Termination Shock

Eight Months Later

There was an old joke about a man who is driving somewhere with an accordion in the back of his car. He parks the car outside a diner in a sketchy part of town and goes in for dinner. When he comes out he sees that the rear window of his car has been smashed out. He runs up to it and discovers that, while he wasn’t looking, some miscreant has thrown a second accordion in there and made a clean getaway.

During Rufus’s past life trying to operate a farm, he’d learned that this actually explained a lot about farm and ranch life. As soon as someone found out you had fifty acres, they’d remember a nephew with a dog that had outgrown his apartment, or nipped a child, and suggest that your farm would be the perfect place for it to live. Or they’d start talking about an old car that was taking up space in their garage that they’d been meaning to fix up one day and just needed to park somewhere for a spell—and a car wouldn’t really take up that much space on fifty acres, would it?

This, more than anything else, explained the condition of a great many farms and ranches Rufus had seen in his day. You started with good and simple intentions, and a couple of decades later you were living in a slum/junkyard/menagerie. Unless you drew a hard line and risked getting a reputation as a difficult person.

But the marble mine was not Rufus’s personal property and so he didn’t have final say over such matters. When word got around among Flying S Ranch staff that he was looking after Bildad, and that he had set up horse-related infrastructure, such as a water tank and hay storage, before he knew it he had acquired another horse—a senior citizen named Goldie—and two mules, Trucker and Patch. It was explained, by ranch staff who towed these animals up the road in trailers, that livestock had to be redistributed around the property from time to time as various stables and other facilities were consolidated and rearranged. It was a strictly temporary measure.

Rufus knew perfectly well that this was a polite falsehood. But he said nothing, construing it as job security and as an opening to file requests for additional goods and services.

The presence of all these animals, and the scent of hay, attracted a mustang whom Rufus suspected of having been part of Bildad’s herd back in the day. He named him Peleg, another Moby-Dick name. But everyone mispronounced it as Pegleg and took it to be a reference to the white sock on one of the animal’s forelegs. Rufus soon grew weary of correcting people and of explaining that the character with the peg leg had been Ahab, so Pegleg it was. Thordis seduced him into the fold with hay and Rufus settled him down to the point where a large animal veterinarian was able to knock him out and cut off his balls, which had been causing trouble. After a short period of recovery Pegleg became a model citizen, and Rufus got him reconciled to bridle and saddle.

What was true of horses and mules was apparently true of eagles. The facilities that these birds required, the frequent deliveries of raw meat and exotic veterinary supplies, meant that if you were going to have one eagle you might as well have several. Which generally meant that you also had to welcome the falconers who came with them, since they tended to bond with individual humans.

Thordis apparently had her own personal text message hotline to T.R., a distinction she shared with Rufus and, apparently, about one thousand other people. And, like T.R., or anyone allowed to remain on that list for very long, she knew how to use it: infrequently and always with good news or interesting new developments that would brighten the great man’s day or pique his interest when he scrolled past these little gems while sitting on the throne or waiting for a meeting to begin. The upshot was that, for reasons that were never quite explained to Rufus, a Mongolian woman named Tsolmon showed up with a golden eagle named Genghis who was half as big as she was. Three weeks later they were joined by Piet, a Dutchman who had worked on the original Schiphol Airport project. With him was Skippy, another golden eagle who was actually named after the airport.

