Reamde

During their endless, creeping approach to this island, it had become obvious that it must have a sort of dog-bone shape, since there was a hill, covered with dark green vegetation, at each end, and the town spread across the saddle between. It was oriented roughly north-south and the terrorists’ boats were anchored toward the southern end of the harbor, where the rafts of conjoined fishing vessels petered out into grids of floating fish farms. As they crept southward, the town abruptly ceased to exist and was replaced by inhospitable terrain consisting of ancient, weathered brown sedimentary rock sloping up out of the water to be colonized by olive-drab succulents on the lower slopes and a scruffy mat of green-black tropical vegetation higher up. Csongor remarked on the fact, which to him seemed odd, that in China some places were unbelievably crowded and others were totally uninhabited but there was no in between. Marlon thought it curious that anyone should find this remarkable. If a place was going to be inhabited, then it should be used as intensively as possible, and if it was a wild place, all sane persons would avoid it.

Csongor guessed that the slope of the ground here was exactly wrong. It was gentle enough that dangerous rocky shallows extended a considerable distance from the tide line, making it a death trap for ships, and yet steep enough that, above the waterline, it was difficult to build on. And so even though they were moving at what seemed an agonizingly slow pace, they went, over the course of perhaps five minutes, from being in a place where ten thousand eyes could see them to a place where they were perfectly invisible. The strata of the bedrock, eroding at different rates, reached into the water with long bony fingers separated by deep shadowed clefts, and the hill rose above them, no man-made objects on the thing except for a radio tower at the summit.

After another half an hour, it became evident that they had worked their way around the southern end of the island and were now looking up its eastern face. Stretched between the hills at either end, like a taut sail between two spars, was a long beach that was absolutely deserted. Driblets of heavily eroded stone were strewn across it from place to place, but for the most part it was an almost perfectly flat expanse of sand that had been dropped by some longshore current as it tripped over the headland they had just circumnavigated. Above it rose a dune held together by some low green vegetation sparkling with yellow flowers and studded with random pieces of garbage that had apparently been hurled off the edge of the bluff above. For backing up against the top of the slope was a jumbled skyline of low houses that, as they now realized, was simply the other side of the island’s one and only town. They had gone halfway around the island and were now looking at the town’s back, huddling against the incoming weather from the South China Sea.

They pulled the boat up onto the beach, which was littered with garbage of a more seaborne nature, and left it among some half-dissolved boulders where it might be slightly less conspicuous. Csongor sat down nearby in the shade of a rock, shading himself under the parasol, and waited, hoping that Marlon would get back soon and that no one would come to ask him what business he had here. Marlon hiked up into the town, carrying a small amount of cash from Ivanov’s man-purse, and returned half an hour later with two shrink-wrapped bricks of water bottles and some noodles in Styrofoam bowls, already lukewarm but exquisitely satisfying to Csongor. Marlon had already eaten, and so he took a turn at the oars now and rowed the boat back south again while Csongor filled his belly. On their first swing around the southern end of the island, they had noticed a few deep clefts in the rocks: corridors of water no more than a couple of meters wide, where soft layers of rock had been eaten away by the waves. It was late afternoon and these were already deep in shadow. They rowed the boat into one of them and let an incoming wave carry them forward until its keel skidded against the bed of gravel and jetsam that was trying to fill this crevice up. It was cool in here, and they felt invisible and safe. So much so that both men were almost overcome now by a powerful need to sleep. But they took turns keeping each other awake until their stomachs had digested the food and the feeling had passed. Then Marlon clambered up out of the slot and disappeared again for a while.

Csongor was awakened by someone shaking his shoulder. It was Marlon. The sky overhead was deep twilight.

“The boat is moving,” Marlon announced.

Csongor was still coming to terms with the fact that he was where he was; it had not all been just a bad dream.

“Back to Xiamen?”

“No. Toward us!”