Termination Shock

The Storm

The storm was hitting in a few hours. Willem had put a coat of allegedly waterproof polish on his cowboy boots and gone in to The Hague to have breakfast with Idil Warsame. Apparently she’d read the weather forecast too and put on a very sensible pair of flat-soled boots. In spite of that she towered over him when she stood up to greet him; she must have been over six feet tall. She had classic East African features, reflecting a mix of sub-Saharan and Middle Eastern ancestries. She made a vivid contrast with her friend, a much shorter and stockier woman. Glimpsing them through the restaurant’s window, already flecked with rain, Willem had assumed that the shorter person was from Africa. But when he got inside, and introductions were made, it became obvious that she was from Papua. Willem wasn’t the first person to guess wrong. The reason Papua had been dubbed New Guinea in the first place was that, hundreds of years ago, a Spanish sea captain had mistaken the people who lived there for Africans.

Sister Catherine—for she was a Catholic nun—and Idil had grabbed a table in the back of the restaurant, next to an emergency exit, all likely pre-arranged by Idil’s security team. These weren’t obvious—they weren’t slinging grenade launchers or anything—but Willem knew how to recognize them. They formed a gantlet spaced along the route that any assailant would have to take en route from the restaurant’s entrance to the table where Idil and Sister Catherine were sipping their coffee.

Sister Catherine evidently belonged to one of those relatively modernized orders that didn’t insist on wearing habits, though she was keeping her hair covered with a scarf. Now that Willem was across the table from her in better light he could see features that if he hadn’t known better would have caused him to guess that she was Australian. The three of them together made quite the cosmopolitan table. In The Hague, this wasn’t so out of the ordinary. People came here from all over because of the International Court of Justice and other global human rights initiatives. Most of them were here to represent populations that were being done wrong in one way or another, which was unquestionably the case with Papuans.

Willem looked at Idil and she looked at him and both of them simultaneously spoke the words “Beatrix says hello.” So that broke the ice. To Idil Warsame, Willem, twice her age, would be an éminence grise of the Dutch establishment, a conservative parliamentarian turned royal retainer, and that could sometimes make the ice pretty thick.

Sister Catherine was most amused, and the look on her face spoke of great affection for Willem’s first cousin twice removed. “You must be proud of her,” said the nun, “such a firecracker!” Willem had trouble making sense of her English for just a moment until he got it that she was speaking with an Australian accent. Then it all snapped into place. “You’ll have to be patient with my Dutch,” she said, reaching across the table and touching Willem’s forearm lightly. “Where I grew up, speaking it was discouraged.”

Willem guessed her age at between forty and fifty. Papua’s transfer from a Dutch protectorate to an Indonesian province would have been a done deal by the time she was born. So, yes, her schoolteachers might have been fluent in Dutch, but using the language wouldn’t have been a great career move.

“We’ll speak English,” Idil announced in a tone making it clear this was not subject to debate. Willem had been warned to expect bluntness. “This is scheduled for one hour, and we’re already ten minutes in; do you have a hard stop at the hour, Dr. Castelein?”

“I’m afraid I do. The weather.”

“Time and tide wait for no man,” Sister Catherine said.

Idil nodded and looked on the verge of delivering a statement but had to suppress frustration as they were interrupted by the waiter. While Willem ordered, she nodded at Sister Catherine, who began producing documents from a tote bag of impressive size. Willem guessed from its look that it had been produced by artisans in Papua.

“Look, there’s no point dancing around,” Idil said, as soon as the waiter was out of earshot. “It’s obvious something is going on around T.R. Schmidt. Geoengineering.”

“Where?” Willem asked. Not wanting to volunteer anything.

“Sneeuwberg. The highest mountain in Papua. Getting sulfur from there into the stratosphere.”

Knocked me for a loop! was one of those down-home expressions that Willem had heard from the likes of the Boskeys during the sojourn in Texas. For a Somalian-Dutch woman to confidently announce that T.R. was pursuing additional geoengineering schemes on New Guinea’s highest mountain knocked Willem for a loop. He somewhat prided himself on being ahead of the curve. An insider who knew such things before anyone else.

