Termination Shock

St. Patrick’s

“Well, that escalated quickly!” T.R. said.

Some combination of pure oxygen from the mask and a precipitous drop in altitude had revived Willem to the point where he was able to be annoyed by the joke. It was a callout to an old Internet meme. He decided to let it go. “Yes,” he said, “but it kind of seems like you were expecting it.”

“We were prepared for it.”

Amelia wasn’t having it. “You have multiple fifty-cal emplacements with interlocking fields of fire. The whole mountaintop is diced up into compartments with anti-personnel and anti-vehicle barriers. Choppers keep their engines running so they can get out fast if mortar rounds come in. It is a straight-up combat zone.”

“Well, it is today,” T.R. allowed. “Most days it ain’t. It’s probably over and done with already. These are pinprick raids. They happen once a year, tops.”

“Papuan nationalists?”

“Or Indonesian black ops angling for a budget hike,” T.R. said. “Impossible to tell, since they do exactly the same shit. What they have in common is that they don’t actually want to destroy the cash cow.”

“The mine?”

“The mine.” A thought occurred to T.R. “Hey, you still have that Glock?”

“No.”

Amelia held it out, action locked open, magazine removed. “I took the liberty. You want it?”

“No,” T.R. said, “I just don’t like loose ends.”

Amelia shrugged, then slid the weapon across the floor to Willem. The magazine followed a moment later. Willem decided to keep them separate for now. He normally carried a shoulder bag, which his father derisively called a man-purse and Remi just called a purse. This was now somewhere on top of Sneeuwberg. So he put the pistol into his belt at the small of his back and slipped the magazine into his pocket.

T.R. had been summoned forward by the pilot, who had put the chopper into a banking turn. Then he leveled it out and angled it back a hair until they were basically hovering, perhaps a thousand meters above the jungle. They were about halfway from Sneeuwberg to Tuaba. The land beneath them had shed most of its altitude and flattened out somewhat. From the jungle below they could see a pall of smoke swirling around a clearing near the highway. “Aw, shit, that’s the pump station,” T.R. said. “Those fucking assholes.”

On a closer look the clearing was a puddle of gray liquid, like wet cement, spreading out into the surrounding jungle. “System should shut off automatically before the spill gets too much worse,” T.R. said. He came back into the cabin, checking his phone. “Aaand the fucking cell towers are down.” He called back to the pilot. “Get on the horn back to Sneeuwberg and make sure they are aware the slurry pipeline has been breached.”

“Roger that,” came the answer. T.R. slammed down into his seat as the chopper tilted forward to resume its flight back to Tuaba. “Fucking assholes,” T.R. said. “They do this every few years. Blow up the pipeline. They know it’s how copper leaves the island. But it’s also the only reason money comes in. Very self-destructive. It is an escalation to be sure.”

“So, just to calibrate,” Willem said, “shooting up Sneeuwberg and detonating some ANFO is a common occurrence but blowing a hole in the pipeline is a big deal.”

“Correct. Forces us to shut a whole lot of things down, higher up. The mine is like an engineered avalanche, running on gravity, material in motion on a scale you can’t believe until you see it. Momentum that is inconceivable. To stop it is like diving in front of a freight train.” T.R. checked his phone again but the look on his face said he wasn’t getting any bars. Finally he slapped it down, put his chin in his hand, and looked out the window. They were almost there. Looking out, Willem could see the outskirts of a town passing below them. And there was only one town.

“We’re gonna land on top of the Sam,” T.R. explained, suddenly remembering his duties as gracious host. He meant the Sam Houston, which was one of the Western-style hotels that had been put up in Tuaba as a base of operations for visiting engineers, business executives, and the like. “From the helipad there, we can get you down to a room where you can hang out while we arrange a convoy to take you to Ed’s compound. Or anywhere else you prefer.” Beyond him, through the chopper’s side window, Willem caught sight of the airport’s control tower in the middle distance. The Sam Houston was in the belt of Western-style hotels and amenities near the airport, so they must be close.

But instead of banking toward the Sam, the pilot swung the other way and put the chopper into a climb. The world rotated slowly around them, and in a few moments the Sam Houston Hotel complex came into view out the window on Willem’s side. It looked like any other generic modern hotel, rising a dozen-and-a-half stories above a parking lot ringed by palm and banana trees.

