Termination Shock

Sneeuwberg

T.R.’s logistics people had warned Willem that he might need oxygen just to remain upright and conscious at the mine. This information had reached him in the form of a link copy/pasted to the tail end of the calendar invite. They hadn’t bothered to warn Amelia, so maybe it was an age-related thing. But they had hastened to assure him that oxygen tanks on wheels would be available at the helipad and he shouldn’t hesitate to just grab one on his way past.

With that as prelude, the chopper ride from Tuaba did not disappoint. In mere seconds they’d left the town behind them and were flying over jungle that was as dense as any Willem had ever seen. The chopper’s main task was not to cover ground—they were only going a hundred kilometers—but to gain altitude, which it did by ramping up steadily along the whole duration of the flight. So at first the jungle plummeted far below and became veiled in clouds. A single gossamer strand of road was laced through it, often hidden beneath the canopy but sometimes breaking into view when it ran across a swamp on a causeway or skirted the river.

Looking out the front they could see the mountains rising up in their path to the north. Over the next half hour the land shouldered up out of a sea of low clouds. By that point the works of Brazos RoDuSh had ramified away from the road to cover large patches of the landscape: settlements where workers could live, close to the mine as distances were measured on a map, but still thousands of meters below it in altitude. Spurs reached out to depots and industrial works the nature of which Willem didn’t understand. But he knew that the gist of it was to crush the ore into powder and concentrate it using some water-based process and send the resulting slurry down a pipeline that ran through the jungle, parallel to the road, all the way to the coast, where it could be poured into huge ships bound for places where the red metal was smelted. His Green instincts, drilled into him by a life spent in a modern Western social democracy, told him to be outraged by what the miners had done to this part of the planet. But he knew that every wind turbine feeding green electricity into the Netherlands’ grid had copper windings in its generator and copper cables connecting it to the system. And that the copper had come from here.

Never in his life had Willem seen such rugged terrain. Range after range of vertiginous mountains, each much higher than the last, passed below them and then plunged into valleys of Grand Canyon–like depth. And yet the mine proper was still far above all that, connected to its outlying works by tramways and pipelines that ran nearly vertically.

Finally, after the sky above had grown a very dark shade of blue, as if they were halfway to orbit, he saw a place where the top of a steep mountain had simply been sheared off. Above one side of it rose tiered ramps connecting it to a higher plateau beyond, for use by the special high-altitude trucks and excavators that were Uncle Ed’s stock in trade. Atop all that was a plateau almost at a level with New Guinea’s highest peak, which lay just a few kilometers farther inland. As they came in for a landing, Willem glimpsed a whole additional mining complex beyond: a pit that could have swallowed central Amsterdam, a ramp spiraling down to its bottom, trucks he knew to be the size of seven-story office buildings scuttling up and down looking no bigger than lice.

Amidst all that hugeness, he had to re-calibrate his eye just to see what he had come all this way to look at. In the desert of West Texas the Biggest Gun in the World had looked big just because it was the only sign of human activity, other than barbed-wire fences, for miles. Here, though, the head frame of the gun could have been overlooked as just another mysterious bit of mine infrastructure. Likewise, the sulfur heap was dwarfed by mountainous piles of mine spoil. It stood out only because it was yellow.

As advertised, little oxygen tanks on carts were lined up for the taking to one side of the helipad. There was also a rack with ski jackets, so that people who’d just flown up from the equatorial jungle didn’t have to bring warm clothes with them. But T.R. was standing right by the helipad next to a Tesla SUV (didn’t burn gasoline; didn’t need air) with its gull wing doors open. So Willem just quick-walked over and climbed into that, then leaned back and waited for his heart and lungs to scavenge enough oxygen to return his body to some kind of equilibrium. The seat was warm and so was the air once T.R. had got in and closed the doors. If there had been a chauffeur, Willem would have sat in the back with T.R. and Amelia would have rode shotgun. As it was she rode in the back so that T.R. and Willem could occupy the two front seats.

“You do have a taste for weird, difficult parts of the world,” Willem gasped, when the oxygen panic had subsided.

T.R. considered it carefully. “A thing you learn real fast, when you are in the oil business”—he pronounced it “ol bidness” and Willem honestly didn’t know if it was wry Texan self-parody, or actually how he talked—“or mining, is that almost every part of the world is weird and difficult. We don’t see those parts because we prefer to build our habitations in more hospitable areas. Which are rare. We come to think of Connecticut, Florida, France, and all that as how the world is. Places like this being aberrations. Thing is, geology don’t care about our convenience and so it puts the oil and the minerals in locations that are truly random. You put on a blindfold, Dr. Castelein—”

“Willem. Please.”

“You throw darts at random into a spinning globe, the odds of hitting Connecticut are small. The odds of hitting what you call a weird, difficult part of the world are high.”

