And business, of course, was exactly what this plane was designed for. The main cabin could be configured as a meeting room; a data projector had been concealed in the aft bulkhead and could throw an image up the length of the cabin to a retractable screen at the forward end. So they pulled down all of the window shades and got Pavel’s laptop connected to the projector.
The two jihadists who had been driving the taxis drove them away from the plane and apparently parked them in the parking lot of the FBO and then walked back to come aboard. So there were now nine people aboard the jet: the pilots Pavel and Sergei, Abdallah Jones, Zula, Khalid, and four whom Zula thought of as soldiers: the one who had spent the entire day driving the stolen taxi around Xiamen, the second bomb vest wearer from the Hyatt, and two more who had only recently been collected from the boat. The latter two seemed younger, more junior. Certainly more obsequious. In any case, these four soldiers all crammed themselves into the private sleeping cabin at the back of the plane, leaving the main cabin available for this meeting. Zula was not invited to it, but neither was she told to move, and indeed, short of locking her into the lavatory, they could not really have put her anywhere else.
And so, shortly before midnight, they resumed the earlier conversation about flight plans and great circle routes, this time with visual aids. For Pavel had a piece of software that could calculate and plot such routes on a map of the world, and he now used it to shape possible courses from Islamabad to various cities in the United States.
The jet’s maximum range was 10,700 kilometers. The pilots wanted Jones to understand that some distance had to be subtracted from that figure to allow for unexpected headwinds and for maneuvering in the vicinity of the airports at either end of the flight plan.
The picture that emerged was that Islamabad was basically located on the opposite side of the world from Denver, and so a great circle route plotted directly over the North Pole would take the jet to the Mile High City, if it had that much range, which it didn’t. In fact, if they were to fly the jet on that heading, it would be lucky to reach as far south as Regina, Saskatchewan. More likely, they’d have to set down in Saskatoon for refueling.
This kind of talk seemed to put Abdallah Jones into a foul mood. After some angry pacing up and down the aisle, he appeared to calm himself down and then divulged something to the pilots. Or at least he acted as if he were divulging something. Zula had seen enough of the man and his wiles, by this point, to doubt that he ever sincerely divulged anything.
All he wanted, he claimed, was to get the jet across the forty-ninth parallel and land it on U.S. soil. It didn’t have to be a big airport. As a matter of fact, he much preferred a smaller, more rural destination. The ideal landing site would be an unmanned dirt strip out in the middle of nowhere. His only goal was to smuggle a few of his brethren into the United States where they could disappear into the general population and then await future orders. But if the jet could only make it as far as Saskatoon, this wouldn’t work.
There followed a lot more screwing around with maps and detailed calculations. The gist of it was that the middle of the United States was actually the worst part to aim for. Because of the mathematics of the great circle calculations, it turned out that the northeastern and northwestern corners of the Lower Forty-Eight were significantly closer to Islamabad—close enough that the jet might be able to reach them without the need to refuel.
They then began to plot and examine great circle routes from Islamabad to various New England and Northwest destinations. Jones was fascinated by the differences between these. The route from Islamabad to Boston, for example, passed over the western Russian heartland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, threaded between Iceland and Greenland, then passed over the Canadian maritime provinces and Maine. Each of these places seemed to give rise to its own set of misgivings in Jones’s mind. The route to Seattle, on the other hand, cut across the least populated swath of Siberia, traversed the Arctic Ocean, made landfall again in Canada’s extreme northwest, and followed the mountainous wilderness of the Yukon and western British Columbia before crossing the U.S. border only a few miles from its destination. The trajectory was an unbroken swath of the most desolate and unpopulated places on the globe. A small diversion to one side or the other would bring the jet down in the wilderness of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, or the mountains or deserts of eastern Washington State.
Once this was understood, there was no question in Jones’s mind as to how they would proceed.
“When we get to Islamabad,” he said, “we’ll file a flight plan from there to Boeing Field in Seattle. We can reach it without the need to refuel. I like this idea because it’s not going to arouse any suspicion in the minds of the authorities; Boeing Field is where you departed from the last time you left the United States.”
