Fire And Ice (6 page)

"You've seen too many movies, Mr. Moss. The bullet is the least of Mr. Jack's troubles. What Mr. Jack needs much more is a hospital."

"We got your hospital."

"Try and think of my hospital as an ambulance, Mr. Moss. And a rather minimally equipped one at that. He

needs a respirator. Our respirator is old and could pack in at any minute."

"Chief engineer's standing by to fix it."

Sarah ignored the interruption. "Mr. Jack is seventy-seven years old. If he is unable to fill his lungs properly, he will contract pneumonia. He will die—provided, of course, he doesn't die first of the morphine your people poured into him."

"You said you were fixin' that."

"He is not responding to the Narcan as I would like. Though I think he's come around."

"So when he wakes up he'll breathe right. Right?"

"Not only is his respiration depressed by the narcotic, but once it wears off, even awake, he will have to fight the pain of the bullet wound and your mess boy's surgical skills with every breath."

"Then you got to get the bullet out."

"No. He can't afford any more complications outside of a hospital. Had a man your age been shot I'd be delighted to operate—"

"Without anesthesia," muttered Ronnie.

Sarah squeezed Ronnie's arm so hard she felt her fingers bite the bone. Moss's mouth formed a wintery smile. "Maybe you want to watch me do your Mom without anesthesia?"

Ronnie looked down at the carpet, and Sarah felt her melt. In the ugly silence, Moss's eyes sought hers. Sarah gazed past, tasting fear for herself as well as Ronnie. Moss seemed to resent the class gulf between them as if she had somehow betrayed their shared African heritage by not suffering poverty.

"I must say, Mr. Moss, among the many things I don't understand about all this is why you, who seem genuinely devoted to Mr. Jack, would risk his life to avoid a hospital. I don't know why you think you have to—and I don't care—but surely you could concoct some story, some plausible explanation how he got shot. It's your and the captain's word to the authorities. Say you were boarded by Indonesian pirates. Or say his gun discharged while he was cleaning it. No one will doubt a ship captain and its owner, particularly as he'll survive. As a physician, I must insist—" Moss crossed the room in a lightning step, looming, so that Ronnie shrank back.

"Insist," Sarah repeated.

Moss caught her arm.

"Let go of me."

He lifted her and stared into her face.

The captain tried to intervene. "Come on, Moss. Ease up." Moss ignored him. "I owe that man. He dies . . . you die. Both of you." He flung her aside and pushed out the door.

Ronnie's lips began to tremble. Sarah hugged her hard. "It's all right. Mummy's all right." The captain tried to smile. "Look here, hon. The sooner your mom patches up Mr. Jack, the sooner you sail back to your daddy. That's the deal, right?"

"Are my daughter and I under your protection, Captain?" The captain looked uncomfortable.

Sarah was not surprised. "What exactly," she asked, "is Moss's role aboard your ship?"

"Well, Moss looks after Mr. Jack."

"Bodyguard?"

"Among other things."

"Made rather a cock-up of it, didn't he?"

"It's not making him any gentler, Doc. I wouldn't push him if I were you."

"And you have no control over him?"

"He answers to Mr. Jack. Moss is a regular lamb around the old man. So, Doc, if you're reading me right, maybe you realize your best bet is to put Mr. Jack in an upright mode."

"Captain, this is insane. You'll be within helicopter range of Manila in a day and a half. If you don't trust Philippine hospitals, you're only eighteen hundred miles from Hong Kong. Three days to helicopter evacuation. Or in four days you could have Mr. Jack in Tokyo. Though my own recommendation is Manila. The sooner he's in hospital the better." The captain was staring intently. With a shrewd expression on his sun-freckled face, he glanced at the antique binnacle, then back at her. Sarah realized, too late, that she had foolishly admitted to knowing too much.

"I've been a sailor many years, Captain. It doesn't take a genius to dead reckon our position."

"How'd you know our speed?" he asked coldly.

"This is a gas carrier. They're fast." She nodded at the broad, flat wake that the ship was grinding out of the ocean. "I estimate twenty-two knots." He stared hard. "Close. You got a good eye, Doc."

"Let us go, Captain. You've already taken us more than a week's fast sailing from my husband. Take Mr. Jack to Manila."

"Sorry, ma'am."

