She understood what Jones had been trying to tell her. These men needed to know that she was broken. Because only then could they trust her.
Which raised the question: Trust her to do what? Because if they just wanted to kill her, well …
What could Zula possibly do for these men that would be worth all of this trouble?
“Please, please, please,” she heard herself blubbering, “please, please, please, let her go!”
Khalid took his foot off her hand and gave the bucket a kick. It rotated out from beneath Yuxia’s head and emptied its contents onto the deck, which meant that Zula got soaked. Yuxia’s head was still hanging upside down just out of Zula’s reach. She coughed water out of her lungs, gasped once, and then vomited. When she was finished with that, they upended her again and sat her back down on the chair. The first thing Yuxia must have seen was Zula lying stretched out on the deck at her feet with blood pouring from her trashed pinky. Zula couldn’t really get a good look at Yuxia until Jones had hauled her back up onto her feet. She wanted to go and throw her arms around Yuxia and tell her how horribly sorry she was that all this had occurred, simply because Yuxia had, a few days ago, taken it upon herself to befriend a group of lost Westerners wandering around the streets of Xiamen. “No good deed goes unpunished” was one of Uncle Richard’s favorite aphorisms. But Jones was gripping both of Zula’s upper arms from behind and was dragging her back toward the ladder. “Time to go,” he was saying. “The sooner we get under way, the sooner she is free.” He spun her around to face the ladder, then shoved her into it hard enough that she had to bring both hands round in front of her to stop herself from slamming teeth-first into a rung.
She looked back at him over her shoulder. Some sort of uncomprehending look must have been on her face, because he suddenly looked disgusted. “The entire point of what you have just seen,” he said, “is that your friend will be kept here as a hostage, and that if you do not behave perfectly at all times during what is to happen next, she will simply be thrown overboard with something heavy attached to her and suffer the fate just now intimated.”
Zula looked past Jones at Qian Yuxia, sitting there in her chair, still breathing rapidly, gazing ahead at nothing in particular. It was hard to imagine how any person could be calmer, more unruffled, by the experience of torture and near drowning. Perhaps Yuxia was just stunned, or brain damaged, or holding in some deep emotional trauma that would later emerge in dramatic and unpredictable fashion.
But that was not how she looked. She looked as though she were calculating how best to revenge herself on these bastards.
“Girlfriend, I’ll do whatever I can to make sure you don’t get hurt anymore,” Zula said.
“I know,” Yuxia muttered.
Then Jones shoved Zula up the ladder, and she began climbing toward the light of the stars.
A smaller vessel, similar to the one that had brought them in from Xiamen, but without a taxi crater in its cargo deck, had met them and tied up alongside. Zula was made to understand that she should climb down into it. She did so and found a place to sit where she would not be in the way.
At least half an hour passed in discussions and preparations. It seemed to her as though a lot of gear was being collected from the larger vessel’s various cabins and holds and lockers and that it was being gone through, sorted, checked, repacked. And having spent her whole life around guns, she knew from the sounds, from the weight of the stuff, and simply from the posture of the men carrying it, that some of it was weaponry. She was intensely interested in what the men were saying to one another and was maddeningly close to being able to follow the Arabic. She definitely heard the words for airplane and airport, which delighted some little-girl part of her soul (“Yay, going on a trip!”) even as her higher brain was ticking off all the bad things that could happen when men like Jones came into proximity with jet aircraft.
She was pretty certain she heard the word for “Russian” too. But it was difficult to make anything out, since all of the conversations were sotto voce, and anyone who raised his voice to a conversational level was glared at and shushed.
Some kind of sorting process seemed to be under way. She had noticed that some of Jones’s men had more of a Middle Eastern look about them and preferred Arabic to whatever it was that the other, more Chinese-looking men spoke to each other. The latter were staying behind while the former took places on the smaller boat.
In a manner familiar to anyone who had ever packed a car for a family trip, genial confusion gave way to impatience, then furious ultimatums, then ill-advised snap decisions. Finally the lines were untied, and the smaller vessel began to move away.
Having apparently delegated Khalid to boss the skipper around and generally run the show, Jones disengaged himself from the main group and came over and sat down next to Zula. “Earlier,” he said, “I had been looking for some way of telling you that you’ve fallen in among men who are happy to stone young women to death as a penalty for wrong sorts of behavior.” And he nodded in the direction of Khalid’s crew, who had busied themselves sorting through and repacking all the gear they’d brought on board. “But you have probably guessed that already.” He turned and looked at her brightly. “Then I remembered something about Khalid. You know which one he is?”
“The one who’s glaring at me right now?”
Jones looked. “Yes. That one.” Then he turned his attention back to Zula. “When Khalid was fighting the Crusaders in Afghanistan — ”
“Meaning what? Knights with red crosses on their shields?”
“The Americans, in this case,” Jones said. “He and his group were driven, for a time, out of a district that they had controlled for some years. The Americans occupied it and began to impose their culture on the place. Things changed. A school for girls was established.”
“Let me guess — Khalid didn’t approve?”
“Not at all. But there was nothing he could do except watch from the hills and bide his time. Of course, nothing prevented him and other members of his group from slipping into town occasionally, just to conduct espionage operations. They would disguise themselves — you’ll like this — by putting on burqas, so that people would think that they were women. Now, Khalid had a lot to think about beside just the girls’ school, but he did make inroads from time to time. Two men on a scooter, one driving, the other carrying a squeeze bottle full of acid. Wait until you see a group of girls walking down the street on their way to school, ride past them, aiming for the faces — squirt, squirt — ” Jones pantomimed it, aiming an imaginary squirt bottle at Zula’s face, and she tried not to flinch. “It scared some of them off. And the poison gas attack very nearly closed the place down altogether. But the teacher was a tough lady. Indomitable. Irrepressible. The kind of woman you only aspire to be, Zula. And so, with plenty of help from the Americans, the school kept on going in spite of all of Khalid’s best efforts. But eventually the Americans decided, as they always do, that they had pacified the place quite enough and that they were tired of seeing their young men picked off one by one by snipers and IEDs. So they declared the job finished and they pulled out of that town. You know what Khalid did then?”