Fire And Ice (40 page)

"Bushmaster," he answered. "Got it off a mercenary." Technically a pistol—a very big pistol—it had a folding stock that extended it into a rifle. Patrick, the mercenary—he had offered no surname—had "moused" the weapon so it could be fired fully automatically by merely holding the trigger. He had taught Stone the guerrilla fighting tricks of duct-taping the spare clips to triple the thirty-two round capacity, and twisting the pistol grip sideways to let the recoil spray bullets like a scythe. Stone banged the clip into the gun and unfolded the stock. He left the grip in the vertical position.

Sarah peered out the hole the missile had blasted through the nav station. "There are three men in the boat," she reported coolly. "Two in the drivers' seats behind the windscreen. Moss is standing in back. He's got

a rifle or something over his shoulder. . . . It has a scope. Michael, you can't kill all three of them."

He didn't know whether she meant he hadn't the ability or the moral right. "Lie flat on the deck and cover your ears. This thing is loud."

Sarah scooped his industrial ear protectors from the toolbox and slipped them over his head. Stone shoved the wrecked electronics out of the nav station. The missile hole would do as a gunport.

The ocean racer was closer than he had imagined. Two hundred yards. They had turned broadside to Veronica and were matching her seven knots effortlessly, engines emitting a lazy growl, while Moss inspected the Swan through raised binoculars. Stone tried to summon up an icy detachment. The advantage of surprise would be brief, and with one gun on the slow-moving Veronica, he was in no position for a prolonged battle.

He adjusted the rear open sight to two hundred yards. His hands were shaking so hard he had to brace the Bushmaster against the shattered fiberglass.

He'd run into the mercenary in Manila and had rerigged the guy's retirement boat and repaired his radio in exchange for the Bushmaster and a crash course in how to shoot it. Stone had learned to hit floating soup cans at three hundred yards. But afterward, over a celebratory San Miguel, Patrick had grown quiet. He was a stocky little man with piercing blue eyes and the aggressive bark of a Marine colonel. "Mike? Wha'd you do in the war?" They were of an age; he meant Vietnam.

"Naval surgeon."

"Right . . . You were a real natural. You displayed a fine accuracy out there. But there's a hell of a difference between shooting a weapon and fighting with a weapon. Problem is, you engage pirates in a firefight, they'll kill you."

"Then what do I want a gun for?"

"Don't think of it as a gun. Think of it as a cannon. Show you what I mean . . . " Stone clamped the Bushmaster's stock to his shoulder, found the black hull in the failing light, waited for Veronica's uproll, and touched the trigger twice to get the range. Even with the earmuffs the sound was deafening, but there was little recoil. He saw a patter of spray flare just short of the racer, raised the barrel a trifle, and fired five shots into the hull. The men in front ducked for cover. But Moss stood tall and still as a statue, hefted a long gun, and trained it on the Swan.

STONE SQUEEZED THE TRIGGER, AGAIN, HELD IT. THE GUN

nudged his shoulder, smooth as a finely tuned engine. The clip emptied in seconds. Moss fired. A high-power bullet passed through the cabin, a foot from Stone's face, with a loud crack. He snatched the clip out, reversed it, banged it back in, and fired another closepatterned burst. The Cigarette boat veered away, throwing Moss to the deck.

Engines thundered as the driver presented the smaller target of her stern. A mirthless grin tugged Stone's face; Patrick would have been proud of him.

He steadied the Bushmaster and fired ten careful shots into her stern. He thought he saw chips fly. It was too dark to see for sure. But the big engines stopped abruptly. The ocean racer slid to a confused halt between two waves.

When the waves raised it again, Stone could see it was listing and sagging low in the stern, where the crew were working frantically, either trying to restart the engines, which now had numerous perforations in vital parts, or, more likely, bailing the seawater gushing through the hole Stone had blown in her hull.

But Veronica, too, was taking on water as she heeled in the stiff monsoon.

"Start pumping."

They put Veronica about on a starboard tack, to make her lean away from the hole in her side.

Sarah pumped and stood watch. Stone gathered tools and material. The hole was way too big—as big around as a soccer ball—for a conical wooden patch, so he duct-taped a piece of sailcloth over it as a temporary patch, while he mixed quick-setting epoxy and laid up several thin layers of fiberglass cloth.

