Termination Shock

The Marble Mine

All of Rufus’s comings and goings were via New Marble Mine Road, which was passable even to ordinary cars once he had gone up and down the length of it and shoveled gravel into some big holes and removed a few rocks. These had tumbled down out of the high ground to either side. The road ran sometimes parallel to, sometimes right down the middle of, what was theoretically a watercourse. T.R. would have called it a stochastic river. In its upper reaches, within a mile of the mine itself, this was as dry and dead as any other part of the Chihuahuan Desert. Farther down, it was joined by a couple of other such arroyos in a flat pan that in any other part of the world might have been a pond, or at least a marsh. Here it was a stretch of low yellowed grass that apparently sunk roots deep enough to strike underground moisture. This was interspersed with cactus and other such plants. In a few deep crevices, actual standing water could be observed, especially as September gave way to October and the temperature dropped.

The only problem with this setup was that no vendor in the world would deliver packages to the minehead, and so almost every day he had to drive down the valley to High Noon to collect stuff he’d ordered online. One morning he was doing that, passing along right next to that low grassy patch, when two horses galloped across the road. It all happened fast. But he could have sworn that one of the horses was bloody.

He pulled up and got out to have a look around. Sure enough, there was blood on the grass next to the tracks that their unshod hooves had made in the dust. Unshod because, of course, the only horses you were going to see running around loose in a place like this were mustangs.

Then he heard an all too familiar noise: the squealing of a wild pig, not more than a hundred feet away.

His view was blocked by a swell in the ground, but when he vaulted up into the bed of his truck he was able to look over that and see another horse engaged in battle with a foe who was so low down that it could only be glimpsed through the grass and the thorny undergrowth. But Rufus knew what it was.

He jumped down into the cab and pulled the truck off the road and up onto that little rise. Then he took his rifle out from behind the seat, climbed up into the back of the truck again, and chambered a round. From this vantage point he could clearly see the wild boar, maneuvering around the mustang, trying to get one of its tusks into the horse’s leg. The horse, of course, was having none of that and kept rearing up to strike down with front hooves or spinning round to kick out with rear. Both animals were mud-spattered. It could be guessed that they were disputing possession of a water hole. This pig had probably been wallowing down in one of those hidden wet places when the horses had come upon it hoping to get a drink.

They had been conducting these hostilities for a while. Both animals were tired. From time to time they would just stop and watch each other. During one of those intervals, Rufus put a .30-caliber slug through the boar’s heart and dropped him like one of those stray boulders that sometimes peeled off the canyon wall. He might have expected the mustang to bolt at the sound of the gun. It startled, but it did not run. Rufus was able to get a good look at it through his scope and saw that it was a gelding. A very uncommon thing among wild horses, who generally were not big practitioners of surgical castration on the open range. Moreover, he was wearing a halter. Old, filthy, and tattered, but definitely a halter. And that was a shame because it could have got tangled on something and condemned this animal to a long slow death.

Rufus knew better than to try to approach it. Instead he got back in his truck and drove away. But to his list of errands he added a new item, which was that he made a detour to a part of the ranch where ordinary livestock operations were still underway and picked up some bales of hay. On his way back to the marble mine, he kicked one of these out of the truck and left it on the road just near where he had shot the wild boar. The horses were not in evidence, but when he came back the next day he found that they had demolished it. So he left another bale a few hundred yards farther up the road, trusting them to find it, which at least one of them did.

A week of this led to a moment when Rufus and the gelding came in view of each other, just a short distance down the road from the marble mine. Rufus avoided making eye contact, which only would have ruined everything, but instead turned his back and went quietly about his business, letting the animal understand that Rufus and his truck were the source of this incredible bounty of fodder.

Within forty-eight hours of that moment, horse and man were quietly and peaceably co-occupying the cool shady refuge before the opening of the mine, and Rufus was trying to figure out how he was going to supply this animal with water. He was going to need a bigger tank.

The horse seemed indifferent as to whether it would live the life of a wild mustang or hang around with Rufus. It was a pinto, mostly chestnut but spattered with white on the legs and belly. Mexicans, Indians, and horse fanciers had complicated names for different kinds of pintos, depending on the pattern of the spots, but Rufus had never made a study of it. A freeze brand—a row of white hieroglyphs on the left side of the horse’s neck—marked him as a formerly wild horse that had at some point been rounded up and auctioned. A second brand on its shoulder marked it as property of one of the three older ranches that T.R. had, in the last few years, bought up and lumped together to form the Flying S. This animal must have got loose at some point during the merger and returned to its wild ways. The lack of shoes, and the condition of its hooves, suggested that it had escaped at least several months ago.

