Pippa’s remark about logistics networks, which had been opaque to Laks when he’d heard it, now came into focus. She and Ilham had a lot to say to each other about this. Though, as days went on and they got closer to the front, Pippa began to focus more on videography and Bella began to go deep on teasing apart the various logistics trains extending their tendrils toward the front. Gopinder, whose Punjabi was a lot stronger than that of Laks, got into the act helping Bella make sense of it all. Sue, the Korean, had learned Mandarin as a second language and became a sort of intelligence analyst, sifting through the latest videos that had been posted from the front and mapping out the hot spots.
They crossed through four thousand meters again, and then five thousand, before starting to lose some altitude. This was in river valleys; the bare crests of the ridges looked so much higher that they might as well have been on Mars. But eventually they dropped again to a mere thirty-three hundred meters so that they could cross the Indus River itself. This flowed northwest out of the mountains before hooking south toward the sea and collecting the waters of the Punjab’s five rivers along the way. The point where they crossed it was still ninety kilometers away from the ever-fluctuating border. Nevertheless, crossing over the Indus seemed a momentous occasion for anyone with a connection to India, and so they stopped there for a night, got the whole Fellowship—which had become scattered among multiple vehicles—together in one place for a meal and a night’s sleep, and then struck out together the next morning into the land beyond. They were now simply traveling in buses, all of whose passengers were people like them, going the same way for the same reason. They drove over a pass that topped out at fifty-four hundred meters, and stopped at the little village there to take selfies and inject cash into the local economy, such as it was. Then they descended to a somewhat more survivable altitude of four thousand, where there was a fork in the road. This was a choke point through which all traffic had to pass to reach any part of the Line. Accordingly the Indian Army had built a logistics depot there and set up a roadblock. Military vehicles, of which there were many, were simply waved through. Vehicles containing volunteers were diverted to an open expanse of dead, rocky ground and their occupants herded into a big inflatable building. A few of the new arrivals had previously been chipped, so they were allowed to pass right through to the other side via a row of metal detectors. The others, including all members of the Fellowship, were funneled into a basketball court where, sitting on the floor, they were obliged to watch a PowerPoint presentation and take a quiz.
South Texas
T.R., or at any rate his pilot, had the courtesy to put the chopper down at a decent remove from where Rufus had parked his trailer, and downwind. So Rufus’s vehicles did not get pelted with little rocks and coated with dust, those being the two main constituents of this part of Texas: about midway between San Antonio and Laredo, five hundred miles east of the Flying S Ranch. It was 6:30 in the morning of what promised to be a clear but not excessively hot day. According to the schedule, which had been worked out to an amazing level of detail by T.R.’s staff, Rufus would have the boss’s undivided attention for three hours, after which there would be something called a “hard stop.” Rufus didn’t know what a hard stop was, and given the way these people talked about it, he was afraid to ask. He had visions of being physically ejected from the chopper’s side door at 9:30 sharp if he failed to complete the agreed-on program of activities by that instant.
So he was ready and eager to get going. But T.R. seemed to enjoy taking his time. Rufus sensed that this was, for T.R., a welcome break from whatever activities normally filled the schedule of such a man. For a minute he stood beside the chopper conversing with someone in the back seat, and Rufus’s ears picked up the solid mechanical chunking and snicking of well-oiled firearms being checked out. T.R. said something indistinct to indicate how fired up he was, then turned his back on the chopper and came crunching over the hard land toward where Rufus had set up his camp last night. It was at the end of one of T.R.’s ranch roads, where it fizzled out in a dry wash. The coordinates had been sent to Rufus yesterday over the encrypted messaging application that T.R.’s staff insisted be used for everything.
Rufus had offered to provide breakfast and meant to make good on it, so he’d deployed the awning on the side of the trailer and set up a pop-up canopy as well. He had a camp stove going and was working on some huevos rancheros with red chile sauce. Coffee was ready and waiting. “Whoo! That smells good!” T.R. remarked from a distance. “We landed downwind of you.”
“Noticed. Appreciate the courtesy.”
“Did you find the accommodations to your liking?” T.R. asked wryly, holding up his hands and looking around. Though the creek bed was dry, there was apparently enough seasonal water to keep a sparse belt of trees going. Birds were singing in those. Life was good.
“I took the liberty of harvesting some mesquite,” Rufus said, nodding at a small but aromatic campfire, which he’d surrounded with some folding chairs.
“Be my guest. Plenty more where that came from,” T.R. said. “Nature’s bounty.” He threw Rufus a socially distant salute, which Rufus returned, and settled into one of the chairs. “Coffee’s right there, help yourself but don’t burn your hand,” Rufus said.
“Don’t mind if I do. Much obliged,” T.R. said and poured himself a mug of java from a fire-blackened pot. “So we gonna kill some pigs?”
“As many as you got time for, sir. I know where they live,” Rufus said. He was assembling the huevos rancheros from ingredients scattered around the burners of his stove.
“How’d you find ’em? What’s your process?”
“Satellite imagery tells me about where to look. I drive around in the truck to get the feel of the place. The sight lines. I look for signs. After that it’s all drones. Cameras on those nowadays is better than the naked eye. The pigs, you know, rub against trees to scrape the parasites off their bodies and that leaves damage on the bark that you can see.” Rufus looked up from his work. “Now, if I were here on a solo job, I’d have gone out and done the work on foot, in the dark. But since you was coming with the chopper I got caught up on my sleep instead.” He carried a tin plate over to T.R. and set it on the camp table next to him.
“Oh, mercy, that looks as good as it smells,” T.R. said, tucking a napkin into the neckline of a UV-blocking khaki shirt. “I thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Rufus returned to the stove, shut off the burners, and collected his own plate. “Think of it as me paying rent on this here campsite.”
“Say more about the drones, Red.”
Rufus pondered it as he chewed his first bite of food. “They’re like guns.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“You go buy yourself a gun, say. It shoots bullets. Fine. Maybe you decide you want a custom grip. You buy that on the Internet. Turns out you need a special screwdriver to install the damn thing.”
T.R. chuckled.
Rufus continued, “So you buy the screwdriver. Maybe you buy a whole set of them. You throw those in a drawer. Time goes by. You end up replacing every single part of the original gun with something different. Maybe you got other guns too. Drawer gets full of old parts and special tools. It’s the same with drones, except worse.” He nodded at his trailer. “That’s my drawer.”
“Mm, if these eggs wasn’t so delicious I would request permission to come aboard and have a little old look round!”