Chapter 10 Where the Power Flows
You could see it from Isla Puting Bato, and Mina had been looking at it for six hours without letting herself look at it.
From the roof of the barangay hall, past four hundred houses with no electricity in any of them, across the black water of the North Harbor channel, the HelixCompute campus stood up out of the reclaimed ground and burned.
Not lit. Burned. There is a standard of illumination that industrial sites use, and then there is what a hyperscale operator does, which is to light every meter of a perimeter to a level that has nothing to do with seeing and everything to do with insurance, and the effect from four hundred meters away in the rain was of a sunrise that had gotten stuck.
Above it the sodium glow went up into the cloud base and lit the underside of the storm orange.
Below it, on the near bank, a woman was cooking on a fire in a paint tin because the barangay’s generator was on its four hours off.
“Two things,” said Simone, in an earpiece, at seven o’clock on Thursday evening. “And you are going to want to sit down for the second one, which I know you will not do, because you are on a boat.”
“I am on a boat.”
“Of course you are.” Paper. “First thing. The lanyard.”
Mina, lying prone under a tarpaulin in the bottom of Mang Rey’s bangka with a monocular and a very sore arm, said, “Go.”
“It is a proximity credential and it carries a facility code, exactly as I hoped, and the facility code resolves to a site registration filed with the economic zone authority in October.” Simone’s voice had an edge of something Mina had not heard in fourteen months.
“Mina, they registered the security force as building services. Forty-one personnel. There is a duty roster lodged as an annex to a fire safety compliance document, because somebody in a compliance department had to list who would be on site during an incident, and nobody told the compliance department what these men actually do.”
“How many shifts?”
“Three. And the roster shows a surge to double staffing beginning at eighteen hundred tomorrow, Friday, running through to oh six hundred Saturday.” A pause. “Eighty-two men, for one twelve-hour window, on the wettest night of the year. That is not a security posture. That is a work party.”
Mina put the monocular down on the wet boat bottom.
“They are doing it tomorrow night.”
“They are doing something tomorrow night.”
The second thing was Wolffe.
The four gray foam cases in the floor compartment had turned out to contain, among other things, a passive receiver about the size of a shoebox, and Mang Rey had put it where Mina asked, which was on the roof of a house at the eastern end of the barangay, wrapped in a rice sack.
Doctor Dieter Wolffe wore a medical alert band.
It had been in the passport photograph and in the hotel lobby stills and in a Zurich conference video from March.
It was not a tracker. It was a piece of consumer medical hardware that answered a query if something asked it from within about fifteen meters, because it was designed for a paramedic in Heidelberg to wave a phone at an unconscious man.
Nobody had thought about it. Not Hansel, not the men who took the watch and left the band, not the man who put the glasses on the folded blanket.
“I have him,” Simone said, at twenty past seven. “It is intermittent and it is deep and it is the only thing on that campus answering a medical query. He is inside the northeast structure, and he is below grade, and Mina, he is about nine meters underground.”
Mina lay in the bottom of a boat in the rain and shut her eyes for a second.
“He is alive.”
“He is answering. That is not the same thing and you know it is not the same thing.” Simone’s voice softened by about four percent. “But somebody has kept a bottle of water in that room, because the band reports a body temperature, and the body temperature is thirty-six point eight.”
They went in closer at half past eight, which was Mang Rey’s idea and which Mina agreed to because he was right.
He took them up a channel between two stacks of derelict containers on the harbor side, poling, no motor, and put the boat in against a rubble bund forty meters from the campus perimeter fence, in the one place in nine hundred meters of shoreline where the security lighting threw a shadow, because the light poles had been sited on a grid and the bund had been there first.
“How did you know that?” Hal said.
“I have been fishing this water for forty years.” Rey settled the pole. “They built the lights in January. In February I noticed the dark place. I have not had a reason to think about it since February.”
Getting onto the bund cost Mina more than she had budgeted.
It was a rubble slope, wet, at about forty degrees, made of broken concrete with rebar coming out of it, and it was a two-hand climb, and she had one hand.
She got about two thirds of the way up and her left arm did the thing Tita Baby had been describing on Wednesday afternoon while sewing it, which was to stop being a negotiation and become a fact.