Idil must have read his stunned expression as I can’t believe you know about that! instead of Holy shit, first I’ve heard of it! “I don’t care,” she said. “I’m not an environmentalist except insofar as it bears on those issues I do care about. Once we’ve gotten to the point where girls in developing countries are getting decent educations and being given control over their own bodies, then I’ll concern myself with T.R. McHooligan’s sulfur veil and its projected side effects. Maybe.”

“Some would say—” Willem began.

Idil ran him off the road. “That climate affects prosperity, and prosperity helps me achieve my goals. Of course. But climate’s not getting better, is it? If some billionaire in Texas has a plan to make it less bad, fine.”

“All right, well, glad we got that out of the way!” Willem said.

“Now, did your niece—”

“Cousin, technically.”

“Did Beatrix talk to you about what she’s been working on with my firm?”

For where there were courts, there were lawyers; and where there was an international court of human rights, there were law firms that specialized in that. Idil wasn’t trained as a lawyer, but one such firm had set her up with a fellowship, endowed by a Bay Area tech zillionaire.

“No, she did not,” Willem said. “But it’s obvious. That branch of our family moved to Tuaba in the early days of the mine project and established a logistics business.”

“Import of mining-related equipment from Australia, Singapore, Taiwan,” Idil said, “as well as German equipment transshipped through Rotterdam.”

“You’ve done your homework.”

Sister Catherine was nodding sympathetically. “That is the way to survive, for people like the Kuoks. Become useful to a project that makes money for the powers that be.”

Willem nodded. “Pre-war, it was oil installations in Java. Now it’s the big mine in your homeland. The business has done well, but the political climate—well, I don’t have to tell you about that.”

Sister Catherine grimaced and nodded.

Willem continued, “Smart young people like Beatrix know that they have to get out before they get enmeshed in it.”

“Or worse,” Sister Catherine said. She was referring to the fact that people simply got murdered there, by Papuan freedom fighters, Indonesian secret police, or the latter pretending to be the former. “It speaks well of Beatrix that once she got out, and got a foothold in America, she’s chosen to do some work on behalf of the people back home.”

“I don’t know much about the nature of that work,” Willem admitted. “I know that the Papuans have been seeking independence for a long time. Which is complicated by the existence of the mine. By the wealth that it represents. Which is not something that the powers that be in Indonesia are in any hurry to relinquish.”

“Such things happen all the time in colonized countries that have resources, such as oil,” Idil said. “What makes Papua unusual is that it’s colonized by a country—Indonesia—that is itself a former colony. So your government—the former colonizer of Indonesia—has a special role that it could play.”

“Here’s where I issue the standard disclaimer that I work for the royal house—not the government,” Willem said.

“And yet one reason you were selected for that role was your family connection back to the colonial past,” Idil said. Calmly, without rancor.

“Fair enough,” Willem said. “Is there some way, Sister Catherine, that I might be of any assistance in the work that you and my cousin are pursuing?”

“We seek independence,” Sister Catherine said. “The Brazos RoDuSh mine has until now been a stumbling block. Like all mines, its fate is to become depleted over time. The less valuable it becomes, the lower the stumbling block. If what’s next is that the site becomes a geoengineering complex—why, that looks to us like an opportunity.”

Willem hadn’t seen that coming. “How so? I’d have thought the opposite would be true. As you said, if the mine peters out, Indonesia covets it less. Becomes more willing to let Papua out of its clutches. But I’d think that if the site gets a new lease on life, all the old problems stay with you.”

Sister Catherine was just looking at him. Not someone you’d want to play poker with. “It has to do with interests. Cui bono?”

“Who benefits?” Willem translated.

“Nation-states—some of which might be quite far removed from my homeland—that would benefit from injection of stratospheric aerosols from a high mountain near the equator will weigh in on our behalf. Even if, until now, they would not have been able to find Papua on a map.”

