The time came when Xiamen Center called out the ID of the plane that Zula was on and issued the command transferring them to the responsibility of Hong Kong center. Pavel answered in the usual way and bid Xiamen Center adieu. Pavel and Sergei then exchanged a few sentences in Russian.
Suddenly the plane shifted beneath Zula’s feet with a crispness that one never experienced on a commercial airliner. She had to throw out both hands to prevent herself from being thrown forward into the cabin door. The plane was not merely descending in the way that airliners did, that is, by throttling back on the engines and shedding altitude in level flight; it was actually pointed down, using the power of its engines to thrust itself directly toward the sea.
The steepness of the dive increased to the point where Zula was lying full-length on the cabin door. Through it she could hear luggage and junk flying around in the cabin, and sleepy men shouting in alarm, and wakeful ones laughing delightedly.
She had thought at first that this was just a temporary maneuver to shed some altitude, but as it went on and on, she came instead to the realization that Pavel and Sergei had decided to commit suicide by crashing the plane into the sea. This couldn’t possibly go on any longer; her ears had popped three times.
But then, just as abruptly as it had gone into the dive, the plane pulled out of it, pressing her into the door, and then the corner between the door and the floor, and finally the floor itself with what felt like several Gs of acceleration as its nose came up and it returned to what seemed to be level flight. When she was able to move again, she peeled herself off the cabin floor, popped her head over the edge of the bed, and looked out a window to see blank white, and raindrops streaming across the glass. She elbow-crawled across the bed, put her face to the window, and looked down. The clouds and fog were too dense to allow her to see very much, but through an occasional gap, she was able to glimpse the gray surface of the ocean hurtling past no more than a hundred feet below.
The plane now banked and executed a course change: a long sweeping leftward turn.
There was a flat-screen TV mounted to the bulkhead above the foot of the bed. Zula had not tried turning it on yet, because she didn’t like TV, but now it occurred to her that she was being foolish. So she turned it on and was presented with a menu of offerings including an onboard DVD player, a selection of video games, and “MAP.” She chose the latter and was presented with a map of the South China Sea, apparently generated by exactly the same software that was used aboard commercial airliners, since the typefaces and the style of the presentation were familiar to anyone who had ever taken a long-haul airline flight. The place of origin had been programmed in as Xiamen, and the destination was Sanya Phoenix International Airport, which was at the southern tip of a huge elliptical island, comparable in size to Taiwan, that lay off China’s southern coast. She was pretty sure that this was called Hainan Island and that it was part of the People’s Republic of China. A flight plan had been drawn on the map, connecting Xiamen to Sanya by two straight legs of roughly equal length. The first leg headed south-southwest from Xiamen, roughly paralleling China’s southern coast. Then it doglegged into a more westerly heading that took it straight to the southern tip of Hainan. Just guessing, it looked as though the course had been laid out to keep it well clear of the Hong Kong/Shenzhen/Macao/Guangdong area, which was right in the middle. Presumably the airspace around it was extraordinarily crowded and a good thing to avoid.
The plane’s actual track and current position were also superimposed on the map, and these showed that the flight plan had been followed precisely until a few minutes ago. Now they were headed a little north of due east, on a track that looked as though it would take them just south of Taiwan.
None of this would have made sense to her had she not been party to last night’s meeting in the main cabin. Obviously, they had never had any true intention of flying to Hainan Island. They had chosen that destination solely because it was a domestic flight and as such would not draw the attention of the immigration authorities at Xiamen’s airport. For that, any destination in China would have sufficed. But Hainan seemed to have another advantage, which was that a flight to there from Xiamen would naturally pass over the ocean; and over the ocean it was possible to get away with tricks such as screaming along at wavetop level to evade radar.
She reckoned that they were playing some kind of game having to do with the workings of the air traffic control system. Though she had never studied such things in any detail, she knew in a vague way that radar had limited range and that the structure of the air traffic control system somehow reflected that fact; a country’s airspace was divided into separate zones, each managed from a different control center with its own radar system. Airplanes in flight were handed off from one control center to the next as they made their way across the country. At some point they had stopped being the responsibility of the air traffic controllers in Xiamen and entered into a zone controlled from Hong Kong. Or perhaps by flying out over the ocean they had entered into a no-man’s-land that was not monitored or controlled by any authority. At any rate, she guessed that they had, a few minutes ago, reached one of those edges or seams in the system. Pavel and Sergei had then bid farewell to the air traffic controllers in the zone that they were departing and had gone into the power dive before they showed up on the radar screen, and came to the attention, of any other controllers.