before him had the strength to bail the open boat hour after hour. How could a man in his eighties have fought the sea as hard as he was fighting now?