Viewed from space, the twin gates of the Maeslantkering—the largest movable objects ever built—looked a bit like the pie-wedge–shaped wings that children scraped out in fresh snow when they were making angels. The curved rim of each pie wedge was the actual barrier meant to stand fast against the full force of a North Sea storm surge. Each was made to block one half of the width of the waterway joining Rotterdam to the sea. They came together in the middle, each swinging inward from a pivot on the embankment. The rest of the pie wedge—the triangle that spanned the 240-meter radius from the curved barrier to the pivot—consisted of massive steel tubes welded together to form a rigid trusswork. That structure transmitted the sea’s force from the barrier to the ball and socket that might be thought of as the shoulder joint of the angel’s wing. It went without saying that these were the largest ball-and-socket joints ever made. The balls were ten meters in diameter. They were cradled in sockets consisting mostly of reinforced concrete, set deeply into the ground and distributing the force into the surrounding earth through long concrete buttresses that splayed out like fingers and eventually ramped down below ground level to connect with massive subterranean footings.

Precisely curved trenches had been gouged into the banks to give the barrier arcs a place to abide during the long spans of time—on the order of decades—during which they were not actually needed. Like dry docks, these trenches lay below the level of the water, but most of the time they were kept empty, leaving the barrier arcs high and dry so that they could be inspected and maintained. The arcs themselves were hollow boxes, normally full of air. Once floated into position across the waterway, they could be flooded so that they would sink and form a seal against the floor of the channel.

The whole complex had been formally christened in 1997 by Saskia’s grandmother and never actually needed until ten years later. After that, it had sat high, dry, and motionless—aside from regularly scheduled annual closures just to make sure it all still worked—for another sixteen years, when another surge had come along. Today, for the third time in its history, they were going to close it to protect the Netherlands from what was predicted to be the largest surge in the North Sea since the disaster of 1953. It was the first such closure in Saskia’s reign.

Thanks to a program that had been set in motion by Willem in the days following her speech to the States General, Queen Frederika had spent much of the last three weeks touring the country in support of disaster preparedness. Now, trying to get Dutch people to prepare for disasters was a little like trying to get English people to watch football on the telly or Americans to buy guns. They were receptive to the message, to a degree that made the queen’s efforts on this front completely superfluous. The very inaneness of it was just the sort of thing that caused anti-royals to roll their eyes and ask what was the point of maintaining such an institution if its work was to be that insipid. For all the good she was doing, Queen Frederika might as well have stayed home at the palace tweeting about muffin recipes. And yet, given the run of close calls and scares the household had experienced last month, this was actually just the ticket. Any royal-hater or royal-skeptic, any tabloid journalist who had become excited or suspicious by the whiff of mystery and possible scandal that had surrounded the queen around the time of her visit to Texas and the geoengineering kerfuffle on Budget Day, was now catatonic with boredom after twenty consecutive days of watching Her Majesty remind pensioners in Zeeland not to get trapped in their attics. She had gone to little towns along the Rhine to inspect their dikes. She had stood in the rain stomping the royal shovel with the royal gum boot. She had nodded thoughtfully as civil servants had pointed to maps of evacuation routes. She had laid wreaths on the graves of people who had drowned in 1953.

During the first half of that three-week span it had all bordered on self-parody. Even steadfast fans of the House of Orange had thought it was a bit much. The weather had been as non-threatening as it could be. But then it had turned decidedly autumnal. Not in a cozy way. Heavy rainfall inland had begun to raise the levels of the rivers. And long-range forecasts produced by computer models had raised concern about a low-pressure system forming in the North Atlantic, south of Iceland. This had intensified and begun to move toward the chute between Scotland and Norway. Curiosity had turned into excitement, then concern, then dread. Tides were going to be exceptionally high to begin with—simple bad luck, that. This thing was then going to push a monster storm surge ahead of it.

So they’d known for days that they were going to have to close the great gates of the Maeslantkering. Across the sea, the same precaution was being taken at the Thames Barrier below London. It was only a question of when the linked computer models that ran the thing would decide to pull the trigger. For along with all the other superlatives that characterized that system, it was also the world’s largest robot.

