“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.
