Termination Shock

“Like a lot of other Western companies they got kicked out of former colonies during the post-war period. Castro kicked them out of Cuba and so on. But they have, I guess you could say, tendrils all over the place—interlocking boards of directors with oil companies. Connections to big establishment figures—Rockefellers, Bushes, and so on. During the 1960s, after they’d been kicked out of Cuba and the Congo, they got wind that a geologist from our country had climbed the highest mountain in New Guinea—which is on the formerly Dutch half of the island—and seen a huge mineral deposit. Mostly copper. But where there’s copper there’s probably gold. The scale of it was unbelievable. Just sitting there in plain sight.”

“In one of the least accessible places on Earth!” Saskia protested.

Willem nodded. “And at extremely high altitude to boot. They didn’t have a prayer of getting to it without local knowledge and connections. So Brazos Mining put together a joint venture with Shell—which I need hardly tell you knew everything there was to know about doing business in the Dutch East Indies—and created Brazos RoDuSh, which went on to create—”

“The world’s largest open pit mine on the top of a mountain surrounded by the New Guinea jungle!” Saskia now knew exactly what Willem was talking about. The place was famous for its hugeness and infamous for political reasons.

“Exactly.”

“I own part of that.”

Willem nodded. “You have owned part of it since you became old enough to own things. Brazos RoDuSh has appeared somewhere on every financial statement you have ever read.”

“How are they doing?” Saskia asked. She was trying to be mischievous. But it didn’t come through. She winked at Willem. But maybe it just looked like she was trying to get a trickle of sweat out of her eye. She really needed to work on her ability to project puckish wit. Maybe it would help if she were actually more witty.

“I won’t go over the politics, the history with you,” Willem began.

“Of Indonesia and West Papua and all that.”

He nodded. “But the Asian economic book created a fantastically huge demand for copper and so they quintupled their value in a short period of time. More recently as you know there has been trouble in Papua and the stock has performed less admirably.”

“But . . . bringing it all back to the here and now . . . T.R. Schmidt is also an investor in Brazos RoDuSh?”

“He was born there.”

“In New Guinea!?”

Willem nodded. “Dr. Schmidt inherited a significant interest in the company from a generation-skipping trust set up by his grandfather in the 1970s. His chain of restaurants and gas stations was funded by the windfall when copper prices went through the roof.”

Saskia looked out over the river and pondered it. “And I naively imagined he was a homespun Texas oilman.”

“He is,” Willem said, “but homespun Texas oilmen really got around during the second half of the twentieth century.”

“Even to mountaintops in Papua.”

Willem nodded and sat back in his folding chair to signal a change of subject. “Now, speaking of Indonesia, and white people who ended up there. If it is really your intention to proceed to Houston this way—”

“It is,” she confirmed. “I can always change the plan, right? Highways and hotels are only a few minutes’ drive away at any point.”

“The hotels are full. The highways are running in the wrong direction.”

“So be it then! We are caught in the middle of a natural disaster. We can’t go back home. There’s nothing to do in Houston until the storm blows over.”

“In that case, I feel a certain obligation to go see my father.”

“Of course! But what is the weather like where he lives?”

“There was rain yesterday but it is clearing up now. I could leave immediately. Drive through the night. Be at his place for breakfast.”

“I should write him a note,” the queen said and reached for a sheet of the royal stationery: a ream of printer paper Willem had scored at Staples.

“Thank you, Uwe Maj . . .” Willem caught himself just in time, and forced himself to say, “Saskia. He will be most honored.”

 

Willem’s grandfather Johannes Castelein was a Dutch petroleum engineer who was sent over to what was then the Dutch East Indies in 1930 to work for Shell. He was assigned to a port town in East Java. This had a large enough expat community to support a school to which most of the local Dutch and mixed-race population, as well as Chinese merchants, sent their children. He met, fell in love with, and married Greta, who was a teacher there. They had three children during the 1930s: Ruud, a boy born in 1932; Mina, a girl in 1934; and Hendrik, Willem’s father, in 1937.