Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

“How is sulfur used?”

“Tires and fertilizer.”

“I see your point about the glamour.”

“They changed the name to Brazos Mining. They went wherever the minerals were. There’s not a lot of margin in clay and potash. They ended up in places like Cuba. Congo. Indonesia.”

“Ah,” Saskia said, “now it’s all starting to come together.”

“Like a lot of other Western companies they got kicked out of former colonies during the post-war period. Castro kicked them out of Cuba and so on. But they have, I guess you could say, tendrils all over the place—interlocking boards of directors with oil companies. Connections to big establishment figures—Rockefellers, Bushes, and so on. During the 1960s, after they’d been kicked out of Cuba and the Congo, they got wind that a geologist from our country had climbed the highest mountain in New Guinea—which is on the formerly Dutch half of the island—and seen a huge mineral deposit. Mostly copper. But where there’s copper there’s probably gold. The scale of it was unbelievable. Just sitting there in plain sight.”

“In one of the least accessible places on Earth!” Saskia protested.

Willem nodded. “And at extremely high altitude to boot. They didn’t have a prayer of getting to it without local knowledge and connections. So Brazos Mining put together a joint venture with Shell—which I need hardly tell you knew everything there was to know about doing business in the Dutch East Indies—and created Brazos RoDuSh, which went on to create—”

“The world’s largest open pit mine on the top of a mountain surrounded by the New Guinea jungle!” Saskia now knew exactly what Willem was talking about. The place was famous for its hugeness and infamous for political reasons.

“Exactly.”

“I own part of that.”

Willem nodded. “You have owned part of it since you became old enough to own things. Brazos RoDuSh has appeared somewhere on every financial statement you have ever read.”

“How are they doing?” Saskia asked. She was trying to be mischievous. But it didn’t come through. She winked at Willem. But maybe it just looked like she was trying to get a trickle of sweat out of her eye. She really needed to work on her ability to project puckish wit. Maybe it would help if she were actually more witty.

“I won’t go over the politics, the history with you,” Willem began.

“Of Indonesia and West Papua and all that.”

He nodded. “But the Asian economic book created a fantastically huge demand for copper and so they quintupled their value in a short period of time. More recently as you know there has been trouble in Papua and the stock has performed less admirably.”

“But . . . bringing it all back to the here and now . . . T.R. Schmidt is also an investor in Brazos RoDuSh?”

“He was born there.”

“In New Guinea!?”

Willem nodded. “Dr. Schmidt inherited a significant interest in the company from a generation-skipping trust set up by his grandfather in the 1970s. His chain of restaurants and gas stations was funded by the windfall when copper prices went through the roof.”

Saskia looked out over the river and pondered it. “And I naively imagined he was a homespun Texas oilman.”

“He is ,” Willem said, “but homespun Texas oilmen really got around during the second half of the twentieth century.”

“Even to mountaintops in Papua.”

Willem nodded and sat back in his folding chair to signal a change of subject. “Now, speaking of Indonesia, and white people who ended up there. If it is really your intention to proceed to Houston this way—”

“It is,” she confirmed. “I can always change the plan, right? Highways and hotels are only a few minutes’ drive away at any point.”

“The hotels are full. The highways are running in the wrong direction.”

“So be it then! We are caught in the middle of a natural disaster. We can’t go back home. There’s nothing to do in Houston until the storm blows over.”

“In that case, I feel a certain obligation to go see my father.”

“Of course! But what is the weather like where he lives?”

“There was rain yesterday but it is clearing up now. I could leave immediately. Drive through the night. Be at his place for breakfast.”

“I should write him a note,” the queen said and reached for a sheet of the royal stationery: a ream of printer paper Willem had scored at Staples.

“Thank you, Uwe Maj . . .” Willem caught himself just in time, and forced himself to say, “Saskia. He will be most honored.”

Willem’s grandfather Johannes Castelein was a Dutch petroleum engineer who was sent over to what was then the Dutch East Indies in 1930 to work for Shell. He was assigned to a port town in East Java. This had a large enough expat community to support a school to which most of the local Dutch and mixed-race population, as well as Chinese merchants, sent their children. He met, fell in love with, and married Greta, who was a teacher there. They had three children during the 1930s: Ruud, a boy born in 1932; Mina, a girl in 1934; and Hendrik, Willem’s father, in 1937.

When the Netherlands fell to Hitler in 1940, contact between it and the Dutch East Indies was lost. The Dutch surrendered the Indies to Japan in 1942. Anyone in the military became a POW and ended up in especially bad places such as the railway project that later became the subject of The Bridge on the River Kwai . Adult civilians were sorted according to both gender and blood quantum. Johannes was totok —pure Dutch. Greta was an Indo—mixed European and Indonesian. The Japanese High Command “invited” them to place themselves under Japanese jurisdiction at “protection centers”—separate camps for adult males on the one hand, women and children on the other.

At the age of ten, Ruud, Hendrik’s older brother, was classified as an adult male and sent to the same camp as Johannes. The boy died the next year of bacterial dysentery. Greta, the daughter, Mina, and Hendrik were sent to a camp where conditions were a little better, at least during the first year. As the war dragged on, however, they kept getting shuffled to worse and worse places, losing possessions at every step. By the time 1945 rolled around, eight-year-old Hendrik had acquired a specialty in climbing trees, where he would beat and shake the branches until creatures fell out of them: big ungainly birds, snakes, monkeys, insects. He would look down to see the women of the camp converging on the fresh meat to beat it to death, tear it to shreds, and fight over the shreds. He watched it with a certain detachment born of the fact that he was up there munching on tree snails, lizards, and large bugs that his mother had encouraged him to harvest and to keep for himself. Meanwhile, down on the ground, Greta and her sister Alexandra, who had ended up in the same camp, worked out a way to cook up a sort of porridge from the prodigious quantities of lice harvested from the heads and bodies of camp inmates. It was sterile, since it was thoroughly cooked, and it seemed to have some nutrients. As a result of these measures, Hendrik grew big, strong, and troublesome enough that in mid-1945 he was deemed an adult one year ahead of schedule and shipped off to a men’s camp. He never saw his mother, Greta, again. Years would pass before he saw his aunt Alexandra and sister Mina.

Conditions were generally much worse at the men’s camp, but some of the older men looked after him and kept him alive through the end of the war a few months later. The Japanese guards enforced a brutal disciplinary regime. The inmates had adapted to it as best they could by using a system of code words. “ Oranje boven ” (Orange on top) was a slogan that in happier times might be chanted at football matches, but here was muttered as an affirmation of continued loyalty to the House of Orange.