same number, all during the last ten hours or so.
He debated whether he should do this. It was not the safest, most conservative measure for him to take. But they were well clear of the most developed part of the city, rounding the northern curve of the island, the flat open land where they’d built the airport. In another few minutes, Taiwanese territory would come into view.
He hit redial.
“ARE YOU OKAY? Where is Zula?”
“Are you okay? Where is Zula?”
“Are you okay? Where is Zula?”
Even through closed eyelids with her back turned, the grenade’s flash had left huge purple patches floating around in the middle of Yuxia’s vision, obscuring her view of Csongor’s face. But she knew who it was.
“They took her,” she said.
He had been holding her by her upper arms. Now he let go. She realized that she was only standing up by virtue of the fact that Csongor had hauled her to her feet. So there were a few moments, now, when she half fell down and had to catch herself and get her legs working and her balance back again. She ended up half leaning against the corner post of a welded steel bunk bed. The cabin was full of smoke, and more smoke was rising from a thousand tiny little embers that had been strewn across the bedspreads and were burning or melting their way down into the blankets. She coughed and pressed her free hand against her mouth. Csongor, meanwhile, was on the move, stepping back and forth over the threshold. She saw him step into the cabin and pick up a man who was lying on the floor. He heaved the man over his shoulder like a sack of rice and stepped outside. There was a splash. Then he stepped back into the cabin and repeated the procedure.
From outside she heard Marlon registering a mild objection. “Those men are stunned!”
“This will wake them up,” Csongor said.
As far as Yuxia was concerned, the only thing wrong with what Csongor was doing was that it might fail to result in these men’s deaths. She wanted to throw them off
She couldn’t hear the ship’s engines and supposed it was because the bang of the grenade had deafened her. But neither, she realized, could she feel their vibration. Some kind of hasty and anxious conversation took place between Marlon and Csongor. Yuxia stepped outside to get some fresh air. She saw the cook—the man who had given her tea earlier—cringing against the rail. He had been watching Csongor throw men overboard and assumed he was next. “This guy was nice to me,” Yuxia announced in English, and then she said to the man in Mandarin that it was going to be okay. But she wasn’t sure he understood Mandarin.
Neither Csongor nor Marlon heard her, since they were, with a lot of banging, running up a steel stairway to the bridge, one level above. Some kind of shouting festival ensued. “Let’s go see what is happening,” she suggested to the tea man, and made a
Csongor was standing in one corner aiming a pistol at a crew member who had, apparently, remained at the controls through everything that had just happened. Marlon was talking to the guy in Mandarin: “You don’t have any choice,” he said, as if he were repeating something that he’d said before and that this pilot had been too stupid to take in. “You have to take us out of here. Get us to Taiwan or the Philippines or something. We don’t have any time to waste!”
The pilot seemed unable to make any decision until finally the cook spoke up in Fujianese and informed him that all the other men on the vessel had been flung overboard. This seemed to make a considerable impression on the pilot. Finally he turned to the control console and shoved on a handle that caused the engines to rev up. Yuxia felt the boat begin to accelerate beneath her, which was a good feeling. “Get us clear of the shore!” Marlon demanded, apparently fearing that the pilot might make a deliberate attempt to beach the vessel. The pilot made a tentative course shift that caused the bow to swing out away from Heartless Island. It wasn’t enough for Marlon who stepped forward and wrenched the wheel farther in the same direction. This elicited a stream of panicky Fujianese from the pilot, which Yuxia translated into English: “He says that you just aimed the ship directly toward Kinmen. If we stay on this course, we will be blown out of the water.”
Marlon backed away from the wheel and let the pilot change the course back to one that was more southerly, but he was clearly in a suspicious and jumpy frame of mind and made a point of walking around the cabin and looking out all of the windows to verify that they weren’t headed toward land.
“GPS,” Csongor said, and nodded at one of the array of little screens and electronic devices mounted to the console.
Within a few moments they had gathered around the device that Csongor had noticed. Identifying it as a GPS unit had actually required some careful observation. It was crude and industrial-looking compared to the units with big color screens that some people had in their cars. This one’s screen was tiny and gray and showed only those details of interest to mariners: coastlines, shallows, and buoys. But the latitude and longitude were clearly displayed as long strings of digits across the bottom, and the crude outlines and symbols on the screen were creeping upward as the boat moved south.
“I cannot fucking believe this,” Csongor said. “Four days ago I am in Budapest drinking beer. Now I have hijacked a boat in China and I have fallen in love and I have killed people.”
No one had much to say about that. Marlon turned to Yuxia and said in Mandarin, “Is there anyone else?”
“I don’t think so,” she answered, “but we should look around.”
They agreed that Csongor should remain on the bridge holding the gun while Marlon and Yuxia familiarized themselves with their new boat.
The cook followed them out and down onto the main deck, then told Yuxia, “There is a gun up on the bridge, hidden under the control panel.”
So they went back up to the bridge and had the pilot stand well back while Marlon got down on hands and knees and groped around and found the gun: an ancient revolver, rusty around the edges, but loaded and ready to use. This he threw into the ocean. Then, just to be sure, they had both the pilot and the cook strip all the way down to their drawers and sifted through their clothes and found a phone and two knives. Marlon pulled the battery from the pilot’s phone, then did likewise to his phone and to Yuxia’s.
FOLLOWING INSTRUCTIONS FROM Khalid, the pilot Pavel climbed into the backseat of the stolen taxi, where Jones had been waiting behind tinted glass the entire time. Zula joined them. Khalid got into the passenger seat. A similar arrangement was made in a second taxi behind them, which they had simply hailed from the queue in the hotel drive; Sergei ended up in that one along with the other bomb vest wearer.
Once they had pulled out onto the highway, and the second taxi was squarely in their rearview mirror—for apparently its driver had been instructed simply to follow—Jones said to Pavel, “In normal circumstances I would plan what is about to happen very carefully. Maybe we would build a mockup of a jet out in the middle of Yemen and train on it. But because of the way things are today, we are just going to wing it and trust to Allah. Call it fatalism if you like; I believe that is the traditional spin put on it by Westerners.”
Pavel did a pretty good impression of not having understood a single word.
“So,” Jones continued, “tell me about what it is like at the private jet terminal in Xiamen. I have never enjoyed the luxury. Will someone be there to stamp my passport?”
Still nothing from Pavel.
“I am quite serious,” Jones said. “I need to know whether we have to pass through an immigration barrier. To show documents. Because”—and here he smiled in a way that Zula would have found charming had she known nothing else about him—“you see, I’m afraid that my British passport has been quite misplaced. As has her American one.” He nodded Zula’s way.
“If you want to know
“But the sort of bloke who flies about on a private jet is too busy to stand in line to get his passport stamped, isn’t he?” Jones said.
“Frequently, yes. Depends on country. Depends also on type of airport.”