"Moss is a fool. The bullet means nothing. I've counteracted the morphine overdose. Now he needs a hospital. I can't do any more. Let us go."

"Can't do that," said the captain. "You're the only doctor the old man's got."

"Then when will you let us go?"

"Soon as he's back on his feet issuing orders."

Suddenly a fire alarm started clanging, and the ship's horn shook the deck with a series of short blasts that rattled the glassware in the mirrored bar.

"Jesus H. Christ," said the captain. He bounded up the stairs, pawing the radio from his hip. The door at the top closed with a pneumatic sigh.

"What happened?" asked Ronnie.

"Something's wrong with the ship."

The clanging grew louder, the whistle thundered a seven-note chant. They ran to the stern windows. Nothing burning on the afterdeck, nothing floating in the wake. The side ports showed the empty Pacific, the chaos of last night's storm erased by the trade rollers.

"Veronica." She knelt before her child and took her face firmly in her hands. "I want you to go in and sit with Mr. Jack."

"What about you?"

"Do what I ask. Stay with him until I come back."

Ronnie glanced at the stairs, then the door. "But what if Ah Lee comes?"

"If Ah Lee comes, tell him your mum's in the loo and wants a fresh pot of tea."

"What if Moss comes?"

"He won't. They've got an emergency."

"I want to come with you."

"You're my lookout. If I'm going to get to a sat phone, you've got to watch my back." Ronnie looked terrified. Sarah said, "Remember what Daddy says in life-raft drill? . . . Come on," she coaxed, "what does Daddy say?"

A smile emerged on Ronnie's frightened face. "Be British, boys!"

"Be British" was supposedly the captain of the Titanic's last command to his crew, and the way Michael said it was usually good for convulsions, especially when accompanied by a solemn salute.

"But no laughing! Or they'll hear us being British!"

That was good for a grin. Sarah bundled Ronnie into Mr. Jack's cabin. The old man had shifted. His hands were twitching as the Narcan did its work. He could wake at any minute.

"Be careful, Mummy."

"Don't you worry, dear. I'll be very careful."

She kissed her, closed the cabin door, and mounted the stairs with a pounding heart. The booming whistle shook the treads. The fire alarms changed. The cacophony—the sheer billowing noise—made it impossible to think. Yet it gave her a strange feeling of being almost invisible.

She was guessing from the various ships that she and Michael had boarded over the years that this companionway would not open directly into the bridge itself but somewhat behind, as light from an entrance would blind the watch at night. At the landing, she opened the heavy door a crack and peered out cautiously and was relieved to find a sort of combination lobby-corridor, which served the captain's and owner's companionways as well as the main stair that rose the height of the house, and the elevator. To the right was an open door, inside a large computer

room, lined with machines and racks of electronics. To the left was the chart room. She entered. Aft, she glimpsed the radio room. Ahead, a curtained entryway. She pulled the curtain an inch from the bulkhead and peered through.

She could see about half the bridge, including the helm—steady in the grip of the autopilot—and, beyond the front windows, an incongruous view of the wind cups spinning on Veronica's masthead. The captain was pressed against the glass, staring ahead at a white plume of escaping gas that soared skyward from a valve on the foredeck.

Suddenly he whirled around, firing orders that she could not hear over the noise. His face was drawn taut in an expression that combined command and healthy fear. The whistle blasts stopped abruptly. An officer hurried into view and threw a switch on a control console that shut off the fire alarm. In the freshness of the silence, she heard the captain shout, "Get down on deck and give 'em a hand!"

Sarah ran back into the radio room and hid behind a bulkhead as the mate pushed through the curtain and pounded down the stairs. She located a satellite phone. Her eye lingered on the single-sideband radio's automatic Mayday switch. But a broadcast call for help could be explained away as a mistake, long before any rescue hove over the horizon, and she would surely be blamed.

She crept back through the chart room to the curtain. The ship felt as if it had begun to slow. The captain was shouting into his walkie-talkie.

"Rustle up a mess of blankets, and soak 'em down good— Where in hell are those people going? Stop those gutless sons of bitches. Hold on, I'm coming down there. Any hand off station's going to get his butt whupped."

