In any case, Ershut and Jahandar trudged back into the camp to find their comrades perhaps 75 percent finished with packing; and the intensity of their outrage was sufficient to make the remaining 25 percent come together rapidly. Even so, a quarter of an hour must have expired before the others were ready. During that interval, Zula was, for lack of a better word, exhibited. Ershut was the custodian of the keys. He opened the padlock that secured the end of the chain around the tree, then used it as a very long and heavy dog-leash to prevent Zula from straying as he led her down the hill for a short distance. Below their campsite, but above the uppermost reaches of the plank-avalanche, a lump of granite, about the size of a two-story house, protruded from the slope. It saw, and could be seen from, much of the valley below. Much of the Blue Fork’s course could be seen from it, beginning in talus-and snow-covered mountains some miles to the south, or left, and running beneath the cliffs of Bayonet Ridge, directly below, to its junction with the White Fork at the Schloss, off to the right. The slope was heavily forested, but when the angles were right, it was possible to get a clear view of the road and of the turnaround at its end.
Standing in the middle of the turnaround were three men. She could not really see faces at this distance, but she knew them from their shapes as Jones, Abdul-Ghaffar, and Uncle Richard. And she knew that they could see her.
A childish thrill shot down her arm, telling her to raise it and wave at her uncle. She controlled that impulse and lost sight of the men below through a screen of tears. Turning her back on her uncle in shame, she began to trudge back to the campsite, heedless of the tug of the chain. Ershut let her go and locked her back up and left her to sit at the base of the tree, curled up and sobbing. A pathetic state of affairs. But better than she deserved. She had just betrayed her own uncle. He was now in the power of men who would certainly kill him as soon as he was no longer useful.
SOKOLOV HAD A moment’s irrational fear that he was never going to strike the water, but he mastered the urge to look down, since this would have led to getting punched in the face by the ocean. He wouldn’t have been able to see anything anyway. He kept his toes pointed and his ankles together, not wanting any water hammer effects on his testicles either, and then suddenly there was a shock in his legs and a searing whoosh immediately snuffed out by a deep mechanical throb: the screws of the freighter, churning away just behind him. An old habit told him that he should begin swimming now. But he was zipped up from ankles to neckline in an orange survival suit that knew how to find the surface. He waited. The frigid water, churned into a foaming sluice by the screws, streamed over him.
His head broke the surface and he was breathing again. To get his bearings, he spun in place, treading water as best he could in the unwieldy suit, until he could see the transom of the freighter receding. It was already impressively far away.
He turned his head to the right and saw what he’d seen a few seconds earlier from the ship’s fantaiclass="underline" brassy light reflecting against the underside of low clouds. The lights of a city, and perhaps of an impending sunrise. Brighter, sharper lights gleamed along a slope perhaps a kilometer distant, a bluff rising out of the sea, carpeted with trees but densely settled with houses, and a few big avenues aglow with the logos of strip malls and fast-food places.
He drew a bead on a KFC sign and began swimming.
THE APLOMB WITH which the boatman had helped Sokolov throw the dead men off the deck of his vessel, in those misty waters off Kinmen two weeks ago, had convinced Sokolov that here was a fellow with whom he could really do business. He had wondered where “George Chow” had found this man and had begun to develop a hypothesis that this was not just any random boatman who had been, as it were, hailed off the street, but was actually some kind of a local fixer who ran various errands for the local espionage community. Either that, or he was a clinical psychopath, of whom Sokolov was more afraid than anyone else he had dealt with on that day.
It happened sometimes that in the early part of one of these projects, it felt as if you were going up hill into a headwind. Everything was against you; luck was always bad; nothing fell together, nothing worked out right. But beyond a certain point it changed and it was all easy, everything went your way. Thus here. He had rid himself of Olivia, who was an alluring and yet highly inconvenient person to have in his life. He was no longer in the PRC, no longer in the crowded city center of Xiamen, and, to boot, shrouded in dense fog and being assisted by a peppy boatman who, if he had been impressed or scared by the three gun-toting agents who’d commandeered his boat, must have been even more so by the way Sokolov had vaulted aboard and machine-gunned them. Since he seemed to have passed over that watershed, it had not really surprised him when he had found himself, only a little while later, ascending a rope ladder toward an open hatch near the stern of a big containership bound for the open Pacific. He had easily come to terms with its Filipino crew and bought passage, and even a bunk of his own, using the remaining cash in his pockets. The next two weeks had been a sort of vacation on a steel beach, and a welcome opportunity to rest up and heal from various minor injuries suffered during the events in Xiamen. Only during the last couple of days had he really stirred himself from his bunk and begun to exercise again, practicing his falls and rolls on the ship’s deckplates to the great amusement of the crew.
A TIDAL CURRENT seemed to drag him alongshore. A beach came into view, and he made for it as best he could in the suit. He did not need it for its flotation properties, but dared not shed it lest he die of hypothermia within sight of land. The sun was far from being up yet and would be hidden by dense clouds when it got around to rising above the horizon; but the sky was definitely growing lighter, enabling him to pick out a few details on the beach: strewn logs, and fire rings, and a public toilet.
Wrestling and kicking his way through a forest of brown kelp, he got to a place where he could feel a rocky bottom under his feet and trudged carefully toward a beached log, taking his time, not wanting to turn an ankle in a moment of thoughtless haste. When the water became knee-deep, he crouched in the lee of the log, in case he was being watched from one of the dwellings on the slope above, and stripped off the suit. Stuffed inside of it he had been carrying a set of clothes wrapped up in a garbage bag. He changed into these, all except for socks and shoes, which he carried a-dangle around his neck for the time being. The survival suit might garner attention if he left it here, so he stuffed it into the black garbage bag and slung that over his shoulder. Then he climbed a little higher on the strand and began to make his way south. He had no idea where he was, but the freighter had been headed south and so it seemed reasonable to assume that port facilities and a larger city were to be found in that general direction.
Half a dozen teenagers, boys and girls, were huddled together around the remains of a campfire. The empty beer bottles and fast-food wrappers all around them gave a fair account of how they had spent the preceding evening. They’d had enough foresight to bring blankets and sleeping bags and make a night of it. As Sokolov approached, one of them rose and staggered down the beach until he felt he had gone far enough to fish out his penis and urinate without giving offense to any female members of his party who might be awake. In this he seemed to be erring on the side of caution, glancing back frequently over his shoulder. Sokolov approved of this.
He was still pissing, with the enviable vigor of the young, as Sokolov approached within hailing distance. His eyes traveled up and down Sokolov’s body. His face bespoke alert curiosity but not fear; he had not identified Sokolov as a derelict or criminal.