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.