They had a pretty good idea of when it would happen. And once it started, it took a while. Advance notice had gone out to mariners so that they would have time to move their vessels in or out of the gates before they swung shut. Saskia wanted to be there for at least part of it, as the capstone of her disaster preparedness jihad. So she went out a bit early and, to kill time, did an informal drive-by inspection of the nearby Maasvlakte.

This was an artificial peninsula that protruded, wartlike, from the nearby coast into the North Sea. Its purpose was to support an immense container port. Back in the age of sail, oceangoing ships had been able to glide all the way up to the ancient center of Rotterdam, some twenty-five kilometers inland. But as centuries had passed and ships had gotten bigger, they’d tended to drop anchor farther downstream. Accordingly the port had grown in that direction. The culmination of all that had been the creation of this Maasvlakte, an anchorage that could be reached without entering the waterway at all. It was thus capable of servicing the very largest container ships in the world: absurdly enormous things, double the width of the biggest ship that could fit through the Panama Canal, that boggled Saskia’s mind whenever she came out here to look at them. It was the place where the economy of China made a direct umbilical connection to Europe. The ships were two dozen containers wide and drew twenty meters of water when fully loaded. Some of them, fresh in from Asia, would unload part of their burden here just so that they would ride higher in the water, making it possible for them to move on to smaller and shallower European ports.

The Maasvlakte comprised several docks. One of them was named after Princess Frederika—a nakedly political move on someone’s part, and yet it had given her a proprietary attitude about the place. There was an access road where you could go and park without getting in the way of port traffic, so that was where her three-car caravan went, just to see the sights and kill a little time before they got the go-ahead to drop in at the Maeslantkering, which was just a few kilometers upstream.

The Maeslantkering’s status as the largest robot in the world seemed less exceptional when viewed from the Maasvlakte. The entirety of the Port of Rotterdam was a giant machine. Not that it didn’t have plenty of greenery—you could hardly stop green things from flourishing here—but the soil in which it grew was just another component of the machine, graded and shaped and tamped just so to channel water or to support unbelievably heavy objects. The greenery had a purpose too: to keep important dirt from washing away. Decades ago one might have seen long strips of grass running parallel to the roads, railways, canals, and pipelines that serviced the docks. Those were still there, but they had all been turned into picket lines of wind turbines, all of which today were facing into the winds coming down out of the north as harbingers of the storm and spinning around as rapidly as their robot control systems deemed prudent. For space on the skyline they competed with looming queues of container cranes, parked oil rigs, and refinery stacks. These were arranged in layers that were interleaved at various distances as far as one could see, eventually blurring into a silvery mist.

The operations of the Princess Frederika Dock and its siblings around the Maasvlakte were as automated as technology and unions would allow. She could still remember cutting the ribbon on this thing as a teenager. One of the senior executives who’d been allowed to have lunch with her had reminisced about his former job deciding which container should be placed where on the cargo ships of his day: how to be sure that the load was balanced, and that it would remain balanced while the ship was being loaded or unloaded, while keeping in mind that the vessel might have to make several stops to discharge all its containers. He’d done it with index cards. The courtiers in attendance had tried to shut the poor man up, fearing that the princess would be bored, but she’d found it fascinating. Nowadays, of course, it was all done by software. When a big ship from China pulled into the Yangtze Canal—the deepest berth of all the Maasvlakte, the one closest to the sea—the over-reaching cranes that plucked the boxes from it and placed them on trucks or railway cars were robots that knew exactly what was in each container and where it needed to go. And the trucks themselves, shuttling containers to and fro, were for the most part driverless. Saskia, who had at one point in her young life been subjected to a battery of tests whose purpose was to find out whether her eccentric interests were a result of being on the autism spectrum, loved to just come here and watch the machine run, somewhat as a monarch of another era might have amused himself playing with his tin soldiers.

