Chapter 34: Another Premiere

THE NEXT WEEK, as Patricia and Anna got settled into the routine of getting Toni to school and working with our house staff, Ronda and I joined Robert on our trip to Nairobi in Kenya. We received a packet from a courier on Sunday morning and were in the air by noon. It was a six-hour flight and Nancy got us settled and fed. We declined drinks and she locked the liquor cabinet.

“We have to make sure we aren’t serving alcohol when we are actually in any of the countries that forbid it,” she explained. “Because we are an ambassadorial aircraft, inspections are pretty cursory, but we’ll make sure alcohol is always locked up.”

“Most of the trips I’m with you on will be to dry countries,” Robert said. “Some of West Africa is pretty liberal, but any of the Muslim states will be non-alcohol regions.”

“I don’t really care that much,” I said. “I’m not that big a drinker.”

“Same here,” Ronda said. “Sometimes it’s nice to have a drink when we’re doing a courier round that hits half a dozen countries. I have a feeling we’ll have a few of those in the coming months.”

“Especially when you start traveling to the other side of the Indian subcontinent,” Robert said. “You might all need to carry your courier bags on those trips.”

“We’re going to try to spread the trips out some,” I said. “Next week, I’ll train our official new passport techs in Muscat. We won’t be traveling unless we receive a packet from the courier on Sunday.”

“Which is likely,” Ronda agreed. “But it may only require one of us to make a delivery.”

“The following week, though, we’ll be leaving on a two-week circuit to mostly West Africa. Five countries. Maybe six, depending on what we hear regarding Ethiopia. We were supposed to go to Addis Ababa this week, but with the overthrow of Haile Selassie the embassy flagged us away,” I said. “They think things will have stabilized in a few weeks.”

“I won’t be with you for that one,” Robert said. “Most of the trip will be outside my region.”

“Yes, but the next week, we’ll be headed up to Jeddah and Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. I know you’ll want to be with us then.”

“Absolutely. I can’t believe this, but we’re considering a mandate to have all chanceries fenced or walled in. When you look at it, our houses in the neighborhood we live in are better defended than the embassy is. I’ll be looking at possible sites for a new chancery in Muscat and finding an architect,” Robert said.

We arrived in Nairobi and found our way to the hotel we’d booked.

We installed the equipment on Monday and trained our two technicians, then had a meeting with the ambassador. After photos, we had dinner with the deputy chief of mission who gave us considerably more insight into the situation in East Africa. It looked to me like we wouldn’t be landing in Ethiopia or in Somalia this fall. That could create problems for us. Flying to Nairobi was at the absolute limit of our little plane’s range. We had counted on using Addis Ababa for refueling on our way to West Africa. Now it was looking like we’d need to make Khartoum our refueling stop, which was just as far as Nairobi.

“Just because you aren’t installing sensitive equipment and training operators in Addis Ababa doesn’t mean you can’t land there for refueling,” the deputy told us. “According to the packet you delivered to us today, we are not changing any diplomatic status with Ethiopia since the overthrow of the emperor. We were told to encourage the Kenyans to adopt a similar stance and not to renew hostilities along the border. That might or might not work. It’s an opportunistic government.”

“I thought the normal position of the US was to not support military coups,” Ronda said.

“That all depends. This coup is not expected to last. The emperor is under house arrest, but the line has not been purged. You know that Emperor Selassie traces his lineage directly from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba? The longest ruling lineage in history. The real issue is whether Ethiopia will continue to be a Christian nation or if it will become an Islamic nation. There is a strong support within the leadership of the coup to join the Arab League. If that happens, the line of Haile Selassie will come to an end.”

We had a long flight from Kenya to Sana’a, Yemen. Ronda and I compared notes and composed a document recounting the deputy’s assessment of the situation in Ethiopia. After training in Yemen and getting our equipment set up in the embassy, we returned to Muscat, delivered our courier package to the waiting Washington courier, and went home to our family.

The next week, I trained the embassy wives in Muscat and Ronda took off on a courier run that lasted two days and went to seven cities. It was hard to concentrate while she was off alone. Well, with Luke, Jay, and Nancy. But still...

The wives were ambassador Wells’s wife Erin, Anna, Patricia, and Joanne Brice, Robert’s wife. I emphasized that there always needed to be two people on duty when the equipment was in use and made Mrs. Wells the keeper of the key. It seemed reasonable since she lived upstairs. Space in the chancery was at a premium, so the setup remained in Ronda’s and my office. The two of us shared a desk and weren’t there all the time anyway. We kept our desk cleared and locked.

The training went well, and they decided the consular section would offer passport and visa services only one day a week. They agreed that Tuesday would be the best day. They were all surprised, though, when I gave them the instructions on disabling the equipment.

“Why isn’t there a disabling switch on the bindery?” Joanne asked.

“The critical pieces in the passport are the photo and the information template. You could figure out a way to bind them into a book if you didn’t have the bindery. The bindery, though, is a commercial piece of equipment that could be used for a hundred different kinds of binding. You could buy a binding machine from the manufacturer and do that process just as well as with this one.”

