But of course it had slowed down as it had neared its destination, and so Marlon and Csongor had finally been able to gain on it. The problem of tracking it had become slightly easier, and easier yet when it had elected to swing clear of most of the harbor’s clutter and tie up alongside a fishing vessel that stood aloof from the myriad others.
Csongor couldn’t be certain that he hadn’t become confused and lost it during those anxious minutes, so it had been with a slowly building sense of relief that he made out the damaged deck planks, the crushed pallets, and certain other identifying marks that he had memorized during the first few minutes of the chase.
Whereupon they had run out of gas and been forced to break out the oars.
Much of the remainder of the day had then been consumed with hugely important, yet infuriatingly trivial matters such as obtaining water and food. Without Csongor, Marlon would have found this easier, but still not easy. Easier because he would not have had to explain the presence of a large white man in the boat with him. But still not easy because it would have been obvious to the waterfront society of this little island that Marlon was by no stretch of the imagination a boat person. Had he shown up in a gleaming new white fiberglass runabout, they might have pegged him as a nouveau riche with a freshly acquired toy and taken little note of his obvious lack of nautical acumen. But instead he was in an old and, to put it charitably, well-broken-in working boat that had had no business making the run across open water from Xiamen in the first place. The easiest possible explanation for this combination of clues was that Marlon had stolen the boat from an honest Xiamen waterman and was now a fugitive from justice.
That had all been obvious, and so it had not seemed like a smart move to simply row the boat into the most crowded part of the harbor. Instead, although they had already been suffering from thirst and from a general feeling of being at the end of their ropes, they had taken turns rowing the boat in a wide arc around the island, looking for a less obvious place to put in. Along the way, they had swung past the fishing vessel to which the terrorists’ boat had been tied up, never coming closer than several hundred meters and trying not to stare directly at it. There had been nothing to see anyway. A couple of men had been visible through the windows on the bridge, and two more had been loafing on the main deck just aft of the superstructure, but beyond that there had been nothing to suggest that the vessel was occupied by anyone other than run-of-the-mill fishermen.
During their endless, creeping approach to this island, it had become obvious that it must have a sort of dog-bone shape, since there was a hill, covered with dark green vegetation, at each end, and the town spread across the saddle between. It was oriented roughly north-south and the terrorists’ boats were anchored toward the southern end of the harbor, where the rafts of conjoined fishing vessels petered out into grids of floating fish farms. As they crept southward, the town abruptly ceased to exist and was replaced by inhospitable terrain consisting of ancient, weathered brown sedimentary rock sloping up out of the water to be colonized by olive-drab succulents on the lower slopes and a scruffy mat of green-black tropical vegetation higher up. Csongor remarked on the fact, which to him seemed odd, that in China some places were unbelievably crowded and others were totally uninhabited but there was no in between. Marlon thought it curious that anyone should find this remarkable. If a place was going to be inhabited, then it should be used as intensively as possible, and if it was a wild place, all sane persons would avoid it.
Csongor guessed that the slope of the ground here was exactly wrong. It was gentle enough that dangerous rocky shallows extended a considerable distance from the tide line, making it a death trap for ships, and yet steep enough that, above the waterline, it was difficult to build on. And so even though they were moving at what seemed an agonizingly slow pace, they went, over the course of perhaps five minutes, from being in a place where ten thousand eyes could see them to a place where they were perfectly invisible. The strata of the bedrock, eroding at different rates, reached into the water with long bony fingers separated by deep shadowed clefts, and the hill rose above them, no man-made objects on the thing except for a radio tower at the summit.