At Pina2bo proper there were the kinds of jobs typical of the oil business and of the chemical industry downstream of it. Unloading bulk sulfur from hopper cars and melting it was child’s play, mostly automated. Natural gas came in via pipeline from wells elsewhere on the ranch and was either shunted directly to the guns, or diverted to the cracking facility, where hydrogen gas—along with a concomitant amount of carbon black—was produced. This was a significant piece of infrastructure, but being a new facility it too was mostly automated, and controlled by engineers from the same bunker where they operated the gun. Likewise, the process of prepping the shells and slapping on the nose cone and sabot, mating it with the pre-packed parasail, running pre-launch checks on the electronics, filling it with hot sulfur, and putting it on the shell hoist—that was all done by robots. So one of the surprises for Rufus during these early days of wandering around and getting to know the operation was just how lightly staffed the actual gun complex was.
That—plus a few mission control types keeping an eye on things in Houston—was the operational side of Pina2bo. Everything else was classed as support. The ranch was so remote and the conditions so inhospitable that it might as well have been on Mars. So “support” had to include things like: Where could employees get food? How could they put gasoline or diesel in the tanks of their vehicles? What would they do if they had a medical problem? In that way it was different from an urban company where the city would just supply all that. It was, though, perfectly familiar to the oil business, where it was common for workers to live on offshore rigs or other remote installations for months at a time. So that
stuff was all subbed out to companies that simply did that kind of thing. Roughly speaking, Rufus guessed that there was one support worker for every one on the operational side. With the exception, that is, of security, which was technically under Support but for various good reasons was a whole department unto itself.
By and large, the ranch as a whole felt like a fracking operation out in the Permian Basin or North Dakota or some such, which was a way of saying that the employees tended to be young single males who lived in trailers and got around in pickup trucks. The trailers were clustered in residential compounds spaced along the Arc, which was what they called the approximately circular road that ran around Pina2bo from about nine o’clock in the west to about four o’clock in the southeast, at a radius that kept the sonic booms from being too obnoxious. The missing southern part of the Arc, from four around to nine, was unlikely ever to be completed because of mountain ranges and the Rio Grande. Anyway there were three of these residential compounds. Two of them were 100 percent bachelor. They were called simply Nine and Four, and they were at the ends of the Arc. At the third, women and families were part of the mix as well. That one was called High Noon, or just Noon, and it lay along the main road-and-railroad artery leading from the ranch gate down to Pina2bo.
Spread over all this as a separate world unto itself was Security, which seemed opaque to Rufus, and was probably meant to be. There was an over-arching contract with a big international private firm that, he had to assume, kept tabs on threats from a distance just by monitoring the Internet, looking at remote imaging data, and conducting private investigations. Another firm basically did what rent-a-cops did on corporate campuses: performed routine patrols, checked credentials at gates, investigated calls. Basically they handled the 99 percent of security-related activities that did not require a lot of training, decision-making, or acceptance of physical risk. Their job was to be visible and call for help. They wore brown hats.
The other 1 percent of such situations were handled by a collection of individuals who were all employed by a company T.R.
had set up called Black Hat Practical Operations and who by and large were some combination of weird, dangerous, and expensive. Rufus was one of those. As far as he could make out, this operation was more French Foreign Legion than SEAL Team Six. It was motley and international. Of course, there were American ex–Special Forces types, but he heard plenty of accents that were not of this continent. He was not an expert judge of such things but he was pretty sure some South Africans were in the mix—at one point he heard one of them talking on the phone in a language that sounded a lot like what Saskia and Willem and Amelia spoke, and he guessed that what he was hearing was Afrikaans. But they were by no means all white English speakers.
The overall boss of the Black Hats was an American man of about sixty （albeit the type of sixty-year-old who seemed to spend half of his waking hours doing push-ups） named Colonel Tatum. He was not, of course, actually in the military and so the “Colonel” was more of an honorific nickname. He was an Anglo Texan, but apparently not the sort who hated nonwhite folk—or if he was, he did a good job of hiding it during his interview with Rufus. Obviously T.R. had briefed Colonel Tatum and everyone understood each other.