“Isn’t the photo just a Polaroid?” Anna asked. “Couldn’t you just get a camera and take the picture?”

“This has a dual lens and a special film type. The film is not available commercially—only through the State Department or directly from Polaroid. If you just clicked a picture without a template inserted, you would just have a picture of the person without having the information that makes it a passport.”

What I didn’t mention was that Polaroid had begun filling back orders for the equipment from other national governments. Our two-year exclusive had expired. Of course, the template was different for each country, the covers were embossed with their country design, and they used different colors. I still was concerned about what a country needed to counterfeit a passport from another country. It seemed that a template and cover might be all that was needed.

“You’re so different when you’re teaching this photography stuff,” Patricia sighed that evening.

“Different?”

“Than when you are in the studio taking art pictures. We all got our pictures taken and an ID printed, but you didn’t spend time posing us or touching us.”

“I think that would probably get me fired,” I laughed. “This is my job. I don’t fool around on it.”

“Isn’t studio photography your job, too?” Anna asked. “What are the differences?”

“Well, I’m working for the government. The embassy handbook is a lot like the military in that an officer is not allowed to engage in any romantic or sexual liaison with an enlisted woman. I suppose it goes the other way, too, if the officer is a woman. The handbook just says to keep all sexual and romantic advances out of the workplace. I suppose people get around it by leaving the workplace and then getting involved. It’s happened to Ronda and me.”

“And how is that different from the studio?” Anna persisted.

“Well, if I’d managed to stick to my principles when I first started, it would be a lot the same. When I started, it was no sex in the studio, in the broadest sense. I didn’t touch models or date them, no matter how they were dressed or undressed. Then, when we started doing the senior portraits for our class, that silly rumor got started that I could make a girl come without even touching her. And then it was okay to touch her when I was posing her. And then it was more like that I could make a girl come without having sex. It just all got out of control.”

“I know we helped,” Patricia said. “I certainly broke the no sex in the studio taboo.”

“Plenty of others figured out that the darkroom wasn’t the studio, and the props closet wasn’t the studio, and that ‘sex’ meant strictly intercourse, so oral wasn’t sex in the studio,” I sighed. “When I go back into photography after this assignment with the State Department is over, I probably need to rethink exactly what I’m comfortable with and what I shouldn’t be doing. You know, I have all the sex I want at home. I love you both and I love Ronda.”

“And we’ve all participated,” Anna said. “We’ve encouraged the process. But Nate, you get such amazing photos when you make that connection. I really don’t mind fucking you after you’ve been turned on by a photo session.”

“Ditto that,” Patricia laughed. “In fact, I don’t mind fucking you after Anna gets you turned on.”

Anna had been playing with my cock for the past ten minutes and I was certainly ready for action. Patricia took her by surprise, though, when she swung a leg over me and captured my cock in her own warm pussy.

On Sunday, Ronda and I headed out on a long training run to West Africa. We stopped for refueling and to take photos of the embassy staff in Addis Ababa. We delivered a courier packet to the ambassador, took his photo, and returned to the plane. We didn’t leave any equipment, but we were told we might need to return in the spring to do more ID photos at the other installations in Ethiopia.

Then we were off to Chad, Niger, Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Ghana, and Upper Volta. On the way back, we stopped in the Central Africa Republic and again in Addis Ababa. We’d succeeded in making eight installations in two weeks. We arrived back on Friday, October twenty-fifth. Though the office was closed, we had to go in and transfer a ton of dispatches to the courier waiting there.

We only had time to confirm our next trip and pick up Robert before we were off again on Sunday. We went first to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and trained at the embassy on Monday morning before taking off for a cross-country flight to Dhahran, Saudi Arabia on the opposite coast. We had a consulate there and it looked to me like there were more employees there than at the embassy.

“We have a lot of Americans here,” the consul general said. “This is the heart of the Saudi Oil industry and every American oil company is sending people here for exploration, drilling, building ports, and shipping crude. Like every oil port in the world, the workers here are busy drinking, carousing, and whoring. I spend half my time trying to keep them from getting their heads cut off for violating a sheik’s sister or daughter. We have a fair share of lost and expired passports. Many visa requests. This will be welcome technology for our consulate.”

From there it was a fairly short hop up to Kuwait City. The Ambassador here was one of the senior guys on the Arabian Peninsula. We had a good chat, took pictures, trained his staff, and headed for the airport. The crew was happy to make the trip back to Muscat that night and we got in before midnight.

I thought Ronda and I would slip quietly up the stairs after we’d said goodnight to Robert and the driver took him on to his own house. That was not to be. Patricia was up, pacing the floor with Alex in her arms.

“She’s got a fever,” Patricia said. “We talked to a doctor recommended by the embassy. He said the symptoms were of very early stage measles. We all got the vaccine before we went to London last year, but I don’t think any of us got the second booster before we came here. What will we do, Nate?”

“We’ll follow all the directions the doctor gave us. And we’d better all get that second booster.” I took Alex and rocked her in my arms. She whimpered a little and went to sleep.

