2. Phae
Phae
“T his has been the best day of the entire year.” Barbie leaned back on a sun lounger and sipped a cocktail. “Maybe even the entire decade.”
On the other side of the pool, Marcel and Sin faced off with Butterball. We’d caught Drumstick two hours ago with a net gun, then Marcel had grown impatient and shot the net onto a barrel cactus, and now it was stuck there forever.
“I’ll admit it, I underestimated the turkey.”
“I overestimated the dog,” Jez said. She’d gone out to get lunch, then made the mistake of returning home and gotten co-opted into welding. “So much for Saint being fierce.”
After the net fiasco, Sin had tried sending her Schutzhund-trained Malinois to herd Butterball into our hastily constructed—but nevertheless solidly built—turkey pen, but then Butterball had given Saint a death stare and said “gobble-gobble,” so Saint bugged out.
Now she was lying beside Barbie, looking mildly embarrassed as well she should.
Kermit, Sin’s tracking dog, had proven adept at finding the turkey but useless at catching it, while Trooper, the fluffy little mutt she and two acquaintances had rescued from a canyon a couple of years ago, wisely stayed inside.
“How trainable are turkeys?” Jez asked. “They’ve trained rats to sniff out land mines, dolphins to find sea mines, monkeys to work as service animals, miniature horses to guide blind people… Those birds are surprisingly tenacious—there must be a job they can do.”
“Like spy turkeys, you mean?”
“Their evade-and-escape skills are on point.”
“Wouldn’t work. The terrorists would just shoot them, which we’re not allowed to do.”
“They’re probably bulletproof,” Barbie pointed out. “Did you see Drumstick’s move with the wing earlier? She’s like Neo from The Matrix .”
Storm exited the house, carrying a metal briefcase.
She was our pilot, and when she wasn’t schlepping our asses around the world, she tested shiny new gadgets that didn’t officially exist, taught air combat classes, and flew the occasional drone mission.
One time, I’d heard a fellow instructor introduce her to the class as “the best female pilot we’ve ever known.
” She’d shot him down in their next joint training exercise as a reminder not to use the “female” qualifier.
Anyhow, the briefcase contained one of her new toys.
“I figured I could use Butterball to test the target acquisition system on the bees,” she said, and Sin gasped.
“Tell me those aren’t the ones with the explosives?”
“That’s the hornets.”
“The ones with the venom injectors?”
“Those are the mosquitoes. The bees used to be dragonflies, but there was a breakthrough in battery technology, so now they can make the MAVs smaller.”
A MAV was a Micro Air Vehicle, or in plain English, a really tiny drone.
“Wait, we don’t have the dragonflies anymore?”
“We do, but they don’t swarm, and we use them for longer-range projects. I can fly the bees in a net formation that won’t get stuck in a cactus, and then all we have to do is herd Butterball toward the pen.”
“And avoid letting Drumstick out in the process,” Jez added, making the logistical nightmare sound easy.
We all looked at each other. Thirty minutes later, we’d added an airlock arrangement to the makeshift cage, and Butterball had pecked the lawn half to death looking for grubs.
Yes, we had a lawn in Vegas, but we also had a grey-water harvesting and purification system set up to nourish it, so we weren’t contributing to the falling water levels in Lake Mead.
We’d never do that. Sin wouldn’t allow it.
Not due to any militant environmental streak—although she was a big fan of recycling—but because she’d slung a dead pimp in there several years ago and she didn’t much want him to resurface.
Storm set up her swarm targeting parameters on a tiny tablet, Butterball blissfully oblivious to her upcoming role as test subject.
The government had pumped billions of dollars into miniaturised weapons technology in the past few years, and MAVs had been a big recipient of the funding.
These ones were designed to mimic bird and insect flight, so the enemy would have no idea spies or even nano-assassins were lurking overhead.
And they were hard to shoot down—highly manoeuvrable, and even if the enemy took out one, ten more would take its place.
On Storm’s command, the swarm rose and flew toward Butterball. The MAVs were quiet, quieter than regular bees, which was perhaps why the turkey looked up, confused. Then she clucked excitedly and ate one of the drones.
I couldn’t say whether it was the shock on Storm’s face or the disgusted expression on Butterball’s as she crunched defiantly on a hundred grand’s worth of top-secret experimental technology, but I struggled to breathe from laughing.
Barbie was crying as she fell off the sun lounger, and even Jez spit wine across the terrace and snort-laughed until she began coughing.
“I just peed myself a little,” she choked out.
“TMI.” But I needed Depends myself. “Shitting fuck… It ate the fucking drone.”
“She,” Sin said. “ She ate the drone.”
Marcel threw his hands in the air. “We’re never going to catch the darn turkey.”
