Termination Shock

Tuaba

Willem could have afforded a suite at any of the modern hotels that had been thrown up within striking distance of Tuaba’s one-runway airport during the last few decades. Instead he would be sleeping on a futon in a back room of Uncle Ed’s compound.

On an aerial view—even one so far zoomed out that it took in the entirety of Australia, Indonesia, and Southeast Asia—you could easily pick this place out by looking for the gray scar on New Guinea’s southern flank. This was the alluvial spew of the river that flowed down to the Arafura Sea from glaciers along the island’s spine: the highest mountain between the Himalayas and the Andes. Unlike all the other rivers draining that slope—and there were a lot of them, given that the glaciers were melting, and rainfall could exceed ten meters per year—the one that ran through Tuaba was gray because the sediments coming down from the copper mine hadn’t weathered naturally and hadn’t had time to oxidize.

Uncle Ed wasn’t named Ed and wasn’t Willem’s uncle. He’d come to this place in the 1970s and established what was imaginatively called a logistics depot for bulldozer parts. Later he had branched out into helicopter maintenance, pipeline supply, and drilling rigs. He had started by simply using a bulldozer to scrape all life off a patch of jungle near the banks of the river, then sold the bulldozer to Brazos RoDuSh. The boomtown of Tuaba had taken shape around him, prompting him to upgrade his security perimeter from time to time. In the early going this had consisted of an earthen embankment topped by barbed wire, but nowadays the compound was outlined by rusty old shipping containers stacked two high, with long snarls of razor ribbon strung along their tops. Within those steel walls, trucks and heavy equipment trundled back and forth across a gravel lot that at any given time was 50 percent gray puddles. When a given puddle became deep enough to impede commerce, Uncle Ed would emerge from the building—not quite a house, not quite an office—in the corner of the lot nearest the street, fire up one of the clapped-out, rust-encrusted bulldozers lined up nearby, and sally forth, dragging in his wake long skeins of strangler vines that had been using the machine as a trellis, and scrape some muck off a high place and shove it into the offending depression. Then he would park the dozer and go back inside and resume his primary occupations of watching basketball on TV while conducting a range of disputes with random people all over the world on social media. Every so often he would see a familiar face looming in a security camera feed and press a button that would buzz them through a door into the compound. As often as not these were old friends who had come to play badminton on a rectangle of Astroturf that Ed had imported in 1982 by making arrangements for it to be wrapped around a replacement driveshaft for the largest truck in the world, which was being barged up the river from the Arafura Sea. Badminton apparently kept him immune from the ill effects of smoking.

It would be conventional to assume that Tuaba had been expropriated from indigenous people, but as far as anyone could tell, no one had ever lived here until the likes of Uncle Ed had showed up. Farther south, along the edge of the sea, people had long roamed among the inlets and swamps in dugout canoes, living off fish, prawns, birds, and sago palm while trying to stay one step ahead of malaria. Farther north, small populations had lived in the mountains, above the swamps but below the tree line, eating sweet potatoes, wild pigs, and small marsupials, suffering from yaws, anemia, and the depredations of their fellow man. But the belt of land in between was the worst of both worlds, and simply not worth living in. Unless, that is, you were a company from Texas who wanted to construct the world’s largest open pit copper mine on top of the island’s highest mountain.

Tuaba was the highest point on the river reachable by barges from the sea. It was only meters above sea level. There, cargo had to be offloaded and transported by road the remaining hundred clicks to the site. A key detail being that this entailed an altitude gain of some four thousand meters. Since said road had not existed at the beginning, the first cargoes, back in the early days, had been mostly road-building equipment. The lineup—some would call it a junkyard—of ancient, rusty hulks in Uncle Ed’s lot constituted a sort of archaeological record of that endeavor. Albeit a selective one, for many bulldozers had simply disappeared into swamps.

Nowadays, 150,000 people lived in the city, which occupied a couple of miles of the river’s western bank and stretched about a mile into the former jungle. Surrounding that were suburbs that didn’t feel quite so much like a hastily thrown-together boomtown. Many of Ed’s badminton buddies had relocated to such neighborhoods, but Ed was quite happy where he was; he seemed to believe that if he set foot off the compound for more than a few hours it would succumb to some combination of jungle rot and rampant hooliganism. Nowadays the business was run by younger members of the clan, many of whom operated out of branch offices in Singapore, Taiwan, and the northern Australian city of Darwin. These people went for months, even years at a time without setting foot on the island of New Guinea.