“But if you land there—” Pavel began.
“—we’ll be arrested, obviously, by Homeland Security,” Jones said. “But we’re not actually going to land there. We’re going to divert at the last minute and land out in the middle of nowhere and scatter. So you’ll need to reserve enough fuel for that.”
“You want to get from Islamabad to Seattle without refueling?” Pavel asked.
“Is that not the entire point of this exercise?”
“We have been plotting great circle routes,” Pavel told him. “This is not the same thing as a flight plan.”
“I understand that,” Jones said.
“You cannot simply fly on a great circle trajectory across Russia,” Pavel said, astonished that Jones would not already know this. He directed their attention at the red arc that his software had plotted northward from Islamabad, bisecting Siberia on its way to the high Arctic. “There is no such air traffic corridor. The Russian Air Force would shoot us down as soon as we crossed the border. This cannot be done.”
“Crap,” Jones said. “Crap crap crap.” He thought about it for a while. “Can we somehow divert around Russian airspace?”
“I can tell you right now that if we try to get to the U.S. from Islamabad without passing over Russia, we will have to go by an indirect route, and we will not have enough fuel,” Pavel said.
“Then we should fly from Islamabad to somewhere else,” Jones suggested, “such as Hong Kong, and refuel there, and then proceed along the usual corridor.”
“What is so important about Islamabad?” Pavel asked.
“That,” Jones said, “is none of your concern. You just need to fly the plane.”
Pavel corrected him: “You need us to fly the plane.” And he exchanged a look with Sergei, who nodded. During the discussion, the two pilots had occasionally broken into Russian for short private conversations, and it now seemed as though they had been talking about other things than just great circle routes. “It is fun to think about Islamabad and flying here, flying there, all over the world, but right now you are stuck in Xiamen FOB and we are the only ones who can get you out.”
Jones sighed. “I had hoped that I could avoid being so blunt,” he said, “but the deal is that, if you don’t file the new flight plan and get us to Islamabad, we will kill you.”
“In Islamabad,” Pavel continued, perfectly unruffled by the threat, “you have protection from officials that you can bribe, and you have connection to your friends who live in Waziristan, Afghanistan, Yemen. Surely you can find one or two comrades who know how to fly a plane. You intend to kill us there and then use your own pilots afterward.”
Jones looked as if he were about to deny this, but Pavel held up a hand to stop him. “Don’t,” he said. “Is ridiculous. You have got something very bad that you want to pick up in Islamabad. It’s totally obvious. You have a nuclear bomb, or some germs, or something. And your plan is to place this on the jet and then deliver this to some American city. You will crash the plane into a building or something and blow up the city, or poison it, or spread some plague. And everyone on that plane will die, one way or the other. It is ridiculous. You must think that Sergei and I are stupid
. We are not. We understand. Obviously we are dead men no matter what. And so we have agreed that you should kill us now. Go ahead. Kill us now, and then figure out some way to get your asses out of China.”
Jones actually considered it for a while. Either that, or he was simply waiting until his temper was under control.
Finally he said, “Surely you have some counterproposal? Other than immediate, summary execution?”
“We can fly you out of here,” Pavel said, “as soon as we can make a plan that guarantees to keep us alive.” He exchanged a look with Sergei and then nodded at Zula. “Us, and the girl.”
It was the first time that Zula’s presence had been acknowledged at all, and she was strangely grateful for it. Jones’s reaction was a little bit odd: ashamed and defensive. Similar to the way he had looked at the conclusion of that phone conversation in the door of the airplane.
Why would he be reacting that way?
Probably, she realized, because he had intended to kill her. Or at least had not really been caring whether she lived or died. Which was apparently just fine with Jones as long as it was a private matter. But when people drew it to his attention, he didn’t like it.
