“It’s so ridiculous!” Amelia muttered in Dutch to Saskia. The two of them were at a table in the Beer Car’s saloon with Rufus and Eshma, who had come over and befriended them. Amelia was sitting with arms folded, getting a load of the gate, like a student puzzling over a math problem. She caught Rufus looking at her and switched to English. “These Texas ranch gates! We have seen a number of these now. So huge and grand. But they don’t connect to anything.” She waved her hand off to the side. Each of the two massive stone gateposts was buttressed by a wing of stone wall, maybe two meters high and extending for a few meters away from the gate. There it gave way to chain-link fence, newly installed, which ran off into the desert for no more than thirty meters before giving way to standard-issue ranch fencing: strands of taut barbed wire that rose no higher than an average person’s midsection.
Rufus pondered the question long enough to clue them in that they had stumbled upon some kind of major cultural/conceptual gap. “They’re connected to fences,” he pointed out, which was true.
“Yes but—” Saskia began.
“Traditionally the gate is the weakest point in a perimeter defense,” Amelia pointed out. “Not the strongest. It’s just basic logic. Surely as a military veteran you—”
Rufus nodded. “I got you.”
“Is it all just for ostentation? Show?”
“Extetics,” Rufus answered with a nod. They’d heard him use the word before. It was his pronunciation of “aesthetics.”
“It’s a signal too,” he continued. “You’re on my property now. Best respect it, or get you gone.”
“That makes sense,” Saskia said.
Rufus looked at Amelia. “Past that—as a military veteran, like you said—don’t look at the barbed-wire fence and say it’s nothing. Look at where it is. This is defense in depth. Maybe when we get where we’re going, they’ll let us go out in some ranch vehicles, some ATVs or four-wheel drives. That desert might look open and flat from out the window, but if you leave yonder road and try driving across it, you’ll learn real soon it is a barrier. Even walking is hard—every footstep requires you formulate a plan.”
Eshma nodded. “I’ve gone hiking in such terrain. It’s exhausting. Mentally exhausting,” she hastened to add. “The cognitive load of having to think about each step.” Eshma tapped her forehead.
Rufus processed that and nodded with the distracted air of a man who was soon going to look up “cognitive load” on the Internet and spend an hour clicking on links. “That’s why people who knew this land used horses. The horse handles the cognitive load. You just tell it where to go and how fast.”
In case anyone had missed the entry to ranch property, event staff were now passing through the saloon handing out baseball caps, bandannas, and steel water bottles bearing the same winged S symbol they had seen on the gateposts. Only for a moment had Saskia assumed that this was the ancient name of the ranch. T.R. had rebranded the place. Literally rebranded, since the Flying S logo was a mark designed to be burned into the hide of a cow. The S was obviously Sulfur.
Eshma happily pulled on her baseball cap, first drawing her ponytail through the little opening in the back. The Cinderella of last night had reverted to the studious and efficient nerd girl. She was just socially awkward enough that she had walked up to their table a few minutes ago and sat down without so much as a “by your leave” and a complete absence of any of that “Your Majesty” nonsense. Saskia was pleased that she’d done so and made a mental note to ask her, later, about those computational climate models that seemed to be her stock-in-trade. She had gotten the impression from Alastair that risk analysts in the financial world were basically unable to do their jobs until they got numbers from people like Eshma. They viewed the Eshmas of the world as a cross between all-knowing supergeniuses and borderline charlatans reading the future from sheep guts. In any case, the respect with which he and Mark Furlong treated Eshma was conspicuous.
Amelia’s gaze was fixed on her new baseball cap, but she wasn’t really seeing it. She was still processing Rufus’s defense-in-depth argument. “You could snip the wires and drive through anywhere—” she began.
“At three miles an hour,” Rufus said, completing her sentence. “Might as well get out and walk. At least get you some exercise.”
“Some vehicles could go faster.”
“Tracked vehicles,” Rufus nodded. “Even they would break down. Fixing them used to be my job. But I don’t think ol’ T.R. is planning to stop an armored brigade. If it comes to that, it means his strategy failed on a whole other level.” He looked to Saskia as he said that. One of those moments, which she wished she never had to put up with, when she abruptly stopped being an ordinary participant in the conversation and was reminded that she was a queen.
The train had dropped to a deliberate speed, perhaps fifty kilometers an hour, as it felt its way across the unbelievably vast ranch—one-quarter the size of the Netherlands—on tracks that had not been built to a modern standard. If Saskia was any judge of such things, the rails themselves were in good repair—T.R. had upgraded them—but the line itself had been laid out long ago with sharp turns and steep grades. Most of the grades were uphill. Her ears popped more than once. She already knew that their destination was more than a kilometer, but less than a mile, above sea level. Not high enough that you’d really notice the thin air, but enough to buy some small advantage for the project.
They passed an airstrip. Parked there were two bizjets, three single-engine prop planes, and a helicopter. Willem had already told her that a Dutch jet would be landing there later to take them home tomorrow. So that helped her fix her location on the map. They were going southwest, directly toward the Rio Grande. The range of mountains where T.R. had built his facility was the last watershed one would cross before descending into that river’s valley and reaching the U.S./Mexico border. The Flying S Ranch ran all the way to the river’s bank.
“That off to the right, in the distance, is the Sierra Diablo,” T.R. announced, apparently referring to some craggy mountains north of them that somehow managed to look even more forbidding than T.R.’s property. “Site of the last armed conflict between Texas Rangers and Apaches in 1881.”
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.