Things were a bit different today, though, because there was some concern that some areas of the Maasvlakte might get swamped by the storm surge, and so efforts were underway to move vulnerable stuff inland. And on the water, ships were making efforts to get out of town. In the middle of the Yangtze Canal loomed Andromeda, one of a fleet of Chinese container ships that vied for the honor of being the largest in the world. She’d apparently wound up her business ashore and was now being nudged away from the quay by tugboats. In old-school ports it might have required some hours before she could get underway, but here at Maasvlakte she already had a straight shot to open, deep water and needed only push down on the gas pedal, as it were. A couple of launches were shuttling back and forth between the shore and a pilot’s door on her flank, presumably ferrying last-minute personnel and necessaries that had been left behind in the rush to get out ahead of the storm.

“I’m going to go survey the disposition of the enemy forces,” Saskia announced and hiked off in the direction of what appeared to be a long low mound of gray sand running in a straight line along one edge of the port and separating it from what looked to be absolute nothingness on the other side. Any Dutch person would immediately recognize it as a dike, although most dikes were covered with grass. Other than a couple of lonely, opportunistic shore birds, this thing was as dead and colorless as the surface of the moon. Guessing her intent, the security team scrambled out of their cars and ran to catch up.

It started as a low flat beach of fine wet sand, then suddenly got steeper and coarser, with a vaguely scalloped shape that probably showed where a grab dredger had opened its clam shell bucket to dump huge gobs of muck. This was new work that hadn’t yet settled to its natural angle of repose. Saskia helped that process along in a small way by wading and staggering up over knee-high mini-cliffs and touching off small avalanches. The levee was higher than it looked from a distance, which on a day like this was reassuring. Eventually she got to the point where she could see over the top, though. And what she could see—“The enemy forces”—was a whole lot of nothing. Visibility was cut off by mist at a distance of maybe a kilometer. The gray sea was churning and heaving, but there weren’t a lot of breakers coming in against this steep artificial shore. Those that did attack it were flicked away by the dike’s outer armor. For, soft as it was on its inner slope, the side facing the sea was another matter. The smallest and lightest objects that met the eye there were reinforced concrete cubes two and a half meters on a side. And, as had been explained to her at a level of detail that would have rendered most royals catatonic, this was only the uppermost layer of an engineered system that reached deep below the water.

But it wouldn’t stop a rogue wave. One of those could come hurtling silently out of the mist and claw the queen off the dike at any time, as her security team well knew. Looking to her right she was pleased in a way to see that, if this were to happen, Amelia would share the same fate. Willem was on her left, performatively checking his watch. But when the royal photographer finally caught up and began snapping, he melted away. She hadn’t actually come up here to have her picture taken, but she knew it was inevitable. And it would make for a fine picture.

If the Netherlands was a castle and the enemy was the sea, then this artificial island they were standing on was part of the bailey: the lightly fortified outer fringe, never meant to be held against a serious assault. It was now time for Queen Frederika to retreat inside the motte: the higher, more easily defended ground within. And along the way she was going to slam the gate behind her. Or rather she was going to stand in a suitably photogenic location and do absolutely nothing while half a million lines of C++ code slammed it for her. The drive to the Maeslantkering complex—or, to be precise, the half of it that was attached to the waterway’s south bank—lasted only a few minutes. Still, when they got out of their cars there, Saskia had the feeling that the wind had picked up. A reminder that storms built slowly and predictably, except when they didn’t.

The complex was surrounded by the same sorts of security barriers and surveillance tech that in other countries might have been used to seal the perimeter of a nuclear submarine base. Not that it was a military target per se, but if some mad saboteur had gotten in there and vandalized a key part of the system, it would have been expensive to repair. If it had happened just before a big storm, and somehow prevented a gate from closing, the resulting damage would have been comparable to a nuclear strike.

Of course, they couldn’t control the waterway itself, so their worst nightmare right now was a ship sinking in the channel right between the gates. Vessels large and small had been moving through in both directions during the hours since the notice had gone out. It was hard to miss the military and police deployment on land, sea, and air, keeping many eyes on every vessel that moved between the gates and making sure they kept moving. Tugboats were standing by to push or pull anything that got in the way.

