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.
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.