But the grounds were a lake of flashing cop lights. Hundreds of people were milling around, but almost all of them had been banished beyond a radius of a few hundred meters from the structure. Inside that radius were just a few cops and some stragglers—hotel employees, it looked like—being hustled away from the building.

“The Sam is evacuated,” the pilot reported. “Suspicious vehicle.”

“What’s so suspicious about it?”

“It crashed into the lobby and the driver ran away.”

“We okay on fuel?”

“Fine, sir.”

“Where would you like to go?” T.R. asked Willem. “There’s enough room in Ed’s compound we could set this thing down right in the middle.”

Willem liked that idea. Amelia didn’t: “With respect, landing a Brazos RoDuSh chopper anywhere marks the location as a target. We won’t be doing Uncle Ed any favors—”

“Painting a bull’s-eye on his property. Understood,” T.R. said.

“Saint Patrick’s has a helipad,” the pilot pointed out.

“That’s it,” T.R. said. “Go there.”

“The hospital,” Willem explained, in case Amelia didn’t catch the reference. Though the hospital was just the biggest part of a complex that included a school, convent, and church.

“A chopper landing there is just gonna look like a medevac flight,” T.R. said, “bringing casualties down from the mine. If it’s really Papuans behind this—well, they know the R.C.s are on their side.”

“R.C.s?” Amelia asked.

“Roman Catholics. If it’s the Indonesians pretending to be Papuans, they gotta do what the Papuans would do—leave the R.C.s alone.”

Some part of Willem’s brain was registering an objection to this gambit on ethical grounds. They were not, in fact, casualties in need of medical care. But he was not in control of this helicopter. And in any case it took a little while for such high-flown considerations to form up in one’s brain; Tuaba was tiny; and jet helicopters were fast.

So fast, as a matter of fact, and so convenient that some less noble part of Willem’s brain was beginning to question the wisdom of disembarking from this one. Might this thing have enough fuel to reach the coast? Or even Australia? Could they just get the fuck out of here?

Anyway the decision was made for him as the Sam Houston Hotel, still clearly visible perhaps a kilometer away, exploded. It happened as the chopper was settling in for a landing on the flat roof of the tallest building in the St. Patrick’s compound, a modern ten-story structure. Because of the prevailing atmospheric conditions—humid, just above dew point—the explosion manifested as a bolt of yellow light almost immediately snuffed out by a sphere of white vapor expanding outward from the blast at the speed of sound. It took all of about three seconds for this thing to strike the helicopter: long enough that everyone knew that it was coming, and knew that they were going to get hit, but too quickly for the pilot to do anything about it. And what could he have done, really? The chopper—which was aimed almost directly toward the Sam Houston—rocked backward, nose pitching sharply up as if it had just taken an uppercut from King Kong. It skidded back across the helipad until it was stopped by a parapet running along the edge of the building’s roof. It all happened more slowly and with less overt violence than you might think. Or maybe Willem’s brain just couldn’t run fast enough to process the violence in real time. The chopper settled back down on its landing gear as the pilot killed the engine. But it was obvious just from the sounds that this thing was not going to take off again anytime soon. And that was confirmed when they got out—which they did very, very hastily—and had a look. The tail rotor had been gnawed down to fibrous stumps and the tail itself was bent upward.

As eye-catching spectacles went, it was hard to choose between a wrecked helicopter close by, and a mushroom cloud of copper-red ammonium nitrate smoke rising above the collapsing remains of a luxury hotel in the distance. And yet only a few minutes later Willem found himself staring at something else. Drawn by the sounds of the hotel being blown up and the helicopter crashing, hospital staff began emerging in numbers from the little hut in the corner of the roof that marked the upper end of the stairwell. More pulsed forth from an elevator near the helipad. They looked much the same as nurses, doctors, x-ray techs, and so on anywhere else: color-coded scrubs, stethoscopes, name tags. Of course there were regional differences: lots of ethnic Papuans, lots of women wearing the headgear that marked them as Catholic nuns. As minutes went by, they were joined by some others who did not appear to be medical professionals. Patients, perhaps, who were well enough to be ambulatory, or people who had come to visit patients. The one who stood out, for Willem, was a grizzled Papuan gent who was naked except for a penis gourd. Willem had read about these, but always assumed they would be smaller. More penis-sized. This one was much, much longer than any human penis Willem had ever seen, and in his younger days he had seen a few. Its wide end—just wide enough to accommodate a penis—was lashed to the man’s groin. From there it curved upward along his belly, restrained by a cord around his waist, and then twisted about in free space to end in a sharp point somewhere out in front of his sternum. Willem wondered if it was rude to stare; or if you went about in that getup, would you find it more insulting not to be stared at?

