Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

“Cash?”

“If you prefer.”

“Where you want to get to?”

“Houston.”

“Is there some kinda legal situation I should know about?”

Saskia shrugged. “Maybe with immigration? But we can’t help it.” She now thought a little harder about the man’s question and understood what he was getting at. “Not drugs or anything like that, if that is what you were thinking.”

He hesitated, trying to get the story to add up. Not that he didn’t trust her. It was all just very odd. She could see this. Key information was lacking.

“I am the Queen of the Netherlands,” Saskia told him. “I am here on a secret mission to save my country.”

“Rufus. Most people address me as Red. My not-so-secret mission is now accomplished.” He glanced at the huge dead boar and repeated the strange gesture of sticking his tongue out.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Red.” They exchanged a sweaty handshake and began walking back toward the plane. She had to remind him not to leave his rifle on the ground. The gator-adorned pickup truck was moving toward Lennert, Amelia standing up in the back keeping an eye on the open-air hog and reptile butchery.

“The pleasure is all mine, Queen.”

“No one ever says that. ‘Your Majesty’ is the correct wording. But please don’t. Just call me by my nickname. Saskia.”

“You want to hide the fact that you’re here? Is that what’s up?”

“This was supposed to be discreet. People weren’t meant to know I was coming to Texas.”

“How many in your party?”

“Five, if the wounded go to hospital. But Willem should probably go with them. So, four.”

“I can have you on a boat in three minutes.”

“On the lake?”

“River. The Bosque. Which runs over yonder into the Brazos.”

“Brazos?” Saskia knew the Spanish meaning of the word but wasn’t sure how Rufus was using it.

“Arms of God,” Rufus said. “It’s the big river that runs on down to Houston. Spaniards named it that. Don’t know why. They were funny with their way of naming things. Sick on religion.”

She liked the sound of it. “During those three minutes would we have to pass through any roadblocks or the like that emergency services might have set up?” Because an impressive line of flashing red and blue lights was thickening about a kilometer away on the other side of the airport.

“Roads ain’t gonna enter into it.”

“Everyone out of the plane?” Rufus inquired, before setting fire to it. This was a pretty abrupt move on his part and caused Saskia briefly to reconsider the wisdom of entrusting her party’s fate to a random desperado. As they sped away, however, leaving the eruption of flames in the truck’s numerous and incredibly large rearview mirrors, she perceived the wisdom of the move. Everyone on the other side of the airport would be looking at that during the few seconds it took Rufus’s truck to speed clear of the crash site and disappear into the woods. The plane was a total loss anyway.

Or perhaps she was cutting Rufus too much slack here, dreaming up post hoc rationalizations for the actions of a deranged man. Anyway, he was driving the truck and their fate was in his hands.

“Heads up!” he shouted as the truck angled across the road and plunged into the woods. Saskia and Amelia were in the cab with him. Alastair and Fenna were in the open box aft. Alastair literally did put his head up but then hastily ducked down as the truck began smashing its way through foliage so dense it was not possible to see more than a few meters in any direction. Apparently this idiom “heads up” really meant its exact opposite. Branches were whipping and cracking, and Rufus swerved whenever he spied an onrushing tree that he deemed too thick to smash into the ground with the truck’s front bumper. This, however, did not happen as frequently as one might expect. It was a different sort of forest from what Saskia was used to. She had grown up, and still resided, in a thing in the middle of The Hague called Huis ten Bosch, which literally meant “House in the Woods.” The woods were classic fairy-tale old-growth Euro-forest with relatively sparse undergrowth. The stuff that they were driving through in Rufus’s truck was nothing but undergrowth. She hadn’t seen a single tree thicker than her wrist. As the wall of green had rushed toward them in the windscreen, she had braced for impact, because it looked so solid. But most of it went down under the front bumper like ripe wheat.

At one point they surprised a wild pig. This ran away from them, and Rufus swerved to follow it. Saskia feared for a moment that this man might actually have no purpose in life other than killing pigs, and that he was, accordingly, seeking to run this one over. But he kept hitting the brakes at moments when the gas pedal would have ended the pig’s life, and Saskia understood that he was following the pig. Using it as a guide through the wilderness. For as dense as these woods might appear when viewed through the windscreen of a lurching truck, in the eyes of a pig sprinting for its life it apparently seemed as open and as easily navigable as the Dutch inter-city rail network.

Anyway, it worked in the sense that they broke out of those woods a minute later at one end of the long straight earthen dam that she had spotted just before the crash. They could not see over it to the right, but obviously the lake must be on that side. Before them was an open grassy slope, unnaturally regular, angling down to a stream that (as she could see as more of the scene came into view) was fed by the spillway: a concrete and steel edifice, pierced by a row of gates, that was integrated into the grass-and-earth dam a couple of hundred meters distant. Saskia, or for that matter any Dutch person, could see at a glance how all this worked. It might have green stuff growing on it and birds—(Were those vultures !? Like in Westerns !?)—soaring above it, but that natural stuff was just a tegument, like paint on a house, allowed to cling to a structure that was in fact absolutely unnatural and engineered. Manholes and standing pipes erupted from little square islands of concrete: the visible bits of a huge buried infrastructure. Every surface that met her eye had been architected by some Texan engineer who was paid to do nothing, every day of his career, except think about what water did.

Ultimately, of course, it sought the sea. The reason that this little river had been allowed to remain in existence was that it gave excess water somewhere to go besides flooding the airport or the housing developments. Right now the gates of the spillway, off to their right, were all wide open and water was coming through them as if shot from fire hoses. The river was running fast, at some risk of spilling out of its banks. But had it done so it would have flooded an area that the engineers had carefully delimited with levees and embankments, isolating it from the slightly higher plateau of the airport. And for just the same reason, no one in the airport—none of the emergency vehicles holding on the other runway, none of the ground crew, none of the people butchering hogs and alligator around the crash site—had line of sight to them right now. The only thing Saskia could see peeking above the top of the airport’s protective berm was the uppermost part of the control tower, but soon enough that dropped from view and they were weirdly alone. There was an employee parking lot below the spillway complex, but no vehicles were parked there. Dam employees well knew the consequences of parking their cars in a floodplain.

Very near, the river plunged into woods. At the edge of those woods a boat had been hauled up onto formerly dry ground and made fast to a tree. Saskia identified it as a RHIB, or rigid hull inflatable boat. Its aft part, sporting a big outboard motor as well as a backup motor to one side, was awash and waggling in the flow. Rufus drove the truck as close as he could get without bogging down in the sodden ground, ten meters or so away, and they formed a line between it and the boat to transfer the luggage: Alastair in the back handing bags down to Fenna who tossed them down the line to Amelia, Saskia, and finally Rufus who made decisions about where to stow each item in the RHIB. There was not a lot of room, but there was not a lot of luggage. Two of the blue earthsuit bags made it in. Rufus locked two more inside the truck’s cab and parked it up on higher ground. Then he jogged down, hopped in, and started the outboard. Saskia handled the painter, untying it from the tree and clambering in over the prow as the river’s current took the boat. Amelia and Alastair grabbed her arms and made sure she was belly flopped into the middle before she was allowed to press herself up and assume a more queenly position on the prow. “Figurehead” was a mildly pejorative English word sometimes applied to modern royalty; now she was one.