At the very end of the journey, the railroad track and the road became one, a strip of pavement with embedded rails, as they funneled through a short tunnel that had been blasted through a rock spur. The spur had nearly vertical sides and served as a natural barrier between the northern expanse of the Bar S, which was mostly alluvial flatland, and more broken and rugged terrain beyond
that straddled the crest of the mountain range. Once they’d emerged from that tunnel—which the train passed through at no more than a brisk walking pace—they entered into a natural bowl, a few kilometers long, embraced by the primary crest of the mountains, which now loomed above them, and the smaller but more precipitous offshoot spur they’d just tunneled through. The railroad track curved round and sidled along the base of the spur before terminating. This was the end of the line. The curve enabled them all to peer forward out the windows and see that, ahead of them, the freight cars had come to a halt adjacent to various cargo handling facilities in what was apparently the main complex. This was underwhelming visually, but Saskia knew from satellite pictures that most of it was belowground. Separated from that complex by a stretch of open, uneven ground was a neat village of mobile homes, surrounded by a wall of shipping containers. It reminded Saskia of military outposts she’d visited in places such as Afghanistan.
“Welcome! We made it!” T.R. announced, and then paused for a brief round of polite applause. “You’ll notice a distinct lack of luxury accommodations. Or accommodation of any sort, really. That’s what this train is for! Not just to get y’all here, but to keep y’all comfy during your stay! For your staff, there’s plenty of space in yonder bunkhouse.” T.R. waved toward the village of mobile homes. “You are of course free to get out and walk around. Look for the individuals in the white cowboy hats! They are the good guys! And gals! You should know as much from the movies! They are here to help you and keep you safe from rattlesnakes, dehydration, hyperthermia, hypothermia, and other unique and special hazards of the Chihuahuan Desert.” Saskia looked around and noticed that several of the event staff had indeed put on white cowboy hats.
“Brown hats are ranch staff—also very helpful,” T.R. continued. “The guys and gals in the black hats are also here to keep you safe, in another sense which is perhaps hinted at by the color of their headgear. They are bad dudes and dudettes. They will not be bad to y’all, of course, but they will be bad in your service and for your protection
should any issue with trespassers of the two-legged sort arise. They are, as a rule, less approachable than the white hats or the brown hats. But you may certainly approach them if you need anything. Just don’t sneak up on them. They hate that.”
The Biggest Gun in the World was so big that it had its own elevator, shoehorned into a space between two of its barrels. The elevator could only accommodate three people in comfort. So T.R. did the tour in two shifts: first Sylvester and Michiel, and, an hour later, Bob and Saskia.
Only a few buildings on the whole site rose to more than a single story aboveground. The most prominent was the head frame: a term from the mining industry referring to the aboveground machinery that bestrode a mine shaft. It was maybe ten meters high and consisted largely of open steel framing through which large reels of cable, motors, and other lifting-and-hoisting sorts of gear were visible. Pipes and cables converged on it from other parts of the complex and plunged down into the shaft.
Of course you couldn’t dig a shaft without raking up the rock and dirt you were displacing. This material—“spoil”—had been distributed around the complex and used to buttress, or to completely bury, outlying facilities such as tanks, processing plants, and buildings that seemed to have a lot of expensive people in them （“command and control” in T.R.-speak）。 Without being terribly obvious about it, the designers had, in other words, hardened the site. Rufus, at a glance, had identified some of the spoil-piles as “revetments,” obliging Saskia to look up the word. It meant a sort of blast wall built around a potential target to protect from near misses by artillery. It didn’t take a military expert to know that a cruise missile could obliterate anything on the surface. But it seemed proof against small, furtive attacks such as bomb-bearing drones or mountaintop snipers. Large areas were screened by nets with strips of fabric woven through them. Their purpose wasn’t entirely clear to her, but they would definitely stop drones, provide much needed shade, and make things complicated for surveillance satellites.