Sarah was reporting scores of fishing boat lights and the occasional seagoing vessel. With luck, one of them might pick up the Cigarette boat; with better luck, he thought grimly, it would run it down in the dark.

The smaller hole over the navigation station was a simpler job. But salvaging enough of the electrical board to jury-rig a charger for the surviving flashlights and the handheld VHF short-range radio took hours.

After he had cleaned up the corrosive residue of the sodium bicarbonate extinguisher from the galley, he tipped a bucket of metal and broken glass overboard and slumped beside Sarah in the cockpit.

"That was the radio. . . . It was a setup. He knew what time Ronnie would call. A listener in Japan, Moss on the Cigarette boat, the old man back in Shanghai. Triangulation. Simple as shooting the sun. But why'd he attack us? He'd set it up long before we called Lydia."

"Vengeance," said Sarah.

"For what?"

"We caused him trouble in Shanghai. That's how he thinks, Michael. An eye for an eye." They looked at each other, shaking their heads in dismay. Stone started to voice his next thought.

"Don't say it," whispered Sarah.

He didn't have to. The question loomed like the night. What would they find in Tokyo?

He dozed off, then awakened, vaguely aware Sarah was speaking in the dark. "What?"

"Where did you get the gun?"

"In Manila. When Lydia took you and Ronnie to Singapore."

"Ah." The sky was clearing and there was sufficient starlight to see her smile. "I'm glad," she said.

"It was certainly a good argument for carrying a weapon."

"No. I don't mean that."

"What do you mean?"

"I knew you were hiding something from me. When I got back from Singapore. I just knew it. . . . I thought you'd had a fling on the beach."

"Fling on the beach? You're my fling on the beach." "Well, you know Manila. Wasn't it Race Week? I supposed . . . you know."

"Why the hell didn't you ask?"

Sarah said nothing.

"Hey, you're the one always telling me to talk. Why didn't you ask?"

"Michael, don't be daft."

"I'm not being daft. Why—?"

"I was afraid. . . . I didn't want to know."

"Oh, for crissake. Come here." He put his arm around her shoulders, felt her stiffness. " Sarah. You know me. I'm a one-woman man and you're the one woman."

"Well, you don't always show it."

"Am I about to be condemned for not having a fling on the beach?"

"I can't believe you hid a gun without telling me." "I wasn't up to arguing about it."

"Or perhaps you just wanted a secret," she retorted, and they glared at each other across a gulf of personality—their gulf of mutual attraction—broadened tonight by fear and exhaustion.

"And you've been sitting on your secret."

"What secret?"

"My imaginary fling on the beach."

"I told you, I was afraid."

"Or wanted something to hold against me?"

"Why would I want that? That's ridiculous."

"You tell me," said Stone. "There's been a little distance lately. I thought it was the East Timor-Africa stuff."

"Michael, you make it sound like they're not legitimate causes. Rough-and-ready doctors like you and me ought to go to Africa."

"Maybe they're an excuse."

"An excuse?" Sarah asked. "For what?"

"For wanting out of this life."

"I love our life. Except the hiding. You love the hiding." They talked in circles, then sat alone in coils of silence.

Finally, Sarah took a deep breath to build her courage and reached for his hand. She said,

"You know something? It's Katherine."

"What?"

"After all these years, you still love her."

Silence swelled like a following sea, and Stone looked into the night, half expecting a wall of water to crash into the cockpit. "I love you too," he said.

"What hurts me is you still miss her."

"You," he said, "are my life and my love. You and Ronnie." Sarah said, "You named that woman Katherine." "It was the second name I thought of." Stone was afraid he had said too much. Or not enough. He sensed death in the silence. . .

. "The single-sideband's wrecked."

"Can you fix it?"

"Nothing left to fix. Blown to pieces. So's the radar." No long-range radio; no way for Mr. Jack to call. No way to contact Lydia. No radar; no collision alarm in the busy Japanese shipping lanes.

Sarah reached across and laid a firm hand on his shoulder. "No radar. No collision alarm. No radio. Ronnie's got the GPS. You've done it, at last, Michael."

"Done what?"

"You're finally back to basics."

There was laughter in her voice, and he felt his heart soar toward the sound.

"What do you say we tear up the deck—get a little closer to the sea?"

