their bogey on radar—supposing they were even discernible against the clutter of giant containerships and small working vessels—would see their movements as unexceptional. But once they debouched from the Xunjianggang into the more open seas, they would come in for all sorts of attention, since there was nothing in that direction that wasn’t Taiwanese.
The shore to port—the mainland suburb of Xiang’an—was less built up than the Xiamen shoreline to starboard, and it extended farther to the east and therefore brought them closer to Kinmen. Sokolov said he wanted to track along that shore, and Olivia relayed that instruction to the driver.
Sokolov now moved up and sat in the seat next to the driver. He had his bag with him. He turned on his flashlight and put it in his mouth like a cigar, then shone it down into the bag, which he had zipped open. It was stuffed with a miscellany of junk, but the predominant color was the queasy red/magenta of large-denomination Chinese currency. Much of it was crumpled loose bills, but Sokolov stirred through these and then pulled out a wrapped brick about one inch thick. He let the light shine on it and glanced up at the driver to make sure that it had been noticed. Then he pulled out a plastic sack—a white laundry bag blazoned with the logo of a luxury hotel. He dropped the money stack into this and then carefully rolled it up into a neat packet.
Then he looked at Olivia. “Please drive boat,” he said.
“I am going to drive the boat now, please get out of the way,” she said to the driver in Mandarin.
He was slow to move.
“I have been watching this man for a while now, and I don’t think he hurts people who are not his enemies,” she said. “I think it is going to turn out all right.”
Watching Sokolov carefully, the driver stood up and vacated the controls. Olivia clambered over the back of his seat and settled in behind the wheel. She picked out a light in the distance and used it to steer by for the time being.
They had exited the strait and come into the fetch of broad ocean waves that were bashing the little boat around. Keeping his center of gravity low, the driver took a seat on one of the benches. Sokolov dropped to his knees in front of the man and thrust the wrapped money-brick at him, then pantomimed a gesture of shoving it into his pants. The driver, whose mood was shifting from abject fear to extreme curiosity, complied. Sokolov then handed him a life vest and made gestures indicating that he should put it on. “Closer to beach please,” he said to Olivia, and she steered the boat in closer to some tidal flats that, since the tide was low, reached out a great distance from the shore of Xiang’an and dully reflected its pink-orange lights.
The driver put the life vest on and snapped its strap around his waist. Sokolov, inspecting him like a squad leader checking a trooper’s parachute, tugged at the strap and gave it a yank to make it tighter. He then held up his fist, thumb and pinky akimbo, to his jaw. The driver, understanding this universal gesture, reached into his pocket and produced his phone, which Sokolov confiscated.
Then Sokolov made a little gesture with his head and stared expectantly into the driver’s eyes.
The driver did not want to go but soon reached a place where he would rather drown than suffer that gaze anymore, so he reached up, pinched his nose, and vaulted over the side.
“Kinmen,” Sokolov said. “Top speed.”
Olivia swung the wheel hard to starboard and pushed the throttle lever forward as far as it would go. The engine howled, the boat surged forward into the darkness and began pounding across perpendicular wave crests. Sokolov moved up and sat next to Olivia and flipped switches on the dashboard until he found the one that turned off the running lights.
Then he spent a while trying to read the tiny screen of his phone despite the jarring impacts of the hull on the waves.
“Taiwan military will shoot at boat?”
“Maybe.”
“You swim?” he shouted.
“Very well,” she said.
“Better than me,” he admitted. He crawled back and returned a few moments later with a pair of life vests, one of which he placed across her lap. He put one on, then took the wheel while she did the same.
She had gotten into the habit of thinking of Kinmen as being farther away than it really was, because of the military and political barrier; but crossing into its waters took so little time that they were barely able to get themselves strapped into the life vests before they closed to within swimming range. Sokolov experimented with taking his hands off the wheel and found that the boat was rigged in such a way that it would basically keep going straight.
And so at some point, much earlier than she felt ready for, he suddenly nodded at her and she—since it seemed to be expected of her—nodded back. Sokolov spun the wheel around and got the boat aimed toward open water, then took her hand and got one foot up on the gunwale. With his free hand he picked up the bag he had earlier rigged with a life vest. Another exchange of nods and then they went over the side.
The water was warm by the standards of oceans, but her immediate and powerful impression was of being cold. Then she got over it and started swimming.
They seemed to be in the lee of Kinmen. The waves were not as powerful, but they came from many directions and clashed into sudden pyramids of water that just as suddenly collapsed. She just tried to get a bearing on the moon and to keep swimming at all costs. The main thing that she was worried about was being swept out to sea by some unseen current, and indeed when she pulled her head up out of the soup to look at the lights of the island, she got the impression that they were moving sideways at least as fast as forward. She was not much of a nautical person but was enough of a Brit to have absorbed, by osmosis, certain terminology such as “slack water,” and she was pretty sure that this was the condition that obtained now: the tide was low, neither incoming nor outgoing, and the water wasn’t moving much. But huge rivers emptied into the sea around Xiamen and their flow had to divert around these islands, and there must be currents associated with that.
After passing through a few emotional swings, she came to the realization that they simply hadn’t been in the water for that long, she hadn’t given this nearly enough time, and just had to keep swimming. She and Sokolov both resorted to the sidestroke and the backstroke when they got fatigued. In the latter position, she watched a helicopter make several passes over the waters nearer to Kinmen than to Xiang’an, probing the seas with a spotlight, and reckoned that the boat must have been noticed on radar. It was natural to feel vulnerable and obvious and exposed. But she tried to imagine what it must be like to be sitting in the cockpit of that chopper with many square miles of dark water beneath and only a needle-thin spotlight beam. If she were a shipwrecked mariner, desperately hoping to be seen and rescued, she would despair of ever being found; so why should she concern herself about it?
Sokolov doffed his life vest and disappeared beneath the water for perhaps half a minute, then resurfaced gasping for breath. “Maybe three meters,” he said, apparently giving an estimate of the water’s depth. She liked the sound of that.
It was perhaps half an hour later that something grazed her fingertip during a deep stroke, and she realized that she could stand up. Probably could have stood up a while ago.
A moment later she was looking down into the astonished face of Sokolov, who was doing the backstroke. He got his legs under him, then gestured with one hand in a way that clearly meant
They squatted with only their heads above the water and surveyed the shore ahead of them as best they could in the faint light of the moon. Olivia had the impression of gazing through the broken teeth of a ruined comb.
“Tank traps,” Sokolov said. “To stop amphibious landing. No problem for us. As long as we stay out of tank.”
Humor. She was too shattered to appreciate it. When she had made it back to her apartment after the gun battle and explosion, an improvised bandage on her head, she’d planned to crawl into bed and not come out for a long time. With some effort, and with Sokolov’s help, she had goaded herself into making a trip out to the
