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?”