Csongor was standing in one corner aiming a pistol at a crew member who had, apparently, remained at the controls through everything that had just happened. Marlon was talking to the guy in Mandarin: “You don’t have any choice,” he said, as if he were repeating something that he’d said before and that this pilot had been too stupid to take in. “You have to take us out of here. Get us to Taiwan or the Philippines or something. We don’t have any time to waste!”
The pilot seemed unable to make any decision until finally the cook spoke up in Fujianese and informed him that all the other men on the vessel had been flung overboard. This seemed to make a considerable impression on the pilot. Finally he turned to the control console and shoved on a handle that caused the engines to rev up. Yuxia felt the boat begin to accelerate beneath her, which was a good feeling. “Get us clear of the shore!” Marlon demanded, apparently fearing that the pilot might make a deliberate attempt to beach the vessel. The pilot made a tentative course shift that caused the bow to swing out away from Heartless Island. It wasn’t enough for Marlon who stepped forward and wrenched the wheel farther in the same direction. This elicited a stream of panicky Fujianese from the pilot, which Yuxia translated into English: “He says that you just aimed the ship directly toward Kinmen. If we stay on this course, we will be blown out of the water.”
Marlon backed away from the wheel and let the pilot change the course back to one that was more southerly, but he was clearly in a suspicious and jumpy frame of mind and made a point of walking around the cabin and looking out all of the windows to verify that they weren’t headed toward land.
“GPS,” Csongor said, and nodded at one of the array of little screens and electronic devices mounted to the console.
Within a few moments they had gathered around the device that Csongor had noticed. Identifying it as a GPS unit had actually required some careful observation. It was crude and industrial-looking compared to the units with big color screens that some people had in their cars. This one’s screen was tiny and gray and showed only those details of interest to mariners: coastlines, shallows, and buoys. But the latitude and longitude were clearly displayed as long strings of digits across the bottom, and the crude outlines and symbols on the screen were creeping upward as the boat moved south.
“I cannot fucking believe this,” Csongor said. “Four days ago I am in Budapest drinking beer. Now I have hijacked a boat in China and I have fallen in love and I have killed people.”
No one had much to say about that. Marlon turned to Yuxia and said in Mandarin, “Is there anyone else?”
“I don’t think so,” she answered, “but we should look around.”
They agreed that Csongor should remain on the bridge holding the gun while Marlon and Yuxia familiarized themselves with their new boat.
The cook followed them out and down onto the main deck, then told Yuxia, “There is a gun up on the bridge, hidden under the control panel.”
So they went back up to the bridge and had the pilot stand well back while Marlon got down on hands and knees and groped around and found the gun: an ancient revolver, rusty around the edges, but loaded and ready to use. This he threw into the ocean. Then, just to be sure, they had both the pilot and the cook strip all the way down to their drawers and sifted through their clothes and found a phone and two knives. Marlon pulled the battery from the pilot’s phone, then did likewise to his phone and to Yuxia’s.
FOLLOWING INSTRUCTIONS FROM Khalid, the pilot Pavel climbed into the backseat of the stolen taxi, where Jones had been waiting behind tinted glass the entire time. Zula joined them. Khalid got into the passenger seat. A similar arrangement was made in a second taxi behind them, which they had simply hailed from the queue in the hotel drive; Sergei ended up in that one along with the other bomb vest wearer.
Once they had pulled out onto the highway, and the second taxi was squarely in their rearview mirror—for apparently its driver had been instructed simply to follow—Jones said to Pavel, “In normal circumstances I would plan what is about to happen very carefully. Maybe we would build a mockup of a jet out in the middle of Yemen and train on it. But because of the way things are today, we are just going to wing it and trust to Allah. Call it fatalism if you like; I believe that is the traditional spin put on it by Westerners.”
Pavel did a pretty good impression of not having understood a single word.
“So,” Jones continued, “tell me about what it is like at the private jet terminal in Xiamen. I have never enjoyed the luxury. Will someone be there to stamp my passport?”
