Fire And Ice Read Free Page B

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