All this coincided with a phase during which Rufus was asking himself what in God’s name he was even doing here. He had long ago got the picture that T.R. was the living embodiment of what was now denoted ADHD. He went off on tangents, a small percentage of which made money. It was just the survival into modern times of old-time wildcatters running around Texas drilling wells and hoping to get lucky. Sooner or later these initiatives came under the heading of “special projects” in his bureaucracy and then continued to be funded in some irregular and hard-to-understand way until someone got around to pulling the plug—probably while T.R. was looking the other way. As long as Special Projects were suffered to remain in existence they could bang into each other in the dark and swap DNA. Setting Rufus up as the Drone Ranger had been one of those. The only thing that had come of it so far was some improvements to the marble mine and the rescue and rehabilitation of a stray horse with a market value of one dollar. It would be way overstating the case to claim that T.R. had any kind of coherent plan for bringing the falconers and the eagles up to the marble mine. But Thordis must be telling him something he enjoyed hearing. Rufus didn’t know whether Tsolmon and Piet were being paid, or simply allowed to be on the property. Clearly it suited them. Tsolmon wasn’t much of a talker but she obviously knew her way around horses. So that was a load off his mind. Piet, though probably in his forties, had the physique of a fifteen-year-old circus acrobat and was a fervid practitioner of the sport of rucking, which apparently was nothing more than running around with a heavy weight strapped to one’s back. The general point was that neither of the new arrivals caused any trouble, and it cost almost nothing to keep them alive.

Rufus therefore came around to the view that his employment on the ranch was likely to be terminated at any moment without warning or explanation, but that while he was waiting for the axe to fall he might as well try to make himself useful to the falconers, who seemed to have momentum within what might optimistically be called the organization of T.R. This meant dropping the pretense that he could actually do anything useful, security-wise, with drones, over and above what Black Hat was already doing. Thenceforth he put all his drone-related know-how to work in the service of the Special Project that accounted for Skippy, Nimrod, and Genghis being here: the idea—pioneered years ago by Piet, developed further by Thordis, and still getting a bit of side-eye from Carmelita and Tsolmon—that trained eagles could be used to defend against hostile drones. The Schiphol project had been shitcanned partly because of protests from animal rights activists. Such people were, to put it mildly, neither common nor welcome on the Flying S, or any other West Texas, ranch.

First, though, Rufus had to settle some misgivings that had been rumbling in the back of his mind since the moment on top of the mountain when Nimrod’s hood had been removed and he had realized that she was a golden, as opposed to a bald, eagle. At that instant this whole thing had suddenly turned into a family affair. For complicated reasons, he had to go back to Lawton and make sure he wasn’t burning any bridges by taking part in a weaponized eagle program. So he took a couple of days off, got into his truck, and drove five hundred miles east-northeast to the place where he had been born, and, up to the age of eighteen, raised.

There was the usual amount of driving down streets that he had known since boyhood, and thereby having random memories triggered. Lawton and the immense army base of Fort Sill were wrapped around each other like two wrestlers on a mat. Much of the town’s population were ex-, active, or future army. There were a few carefully delineated pockets of squalor, and the odd person who didn’t mow his lawn, but those only emphasized the place’s overall windswept tidiness.

It was a roomy place where all the development had long since gone over to modern commercial big-box strips. The only change since his childhood was that old signs had been ripped out and replaced with electronic ones on which managers could advertise the latest specials or job openings from the air-conditioned comfort of their offices. These provided a weird sort of digital peephole into their minds. A bakery was looking to hire a dependable baker. Two miles down the road, an auto parts store had a job opening for a dependable sales associate. Dependability was a major preoccupation of Lawton’s managerial class. Rufus could see people walking, bicycling, or skateboarding up and down the same streets who, it could be inferred, had failed the dependability test.

Young Rufus might have assumed that this drought of dependability was a problem peculiar to Lawton, had he not joined the army and become aware of the fact that it was a worldwide phenomenon. If you did happen to be one of those rare people blessed or cursed—take your pick—with dependability, there were opportunities everywhere. The world’s howling need for it would suck you into all kinds of situations that might look peachy if you had just fallen off the Lawton turnip truck but that, in the light of experience, probably needed to be vetted a little more carefully before saying yes. Which was part of why he was here. T.R. had checked the “dependable” box next to Rufus’s name. Rufus now had better keep his wits about him.

Despite carrying a tribal ID card, he had always refrained from calling himself a Comanche. It seemed presumptuous, and it put him at risk of being called a Pretendian, which was absolutely not a label you ever wanted to have slapped on you. And yet that branch of his family had always been more welcoming and, for lack of a more devious way of saying it, loving, in an unconditional way, than any of the others, whenever he came around to visit. Possibly because he didn’t come around that often.

