down the steel steps and ran into a cabin and slammed the door behind her.
Csongor continued steering the vessel into the sunrise while poking at the controls on the GPS unit, trying to get a sense of where they were. The morning light filtering into the front windows made it much easier to see around the bridge, and he noticed a stash of nautical charts that had escaped their notice in the darkness. He began to spread these out and to try to make sense of them. Most were large-scale depictions of complex features up and down the coast of China, and it was difficult for him to figure out their context. But one sheet caught his eye because it depicted a group of small islands, whose shapes jogged his memory; he’d seen them earlier while panning and zooming the GPS. They were identified, on the chart, as the Pescadores. They were out in the middle of the Straits of Taiwan, nearer to Taiwan than the mainland, but still a good fifty kilometers nearer to the boat’s current position than the shore of Taiwan itself. And the GPS seemed to be saying that these islands lay rather close to the course that they’d been steering anyway. So it seemed obvious that they should be making for the Pescadores. Csongor altered his course accordingly, steering on a slightly more southerly heading. As best he could make out from the charts and the GPS, they would reach the island group at something like four o’clock this afternoon. Assuming, that is, that they did not run out of fuel along the way.
THE JET CONTINUED to follow what seemed to Zula like an unremarkable flight plan: slowly gaining altitude, following a straight course that took it away from the Chinese mainland and southward over the South China Sea. Some mountains poked their heads over the eastern horizon, and she guessed that these must be on Taiwan; but they rapidly fell away aft.
She could not make up her mind whether to open the door or remain cloistered back here. A strong instinct told her simply to hole up in the dark and private cocoon of Ivanov’s cabin. But sooner or later she’d have to pee, and the jet only had one lavatory, which was forward.
As long as she was alone, it seemed sensible to take stock of what was at her disposal. Though small, the cabin had a little dresser. She checked the drawers and found nothing besides spare pillows and blankets. Ivanov would have taken all his stuff with him, of course. There was also a little flip-down desk, just large enough to support a laptop, and above this, built into the cabinetry, an appliance that was obviously an intercom. It had a row of pushbuttons, variously marked CABIN, COCKPIT, PA, and TALK. Next to them was a volume knob.
She turned the volume all the way down, then pressed the COCKPIT button. She found that if she pressed hard enough, it would lock down, causing an LED to illuminate, marked MONITOR. She then experimented with turning the volume up slowly and began to hear speech: Pavel and Sergei communicating with each other in Russian. Of which she, of course, knew not a word. But from time to time she would hear something she recognized, like “jumbo” or “Taipei.” And occasionally a voice in English would burst out of their radio: air traffic controllers, she supposed, communicating with them, or with other planes, from towers on the mainland.
She did not really understand the purpose or the content of these transmissions, but after a few minutes she was able to pick out certain patterns. Many of the transmissions began with a Chinese-accented voice saying “Xiamen Center” followed by the name of an aircraft manufacturer such as “Boeing” or “Airbus” or “Gulfstream” followed by a series of letters and numbers. Then a series of laconic instructions concerning altitude or heading or radio frequency. She reckoned that these transmissions all originated from an air traffic control center responsible for Xiamen’s airspace and that they were bossing the pilots of various airplanes around. In almost all cases, another voice would respond directly, frequently speaking in an English or American or European accent, repeating the series of letters and numbers that seemed to be their plane’s call sign, and then acknowledging the command with “Roger” followed by repeating the instructions out loud, presumably just to be sure that they’d gotten the details correctly. Occasionally, though, a transmission would go unacknowledged, and then Xiamen Center would have to repeat it; and if that failed, they might ask some other plane to relay the message. All of which was done with absolute, deadpan calm, which made sense given that it was what these people did all day, every day, just like bagging groceries or driving a truck. Twice she recognized the voice of Pavel acknowledging one of these transmissions, and in that way she learned the call sign of the plane on which she was a passenger, or rather a prisoner.