Still nothing from Pavel.
“I am quite serious,” Jones said. “I need to know whether we have to pass through an immigration barrier. To show documents. Because”—and here he smiled in a way that Zula would have found charming had she known nothing else about him—“you see, I’m afraid that my British passport has been quite misplaced. As has her American one.” He nodded Zula’s way.
“If you want to know normal,” Pavel said, “then, normally, I would file a flight plan to the destination city. Also passenger manifest. If the destination is in same country, then obviously there is no need to deal with immigration. If destination is in other country, then you should get passport stamped on way out.”
“But the sort of bloke who flies about on a private jet is too busy to stand in line to get his passport stamped, isn’t he?” Jones said.
“Frequently, yes. Depends on country. Depends also on type of airport.”
“Say more.”
“Some places, there is no FBO—”
“Come again?”
“Fixed base operator. Special terminal for private jets.”
“Ah, thank you for the clarification.”
“If is no FBO, you stand in line with everyone else at emigration.”
“And if there is an FBO?”
“Then many times it is handled on plane. You go direct to FBO. Get on plane. Wait for official. Official comes on plane. Counts passengers. Checks against manifest. Stamps passports. Goes away. Plane takes off.”
“Is this one of those places that has an FBO?”
“Of course, our plane is parked at FBO since three days.”
“How did you get into the country in the first place? Did all of you have visas?”
“No,” Pavel said.
Zula provided a brief explanation of how they had done it.
Jones considered it. “What if you filed a flight plan for some city in China and then flew to Islamabad instead?”
“Some places it would be noticed. Other places—” Another shrug.
“All right then. What’s out there in the general direction of Islamabad?”
“Dushanbe?”
“I’m talking about airports in China—so that there’d be no need for an international flight plan.”
“I see.”
“Do correct me if I’m wrong. But I think you just got done telling me that, if you file a flight plan for another city in China, the immigration officials need not come on board to stamp passports.”
“Generally correct.”
“So where would that be?”
“Urumqi?” Pavel guessed.
“How about Kashgar?”
“Yes, of course, Kashgar.”
“Never been there,” Jones admitted, “but I’ve been close to it, on the Tajikistan side.”
Pavel waited.
Jones smiled. “I daresay that if we file a flight plan to Kashgar, and then overshoot it, and dogleg down to Islamabad, no one will notice. Or if they do, it’ll be too late for them to take any action.”
“It is only few hundred kilometers from western border of China,” Pavel allowed.
“Then I suggest that you get out your laptop, or whatever it is that you use, and make it happen,” Jones said.
“Departure when?”
Jones looked at Pavel as if he were a blithering idiot. “Departure now. We are driving directly to the airport from here.”
“
Is not possible.”
“What do you mean is not possible?”
“Rules in China are that flight plan must be filed six hours in advance.”
“Hmm.”
“Used to be three to six days, is much easier now.”
They drove in silence for a few minutes as Jones considered it. Then, just as Zula was beginning to wonder if he had nodded off, he spoke up again: “You were sitting in your hotel waiting for Ivanov.”
“Yes,” Pavel said.
“If Ivanov had come to the hotel, as planned, today, and picked you up, you’d have gone to the FBO and boarded the jet and then what?”
“We would have flown to Calgary.”
“What’s in Calgary?”
“Fuel.”
“So you’re saying Calgary would be a mere refueling stop.”
“Yes.”
“What would the final destination be?”
“Toronto. Where we started.”
“Why not fly directly to Toronto, then?”
“Great circles.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Pavel sighed, then held his hands out in front of him as if gripping a globe about the size of a pumpkin. “You see—”
Jones interrupted: “I know what a bloody great circle route is.”
“Okay, good. Is much easier to explain then.”
“Then explain it.”
