Fire And Ice by Paul Garrison

Author:Paul Garrison [Paul Garrison]
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2010-06-23T23:00:00+00:00

SARAH HELD RONNIE SLEEPING IN THE CROOK OF HER ARM

and the radio pressed to her ear. She had the volume turned down so that all she heard was faint static and the occasional muted squawk of ship-to-ship traffic on the Huangpu. It sounded like the river was breathing in the bed beside her.

The ship's clock in the lounge chimed eight bells. Midnight. Laughter through the door. Mr. Jack's cronies had come aboard at ten, and if the previous nights were any guide, they'd be hard at it until three in the morning.

There was a steady din of machinery outside the ship and occasional shrieks of tortured steel. Suddenly the bed shook and the entire ship trembled. It had happened twice earlier in the evening, a sudden jolt and the resounding boom of something enormously heavy dropped on the deck.

She wished she knew where Moss was.

The captain—who seemed somewhat overwhelmed by the turmoil of shipfitting, the nature of which work Sarah could not see from the stern-facing owner's suite—was sound asleep in his cabin. He had come to her for, as he put it, "A Valium or something," so he could catch up on his sleep. Earlier in the week she had answered the request with sample Valiums or black market Halcions. Tonight she had prescribed the secobarbital she ordinarily used to sedate a patient facing surgery. Five hundred milligrams. The captain would sleep until noon.

Unfortunately, Moss took no drugs and no alcohol, his addictions confined to worshipping Mr. Jack, working out on the Nautilus machines, and net surfing in the computer room. She feared he was there, now, and she could only pray that he was not eavesdropping on radio signals.

Armed only with a basic knowledge of radio systems—she left the electronics to her husband—Sarah reckoned that the ship's computer had been alerted to her satellite telephone call, revealing their position to Marcus in Palau, by a constantly listening radio scanner. (If it had automatically recorded her conversation, then the only reason Moss hadn't searched for her GPS was a mistaken assumption that she had taken her position from the instruments on the temporarily deserted bridge.) Such a signal monitor would work fine at sea, but on the Huangpu River, in the heart of the busiest port in the world, the hundreds and thousands of transmissions would overwhelm the system. That, she hoped, meant Moss had shut it down.

Ah Lee, too, was awake five decks below, carousing with his cousins in the crew's lounge. They were waiting for the bosun to go off watch so they could raid his storeroom for a fifty-yard coil of nylon line. After desperate internal debate—and tormented by Mr. Jack's hideous slave threat—Sarah had approached him directly. Though Ronnie had befriended him, and expanded his English, Sarah did not trust her daughter to be able to conceal the news that her father was near.

Mr. Jack, she realized bitterly, had outfoxed her, seducing Ronnie far more effectively than the child had seduced him. God knew how confused she was and how skewed would be her loyalties.

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