Yao came over the net, hollow. “We’re blown,” he said. “I don’t know how, but there are people on the boat. I can’t be certain, but I think it’s the tall guy with the hat.”
“We can’t be blown,” Ryan said. “We’ll just have to take the boat back from them.”
“Jack,” Yao said. “I want to run down there and kill that son of a bitch. But they’d see us coming before we made it halfway down the pier.”
“I don’t care,” Jack said. “Lisanne needs a doctor—”
“It’s okay,” Lisanne whispered from the back. “It’s my fault anyway.” She coughed again. “Should have paid better attention…”
Ryan pounded the steering wheel with both hands.
“We can’t be blown!”
“Jack, really,” Lisanne said, every breath like she was leaking air. “It’s…” She licked her lips, summoning the effort for a few more words. “It’s… not your fault…”
“Stand by,” Yao said over the net. “Medina has an idea.”
Fu Bohai cursed himself for not telling his men to kill the woman straightaway. They had yet to answer his calls, and that had him worried. The woman’s friends must have shown up. He had little doubt now that these tourists from Finland were the ones who had chartered this boat. There were cabins around the lake. Perhaps they had knowledge that Medina Tohti was hiding out at one of them. It was the only thing that made sense in a country with security cameras on virtually every light post. Yes. She must be hiding in the wilderness, possibly being supplied by the person with the boat whose ticket stubs the CIA officer spoke of. Fu and his men would simply wait, and then force them to disclose her location. With any luck, he would have the Uyghur bitch by morning.
He tried Qiu once more on the phone… What had the CIA officer in Albania called him?
Again, there was no answer.
He slapped the chart table with his palm, causing his men to glance up from their phones and the boat captain to give a muffled yelp beneath the tape over his mouth.
Yang, who was seated at the dinette, perked up and peered out the window.
“Did you hear that?”
“I heard nothing,” Fu said.
Then, far down the docks, a boat motor burbled to life.
Fu bolted to his feet, rushing out onto the deck to look down the pier. Gray hulks bobbed side by side all the way down, barely visible against the ink-black water. The engines were running, as Medina and her fellow conspirators would expect them to be when they arrived — but he’d never expected to actually launch. The boat was still tied to its moorings.
Farther down, the engine burbled louder. Something thumped against the dock. A light flashed briefly across the water — getting their bearings — and then winked out at the same moment the engine opened up. In his peripheral vision, Fu watched a small cabin runabout disappear into the night.
He loosed a scream of rage, pounded the bulkhead by the rear door. “Which one of you can drive a boat?”
Neither answered quickly enough. Fu strode to the V-berth and hauled the skipper to his feet, ripping away the gray tape, then spinning him to reach his bindings. He opened his knife, pointing it at Yang.
“Untie the dock lines,” he snapped, before cutting the skipper’s hands free. “You will follow that other vessel,” he said. “Catch it, and you will be greatly rewarded.”
“Y-Yes,” he stammered. “No problem. I will do that. Thank you.” The skipper’s head snapped up, looking out at the man pulling a line off the stern. “No, no, no,” he said, walking to the open door. “You must cast off the bow or you will run us into—”
The skipper stepped out as if to finish his imperative bit of instruction — but instead leaped over the side into the black water.
“Stop him!” Fu Bohai roared, then turned to his man who was left inside. “Tell me you have driven a boat before! Any boat!”
“Yes, Boss,” he stammered. “Though never one this large.”
“You take the wheel,” Fu said.
“Yes, Boss,” the man said again, tentatively sitting down to familiarize himself with the controls.
The outside man stuck his head in the door, pistol in hand, panting after running from one end of the boat to the other.
“He is gone, Boss.”
“I don’t care about him,” Fu snapped. “Are we untied?”
Yang nodded.
Fu began to pound against the seat next to the captain’s chair. “Then go! Go! Go!”
The new driver pulled the twin throttle levers toward him, causing the boat to lurch backward, burbling in the water. Away from the dock, he cut the wheel hard left and eased the throttle forward, taking the boat into the blackness of the lake.
“I said, go,” Fu snapped, and, reaching across the wheel, jammed the levers all the way to the firewall.
“Boss,” the driver said, knuckles white on the wheel. “I could use some light…”
“He’s back there,” Chavez said above the roar of the twin Tohatsu 150-horsepower outboards. “For sure. Lights just came on.”
