The men on the vessel were not Middle Eastern and they were not Chinese, but depending on how light and emotion played over their faces, they showed clear signs of both ancestries. They spoke some other language than Chinese or Arabic, but there was at least one—the more competent of the two gunmen, also equipped with binoculars and the phone—who could switch to Arabic when he wanted to communicate with Jones. Zula got the sense that they were burning a lot of fuel during the first fifteen minutes of the voyage, probably trying to put distance between themselves and trouble. The place where they’d shot it out with Csongor could be seen from any number of high-rise apartment buildings; perhaps some curtain twitcher on an upper story had seen the whole thing and was watching their getaway. But even if this were the case, Jones had little to worry about, since there was nothing about this boat to distinguish it from all the others. They churned out into open water, then cut around the northern limb of the island, going right past the end of the runway, where a jetliner on its landing run passed so close overhead that Zula could count the wheels on its landing gear. A slow turn to the south brought them into the busiest zone, the strait between Xiamen and its industrial suburbs on the mainland, spanned by huge bridges and chockablock with much larger vessels.