“Plenty of time to finish the eggs and do that too,” Rufus said, though he already felt that they were running a bit late. He settled himself down by reflecting that he had killed a lot of pigs in his time, it was nothing new to him, and so what he really ought to be concerning himself with wasn’t killing even more of them, but rather satisfying whatever mysterious agenda T.R. McHooligan was pursuing. And this was a topic on which he could only speculate; but he had the sense that he was being recruited. Also, he had made love to a queen.
“Man oh man, Red, you are a label-making machine! You have got labels on your labels!” T.R., deeply satisfied by the huevos and the coffee, was now checking out Rufus’s trailer. Over time Rufus had progressively gutted this, replacing the built-in cabinets with modular storage bins made of translucent plastic. They were subdivided into innumerable compartments. Everything was labeled. “Blue labels is drone related. Red is for gun parts. White is miscellaneous.” Most of the labels were blue.
“How’d you get to be so organized, Red?”
“Army beat it into me. Then it was the business. Being on the road, you know, the starting and stopping and the bouncing over the washboarded roads will mix up all your stuff and make a mess of it unless you got everything in its own compartment. There’s a chapter in Moby-Dick where—”
And here Rufus was all set to describe Chapter 98, “Stowing Down and Clearing Up,” where they have made a huge mess of the Pequod butchering whales, but then they put everything back where it belongs and clean it all up spick-and-span, and it’s as if nothing had ever happened.
“Read it,” T.R. said, cutting him off. “I get it, this is your whaling ship, a place for everything and everything in its place. You the Captain Ahab of this little operation, then?”
“I prefer to think of myself as being more in the mold of the harpooneers.”
“Excellent choice. More sustainable.” T.R. turned around, took it all in, peered through the milky plastic bins at drone batteries, drone transceivers, drone propellers, spools of colored wire, tiny metric fasteners, jewelers’ screwdrivers, heat shrink tubing, stainless-steel hemostats. A 3D printer where a microwave oven had once been installed. “Man,” he exclaimed, “you are the Drone Ranger!”
They went out and got in the chopper and shot pigs. These were exactly where Rufus had predicted they would be. Shooting them in this way was like a video game set to “easy.” T.R. had brought an assortment of old and new guns from what Rufus could only assume was an inconceivably expensive collection. T.R. made a point of handing Rufus a different firearm every few minutes. He always introduced it with some patter along the lines of “Hoo-ee! This one’s got quite a kick but it gets the job done!” However, when Rufus was actually operating the weapons, T.R. watched his movements and Rufus understood that he was being evaluated both as to his attention to firearm safety and as to general familiarity with different weapon types, marksmanship, and so on. At one point late in the interview—for it was clear that this was a job interview—T.R. threw him a curve by handing him one of his antiques. It was some kind of early clip-fed rifle with a heavy military feel to it.
“I’m not familiar with the use of this weapon,” Rufus said, after glancing it over. “I’d be more comfortable if you showed me how to operate it.”
T.R. did so, enthusiastically. Rufus then copied his movements, looking up at him occasionally to verify that he was getting it right, and used it to drill a big sow from about fifty yards. He understood that if he had attempted to brazen it out and use the gun without requesting help, he would have failed the interview. T.R. would have tapped the pilot on the shoulder. They’d have flown back to the campsite. T.R. would have paid him for his time, cash on the barrelhead, and they would never have seen each other again. Conversely, Rufus’s asking for help had sealed some kind of deal in the mind of T.R. His interest in ridding the world of more feral swine tapered off sharply. Ten minutes later they were back on the ground polishing off the coffee.
“I ain’t one of those Rambo cats,” Rufus cautioned him, before the conversation got too deep. “Stayed mostly on base. Took some mortar rounds, heard sniper bullets go by. Saw IEDs go off. Saw some other shit too. But I’m a mechanic. Not a snake eater.”
“Ah, shit, I got plenty of snake eaters. I know where to find them. Hell, they won’t leave me alone, word’s got round that T.R. is hiring.”
“For the Flying S?”
“That’s right. Activity is ramping up there, as you saw. More people moving in. It is becoming a community. Really, Red, you could think of it as a microstate.”
“Like Rhode Island?”
“I was thinking Liechtenstein.”
“How’s the United States gonna feel about that?”
T.R. chuckled. “Do you know what the United States did last week, after we fired those eighteen shells up into the stratosphere?”
“No, sir, I do not.”
“Nothing.”
“Not even a phone call?”
“I got people on the inside of the FAA. They didn’t even notice, Red. They knew we had filed for a permit, of course. But if the shells were picked up on radar, no one was looking at the screen.”
“It wouldn’t move like the bogey from an airplane.”
“Nah. It goes straight up! So on a radar screen it doesn’t even move. Probably just looks like a dead pixel.”
“What about when the shell is gliding down?”
“Moves differently then, of course. But we do that mostly over Mexican airspace. I’m working out an understanding with our friends south of the border. On final approach, after the shell has dropped below the radar, only then do we let it glide north over the Rio Grande. It re-enters U.S. airspace below the altitude where the FAA gives a shit and lands on Flying S property.”
Rufus considered it. “How about military radar? They gotta know.”
T.R. checked his watch and Rufus knew he’d gone somewhere he shouldn’t have. “None of my business,” Rufus conceded, “just working it out in my head.”
“You’re army. Not air force. A ground pounder. Not a flyboy. Let’s talk about that.”
“Okay, let’s do.”
“I want you to go to the Flying S Ranch—assuming I can make it worth your while, of course. I would feel better if you were there keeping an eye on things. I want you to be the Drone Ranger.”
T.R. had coined that term earlier and Rufus had gotten the feeling that it might stick. He smiled. “You want ol’ Red to keep an eye on, what, a couple of thousand square miles?”
“I got other resources, as you know. Imaging satellites passing over at all hours. Plenty of boots on the ground.”
“Brown hats and black hats.”
T.R. nodded. “Brown hats you could think of as cops. Black hats are your mercenaries—the equivalent of the military. But the Lone Ranger—he was neither fish nor fowl!”
Rufus laughed. “You want me in a white hat?”
“Wear whatever you want. The black mask and the blue jumpsuit are optional. I imagine you’ll be in an earthsuit much of the time.”
“What do you imagine I could do that ain’t being done already with the resources you got on hand?”
“Roam around and notice anything that don’t feel right. Respond to inquiries. Just keep an eye on things. It’s a burden, Red, to own property.”
“I farmed fifty acres,” Rufus said. “I know.”
“You lie awake at night wondering what the hell’s going on there.”
“Yup, you do.”
“That’s why we have caretakers. Ranch hands. Oh, sure there’s always chores to keep that kinda person busy. But the real reason to hire people like that is so we can sleep better at night. Because then we know that there is intelligence—active intelligent minds—right there on the ground.”