The business was simple enough: they caused certain very specific objects to show up when and where they were needed, incredibly reliably. The mine operation as a whole consumed tens of thousands of gallons of diesel fuel per hour. The engines that did the consuming were distributed across a wide range of equipment both stationary and mobile. Almost none of it was run-of-the-mill. Run-of-the-mill equipment couldn’t operate at four thousand meters of altitude on some of the world’s worst terrain. It was all weird special equipment. Helicopters had to be fitted with special blades to get purchase on the thin air. A burned-out bearing or snapped driveshaft could burn astronomically more money in downtime than what it cost to replace it. Uncle Ed’s company was far from the only one serving that market, but they were holding their own against the competition—enough that members of the younger generations, like Beatrix, could get expensive educations and passports to First World countries.

Most of the business was transacted over the Internet. But they had to have a physical depot here. So Uncle Ed pinned down both tails of the bell curve. He was the founder and CEO. But he was also the guy filling in chuckholes. Everything in between those two extremes he delegated to the juniors. He could have moved, of course, and lived out the rest of his life in a part of the world characterized by greater political stability. But having seen shit you wouldn’t believe in Indonesia, he had arrived at the conclusion that political stability anywhere was an illusion that only a simpleton would believe in. That (invoking, here, a version of the anthropic principle) such simpletons only believed they were right when and if they just happened to live in places that were temporarily stable. And that it was better to live somewhere obviously dangerous, because it kept you on your toes. Willem had thought all this daft until Trump and QAnon.

So the first humans to live here had been Texans. They’d brought Dutch and Australian expats in their wake. Not long after, people like Ed had begun to show up. Ed was an Indonesian citizen on paper, but culturally was overseas Chinese, conducting business in English, speaking Fuzhounese otherwise and Mandarin when he had to. In Irian Jaya (as Western New Guinea was called in those days) he did for Brazos RoDuSh what, before the war, his forebears had done for Royal Dutch Shell in Java.

The mine had attracted Indonesians—almost all Muslims, of a different race and culture than the indigenous Papuans. So the second layer of settlement had seen Indonesian neighborhoods, mosques, schools, playing fields, and shopping centers growing up around the airport, the hotels, the bars, and the office buildings that the white expats had thrown up just as table stakes. Efforts to train and hire native Papuans, and allow them to share in some of the wealth, had got underway. They’d migrated to the area in numbers. As part of their overall deal with the Indonesian government, Brazos RoDuSh had provided schools, modern housing, clinics, and helicopter rides. Their numbers had grown because of natural population increase over the fifty years that all this had been here, combined with the in-migration of people from surrounding areas drawn by the availability of all these goods and services.

According to an informal pact dating back to colonial times, the half of New Guinea north of the mountains was the turf of Protestant missionaries and the south was Catholic. This explained the existence, in Tuaba, of a new Catholic cathedral and an associated complex of religious schools, convent, hospital, and so on. White European Catholics could, of course, go to church there; but it had all been built mostly to serve a flock of Papuans who had been converted by missionary activity that was still going on. Thus Sister Catherine, the Papuan nun Willem had broken bread with in The Hague on the morning of the great storm, which now seemed a hundred years and a hundred light-years away.

Sound arguments could be, and often were, constructed as to why all these different groups should not get along. To nationalist Indonesians, the white mining companies were colonizers pure and simple, only allowed to be here because the people who had been in charge of Indonesia in the 1970s had realized that if they were ever going to attract development capital they were going to have to make things good for the likes of Brazos RoDuSh. That company’s efforts to train Indonesian engineers and managers—effectively nationalizing the operation one head count at a time—were, from a certain point of view, particularly sneaky forms of cultural imperialism.

To the Papuans, it was the Indonesians who were the foreign colonizers, moving to places like Tuaba in their tens and hundreds of thousands and putting up mosques and such. The Christian whites were no better in principle, but they had ties to media outlets, human rights organizations, and the United Nations, which might be of some help in enabling the Papuans to get their country back. For its being part of Indonesia made no sense on any level. Most activists were in the orderly, systematic mold of Beatrix and Sister Catherine. But there were enough angry young men up in the hills with guns, machetes, and dynamite to justify the presence in Tuaba of Indonesian black ops security forces. Obvious targets had been hardened—as anyone who tried to sneak into Uncle Ed’s compound would soon discover—and so when violence happened it tended to be on weak links in the security chain: people getting shot by assailants on motor scooters while out running errands. Slurry pipelines dynamited in inaccessible swamps. Truck engines sabotaged. Adding to the overall feeling of paranoia and dread was the perception—right or wrong, it didn’t matter—that some of those outrages had actually been committed by Indonesian security cops pretending to be Papuan nationalists, to justify their presence here and boost their budget. Living in a separate bubble from all that were the expats in their gated communities with their private security forces drawn from a pool of mostly Western ex-military.