He drove north out of town past the Comanche Reformed Church. This massive red-rock pile had always been there. It was where he had first heard names like Bildad and Peleg being read out from the pulpit. But recent developments in his life had made him aware that it had been founded by Dutch missionaries. So it was technically an offshoot of the Dutch Reformed Church, which in a roundabout way was the same church Saskia belonged to. He’d been to his share of christenings, weddings, and funerals in the place. But he had never been aware of its connection to the Netherlands, and certainly could never have imagined the whole Saskia thing, which as time went on seemed more and more like a dream or hallucination to him.

North of the military base the country became a little more rolling, with a good number of small trees casting shade on the ground but still letting enough light through that grass could grow and provide grazing for cattle and horses. The grid of streets was broken up by rivers, hills, and lakes. Roads rambled wherever the rambling was good. Strung along them like beads were the hundred-and-sixty-acre parcels known as allotments.

The allotment now controlled by his grandmother Mary was a bit smaller because part of it had been submerged in an artificial lake some decades ago, but on balance that wasn’t such a bad thing because lakefront property was worth more. Like many of these things its ownership had, after a few generations, become splintered among a couple of dozen descendants of the original allotee. Making decisions had become difficult. Part of the property had been leased out as a sod farm. Some of the lower-lying ground near the water had become overgrown with juniper, cedar, and mesquite—all invasive species that back in the old days had been kept at bay by grazing bison. Rufus, fifteen years ago, had contributed to an effort whereby Mary and three of her other descendants had bought out most of the other co-owners. He’d also showed up with a chain saw on weekends to help clear away the unwanted brush along the lake. Now it was an RV park with seventy-five spaces. About half those were occupied by permanent residents, mostly military retirees with a weakness for fishing. The other half were available for short stays by transient vacationers. An L-shaped arrangement of mobile homes, spliced together with a prefab steel building, served both as front office and as a residence for Mary and some of her descendants—aunts, uncles, and cousins to Rufus. To get there, you had to drive along the edge of the former sod farm, which had now been fenced and turned over to three horses and a donkey. The horses were said to be descendants of some that had survived the depredations of the U.S. Army during the Red River War. Unable to defeat the Comanches on the battlefield, they had killed all the bison and drove herds of captured horses over cliffs, reducing the Indians to starvation and thus forcing them into captivity at Fort Sill.

“Weh! Weh!” was how they greeted Rufus, a word meaning “Come on inside!” It almost seemed as though they were expecting him, which made him wonder if he’d been spotted by some cousin while pumping gas in Lawton, and his arrival heralded on social media. Once he was through the door of the mobile home, all further conversation was in English. With one exception: his grandmother always addressed him as Eka, which was simply the Comanche word for Red. His hair had been red-tinged as a boy, and no visit was complete without her standing up on tiptoe and reaching up to tug at his locks, pretending to inspect for red roots.

It was a long reach. Like many of that tribe she was sturdy, but had not been of great stature even in her prime. Now she was pushing ninety. To find a genetic basis for the comparative tallness of Rufus, it was necessary to look elsewhere in the family tree. Perhaps to his great-great-grandfather Hopewell (though no one had ever measured him) but more likely to Bob Staley, his maternal grandfather, who had been some combination of white and Osage. And the Osage were as famous for their large stature as the Comanches were for the opposite; it was rumored that if the Osage branch of the family were traced back far enough it would include Heavy Runners, warriors who could chase down a Comanche pony in the middle of a fight, grab it by the tail, and bring it to the ground. For that reason Comanches, preparing to fight Osages, would bob or tie up their horses’ tails.