Sarah ran back to the radio room and hid as the captain raced down the stairs. Before his curses and footsteps had faded, she pulled from her pocket a scrap of paper on which she had written a Palau Islands number, and she punched it into the satellite phone. Holding it to her ear as she waited for the connection, she ran back through the curtain and onto the deserted bridge.

Like the elaborate electronics and computer room, and the luxurious owner's suite, the bridge itself appeared to

belong to a wealthier and more advanced ship than the Dallas Belle. The navigational equipment, the radar repeaters, the engine monitors and controls reminded her of an Australian missile frigate they had lunched aboard with the warship's captain, who was Kerry McGlynn's brother. But this, she realized was even more modem, the latest in technology, for the Dallas Belle was an OMBO ship—one man bridge operated.

The giveaway was a glass-walled toilet, elevated with a clear view of the windscreen, and a computer station in front of the helm. OMBO was a cost-cutting experiment that allowed a single officer to stand watch as the fiftythousand-ton vessel steamed full speed, day and night, fair weather and foul.

At the helm, the computer's thirty-inch monitor displayed course, speed, position, weather, and sea conditions; the Dallas Belle itself was represented by an icon of a ship steaming on a pale blue electric sea. If some virus struck down every living soul aboard, the fully automated gas carrier would steam forever on a course dead hands had entered into the computer.

The instant Michael had caught wind of OMBO, he had begun plotting ways to replace Veronica's homemade collision alarm with a modem raster scan radar. The phone clicked, went silent, and then hummed a dial tone.

Sarah dialed again and stepped to the windscreen, crouching so the men on the main deck sixty feet below wouldn't see her. The captured Swan was lashed to a cradle directly in front of the house. Someone knew their business, she was relieved to see: they had furled the sails and even fitted the sun cover over the boom. Two hundred yards ahead of the yacht, firefighters were spraying foam on the deck, while two men in gas masks and rubber suits were struggling with the ruptured valve. The rest of the crew—a half dozen men including their Chinese steward—were watching fearfully from a distance, ignoring the shouts and angry shoves of the bosun. The sea, as usual, was empty.

Directly below her, she saw the captain and Moss run

out of the house, arms laden with blankets. They climbed to a catwalk and raced forward, dropping down to the deck near the plume. Moss shoved a seaman off a fire station and directed the nozzle at the heaped blankets. The captain gathered one up, ran to the plume, and flung it over the broken. valve.

To Sarah's amazement, the blanket froze solid instantly, like a sheet of metal. The gas jet blew it high into the air and it sailed away like a metal bird. Of course, she thought. To compress the gas into a liquid, it had to be supercooled, many degrees below zero. Moss ran up with his arms loaded with dripping blankets. The two men conferred, then darted in through the foam, hurling the wet blankets at the base of the plume. The bosun charged up with a water hose, spraying the blankets as they threw more on. The supercooled gas froze the blankets and hose water. The plume wavered, curled in on itself like a question mark, and dissipated into thin air. The ruptured valve was soon encased in a solid block of ice.

Moss and the captain high-fived each other and headed back to the house, just as the satellite phone connected to the line Sarah had dialed. One ring. Two. Three. On the fourth ring an answering machine picked up and a recorded voice offered to take a message.

A TALL SEA LIFTED THE CANOE. THE SUN HAD BURNED OFF

the morning haze and the air was crystal clear. The triple strands of palm tops brushing the horizon were unmistakably Pulo Helena. Stone cursed the miles lost and the time he had wasted.

How far had the Dallas Belle steamed in eighteen hours? Gas carriers were much faster than most freighters. Twenty knots service speed? Twenty-two? He conjured the chart in his memory, drew upon it a distance-madegood circle of three hundred and sixty sea miles. Were the ship still headed north, it had passed the Palau Islands by now—Angaur, his own goal, already a hundred miles in its wake.

Well, Michael. Where do we stand?

Up the same creek we started, sweetheart.

Spilt milk.

He turned his back on the atolls and headed north again.

But when he tossed a coconut shell into the water to judge his speed, the Dutchman's log confirmed that the canoe was a pig upwind. For every mile he gained north he slipped an equal distance to the west. He'd be lucky to make twenty real miles a day. Built to run before the trade winds, the canoe carried too much sail forward to beat efficiently. The wind kept levering the bow off course. Slacking the sail made things worse: it flapped like laundry. But trimming it to stop the luffing promptly pushed the bow downwind again.