Termination Shock

South Texas

T.R., or at any rate his pilot, had the courtesy to put the chopper down at a decent remove from where Rufus had parked his trailer, and downwind. So Rufus’s vehicles did not get pelted with little rocks and coated with dust, those being the two main constituents of this part of Texas: about midway between San Antonio and Laredo, five hundred miles east of the Flying S Ranch. It was 6:30 in the morning of what promised to be a clear but not excessively hot day. According to the schedule, which had been worked out to an amazing level of detail by T.R.’s staff, Rufus would have the boss’s undivided attention for three hours, after which there would be something called a “hard stop.” Rufus didn’t know what a hard stop was, and given the way these people talked about it, he was afraid to ask. He had visions of being physically ejected from the chopper’s side door at 9:30 sharp if he failed to complete the agreed-on program of activities by that instant.

So he was ready and eager to get going. But T.R. seemed to enjoy taking his time. Rufus sensed that this was, for T.R., a welcome break from whatever activities normally filled the schedule of such a man. For a minute he stood beside the chopper conversing with someone in the back seat, and Rufus’s ears picked up the solid mechanical chunking and snicking of well-oiled firearms being checked out. T.R. said something indistinct to indicate how fired up he was, then turned his back on the chopper and came crunching over the hard land toward where Rufus had set up his camp last night. It was at the end of one of T.R.’s ranch roads, where it fizzled out in a dry wash. The coordinates had been sent to Rufus yesterday over the encrypted messaging application that T.R.’s staff insisted be used for everything.

Rufus had offered to provide breakfast and meant to make good on it, so he’d deployed the awning on the side of the trailer and set up a pop-up canopy as well. He had a camp stove going and was working on some huevos rancheros with red chile sauce. Coffee was ready and waiting. “Whoo! That smells good!” T.R. remarked from a distance. “We landed downwind of you.”

“Noticed. Appreciate the courtesy.”

“Did you find the accommodations to your liking?” T.R. asked wryly, holding up his hands and looking around. Though the creek bed was dry, there was apparently enough seasonal water to keep a sparse belt of trees going. Birds were singing in those. Life was good.

“I took the liberty of harvesting some mesquite,” Rufus said, nodding at a small but aromatic campfire, which he’d surrounded with some folding chairs.

“Be my guest. Plenty more where that came from,” T.R. said. “Nature’s bounty.” He threw Rufus a socially distant salute, which Rufus returned, and settled into one of the chairs. “Coffee’s right there, help yourself but don’t burn your hand,” Rufus said.

“Don’t mind if I do. Much obliged,” T.R. said and poured himself a mug of java from a fire-blackened pot. “So we gonna kill some pigs?”

“As many as you got time for, sir. I know where they live,” Rufus said. He was assembling the huevos rancheros from ingredients scattered around the burners of his stove.

“How’d you find ’em? What’s your process?”

“Satellite imagery tells me about where to look. I drive around in the truck to get the feel of the place. The sight lines. I look for signs. After that it’s all drones. Cameras on those nowadays is better than the naked eye. The pigs, you know, rub against trees to scrape the parasites off their bodies and that leaves damage on the bark that you can see.” Rufus looked up from his work. “Now, if I were here on a solo job, I’d have gone out and done the work on foot, in the dark. But since you was coming with the chopper I got caught up on my sleep instead.” He carried a tin plate over to T.R. and set it on the camp table next to him.

“Oh, mercy, that looks as good as it smells,” T.R. said, tucking a napkin into the neckline of a UV-blocking khaki shirt. “I thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Rufus returned to the stove, shut off the burners, and collected his own plate. “Think of it as me paying rent on this here campsite.”

“Say more about the drones, Red.”

Rufus pondered it as he chewed his first bite of food. “They’re like guns.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“You go buy yourself a gun, say. It shoots bullets. Fine. Maybe you decide you want a custom grip. You buy that on the Internet. Turns out you need a special screwdriver to install the damn thing.”

T.R. chuckled.

Rufus continued, “So you buy the screwdriver. Maybe you buy a whole set of them. You throw those in a drawer. Time goes by. You end up replacing every single part of the original gun with something different. Maybe you got other guns too. Drawer gets full of old parts and special tools. It’s the same with drones, except worse.” He nodded at his trailer. “That’s my drawer.”

“Mm, if these eggs wasn’t so delicious I would request permission to come aboard and have a little old look round!”

