In passing he saw a news flash from the BBC. The Thames Barrier had been circumvented by the storm surge and the water was rising in London. The drainage systems meant to handle storm runoff from north of the city had been overwhelmed and were backing up, flooding places inland. The Netherlands, he knew, would soon be facing a similar problem. They had no way to stop the great rivers that flowed in from fucking Germany. Those had to reach the sea eventually. One of their possible outlets was now flowing the wrong way. All the others had been temporarily dammed off to hold back the storm surge.
The question was—now that he’d reached his office, changed clothes, turned on the TVs, and got up to speed—what could Willem actually do? And the answer was nothing. During his former career he’d have had duties as a member of the States General on various committees. Now he was an aide to a theoretically powerless monarch. And she’d already done everything she could do by going about telling people to be ready for a disaster that was at this moment actually unfolding. There would be no repeat of her impromptu performance on the foam-drowned beach at Scheveningen. In a situation like this she had two jobs: to stay put, and to shut up, with the possible exception of maybe issuing a brief statement later in the day. Once the crisis had abated—tomorrow at the very earliest—they could arrange some photo ops and wreath layings.
So there was literally nothing for him to do. No reason for him to have gotten out of bed. He could watch TV from home.
> HOW COULD IT HAVE GIVEN WAY SO EASILY !? his father wanted to know.
Others would be asking the same question. Willem had a vague idea as to how, but he needed to confirm it.
Alastair had a rock on his desk. It had been there the whole time Willem had known him. Had it been quite a bit smaller, it might have been mistaken for a paperweight. It was an irregular oblong, smoothed by wave action, and totally unexceptional. Willem had asked him about it once and Alastair had explained that it had been retrieved from a lighthouse off the Oregon coast. The lighthouse keeper had heard a loud noise in the middle of the night and climbed the stairs to investigate. Halfway up was a window that had been smashed out by this rock. The window was a hundred feet above sea level. The only way the rock could have ended up there was by being entrained in a huge wave that had broken against the cliff on which the lighthouse stood. Alastair had somehow acquired the rock and kept it “as a memento mori” to focus the minds of shipping company executives who wanted to know (a) why insurance was so expensive and (b) why enormous ships sometimes ceased to exist without warning or explanation.
Alastair was looking as frazzled as one might expect. His extremely short hair required little maintenance but he hadn’t shaved in a while and was just wearing an old T-shirt and a hoodie. “You’ll be wanting to know why the Maeslantkering caved in” was how he started the conversation. His emphasis on the first word in that sentence, combined with a general air of distraction, suggested that Willem was just one in a long and ever-fluctuating queue of calls. “The fact that you called me hints that you suspect a rogue wave was the murder weapon.”
“And what say you?” Willem asked.
“I say yes. Just by process of elimination.”
“How so?”
“Those gates were engineered to take steady loads. Dead loads. The sea presses against the barrier with a force that gets larger as the storm surge gets higher. We call it a ‘surge,’ which sounds like something fast and violent, but it isn’t. It’s slow and predictable. Engineers can calculate the forces, work with the numbers. Oh, they add in a fudge factor to account for the odd wave. That is a stochastic figure that mostly stays within predictable limits. What hit the Maeslantkering a couple of hours ago was probably orders of magnitude outside the bounds of what those engineers planned for, what, forty years ago. And it was a live load, which just makes it all much worse from a structural engineering standpoint. The thing simply broke. There is not much else to say.”
“And it’s just bad luck,” Willem said.
“That, sir, is my stock in trade. I am the bad luck man. Gandalf Stormcrow.”
“Such a wave could have hit anywhere,” Willem said, mentally organizing the press release. “Today it just happened to hit the Maeslantkering.”
“It probably got funneled, intensified, by the entrance to the channel. We can analyze it later when there’s more evidence. It might have diffracted around the Hook, bounced off the Maasvlakte dike, picked up steam as the channel narrowed. You can’t predict this sort of thing, sadly, but doing the postmortem is easy. Like you can’t predict a car crash but it’s easy to reconstruct it from skid marks.”
“I’ll let you get on with what must be a very busy day,” Willem said, as he saw Alastair reaching for the red button that would terminate the call.
> Rogue wave, Papa. Impossible to predict. Impossible to plan for.
> WHERE IS THE BACKUP SYSTEM !?!?
> You know there isn’t one. There can’t be one.
> THESE DEFENSES ARE ANCIENT
Willem let the exchange lapse. Eventually his father would see that all the other such defenses were doing fine, despite being “ancient.” Though a dike had been overtopped by waves in North Holland and would have to be repaired.
On the spur of the moment, he messaged T.R.
> How do you talk to people about randomness? Stochasticity?
> You don’t. It’s a fool’s errand T.R. answered, as if he had just been sitting there waiting to hear from Willem.
> I guess that makes me a fool :(
> The Chinese had it right. The Mandate of Heaven and all that.
> So . . . wait for the stochastic outlier . . . then turn it into an opportunity?
> Worked for them!
Willem was getting ready to point out that it hadn’t worked so well for the outgoing emperors. But as soon as T.R. had mentioned China, Willem had remembered Bo’s weird, hasty departure from the country yesterday. Bo. Who had known, at least a week earlier than anyone in the Netherlands, that a big storm was coming. His scalp was tingling as nonexistent hairs attempted to stand up.
> I am sorry about your country’s loss. Please give my best wishes to the queen T.R. added.
> Thx was all Willem could manage to thumb out.
The Barracks
Another advantage of being supported by the Indian military was having access to Indian military intelligence. Sometimes this could mean having satellite imagery piped into augmented-reality glasses, but in other cases it was as old as the Bhagavad Gita: for example, talking to the caretaker about sneaky ways to get into the building.
For a couple of decades around the turn of the century, the barracks had been little used. During that time the army had hired a local guy, a Tibetan, to go up there every so often and look after the place. Major Raju had found that guy, and that guy had supplied the information that there was a coal hole. Most people nowadays would identify it as a manhole and would guess that it led down to a sewer or electrical vault. This thing had been set into the pavement right next to an otherwise featureless stone wall on the down-valley side of the barracks so that coal could be dumped from a truck down a chute into a sub-cellar that contained the boiler. The last of the coal had been burned twenty years ago, and the boiler long since devolved into a pile of rust. If the Chinese volunteers had any sources of heat at all, it must be from propane they’d brought with them.