Once they were through security they found themselves in a very un-Dutch world of things that were so preposterously enormous that even Texans might nudge their cowboy hats back on their heads and say, holy shit, that’s big. There was a vast open triangular area whose sole purpose was to have nothing whatsoever on it: this was the zone across which the wing would sweep once it began moving. The trusses themselves were the size of seventy-story buildings that had toppled over onto the ground. The nerve center was a horseshoe-shaped building that rose above the level of any conceivable storm surge, commanding the waterway from a sweep of windows. Above that rose a reinforced-concrete tower topped by radars and antennas. A red box, small in comparison to everything else, housed the motor that would actually drive the barrier out into the channel. This, understandably, had come in for a lot of loving attention from maintenance crews during the last few days. As Saskia was whisked from her car toward the south bank’s control center, she exchanged hand waves with a couple of crew members who glanced her way.

Looking up at the huge white vertical expanse of the barrier she had a moment of vertigo and put a hand on a railing just to steady herself. Then she realized that she was rock solid. It was the barrier itself that was moving. They’d already flooded its dry dock and set it afloat. The whole thing was bobbing ever so slightly, restrained by the 240-meter-long arms, but, thanks to those ball-and-socket joints, free to move up and down.

The control room proper was as small and spare as a ship’s bridge. Everyone there was, of course, busy. But there was plenty of room along the panoramic sweep of windows where Saskia could see everything and yet not be in the way. Willem remained with her, and so did the photographer. The rest of her entourage stayed outside to watch from a green embankment, lashed by rain. But around here you were always lashed by rain. The photographer had already got pictures of the queen in her bedraggled and windswept incarnation up on the dike. Check. This was going to have a more formal vibe. Like christening a ship. Fenna had patched her up in the car. She hadn’t gotten too ruined while quick-stepping from there to the building’s entrance. Nothing she couldn’t fix up in the women’s toilet without professional assistance.

The actual closing of the gates was so smooth and quiet that she’d have missed it if she’d looked the other way. The only real clue it was happening was a mild rise in the chthonic thrumming of the motor in the red box. Stepping up to the window, she saw the barrier arc extruding into the channel. Looking across to the opposite bank, half a kilometer away, she saw its opposite number doing likewise. There was still that slow heaving as it responded to waves and currents in the channel, but its swing was as steady and relentless as the hand of a giant clock. The photographer danced around, trying to get the right angle, and finally clambered up on a table so that he could get both the queen and the front gate of her kingdom together in the frame. Slowly the gates severed the waterway. Off to the left, on the opposite shore, was the terminal at the Hook of Holland where the ferries went to and from England. That stretch, which was on the sea’s doorstep, was still torn by whitecaps and shrouded by spray sliced off the waves by a scything wind. But to the right, upstream of the gates, the wild waves were subsiding. Big breakers seeking entrance to her country were slamming into the barrier arcs and sending up explosive gouts, but all those tons of steel soaked up the impacts as if they were gnats ticking into the windshield of Rufus’s truck. She supposed that if you could go and rest a hand on the seven-hundred-ton steel balls in the shoulder joints you might feel a slight tickling in the tips of your fingers.

It would have been satisfying to hear a great boom and snap as the two gates touched in the middle, but that probably would have meant sloppy engineering. The low purr of the motor cycled down. The engineers whose job it was to make sure that those things worked could go home tonight and enjoy a beer. Other machinery was now engaged to open valves and flood the barrier arcs. The only way you could tell that was happening was that less and less of them showed above the churning surface. The long trusses, formerly parallel to the ground, tilted downward slightly. One had to use one’s imagination a little to visualize the flat bottom of those arcs settling down along the full width, making contact with a channel bottom painstakingly sculpted and inspected to be as flat as a hockey rink. The seal wasn’t perfectly watertight—nothing ever was—but it would hold for a day until the surge had passed.

