Fire And Ice

by Paul Garrison

  "They're waiting for us," said Sarah.

  Stone thumbed Transmit. "This is Veronica. What can we do for you?"

  "Man, are we glad to see you. This is Dallas Belle. We're outta Surabaya bound for Tokyo. The old man's hurt. Took hisself a header. We need a doctor, bad. You want us to come out and meet you?"

  Stone looked at Sarah. The Surabaya-to-Tokyo run lay hundreds of miles west of Helena.

  "Not in these swells. We'll board you in the lee of the atoll. Just sit tight. We'll be there in forty-five minutes."

  "You're the boss, Doc."

  Sarah took the radio. "When was your captain injured?"

  "Yesterday, ma'am."

  "Is he conscious?"

  "Sometimes."

  "Is he vomiting?"

  "No, ma'am. Folks on the ham net said you was coming this way. Thank God we lucked out."

  Stone released the preventer, disengaged the self-steering, and altered course to swing around the south side of the main atoll. The water was turning confused as the land divided the swells, and he thought he could hear the first faint mutter of the surf that battered the fringing reef.

  Sarah touched his arm as they headed toward the sound, and brought up a subject that they'd been debating for days now. "Have you thought about East Timor?"

  Stone looked away, scanned the roiled seas, the low round atolls, the reefs, and the sand-colored ship, which had a soft, hazy plume rising from its smokestack. "Darling, I still can't seem to make you understand—it is too dangerous." The Indonesians had invaded East Timor when the Portuguese colonists left and had for years waged a war of terror against the protesting Timorans. Sarah wanted to sail Veronica there to treat the wounded.

  "Those people are helpless. The world doesn't care. The least we—"

  "And what do I do when an Indonesian patrol boat catches us playing doctor in some rebel anchorage? We can't outrun them in a sailboat."

  "The boat is plastered with red crosses. How would they know we're not an 'official'

  mission? Besides, Ronnie won't be there. We're sending her off to school. We've agreed."

  "Yeah, we agreed." Hiroshi, the Japanese sailor whose life Sarah had saved, had turned out to be scion of a wealthy industrialist; his grateful father had offered to send Ronnie to the Swiss school his daughters had attended.

  They exchanged unhappy smiles. It had to be done, before Ronnie was cut off from her peers forever. And, in fact, she seemed to crave a larger world: when she wasn't mooning over ships, she would lie on deck for hours watching for planes, and at night for satellites on their purposeful courses through the stars.

  "I feel an obligation to go to Timor," Sarah said firmly. "We are doctors."

  Stone looked away at the ocean again. Whether it was

  middle-aged complacency or male aversion to change, he feared that he was more satisfied with their life than she was. He clung happily to a daily existence he enjoyed for its consistency. When he felt the need for additional excitement, the sea usually obliged with a squall that pumped the adrenaline and burned off excess energy. The endless repairs required by an old boat kept him busy, as did the simple but vital chores of navigation and piloting. But Sarah had grown increasingly restless, almost eager to move on.

  He said, "Let's keep Ronnie one more year . . . please."

  Sarah stood up. "I promised to help her with her hair."

  Stone picked up his glasses and studied Pulo Helena's glassy, green lagoon. Clustered on the white sand beach under tall coconut palms was a tiny village of a half dozen fales—open huts with thatched roofs.

  -"Hey," he called down the companionway. "No one's here. There're no boats on the beach. . . . No, wait. . . ." Steadying the helm with his knee, he fine-focused on the shade under a thatched roof. "Someone's sitting in one of the fales."

  The next instant Veronica needed all his attention as they surfed and pounded through the chaotic intersection, where Pacific rollers with nine thousand miles of fetch smashed past the atoll and raced on toward the Philippines. On the leeward side was a cut in the reef, the pass which ordinarily Stone would have entered to shelter in the lagoon if he hadn't been heading for the ship.

  Just past the reef, he seized the glasses again and focused tightly. The little village was deserted, but there was one boat, a minuscule sailing canoe beached askew at the edge of the lagoon. A lone figure slumped in the open hut. He tried to rise, but fell back, his head lolling on his chest.