' "Michael. You made a joke. I can't believe it."

He shook his head and grinned. "I can't believe we're

still alive. You know that son of a bitch almost killed us?" Sarah giggled. "How do we know he didn't?" "Maybe we're in heaven."

"It's too cold for heaven."

"Besides, nobody dead could be this tired."

Exhaustion, release, fear, and postponed hysteria erupted in laughter. They reached for each other, held tight, searched clumsily for the other's mouth and crashed together in their first real kiss since they'd escaped Shanghai. Their hands grew active. Velcro hissed, snaps parted; they tore at the zippers of their foul-weather jackets, struggled with the bibs of their sea pants, frantic to press their bodies together. "Oh my God, Michael. I thought— Oh."

Loath to part even for a second, they stayed all night in the cockpit, wrapped in blankets under the storm trysail, spelling each other as they dozed and watched for ships. Sarah felt warm at last, warmed within, her body content, her mind willing to shut down for a while, stop thinking, let the boat take care of them. But as day broke, she felt Michael's body begin to tense up, and the warmth drained away.

"Where are you going?"

"Figure out where we can get close enough to the Dallas Belle to talk to Ronnie on the VHF."

Sarah followed him below and stood over his shoulder as he walked the calipers over the singed and sodden chart. "Assuming he left when she said—fifteen hours ago—and assuming he's making twenty-two knots, he'll be here—three hundred and thirty miles east of Shanghai and through the Osumi Straits in another eight hours—here.

"We've got to head north and cut ahead of her. At twenty-two knots, they'll come screaming up behind us in fifteen or sixteen hours. We could meet 'em here." He tried to draw a circle over the Dallas Belle's course. The pencil gouged the wet paper.

"Then what?" asked Sarah.

"Assuming all the assumptions are correct, we'll have about a fifty-mile circle we can talk in—if we raise her—which the ship will pass through in less than three hours. God, if we could get close maybe she could jump for it."

"Too dangerous."

"Down a rope or something—"

"Into the propeller."

"At least we can talk to her."

"He'll try to kill us again."

"Not if he can't see us. Fifteen hours from now it'll be dark."

"Michael, this is crazy. What are we doing?" "Ronnie sent a message. Says she's got a radio. What else can we do but try to get close?"

"And what happens if the ship isn't there?"

"We keep on sailing."

"Let's talk about better ideas."

But as dawn struggled to pierce a gloomy sea fog that drifted down from the north, they kept coming back to the same conclusion: the best they could do was try to answer Ronnie's radio, while they raced for Tokyo.

For thirty hours they watched and waited and listened for Ronnie's voice to come piping over the VHF airwaves.

Stone wired their short range handheld unit to a high-gain antenna—the steel-wire backstay. The antenna for the main unit at the nav station was atop the masthead, but that long range radio had been destroyed by the missile.

They cut near the flat-topped headland at Shiono Misaki, the southernmost tip of Honshu, and passed ten miles offshore, hugging the outer edge of the eastbound traffic separation lane. Ship traffic was heavy, but they neither heard the Dallas Belle nor saw any sign of the gas ship.

The northwest monsoon was blowing hard, the wind dry and bitter cold. The Kuroshio Current flowed strong, three and four knots in their favor. But still no word from Ronnie. And nothing, of course, from Lydia. They debated what might have happened. Either the Dallas Belle had passed them in the dark at a time when Ronnie couldn't get alone to use the radio. Or the ship wasn't headed for Tokyo at all. Or—and this they clung to, in their frightened, sleepless state—the ship had broken down and was making repairs. In that event, the prodigious wind and the Kuroshio "Black Current" would sweep the Swan into Tokyo first. Lydia Chin watched the neon lights of Tokyo hold the night at bay. With her husband, Robert, his trading hong's top man

in Japan, she enjoyed a lavish apartment with views few Tokyoites could afford. One end of the living room overlooked Tokyo Tower, a steel-girdered symbol of Japanese postwar recovery, and, in its likeness to the Eiffel Tower, a quaint example of oldfashioned 1950s Asian insecurity. Buildings were kept low, out of fear of earthquakes, and compared to Hong Kong, Lydia thought the much larger Tokyo resembled a massive cluster of airport hotels and suburban shopping centers.