The sun had hove up over the ridge during all this and felt warm and welcome on his skin for about ten seconds before turning unpleasantly hot. As long as he was stopped anyway, Rufus opened up the saddlebag where he had stashed his earthsuit and changed into its under-layer, which as far as he could tell was a glorified spandex bodysuit. It was khaki, so it wouldn’t stand out too bad in the desert, but it would be going too far to call it camouflage. He put on a white broad-brimmed hat to protect his head and then got “strapped,” to use Carmelita’s terminology: a semi-automatic pistol on his hip and a pump shotgun slung over his shoulder on a strap pendulous and gleaming with extra shells. He had the idea that such a weapon might be capable of taking down drones. If it worked on clay pigeons . . .
Fussing with these things was one of those deals where the longer it took, the longer it took. Between that and the slowness with which the three falconers were obliged to travel, Rufus began to feel that they were terribly behind schedule and that they had wasted the cool part of the day. He couldn’t believe, in retrospect, that he had contemplated grabbing a couple of hours’ sleep last night.
Finally he climbed back up into the saddle and began to ride Pegleg toward the Biggest Gun in the World.
By the time he was, at long last, able to lengthen his stride down into the flat between him and the big gun, Laks was in a quite ambivalent frame of mind about the whole drone thing. On the one
hand, this whole operation would have been unthinkable without them. On the other hand, batteries. The big drone had been forced to land well short of its objective because it was low on batteries, and this had led to knock-on effects as the smaller drones escorting him had run low on juice in the dark. Several of the ones that still worked had then been spent on the weird blond hiker, leaving Laks bereft of air cover. So he’d been ordered to sit on his ass for a while as a couple of mothership drones spread their photovoltaic wings in the sun and recharged their broods.
On the other, other hand, he’d made an honest effort to read some military history, since it seemed he was bound for a military career, and found it to be a whole lot of repetitive accounts of armies running out of things. Usually energy. Whether that meant food for troops, grass for horses, or fuel for trucks. Electrons for batteries was just the modern equivalent of that. Hitler’s invasion of Russia had stalled in the dead of winter, in a place from which the Germans could actually see Moscow. Now, in the dead of the Texas summer, India’s invasion of the Flying S Ranch was stalled at a place where Laks could see the huge flash suppressors on the gun’s six barrels, protruding from a lake of camouflage netting. Choppers and planes were beginning to cross high overhead as word apparently got out that something bad was happening here.
To the extent Laks understood the plan, anyone who looked down from those planes and choppers would see a congregation of ranch personnel all together in the residential part of the valley, and it would be understood that—for their own protection, of course—they were being temporarily detained there while the Indian military conducted a “climate peacekeeping” mission—the smallest and deftest of surgical strikes—at the gun complex. Which was Laks’s job. In his mind’s eye he reviewed the instructions from the most recent PowerPoint. He was to hike to the “head frame,” which was easy to find; he could see that already. At ground level there would be a door to a lift. The lift ran down a deep shaft into the ground, where the guts of the gun were protected beneath hundreds of meters of rock. His job was to get the heavy briefcase down to the bottom of that shaft. If the lift was
operating, he could just walk into it and hit the “down” button. However, this was deemed the unlikeliest of scenarios. The shaft, according to their intelligence, was a chimney, open at the top. It was cluttered with equipment, but not so cluttered he couldn’t simply drop the briefcase down it and let gravity handle the rest.
That done, he was supposed to just travel upwind as fast as he could manage.
Laks would have to have been an exceptionally dense and slow-witted fellow not to have asked himself the obvious question: Am I carrying a nuclear weapon on my back? He wasn’t sure how small you could actually make such things. He’d heard of backpack nukes and suitcase nukes. This thing was smaller yet. A briefcase. And it felt like most of it consisted of lead. Not much spare room on the inside, then.
His mind circled around it, considering various possibilities, as he just sat there on the ground waiting for batteries to charge. It was a beautiful place, in its way. Pretty quiet, since not much was alive. Lizards began to come out and dart around. Far away on an opposite slope he could see a brown dog. No, of course that would be a coyote. There were a few birds hopping and flitting about. A screech high overhead drew his gaze up into the sky. An eagle, or at least, some kind of big raptor, soaring on a thermal high above the flats beyond Bunkhouse. Laks leaned back and propped himself up on his elbows, to enjoy a better view. The eagle banked round once, twice, then folded its wings and went into a power dive. Before it reached its prey it disappeared from view behind a rise. Must be a bad morning for some poor gopher or whatever it was eagles feasted on in these parts.