  "Coming about!" he warned Sarah and Ronnie, threw the helm hard over, and sheeted in the main. Both sails crashed and crackled across the deck as Veronica spun on her keel and shot at the reef. Stone leaned over the side searching for the submerged coral prong that was cited emphatically in the Sailing Directions, cleared it by a yard, and surfed into the deep lagoon.

  Sarah ran up the companionway. "What happened?" "Old fisherman, all alone on the beach. I think he's hurt."

  "What about the ship captain?"

  They looked back at the sand-colored, slab-sided ship, which loomed on the water with the anonymous force of an industrial city.

  Sarah shivered. "Horrid looking thing, isn't it? Ugly as sin."

  "Reminds me of one of those godforsaken backwater refineries."

  "Yes! Like in the Bight of Benin."

  "Listen, maybe I should do the captain," offered Michael. "You stay on the atoll here with this guy. What do you think?"

  "I'd rather, but Ronnie's so excited. She just said to me, 'It's like we're going shopping at a mall.' "

  Ronnie squeezed past her mother. "Are you ready, Mummy?" She was wearing a bright red lava-lava, her Snoopy backpack in hopes of presents, and ribbons in her hair. Her eyes were locked on the ship and when she saw they were inside the lagoon, heading for the rickety dock where the fales clustered on the beach, she howled, "Where are you going?"

  "Let me check out the ship, first," Michael said. "No! I want to go with Mummy. She's all dressed and

  pretty and she wants to go, too. Don't you, Mummy?" "Well, maybe Daddy's right."

  "N000. We'll get all hot and sweaty on the atoll."

  Stone laughed. "Okay, okay. You take your mother to the ship; I'll do this guy. Grab the helm, hon. I gotta get my bag."

  "He'll be dehydrated," Sarah called down the companionway. "You'll want extra glucose and saline."

  Stone stuffed the plastic glucose and saline bags into the waterproof backpack that served as his medical bag, and some plasma from the freezer, and plucked the backup VHF handset from its charger. On deck, he said, "You're going to board leeward side.

  Radio the ship, make sure they've got plenty of hands standing by to fend off."

  "Yes, dear."

  "Ronnie, run below and get Mummy's pack, then put out all the fenders, both sides.

  Sarah, don't forget to cut that coral real close on the south side."

  "Yes, dear."

  "Do I get a kiss?" he asked Sarah.

  "Later."

  "Careful boarding. Wear your life vest. You too, young lady."

  "Yes, dear."

  Sarah said, "If they're pleasant, I'll wangle an invitation to dinner."

  "Tell 'em the charge for a house call is a raster scan radar."

  "Here you go!"

  The Swan was closing fast on the dock. Stone stepped over the lifelines, hesitated. The sea was quick. He stepped back into the cockpit, where Sarah had taken the helm. "I'll have that kiss, now."

  He took her face in his hands. "I love you."

  Her lips were cool, her dark eyes fathomless. "Michael, I want to go home."

  "Home? What do you mean? Nigeria?"

  "Africa."

  "What happened to East Timor?" he asked, belatedly aware that East Timor was old news and that she had been building toward a major pronouncement for weeks.

  She returned a defiant stare. "There's plenty to do in Africa."

  "We can't go home."

  "I am aware that we are fugitives, thank you." "Strictly speaking,
I am the fugitive."

  "Don't be daft, Michael. Where you go, I go. Always . . . But has it ever occurred to you that being a fugitive gives you the excuse to hide from everything?"

  "Dock!" Ronnie called urgently.

  Stone swung outside the safety lines with his backpack. "We'll talk."

  "No shortage of talk," Sarah shot back. Then she, too, remembered that the sea was quick, and she pulled him to her and kissed him again. "I love you, too. And I always will."

  As Sarah steered past, two feet from the edge, he jumped, landed running, and jogged into the glaring white beach. He turned and waved.

  Veronica danced across the lagoon, Sarah tall at the helm, Ronnie scurrying around with the fenders, both too busy to wave back. Stone paused a moment to drink in the rare and beautiful sight of his own boat under way, then hurried past the wrecked canoe with its flapping rice-bag sail and tangled sennit ropes.

