“Good to know.”
“But then you get hit in the face a lot.”
“Hit in the face?”
“When she moves her wings.”
“I guess every job has its downside.”
“What’s the downside of your job, Rufus?”
“I’m waiting for that shoe to drop.”
He had only been up to the summit a couple of times. Now he saw it through the fresh eyes of Thordis and Carmelita and he had to admit it was glorious. From here you could see much of the ranch, but the best view was south across the Rio Grande and into Mexico. The low sun had gone red orange. Everyone said Pina2bo would make for beautiful sunsets all around the world. He didn’t know whether it was really having an effect yet. Whatever the cause, the angle of it was bringing out the shapes of the landforms bracketing the river. These stood out all the more crisply for being almost totally bare of vegetation.
“Yippee—ki-yi-yay!” was the exuberant verdict of Thordis. Seeing it through her eyes Rufus understood how it must look like a western. Not one of your low-budget spaghetti westerns but a bigbudget wide-screen feature.
“Beats the dump” was Carmelita’s more understated verdict as she got busy doing Nimrod stuff. Even a complete falconry ignoramus such as Rufus could guess that this was the best place in the world to be an eagle. Thordis dismounted to help out, and in short order they had Nimrod out of the box.
At first a hood covered Nimrod’s eyes. But after conducting some pre-flight checks and unwrapping some raw meat—apparently some sort of incentive program—they took the hood off to expose Nimrod’s eagle head, and her eagle eyes looked out to the south.
When T.R. had mentioned that an eagle was going to show up, Rufus’s mind had immediately gone to the image of a bald eagle. But Nimrod was a golden eagle: all different shades of brown, edged with gold where the sunlight caught it just so. Her beak was edged with bright yellow, which Rufus interpreted as lips. Her eyes were yellow. The scaly dinosaur skin covering her feet was yellow. From her toes sprouted steel-gray talons. The toe and the talon combined were as long as one of Rufus’s fingers.
Rufus convinced himself that the expression on Nimrod’s eagle face was one of profound interest. But probably eagles always looked that way. She whacked Carmelita in the face as she spread her wings to take off, and then she was airborne, finding a thermal almost immediately above the sunbaked slope to the south.
“If you look thataway,” Rufus said, making a blade of his hand and chopping it down along a certain azimuth, “you can see the parasails spiraling down and hitting the nets on the mesa.” From this distance they were no bigger than dust motes in a sunbeam, but once you focused on them the eye was drawn to their neat spacing and orderly movement.
Thordis and Carmelita didn’t respond. He glanced over and saw that they were having a private moment. So he turned his back on them. He’d noticed his phone buzzing a couple of times in the last few minutes, so he checked it.
> Shit’s getting real in the North Sea!
This was from Alastair. It must be the middle of the night where he was. He had added a link, which took Rufus to some kind of scientific site. There was a map of the water between Britain and the west coast of Europe. Not a fancy map but a plain-Jane one that put him in mind of military documents. Numbered dots were scattered across it. When he scrolled down it was all just tables of numbers.
> What am I looking at?
Alastair responded with a five-digit number. This matched one of the labeled dots in the North Sea, between Scotland and Norway. Rufus zoomed in on that and gave it a tap. The result was a spreadsheet-like table of numbers. Left to his own devices for a while, on a larger screen, Rufus might have been able to make sense of it. Up here in bright sun on a screen the size of his hand was a different story. He panned around and stumbled upon a graph. The graph sort of meandered up and down for a while, but trending generally upward. Then at the very end it zoomed up to a high spike and then flatlined.
His phone buzzed again and a message from Alastair showed up at the top of the screen:
> That was a weather buoy until fifteen minutes ago
> What is it now?
> A projectile.
THE STORM
