Reamde

“NI YAO GAO de tamen ji quan bu ning.” Easy for Marlon to say. Hard for Yuxia to accomplish, locked as she was in a steel-walled cabin where everything of consequence seemed to be welded down. There was little in here that a person could smash or break. She tried smacking the glass of the porthole and nearly broke her hand. But there was a wooden chair that wasn’t nailed down, and she found that she could pick it up by its back and smash it into things. Her first few attempts went wild and crashed into the steel door, hard enough that the chair itself began to disintegrate and to send fragments of dry, broken wood bouncing back into her face. She brushed kindling out of her hair, then shifted to a double-handed grip on the largest part of the chair that was still in one piece and went back to work, finally beginning to strike home on the glass of the porthole itself. The glass wasn’t impressed. She hit it harder. Still nothing. Somehow this made her more enraged than Ivanov’s deception, being handcuffed to the steering wheel, Jones abducting Zula, being shoved facefirst into salt water.

She just wasn’t screaming enough. She began to let go with a deep grunt from her belly with every blow. Like that American tennis player, the big black woman, who screamed whenever she hit the ball. Anyway, to scream was part of raising hell, right? She wound up like a baseball player and lashed out with what was rapidly being reduced to a single short club of wood and screamed as loud as she could and just missed the porthole with a vicious blow. This made her even more angry, so she sucked in a breath and let go another scream and struck another wild blow that missed; and she began now to mix her screaming with curses that she had learned from the women of her village when they were very angry at the men in their lives, and finally she landed a strike on the porthole glass so hard that it cracked. The men of the boat had covered the porthole with paper and someone on the other side now snatched it down and looked through the broken glass just in time to see another chair-leg attack headed right for his face. He ducked out of the way as chips of glass flew out from the spreading fracture, and when he bobbed back up, he was screaming right back at her.

A few more strikes and a pie-wedge-shaped chunk of porthole glass was knocked out, and the one man had been joined by three others. Four of them! There were only six men on the whole boat. She gripped the chair leg like a mortar and began to use what was left of the glass as a pestle, jabbing at it with short sharp blows. This was, as much as anything, a way of catching her breath. She had forgotten to breathe. She saw the door handle move and knew they were coming; she stepped back from the door, sucked in as much air as she could, and greeted the first man into the room with a blast of invective that, had he understood the dialect she was using, would have shriveled his genitals into something like raisins. Other men followed the first one in through the narrow hatch and then spread out to either sides, backed up against the walls, out of range of the flailing chair leg. The look on their faces was genuine fear. Yuxia had turned into a crazy woman, a witch. Because only a crazy woman or a witch would behave this badly when she was totally in the power of a group of men who could rape her and kill her any time they felt like it.

A man entered the cabin with such force that he practically knocked the other men down. It was the boat’s captain. He hated her. He came right at her. She instinctively swung the chair leg at him, but he must have known some martial arts because he caught it on the fly and twisted it right out of her hand and hurled it contemptuously out the door and into the sea.

Yuxia reached into her boot and pulled out the phone and held it up for all of them to see. “I have already called the police!” she announced. “You are all dead men.”

This was perhaps the only thing that could have stopped the captain in his tracks. He stood perfectly still for a count of three.

A small, cylindrical object bounced in over the cabin’s threshold and landed in the middle of the floor. This was not the first time Yuxia had ever seen one. Earlier today, Marlon and Csongor had discovered a couple of them among Ivanov’s personal effects, and they had discussed them briefly, using some English terminology that she vaguely recognized. Not commonly used English words but ones she had heard before. “Stun” and “grenade.” From movies, she understood the grenade concept well enough. The thing on the floor didn’t look like the grenades from movies and so she would not have recognized it had it not been for the lucky coincidence of the chat in the van a few hours ago.

Or maybe not such a coincidence.

It occurred to her that the grenade was missing its ring.

Yuxia turned away from it, closing her eyes, and clapped her hands to the sides of her head.