Big Bob had been stationed in Korea with the U.S. Marines during and after the war there. He had married a younger Korean woman and brought her back to the States, eventually settling in the vicinity of Fort Sill where there were enough Koreans to prevent his bride from feeling completely isolated. Their oldest daughter had met, and briefly and unhappily married, Rufus’s dad. That whole generation was a little bit of a sparse patch in the family tree, though. Rufus’s mom had died young in a car crash and his dad, as the polite euphemism went, “was not in the picture”; a charming pathological gambler, he had faded away, when Rufus had been in his teens, as a steadily widening circle of family and acquaintances had called him on his bullshit. All of which helped to explain why Rufus had simply joined the army upon graduation from high school, and why he had completed his twenty years’ service while still a young and healthy man.

On the Korean/Osage/white side—his mother’s branch of the family—there had been a general turn toward extremely fervent Christianity and the production of a lot of cousins Rufus didn’t know very well, since their incessant Jesus talk was so tiresome. By process of elimination, then, when he returned to this part of the country, the people he was seeing were his ninety-year-old grandmother, Mary, and the offspring of his two aunts on that side, who were enmeshed by many family and social ties in the KCA or Kiowa/Comanche/Apache network around Lawton.

An impromptu barbecue was fomented in the L-shaped compound as word got out that Rufus had slid into town. Various shirttail relations and friends began to pull up. Accustomed to solitude, Rufus had to suppress a fight-or-flight reaction as one person after another came up to interact with him socially. Most of these exchanges were either (1) rote friendly joshing about Rufus’s unusual looks, stature, and way of life, frequently softened by the exclamation “kee!” meaning “not!” or “just kidding!” or (2) congratulating him in a more serious way about his destruction of Snout. This feat—minus the part of the story where a business jet did most of the work for him—had somehow made its way into the oral tradition. Everyone, of course, knew the first part of that story: what had happened to Adele. Word seemed to have got around that Snout was no more and that Rufus had something to do with that. People had filled in the missing details with a conjectural story line that made Rufus out to be pretty heroic. Explaining what had actually happened was, of course, completely out of the question, and so all Rufus could do was nod and accept their warm admiration.

It all delayed the real conversation that Rufus wanted to have, which was with Mary. Which meant also having it with his aunt Beth, who had become the chief Mary caretaker and living repository of Mary lore. But eventually when the barbecue broke up, everyone went home, and the younger kids were in bed, he found himself sitting around the remains of a campfire with Mary and Beth in the cool of the evening. And then he laid the whole thing out, as much as he could without violating his NDA.

“I don’t want to burn any bridges with y’all or get mixed up in anything y’all would consider sacrilegious,” Rufus said, where “y’all” here basically meant that portion of his surviving family who lived around Lawton and identified as Comanche. “But it looks like I’m getting involved in this project that involves eagles.”

“Like the fighter planes?” Beth asked.

“No, ma’am. Birds. Some falconers—eagle tamers, basically—from different parts of the world, all come together to work on this thing I can’t talk about in West Texas. But these eagles have been brought up around humans and trained to use their eagle superpowers in certain ways—”

“Bald eagles?” Mary demanded to know.

“No. Golden.”

Mary nodded decisively. “Good.”

Beth was nodding too. “Because fuck those things.”

What was being referred to here was a long history of ambivalent feelings toward U.S. patriotic imagery, with bald eagles and the Stars and Stripes at the top of the list. Lots of Indians in this part of the country had served in the military and spent their careers saluting that flag, but they were all perfectly aware of the fact that effigies of bald eagles, and the red, white, and blue, were the last things that many of their ancestors had ever seen.

“That’s my understanding,” Rufus said hastily. “That when Comanches related to eagles it was always goldens. Balds were not part of the picture for us.”

Mary nodded. Beth exchanged a few muttered words with her, including pia huutsu, which Rufus was pretty sure was the word for bald eagle, and kwihnai, which he knew for sure was the word for goldens. Then they looked at him expectantly.

“But that don’t clear the picture up for me, ma’am,” Rufus continued. “I get that y’all got no time for pia huutsu and that y’all have reverence for kwihnai. But that might just make the situation worse, if you see what I’m saying, if I am mixed up in a project where the kwihnai are being, for lack of a better term, used.”

