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.”