Reamde: A Novel

by Neal Stephenson

  “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.

  Then, at some point, the boat had been acquired by the jihadists, who had turned it into a floating arsenal: probably not enough to run a war, or even an insurrection, but plenty if the only goal was to blow up a building or plan a Mumbai-style shooting spree. So there was a pallet carrying a black steel drum of what Csongor guessed, by smell, to be fuel oil, and another carrying heavy woven-plastic sacks of white powder labeled as FERTILIZER: ammonium nitrate, presumably. Those two ingredients, mixed together, would make a high explosive that, as Csongor knew from reading the newspapers, could be detonated if one had some blasting caps handy. Csongor had no idea what a blasting cap even looked like, but he soon enough found out, as a carton of them had been helpfully stored on a shelf next to a translucent plastic box filled with phones, all of the same make and model.

  Other boxes and pallets had been
loaded with ammunition, mostly loose rifle cartridges in dark green or black steel boxes. But these had been raided and depleted earlier in the day as Jones and his men had made hasty preparations for their departure. He already knew that the guns were all missing, since they’d carefully searched for them earlier.

  Supposing that they got picked up, eventually, by naval or coast guard vessels, he did not want to be found on board with such things, and so he began to consider how most easily to throw them overboard. Looking up, he noted that much of the foredeck consisted of a large cargo hatch, and so he went up and figured out how to get that open, and then spent a few minutes shining his flashlight over the equipment poised above it: cranes and winches and cables that had obviously been put there to facilitate moving things in and out of that hatch, if only he could figure out how to turn them on and use them. Some of the winches sported hand cranks, and so he reckoned he could get it done with muscle power if he had to. Now that he was out of China, he was finally getting a feel for how things were done in the country, and realizing that they had a genius for the kind of simple technology that required no instruction manuals. It was going to help them during this voyage.

  Returning to the hold, he began sorting things out into three piles: trash (e.g., empty cardboard boxes), stuff they might be able to use (food), and dangerous or incriminating objects that needed to be jettisoned. He found four boxes, shrink-wrapped together, packed with instant ramen. Then three cartons of military rations: ready-made meals sealed in black pouches. Opening one of these just to see what it was, he discovered that he was ravenous and ate the whole thing standing up, stuffing the food into his mouth with filthy hands.

  He found cigarettes and first aid kits and sorted those into the “keep” pile.

  He was spending a lot of time maneuvering around the black steel drum of fuel oil, and finally—for perhaps the energy from the food was at last making its way to his brain—realized that the ship’s engines would probably burn it. How to transfer it into the fuel tanks? He spun up a sort of harebrained idea that involved using the ship’s crane to haul the drum up out of the hold and then somehow funnel its contents into the fuel filler abovedecks. With a little more consideration, though—for perhaps the Chinese way with technology was beginning to catch on with him—he realized that a siphon ought to work, since the ship’s fuel tank was actually situated below the altitude of the fuel drum. So he scrounged a hose and got the thing rigged up and after some false starts and spills and spitting out of fuel oil was eventually able to get a siphon working that drained the drum over the course of the next half hour.

  He then redipped the tank, hoping to observe a triumphant and dramatic rise in fuel level, and found that all of his labors had made no effect; in the amount of time it had taken him to do it, they’d burned as much as he’d added.

  The eastern sky was growing lighter when he was finished with all of this. He went up to the bridge and found Yuxia up there alone, piloting the boat eastward and silently weeping. Marlon was apparently getting some sleep down in one of the cabins.

  It required no great leap of imagination for Csongor to understand why Yuxia had tears running down her face. They had taken insane risks and devoted all their energy during the last few hours to the goal of escaping from China. Replaying the story in his memory, Csongor was unable to see any moment when they might have chosen differently. He and Marlon could not have abandoned Yuxia to whatever fate the jihadists might have had in mind for her. Once they had unexpectedly gotten control of this fishing boat, they’d had to do something with it, and getting out of the ­People’s Republic of China had seemed like a good idea. In Csongor’s mind, this happened to be synonymous with getting closer to home. Marlon didn’t seem to be especially broken up by this hasty and unplanned departure from his native land; for him it must be an adventure of the sort that any young man would want to go on. Anyway, he needed to put some distance between himself and the apartment where he had created REAMDE, and this was an excellent way to accomplish that. But Yuxia had originally been drawn into this by nothing more than her desire to befriend some clueless Westerners she had observed wandering lost in the street. She had family back in Yongding, family who must be worried about her, and she must be asking herself now whether she would ever see them again.

  Even if she did, how could she explain certain things to them? The fight on the dock? The torture in the bucket of seawater? Aiming a pistol at Mohammed and trying to shoot him?

  No wonder she was a wreck.