A good thing about horses, as opposed to some other domestic animals, was that they did not insist on being entertained. As long as they had food and water they would contentedly pass the time of day. So getting this animal put to rights was a side project that Rufus was able to prosecute in his spare time over a couple of weeks. He arranged for a farrier to come up and see to its hooves and get it shod, and for a vet to give it the recommended shots and pills and to care for some wounds it had presumably sustained during the conflict with the late boar. The ranch possessed a surfeit of saddles and other tack that was no longer being much used. This was made available to him when he let it be known that he had become the trustee of this particular animal. Online shopping caused a few other necessaries to show up at his locker down at High Noon. Once he had given the horse a day or two to get used to the look and the smell of the tack, he bridled and saddled him, whereupon he gave every indication of having been ridden in his past life.

Before mounting up for the first time, Rufus considered what the animal ought to be named. The Lone Ranger’s horse had been Silver, but this creature was mostly brown. He considered “Copper.” That, however, seemed like what a twelve-year-old girl would name her horse. Eventually he settled on Bildad, who in Moby-Dick was one of the three owners of the Pequod. In the Bible, he was one of the friends of Job, who came to him in the wilderness to lay a guilt trip on him.

T.R. had the habit, always surprising to Rufus, of shooting him a text message—usually swine- or drone-related—every couple of weeks. Most of these were just links or pictures. Rufus did not dare to suppose that this made him in any way special. He had sort of assembled the picture in his mind that he might be one of several hundred people in T.R.’s mental Rolodex who would occasionally be so favored, and that T.R. probably sent out dozens of such messages on every occasion when he got a snatch of time on the throne or whatever. Rufus was pretty sure that to send a whole lot of messages back the other way would get him blocked, or even fired. So he mostly kept his mouth shut. But a decent respect for another man’s property did place him under an obligation to document Bildad, so he fired off a couple of pictures detailing the brands, as well as a few more intended to convey the general idea that the animal was safe and well cared for at the marble mine. T.R. seemed pleased by that out of all proportion to the actual monetary value of one stray horse. Rufus remembered their conversation about the importance of having good people on the property who could make decisions and manage things, and he reckoned that this was an example of that, and that, to the extent T.R. ever thought of him at all, it was now in a favorable light.

All pretty normal as Texas ranch management went, but with T.R. there was always some kind of extra, weird twist. One day in early October the peace and quiet of the marble mine were shattered by the strains of “The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You,” which was the ringtone that Rufus had assigned to T.R., and only T.R. It was a video call and so Rufus propped his phone up against a stack of drone batteries on his worktable.

“I got a call from our Dutch friend,” T.R. announced.

“Which one?”

“The jet pilot.”

Rufus now had some cause to regret that he had turned on the video, because his heart started pounding and he was afraid that some consternation might be visible on his face. But if he was about to be fired for fornicating with the queen, there was really nothing he could do but take it like a man.

“How is she?”

“Fine. Sends her regards. Asked how you were doing.”

“Oh, that’s nice.”

“I filled her in. She came up with an idea.”

Just when he’d started to settle down, Rufus felt his face getting warm at this development. What possible ideas could Saskia be coming up with relating to Rufus? Did she want him back for more? Or did she hate him?

But it was nothing of the sort. “You ever see eagles up there?”

“You mean, like F-15s?”

“No, Red. Fucking eagles. The large birds.”

“Plenty of buzzards.” Rufus was visualizing a particularly energetic group of them who had lately been subsisting on the corpse of the boar that had attacked Bildad.

“I know that,” T.R. said, somewhat exasperated. “It’s Texas. There’s gonna be buzzards. I’m not talking about those. I’m talking about eagles.”

“I guess I’ve seen a few. More down toward the river.”

“Well, a few years back, the Dutch had a program to train eagles to take out drones. They were worried about airspace security at Schiphol. Figured they could train eagles to pounce on any drones and take ’em down before they got sucked into a jet engine or whatever.”

“Did it work?”

“No. Well, sort of. The eagles attacked the drones. But they were hard to control. I mean, they’re eagles. Animal rights activists lost their minds, of course. But at the end of the day . . .”