“All right,” Jones said, “since this is all about you lot now, and what you want, have you considered what is going to happen to you if you get arrested in China? Because you are responsible for having flown some rather bad chaps into the country, aren’t you?”
“Obviously we would like to get out of China,” Pavel allowed.
“And soon, I should think, since before long they’ll be pulling Ivanov’s corpse out of that basement and figuring out who he is, and then they’ll connect him to this plane, which is just sitting here, with us in it.”
“Agreed.”
“We can’t get out on an international flight plan because the immigration officials will want to come on board and check our documents,” Jones said.
“Yes.”
“So we have no choice but to file a domestic flight plan, wait for six hours, and then, for lack of a better word, cheat,” Jones said. “In the sense that we can’t actually land the plane at another airport in China or we’re dead. So we have to divert from that plan, don’t we, and get to some place where we have some chance of surviving.”
“Something like that, yes,” Pavel said.
Jones spread his hands out wide. “Enlighten me, then,” he said. “How can we do that?”
Pavel considered it and discussed it in Russian with Sergei. Zula realized, after a point, that the discussion would go on for a little while, so she got up and used the toilet. Once she’d sat down, she realized that she had sort of ducked past the mirror without looking at it, as if her own reflection were a deeply estranged frenemy with whom she could not possibly make eye contact. So she forced herself to turn her head to the side—for in this high-luxe bathroom, the entire bulkhead was a mirror—and look herself in the eye. She was startled to discover none other than Zula Forthrast looking right back at her. Same old girl. A little bit the worse for wear, of course. Older. Not in the sense of old-old, but rather of having seen more during her life. She wondered what others saw in her; why Csongor, of all people, would go to such lengths to protect her. Why Jones was keeping her around. Why Pavel and Sergei had decided—spontaneously, she thought—to include her in the deal they were striking with Jones. But most of all, why Yuxia would do what she had done. Not nose-diving the van into the boat, for that had been an accident, but ramming the taxi on the pier and taking the airbag right in her face.
Because in a sense the only worthy thing Zula had done all day had been to try to help the hackers upstairs. And Yuxia had not seen that. Neither had “Manu” and the other hackers—the beneficiaries. Only Csongor. But maybe he had told the story to the others?
Or maybe none of it had been that rational. Maybe Yuxia didn’t know about the SOS with the fuse. Maybe this was all down to some supernatural effect, such as grace, that flowed through people’s lives even if they didn’t understand why.
Which led her to a moment, there on the toilet, looking sideways into the mirror, of something akin to prayer. Her earlier thoughts on this topic still stood and so it was not a hands-together, now-I-lay-me-down-to-sleep sort of prayer. More of an act of will. Because if there were some power like grace, like the Force, or Providence, or what-have-you, that had been at work in the world today, then it needed to find its way now to the boat where Qian Yuxia was being held captive and it needed to go one step further in whatever mysterious chain of transactions was playing out here. And if it were possible for a conscious effort of will on Zula’s part to make that happen, then she was willing it to happen.
She pulled herself together, splashed water on her face, and came back out into the jet’s cabin. Pavel and Sergei were still talking in Russian, panning and zooming around digital maps of the world on the big screen. Jones was on his feet, phone clamped to his head, finger in his ear, looking dumbfounded. He talked in Arabic for a while, his voice and his eyes dull. Not defeated, she thought, so much as completely exhausted. Then he hung up.
“You’re free to go,” he said, looking Zula in the eye.
“What are you talking about?” she said. Because he could show a kind of mean sarcasm, and this seemed like one of those times.
“The boat,” he said, “with your girlfriend on it…”
“Yes?”
“Has disappeared.”
“What do you mean?”
“Dis. Appeared. Without a trace. Not responding on the wireless. Not answering phone calls. No sign of wreckage. No distress call.”
“You know this how?”
“Those lads who dropped us off at the dock,” Jones said. “They went back to the island, and there is simply nothing there.”
Zula badly wanted to show how happy she felt, but certain matters had to be settled first. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because it doesn’t matter,” Jones said. “You’re going to stay on the plane anyway.”
