Termination Shock

“It is the middle of summer, the sun rises at three in the morning!” Dharmender went on. Also an exaggeration; the correct figure was 5:09. “We should have gone to bed five hours ago if that was your intention!”

“Sorry to spring it on you like this.”

“You weren’t kidding. You literally are going to go down the river.” He was referring to the Columbia. “Into the United States.” Which was where the Columbia flowed.

“I have a wet suit,” Laks volunteered, in case Dharmender was getting ready to give him a hard time about hypothermia.

“Why don’t you just cross on the land like a normal person? I mean, the United States is a mess, sure. But it’s not like going to North Korea.”

“I’m not at liberty to say, but—”

“You’re on some kind of secret mission?”

Apparently Laks’s face was quite easy to read.

Uncle Dharmender raised his voice. “Gurmeet!” His wife, two rooms away, could not hear him in the clatter and chatter of the kitchen. “Gurmeet! Gurmeet! Our nephew is going on a secret mission!”

The kitchen suddenly became a lot quieter. Gurmeet bustled into the room, drying her hands on a simple cotton apron she had tied on over a spectacular getup that made her look, in small-town Canadian eyes, like the wife of the Romulan ambassador. In her wake were several younger women, as well as Gurmeet’s mother. They were all dressed to party.

“For the Indian government?” she asked.

“Who else would he be doing it for?!”

“You’ll need food!”

“He’s sneaking into the U.S. They have food.”

“It is carrion.”

“He’s probably carrying a ton of cash money, he can buy proper food.” Dharmender looked at him. “They gave you money, yes? American cash? Bitcoin?”

“Yes, Uncle.” But Laks now became distracted by the sight of Tavleen—one of the younger women—whipping out her phone and getting busy with both thumbs.

“Tavleen!” Laks shouted. “Are you Facebooking this?”

Far from seeming in any way mortified, Tavleen glared back at him as if to say that the answer was so ridiculously obvious as to be not worth giving. “Your last secret mission was the biggest thing on the Internet! I’m just giving you a signal boost!”

“This actually is secret,” Laks protested.

Dharmender explained, “If you put it on social media, he will be arrested for swimming across the border and put in real handcuffs.”

“Then why are you telling us?” Gurmeet demanded.

Dharmender checked his wristwatch, a momentous bauble that he kept with him at all times in case everything went sideways and he had to trade it for a jet airplane. “Because at this point we are going to be up all night, and you’ll notice.”

SNEEUWBERG

T.R.’s logistics people had warned Willem that he might need oxygen just to remain upright and conscious at the mine. This information had reached him in the form of a link copy/pasted to the tail end of the calendar invite. They hadn’t bothered to warn Amelia, so maybe it was an age-related thing. But they had hastened to assure him that oxygen tanks on wheels would be available at the helipad and he shouldn’t hesitate to just grab one on his way past.

With that as prelude, the chopper ride from Tuaba did not disappoint. In mere seconds they’d left the town behind them and were flying over jungle that was as dense as any Willem had ever seen. The chopper’s main task was not to cover ground—they were only going a hundred kilometers—but to gain altitude, which it did by ramping up steadily along the whole duration of the flight. So at first the jungle plummeted far below and became veiled in clouds. A single gossamer strand of road was laced through it, often hidden beneath the canopy but sometimes breaking into view when it ran across a swamp on a causeway or skirted the river.

Looking out the front they could see the mountains rising up in their path to the north. Over the next half hour the land shouldered up out of a sea of low clouds. By that point the works of Brazos RoDuSh had ramified away from the road to cover large patches of the landscape: settlements where workers could live, close to the mine as distances were measured on a map, but still thousands of meters below it in altitude. Spurs reached out to depots and industrial works the nature of which Willem didn’t understand. But he knew that the gist of it was to crush the ore into powder and concentrate it using some water-based process and send the resulting slurry down a pipeline that ran through the jungle, parallel to the road, all the way to the coast, where it could be poured into huge ships bound for places where the red metal was smelted. His Green instincts, drilled into him by a life spent in a modern Western social democracy, told him to be outraged by what the miners had done to this part of the planet. But he knew that every wind turbine feeding green electricity into the Netherlands’ grid had copper windings in its generator and copper cables connecting it to the system. And that the copper had come from here.