Read Online Fire And Ice by Paul Garrison - Free Book Online Page B

been semiconscious for twenty-four hours; baked all day by the tropic sun, seasick and wave tossed, he had passed beyond thirst into a state of muddled lethargy.
    Too bleary to make any sense of the sails, he fumbled around in the bilge for the net bag of coconuts, and sliced his hand trying to bore a hole in one.
    He sucked greedily at his blood. Eventually he pierced the soft eyes of the coconut, and dribbled sweet milk on his cracked lips.
    He drank it dry, counted two more, the last of the coconuts, and drank from one. It wasn'
    t near enough liquid. He debated opening the last. The starry sky meant no rainwater. He'
    d have to trail the old man's hooks and hope to catch a fish.
    Searching for a coconut he might have missed, he found his backpack tethered under the abbreviated foredeck, tore it open, and, with a cotton-mouthed croak of triumph, pulled out one of the saline bags he'd tossed in for the old man. He tied it to the mast, lay down and probed with the needle for a vein. He missed, licked up the blood, and missed, again, despising his weakness and cursing the pain.
    A vague memory of the Japanese trawler took shape, interspersed with recollections of crazy dreams of Sarah and Ronnie and the Dallas Belle, converted to a schooner. He could only hope that his concussion was a mild one.
    He pinched the saline feed, and detached it from the needle, which he left in his arm, and rose on shaky legs to trim the flapping sail and put the canoe back on a northerly course, with the east-rising sun hard on his right hand.
    He gnawed a moldy sweet potato and a chunk of hard poi. Then he lay down again to let more liquid into his veins. He pressed his watch to his ear and listened intently. The rapid ping raised his spirits like a second heart.
    But his head still ached, and a thin red haze hung before his left eye like a dirty window. The crazy dreams kept coming back. Sarah in the arms of the sailors. Ronnie deaf to his pleas. The Dallas Belle sailing closer to the wind than he could. Odd how the mind had chosen a staysail schooner rig with all those free-flying sails and not a boom in sight. . . . He looked up at his own boom, which had nearly killed him. Another unexpected gust, another mistake, and once again the heavy length of breadfruit wood would sweep the deck like a blunt scythe.
    He had always prided himself in the simple life he lived aboard the Swan, all his belongings tucked inside a thirty-eight foot hull. But, compared to the old fisherman from whom he'd inherited this canoe, he wallowed in equipment. Sextant. Radios. Three self-steering devices. Diesel generator, wind generator, pumps, engine, winches, blocks, lights, fire hose. He was wondering why he was mentally ranting like a latter-day backto-the-basics hippie, when a truly radical idea occurred to him. Why not deep-six his boom?
    The crazy thing was it worked better without it. When he sheeted in the loose sail, the canoe leaped into motion and sailed a full point closer to the wind. He laughed out loud, razoring pain through his skull. With the wind veering more and more easterly, he could hold a course nearly due north.
    A fish struck the line he was trailing. Startled awake, Stone pulled it in slowly, the thin twine slicing his fingers. A small tuna that fought hard, and he was surprised he managed to land it without breaking the line. He killed it with a scalpel thrust in its brain and cut thin strips of flesh, which he inspected closely for parasites before swallowing it raw. Fixing his position without charts and instruments was like trying to balance a checkbook from scribbles on a cocktail napkin. But Stone had to know exactly where he was before he turned west. The decision was momentous—the heart of any hope of rescuing Sarah and Ronnie—for the instant he turned west he was irrevocably committed. If he turned too soon—too far south—the trade wind and the rolling seas would whisk the canoe past Angaur deep into the Philippine Sea, where