Now there was a few minutes’ lull during which Olivia tried to review in her mind all that had happened today. Perhaps this was a mistake. She suspected that men like Sokolov did not devote much time to this sort of introspection. It seemed, though, to be part of her academic/analytical programming, which was all that she really had to offer to this ad hoc partnership. Sokolov’s talents and abilities had been on conspicuous display during the last half hour and had made Olivia feel, from time to time, like a side of beef that he was obligated to carry around with him as part of a hazing ritual (though she had saved his life by hiring the water taxi and then talking its driver into driving it to a place where Sokolov could jump on board, and she wondered whether Sokolov understood that fact). There was a temptation to just dissolve her will into his and look on while he did stuff. But the kinds of things Sokolov was extremely good at were useful in specific, limited circumstances that, in normal life, simply didn’t arise that often. A time was coming when he would be as helpless and as dependent on her as she had been on him during the escape from the mysterious assailants on Gulangyu.
Speaking of which, she had seen but not quite believed what he had done to those men. It had to have been real, since they had fallen down and not gotten up. But for the moment it was just a pattern of sensory impressions painted on the screen of her memory, not soaked in yet, not understood, not even granted the dignity of having really happened.
Sokolov’s phone had GPS and maps, which he had been watching with interest ever since they had left the airport in their wake. They were roaring down Xunjianggang, a strait about three kilometers wide that ran between Xiamen Island and the northeastern district of Xiang’an. It was aimed like a gun at a dark island about ten kilometers away: Kinmen, the “Quemoy” of Cold War propaganda. Though she had never discussed it with Sokolov—they had not discussed anything really—it was obviously their destination. For another minute or so they’d be in easy reach of PRC territory to both port and starboard, and so anyone tracking 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 Get down, idiot!
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 wangba to send out a distress call. Adrenaline had propelled her through the last hour’s events. But as soon as she felt land under her feet and exited swim-or-die mode, the bottom fell out. She dropped to all fours in the shallow surf, not just as a way of keeping her head down but because she did not think herself capable of standing up. Like a prehistoric fish dragging itself up onto the strand by its floppy, vestigial fins, she followed Sokolov up into shallower and shallower water and finally onto a sandy beach guarded by a vast defensive works: a double picket line of spikes angled toward the mainland. As became clear when they got closer, each spike was a railroad rail that had been planted in a massive tub of concrete and cut off at an angle to make it sharp. A fat eye bolt projected from the top of each cement block, which was apparently how they’d been lifted from a barge and dropped into place, one by one, during some long-forgotten Cold War defensive buildup. Rust had thinned the steel, barnacles thickened and furred it. The blocks had settled into diverse angles. Sokolov was right that this was no impediment to them.
A couple of meters beyond the tank traps they encountered a region of hexagonal blocks that had been sunk into the sand, apparently to stop beach erosion; these formed a strip of wildly uneven pavement maybe ten meters wide, running as far as they could see (which was not very far) in either direction.
Beyond that it was just a beach like any other. Alive, though, under her hands. For thousands of tiny crabs, no larger than beetles, were scuttling about, going in and out of pencil-sized holes in the sand.
Sokolov hissed at her, and she realized she’d gone too far. She flattened herself against the sand, glad of an opportunity to lie down and stop moving, even if she were wet and cold. He was a few meters behind her, draped over the dark hexagonal blocks, invisible even to Olivia who knew where he was.
They lay there for a few minutes, waiting and watching. Olivia had begun to shiver upon coming out of the water and was now doing so convulsively. Her teeth literally chattered together for the first time since she’d been four years old. She opened her mouth wider to stop the noise.
Moonlight and long, careful looking revealed that the beach gave way, above them, to a long glacis of what she could only assume was sandy soil, held together by low foliage dotted with yellow flowers. Above that loomed a row of crude, blocky structures that were completely dark. A few hundred meters away from them to the left was a small white blockhouse raised above the beach and supporting an array of antennas and lights. But the lights were not aimed in their direction, and it did not seem likely that they would be visible, supposing anyone was even looking for them.