“Fair enough.”

“But I’ll give you this much: this is the worst place of all, with the possible exception of Antarctica. The first map of New Guinea was drawn up just a little over a century ago. It killed seventy-nine out of eight hundred men who worked on it.”

“Drawing the map!?”

“Drawing the map. The first European expedition to these parts involved four hundred men and took over a year. Only fifteen of those four hundred stuck it out—and they didn’t even come close to reaching where we are now! When some crazy Dutch mountaineers finally made it up here in the 1930s they described it as a mountain of ore on the moon. This here”—T.R. made a “look about you” gesture—“was then the highest point on Earth between the Himalayas and the Andes. Because it was buried fifty meters deep under a glacier. Hence, the Dutch name of the place. Sneeuwberg. Snow Mountain. Since then the glacier has melted and the mountain has been leveled. No snow, no mountain. So now that”—he pointed to the brown rock crag that loomed over all this, so close they could, with oxygen tanks, simply hike over to it—“is the highest.”

“Five thousand meters, give or take,” Willem said.

“That is correct.”

T.R. during this had been piloting the car over a terrible road at little more than a walking pace. They had put the helipad behind them and passed through a security gate staffed by Caucasian men armed with submachine guns. There was a sort of buffer zone consisting of strewn cargo pallets and parked equipment. Here and there, Papuan men in hard hats and high-visibility vests were working on engines or driving forklifts. Then they passed through another belt of armed security and came alongside a row of office trailers. “Fiefdoms of different subs,” T.R. explained. “Brazos RoDuSh is a mining company. Period. Don’t wanna run medical clinics, commissaries, housing, anything that ain’t mining per se. So, subcontractors. You might remember this one.”

He had pulled up in front of a trailer that was unsigned and unmarked, other than a blank sheet of white printer paper taped to the door. “Welcome to the Papua offices of White Label Industries! Breathe deep and don’t go into oxygen debt as you ascend the four steps to the door!”

The interior was true to White Label form. The ends of the trailer featured a couple of smaller offices and a toilet, but most of it was a conference room. The walls were sheathed in cheap fake wood paneling with whiteboards drywall-screwed into place. A watercooler and a coffee maker sat in the corner on a makeshift table consisting of the cardboard boxes they had arrived in. The flimsiest, cheapest obtainable folding plastic chairs surrounded a couple of plastic folding tables jammed together. “Sometimes the glamour of it all is just a bit much,” T.R. gasped as he collapsed into one of those chairs and nearly buckled it. Next to it was an oxygen tank. He cranked its knob and took a few deep breaths as Willem tottered back to the toilet.

“Have you considered simply piping oxygen into rooms like this one?” Willem asked when he came back.

“First question I asked,” T.R. said. “Turns out it’s dangerous. You add too much oxygen, and stuff burns you didn’t know was capable of burning.”

Willem nodded and sat down. Amelia, who had better cardio, prowled up and down the length of the trailer looking out the windows. These had all been covered on the inside with steel mesh, affixed with drywall screws and washers. She gave one a rattle. “For grenades?” she asked.

“Correct. Wouldn’t stop a burglar. Protects upper management from casual fragging. Sandbags on the roof—before you ask.” T.R. turned his attention to Willem and winked at him to indicate that he approved of Amelia. “Welcome to the Southern Hemisphere branch!”

“Just barely.”

T.R. considered it. “You refer to the fact that we are only a couple hundred clicks south of the equator. It’s enough, though! The circulation patterns of north and south are surprisingly well separated. And the special circumstances here make it possible for us to reach farther south yet—we pulled off a few tricks that were not an option in our little old pilot project down Texas way.”

“Pilot project!” Willem said under his breath, shaking his head in disbelief.

T.R. had been fussing with the AV system while they chatted, and now pulled up an image on a 3D holographic projector that was mounted to the ceiling: the one concession in this place to fancy high-end office equipment. As if reading Willem’s mind, T.R. said, “Cost more than everything else combined. But we gotta put on some kind of show for folks like you who go to the trouble of coming all the way out to this godforsaken shithole!” Left unspoken was the question What the hell are you doing here? but Willem was pretty sure they’d get around to it after T.R. was finished putting on this big show of hospitality.

Hovering in the middle of the conference room was now a semi-transparent model of the entire mine complex. This slowly zoomed in on an area not far from the trailer where they were having this conversation. Hard as it was to make sense of the vast complex when viewed from a chopper, this rendering made it all even more confusing as it revealed all the underground works that had been cut into the mountain during the half century that Brazos RoDuSh had been working here. Not for the first time, Willem was awed, staggered, and even a little humiliated by the sheer scale at which the oil and mining industries operated—year in, year out, in a way that was basically invisible to the people on the other side of the world who benefited from what they were doing, and who funded these works, every time they checked their Twitter.