“They just didn’t need those darn eagles.”

T.R. nodded. “There’s other ways to take a drone down, as you probably know.”

“Sure,” Rufus said, “if you know it’s there.”

“Right, and at Schiphol fucking Airport you’re gonna know, it’s gonna stand out like a murder hornet on a pool table.”

“Not so easy here,” Rufus pointed out.

“Exactly, Red. Anyway, Her Majesty, with her interest in aviation, had a soft spot for that program and stayed in touch with some of the falconers who got let go when it was shitcanned.”

“Falconers?”

“Folks who know how to wrangle these big birds. I guess ‘Eaglers’ would be a better term.”

“Are there a lot of out-of-work Dutch falconers?”

“There’s at least one,” T.R. said, “but she’s not out of work anymore, ’cause I just hired her.”

While Rufus was absorbing that, T.R. was fielding an interruption from someone off camera, an aide or something who was in the car with him. “Okay, I stand corrected,” he said. “She ain’t Dutch. She’s Icelandic.”

“There ain’t a lot of work for falconers in Iceland,” Rufus said, thinking out loud, “so she worked on this Dutch project for a spell and then got laid off. But Saskia still has her on speed dial.”

“Thordis, for that is her name, is in love with one Carmelita, a falconer in SoCal who has had her fill of hanging around garbage dumps.”

“Why does Carmelita hang around garbage dumps?”

“That’s where the work is. Crows go to dumps and pick over the discarded food, then drop chicken bones and whatnot on housing developments miles away. Carmelita gets paid, by homeowners associations and real estate developers, to use falcons to chase away the crows.”

“Well, I can see how that would get old.”

“I need you to go down to the airstrip tomorrow noon and pick up Thordis and Carmelita and Nimrod.”

“Nimrod?” To Rufus this was a Moby-Dick kind of name, right up there with Bildad.

“An eagle. Don’t worry, Nimrod travels in a box.”

Nothing was ever simple and so Rufus ended up burning the whole next day on this. Thordis showed up first but Carmelita and Nimrod were delayed—something to do with logistics pertaining to Nimrod’s box. Since the Flying S Ranch was nothing like a real airport, both of them were coming in on smaller planes that T.R.’s people had chartered. Rufus ended up cooling his heels in a prefab steel building next to the airstrip that had to all appearances been erected ten minutes ago. This looked like a warehouse from the outside but had all the amenities on the inside. There was a sort of lounge or waiting room with a view of the airstrip and the mountains beyond. Arranged around that were bathrooms, a couple of offices, and a conference room. When Rufus arrived, half a dozen men were seated around the table in there, having apparently just converged on the site in a couple of different planes that were now being refueled and fussed over outside. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, not that it was any of his business. At the head of the conference table was a big screen running a video call with two talking heads on it. One was an efficient-looking woman probably in her forties. The other was Michiel, the ex-soccer player from Venice. Even though he couldn’t hear a word of what was being said, Rufus understood the meeting. All the guys sitting around the table had come here on a mission. The overall boss was Michiel. Or to be truthful it was probably his aunt Cornelia, but she wasn’t on the call. Michiel was hanging out in a nice room full of old stuff. The sun had gone down where he was and his handsome face was warmly illuminated by lamps. The efficient-looking woman was well pulled together but not glamorous. Her clothing and her bearing were formal. She had put more thought into her backdrop. So he could see that Michiel was basically calling the shots but had delegated the management to the woman. Michiel could be the informal nice guy who smiled and made witty comments, but the woman had to be all reserved and serious to prevent the whole thing from turning into a frat party.

After a little while the meeting broke up and the big screen went dark. The guys in the room stood up and began unplugging their gear and putting things back into luggage. One of them emerged towing a rollaway bag and went right outside and got on a plane. The others climbed into a big Flying S Ranch SUV and were taken off in the direction of Pina2bo. They all spoke English but not a one of them was a native English speaker. They must be from a mess of different European countries.

Based on the name, Rufus had been expecting Thordis to be built like an Olympic shot-putter, but he was wrong. She did have the expected level of blondness, and if anything was going a little overboard on sun protection. But she was maybe five feet five and built more like a badminton player. In birdlike fashion she constructed a nest of luggage and throw pillows at one end of a couch after she had exchanged pleasantries with Rufus. She did stuff on her phone for five minutes before pulling her enormous sun hat down low over her cheekbones and nodding off.

