Csongor, of course, could not see where he was going and so in the final moments Marlon, not trusting his ability to communicate in English, began pointing this way and that, telling him which way to steer. He had neglected to allow for the fishing boat’s bow wave, which caused their prow to pitch up sharply at the very end; then one of the tires slung along its sides bashed into them and flipped the boat over in an instant. Marlon, who saw it coming, jumped straight up off his bench even as the little boat was spinning out from under him and managed to snag the rim of a tire with one hand. The other hand followed it an instant later, which was a good thing because otherwise he’d have lost his grip. The larger vessel was moving faster than he’d estimated, and it positively yanked him forward. This drew all of his attention for a moment, but then he looked back along the side and saw the capsized rowboat rapidly falling away to aft, and no sign of Csongor.
Then a hand broke the water and groped up and pawed uselessly at the upturned hull. Another hand joined it. The boat jerked straight down, as if grabbed from beneath by a shark. Csongor was trying to find a way to get his weight on top of it, but it was rapidly falling away to aft. Finally Csongor’s torso rose partway out of the water and a hand shot up and grabbed the rim of the last tire. Instantly Csongor was buried in a bow wave of his own making, the same thing that had hit Marlon a few moments earlier: he was being pulled through the sea by the tow rope of his arm, and his head was breaking the waves. But with some more struggling and wrestling, he was able to get the second arm out of the water and grip one of the ropes by which the tire was suspended, and then do a pull-up that got his head out of the water so that he could breathe.
Marlon looked away and tended to his own problems for a moment. His upper body was out of the water, but his legs were being dragged along, creating powerful suction that threatened to rip him off the tire. Inching, like a rock climber, to a slightly better grip, he was able to lift a leg out and drape it over the adjoining tire, and this both reduced the suction and gave him leverage to clamber up and get better handholds. He worked his way to a place where he was standing with one foot on the tire’s rim and reaching up over his head with both hands to grip the boat’s gunwale.
He risked a look back and saw that Csongor had achieved similar results. The little rowboat was nowhere to be seen. Csongor was holding on with one hand, using the other to pat himself down, verifying that the gun was still where he had put it, the shoulder bag still slung across his body.
Then he began climbing, and Marlon followed suit. In a few moments, he was able to vault over the gunwale and land in a crouch on the main deck. There didn’t seem to be anyone around. From the sounds of it, Yuxia was still doing an excellent job of raising hell on the other side.
Csongor, squatting back at the stern, looked across to the opposite side, then turned to Marlon and shrugged, indicating that he saw nothing. He rose to his feet, took the pistol out of his pocket, checked it, and then began to walk around the back of the superstructure.
Marlon took one of the stun grenades out of his pocket and got his finger into its ring. Then he walked across the front of the superstructure, sticking close to its front bulkhead in case anyone might be looking down from the bridge, and peeked around the corner. Perhaps three meters aft, light was shining from an open hatch. Two men, a large one and a smaller one, were standing on the catwalk outside, looking in. The larger of the two got a snarling look on his face and strode over the high threshold into the cabin. As soon as he was out of the way, Marlon was able to look all the way aft to the stern of the boat and see Csongor’s bulky form there.
Marlon began to walk aft. Csongor began to walk forward. The smaller man who was still out on the gangway noticed Marlon first, and his whole body went into a kind of spasm. There was no helping it; he couldn’t prevent himself from being astonished at the sight of a stranger on his boat. Marlon caught his eye and pointed suggestively aft. The man turned to look in the direction indicated and saw Csongor raising a pistol and aiming at his face. While this poor fellow was thus distracted, Marlon pulled the pin out of the stun grenade—this was surprisingly difficult—and then reached around and chucked it into the cabin. He noticed, then, that the door opened outward, and so he gave it a shove and clanged it shut and leaned against it just in time to feel a mighty boom through his butt and feel a blast of hot air and shattered glass smack him in the back of the head.
SOKOLOV HAD A key card that would enable him to summon an elevator, but he reckoned that the jihadists might be down in the lobby, in view of the indicator panel. They might notice one of the lifts going into motion and stopping at 43. If so, they could simply kill him when the door opened. So he took the stairs instead, just as Zula had done the other day. He took them fast, bounding over banisters and caroming off walls. But he was still moving a hell of a lot slower than those guys in the elevator.
Fearing that the fire exit to the outside might set off an alarm, he took a chance on the door to the lobby, pushing it open slightly first to check for an ambush. No one was there.
They might be waiting to ambush him from the plantings outside, but if they really knew he was here and wanted to ambush him, they’d have gone about it differently. So he walked stolidly out of the building, down the drive, and out to the street. Then he broke into a jog, headed toward the ferry terminals, less than a kilometer away. He was keeping an eye out for the jihadists the entire way but saw nothing.
A ferry was loading at the terminal for Gulangyu. Sokolov swung wide around it, avoiding streetlamps, and made his way down to a smaller and lower dock nearby, where several speedboats were tied up, and their drivers sitting around smoking cigarettes and talking. These were the high-speed water taxis for moneyed passengers, and Sokolov had been eyeing them with interest the whole time he’d been in Xiamen.