The only way she knew it was done was by a sort of lightening in the atmosphere of the room, a change in the tone of the low conversation, a few laughs. She looked at Willem, hoping to share the moment with him, but he was fixated on his tablet.

A senior engineer approached, peeling off a headset and then self-consciously tucking his gray hair into place. The Netherlands really was just a constitutional monarchy. She had no real business here. She probably shouldn’t have come here at all. If she’d been swept off the dike by a rogue wave, the same things would have happened at the same time. This man had no actual duty where she was concerned. But. He had to do it. “Your Majesty,” he said, “I am pleased to report that the Maeslantkering is closed.”

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.

Willem was dressed and on his way downstairs before it even occurred to him to wonder whether he and Remi were in danger. The natural and artificial waterways of this country were a maze. Could the floodwaters hook around through central Rotterdam, come north, and inundate Leiden?

Always an important question to ask oneself before surrendering altitude; and it came to him when he was halfway down the stairs. Remigio, who’d helped him pull his things together and get going, was standing at the top of the stairs in gym shorts and bathrobe, watching him quizzically.

“Could we get . . . flooded here?”

There turned out to be advantages in being espoused to a history professor. Remi shook his head. “Leiden predates the reclamation of the Haarlemmermeer.”

“Of course.”

“It was above sea level then. It’s above sea level now . . . probably.”

“Sea level,” Willem said, making air quotes. He glanced down at his cowboy boots. After Texas he would never be able to use the term again with a straight face.

Remi sighed, taking his point. “Well, there is that. But if I had to pick a spot to wait this out, it’d be here or where you’re going.” Meaning The Hague. “Now, go. I’ll stay above ‘sea level.’ Take care of yourself.”

“Don’t—”

“Get trapped in the attic. I know, I follow the queen’s Twitter feed too.”

Willem spent a few minutes comparing wait times on various ride share apps. All disastrous. Then he tried to sort out the train schedules, which had been thrown into disarray. Finally he just got on his bicycle and rode the few kilometers. He didn’t even have to pedal. The wind pushed him there. He went straight to Noordeinde Palace because it was clearly going to be that kind of day. He changed into dry clothes and turned on all the TVs. The predominant image was of the north gate of the Maeslantkering, the barrier arc stove in, the truss crumpled, the whole thing peeled back, the North Sea rushing through the gap with such power that the south gate was bucking and shuddering in the backwash. He’d had time on the ride down to plot out in his head the shape of the waterways around Rotterdam and to form the opinion that, from there, the water was going to generally head south and inundate parts of Zeeland. Not that the flooding of Rotterdam wasn’t a pretty big fucking disaster in and of itself.

In passing he saw a news flash from the BBC. The Thames Barrier had been circumvented by the storm surge and the water was rising in London. The drainage systems meant to handle storm runoff from north of the city had been overwhelmed and were backing up, flooding places inland. The Netherlands, he knew, would soon be facing a similar problem. They had no way to stop the great rivers that flowed in from fucking Germany. Those had to reach the sea eventually. One of their possible outlets was now flowing the wrong way. All the others had been temporarily dammed off to hold back the storm surge.

The question was—now that he’d reached his office, changed clothes, turned on the TVs, and got up to speed—what could Willem actually do? And the answer was nothing. During his former career he’d have had duties as a member of the States General on various committees. Now he was an aide to a theoretically powerless monarch. And she’d already done everything she could do by going about telling people to be ready for a disaster that was at this moment actually unfolding. There would be no repeat of her impromptu performance on the foam-drowned beach at Scheveningen. In a situation like this she had two jobs: to stay put, and to shut up, with the possible exception of maybe issuing a brief statement later in the day. Once the crisis had abated—tomorrow at the very earliest—they could arrange some photo ops and wreath layings.

So there was literally nothing for him to do. No reason for him to have gotten out of bed. He could watch TV from home.

> HOW COULD IT HAVE GIVEN WAY SO EASILY !? his father wanted to know.

Others would be asking the same question. Willem had a vague idea as to how, but he needed to confirm it.

