After passing through a few emotional swings, she came to the realization that they simply hadn’t been in the water for that long, she hadn’t given this nearly enough time, and just had to keep swimming. She and Sokolov both resorted to the sidestroke and the backstroke when they got fatigued. In the latter position, she watched a helicopter make several passes over the waters nearer to Kinmen than to Xiang’an, probing the seas with a spotlight, and reckoned that the boat must have been noticed on radar. It was natural to feel vulnerable and obvious and exposed. But she tried to imagine what it must be like to be sitting in the cockpit of that chopper with many square miles of dark water beneath and only a needle-thin spotlight beam. If she were a shipwrecked mariner, desperately hoping to be seen and rescued, she would despair of ever being found; so why should she concern herself about it?