Termination Shock

The Line

There was a catch, sort of. When in life, though, was there ever not a catch? During the after-dinner chitchat, Prince Fahd had strolled over for a bit of airplane talk. In an apologetic and self-deprecating tone—as if he had embarrassed himself by giving Princess Frederika the wrong type of jet airplane—he mentioned that its range was nothing like what a modern bizjet was capable of. Gone were the days of nonstop flights from Schiphol to Sydney. No, getting around in that thing was going to be more akin to traveling in the Beaver: shorter hops, more frequent stops. And, further compounding his shame, the stops couldn’t be just anywhere: obviously you had to put the thing down at a location where hydrogen was available. Of course, very few airports had that on tap. But in many of your more technologically advanced countries it was possible to have a truck deliver the stuff to the tarmac and pump it directly into the plane. It just required a bit more advance planning, which the prince’s staff would be glad to assist with until Princess Frederika and her people got up to speed.

Saskia had to suppress an impulse to confess that she no longer had “people” in that sense of the term. She was meaning to get some sooner or later. She could support a modest staff. But, for now, she was still enjoying the simplicity and freedom of not being anyone’s boss.

“If you are interested in taking the thing on a little shakedown cruise,” Fahd bin Talal went on, “I would draw Your Royal Highness’s attention to the Line. It is just within range from here, and as part of the kingdom’s commitment to decarbonization, we have, as a matter of course, equipped the airport with state-of-the-art facilities for the storage and delivery of hydrogen. It is easily the most hydrogen-friendly air terminal in the world today.”

Saskia had heard of this Line place. It was a completely new city, a hundred miles long and only a few blocks wide, that the Saudis were constructing on mostly unoccupied land. Its western end was on the Gulf of Aqaba at the head of the Red Sea, its eastern reached deep into the desert. They’d started the project years ago with high aspirations and a great deal of fanfare, but it had stalled out after the Khashoggi assassination, which had led many international corporate partners to back away from it.

The prince’s description made sense, though. When you were building a completely new airport from scratch, drawing on an infinite fund of petro-dollars, why not plumb it for hydrogen? Why not pave the runways in gold?

She wondered if she was being set up here for a photo op. And to his credit, Fahd scented her misgivings. “This would not, in any way, be a public visit,” he hastened to add. “On the contrary. Publicity would be counterproductive. Fortunately, we control the airspace.”

On that promise, Princess Frederika allowed as how she might consider a spontaneous shakedown cruise to the Line the next day, provided she could then fly back and be reunited with her good old Beaver. The prince took this as an unconditional yes and nodded. “Everything will be made ready,” he announced. “Departure will of course be at your convenience, but might I be so forward as to propose wheels up by nine in the morning?”

He was a hard man to say no to. He knew what he wanted, he was used to getting it, and his politeness was as a veil of finest silk draped over a brick. Thus did Saskia find herself suddenly obliged not only to accept the gift of the airplane but to sit in the co-pilot’s seat the next morning as Ervin flew it to the Line.

On the contrary. Publicity would be counterproductive.

Saskia ought to have been paying attention to the advanced controls and unusual features of the hydrogen-powered plane. Ervin was keen to show her these, on the assumption that one day she’d be piloting it herself. And she did manage to show a polite level of interest, but only by dint of a lifetime’s royal experience pretending to pay attention to things for the sake of other people’s feelings. She got the sense that Ervin was frustrated, or at least a bit nonplussed, by her tendency to drift off into long silences as she pondered the prince’s words.

Fahd wanted to show her something connected with the Line, something that must be climate-related but that was meant to be kept under wraps.

And there had been that stinger at the end: “we control the airspace,” with the emphasis on “we.” Kind of an obvious statement. Of course Saudi Arabia controlled Saudi Arabian airspace. Why bother even pointing it out?

Because he was emphasizing a contrast between the Saudis, and someone else who didn’t control the airspace. Probably T.R. Who had designed his whole system to punch bullets straight up through airspace he didn’t legally control. If you wanted to do what T.R. was doing, and you didn’t have to worry about the FAA shutting you down, what would you come up with in place of giant guns?