  “I’ll do this,” Csongor said. “Go get some food. Go to sleep.”

  She didn’t move.

  “It’s going to be okay,” he said. “We will sort it all out somehow. None of this was your fault. You will go back home someday.”

  This was meant to be comforting, but it sent Yuxia running out of the bridge with a wail escaping from her throat. Csongor followed her halfway, fearing that she was about to throw herself into the sea, but she thumped down the steel steps and ran into a cabin and slammed the door behind her.

  Csongor continued steering the vessel into the sunrise while poking at the controls on the GPS unit, trying to get a sense of where they were. The morning light filtering into the front windows made it much easier to see around the bridge, and he noticed a stash of nautical charts that had escaped their notice in the darkness. He began to spread these out and to try to make sense of them. Most were large-scale depictions of complex features up and down the coast of China, and it was difficult for him to figure out their context. But one sheet caught his eye because it depicted a group of small islands, whose shapes jogged his memory; he’d seen them earlier while panning and zooming the GPS. They were identified, on the chart, as the Pescadores. They were out in the middle of the Straits of Taiwan, nearer to Taiwan than the mainland, but still a good fifty kilometers nearer to the boat’s current position than the shore of Taiwan itself. And the GPS seemed to be saying that these islands lay rather close to the course that they’d been steering anyway. So it seemed obvious that they should be making for the Pescadores. Csongor altered his course accordingly, steering on a slightly more southerly heading. As best he could make out from the charts and the GPS, they would reach the island group at something like four o’clock this afternoon. Assuming, that is, that they did not run out of fuel along the way.

  THE JET CONTINUED to follow what seemed to Zula like an unremarkable flight plan: slowly gaining altitude, following a straight course that took it away from the Chinese mainland and southward over the South China Sea. Some mountains poked their heads over the eastern horizon, and she guessed that these must be on Taiwan; but they rapidly fell away aft.

  She could not make up her mind whether to open the door or remain cloistered back here. A strong instinct told her simply to hole up in the dark and private cocoon of Ivanov’s cabin. But sooner or later she’d have to pee, and the jet only had one lavatory, which was forward.

  As long as she was alone, it seemed sensible to take stock of what was at her disposal. Though small, the cabin had a little dresser. She checked the drawers and found nothing besides spare pillows and blankets. Ivanov would have taken all his stuff with him, of course. There was also a little flip-down desk, just large enough to support a laptop, and above this, built into the cabinetry, an appliance that was obviously an intercom. It had a row of pushbuttons, variously marked CABIN, COCKPIT, PA, and TALK. Next to them was a volume knob.

  She turned the volume all the way down, then pressed the COCKPIT button. She found that if she pressed hard enough, it would lock down, causing an LED to illuminate, marked MONITOR. She then experimented with turning the volume up slowly and began to hear speech: Pavel and Sergei communicating with each other in Russian. Of which she, of course, knew not a word. But from time to time she would hear something she recognized, like “jumbo” or “Taipei.” And occasionally a voice in English would burst out of their radio: air traffic controllers, she supposed, communicating with them, or with other pla
nes, from towers on the mainland.

  She did not really understand the purpose or the content of these transmissions, but after a few minutes she was able to pick out certain patterns. Many of the transmissions began with a Chinese-accented voice saying “Xiamen Center” followed by the name of an aircraft manufacturer such as “Boeing” or “Airbus” or “Gulfstream” followed by a series of letters and numbers. Then a series of laconic instructions concerning altitude or heading or radio frequency. She reckoned that these transmissions all originated from an air traffic control center responsible for Xiamen’s airspace and that they were bossing the pilots of various airplanes around. In almost all cases, another voice would respond directly, frequently speaking in an English or American or European accent, repeating the series of letters and numbers that seemed to be their plane’s call sign, and then acknowledging the command with “Roger” followed by repeating the instructions out loud, presumably just to be sure that they’d gotten the details correctly. Occasionally, though, a transmission would go unacknowledged, and then Xiamen Center would have to repeat it; and if that failed, they might ask some other plane to relay the message. All of which was done with absolute, deadpan calm, which made sense given that it was what these ­people did all day, every day, just like bagging groceries or driving a truck. Twice she recognized the voice of Pavel acknowledging one of these transmissions, and in that way she learned the call sign of the plane on which she was a passenger, or rather a prisoner.

  From time to time the instruction would be something like “Contact Hong Kong Center” or “Contact Taipei Center” followed by a series of digits, which she assumed must be a radio frequency. Whereupon the pilot would identify himself and repeat the instructions as usual, and then sign off with a “Thank you” or “See ya” or “Out,” never to be heard from again. At least on this channel. So she figured that these were outbound aircraft being handed off from one air traffic control center to another.