Piet’s ruck on tonight’s trek consisted of an earthsuit and a few liters of water. He departed after a briefing with the other falconers about the idiosyncrasies of Skippy. Skippy was chilling out in her box unaware of these goings-on, but when she awoke she’d find herself being handled by humans to whom she was not as accustomed as she was to Piet. Overhearing this conversation Rufus could tell it was mostly about Piet working through his misgivings and perhaps grief wasn’t too strong of a word re being separated from Skippy for a few hours. Duly reassured by the other falconers, he chugged a liter of water, shouldered his pack, and jogged off down the road. Rufus had equipped him with a revolver, not for humans but for feral swine. As soon as he broke free from the confines of the canyon’s nearly vertical walls, about a mile down the road, he would cut up into the lower slopes of the arc of mountains that embraced Pina2bo and traverse that until he came in view of the gun complex, probably around sunrise. He would scout things out, try to get a sense of what was happening, and try to link up with the others—in person if that was possible, using mirror flashes otherwise.
Hot-wiring the earthsuits went fast once Rufus worked out the procedure. He had the notion he’d make everything ready during the wee hours, then catch a couple of hours of shut-eye, setting his alarm for a four A.M. departure. Then he realized he had no way of setting an alarm. All his timepieces were electronic. He
had never owned a mechanical clock or watch in his life. If he had a star chart, he’d be able to estimate the time from the elevations of astronomical bodies, but you couldn’t do that while you were asleep. And the only way he knew to obtain a star chart was to download it from the Internet.
So he just stayed awake. Which, to be honest, he probably would have done anyway. The more he thought this thing through, the more obvious it was that Big Fish was going to have to do whatever he was going to do sooner rather than later. Might have done it already. Because it just wasn’t going to take that long for some kind of reaction from Black Hat, or from the cops. And when it came to that, the only way for India to hold them at bay was going to involve hostages. Such as Saskia.
“We should just leave,” he announced. “As soon as we’re ready.” He stood up from his soldering table, having finished with the last of the earthsuits. His eyes were still adjusting to the dark. With great care he walked, planting one foot at a time, toward the place a hundred feet away where Thordis, Carmelita, and Tsolmon had been working with Bildad, Pegleg, and the mules Trucker and Patch. And what he saw there was testimony to the power of something that Rufus had never really got the hang of: working in a coordinated fashion with other human beings. In his personal experience, this had always been pure foolishness, because you had to get them to do what you wanted them to do. And getting other people to do what you wanted them to do had, for Rufus, always been a sort of black art. Not worth the trouble of learning. In the army, they had people for that. Whole echelons of people.
But these three women might as well have been of a different species. Working quietly and assiduously while he’d been busy with his soldering iron, they had simply got it all done. The boxes containing Nimrod, Skippy, and Genghis were perched on the horses’ and mules’ croups. Looked like a bumpy ride to Rufus, but what did he know about eagles and their ways? If home for you was a tangle of sticks in the top of a tree on the edge of a cliff in the mountains, why, maybe riding on a mule’s ass was a Sealy Posturepedic.
And they’d packed all the other stuff too, looked like. Rufus was about to ask them if they had plenty of water but thought better of it since it would border on insulting.
Carmelita came out to meet him as he approached. “We decided we have to do it,” she announced.
“Why?” Rufus responded. “If I may ask.”
“For the profession.”
“The profession of falconry?”
“Yeah. If an opportunity to do something was presented to us like this and we just said ‘Naah’—”
“How could you look other falconers in the eye after that?”
“Yeah.”
“Anyone have any idea what time it is?”
“One fifty-six,” said Carmelita, checking a mechanical watch on her wrist.
“Let’s saddle up.”
“We’re ready. Are you?” Carmelita looked him up and down. “I was expecting you to be more strapped.”
Rufus had heard the term in old rap music. “You are referring to guns,” he said.