To help make sense of it T.R. did something that grayed out most of the complex while highlighting a narrow shaft that angled down into the rock from the head frame Willem had noticed as they drove in. “Looks small compared to all this other shit,” T.R. said, “but it ain’t. Here’s the Pina2bo shaft for comparison.” He somehow caused a red tube to materialize on the map, beginning at the same site. It went vertically downward and it only went half as deep. “Point is, conditions prevailing here—availability of equipment, competence of the rock, et cetera—make it possible to bore at an angle and to bore deeper and wider. More barrels. Higher muzzle velocity.”

He made the red overlay fade out to provide a clearer look at the angled shaft they’d apparently finished here. “Projectiles coming out of that gun are going faster. They are starting halfway to the stratosphere already, so they don’t lose as much energy fighting their way through the lower atmosphere. And they are angled southward, away from the equator, with an over-the-ground velocity component of almost two thousand miles an hour.”

He cut to a different view, zoomed way out, showing a trajectory that started at the top of New Guinea and arced toward the Arafura Sea. The boundary of the stratosphere was helpfully delineated. The shell soared well above that, passed through apogee, and began to arc downward again as it approached the southern coast of the island. Its trail then straightened, leveled off, and became a thickening plume of yellow gas drawn southward across the airspace between New Guinea and Australia. “The burn phase,” T.R. explained. Having been through all this at Pina2bo Willem understood that this was the part of the shell’s flight when the molten sulfur was burned to make thrust, extending the duration of the flight.

Once it had consumed all the sulfur, the shell’s trajectory became a long straight glide that angled down until it hit the sea between New Guinea and the northern capes of Australia. A zoom-in showed a flotilla of barges and ships with nets like the ones on the mesa above the Rio Grande on the Flying S Ranch. Willem knew enough about the West Texas operation to guess that the shells and parasails would be refurbished and ferried back to Tuaba, whence they could be trucked back up to Sneeuwberg.

A further zoom-out provided a view of the whole Earth, but from a perspective you normally didn’t see: the South Pole was up. Willem had recovered his wind to the point that he felt it was safe to stand. This enabled him to look down on the whole Southern Hemisphere. The trails of sulfur dioxide—shown here as bright yellow smoke, for visibility—began as faint curved scratches over the Arafura Sea. But prevailing winds blurred them together into a blob and then stretched the blob westward. Over Western Australia it was dense, but it feathered out over the Indian Ocean until it had become a diaphanous veil.

“Pina2bo? Vadan?” Willem said.

“Glad you asked.” T.R. made a scooping gesture that caused the globe to spin about until it was north up. Smaller blobs could now be seen originating from West Texas and the Adriatic, spreading and fading as the Northern Hemisphere’s prevailing winds carried them eastward.

Willem regarded it for a minute, walking slowly around the table to view it from different angles. “I’m looking at this,” he said, “and I’m seeing causes but not effects. The plumes of sulfur dioxide fade and dissipate. They just look like localized sources of pollution, diluted by the immensity of the atmosphere. But you and I know that the effects will make themselves known all over the globe.”

T.R. nodded. “You’re correct that this particular visualization does not attempt to show that. I could pull up others that do.”

“And those would show—?”

“Good things for your country. For Houston, Venice, Jakarta, Bangladesh.”

“And bad things for—?”

The trailer resonated with a deep boom, felt rather than heard. All the flimsy bits, of which there were many, rattled and buzzed. Amelia pivoted toward a window, more curious than alarmed. “ANFO,” T.R. said. “We use tons of it. You get used to it.” He turned back to Willem. “It’s a smartass, gotcha question, as I think a man of your sophistication knows, Dr. Castelein. ‘Bad things’ can mean a drought, a flood, a heat wave, a cold snap. Bad things tend to be localized in time and space. Harder to predict. But we can predict them to some extent. And the more sites we have operational, the more knobs and levers we have on the dashboard, so to speak. So instead of just blundering around we are managing the situation to maximize the good and minimize the bad.”

“And who is ‘we’ in this case?”

“Whoever controls the knobs and levers, obviously.”

“How long do you expect you’ll be allowed to control them? What if someone else decides they want the knobs and levers for their own?”

T.R.’s phone had buzzed, and he had put on reading glasses. He looked at Willem over the lenses. “My granddad built a mine in Cuba. Castro took it away from him. Does that mean he shouldn’t have built it?”

While Willem pondered this not uninteresting philosophical conundrum, T.R.’s phone buzzed a couple more times. The man was making a Herculean effort not to look at it, but the effort was taking a toll on his patience. “Look, this is a whole very interesting question unto itself, which I would love to discuss at the bar at the Sam Houston Hotel down in Tuaba or just about anywhere that has more oxygen. But maybe you overrate the value of discussing things. There is a reason why I don’t hire a lot of Ph.D.s. I have a Ph.D., Dr. Castelein. I seen how the sausage is made. And the problem with Ph.D.-havers is overthinking. Y’all live in this alternate universe where everything has to be made perfect sense of before y’all can do anything. Is that why you came here? To help me make perfect sense of everything?”

