Some time passed before he was really conscious; he felt it must have been 
half an hour, though debris was still raining down around him, so five seconds 
was probably more like it. The hull of the white yacht had been caved in on one 
side and most of its crew flung into the river. But a minute
later, a fishing trawler pulled up and took the barbarians on board with only 
perfunctory negotiations. Carl nearly forgot about Spence and almost left him 
there; he found that he no longer had the strength to raise the Colonel's body 
from the ground, so he dragged him on board with the help of a couple of young 
Boers—identical twins, he realized, maybe thirteen years old. As they 
headed across the Huang Pu, Carl Hollywood huddled on a piled-up fishing net, 
limp and weak as though his bones had all been shattered, staring at the 
hundred-foot crater in the center of the Bund and looking into the rooms of the 
Cathay Hotel, which had been neatly cross-sectioned by the bomb in the Boer 
woman's body.