Termination Shock

Before mounting up for the first time, Rufus considered what the animal ought to be named. The Lone Ranger’s horse had been Silver, but this creature was mostly brown. He considered “Copper.” That, however, seemed like what a twelve-year-old girl would name her horse. Eventually he settled on Bildad, who in Moby-Dick was one of the three owners of the Pequod. In the Bible, he was one of the friends of Job, who came to him in the wilderness to lay a guilt trip on him.

T.R. had the habit, always surprising to Rufus, of shooting him a text message—usually swine- or drone-related—every couple of weeks. Most of these were just links or pictures. Rufus did not dare to suppose that this made him in any way special. He had sort of assembled the picture in his mind that he might be one of several hundred people in T.R.’s mental Rolodex who would occasionally be so favored, and that T.R. probably sent out dozens of such messages on every occasion when he got a snatch of time on the throne or whatever. Rufus was pretty sure that to send a whole lot of messages back the other way would get him blocked, or even fired. So he mostly kept his mouth shut. But a decent respect for another man’s property did place him under an obligation to document Bildad, so he fired off a couple of pictures detailing the brands, as well as a few more intended to convey the general idea that the animal was safe and well cared for at the marble mine. T.R. seemed pleased by that out of all proportion to the actual monetary value of one stray horse. Rufus remembered their conversation about the importance of having good people on the property who could make decisions and manage things, and he reckoned that this was an example of that, and that, to the extent T.R. ever thought of him at all, it was now in a favorable light.

All pretty normal as Texas ranch management went, but with T.R. there was always some kind of extra, weird twist. One day in early October the peace and quiet of the marble mine were shattered by the strains of “The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You,” which was the ringtone that Rufus had assigned to T.R., and only T.R. It was a video call and so Rufus propped his phone up against a stack of drone batteries on his worktable.

“I got a call from our Dutch friend,” T.R. announced.

“Which one?”

“The jet pilot.”

Rufus now had some cause to regret that he had turned on the video, because his heart started pounding and he was afraid that some consternation might be visible on his face. But if he was about to be fired for fornicating with the queen, there was really nothing he could do but take it like a man.

“How is she?”

“Fine. Sends her regards. Asked how you were doing.”

“Oh, that’s nice.”

“I filled her in. She came up with an idea.”

Just when he’d started to settle down, Rufus felt his face getting warm at this development. What possible ideas could Saskia be coming up with relating to Rufus? Did she want him back for more? Or did she hate him?

But it was nothing of the sort. “You ever see eagles up there?”

“You mean, like F-15s?”

“No, Red. Fucking eagles. The large birds.”

“Plenty of buzzards.” Rufus was visualizing a particularly energetic group of them who had lately been subsisting on the corpse of the boar that had attacked Bildad.

“I know that,” T.R. said, somewhat exasperated. “It’s Texas. There’s gonna be buzzards. I’m not talking about those. I’m talking about eagles.”

“I guess I’ve seen a few. More down toward the river.”

“Well, a few years back, the Dutch had a program to train eagles to take out drones. They were worried about airspace security at Schiphol. Figured they could train eagles to pounce on any drones and take ’em down before they got sucked into a jet engine or whatever.”

“Did it work?”

“No. Well, sort of. The eagles attacked the drones. But they were hard to control. I mean, they’re eagles. Animal rights activists lost their minds, of course. But at the end of the day . . .”

“They just didn’t need those darn eagles.”

T.R. nodded. “There’s other ways to take a drone down, as you probably know.”

“Sure,” Rufus said, “if you know it’s there.”

“Right, and at Schiphol fucking Airport you’re gonna know, it’s gonna stand out like a murder hornet on a pool table.”

“Not so easy here,” Rufus pointed out.

“Exactly, Red. Anyway, Her Majesty, with her interest in aviation, had a soft spot for that program and stayed in touch with some of the falconers who got let go when it was shitcanned.”

“Falconers?”

“Folks who know how to wrangle these big birds. I guess ‘Eaglers’ would be a better term.”

“Are there a lot of out-of-work Dutch falconers?”

“There’s at least one,” T.R. said, “but she’s not out of work anymore, ’cause I just hired her.”

While Rufus was absorbing that, T.R. was fielding an interruption from someone off camera, an aide or something who was in the car with him. “Okay, I stand corrected,” he said. “She ain’t Dutch. She’s Icelandic.”