When he was satisfied, Sokolov slithered down out of the jumble of hex-blocks and crawled on his elbows until he had reached the boundary between bare sand and the carpet of yellow flowers. Olivia followed him as he passed under a steel cable that had been stretched along a row of posts.
“Stay back,” he said. She stopped short of the cable.
He did a push-up, drew his knees up under him so that he was sitting on his haunches, pulled out his knife, and stuck it into the sand. After a few moments he drew it out, inched forward, and stuck it in again. Then again. Then again. “Follow in my steps,” he said.
“What are you doing?”
“Read sign,” he suggested.
Pulling herself up into a squat, she looked straight into a red triangle, suspended from the cable, sporting a skull and crossbones and reading DANGER MINES.
She wondered if a mine could be detonated by shivering.
Sokolov had been dragging the bag behind him. As neither it nor she were yet in the minefield, she duckwalked over to it, opened it up, and pulled out a sweater she’d stuffed into it earlier. This was damp, but because it was wool it would be warm anyway. She pulled it on and immediately felt somewhat better. Then she slung the bag over her knees and inched forward under the cable, stepping in Sokolov’s wake.
They now spent what felt like an hour creeping across the minefield.
“Mines very old,” Sokolov mentioned, after a while.
“Oh good,” she said.
“No, bad. More dangerous.”
So much for conversation.
Perhaps sensing Olivia’s mood, Sokolov essayed the following: “You could perhaps make phone call?”
“My phone is gone.” She’d lost it during the swim.
“Good.”
She agreed. The PSB would be all over her apartment by now. They’d find nothing there that was the least bit incriminating, in and of itself: just the personal effects of one Meng Anlan. But a little bit of footwork would make it obvious that Meng Anlan was a fabricated person. They would discover that she had leased a space directly across the street from the epicenter of this morning’s excitement, and she would become the object of intense interest, and they would be listening in on all activity involving her phone number. Not that it mattered quite as much now that she and Sokolov had made it to a different country, but sending up a flare didn’t seem like the right next step.
“Look in CamelBak,” Sokolov suggested.
She had not seen one of these before, but she figured out how to get it open and discovered a couple of phones inside of it. “Which one should I use?” she asked.
“Little Samsung.”
“Whose is it?”
“No one’s. Bought yesterday. Never used.”
She turned it on and observed a weak signal. Apparently it had succeeded in picking up a cell tower across the strait in Xiang’an.
She thumbed out a brief text message and sent it to a number she had memorized but never used before. Part of her training. What to do when everything turned to shit. Don’t use any of the usual email addresses or phone numbers. Don’t use your own phone. Send a message to this special number, the oh shit number, which you have memorized and which you rememorize every single day before you go to bed and when you wake up in the morning. Use the oh shit number once and never use it again.
&nbs
p; The message said HAVE GONE TO HAICANG TO CHECK IN ON GRANDMOTHER; and it meant I am on Kinmen and my cover is blown.
Then she shut the phone off.
Half an hour later they made it out the other side of the minefield and entered into a more lushly vegetated zone of aloe and flowering cacti growing around old half-buried concrete boxes that she reckoned were bunkers, made to withstand artillery from the mainland. The floors of these were scattered with military debris, but they were otherwise stripped, with rusty, bent brackets dangling from the walls where wiring harnesses had been ripped out. Beyond them, the foliage rose up in a wall, completely untamed. Sokolov ventured into it and came out trailing huge volumes of green vines that he had cut and torn out of the tangles. They piled it on the concrete floor of the bunker until it came up to midthigh. They put on all the clothes they had and then lay down next to each other and pulled more of the foliage on top of them to make a sort of comforter. Sokolov put his arms around Olivia and she burrowed her head into his chest. They interlocked their legs. A quarter of an hour later, she stopped shivering. Then she was gone into a sleep so profound that it verged on death.
JONES HADN’T SAID much during his mysterious phone conversation. He had mostly listened. Whatever he had listened to had really changed his mood. There had been no gloating since then. Instead he had demanded, peevishly and insistently, that they move on to business.