“You can’t breathe in that stuff,” Willem said. “It gets in your lungs. Nor can you swim out of it. You can only run, or rather wade, to some place where you might be able to breathe. But of course you can’t see where you’re going. A few of them made it to the top of the dune. A few went back down, trying to rescue the others.”
“How many?” Saskia asked, watching dully as the fire hose exposed another body, and another, within the space of a few meters.
“At least a hundred,” Willem said.
Willem’s job in such a situation was to be cold-blooded. This wasn’t necessarily in his nature. He was as shocked by all this as anyone else. It wasn’t completely unprecedented. There had been isolated cases of drowning in sea foam during the last few years. It had come up on the emergency services’ radar as something that would become more likely as the temperature of the sea rose and algae—which apparently had something to do with the formation of sea foam—flourished. But a mass casualty event of this type was completely astonishing.
That astonishment was over and above the natural feelings of grief that anyone would experience upon seeing so many lives lost. Only for a few minutes did Willem remain in that catatonic state. Then Princess Charlotte became very emotional as it became obvious to her that one or more of her friends might be lying dead on this beach somewhere. She ran off in the direction of a cluster of aid workers who were pulling body bags out of crates that had begun to arrive in police vans. The princess got a few meters’ head start before Queen Frederika lit out after her.
Amelia, who’d been on duty continuously for the last week, had a well-earned day off. But other members of the security team had swapped in for her. They jogged along roughly parallel to the royals. These people dressed specifically to blend in and not seem like armed goons, so they just seemed like extraordinarily fit and clean-cut citizens moving in a strangely intentional and coordinated fashion around two women, a mother pursuing a distraught teenager toward a row of wet-suited corpses.
So Willem’s job—again—was not to do as normal human emotion might dictate （plenty of people were doing that） or to see to the immediate physical security of the royals （that was already sorted） but to look a few hours or days ahead.
Obviously, today’s planned slate of activities was toast. He saw to that with a quick message thumbed out on his phone.
He did not follow the others but remained at the high vantage point on the dune, trying to assemble a picture of what was happening.
It was now obvious that they had arrived quite early to an event that was only starting to ramp up, and that would go on doing so for much of the day. This was Sunday morning and few people would be at work. As word spread, they would flock here to gawk or volunteer. Random circumstances—the extreme proximity to Huis ten Bosch, the messages on Lotte’s friend network—had caused the royals to arrive only minutes after the event （or during it? For he had the horrible thought that people might be down there now struggling for air）。
Anyway, traffic to the beach was building rapidly. Twice as many were here now as had been when they arrived, and police were turning their attention to the problem of crowd control—since all who came here would have the same instinct to get up to the top of the dune. Some would inevitably blunder down into the foam as the result of clumsiness, curiosity, or ill-advised rescue attempts. So police vehicles were now arriving in numbers and they were setting up a cordon along the dune-top bicycle path.
The yellow search and rescue helicopter came in closer and settled low, trying to use its rotor wash to dispel the foam. A good idea on someone’s part. The down blast began to dig a bowl in the foam, exposing a circle of beach sand. The excavated foam flew outward in a myriad of small flecks that caught in the wind and filled the air like a blizzard.
All well and good but Willem still wasn’t doing his job. He turned his back on the sea and looked down the back slope of the dune to the little cluster of emergency vehicles where Princess Charlotte and Queen Frederika had stopped. The two of them were together. Charlotte was holding on to Frederika’s arm and resting her head on her mother’s shoulder—sweet, but awkward now that she was a few centimeters taller! The queen stood there stolidly and with perfect posture nodding as she was briefed by a young woman wearing a reflective vest. Everything about the body language told him with certainty that their brief spell of anonymity had come to an end. The queen had been recognized. Those around her had changed their behavior accordingly. She was getting a little status report from an emergency worker. Not because