From time to time the instruction would be something like “Contact Hong Kong Center” or “Contact Taipei Center” followed by a series of digits, which she assumed must be a radio frequency. Whereupon the pilot would identify himself and repeat the instructions as usual, and then sign off with a “Thank you” or “See ya” or “Out,” never to be heard from again. At least on this channel. So she figured that these were outbound aircraft being handed off from one air traffic control center to another.
The time came when Xiamen Center called out the ID of the plane that Zula was on and issued the command transferring them to the responsibility of Hong Kong center. Pavel answered in the usual way and bid Xiamen Center adieu. Pavel and Sergei then exchanged a few sentences in Russian.
Suddenly the plane shifted beneath Zula’s feet with a crispness that one never experienced on a commercial airliner. She had to throw out both hands to prevent herself from being thrown forward into the cabin door. The plane was not merely descending in the way that airliners did, that is, by throttling back on the engines and shedding altitude in level flight; it was actually pointed down, using the power of its engines to thrust itself directly toward the sea.
The steepness of the dive increased to the point where Zula was lying full-length on the cabin door. Through it she could hear luggage and junk flying around in the cabin, and sleepy men shouting in alarm, and wakeful ones laughing delightedly.
She had thought at first that this was just a temporary maneuver to shed some altitude, but as it went on and on, she came instead to the realization that Pavel and Sergei had decided to commit suicide by crashing the plane into the sea. This couldn’t possibly go on any longer; her ears had popped three times.
But then, just as abruptly as it had gone into the dive, the plane pulled out of it, pressing her into the door, and then the corner between the door and the floor, and finally the floor itself with what felt like several Gs of acceleration as its nose came up and it returned to what seemed to be level flight. When she was able to move again, she peeled herself off the cabin floor, popped her head over the edge of the bed, and looked out a window to see blank white, and raindrops streaming across the glass. She elbow-crawled across the bed, put her face to the window, and looked down. The clouds and fog were too dense to allow her to see very much, but through an occasional gap, she was able to glimpse the gray surface of the ocean hurtling past no more than a hundred feet below.
The plane now banked and executed a course change: a long sweeping leftward turn.
There was a flat-screen TV mounted to the bulkhead above the foot of the bed. Zula had not tried turning it on yet, because she didn’t like TV, but now it occurred to her that she was being foolish. So she turned it on and was presented with a menu of offerings including an onboard DVD player, a selection of video games, and “MAP.” She chose the latter and was presented with a map of the South China Sea, apparently generated by exactly the same software that was used aboard commercial airliners, since the typefaces and the style of the presentation were familiar to anyone who had ever taken a long-haul airline flight. The place of origin had been programmed in as Xiamen, and the destination was Sanya Phoenix International Airport, which was at the southern tip of a huge elliptical island, comparable in size to Taiwan, that lay off China’s southern coast. She was pretty sure that this was called Hainan Island and that it was part of the People’s Republic of China. A flight plan had been drawn on the map, connecting Xiamen to Sanya by two straight legs of roughly equal length. The first leg headed south- southwest from Xiamen, roughly paralleling China’s southern coast. Then it doglegged into a more westerly heading that took it straight to the southern tip of Hainan. Just guessing, it looked as though the course had been laid out to keep it well clear of the Hong Kong/Shenzhen/Macao/Guangdong area, which was right in the middle. Presumably the airspace around it was extraordinarily crowded and a good thing to avoid.
The plane’s actual track and current position were also superimposed on the map, and these showed that the flight plan had been followed precisely until a few minutes ago. Now they were headed a little north of due east, on a track that looked as though it would take them just south of Taiwan.
None of this would have made sense to her had she not been party to last night’s meeting in the main cabin. Obviously, they had never had any true intention of flying to Hainan Island. They had chosen that destination solely because it was a domestic flight and as such would not draw the attention of the immigration authorities at Xiamen’s airport. For that, any destination in China would have sufficed. But Hainan seemed to have another advantage, which was that a flight to there from Xiamen would naturally pass over the ocean; and over the ocean it was possible to get away with tricks such as screaming along at wavetop level to evade radar.
She reckoned that they were playing some kind of game having to do with the workings of the air traffic
