“The Sam is evacuated,” the pilot reported. “Suspicious vehicle.”
“What’s so suspicious about it?”
“It crashed into the lobby and the driver ran away.”
“We okay on fuel?”
“Fine, sir.”
“Where would you like to go?” T.R. asked Willem. “There’s enough room in Ed’s compound we could set this thing down right in the middle.”
Willem liked that idea. Amelia didn’t: “With respect, landing a Brazos RoDuSh chopper anywhere marks the location as a target. We won’t be doing Uncle Ed any favors—”
“Painting a bull’s-eye on his property. Understood,” T.R. said.
“Saint Patrick’s has a helipad,” the pilot pointed out.
“That’s it,” T.R. said. “Go there.”
“The hospital,” Willem explained, in case Amelia didn’t catch the reference. Though the hospital was just the biggest part of a complex that included a school, convent, and church.
“A chopper landing there is just gonna look like a medevac flight,” T.R. said, “bringing casualties down from the mine. If it’s really Papuans behind this—well, they know the R.C.s are on their side.”
“R.C.s?” Amelia asked.
“Roman Catholics. If it’s the Indonesians pretending to be Papuans, they gotta do what the Papuans would do—leave the R.C.s alone.”
Some part of Willem’s brain was registering an objection to this gambit on ethical grounds. They were not, in fact, casualties in need of medical care. But he was not in control of this helicopter. And in any case it took a little while for such high-flown considerations to form up in one’s brain; Tuaba was tiny; and jet helicopters were fast.
So fast, as a matter of fact, and so convenient that some less noble part of Willem’s brain was beginning to question the wisdom of disembarking from this one. Might this thing have enough fuel to reach the coast? Or even Australia? Could they just get the fuck out of here?
Anyway the decision was made for him as the Sam Houston Hotel, still clearly visible perhaps a kilometer away, exploded. It happened as the chopper was settling in for a landing on the flat roof of the tallest building in the St. Patrick’s compound, a modern ten-story structure. Because of the prevailing atmospheric conditions—humid, just above dew point—the explosion manifested as a bolt of yellow light almost immediately snuffed out by a sphere of white vapor expanding outward from the blast at the speed of sound. It took all of about three seconds for this thing to strike the helicopter: long enough that everyone knew that it was coming, and knew that they were going to get hit, but too quickly for the pilot to do anything about it. And what could
he have done, really? The chopper—which was aimed almost directly toward the Sam Houston—rocked backward, nose pitching sharply up as if it had just taken an uppercut from King Kong. It skidded back across the helipad until it was stopped by a parapet running along the edge of the building’s roof. It all happened more slowly and with less overt violence than you might think. Or maybe Willem’s brain just couldn’t run fast enough to process the violence in real time. The chopper settled back down on its landing gear as the pilot killed the engine. But it was obvious just from the sounds that this thing was not going to take off again anytime soon. And that was confirmed when they got out—which they did very, very hastily—and had a look. The tail rotor had been gnawed down to fibrous stumps and the tail itself was bent upward.
As eye-catching spectacles went, it was hard to choose between a wrecked helicopter close by, and a mushroom cloud of copper-red ammonium nitrate smoke rising above the collapsing remains of a luxury hotel in the distance. And yet only a few minutes later Willem found himself staring at something else. Drawn by the sounds of the hotel being blown up and the helicopter crashing, hospital staff began emerging in numbers from the little hut in the corner of the roof that marked the upper end of the stairwell. More pulsed forth from an elevator near the helipad. They looked much the same as nurses, doctors, x-ray techs, and so on anywhere else: color-coded scrubs, stethoscopes, name tags. Of course there were regional differences: lots of ethnic Papuans, lots of women wearing the headgear that marked them as Catholic nuns. As minutes went by, they were joined by some others who did not appear to be medical professionals. Patients, perhaps, who were well enough to be ambulatory, or people who had come to visit patients. The one who stood out, for Willem, was a grizzled Papuan gent who was naked except for a penis gourd. Willem had read about these, but always assumed they would be smaller. More penis-sized. This one was much, much longer than any human penis Willem had ever seen, and in his younger days he had seen a few. Its wide end—just wide enough to accommodate a penis—was