Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

Willem had acquired an acute and finely calibrated sense for that moment when things suddenly got weird. Sometimes, of course, he could still be taken by surprise, as with the pigs on the runway in Waco. But more often than not this served him in the same way as the whiskers of a cat stalking through a maze in the dark. Today it had begun in the car during the brief drive back from the container port to the Maeslantkering. He had received a secure text from his contact in the security service:

> Meeting with him?

Then, a few moments later:

> Can’t wait to hear the latest!

> Meeting with whom? Willem responded, already feeling badly far behind in the conversation.

> Winnebago

This was the code name that they had settled on for Bo.

> I’ve been killing time at Maasvlakte with Crash.

> You didn’t cross paths with Winnebago?

> Are you trying to tell me he was there? At Maasvlakte?

> LOL I thought you knew he was there and had gone there to “meet him?

> No

> Well, he went there this morning.

> Maybe I’ll touch base with him later when I get back.

> You won’t. Winnebago has left the country.

> ???

> He took an Uber to Maasvlakte this morning and boarded a Chinese container ship on Yangtze Canal.

> Andromeda?

> Yes

> Saw the ship Willem responded. You couldn’t not see something like that. He remembered the launches shuttling to and fro minutes before the Andromeda drove out into the North Sea, and now wondered if he might have been able to spy Bo aboard one of them, had he taken the trouble to peer with binoculars.

> Did not see Winnebago he added. Nor would have he expected to! This seemed an odd way for a man like Bo to travel. But what did he know? Andromeda could carry more than twenty thousand containers. Maybe Bo had his own personal shipping container kitted out like a penthouse. Hell, maybe he had fifty of them. Wouldn’t have made much of a dent against twenty thousand.

> You’re still at the Maeslantkering with Crash?

> Yes

> Let’s catch up after the storm passes.

On the way back they got stuck in traffic. Saskia, sitting in the back seat of a car with Willem, idly flicking through messages on her tablet, suddenly asked, “What do you know about New Guinea?”

It gave him the start of his life. “What!?”

“You have family there, don’t you?”

He frowned. “Is this about Idil Warsame?”

“She’s from Somalia.”

“I know, but . . .”

“Totally different place! I’m talking about Papua .”

“I understand, but what causes you to bring up this topic today of all days?”

“Do you remember a few weeks ago when I showed you some selfies that Cornelia had sent me?”

“From that island in Albania? Yes.”

“Well, the selfies have just kept on coming. It wasn’t just a weekend cruise down the Adriatic. That yacht of hers can really haul ass. Thirty knots cruising speed, apparently. Faster if you don’t mind a few bumps.”

Saskia angled her tablet so that Willem could see it, and began flicking through a series of images, all apparently texted to her by Cornelia during the last three weeks. They told a little disjointed story.

The yacht passed through a waterway that was pretty obviously the Suez Canal. Cornelia went on a camel ride.

There were photos of spectacular landforms to either side of the Red Sea. Then a quick cut thousands of miles south and east: some low-lying coral reefs. Cornelia getting a tour from important-seeming locals. Lots of pointing and frowning.

“The Maldives,” Saskia explained. “One of those countries that is going to end up completely underwater.”

“Why are they squiring her around? It’s not like she’s a fucking ambassador.”

“Anyone who shows up in a yacht like that and expresses interest in their plight becomes an ambassador,” Saskia said. “Honestly, Willem, it’s not as if any of the real ambassadors are giving these poor people the time of day.”

“All right, fair enough.”

Then another abrupt cut to Cornelia on an elephant in Sri Lanka. “She likes riding things,” Willem commented. Saskia kicked him.

A photo of Cornelia at a Dutch war monument in Indonesia caused Willem to give out a little grunt of recognition. “You weren’t kidding,” he said. “She must be halfway around the world from Venice by this point.”

“She’s just getting started.” The next selfie showed her having cocktails on the yacht’s deck at sunset with Sylvester Lin and Eshma, the skyscrapers of Singapore in the background. In spite of himself Willem felt the little pang of emotion that comes from not being invited to someone else’s party.

After some Indonesian island tourism the yacht anchored before a modern city of very modest scale, perhaps Waco-sized. “Don’t bother guessing,” Saskia said. “It’s Darwin, Australia.”

The next photo contained no buildings or signs of human activity at all for that matter. Just the alluvial fan of a river splitting a wall of jungle like a gray axe head.

“Aaand that would have to be New Guinea,” Willem said. “I see where all this is going now.”

“Then I won’t keep you in suspense,” Saskia said and began advancing more quickly. The next photo showed the yacht’s helipad, because of course Cornelia’s yacht would have one of those. A jet chopper was perched on it, painted in the corporate livery of Brazos RoDuSh.

The next few pictures had been shot out the chopper’s window. Some snapshots of jungle far below. A small town carved out of said jungle. “Tuaba,” Willem said. The fact that he would know this drew a curious look from Saskia. High mountains rising out of the jungle in the distance. And finally a huge hole in the ground, a spiraling roadway carved into its sloping walls, the size of it incomprehensible when you saw the motes spaced out along that road and understood that they were the largest trucks on Earth. “The famous mine,” Saskia said. “Even I know that.”

“ Your famous mine.”

“Touché.”

The chopper came down on a pad staffed by Westerners slinging assault rifles. That plus the adjacent machine-gun nest left little to the imagination regarding the security climate prevailing around the mine.

The last selfie was just Cornelia and T.R. Schmidt, both in Flying S baseball caps, with New Guinea’s tallest mountain as backdrop. T.R. was strapped with a shoulder holster, the weight of a big semi-automatic pistol under his left arm balanced by several loaded magazines under the other.

“The end,” Saskia said.

“Yee haw!” Willem called out. “When was this photo sent?”

“Yesterday.”

“Well, that explains a lot about my breakfast.”

There was this delicious sense of having barred the door and battened down the hatches. After seeing to it that the queen was safely back at Huis ten Bosch, Willem got a lift back to Leiden in a government car. He Bluetoothed his phone to its sound system and, after apologizing to the driver, pulled up “Riding the Storm Out,” a song by R.E.O. Speedwagon and a guilty pleasure from his misspent youth. He played it loud, once, and confirmed that it still rocked. Then he enjoyed spicy Indonesian takeout at home with Remigio in front of a YouTube feed simulating a crackling fire and went to bed mildly but pleasantly buzzed from a crisp New Zealand sauvignon blanc.

He was awakened at four in the morning by a call from his father in Louisiana making him aware that one-half of the Maeslantkering had caved in and was allowing the sea to flood Rotterdam and points inland. Hundreds of people were already missing. Most of them were probably dead. The storm hadn’t even peaked.