excerpt | review

FIRE AND ICE

~1~

He swung his sextant to the sky.

Night ended abruptly in the equatorial Pacific. In the brief moments when first light revealed the horizon and the heavens still shone, he lowered mirrored pinpoints of Jupiter, Antares, and Capella to kiss the rim of the sea. And, with a careful look around, went below to reckon where he stood among them.

She was asleep on a double berth, hip cocked, long limbs sprawled luxuriously. He plotted the celestial fix on a chart sprinkled with reefs and atolls, and extended the pencil track of their passage from the Marshall Islands.

It was still cool in the cabin, so he crawled into their berth to cover Sarah's shoulders. She smiled in her sleep, and when she arched invitingly, he kissed her, trailing his beard softly down her spine.

The collision alarm began to scream.

Sarah shot awake, scrambling from the sheets to work the boat. Michael Stone caught her in his arms, felt her frightened heart hammer her breasts. "I got it. I'll yell if I need you."

He ran on deck, his own heart pounding.

The sun had risen, already harsh.

He saw neither land nor another vessel. But they were sailing in a deep valley between two trade wind rollers and lay far below the crests. Before he could see what had set off the alarm, he had to wait for the mountain behind to overtake and lift the boat.

An elderly, sun-bleached thirty-eight-foot Nautor Swan, Veronica was small by modern offshore standards. Stone had rerigged her as a cutter, and she was inventively maintained wherever ingenuity could substitute for cash. The only high-tech element of the rig was an unusually tall carbon-fiber mast cannibalized from a racing boat, and, like a Stealth war plane, it made Veronica virtually invisible to radar.

Their ten-year-old daughter padded up the companionway in her pajamas. "What's up?" She yawned.

"Something spooked the radar."

"What?"

"We'll see in a minute."

Ronnie swayed sleepily with the motion of the boat and wrapped one arm around his waist. With the other she clung to the treadbare Snoopy backpack in which she stashed her things. Stone bent to kiss her. "Good morning, sweetie. Here, maybe we better put on your life vest."

Ronnie made her standard protest—that the child netting lashed to the lifelines that fenced the deck was insulting enough to a person of her age.

"Just till we see what's out there."

He had the blue-water sailor's deep distrust of all equipment. Although he had built the warning system himself, and was reasonably sure that the radar had simply acquired a target many miles away when Veronica had perched atop the previous crest, it would not come as a total surprise to discover the Third Fleet on the far side of the next wave.

He hauled Ronnie's life vest from a cockpit locker, strapped her in, and debated calling Sarah up on the deck. What could go wrong offshore would go wrong.