The riders are quiet. One of them is carrying a rifle slung across his back. They have buried family members three times in the last two years — not in this village, but in others nearby. They know what is about to happen. No one inside the village does.

But this village has a Capture Node on a bamboo pole at the end of the approach corridor — a solar-powered camera the size of a deck of cards, running a quantized neural network on a $15 board. It does not stream video. It does not need to. It sees the riders, recognizes five people, three motorcycles, one firearm, compresses the frames to thumbnails, and pushes them over LoRa to a reviewer in another country.

The reviewer takes nine seconds to confirm and presses a button.

Four kilometers away, mounted on a higher pole near the village square, the Alarm Node wakes up. A 30-watt horn speaker, audible to 400 meters, sounds the pattern the village has rehearsed. People rise in the dark. They do not pack. They do not look out the door. They take the route they have walked at noon a hundred times — down the wash, across the riverbed, to the shelter cut into the bank.

By the time the attackers reach the first hut it is empty. There is nothing to take and no one to find.

Meanwhile, in a third sealed box on a third pole, the Tower Node has been listening on the GSM 900 and 1800 bands the entire time. It has captured the IMSI and IMEI of four phones moving with the riders, along with their direction of travel. The numbers themselves mean nothing tonight. They are saved.

Six weeks later, forty kilometers away, near a different village, two of those identifiers reappear on a different Tower Node. The alarm sounds automatically. No reviewer is consulted. No button is pressed. The attackers have not yet dismounted.