“If you draw a great circle from here to Calgary, it passes up along the coast of China. South Korea. Sakhalin Island. Kamchatka. Then along the coast of Alaska and British Columbia for some distance. Then it cuts across the mountains and down into Calgary. All of this is a very commonly used air travel corridor, you understand? All of the jets between Asia and North America follow such a route. It does not pass over any sensitive areas. However. If you draw a great circle from here to Toronto, is totally different. It goes up across China. Then North Korea—very bad. Then a large part of Siberia that is definitely not a normal air traffic corridor. To get approval for such a flight plan is impossible. So we must follow the normal corridor until we are over western Canada. From there things get easier. But then we are so far from following a great circle route that it becomes necessary to refuel. Most efficient place to refuel is Calgary. That is where we filed the flight plan.”
“You say it has already been filed?”
“Of course.”
“You say ‘of course,’ ” Jones said, working it out, “because of that six-hour delay you mentioned. Ivanov was a man in a hurry. He wanted to be ready to get out of here at a moment’s notice. Which is a difficult thing for you to reconcile with the six-hour delay mandated by the Chinese government. So you had a flight plan all set up and ready to go in advance.”
“This is what I do,” Pavel said, “when I am waiting in hotel. My job.”
“So it would be possible for you to go directly to the airport now and get on that plane and start flying in the general direction of Calgary immediately.”
“Not in general direction. Exact direction. But yes. No problem for us to get clearance for this.”
“But that is obviously an international flight.”
“Yes.”
“So the immigration officials will want to come on board and stamp passports.”
“Yes.”
“Did you say something about a passenger manifest before?”
“Yes. We supply such document to officials.”
Jones winced. “I’ll bet it has the names of a lot of Russians on it. That would be unfortunate, since all those Russians except for one are now dead.”
“Not a problem,” Pavel said. “Passenger manifest is separate document from flight plan. Goes to different officials. Does not have to be filed in advance. You see, manifest changes all the time. Someone changes plans at last minute, decides not to fly, or someone is added. We file manifest immediately before departure.”
“All right,” Jones said, “so the worst case is that by playing some games with the manifest we might be able to take off and head in the direction of Canada.”
“Maybe. Depends on officials and passports.”
Jones waved this off. “We’ll worry about that later. Right now I want to talk about flight plans.”
Another long period of him thinking.
“I would really like to make a stopover in Islamabad,” he concluded. “Let’s go over the steps involved in the Kashgar gambit.”
“This depends on what you want to do after Islamabad. If you just want to abandon plane there, then your plan would work fine. We could file a plan for Kashgar and divert to Islamabad and no one could stop us.”
“Ah, but Islamabad is not the final destination,” Jones said. “After a brief stopover there, I would most definitely want to fly somewhere else.”
“What is brief?”
“A day or two. Maybe three.”
Pavel considered it. “Could work,” he finally allowed.
But Pavel had been thinking about it for so long that he had attracted the attention, and then the suspicion, of Jones, who now drew something out of his pocket and reached down and did something that made Pavel jerk uncomfortably. Zula looked down and saw a passing streetlight reflected in the polished metal of a blade, which Jones was holding against the side of Pavel’s hand. “You can fly an airplane with nine fingers, can’t you?” Jones asked.
Pavel said nothing.
Jones went on: “I’m just a bit concerned. Until now, you’ve been answering my questions without hesitation, which is how I like it. But the last answer was a long time in coming. Which makes me think that you are starting to play chess with me. I don’t want you playing chess. You need to understand that the success of my endeavors, and your personal survival, are now one and the same thing, Pavel. It would be a terrible shame, and a very bad thing for you personally, if I found out, a few days from now, that you had done something clever and fucked me. Fucked me, that is, by exploiting some technical nicety in the world of private jet travel that I can’t possibly know about.”
“I was thinking about consequences of staying in Islamabad for several days,” Pavel allowed.
“And that is very good,” Jones returned, “provided you share all those thoughts with me honestly.”
“It is a modern airport. You cannot simply fly a jet airplane into such an airport and park it like a car at a shopping mall. It will be noticed. Records will be made of it.”
“I encourage you to keep alerting me to such complications,” Jones said. “But the fact of its being noticed might not be a bad thing. After Islamabad, I only need to make one more flight.”
