> 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.