Beth totally got the picture and nodded. She discussed it with Mary for a minute or two in a rapid-fire mix of drawling Oklahoma English and Comanche.

“Our ancestors never did what these falconers do. Training them that way. We just captured them and held them captive,” Mary said. “For eagle medicine—because, you know, for some people, their personal medicine was eagle medicine—and for feathers.”

“Right! So do you think it’s okay to—”

“You said these falconers came from all over the world,” Beth said. “None of these people are Comanches, right?”

“Of course not.”

“So we don’t really have an opinion as to whether they should train golden eagles. It’s a different group of people, different religion, none of our dang business.”

“Yeah, but I’m involved and I don’t want y’all to think I’m being disrespectful.”

“What are these kwihnai being used for?” Mary asked. “What are they doing?”

“Catching rabbits?” Beth asked. “Isn’t that what falconers usually do?”

“Fighting,” Rufus said. “Fighting off invaders, I guess you could say.”

“Oh, that’s no problem then!” said his grandmother.

There had been some concern that spinning rotors might injure the birds’ talons. Piet, like Tsolmon, wasn’t much of a conversationalist, but it was easy to draw him out on this topic. He encouraged Rufus to reach out and grab Skippy’s perch and compare the size of his hand to the eagle’s foot. If you included the long curving talons, the bird’s digits were as long as Rufus’s fingers.

Not that Rufus would have relished shoving his hand into the rotors of a drone in flight. The blades of those things were extremely lightweight, but they spun quickly. They didn’t pack enough of a punch to break a finger, but they could draw blood, and the impact hurt.

He now perceived an opportunity to be of service. Actually wrangling eagles was not a thing that he was ever going to learn. It was a whole world of fussy veterinary procedures, weird social man/bird interaction, and messing around with small dead raw animals that did not appeal to him and that he never would have become good at. Even if he were to somehow master all those skills, the fact was that the eagles they actually had at the Marble Mine had all bonded with specific human beings who were not Rufus.

But if the goal of this Special Project was to reboot the canceled Schiphol Airport Eagle vs. Drone project, then there were ways he could be of service. First of all by building practice drones, the sole purpose of which was to be ripped out of the air by eagles, using rotors with pivoting blades that would be less likely to damage the feet of an attacking eagle. These would make it possible for the falconers to train their eagles safely.

In actual practice, though, it wouldn’t make sense to assume that the bad guys—whoever they might be—would be so considerate as to build eagle-friendly equipment. So the second part of Rufus’s work was to construct eagle gauntlets: lightweight, hard-shelled gloves, like those on a suit of medieval armor, that could be slipped over the birds’ feet and lower legs to take the impact from spinning drone rotors. Once those had brought the lightweight blades to a dead stop, the eagles’ talons could close in around the body of the drone, the three front toes raking it back so that the hallux—the huge talon on the bird’s “heel”—could close in, crushing and piercing the drone’s hull just like the rib cage of a hapless bunny.

In the era before 3D printers, inventing eagle gauntlets would have been difficult, but now it was easy. Better yet, it gave him an excuse to purchase a fancier 3D printer that was capable of making stronger, lighter parts. Rufus was gradually getting clued in to the fact that dudes like T.R. actually liked it when you spent money, provided you did it within reasonable bounds. It proved that you were doing something.

In other words, he dropped, or at least set to one side, the pretense that he was actually patrolling the airspace of the Flying S Ranch with a personal fleet of drones and threw himself full-time into helping Thordis, Carmelita, Tsolmon, and Piet train their eagles. In military parlance, they were the Blue Team, preparing to defend the ranch against possible invaders, and he was the Red Team—a simulated opponent that the Blue Team could train against. And since all of them called him by his nickname of Red, it all seemed to fit. It gave him a story he could tell himself, as he sat down there in the cool recesses of the marble mine repairing drones torn apart by enraged birds of prey, as to why this all made sense. A story he could also relate to T.R., if T.R. ever asked. But he never did.