“Obviously, I don’t have a ready-made passport for a gentleman of his description,” the man said, “since I don’t even know what his description is. Even if I did, for him to go to the airport today and get on a plane — ”
“I understand. I get it.”
“Speaking of passports — ”
Olivia was nonplussed for a few moments, then took his meaning. She reached into her pocket and took out her Chinese passport. Her million-pound Meng Anlan passport. The man took it from her and, with a flip of the wrist, tossed it through the open maw of the forge. It exploded into flame before it had even touched the coals, and was fully consumed in a few moments.
“Farewell, Meng Anlan,” he said. “Hello, whoever’s name is on the passport in that bag. I’ve forgotten it already.”
“Obviously, I’m pleased that you can get whoever I now am out of the country,” Olivia said. “But I am disinclined to leave until I know what is to come of Mr. Y. I know you can’t get a passport for him. But isn’t there some way — ”
The man was nodding. “We do, in fact, have a backup plan.”
“Really?”
“Yes. We’re good at such things. It is much more old-school. Very Cold War. Your friend might like it.”
“Pocket submarine?”
“Even more old-school than that. There’s a containership,” he said. “You can actually see it from the north shore of the island. Riding at anchor. Panamanian registered. Filipino crewed. Taiwanese owned. It has been taking on cargo at Xunjianggang. In a few hours, it is departing for the Port of Long Beach. We’d hoped we could get something Sydney bound — which would be quicker — but it’s more important to get you and your fantastically homicidal entourage out of here today, before the Chinese can get any more furious than they already are. So Long Beach it is. The great circle route takes two weeks or so.”
“How do we make this work?”
“He will need to get out to the ship just after dark. This is something that you shall have to arrange yourself, preferably without leaving the waterfront district littered with corpses. As the ship is pulling out of the Xunjianggang, just starting to build up speed, it should be possible to pull up alongside it and come aboard. As long as you stay out of sight, it should be fine.”
“Stay out of sight? Are you serious?”
“From the mainland. Come up on its starboard side.”
“And they’ll be ready for this?”
“They had better be,” he said, “considering what we have paid them.”
THEY SPENT THE remaining hours of darkness learning the physics of the boat, which was by no means easier given that they had all been awake for going on twenty-four hours now.
Mohammed’s body had to be gotten rid of. This meant throwing it overboard, which seemed like a terrible and disgraceful thing, even notwithstanding the Osama bin Laden precedent. They avoided the matter for a little while, but it was simply out of the question that they could share the bridge with a dead man. So, after some dithering and stalling, Csongor went rummaging for something that was dense and heavy enough to pull the body down to the floor of the sea, but not too heavy for them to move, and that they didn’t need for any other purpose. He ended up settling on a black steel box filled with 7.62 millimeter cartridges, of which there were several strewn around the cargo hold. He laid this across Mohammed’s ankles and held them up in the air while Yuxia lashed it all together with surplus pallet wrap, and then he dragged Mohammed out of the bridge and jackknifed him over the railing. The corpse was poised there for a moment. Csongor felt it would be proper to say something. But he realized that there was nothing he knew how to say that Mohammed and his people would not find grievously sacrilegious. So he tumbled the body the rest of the way over. The shrink-wrapped lashings seemed to hold, and the corpse vanished.
With buckets of seawater, hauled up on a rope, they sluiced the steel floor of the bridge until it was no longer bloody. Learning their way around the vessel, they found scrub brushes and cleaning supplies and gave the place a more thorough washing down, swabbing blood splashes and fingerprints away from some of the bridge’s vertical surfaces. Marlon pulled the ruined radio off its bracket and threw it into the sea, trailing its bloody microphone.
The user interface of the GPS was anything but intuitive, but Marlon figured out how to zoom and pan its tiny map. Standing around it in the dark, they began to get a sense of where they had been — for the GPS displayed the boat’s past track — and where they were going. It seemed that, for the first hour of their voyage, Mohammed had steered them generally south along the coast, then changed to an easterly heading, making directly for Taiwan at a speed of something like ten knots. This had brought them to a point about thirty nautical miles off the Chinese coast, which was where the confrontation and shooting had taken place.
At that point, Marlon had dropped the vessel’s speed to more like five knots. This was not the absolute slowest they could go, but if they went any slower they lost all sense that they were making forward progress, and the boat seemed to wallow and wander (an impression that could be confirmed by zooming in on the track and observing the way it staggered across the screen). The rudder, it seemed, was not capable of doing its job unless water was flowing across it with at least some minimum speed.
Marlon told Csongor about what Batu had said regarding the fuel gauge, or lack thereof, and so Csongor went down to the engine room and spent a while figuring out how the diesels worked, eventually identifying the fuel line and the pump that fed it. From this, plumbing led back through a bulkhead to a space mostly occupied by a pair of cylindrical tanks of impressive and reassuring size, each rather more than a meter in diameter and perhaps three meters long. Each had a fill pipe welded into its top. Csongor traced those up to a pair of fittings on the deck, which he guessed they would use whenever they pulled up to the nautical equivalent of a gas station. Shining his flashlight around that area, working out slowly in concentric circles, he finally found where they kept the dipstick: a piece of (inevitably) bamboo secured under the gunwale with bungee cords, ruled with felt-tip scribe marks and (to him) cryptic annotations. He called Yuxia down to help him interpret the marks, and then they opened one of the fuel fill hatches and shoved the bamboo pole down into it. Then he began pulling it out in a hand-over-hand movement, praying that he would feel cold wet diesel fuel on his palms. This did not happen, however, until the last few inches of the stick emerged. Yuxia read the nearest number marked on the pole. This meant nothing since they had no idea how quickly the diesels consumed fuel. But there was no ignoring the fact that it was the last number on the stick. “We just have to be scientific about this,” Csongor said, and he marked the exact location of the fuel level and noted the time.
They then repeated the experiment with the other tank and found that it was completely dry. Csongor went down and fiddled with the valves and confirmed his suspicion that the empty tank had simply been disconnected from the system; the jihadists had only used the one tank, and they hadn’t bothered to put more than a little bit of fuel in it, since all they ever did was putter around the harbor at the island.
Yuxia went back up to the bridge to keep Marlon company and make sure he didn’t fall asleep on his feet, and Csongor devoted more time to sorting through the hold’s contents. It did not take a Sherlock Holmes to read the recent history of this boat. It had been owned, and used hard, for many years by actual fishermen who had accumulated the sorts of gear and supplies one would expect: nets, lines, stackable plastic trays, polyethylene cutting boards, cutlery, whetstones, all manner of tools, paint, lubricants, solvents, and the like. As sustenance on longer voyages they had also laid in white plastic drums of what he took to be potable water, and sacks of rice, and a few other bulk food items such as soy sauce and cooking oil.