  Up the gently sloping beach, inside the fate, the fisherman lay with a dark lava-lava wrapped around his waist, his hands across his belly. His legs were swollen with infected coral cuts. He peered at Stone through milky cataracts.

  Those Pacific Islanders who ate their traditional diet and avoided booze, sugared breakfast cereals, and radiation poisoning from the bomb tests, lived long. Stone often found it impossible to guess their age. But this guy had to be in his eighties.

  His thighs were tattooed with porpoises—the proud symbol of the Micronesian navigators—and like many of his generation, he had a Japanese rising sun tattooed on his belly. A crucifix gleamed on his leathery chest. A mission convert, which meant he might speak English. Pretty far off his regular track, way down here in the southwest islands, but they went where they pleased.

  "Hello, sir. How you doing?"

  The old man stared past him at the sea.

  Stone smelled the sweet odor of drying copra and he felt the ground reel, his first moment off the moving boat in nearly three weeks. Surf pounded nearby and the trade wind blew hard on his skin, rattling palm leaves.

  "Beg pardon?" He leaned closer, smiling, kneeling, trying to put him at ease. He considered himself a barely competent doctor—not a gifted physician like Sarah—better with things than people.

  "Too old." The old man opened his hands, revealing a fishing knife plunged into his body.

  "Jesus!" Stone gasped. "What happened to you?" Suicide was one of the plagues of the far Pacific, right up there with drink and diabetes, though they saw it most often among the young. "Is that your boat?" he asked, trying to distract him so he could examine the wound. "What did you do? Sail home and find them all gone?"

  "Not my home. I head for Tobi. Stupid old man."

  Tobi lay a hundred and fifty miles southwest.

  "From where?"

  ``Puluwat."

  "Puluwat?" Puluwat was a thousand miles east.

  The Carolinian navigators thought nothing of sailing five hundred miles without a compass for a carton of Marlboros or a good party. But the old guy had gotten himself good and lost, then compounded his shame by cracking up on the reef.

  "Why you sail alone?"

  "Sweet burial," the old man muttered.

  The navigator's death at sea.

  Gazing into the milky eyes that couldn't have seen any but the brightest stars, Stone guessed that this last voyage had been a test of do or die.

  "Excuse me a moment . . . let me just move your hands."

  The old man had lost a lot of blood, and as Stone touched him, he fainted with a sigh.

  Stone quickly ran a saline tube into his arm, and another for glucose. The knife would have to wait for Sarah. Set up an operating room right here in the fale. He started to radio the ship to ferry in his Levine tube so he could drain the stomach fluids leaking into the old man's abdomen. But it was too late.

  The navigator opened his eyes. A serene smile crossed his lips, when Stone brushed them with water. "Who you?" he asked in a hoarse whisper, even as he craned his neck again to see the sea.

  "Just a Sunday sailor, compared to you, sir."

  The weathered face rejected the compliment even as the light left his eyes. "Oh, goddammit," said Stone, hoping that Sarah was doing better.

  He walked among the fales, looking for a shovel. Nothing. Whoever had been here last had taken everything with them. Get a shovel from the Swan. Or maybe put the old man in his boat and sail him off into the sunset.

  A pillar of smoke caught his attention, jetting thick

  black from the Dallas Belle's massive funnel. The trade wind caught it and streamed it west. White water boiled behind the ship and it began to move.

  "That was fast."

  He walked toward the dock, watching for Veronica. But when the Dallas Belle had proceeded a thousand feet—its own length—he still couldn't see her.

  "Oh, God!" A horrific thought crashed through him. Had the ship somehow run Veronica down? Or had its giant propeller dragged her under?

  He ran to the old man's canoe. Sarah and Ronnie must have been wearing life vests. They might have been thrown clear, into the water. But as the ship wheeled, presenting a new angle of perspective, Stone slowed to a walk, stopped, stood, and stared in disbelief.

  He saw the Swan suspended sixty feet above the water in the sling of a deck crane. The crane swung the sloop inboard, over the gas carrier's main deck. While Michael watched, a party of seamen guided her copper red bottom onto a makeshift cradle and the Dallas Belle completed its turn and steamed away.

  "MUMMY. WE'RE MOVING!"

  "Shhhh!"