“What the hell are you doing here?” asked Uncle Ed, after giving Willem a decent interval to unpack and get settled.

“Getting drunk,” Willem said, which was not wrong. He had found his way out to a sort of screened-in patio adjacent to the badminton court and uncorked a bottle of duty-free whiskey he had scored while changing planes in Jakarta. Not at the old airport, which was usually underwater, but at the new one they had just built on higher ground. Ed was finishing up a sweaty doubles match with some of the usual crew of Chinese gaffers. This was the coldest part of the year. It was a little above room temperature, but extremely humid. Willem was almost comfortable in a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. No rain was spattering the tin roof at the moment, but it had been recently and it would be soon.

“I thought you were going to be the prime minister of the Netherlands or something!”

“For a brief moment, it looked like it was on the table, but . . .” Willem sipped his whiskey and tried to remember that brief moment. For all its apparent stability, Dutch politics could be convoluted. It had been in—what—December? No, after the holidays. He shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about all that stuff.”

“Instead you are retired. And you come . . . here!?” Ed looked around. “Don’t get me wrong, you are most welcome. Would you like some tea, or are you going to stick with whiskey?”

“Whiskey is fine, thank you.”

“Then I will smoke.” Ed knocked an unfiltered cigarette from a pack—some Chinese brand—and bit slightly into the middle, creating a tear in the paper. He put the cigarette in his mouth crosswise and lit both of the ends, a glowing coal projecting to either side as he inhaled through the central hole. In Papua it was not an unusual practice, but for new arrival Willem it took a little getting used to. “You said another person is coming? A woman?” Ed asked. He knew that Willem was gay and so there was an implicit question.

“Amelia Leeflang. Ex-military. She used to be on the queen’s security detail.”

“And now she is on yours?”

“I was told it might be a good idea.” Willem glanced out over Ed’s compound. At least two men could be seen strolling around in a sort of Brownian-motion style, picking out irregular paths to avoid puddles. Each had a pump shotgun slung over his shoulder. They looked Papuan. From the taller coastal tribes, Willem guessed. “Amelia has left the government payroll and is working for private clients now.”

“You mean she was fired?”

“The Netherlands holds its politicians to a very high standard. The royals as well. And the staff who surround those people.”

“Such as you.”

“Sometimes it is clear which way the wind is blowing. You don’t have to get fired to see that there might be other opportunities. Amelia joined a private firm.”

“Mercenaries?”

“If you will. I requested her by name.”

“Will she be staying here?”

“Is that a possibility?”

“I can have a trailer dropped over there.” Ed indicated an unfrequented corner of the lot. “She’ll need to talk to locals who know how things work here. I can get you in touch.”

“Papuans?”

Ed looked at him incredulously. “Australians.”

Willem took a sip of whiskey. Ed took a drag on his double-barreled cigarette. Exhaling, he said, “You’re not actually retired, are you?”

“In a sense, if you love your work, you’re never truly retired.”

“Are you going to make trouble for me? For the family business?”

“I’ve seen the numbers on the mine.” Willem nodded vaguely in the direction he thought most likely to be north. The mountains as usual were completely invisible behind a blank white sky. “Eventually the ore will run out—or become so difficult to extract that it can no longer compete on the world market.”

“Decades from now,” Ed said dismissively.

“You’ve been here for decades. It’s not that long. What happens to the family business then?”

Uncle Ed didn’t have a ready answer.

“Do you move to some other part of the world? Or stay here?”

“Why would we stay in this hellhole?” Ed asked. As if on cue, a gunshot sounded in the distance, then two more. The men with the shotguns did not seem to find this remarkable.

“Maybe something new happens.”

“Where?”

“Up there.” Willem nodded to the north again.

“What could possibly happen up there besides the copper mine?”

Willem got up, took a few steps across the patio, and stepped down to the gravel lot. He bent over and scooped up a handful of gray muck from the edge of a puddle. He held it up to the skeptical, bordering on worried, inspection of Uncle Ed. “Do you know what this is?”

“The shit that washes down from the mine. Tailings that don’t have enough copper to be worth refining.”

“Do you know what else it contains besides copper?”

“Gold. A tiny amount.”

“What else?”

“I don’t know, I’m not a geologist.”

“Sulfur.”

Ed snorted. “There are easier places to get sulfur, even I know that.”

“None that are so close to the stratosphere.”