“You think so?”
“Yes. Because you’re in China illegally. You’re associated with people who have committed more murders in a few days than Xiamen normally sees in a year. And there is only one way for you to get out of this country, and it’s to stay on this plane”—Jones extended a hand, in a sarcastic flourish, toward Pavel and Sergei—“with your white knights.”
The racial gibe was not lost on Zula. “I’d take knights of any color,” she said. Substituting wordplay for action. Because she knew Jones was right. This plane was her only way out.
“Okay,” Pavel announced, “we have plan for getting out.”
“How’s it going to work?”
“File flight plan now,” Pavel said. “Explain later.”
“File it then,” Jones said. “I’m going to take a bloody nap.”
Day 5
A jittery and sometimes outrageous series of misunderstandings led, none too soon, to the following arrangement aboard the fishing boat: Mohammed (for that was the name of the pilot who had been left at the vessel’s controls) remained at his station, steering the vessel on a course that would, he claimed, get them out of Chinese territorial waters as quickly as possible without arousing any suspicion that they might be heading for Kinmen. Csongor, armed with the pistol, remained on the bridge with him, to keep an eye on the little GPS screen and make sure he didn’t do anything tricky. Meanwhile Yuxia and Marlon, accompanied by the cook, who gave his name as Batu, went up and down the length of the vessel, just trying to get a basic sense of where stuff was and how things worked. Batu’s name, appearance, and accent made it obvious to Marlon and Yuxia that he was a member of the Mongolian ethnic minority, and it could be guessed that he had been drawn to Heartless Island as an economic migrant. He had accepted the sudden takeover of his vessel by armed strangers with remarkable serenity and seemed to prefer the new management to the old.
They began by climbing to the flat roof of the superstructure, directly above
the bridge. A large white fiberglass capsule was mounted here. Batu said that it contained an inflatable life raft. The hushed voice, cringing posture, and sidelong glances with which he explained this as much as told them that this was some kind of statutory requirement, and hence the epicenter of an elaborate complex of rules, penalties, inspectors, and bribes. Other than that, the vessel didn’t have anything in the way of a dinghy. It seemed that, in the harbors it frequented, small craft were so numerous that one could be hailed in a few moments with a wave of the hand, and so there was no need to carry one aboard. A disk-shaped enclosure mounted high up on a steel mast was said to contain a radar antenna, but Batu was skeptical about its being in any kind of working order. The same mast sported mount points for additional lights and antennas, only some of which were used. Marlon looked warily at the things that seemed to be antennas, and Yuxia could see his eyes tracing the cables down the mast and into fittings in the roof of the bridge.
One level below that was the bridge, and the narrow catwalk that surrounded it. Bracketed to the catwalk’s railing, directly in front of the bridge’s forward-facing windows, were two life preservers, formerly bright orange but sun faded to a sort of bilious caramel hue. Threadbare green-and-white poly ropes had been laced through the railing’s stanchions and used to support one edge of a plastic tarp that had been stretched across much of the foredeck; it had been under its cover, Yuxia explained, that much work had earlier been done packing and prepping whatever sort of cargo the vessel had been carrying. If the vessel were being used for its intended purpose, this was where the fishermen would work with the nets, pull the fish on board, and do whatever else it was that fishermen did.
They made a cursory tour of the cabins, mostly just checking for dangerous and/or useful articles, and then ventured belowdecks. Things looked different here from when Yuxia had been put through her ordeal. Then, the place had seemed larger, since its contents had been neatly stowed in boxes. But in the hours since, some kind of frenzied unpacking had taken place, and junk was strewn all over, interspersed with slashed-open cardboard boxes. Yuxia remarked on this, which led to a conversation with Marlon in which she explained, as curtly as she could, what had happened in this place during the afternoon. Yuxia held up her wrists to show the damage inflicted by the ropes as she had struggled. This seemed to affect Marlon deeply, and she was astonished to see tears beginning to come into his eyes.
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