Inevitably then, Carmelita, who had the more delicate-sounding name, was a bit of a bruiser. She wore a tank top that exposed tattoos consisting predominantly of simple black rectangles covering large parts of her arms. She had long black hair in a braid. As a courtesy Rufus went out to her plane to see if he could help wrangle Nimrod’s box, but it was plain at a glance that Carmelita could deal with it and didn’t want him anywhere near her eagle. So he ended up towing her bag while she looked after the Nimrod containment system. “Box,” while not wrong, hardly did it justice. A return trip to the plane’s luggage hold was needed to fetch a large equipment case presumably containing other necessities of the falconer’s trade. Rufus heaved that into the back of his truck while Thordis and Carmelita loudly and happily greeted each other. Both had kept Rufus at arm’s length. He didn’t take it personally.

When those two had come down a bit from the emotional high of seeing each other, and Rufus had got everything squared away in the back of his truck, they got into an interesting dance around the seating arrangement. The truck had a back row of seats accessible via small doors, both of which Rufus had left open in a manner that he hoped they would construe as inviting. Carmelita hopped right in and made herself at home, but Thordis—to the extent her facial expressions could be read under the reflective aviator sunglasses, spandex sun cowl, broad-brimmed hat, and half an inch of zinc-based sunscreen—deemed it maybe insensitive for the two guests to sit in back and be chauffeured. So she claimed that sitting in back might cause motion sickness and took shotgun instead. Rufus stayed impassive throughout. Making nice with these two was going to have a lot in common with how he had cultivated his relationship with Bildad. He just had to be cool and let them observe him. Which they did quite a bit of, during the drive. He could always tell when someone had googled him and pulled up the old newspaper stories.

On his way in to the airstrip this morning he had swung by the ranch office and picked up a fifth-wheel travel trailer that was supposed to be the lodgings of Thordis and Carmelita until better arrangements could be made. This jounced along behind them as the roads got worse and the mountains got closer. As a conversationalist, Rufus never got out of first gear until they came in view of the mine head and Bildad came strolling out to investigate. Thordis turned out to be a horse person. Apparently horses were a big deal in Iceland. So everything literally came to a stop as Bildad shoved his face into the back of the truck looking for hay, and jostled Nimrod’s box. Carmelita urgently wanted out so that she could make sure Nimrod wasn’t in a bad situation, but Thordis had to get out first because of how the seats and the doors worked. And Thordis had eyes only for Bildad. So after some delay the final leg of the trip was as follows: Thordis escorting her new best friend Bildad, followed at a distance by Carmelita carrying Nimrod on her arm—this involved a special glove—and finally Rufus in his truck idling along in low gear and towing the trailer toward a site he had taken the liberty of picking out that would keep it out of the midday sun while remaining far enough away from Rufus’s trailer to give the ladies a feeling of privacy. Earlier those two had engaged in a minor public display of affection and then turned to look at Rufus to see whether he would spontaneously combust. He had given them the Bildad treatment. It seemed to have had the same reassuring effect. Which was all well and good, but Rufus could have used a bit of reassurance himself as his formerly isolated hermit’s retreat had suddenly acquired a horse, an eagle, and two ladies.

Just getting the trailer leveled and hooked up, and other such duties, consumed a fair bit of the afternoon. When the day began to cool off, he showed them how you could hike a couple of hundred yards back down the road and then double back on a path that ran steeply upward to the top of the peak that loomed above the mine’s entrance. The maintenance crews who came out every so often to work on the radio tower or the solar array used ATVs for that leg of their journey. Thordis did it on Bildad, who turned out to be as sure-footed as might be expected of a horse who’d spent much of his life in the wild. Rufus and Carmelita trudged along behind, carrying the Nimrod containment device between them on a pole stuck through its top handle. When the top of the mountain came in view, Thordis rode on ahead, causing Rufus to feel a twinge of jealousy as to his formerly exclusive personal relationship with Bildad.

“How much does ol’ Nimrod weigh?” Rufus asked, shifting the pole on his shoulder.

“Sixty-five hundred and eighty grams,” came the answer from the other end of said pole.

Mere hours ago, this level of precision would have been startling to Rufus, but he had already seen enough of these falconry people to get the picture that they were a little different. He had to mentally convert six and a half kilograms to pounds, a skill he had developed in the army. It must be somewhere north of fourteen pounds.