  Sarah hunched over her stethoscope, every sense tuned to the old man's heart.

  He had not fallen, as they had claimed on the radio. He had been shot in the chest.

  Medically, it was the least of his problems. Attempting to remove the bullet, his shipmates had anesthetized the already unconscious victim with morphine. Now he was deep in a narcotic depression, blood pressure plummeting, respiration so faint his lungs barely lifted his ribs.

  Sarah shot a half milligram of Narcan into his veins, then listened anxiously for the fibrillation that would tell her that the narcotic antagonist had aggravated some pre-existing cardiac disease. He was old. The Narcan could as easily kill him as save him, but she had no choice. She had to get him breathing and increase his blood pressure.

  "Mummy."

  "Narcan!"

  Ronnie slapped a fresh hypo into her glove. Sarah entered a vein, pumped a half milligram, massaged his faltering heart, and listened again.

  "Narcan!"

  On the third dose, the old man woke up vomiting. "Quickly."

  Ronnie helped her sit him up so he wouldn't choke on his vomit. But just as they had his torso erect he passed

  out, swallowed, and began to choke. Sarah cleared his airway.

  "Captain," she called to the men watching from the sick bay door. "I need the respirator from my boat. And the intubator."

  The Texan shouted down the corridor. In moments the mess boy ran in with the gear.

  The captain's companion, a tall, powerfully built black American, said, "What about the bullet?"

  "Would you step outside and close the door, please?"

  "Let's get something straight, Doc. Neighborhood I come from every man my age is dead or locked up. Mr. Jack is the only reason I'm not."

  "If I can't stabilize your friend he's a dead man. Get out."

  From what she could tell without X rays, a small-caliber bullet had entered at an angle, ricocheted off the gladiolus, plowed along the fourth rib toward his shoulder, tearing the subclavius, and lodged deeply in the lesser pectoralis.

  Lucky. Until his panicked numb-skull shipmates took it in their collective heads to remove the bullet. A mess boy who had served as a hospital nurse had been drafted to perform the wholly unnecessary operation. Morphine was prescribed to anesthetize the already unconscious victim. . Generous in the extreme, they had emptied the ship's dispensary into the old man's veins and set about butchering the remains of his shou
lder.

  The bullet was in deep, and eventually they gave up and left it where they should have in the first place.

  That the overdose hadn't killed him outright was either a miracle or a testament to a constitution of titanium alloy. Judging by his harsh features, Sarah was inclined to believe the latter. His face might have been chiseled from igneous rock: sharp brows, hawk nose, square chin, cropped white hair and nary a jowl or a sag in the skin. And he bore the marks of torture from long ago—his back was crisscrossed with ancient scars, his fingernails and toenails had been ripped out.

  Yet whatever luck had kept him alive then and deflected the bullet today had held. The crew had heard on the ham radio cruiser network that the hospital yacht Veronica was bound for Pulo Helena. And who should hove over the horizon but Doctor Mike and Doctor Sarah?

  "Mummy, we're moving."

  The ship was definitely moving, heeling into a turn. "I know," said Sarah.

  "Where's Daddy?"

  "I don't know. Help me with this."

  "But—"

  "First things first—our patient. Don't cry, dear, I need you."

  She got him tubed and on the respirator and listened to his heart again. He seemed stable, the Narcan taking at least temporary effect.

  "Okay, darling, now we'll find out what the devil is going on here."

  She called for the captain. He came, accompanied by the black American.

  "How's he doing, Doc?"

  "Where is my husband?"

  "On the beach," said the black.

  "What? You left him on the beach? Where's our boat?" "We got her cradled up, safe on the main deck."' - "You shipped our boat? You can't—"

  "Done deal, Doc."

  Sarah tried to absorb the impossible. Ronnie looked ready to cry. Sarah put her arm around her automatically. She was aware that they had in essence been kidnapped, but all she could think about was Michael and the miles the ship's propellers were already churning between them. "You've stranded my husband," she said angrily. "He'll be frantic with worry. You can't just leave him there!"

  "You can go back and get him as soon as the old man's on his feet."

  "On his feet?" she echoed. "He needs to go in hospital."

  The black man shook his head.