“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.”
NEDERLAND
The last two hours of the flight to Schiphol featured some of the worst turbulence Saskia had ever experienced. She very much wished she was in the business jet’s cockpit, where she would have enjoyed a better view of the horizon and some sense of being in control. The great circle route from Texas scissored across a storm that was pouring down the gap between Norway and Britain and scheduled to hit the Netherlands coast early in the morning local time. Finally they ranged out ahead of it, though, and made the final descent and landing in calm air. She was glad she’d taken the advice to advance the timing of their departure from the airstrip at Flying S.
Queen Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia passed through immigration formalities like anybody else inside the main terminal at Schiphol. This reminded her that they had never formally entered the United States. Had Willem somehow smoothed that over? Or was it still a dangling loose end? If so, did it really matter now that they were back on Dutch soil? These questions caused her to review in her mind all that had happened in the last week, beginning with the pigs on the runway and culminating with totally satisfactory casual sex with Rufus last night on an antique railway carriage in a high desert valley in the wilds of West Texas. Walking through Schiphol, dazed from jet lag and still queasy from turbulence, surrounded by Dutch voices and the familiar reality of her homeland, Queen Frederika found it almost impossible to believe that all that had really happened.
Within a few minutes they were in a car headed toward The Hague, and by two in the morning Saskia was back in the familiar confines of Huis ten Bosch. Lotte had already gone to sleep. On Saskia’s biological clock it was early evening. Moreover, she had made the tactical error of napping on the plane. She took a
stroll around the grounds. Stars and a half-moon were visible in the south, but the northern half of the sky was a dark indigo blur as clouds, invisible in the dark, swept across it in advance of the summer storm. A faint hiss, building toward a roar, reached her ears from the ancient forest all around as the tops of the great trees, thick with late summer foliage, began to seethe and toss in the rising wind. Part of Saskia just wanted to pull up a chair and sit in the open and let the weather wash over her, but finally she was beginning to feel a little drowsy. She went inside and climbed at last into her own bed.
If it made sense to speak of a typical disaster, then this sounded as if it had been one of those until about halfway through breakfast. Wind and waves had first struck Frisia in the north and then worked their way down the coast. The occasional rogue wave had overtopped a dike, but none of the coastal defenses had been breached. Here and there, trees were down, roads awash, trucks and caravans flipped on their sides. To all appearances, it looked like Saskia would be headed to wherever her presence might actually be helpful. This, however, probably meant simply waiting until tomorrow. Showing up right on the heels of an active disaster just got in the way of relief efforts and made it look like she was pandering for a photo op.
Apparently she had slept through a loud crack that had raised a minor security alarm until the cause had been identified as a large bough—itself the size of a mature tree—snapping off a big oak a hundred meters outside the security fence. Plans were being made for her to walk out there with Lotte in an hour or so and be photographed marveling at it.
She was reviewing all this with Willem and other members of her staff when Lotte came down for breakfast. All the staff members broke off and quietly made themselves scarce as mother and daughter greeted each other with somewhat more than the usual amount of hugging and smooching. For the last couple of years, relations between queen and princess had been not exactly frosty, but distant and maybe even a little prickly in a way that was not