From the plane’s cruising altitude over the barren mountains of the Sinai, it was just barely possible to make out the two splayed prongs of the Red Sea curving along the horizon to right and left. The one to their right was the Gulf of Suez, visibly congested with shipping even from this distance, the air above it stained with their sooty exhaust. A good many of those huge container ships were, she knew, bound to or from Maasvlakte, the only port capable of accommodating them. The one to the left was the Gulf of Aqaba, running up the Sinai’s eastern shore, separating Egypt from Saudi Arabia along much of its length. It was less busy because it was a dead end. The Israelis and the Jordanians had footholds at its northern terminus and used it as a shipping outlet to the Red Sea and points east.

Just south of there, the Line was anchored to the eastern shore of the Gulf of Aqaba on Saudi territory. From the waterfront it cut straight across the desert for more than a hundred miles. From the looks of it, the spine of the city—a pair of tunnels that ran its whole length, whisking people and cargo from one end to the other in high-speed maglev trains—was largely complete. Along most of its length it was just a faint scar on the desert where they’d backfilled lifeless and bone-dry earth over the completed tunnels. The beginnings of train stations and settlements were tidily spaced along its length. The far eastern end of it, 170 kilometers away on the other side of some mountains, she only glimpsed. But in that glimpse she saw neat phalanxes of black rectangles marching across the desert: photovoltaic panels taking advantage of the kingdom’s virtually infinite supply of sun-battered land. Much easier to see, since the airport lay near the Line’s western end, were the port facilities. There were two Chinese ships unloading and another waiting its turn out in the gulf, spewing a plume of soot into the languid, sunny air. In contrast to the ships at Rotterdam, which were a colorful, random mosaic of differently logotyped containers, these were virtually monochromatic. All the containers, with a few exceptions, were yellow, with a green logo. They were all, she could guess, carrying photovoltaic panels or related equipment from the same supplier, and they were all destined for the blank space on the map at the opposite end of the Line.

The plane landed itself adroitly. The weird ducted engines could vector their thrust, and so it didn’t need a lot of runway, especially when the hydrogen tanks were nearly drained. Formalities on the ground were nonexistent. That was only in part because she was a royal being greeted on the tarmac by a prince. The Line was supposed to have some kind of transnational status, free of the visa requirements and so on that made travel to the rest of Saudi Arabia burdensome.

The prince got the princess into an ice-cold Bentley as soon as he could, then surprised her by climbing in opposite her. Apparently they were going to dispense with the pretense he had observed on Vadan of having men and women travel in separate vehicles. Or maybe he was just running low on Bentleys. Their apparent destination was not far away: a colossal but nondescript hangar on the other side of the airport’s web of runways.

“Did you see the container ships?” Fahd asked, as they dodged around an incoming hydrogen tanker and set a course along the edge of a taxiway.

“Yes, clearly the Chinese have taken an interest!” In other company, she might have added while Western companies were sleeping on it but thought it better not to.

Fahd made a faint grimace and tossed one hand as if shooing something away. “We are buying what they are selling, no more,” he said. “Chinese aid comes at a high price—a price we don’t need to pay.”

“How much of the Empty Quarter are you planning to pave with photovoltaics?”

He leaned forward, elbows on knees. “We have grown rather attached to the practice of selling energy for piles and piles of money, and we intend to continue it long after we have run out of oil. To be blunt, we will install enough photovoltaics to alter the climate.”

She nodded. “Those panels are going to keep a hell of a lot of CO₂ out of the atmosphere!”

“Yes, but that’s not what I meant.”

“Oh?”

“The desert has high albedo for the most part—sunlight bounces back from the light-colored soil and returns to outer space where it cannot warm the planet. Solar panels, on the other hand, are dark. The whole point of them is to absorb, not reflect, sunlight. They get hot. Hotter than the light sand that they are covering. Convection grows more powerful as hotter air rises with greater force. This changes the weather directly.”

“Have you modeled it?”

“No, but those guys have.” Fahd gestured toward a row of unmarked mobile office trailers huddling in a narrow strip of shade along the north wall of the huge hangar. What few windows they had were covered with mirrored film. Rooftop air conditioners shot plumes of heat into the air.

“Who are ‘those guys’?”

“Israelis.”

And so what she was expecting—completely illogically—was that the hangar would turn out to be full of racks stuffed with computers, all chugging away on climate simulations.

But no. The Israelis didn’t need to do that here. The hangar turned out to be occupied by a single enormous airplane. A type she had never seen before. It was complete, just in the sense that two wings and a tail were attached to its fuselage, but it was imprisoned in a web of scaffolding. Workers in hard hats and high-vis vests were busy here and there. Not a lot of workers and not super busy. This was not some mid-twentieth-century assembly-line operation. It felt more like one of those facilities where space rockets were meticulously pieced together.