“Are you sure you’re getting enough oxygen?”

“Your bluntness does lead me to ask a blunt question of my own, if you would not take it amiss: What the fuck are you doing here, Willem? Don’t get me wrong, visitors are always welcome. We will show you nothing but hospitality. But out of all the places in the world you could be, why here?” His phone buzzed again.

“I’ve been sent to talk some sense into you.”

“Many are those who have tried,” T.R. said absentmindedly while finally succumbing to the siren song of his phone.

“Also, I thought I could make myself useful.”

“In what capacity?”

“Politics,” Willem said, “which you suck at.” He glanced over at Amelia, then did a double take. A gun had appeared in her hands. She dropped the cheap plastic venetian blind over the window, then tweaked the angle so she could see out without presenting an obvious silhouette.

Another boom rattled the trailer. As its echoes rolled back and forth among the surrounding mountains, individual gunshots, then fully automatic fire, started up.

“Coincidence, Willem?” T.R. said, getting to his feet.

“Of course not,” Willem said. “Saskia suggested I come here for a reason.”

“Know how to shoot a gun?” T.R. asked, in a fairly light conversational tone, as he brushed past Willem and trudged down a narrow passage to the office closest to the trailer’s front door. There, he hauled open a vertical gun safe and pulled out a long weapon with a fat barrel. Willem guessed it to be a semi-automatic shotgun.

“I could maybe be trusted with that Glock,” he said.

“Be my guest,” T.R. said, pulling it from a felt-lined slot and holding it out, pointed at the floor. Willem accepted it. He was no gunslinger but he’d had enough basic security training that he knew what and what not to do with this style of weapon.

T.R. remarked, “The odds you’ll have to use it are minimal. My security detail is right outside. They will get us to the chopper. Please do us all the courtesy of pointing it at the ground or the sky when not trying to murder someone.”

“Happy to,” Willem said.

“Very much obliged,” T.R. returned, stepping past him to the door. He turned his back to the wall, dropped to one knee, reached across the door, unlocked it, and hauled it open. Several holes appeared in the opposite wall of the passageway; apparently someone out there had fired a burst when they saw the door move. This touched off an answering fusillade from right in front of the trailer: T.R.’s security detail, apparently filling the air with lead to discourage any more such unpleasantness. A man in a plate carrier pounded up the steps carrying what looked like the heaviest blanket in the world and wrapped it around T.R., then essentially picked him up and threw him down the stairs. You could get bulletproof blankets? It was a new concept to Willem but he saw the good sense in it, in a world full of bullets.

Amelia followed those guys out, perched on the top of the stairs to look around just for the amount of time it would take someone to pull a trigger and send a bullet her way, then nodded back at Willem and dove down the steps. Willem ran out the door, tripped down the last couple of steps and sprawled facedown on cold wet ground. A moment later he felt Amelia’s weight on top of him. Everything was insanely loud. He was more worried about his hearing than his life. His breathing and pulse had shot up to what seemed like inevitably fatal levels. But all that heart/lung action didn’t seem to help, made no change in the world. He finally just allowed himself to go limp and be manhandled by much bigger, stronger people. The next time he was fully cognizant of his surroundings he was in the back of an SUV under a pile of plate carriers that sprang into the air and crashed down on him whenever the thing went over a chuckhole. Someone was operating a jackhammer. Here!? Now!? No, it was a fifty-caliber machine gun. “Choppers are all in the air,” said an Australian, “S.O.P. or else they’d be sitting ducks.”

“I understand,” T.R. said.

“We’ll have to time it.”

Apparently they timed it. Willem didn’t know. He’d slumped down until he was on the floor of the SUV. All he could see out the windows was the blue-black stratosphere, as yet unmarked by streaks of SO₂ but occasionally diced by the rotor of a helicopter. There was another helter-skelter transfer. Not at the official helipad—which frankly was nothing to write home about—but some alternate site. And then they were in the air. Were people shooting at them from the ground? One had to assume so. But you couldn’t see the bullets, so they’d have no way of knowing unless they got hit. To make that less probable the pilot was operating the chopper in a way that involved all the passengers getting slammed to one side of the cabin or other every couple of seconds. They hadn’t had time to buckle their safety belts; the chopper hadn’t even really landed, getting into it had been like diving through the window of a moving car. Willem ended up supine on the floor, gasping like a landed fish, vision desaturating until Amelia’s hand grew vast in his field of view, reaching toward his face with a hissing oxygen mask.