Sin glared at him. “Good. I hear Kitty Roebuck has an excellent pumpkin lasagne recipe.”
“That freaking bird will still be running around at Christmas, digging up the grass and terrorising the dogs.”
Barbie’s phone rang, and she put it on speaker.
“Did the…” Echo dissolved into giggles. “Did the turkey just eat a drone?”
“Oh my gosh, yes. I guess the good news is that they’re realistic.”
Great, Echo was still watching. “Don’t you ever take a break from spying?”
“Hey, this is the best entertainment I’ve had all year. Chase is making popcorn.”
Chase was her assistant, a purely platonic arrangement because although Chase was smokin’ hot, he was also very gay.
“Gee, I sure hope it doesn’t get stuck in your teeth,” I said.
“Well, at least none of my stuff got stuck in a turkey.”
“Neither did any of my stuff.”
“No, but you were still an accessory to— Uh, I gotta go.”
Huh. Echo was renowned for hanging up abruptly, but not usually mid-sentence.
Weirder still was when Jez glanced at her phone thirty seconds later and said pretty much the same thing.
What were those two cooking up? Not turkey, clearly, but they’d known each other since they were teenagers, while the rest of us had only met when our team—officially Point Team Golf, colloquially known as the Choir—was formed.
I’d transferred across from Point Team Bravo, and the reduction in testosterone was…
refreshing. We had Priest—who was technically our boss—and Marcel reasonably well-trained when it came to putting down the toilet seat, but wet towels still got left in random places.
Actually, the towel thing was only Priest. Marcel tutted and picked them up the same as we did, although he put them in the laundry hamper and bitched about it while everyone else dumped them on Priest’s bed.
And speaking of Priest…
He materialised on the terrace like the sneaky fucker he was and beckoned, but when I sighed and made a move in his direction, he shook his head.
“Not you. Storm.”
Her turn to huff. “Talk about shitty timing.”
“Just ask Echo for the video later.”
The two of them disappeared inside along with Jez, and I slurped the half-melted margarita Barbie had made for me. Marcel had vetoed our suggestion for taco Thanksgiving, so really, he’d brought the turkey debacle on himself.
“I’d love to be a fly on the wall—no pun intended—when Storm turns in her report on this,” Barbie said, stretching out on her sun lounger and cracking her joints. Ugh. “How do you say ‘got eaten by a turkey’ in diplomatic?”
“Actioned deployment in a novel environment, thereby testing the unit’s ruggedized exterior, liquid resistance, and ability to perform when subjected to unexpected external pressures. Test failed, ah-ah.” I made a noise like a game-show buzzer.
“If you ever get bored with shooting people, you should become a lawyer.”
“Like my dad? No way.”
And besides, I hardly ever shot people. There were far more entertaining ways to kill a man.
Not that I didn’t also take out women occasionally, but during my years in special ops, I’d come to the conclusion that there was an asshole gene passed down through the male line, and a not-insignificant number of douches inherited it.
Sin made a sudden grab for the turkey, and it jinked left.
Right into the path of Marcel. Feathers and fake Frenchman—Marcel’s papa was from Paris, but he’d lived in the US his whole life—tumbled slo-mo into the pool, and what do you know?
Echo was wrong for once in her life. Regular turkeys might be able to swim, but this one was stuck in the deep end, flapping. Sin dove in after it.
“Are you getting this?” I asked Barbie.
Her hand stayed on her smartphone. “Yup.”
“You think we should save Marcel?”
“Be my guest.”
“I said ‘we.’”
“I just blow-dried my hair.”
Marcel did know how to swim, but he’d begun panicking, and the turkey’s flapping wasn’t doing him any favours. I got to my feet and joined the fun. Only to get elbowed in the jaw three seconds after I surfaced.
Motherclucker.
“Keep still or I’ll leave you to drown.”
Marcel gulped in a mouthful of air and began coughing as I towed him across the pool. Sin joined us at the edge, minus the turkey, although she did have some nice souvenir scratches.
“We’re having beef for Thanksgiving,” Marcel choked out.
Seriously? “No way. We don’t have room for a live cow.”
“We could all have roast squash,” Sin suggested.
Marcel groaned, and I wasn’t sure whether that was due to the general situation or the prospect of having roast squash for Thanksgiving dinner.
“Whatever we eat, we can’t leave a turkey running around the place.”
“Agreed.” Sin tilted her head to the side, studying me. “I think you need ice for your jaw. It’s swelling already.”
Fantastic.
Barbie offered a hand and hauled me out of the water, smirking.
“This isn’t funny. I’d rather rescue a hostage from a bunch of terrorists than try to capture a turkey alive.”
“I’m sure that can be arranged.”
Undoubtedly. But if I’d known how prescient her words would be, I’d have swan-dived back into the pool and played water polo with our new houseguest.