Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

“Thank you,” Willem said, handing him the phone.

“Is this for Remigio?” Bo asked, maneuvering around and trying to figure out how the zoom feature worked.

“The uniform suits you,” Willem said. “Much better than the tank top.”

“I had it tailored in Hong Kong,” Bo explained. “The standard issue are rubbish.” He was tapping the shutter button over and over. “Off to Texas?”

“No,” Willem decided.

“No!?”

“I’m going to stay. Keep an eye on you guys.”

He realized Amelia had come over to collect him. She’d heard.

“It has been great working with you,” Willem said and held out his hand.

Recovering her poise quickly, Amelia reached out and shook it. “Back to Uncle Ed’s for you?”

“Too gritty for a prolonged stay. I can’t see Remigio coming to visit me there. No, I’m going to check into one of the hotels Bo hasn’t blown up yet.”

“Terrorists did that,” Bo demurred. “Believe me, the Sam Houston was no great loss. Black mold and bedbugs everywhere. I recommend the Mandarin.”

“T.R. likes you,” Willem said to Amelia. “Maybe he’ll offer you a gig.”

Amelia’s face reflected skepticism. “Ehh, I’ll bet there’s openings in Netherworld.” She was turning to leave.

“Defense minister. I’ll put in a word for you.”

She looked back over her shoulder. “You going to visit?”

“This place is going to need a foreign policy now that it has been . . . liberated.” Willem nodded into the southern sky above the end of the runway. Lined up on approach, still miles out, were the lights of an approaching airplane. Behind that, another. Behind that, yet another. Like a train in the sky.

“We have to leave now !” shouted T.R.’s pilot through cupped hands. Amelia took off at a run. They didn’t bother stowing her bag, she just heaved it up above her head and pounded up the stairs. The cabin door closed right behind her. The jet was already rolling. It made a turn to get lined up on the runway. Framed in one of its big oval windows was the head of T.R. Schmidt. He tossed Willem a salute as the jet’s engines whined up to a shriek and it sprang forward.

It had barely got its landing gear retracted when the first of the heavy Chinese military transports touched down in its wake.

“Well,” Willem said to Bo, “I’m sure you have a lot to do.”

“On the contrary, my work here is essentially finished,” Bo said, “but I would imagine you are about to become quite busy.”

PERFORMATIVE WAR

It took about a day for T.R.’s people to set Rufus up with the access he needed, and another day for him to find his way around the various directories where the surveillance videos were archived, and to make sense of what he found there.

Rufus was able to rule out the theory that those drones had been put in the air by members of what T.R. referred to as the well-regulated militia. Or the even more far-fetched notion that it had just been some random hobbyist in the right place at the right time. The drones had been launched from a small RV, a converted Sprinter van, which had pulled into the Mobility Center a few minutes ahead of Burrito Guy’s truck. During their brief stay, the occupants—two black-haired men in baseball caps and dark glasses—had refueled their RV but shown a marked lack of interest in using the toilets or getting food. One had looked after the refueling while the other had opened the vehicle’s side door and got three identical drones in the air. They’d done this at an outlying gas pump, far away from any other vehicles. They’d parked in such a way that the only things on that side of the van were a barbed-wire fence and a hundred miles of open range. So no other customers would have seen them launch the drones. The dark glasses they wore (at night) must have contained AR gear. Darkness made it impossible to know where those drones had gone between the time they were launched and the moment that two of them had been silhouetted against the flames.

After the tanker exploded, Squeegee Ninja ran down the line of gas pumps to the parking lot beyond, obviously headed for the location where Burrito Guy’s semi rig had been parked. It was no longer there because Burrito Guy—who had got back to the rig without incident a couple of minutes earlier—had put it in gear right after the explosion and pulled out to a greater distance from Ground Zero. The bafflement of Squeegee Ninja was clear from his body language—one could almost see a huge exclamation point and question mark hovering in space above him—but then he turned his head in the direction of the truck and homed in on it. Fifteen seconds’ sprint across the parking lot took him to the passenger door of the rig, which was already rolling forward as he scampered up into it. Within moments they had passed beyond the purview of T.R. Micks’s security cameras. From one angle, though, it was just barely possible to see the rig’s turn signal flashing out on the main road as it approached the on-ramps to Interstate 15. The truck was headed south.

At the same time, the drones were headed back to the little RV. Three had gone out. Two came back. The consternation of the RV’s occupants was obvious. Where was the third drone? Equipment was fiddled with. Heads were shaken. Fucking binoculars were produced and used to scan the disaster scene. Again though, body language was eloquent as these two guys concluded, Fuck it, that thing is toast, let’s get out of here! Which they did, signaling the same southbound turn as the semi had done a few minutes earlier.

> There will be a drone that was left behind at the site. Maybe destroyed. But maybe someone there has found it.

> Will inquire

Rufus turned his attention now to the strange case of this turban-wearing badass who roamed the western U.S. in an anonymous semi rig shadowed by high-tech drone geeks in a small but expensive RV (those Sprinter conversions didn’t come cheap, and this one looked new).

It was but a few moments’ work to turn up many examples from all over the Western world of turbaned Sikhs being mistaken for Muslims and persecuted as such by people who took a dim view of the religion of Islam. So this was just another case of that.

Noting his sudden interest in the Sikh religion, YouTube helpfully revamped his feed, expunging videos about wild horses, feral swine, drones, eagles, the Dutch royal family, and climate change, and replacing them with a slate of content featuring various aspects of that religion and culture. Scanning through those, Rufus’s gaze snagged on a clip showing a dude in a turban brandishing a sword and standing in the middle of a ring of spectators, giving some kind of martial arts demo. Or maybe a dance performance? His hopping and twirling movements seemed far removed from any fighting style that Rufus had ever seen. But he had seen a similar move performed recently, at Pump 37G, when Squeegee Ninja had inexplicably sensed that Revolver Man— who was behind him —was fixing to shoot him in the back.

This—once he’d confirmed it by split-screening the YouTube guy and Squeegee Ninja—sent Rufus down two parallel tracks. One, which was fairly trivial, was familiarizing himself with the martial art in question. It was called gatka and it made a lot of use of sticks—which explained why the subject of this inquiry was so handy with a squeegee. The other, which was more of a brainteaser, related to the drone operators in the RV and the nature of their relationship to Squeegee Ninja.

> Found it. You will have it later today

> Thanks

Rufus replied, pausing briefly to wonder how that delivery was going to be accomplished. Was T.R. going to charter a jet? A jet helicopter? Both? Probably.