Something along the outside of the forearm let go under the dressing with a sensation like a zip opening, and Mina put her forehead against wet concrete and took four slow breaths through her nose.
Then Hal’s hand came down past her face.
She did not take it at once. That was a thing she thought about a great deal afterward, in a ceiling void, on Friday: that there had been a whole second in which Guillermina Hermosa, thirty-six hours after four men came through her kitchen, had looked at an offered hand and calculated.
She took it. He got her up the last three meters without saying anything about it, and put her down on her front on the flat, and lay down beside her, and only then said, very quietly, “Bleeding?”
“A little.”
“Baby.”
“It is under the dressing and it is going to stay under the dressing.” She got the monocular up. “Nine hours. Then Tita Baby can shout at me for nine hours.”
From the bund they could see the whole south face.
Mina worked it quadrant by quadrant, and narrated for Simone, and Hal lay beside her on wet rubble in the rain and did not say anything for seventeen minutes, which was unlike him.
Transformer yard, northwest, three units in oil containment bunds, fenced, mains hum audible from forty meters even over the rain.
Incoming feed on lattice towers from the northeast.
And along the whole eastern side, in a row, under an open-sided steel canopy: eleven containerized diesel generators, running.
Not idling. Running under load, all of them, with the exhaust going straight up into the rain in nine columns and the day tanks beside them and a tanker truck parked at the end of the row with a man in a high-visibility vest sitting in the cab.
“They are not on the grid,” Mina said.
“Say again?”
“Simone, they are running the whole campus on standby generation and the grid is up. Meralco is up on this side, I can see lit windows in the port offices.” She adjusted the monocular. “Why would you run eleven megawatts of diesel when you have a substation feed?”
It was Hal who answered, and it was the first thing he had said in eleven minutes.
“Because they are going to lose the substation,” he said.
Mina turned her head.
“Say that again.”
“Baby, look where the substation is.” Hal pointed, and she followed his hand, past the campus, to the northwest, to a fenced compound sitting on ground that was lower, and not by a little.
“That yard is on grade. The campus is up on fill, it has got to be two meters of fill, you can see the ramp. But the substation is on the old ground level, because the substation was there before, it is a port substation, it is from the seventies.”
“And tomorrow night.”
“And tomorrow night,” Hal said, “if the water comes up the way it came up in Tondo, that yard goes under, and every transformer in it trips, and the whole of North Harbor loses power including this campus.” He wiped rain off his face.
“So they went out and bought seven gensets and a tanker. They are not worried about the flood. They have planned for the flood. Mina, they have budgeted for the flood.”
Nobody said anything.
Out on the water the rain went on falling into the North Harbor channel, and eleven diesel engines ran at a steady load under a steel canopy, and four hundred meters away a woman cooked over a paint tin.
“Hal,” Mina said. “You read the tide table.”
“I read it Wednesday.”
“Read it again.”
He got his phone out under the tarpaulin and hunched over it so the light did not show, and Mina watched his face while he did the thing he did, which was to stop being a person for about nine seconds and become an instrument.
“High water tomorrow is at oh one hundred hours Saturday,” Hal said.
“That is not the tomorrow-night tide, that is the one after midnight.” He scrolled.
“And it is a spring. New moon was Tuesday. Baby, this is the highest astronomical tide of the month, and it is at one o’clock in the morning on Saturday, and it has a typhoon sitting on top of it. ”
“Surge on top of spring.”
“Surge on top of spring.” He put the phone away. “Whatever they are doing, it is at one in the morning on Saturday, because at one in the morning on Saturday this bay is going to be as high as it gets all year, and anything they let go will not have anywhere to drain to for six hours.”
Twenty-nine hours.
Mina lay on wet rubble in the rain and did the last piece of arithmetic, and it went together the way the last piece always does, all at once and with no pleasure in it.
“The roster,” she said. “Simone. The roster surges at eighteen hundred Friday, and the men are on until oh six hundred Saturday. Why would you need eighty-two men on a site during a flood you have already budgeted for?”
Simone was quiet.
“You would not,” she said. “Unless you were expecting people to come to the fence.”
“Yes.”
“Forty thousand of them,” said Simone.
They lay on the bund for another forty minutes because Mina wanted the shift change and got it at nine.