And yet the overall lines of the giant airplane were not at all rakish or science fictiony. It looked like a child’s model, scaled up. The wings, which were extraordinarily long, stuck straight out from the sides. Nothing was swept back, nothing optimized for amazing speed or maneuverability. It really looked like a sailplane—a glider. But it had engines.

A hard-hatted man with an East African look about him was waiting behind the wheel of a golf cart. Saskia was a bit sick of being whisked around from place to place in vehicles controlled by others. She was a pilot for a reason. In the Netherlands, in front of cameras, she’d have made a point of walking. But . . . when in Rome. After donning the inevitable pair of safety glasses, she and Fahd were treated to a slow pass down one side of the plane and up the other.

“If you were anyone else, I would give you a laborious explanation of what this is,” said Fahd, as the golf cart swung wide around the slender, exquisitely sculpted tip of one wing. “But since it’s you . . .”

“It’s modeled after a U-2 spy plane,” Saskia said. “Those, in turn, were modeled after gliders. It is designed to operate at extremely high altitudes—seventy or eighty thousand feet. The thin air makes it tricky to design and even trickier to fly. It’s probably not even stable unless there are computers in the control loop.”

“Very good,” said Fahd. “And the cargo?”

“The fuselage will be full of tanks, with baffles to control sloshing and weight distribution. The tanks will be full of sulfur dioxide when it takes off, empty when it lands. Because the whole purpose of it is to inject SO₂ directly into the stratosphere.”

“Clearly my presence here as tour guide is superfluous!” said the prince, allowing his usual mask of stony dignity to be cracked open with a grin.

The compliment was appreciated, but she knew flattery when she heard it. People had been talking about making a plane like this for decades. She’d seen CGI renderings. Not of this exact plane, of course, but of ones very like it, in PowerPoints and videos envisioning how solar geoengineering might change the climate for better or worse. Depending on how you felt about the idea, you could soundtrack the animation with scary war drums or with soaring anthemic strains and make it seem like the end of the world or the dawn of a new era. In any case, she’d have to have been pretty ill-informed not to know this for exactly what it was.

“You had the airframe designed by . . . someone who knows what they’re doing,” she continued. “Composite wings made by people who do wind turbine blades. I recognize the engines—but you’ve had them modified for high altitude. The airframe is built, but that’s the easy part. Now the fancy systems are being integrated into it by contractors from around the world.” The coveralls worn by various teams were blazoned with corporate logos, most of which she’d seen before. But it was all pretty understated and you had to get up close to make them out. Americans, Germans, Israelis, Japanese were working on different subsystems, many using AR goggles to gesture at figments in the air.

“With all due respect to Dr. Schmidt,” Fahd said, “who really has accomplished something quite remarkable, we think that this is the future of solar geoengineering. The second wave, if you will. The first wave is a stopgap measure. Hurling enough SO₂ into the stratosphere to begin making a difference. All well and good; when a house is on fire, you throw water on it. The second wave will be about tuning the distribution of the veil so as to achieve the results . . .”

Saskia looked him in the eye. She got the idea he was about to conclude the sentence with “we want” but after the briefest of hesitations he said “that are most beneficial.”

Their loop around the plane ended at a cafeteria that had been set up in the corner of the hangar. Several rows of folding tables, a buffet line staffed by what she guessed were Filipino and Bangladeshi food service workers, the very latest in coffee-making robotics. “You must be famished,” Prince Fahd said, extending a hand to give her unnecessary help in alighting from the golf cart. She had to admit that a cup of coffee sounded good. Maybe a pastry. Lunchtime was over. So only a few workers were here, taking solo breaks or holding impromptu meetings. Saskia peeked over the shoulder of a man with close-cropped, sandy hair and a deeply tanned neck as he fluidly worked his way through the user interface of a coffee machine. By the time he had finished, she had an idea what to do, and without too much floundering was able to get away with a decent enough macchiato. She turned around and scanned the tables until she picked out Prince Fahd, who had chosen a seat conveniently far away from any other diners. He was scrolling messages on his phone. She sat down across from him and began to enjoy her coffee and her Danish. “A thousand apologies,” he mumbled, “something has come up, you know how it is.”