“Plenty of time to finish the eggs and do that too,” Rufus said, though he already felt that they were running a bit late. He settled himself down by reflecting that he had killed a lot of pigs in his time, it was nothing new to him, and so what he really ought to be concerning himself with wasn’t killing even more of them, but rather satisfying whatever mysterious agenda T.R. McHooligan was pursuing. And this was a topic on which he could only speculate; but he had the sense that he was being recruited. Also, he had made love to a queen.

“Man oh man, Red, you are a label-making machine! You have got labels on your labels!” T.R., deeply satisfied by the huevos and the coffee, was now checking out Rufus’s trailer. Over time Rufus had progressively gutted this, replacing the built-in cabinets with modular storage bins made of translucent plastic. They were subdivided into innumerable compartments. Everything was labeled. “Blue labels is drone related. Red is for gun parts. White is miscellaneous.” Most of the labels were blue.

“How’d you get to be so organized, Red?”

“Army beat it into me. Then it was the business. Being on the road, you know, the starting and stopping and the bouncing over the washboarded roads will mix up all your stuff and make a mess of it unless you got everything in its own compartment. There’s a chapter in Moby-Dick where—”

And here Rufus was all set to describe Chapter 98, “Stowing Down and Clearing Up,” where they have made a huge mess of the Pequod butchering whales, but then they put everything back where it belongs and clean it all up spick-and-span, and it’s as if nothing had ever happened.

“Read it,” T.R. said, cutting him off. “I get it, this is your whaling ship, a place for everything and everything in its place. You the Captain Ahab of this little operation, then?”

“I prefer to think of myself as being more in the mold of the harpooneers.”

“Excellent choice. More sustainable.” T.R. turned around, took it all in, peered through the milky plastic bins at drone batteries, drone transceivers, drone propellers, spools of colored wire, tiny metric fasteners, jewelers’ screwdrivers, heat shrink tubing, stainless-steel hemostats. A 3D printer where a microwave oven had once been installed. “Man,” he exclaimed, “you are the Drone Ranger!”

They went out and got in the chopper and shot pigs. These were exactly where Rufus had predicted they would be. Shooting them in this way was like a video game set to “easy.” T.R. had brought an assortment of old and new guns from what Rufus could only assume was an inconceivably expensive collection. T.R. made a point of handing Rufus a different firearm every few minutes. He always introduced it with some patter along the lines of “Hoo-ee! This one’s got quite a kick but it gets the job done!” However, when Rufus was actually operating the weapons, T.R. watched his movements and Rufus understood that he was being evaluated both as to his attention to firearm safety and as to general familiarity with different weapon types, marksmanship, and so on. At one point late in the interview—for it was clear that this was a job interview—T.R. threw him a curve by handing him one of his antiques. It was some kind of early clip-fed rifle with a heavy military feel to it.

“I’m not familiar with the use of this weapon,” Rufus said, after glancing it over. “I’d be more comfortable if you showed me how to operate it.”

T.R. did so, enthusiastically. Rufus then copied his movements, looking up at him occasionally to verify that he was getting it right, and used it to drill a big sow from about fifty yards. He understood that if he had attempted to brazen it out and use the gun without requesting help, he would have failed the interview. T.R. would have tapped the pilot on the shoulder. They’d have flown back to the campsite. T.R. would have paid him for his time, cash on the barrelhead, and they would never have seen each other again. Conversely, Rufus’s asking for help had sealed some kind of deal in the mind of T.R. His interest in ridding the world of more feral swine tapered off sharply. Ten minutes later they were back on the ground polishing off the coffee.

“I ain’t one of those Rambo cats,” Rufus cautioned him, before the conversation got too deep. “Stayed mostly on base. Took some mortar rounds, heard sniper bullets go by. Saw IEDs go off. Saw some other shit too. But I’m a mechanic. Not a snake eater.”

“Ah, shit, I got plenty of snake eaters. I know where to find them. Hell, they won’t leave me alone, word’s got round that T.R. is hiring.”

“For the Flying S?”

“That’s right. Activity is ramping up there, as you saw. More people moving in. It is becoming a community. Really, Red, you could think of it as a microstate.”

“Like Rhode Island?”

“I was thinking Liechtenstein.”

“How’s the United States gonna feel about that?”

T.R. chuckled. “Do you know what the United States did last week, after we fired those eighteen shells up into the stratosphere?”

“No, sir, I do not.”

“Nothing.”

“Not even a phone call?”

“I got people on the inside of the FAA. They didn’t even notice, Red. They knew we had filed for a permit, of course. But if the shells were picked up on radar, no one was looking at the screen.”

“It wouldn’t move like the bogey from an airplane.”