“To where?”
“Almost any major city in the United States of America would do. I rather have my heart set on Vegas, but I’m prepared to be flexible.”
Khalid, who had been sitting quietly in the front seat this entire time, now made a remark over his shoulder, entirely in Arabic, except for the words “Mall of America.”
“My comrade makes an excellent point,” Jones said, “which is that, if we don’t have the range for Vegas, Minneapolis would be brilliant. That would be easier, right? Because farther north.”
“Depends on great circles,” Pavel said stolidly. “May I use laptop?”
Jones considered it. “This is going to take longer than I had hoped,” he said. “We have a bit of business to attend to first. But after that, yes, you may use your laptop.”
They arrived at the dock they’d used earlier. The boat had been loitering out in the channel but came in to meet them again.
The driver of the second taxi was ushered onto the boat at gunpoint, and his place behind the wheel was taken by the bomb vest wearer who’d been riding in his passenger seat. The trunks of both taxis were stuffed with cargo. The last two Middle Eastern–looking jihadists, who had been cooling their heels aboard the boat this entire time, climbed into the second taxi along with Sergei. The two taxis pulled back onto the ring road and proceeded to the airport and then to the private jet termin
al—what Pavel had referred to as the FBO. Access to this was controlled by a gate with a security guard, but Pavel, in his pilot’s uniform, seemed to know the right things to say, and so they were allowed to pull through and drive right up to the side of the jet. Jones and Zula and the two pilots went directly aboard while Jones’s men, under the direction of Khalid, began loading gear from the taxis into the plane’s cargo hold.
The interior of the jet had been cleaned and spruced up to the level that people who could afford to travel in this style would naturally expect, complete with flower arrangements, chocolates, and drinks in wee fridges. The wood-paneled interior gleamed softly under artfully designed halogen lights, and after the rigors of the last few days, the leather seats gave one the feeling of nestling in a giant baby’s lap. Jones did not sit down right away but spent a few minutes walking up and down the length of the thing, alternating between awe, outrage at the sheer level of luxury, and cackling amusement.
He was up in the cockpit, ogling the state-of-the-art displays, when his phone rang. He checked the screen.
“Ah,” he said, “the only thing that could possibly make this moment sweeter.” He flipped it open, raised it to his head, and spoke in a delighted tone of voice. Zula didn’t understand his Arabic, but she could guess what he was saying: “Hey, man, you’ll never guess where I’m calling from!”
Then he spun on his heel and stepped back out of the cockpit, a look of astonishment on his face. He moved into the plane’s open doorway, as if trying to get better reception. Switching to English, he demanded: “Who’s this?”
“SOKOLOV,” SAID THE Russian into the phone. “We met earlier when I killed half of your men. Ten minutes ago I killed the other half. Now there is just you, motherfucker. A fucking piece of shit who uses phone to send better men to die. Then runs away to airport.”
Olivia, watching interestedly from the opposite side of the boat, wondered how Sokolov knew that the person he was talking to was at the airport. Maybe he could hear jet engines in the background. As it happened, they were just now swinging around the northern end of Xiamen, where the airport was; and realizing this, Sokolov started looking around, just in time to see a 747 come rocketing up off the tarmac and angle up into the night sky. Sokolov’s arm jerked toward the place where he had stashed the submachine gun and Olivia shrank down lower on the fiberglass bench, anticipating with a mixture of terror and awe and delight that he might pick up the weapon and try to bring down the plane. But then his rational mind seemed to get that particular bad idea under control. “Running away like fucking rat while brave men are dead in city below. What a fine man you are, Jones. Still have Zula? Are you being nice to her? I suggest you be nice to that girl, Jones, because when I find you, I will kill you fast if you have treated her well and if you have harmed her in any way, I will do it in a way that is not so nice. I have sent a thousand jihadists to heaven to be with their virgins, but you I am going to send to hell.” And he hung up the phone and threw it into the sea.
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