“On the contrary, this lets me enjoy my snack!”

She had been enjoying it for no more than thirty seconds when Fahd’s phone signaled an incoming call. “So sorry, I must take this,” he said, and stood up. He walked away, beginning the conversation in English but then switching to Arabic. Saskia gazed through the vacancy he’d left in his wake and saw that the sandy-haired man had taken a seat at the next table, facing her squarely. And his green eyes were looking at her squarely, with no trace of the atavistic deference that some people still afforded to royals.

“Your friend T.R. is quite a character,” he said. He spoke in a somewhat lilting, bemused accent that might have been Eastern European. But she’d seen enough circumstantial evidence to know that this guy was Israeli.

“Friend might be too strong a word? He does have some likable qualities.”

“Well, a person in whose company you have been seen from time to time, let’s say.”

“Only by people with truly exceptional powers of observation. But do go on.”

“He might be wrong, he might be crazy, but you have to admire his focus.” The Israeli emphasized that word. He liked focus. “Very important. Very good! But sometimes when you’re focused, you get tunnel vision. You don’t see the bigger picture.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“You know, things that come at you from the side.”

“I haven’t seen him in a while but I’ll be sure to pass that on.”

“He wasn’t at Vadan.”

“No.”

“You’d think he would have been there. To see his big gun go off.”

“It surprised me a little. But apparently he’s quite busy in some different part of the world.”

The Israeli snorted. “Different is for sure the right word. He has an eye for strange places, that one.” He took a sip of his coffee. “Look. I just wanted to say you might want to have a talk with your friend. Tell him to raise his head up out of that hole in the ground and look around. To be a little more aware.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“Sources and methods,” he said. Intelligence-speak for I can’t tell you what I know because by doing so I might inadvertently reveal how I came to know it. “Maybe look to the north.”

“How far north? Oklahoma? Canada?”

“You don’t know where he is,” the Israeli realized. “He’s in New Guinea.”

Saskia was taken aback. It wasn’t so much that she was surprised by the news. Rather it was a sense of inevitability. Brazos RoDuSh, the selfies from Cornelia, Willem’s contacts with the Papuan nationalists . . .

“I suppose I ought to have seen it coming.”

“You’re a shareholder! You have to keep an eye on your investments!” he said, in an amused, world-weary tone. “Look. We like the guy. We like what he’s doing. It helps us”—he flicked his green eyes toward the plane—“do what we’re doing. But we have reason to believe that the time has come when he should just keep his wits about him a little more.”

“And I am somehow the person who needs to deliver this message.”

“Texans!” The man threw up his hands. “Like some other ethnic groups I could mention, they seem to place great stock in personal relationships. He respects you. That’s all I’m saying.”

Saskia nodded. “What’s in this for you guys?”

“You ever wonder why people in the Bible are always fighting over our tiny scrap of land? Why the Romans even bothered with it? Israel used to be sweet real estate. The land of milk and honey. Now it’s kind of a shithole, climate-wise.”

“So it’s all about bringing back the milk and honey.”

“Sure.”

“Nothing more than that.”

“You thought otherwise?”

“Maybe I’m just of an overly cynical nature,” Saskia said, “but it occurs to me that you and the Saudis might be working together to completely fuck Iran.”

The man shrugged. “Personally, nothing would give me greater pleasure. But the models are complicated.”

“The Arabian Peninsula, all by itself, is vast. If you add Israel and Jordan to the north, it spans a huge range of latitude. If you fly those planes south . . . well, I don’t think Somalia has the technology to shoot planes out of the stratosphere. You could fly to the equator and beyond. You could dispatch those planes anywhere you like across that range. Put the SO₂ exactly where you want it. Do acupuncture on the region’s climate.”

The Israeli took another sip and stood up, sighing as if he regretted leaving this fascinating conversation and abandoning his nearly full cup of coffee. “I like the acupuncture analogy. I might steal that.”

“It wasn’t mine.”

“Thanks for your time, Your Royal Highness.”

Saskia waited for him to clear out, then scanned the area until she caught a glimpse of Fahd bin Talal. He was still talking, or pretending to, on his phone, keeping a sidelong eye on her.

She texted Willem.

> The day has arrived. A year or two sooner than I thought.

Meaning, as he’d understand, the day when her “retirement” would end, and she’d need him for something.

> Ha! Even sooner than I predicted. What do you want?