“Nah. It goes straight up! So on a radar screen it doesn’t even move. Probably just looks like a dead pixel.”

“What about when the shell is gliding down?”

“Moves differently then, of course. But we do that mostly over Mexican airspace. I’m working out an understanding with our friends south of the border. On final approach, after the shell has dropped below the radar, only then do we let it glide north over the Rio Grande. It re-enters U.S. airspace below the altitude where the FAA gives a shit and lands on Flying S property.”

Rufus considered it. “How about military radar? They gotta know.”

T.R. checked his watch and Rufus knew he’d gone somewhere he shouldn’t have. “None of my business,” Rufus conceded, “just working it out in my head.”

“You’re army. Not air force. A ground pounder. Not a flyboy. Let’s talk about that.”

“Okay, let’s do.”

“I want you to go to the Flying S Ranch—assuming I can make it worth your while, of course. I would feel better if you were there keeping an eye on things. I want you to be the Drone Ranger.”

T.R. had coined that term earlier and Rufus had gotten the feeling that it might stick. He smiled. “You want ol’ Red to keep an eye on, what, a couple of thousand square miles?”

“I got other resources, as you know. Imaging satellites passing over at all hours. Plenty of boots on the ground.”

“Brown hats and black hats.”

T.R. nodded. “Brown hats you could think of as cops. Black hats are your mercenaries—the equivalent of the military. But the Lone Ranger—he was neither fish nor fowl!”

Rufus laughed. “You want me in a white hat?”

“Wear whatever you want. The black mask and the blue jumpsuit are optional. I imagine you’ll be in an earthsuit much of the time.”

“What do you imagine I could do that ain’t being done already with the resources you got on hand?”

“Roam around and notice anything that don’t feel right. Respond to inquiries. Just keep an eye on things. It’s a burden, Red, to own property.”

“I farmed fifty acres,” Rufus said. “I know.”

“You lie awake at night wondering what the hell’s going on there.”

“Yup, you do.”

“That’s why we have caretakers. Ranch hands. Oh, sure there’s always chores to keep that kinda person busy. But the real reason to hire people like that is so we can sleep better at night. Because then we know that there is intelligence—active intelligent minds—right there on the ground.”

Rufus nodded. “Now, let’s talk straight about one thing. You ain’t worried about no wild pigs. Coyotes. Rattlesnakes.”

T.R. managed to look as if he were glad Rufus had finally brought this topic up. “Pina2bo is going to change the world, Red. It’s gonna change it for the better, overall. The people of places like Houston, Venice, Singapore—they’ll feel the most benefit. It will benefit those places unambiguously by stopping sea level rise in its tracks. Now, there’s other countries in this world that are gonna have more pros and cons to think about.” T.R. set his coffee mug down so that he could make a scale pan juggling motion with empty hands. “Less coastal flooding—great! Colder winters. Not so great. But, overall”—he let one hand drop to his knee as the other floated up—“an acceptable trade. But. But. There is going to be a third category of country. Hopefully a small category.” He reversed the positions of his hands, letting the high one drop to his knee, raising the other and turning it into a fist. “They are gonna run the numbers. By which I mean they are gonna run big computer sims to evaluate the effect that Pina2bo will have on their climate. Their economy.” T.R. paused for a second and blinked. “And they are gonna be pissed.”

Rufus nodded. “And depending on what kind of country they are, maybe it’s limited to, I don’t know, filing a complaint with the United Nations.”

“Which wouldn’t do shit,” T.R. said. “But other countries—who knows, maybe they got snake eaters of their own.”

“You’re worried about espionage. Maybe sabotage.”

“Yup. And there’s always the fucking Greens. The remote and wide-open nature of the Flying S Ranch, its location on the Rio Grande, cuts both ways. It enables us to fire giant bullets straight up into the stratosphere without anyone even noticing. But it also makes it easy to infiltrate, easy to spy on, easy to mess with.”

“I’d do it with drones,” Rufus said. “If I was one of the bad guys, I mean, looking for a way to fuck you up.”

“Of course you would. Maybe part of what you can do is be a red team for us—heh! Think of how an adversary would use drones, anticipate their moves, develop countermeasures. Shit, I don’t know!” T.R. checked his watch. The hard stop was drawing nigh. “That’s kinda the point of hiring intelligent people, Red. You don’t exactly know what they’re gonna think of.”

Rufus nodded. “Reckon I’ll head over that way and have a look round.”

T.R. brightened. “To the Flying S?”

Rufus nodded. “I’ll be sure and put out the fire before I leave.”