They shoved the helicopter off the roof. More choppers—legit medevac choppers—were coming in. They couldn’t land while T.R.’s helicopter was in the way. It was not capable of taking off. So a contingent of the hospital’s security staff was detailed to cordon off a generous stretch of lawn below. Once they gave the all clear, a couple of dozen of those on the roof converged on the chopper and rotated it until its glass snout was protruding over the edge of the parapet. Then they used its long tail as a lever arm to pitch it forward. This quickly elevated beyond reach and so people rushed to get their shoulders under the landing gear and push on that. Willem found himself between Amelia and the man with the penis gourd. Whatever strengths and weaknesses this guy might have had as far as his grasp on technology and the ways of the modern world were concerned, he understood the helicopter-tipping procedure as well as anyone here, and even used hand gestures to make polite suggestions as to how others might position their hands and use their muscles to best advantage. Eventually the crowd settled into a rhythmic heave-ho procedure, and finally shifted it past its tipping point. It lifted free of their outstretched hands and somersaulted over the edge in perfect silence. The man with the penis gourd watched it fall and smash into the ground with only modest curiosity. It simply wasn’t as big a deal to him as it was to those of a more modern mindset. Having made friendly eye contact with Willem earlier, he now made gestures the import of which was Hey buddy, got a smoke? and Willem had to pat himself down and show empty hands. “Does anyone have a cigarette for this man?” Willem asked. In short order one was conjured from a janitor’s pocket. The man, after expressing due gratitude, snapped it in half and smoked it double-ended as he watched the first medevac chopper come in for a landing.

T.R. led them toward the stairwell. As they walked past the elevators that serviced the helipad, Willem did a double take. A sign above the doors proclaimed t.r. and victoria schmidt medical pavilion, with the same—or so he assumed—repeated in Indonesian and one of the eight hundred some local languages of New Guinea.

“Where are we going? Just curious,” Willem asked, after T.R. had led them down eight flights of modern, reinforced-concrete stairs and then into a much older wing of the hospital—walls lined with glazed cement blocks, linoleum floors, wooden doors, the smell of disinfectant. Like a certain number of post-war institutional buildings in the Netherlands.

“L & D.”

“Which stands for?”

“Labor and Delivery,” T.R. said.

An odd choice, but logical in a way? The trauma center, surgery, x-ray, ICU—all probably swamped, or about to be. Labor and Delivery, no more so than on any other day.

It was an endless maze like all other hospitals, but eventually they found L & D. It did not seem particularly busy. Behind one closed door a woman in labor was crying out in pain. Clusters of family members sat in hallways. Nuns bustled around and glared at them. But T.R.’s was a face they soon recognized. No wonder, since portraits of him and Victoria were prominently featured in the eponymous Medical Pavilion. So they went unchallenged as T.R. led Willem, Amelia, and one of his security guys down a long corridor and then through a wooden door into a hospital room. No one was using it. No one had used it for a while. It looked next in line to be gutted and modernized. It was half full of stacked boxes of medical supplies.

“Thanks for bearing with me,” T.R. said. “I just had to stop by and see this, long as I was in the vicinity.”

“Why? What’s it to you?” Willem asked.

“I was born in this room,” T.R. said.

Before long an important-seeming man—a Filipino in a clerical collar—tracked them down and escorted them to an office suite elsewhere in the complex, where they camped out for a bit while T.R. tried to sort out his next move. To judge from listening to his half of various conversations, he would not be averse to simply leaving the country. But there was some kind of shutdown affecting Tuaba’s airport and so his jet was grounded. His people were organizing an armed convoy of SUVs that would take him to a residential compound on the edge of town, easier to defend than a luxury hotel. Willem and Amelia could tag along, or—

The “or” was abruptly resolved by the advent of Sister Catherine, whom Willem had last seen at breakfast in The Hague, last October. She denounced T.R.’s plan as nonsensical, though T.R. didn’t hear any of that because he was on the phone the whole time she was in the room. “We could offer you sanctuary here,” she said. “But to be frank you would be taking up space needed by others.”

