Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

Saskia stood up. “Get the bicycles.”

Even bicycles were almost overkill. Huis ten Bosch was just a few thousand strides from the edge of the North Sea. They could have walked to it briskly in less than an hour. On bicycles, trailed by security and support staff in cars, they covered the distance in minutes.

Along this stretch of the North Sea coast, the basic shape of the land was a flat beach that grew wider or narrower according to the tides. Rising abruptly from that was a line of dunes, held together by scrubby vegetation that had found purchase in the loose sandy soil and survived the wind and spray that came off the sea almost continuously during much of the year. Inland of the dunes’ crest, the ground dropped lower and was spattered with small pools embedded in marshy ground. That described the coastline in its natural state from the Hook of Holland, a few kilometers south of The Hague, north as far as Frisia. The Hague’s bit of it was a popular recreational beach, serviced by a row of restaurants, bars, and so on built well back from the surf, nestled at the base of the steep bluff or strung out above along its brow. This, of course, was the high season for beachgoing. Conditions had been fine and warm until the onset of this morning’s weather.

That sort of development—the touristy stuff that you could see at any beach in the world—terminated abruptly as one went north up the beach past Scheveningen. Beyond a certain point there were suddenly no businesses, and very few human traces: just a long wire fence that had something to do with maintaining the dune, and a couple of reinforced concrete bunkers that the Nazis had embedded in the sand as part of their coastal defense system. A paved bicycle path ran along the top of the dune, but you couldn’t see that from below, just occasional wooden staircases linking it to the beach. Other than that, it was a nature preserve. During the winter, the place could be astonishingly deserted given that it was only a short walk from the capital of one of the most densely populated countries in the world.

An exception occurred whenever conditions of wind and sea combined to produce large waves. Then, this coastline drew surfers. They all had apps that alerted them when conditions were likely to be right. They would flock to whatever stretch of the Dutch coastline looked like it would have the biggest and best waves. Given the climate, they generally wore wet suits.

This morning, probably during the wee hours, those people had been awakened by those apps letting them know that conditions in a few hours’ time were going to be ideal at Scheveningen, and that waves could be expected that might only occur once in a decade.

Therefore, as Saskia and Lotte and their entourage pedaled westward over the landscape of dunes and potholes just inland of the beach, they were following in the footsteps and bicycle tracks of hundreds of surfers who had come the same way during the hours just before dawn, fighting their way up into the teeth of that wind. It was easy to see the traces they had left behind in the loose ground and various pieces of kit they had stashed in the lee of the dune line.

The crest of the dune—the highest prominence between them and the flat beach below—was now a ragged picket line of civilians, police, and aid workers, all looking down and out over the sea. They were strangely inactive. They had all been summoned here by some great spectacle, but having arrived, they didn’t know what to do besides look at it.

Saskia and her group pulled over and got out of the way of a fire truck that was trying to reach the shore along the same indistinct path. Then they followed it up and found their way into a gap between other onlookers where they could look out over the beach.

The beach appeared to be gone.

What they saw was so strange and so contrary to what they had expected that it took several moments for them even to make sense of the plain evidence of their eyes. Directly below them, only a few meters below the brow of the dune, a flat, featureless slab of dirty-yellow stuff was butted up against the slope. It extended from there all the way out to the North Sea, which was still slamming into it with great waves. But for all their power the waves did not move it. They simply dissolved into it. Even their sound was swallowed up.

Looking to the left and the right, Saskia could see that this phenomenon extended south to the pier and Ferris wheel at Scheveningen, and northward for at least an equal distance. Several kilometers of beach had been buried to a depth of a few meters beneath a featureless and disturbingly quiet slab of what appeared to be foam.

Still finding this difficult to believe, Saskia ventured down a short distance from the lip of the dune, wanting to inspect the stuff close up. It wasn’t that far below them. She could have poked it with a long stick. But the moment she broke ranks, an outcry came up. They had not even recognized her yet. She was just a random person to them. But all those who’d arrived earlier, all the police and aid workers, wanted her to know that under no circumstances should she descend one step farther.

“But it’s just . . . normal sea foam? Natural foam?” she asked.

“This is what the experts are saying,” Willem said. “You see it on the beach all the time, of course.”

“Of course! But just little puffs of it. Ropes of it along the surf line.”

“This is the same. Just . . . more of it. All concentrated along this stretch where the surf was strongest. It piled up on the beach faster than it could dissipate. It was trapped against the base of the dune. So it just piled up higher and higher. Faster than people could get away.”

Saskia was finally, only now, observing the nature of the rescue activities. A coast guard chopper, painted a vivid shade of yellow, was inbound over the sea. A couple of huge orange RHIBs were moving around offshore, carrying rescue divers, but it looked like they were largely preoccupied just managing their relationship to the incoming waves—trying not to become surfboards. Red fire trucks were continuing to show up along the paved bicycle path that ran along the top of the dune. One of them had been used to anchor ropes that had been tossed down into the foam. A fireman in full face respirator, with an air tank on his back, was trudging up out of it. He looked like someone who had been tarred and feathered. Every square inch of him was flocked with white foam. When he reached a safe altitude he unsnapped himself from the rope and made a gesture to colleagues above, who began to haul on the rope. After a few moments a body in a wet suit emerged from the foam. When it was safely up on dry ground, medics converged on it.

Other victims—many in wet suits—were lying supine on gurneys, or just on the ground. Rescue workers were forcing air into their lungs by squeezing rubber bags. Or at least that was the case for some of them. Others were just lying motionless. They were being zipped into body bags.

The fire truck deployed a hose and began to spray water down into the foam, easily carving a trench into it. This they widened by playing it from side to side. Soon they uncovered a still human form sprawled partway up the slope of the dune.

“You can’t breathe in that stuff,” Willem said. “It gets in your lungs. Nor can you swim out of it. You can only run, or rather wade, to some place where you might be able to breathe. But of course you can’t see where you’re going. A few of them made it to the top of the dune. A few went back down, trying to rescue the others.”

“How many?” Saskia asked, watching dully as the fire hose exposed another body, and another, within the space of a few meters.

“At least a hundred,” Willem said.

Willem’s job in such a situation was to be cold-blooded. This wasn’t necessarily in his nature. He was as shocked by all this as anyone else. It wasn’t completely unprecedented. There had been isolated cases of drowning in sea foam during the last few years. It had come up on the emergency services’ radar as something that would become more likely as the temperature of the sea rose and algae—which apparently had something to do with the formation of sea foam—flourished. But a mass casualty event of this type was completely astonishing.