Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

“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.”

“There ain’t a lot of work for falconers in Iceland,” Rufus said, thinking out loud, “so she worked on this Dutch project for a spell and then got laid off. But Saskia still has her on speed dial.”

“Thordis, for that is her name, is in love with one Carmelita, a falconer in SoCal who has had her fill of hanging around garbage dumps.”

“Why does Carmelita hang around garbage dumps?”

“That’s where the work is. Crows go to dumps and pick over the discarded food, then drop chicken bones and whatnot on housing developments miles away. Carmelita gets paid, by homeowners associations and real estate developers, to use falcons to chase away the crows.”

“Well, I can see how that would get old.”

“I need you to go down to the airstrip tomorrow noon and pick up Thordis and Carmelita and Nimrod.”

“Nimrod?” To Rufus this was a Moby-Dick kind of name, right up there with Bildad.

“An eagle. Don’t worry, Nimrod travels in a box.”

Nothing was ever simple and so Rufus ended up burning the whole next day on this. Thordis showed up first but Carmelita and Nimrod were delayed—something to do with logistics pertaining to Nimrod’s box. Since the Flying S Ranch was nothing like a real airport, both of them were coming in on smaller planes that T.R.’s people had chartered. Rufus ended up cooling his heels in a prefab steel building next to the airstrip that had to all appearances been erected ten minutes ago. This looked like a warehouse from the outside but had all the amenities on the inside. There was a sort of lounge or waiting room with a view of the airstrip and the mountains beyond. Arranged around that were bathrooms, a couple of offices, and a conference room. When Rufus arrived, half a dozen men were seated around the table in there, having apparently just converged on the site in a couple of different planes that were now being refueled and fussed over outside. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, not that it was any of his business. At the head of the conference table was a big screen running a video call with two talking heads on it. One was an efficient-looking woman probably in her forties. The other was Michiel, the ex-soccer player from Venice. Even though he couldn’t hear a word of what was being said, Rufus understood the meeting. All the guys sitting around the table had come here on a mission. The overall boss was Michiel. Or to be truthful it was probably his aunt Cornelia, but she wasn’t on the call. Michiel was hanging out in a nice room full of old stuff. The sun had gone down where he was and his handsome face was warmly illuminated by lamps. The efficient-looking woman was well pulled together but not glamorous. Her clothing and her bearing were formal. She had put more thought into her backdrop. So he could see that Michiel was basically calling the shots but had delegated the management to the woman. Michiel could be the informal nice guy who smiled and made witty comments, but the woman had to be all reserved and serious to prevent the whole thing from turning into a frat party.

After a little while the meeting broke up and the big screen went dark. The guys in the room stood up and began unplugging their gear and putting things back into luggage. One of them emerged towing a rollaway bag and went right outside and got on a plane. The others climbed into a big Flying S Ranch SUV and were taken off in the direction of Pina2bo. They all spoke English but not a one of them was a native English speaker. They must be from a mess of different European countries.

Based on the name, Rufus had been expecting Thordis to be built like an Olympic shot-putter, but he was wrong. She did have the expected level of blondness, and if anything was going a little overboard on sun protection. But she was maybe five feet five and built more like a badminton player. In birdlike fashion she constructed a nest of luggage and throw pillows at one end of a couch after she had exchanged pleasantries with Rufus. She did stuff on her phone for five minutes before pulling her enormous sun hat down low over her cheekbones and nodding off.

Inevitably then, Carmelita, who had the more delicate-sounding name, was a bit of a bruiser. She wore a tank top that exposed tattoos consisting predominantly of simple black rectangles covering large parts of her arms. She had long black hair in a braid. As a courtesy Rufus went out to her plane to see if he could help wrangle Nimrod’s box, but it was plain at a glance that Carmelita could deal with it and didn’t want him anywhere near her eagle. So he ended up towing her bag while she looked after the Nimrod containment system. “Box,” while not wrong, hardly did it justice. A return trip to the plane’s luggage hold was needed to fetch a large equipment case presumably containing other necessities of the falconer’s trade. Rufus heaved that into the back of his truck while Thordis and Carmelita loudly and happily greeted each other. Both had kept Rufus at arm’s length. He didn’t take it personally.