This sounded like an opening for Willem to declare he wouldn’t dream of doing so, and so he opened his mouth. But Sister Catherine ran him off the road. “I can provide easy and safe conveyance to your uncle Ed’s if that is where you would prefer to wait this out.”

Her phrasing could not help but raise a question in Willem’s mind as to what “this” was and how long “this” was projected to last. Part of him wanted to stick with Western-style accommodation near the airport. But a lot of people who’d been staying at the Sam Houston had probably felt safer there, until they’d been hustled out of the building by cops and watched it blow up.

So he accepted Sister Catherine’s offer. Five minutes later he and Amelia were lying down in the aisle of a yellow school bus as Sister Catherine fired it up and pulled it out of the school grounds and onto the streets of Tuaba. Her proficiency with the vehicle’s manual transmission, the adroitness with which she gunned it through traffic, her hair-trigger approach to application of the horn, all made Willem wonder what other skill sets this nun had acquired during her (he estimated) three decades as a bride of Christ.

“You saw the gun?” she asked him, in Dutch. “Up on Sneeuwberg?”

“A very quick glimpse,” Willem said. “Then there was some sort of attack and we had to evacuate.”

“Still, it’s good that you saw it,” Sister Catherine remarked. “Not just the gun. The whole mine. So you know what we are dealing with. The scale of it.”

Noteworthy to Willem was the nun’s utter lack of curiosity about the attack. He raised his head from the floor of the bus and exchanged a look with Amelia.

He asked, “Do you think that the attack was related to the new gun project or—”

“No!” she said, with a brusqueness that gave Willem a glimpse of what it would feel like to be a dull pupil in her classroom. “No one here cares about any of that.”

“Climate change, geoengineering . . .”

“No one cares. Except foreign countries. And it is those who decide our fate.”

“Whether you will remain part of Indonesia or—”

“We are ‘part of Indonesia’ in the same sense that Indonesia used to be ‘part of the Dutch Empire,’” she said, and, in the scariest thing Willem had seen all day, turned around to look back and down at him while removing both hands from the steering wheel to form air quotes.

“Please overlook my poor choice of words,” Willem said, suppressing the rest of the sentence and keep your eyes on the fucking road.

“Go and sin no more,” she cracked, swinging the bus decisively onto a side street. Judging from the frequency with which Willem’s skull was slamming into the floor, this one was not as well paved. They were plunging into puddles that began, but never quite seemed to end. Canopies of trees were looming above the windows. The verdant scene was interrupted by the hard corner of a rusty shipping container. Standing atop it, well back of a coiling fumarole of razor wire, was a young man in a backwards baseball cap and mirror shades, cradling an AK-47 and smoking a cigarette. Others like him came into view as the bus slowed and then stopped. Sister Catherine put it in neutral and stomped the parking brake with a vehemence she might have used to crush a scorpion threatening a pupil. “School’s out,” she said.

“Home sweet home,” Willem said, and stood up. “Thanks for the lift, Sister Catherine.”

“I’ll be in touch,” she said, “as this plays out.” Again, this clear sense that there was a specific “this” and that she knew what it was. To Amelia she said, “There’s probably no safer place for you to be. It’s where we used to take Beatrix and the others when there was trouble.” Amelia didn’t know who Beatrix was, but she smiled and nodded politely.

Willem had been anticipating a potentially awkward delay out in front of the gate, during which he would gesticulate in front of Uncle Ed’s security camera in an effort to get buzzed in. But their arrival happened to coincide with the departure of several badminton buddies, whose taxi was waiting for them on the street. Clearly these men were not about to let a small insurrection alter their plans for the day. The last of them recognized Willem and simply held the door open for him by sticking one leg out. He made the most of the slight delay by lighting a cigarette. “See you tomorrow,” he said to Willem in Fuzhounese, as Willem walked past him.