Alastair had a rock on his desk. It had been there the whole time Willem had known him. Had it been quite a bit smaller, it might have been mistaken for a paperweight. It was an irregular oblong, smoothed by wave action, and totally unexceptional. Willem had asked him about it once and Alastair had explained that it had been retrieved from a lighthouse off the Oregon coast. The lighthouse keeper had heard a loud noise in the middle of the night and climbed the stairs to investigate. Halfway up was a window that had been smashed out by this rock. The window was a hundred feet above sea level. The only way the rock could have ended up there was by being entrained in a huge wave that had broken against the cliff on which the lighthouse stood. Alastair had somehow acquired the rock and kept it “as a memento mori” to focus the minds of shipping company executives who wanted to know (a) why insurance was so expensive and (b) why enormous ships sometimes ceased to exist without warning or explanation.

Alastair was looking as frazzled as one might expect. His extremely short hair required little maintenance but he hadn’t shaved in a while and was just wearing an old T-shirt and a hoodie. “You’ll be wanting to know why the Maeslantkering caved in” was how he started the conversation. His emphasis on the first word in that sentence, combined with a general air of distraction, suggested that Willem was just one in a long and ever-fluctuating queue of calls. “The fact that you called me hints that you suspect a rogue wave was the murder weapon.”

“And what say you?” Willem asked.

“I say yes. Just by process of elimination.”

“How so?”

“Those gates were engineered to take steady loads. Dead loads. The sea presses against the barrier with a force that gets larger as the storm surge gets higher. We call it a ‘surge,’ which sounds like something fast and violent, but it isn’t. It’s slow and predictable. Engineers can calculate the forces, work with the numbers. Oh, they add in a fudge factor to account for the odd wave. That is a stochastic figure that mostly stays within predictable limits. What hit the Maeslantkering a couple of hours ago was probably orders of magnitude outside the bounds of what those engineers planned for, what, forty years ago. And it was a live load, which just makes it all much worse from a structural engineering standpoint. The thing simply broke. There is not much else to say.”

“And it’s just bad luck,” Willem said.

“That, sir, is my stock in trade. I am the bad luck man. Gandalf Stormcrow.”

“Such a wave could have hit anywhere,” Willem said, mentally organizing the press release. “Today it just happened to hit the Maeslantkering.”

“It probably got funneled, intensified, by the entrance to the channel. We can analyze it later when there’s more evidence. It might have diffracted around the Hook, bounced off the Maasvlakte dike, picked up steam as the channel narrowed. You can’t predict this sort of thing, sadly, but doing the postmortem is easy. Like you can’t predict a car crash but it’s easy to reconstruct it from skid marks.”

“I’ll let you get on with what must be a very busy day,” Willem said, as he saw Alastair reaching for the red button that would terminate the call.

> Rogue wave, Papa. Impossible to predict. Impossible to plan for.

> WHERE IS THE BACKUP SYSTEM !?!?

> You know there isn’t one. There can’t be one.

> THESE DEFENSES ARE ANCIENT

Willem let the exchange lapse. Eventually his father would see that all the other such defenses were doing fine, despite being “ancient.” Though a dike had been overtopped by waves in North Holland and would have to be repaired.

On the spur of the moment, he messaged T.R.

> How do you talk to people about randomness? Stochasticity?

> You don’t. It’s a fool’s errand T.R. answered, as if he had just been sitting there waiting to hear from Willem.

> I guess that makes me a fool :(

> The Chinese had it right. The Mandate of Heaven and all that.

> So . . . wait for the stochastic outlier . . . then turn it into an opportunity?

> Worked for them!

Willem was getting ready to point out that it hadn’t worked so well for the outgoing emperors. But as soon as T.R. had mentioned China, Willem had remembered Bo’s weird, hasty departure from the country yesterday. Bo. Who had known, at least a week earlier than anyone in the Netherlands, that a big storm was coming. His scalp was tingling as nonexistent hairs attempted to stand up.

> I am sorry about your country’s loss. Please give my best wishes to the queen T.R. added.

> Thx was all Willem could manage to thumb out.