Rufus shook his head. He might have whistled if his lips weren’t dry. “Don’t sound like much. But holding that on your arm for any length of time—” He risked looking straight at Carmelita. Deadpan, she flexed her bicep. As the tattoo rippled in the afternoon sun he saw traces of an older tattoo that had been covered up by the solid block of ink. Maybe in a few weeks, if she was still around, he’d ask her about that. For now he just tried to show due appreciation for Carmelita’s upper-body development without seeming weird about it.

“You got to keep her close into your body to support her weight,” she explained.

“Nimrod’s a female?”

“Yeah. Females are, like, twice the size of males.”

“Good to know.”

“But then you get hit in the face a lot.”

“Hit in the face?”

“When she moves her wings.”

“I guess every job has its downside.”

“What’s the downside of your job, Rufus?”

“I’m waiting for that shoe to drop.”

He had only been up to the summit a couple of times. Now he saw it through the fresh eyes of Thordis and Carmelita and he had to admit it was glorious. From here you could see much of the ranch, but the best view was south across the Rio Grande and into Mexico. The low sun had gone red orange. Everyone said Pina2bo would make for beautiful sunsets all around the world. He didn’t know whether it was really having an effect yet. Whatever the cause, the angle of it was bringing out the shapes of the landforms bracketing the river. These stood out all the more crisply for being almost totally bare of vegetation.

“Yippee—ki-yi-yay!” was the exuberant verdict of Thordis. Seeing it through her eyes Rufus understood how it must look like a western. Not one of your low-budget spaghetti westerns but a big-budget wide-screen feature.

“Beats the dump” was Carmelita’s more understated verdict as she got busy doing Nimrod stuff. Even a complete falconry ignoramus such as Rufus could guess that this was the best place in the world to be an eagle. Thordis dismounted to help out, and in short order they had Nimrod out of the box.

At first a hood covered Nimrod’s eyes. But after conducting some pre-flight checks and unwrapping some raw meat—apparently some sort of incentive program—they took the hood off to expose Nimrod’s eagle head, and her eagle eyes looked out to the south.

When T.R. had mentioned that an eagle was going to show up, Rufus’s mind had immediately gone to the image of a bald eagle. But Nimrod was a golden eagle: all different shades of brown, edged with gold where the sunlight caught it just so. Her beak was edged with bright yellow, which Rufus interpreted as lips. Her eyes were yellow. The scaly dinosaur skin covering her feet was yellow. From her toes sprouted steel-gray talons. The toe and the talon combined were as long as one of Rufus’s fingers.

Rufus convinced himself that the expression on Nimrod’s eagle face was one of profound interest. But probably eagles always looked that way. She whacked Carmelita in the face as she spread her wings to take off, and then she was airborne, finding a thermal almost immediately above the sunbaked slope to the south.

“If you look thataway,” Rufus said, making a blade of his hand and chopping it down along a certain azimuth, “you can see the parasails spiraling down and hitting the nets on the mesa.” From this distance they were no bigger than dust motes in a sunbeam, but once you focused on them the eye was drawn to their neat spacing and orderly movement.

Thordis and Carmelita didn’t respond. He glanced over and saw that they were having a private moment. So he turned his back on them. He’d noticed his phone buzzing a couple of times in the last few minutes, so he checked it.

> Shit’s getting real in the North Sea!

This was from Alastair. It must be the middle of the night where he was. He had added a link, which took Rufus to some kind of scientific site. There was a map of the water between Britain and the west coast of Europe. Not a fancy map but a plain-Jane one that put him in mind of military documents. Numbered dots were scattered across it. When he scrolled down it was all just tables of numbers.

> What am I looking at?

Alastair responded with a five-digit number. This matched one of the labeled dots in the North Sea, between Scotland and Norway. Rufus zoomed in on that and gave it a tap. The result was a spreadsheet-like table of numbers. Left to his own devices for a while, on a larger screen, Rufus might have been able to make sense of it. Up here in bright sun on a screen the size of his hand was a different story. He panned around and stumbled upon a graph. The graph sort of meandered up and down for a while, but trending generally upward. Then at the very end it zoomed up to a high spike and then flatlined.

His phone buzzed again and a message from Alastair showed up at the top of the screen:

> That was a weather buoy until fifteen minutes ago

> What is it now?

> A projectile.