Reamde

This did not take especially long, so when it was finished, he leaned back and enjoyed the view of the city, the colossal bridges thrown over the straits that separated it from the mainland, the container port, the big freighters riding at anchor. He would never see Xiamen again, that was for certain.

Something trembled against his leg. He reached in and pulled out the phone he’d taken from the dead jihadist. It had a new text message, consisting of three question marks.

Sokolov flipped through the “recent calls” menu and found seventeen consecutive phone calls to or from the 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 herself.

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 you first gesture in the direction of the stairs. With great trepidation, he preceded her up the stairs and onto the ship’s bridge.

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.”