“Then why aren’t we going to take this boat?” she asked again.
“Because this boat is conspicuous. If the guys who attacked us have backup coming, and I suspect they do because they had to come from somewhere, they’re going to see this boat and come after us.”
“How will they even know it’s us?” Her voice sounded small, unsure, her shoulders slumping in as one hand curled around the opposite arm.
“It doesn’t matter if they know it’s us or not. The terrorists know they’re looking for someone, and they’re not the kind of people to let the simple fact that they don’t know the passengers stop them. They’ll kill whoever they have to just to get to us, to make sure we don’t get away and tell others what’s happening.”
“Oh.” I saw the woman’s convulsive swallow, her eyes darting to the water as though a boat would come over the horizon at any moment.
I turned back to the storage box, shifting the contents around and dumping out what I didn’t need. “They have fast, powerful boats. We would have no way to outrun them, and I can’t fight them all off by myself. We have to disappear.”
I shifted another old lifejacket and half-frayed rope and finally found what I was looking for. I scooped the old wool blankets up and pushed past the woman to the small rowboat tied down onto the deck. Pulling back the canvas cover, I dumped the blankets inside.
“That’s what you were doing, wasn’t it, when you left me at the rock? Covering our tracks, making it look like we had tried to hike towards the other side of the island? Why you sank the bag into the water?”
“Yes.”
That was a clever way to put everything together. I allowed the woman a slight nod at her perceptiveness in the face of chaos.
I bent and started working at the knots that kept the rowboat lashed to the deck. A shadow fell over me, and I looked up just as the woman knelt beside me, bending to untie the next knot. We worked in silence until the rowboat was free.
Together, we managed to get it into the winch and lower it to the water.
“I assume we’re taking that? Or is that another distraction?”
“No, this trawler is the distraction, so it looks like we never left. We’re taking the rowboat.”
She hesitated, her mouth a thin line as she peered down at the small boat bobbing in the water.
“What about food? Clothing? Water?”
“Going to have to figure that out later.” I knew the words wouldn’t satisfy her—they didn’t satisfy me—but right now, escape was the priority. But I’d done enough survival training—and surviving—that I wasn’t worried.
Not too worried, anyway.
“That’s not very comforting.” The words followed me back through the steering cabin as we searched for anything light we might take that would be helpful, but came up empty. Everything had been in my teammates’ bags.
“So, where are we going?”
Her arms were crossed as she watched me move back across the deck, and I busied myself preparing to get us both overboard instead of answering.
Because that was the problem, wasn’t it? There was nowhere to go. Any Self-Defense Force ships nearby would still be too far away—they would never come close enough to the disputed waters to cause an incident, which meant they were too far away to be of any help. And there was no rescue plan, because a rescue would mean an acknowledgment of the United States’ involvement. The plan had been to get to the boat upon completion of the missions with the other men and radio for help once we were back within Japanese waters. But the radio was with my teammate lying dead by the building. And I couldn’t go back. Not now. Maybe if we could find a way to survive and a place to wait it out safely, we could return and find rescue that way.
“I’ll climb down first, then you. Can you make it down?”
The woman nodded, a visible shiver of cold running through her with a slight jerk.
I climbed down the side again, letting go of the last few rungs to plunge into the water. A sudden plunge back into the freezing water was preferable to a slow entrance, like ripping off a band-aid. It still hit my body like an ice bath, my strained, tired muscles contracting. I would be lucky if I didn’t cramp up.
She hit the water with a small splash just behind me—again, I wasn’t sure she would follow me—and I indicated she should grab the back of the boat.
“We’re going to push the boat for a while, so it doesn’t look like anyone is in it.”
If the terrorists did come upon us, we could duck underwater, and it would look like a dingy that had slipped its moorings and drifted out to sea. It happened all the time.
For once, the woman didn’t ask a question, just nodded, her mouth a grim line.
We swam, pushing the boat until the island was a chunk of rock rising behind us, a colorless gray dipped further toward the horizon. Her leg brushed mine as we kicked side-by-side.