Viewed from space, the twin gates of the Maeslantkering—the largest movable objects ever built—looked a bit like the pie-wedge–shaped wings that children scraped out in fresh snow when they were making angels. The curved rim of each pie wedge was the actual barrier meant to stand fast against the full force of a North Sea storm surge. Each was made to block one half of the width of the waterway joining Rotterdam to the sea. They came together in the middle, each swinging inward from a pivot on the embankment. The rest of the pie wedge—the triangle that spanned the 240-meter radius from the curved barrier to the pivot—consisted of massive steel tubes welded together to form a rigid trusswork. That structure transmitted the sea’s force from the barrier to the ball and socket that might be thought of as the shoulder joint of the angel’s wing. It went without saying that these were the largest ball-and-socket joints ever made. The balls were ten meters in diameter. They were cradled in sockets consisting mostly of reinforced concrete, set deeply into the ground and distributing the force into the surrounding earth through long concrete buttresses that splayed out like fingers and eventually ramped down below ground level to connect with massive subterranean footings.
Precisely curved trenches had been gouged into the banks to give the barrier arcs a place to abide during the long spans of time—on the order of decades—during which they were not actually needed. Like dry docks, these trenches lay below the level of the water, but most of the time they were kept empty, leaving the barrier arcs high and dry so that they could be inspected and maintained. The arcs themselves were hollow boxes, normally full of air. Once floated into position across the waterway, they could be flooded so that they would sink and form a seal against the floor of the channel.
The whole complex had been formally christened in 1997 by Saskia’s grandmother and never actually needed until ten years later. After that, it had sat high, dry, and motionless—aside from regularly scheduled annual closures just to make sure it all still worked—for another sixteen years, when another surge had come along. Today, for the third time in its history, they were going to close it to protect the Netherlands from what was predicted to be the largest surge in the North Sea since the disaster of 1953. It was the first such closure in Saskia’s reign.
Thanks to a program that had been set in motion by Willem in the days following her speech to the States General, Queen Frederika had spent much of the last three weeks touring the country in support of disaster preparedness. Now, trying to get Dutch people to prepare for disasters was a little like trying to get English people to watch football on the telly or Americans to buy guns. They were receptive to the message, to a degree that made the queen’s efforts on this front completely superfluous. The very inaneness of it was just the sort of thing that caused anti-royals to roll their eyes and ask what was the point of maintaining such an institution if its work was to be that insipid. For all the good she was doing, Queen Frederika might as well have stayed home at the palace tweeting about muffin recipes. And yet, given the run of close calls and scares the household had experienced last month, this was actually just the ticket. Any royal-hater or royal-skeptic, any tabloid journalist who had become excited or suspicious by the whiff of mystery and possible scandal that had surrounded the queen around the time of her visit to Texas and the geoengineering kerfuffle on Budget Day, was now catatonic with boredom after twenty consecutive days of watching Her Majesty remind pensioners in Zeeland not to get trapped in their attics. She had gone to little towns along the Rhine to inspect their dikes. She had stood in the rain stomping the royal shovel with the royal gum boot. She had nodded thoughtfully as civil servants had pointed to maps of evacuation routes. She had laid wreaths on the graves of people who had drowned in 1953.
During the first half of that three-week span it had all bordered on self-parody. Even steadfast fans of the House of Orange had thought it was a bit much. The weather had been as non-threatening as it could be. But then it had turned decidedly autumnal. Not in a cozy way. Heavy rainfall inland had begun to raise the levels of the rivers. And long-range forecasts produced by computer models had raised concern about a low-pressure system forming in the North Atlantic, south of Iceland. This had intensified and begun to move toward the chute between Scotland and Norway. Curiosity had turned into excitement, then concern, then dread. Tides were going to be exceptionally high to begin with—simple bad luck, that. This thing was then going to push a monster storm surge ahead of it.