“Anna, Toni, Alex, and I all got it this morning. It’s called a post-exposure vaccine. The doctor said it was likely that she was exposed just a couple of days ago and the vaccine would minimize symptoms. Other than that, she’s getting baby aspirin to keep the fever down and the doctor gave us a list of foods that are high in vitamin A. Otherwise, we just hold her and comfort her.”

“Nate and I had better get the booster now, too,” Ronda said. “We don’t need the whole family down sick. You poor sweetheart. You must have been worried sick all day. I’m sorry we weren’t here.”

“I love you,” Patricia said as she snuggled into Ronda’s arms. “Anna is sleeping with Toni. She’s been so worried.”

We’d really been remarkably lucky with illness in our family. The only major problem we’d had outside of a few sniffles was when my appendix nearly burst. Well, at least we were in a country that had a pretty good health system. Who knows what kind of good-intentioned missionary doctor we’d have gotten if we were someplace in Africa.

Friday morning, we went to the doctor out in the American neighborhood at the airport. He gave Ronda and me the vaccine and looked at Alex again. He said she was already showing signs of improvement and wasn’t developing the typical rash. He examined Toni and pronounced her in good health. She was far more concerned about her sister.

Sunday morning at the embassy, we found out the disease had propagated in the school and half a dozen children were infected. Of course, Patricia and Alex often rode to the school with the children in the embassy van, so Alex could have been exposed by anyone in the school as Patricia volunteered in the classroom. That would have been Wednesday, and Anna was involved with passport photos at the chancery with Erin that day.

Monday, we received a telex from Mr. Martin directing us to spend the week in Muscat and to go to the doctor for more vaccines. The telex included a list of vaccinations we were apparently supposed to have had before we left the US this year. The whole family returned to the doctor on Tuesday for a fresh round of shots. Who knew we needed a plague and yellow fever immunization? None of us were particularly happy about that, but the State Department Foreign Service had additional vaccine requirements for both Africa and Asia.

The good news was that Alex got a clean bill of health and none of the rest of us were showing any signs of having contracted measles. As we were leaving the office, we saw Robert, Joanne, and their two kids. He’d received the same directive.

Normally, we’d have tried to make another short run during the week, perhaps to Iran. Since we were forced into staying in the office, we spent the time going over the list of countries yet to cover and the inventory of equipment we had available.

After discussing it with the family, we decided to make another long Africa trip. The tradeoff was to either spend three weeks knocking off the rest of the West African nations, or spend six weeks doing out and back missions.

Thursday, we got a call from Mr. Martin just before the office closed. We put the call on the speaker device in the conference room so Ronda and I could both hear him and speak to him.

“You two have been very busy,” he said. “No one expected you to cover eight countries in two weeks.”

“It was exhausting, but we think we can cover the rest of Africa in two more tours,” I said.

“The report you sent indicates three weeks out for the next tour,” he said. “Is that doable?”

“We’ve talked to the crew for our plane and they agree that it will be much easier on all of us to load up and do as many countries as possible in small hops. Otherwise, we have a four thousand mile trip to the nearest target every week,” Ronda said.

“And then you’ll come back and cover the rest of the Arabian Peninsula?”

“We only have three countries left on the peninsula before we have to start moving eastward,” I said.

“Okay. I’ll approve it, but it seems it will be hard on your family. Why don’t you plan on a three-week break back in the US when you complete that one. Come home for the holidays,” he said. I looked a question at Ronda.

“Do we have available time off for that?” she asked.

“Not exactly. We keep having a backlog of military passports. I’d like you to do an installation at Oakland, Travis, and Lewis while you are here. It will still be State Department personnel you’ll be training, not military. But it will be at military installations. I trust you won’t have a problem with that.”

“No, sir. I think it is within our purview,” I said.

“Good. In return, you get the rest of the time off. Plan on returning to Oman New Year’s week. Josie can make arrangements for your travel.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You don’t think he knew about this, do you?” I asked, holding the official invitation in my hand.

We’d talked to Adrienne earlier in the week and she affirmed that an invitation to the world premiere of Saigon Summit was on the way. Ronda and I sat at the desk in our office and marked things on the calendar. The premiere was on Friday the thirteenth. I’m sure they could have found a date that was less ominous. We figured that we could fly to LA the day before the premiere, then be up in Oakland and Travis on Monday and Tuesday. We’d have to fly to Seattle then and go down to Fort Lewis before catching a flight back to Chicago. We would have most of two weeks with the family over Christmas before we had to return to Oman. And this time, while we were gone, Patricia and Anna and the girls would have parents and grandparents to entertain them.

The family greeted the news enthusiastically. It made the next four weeks seem less impossible. And when we looked at the calendar, we found we could lay over in London for a couple of days to visit Jane and Peter.

The crew was happy about the arrangement, too. They would have the month off as soon as we finished these last long runs. We took off on Sunday, and after refueling in Ethiopia, got to Leopoldville in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This was a strange area as far as I was concerned. The capital of the Congo Republic, Brazzaville, was directly across the river. The official language of both countries was French. But it would be easier for us to skip Brazzaville when we finished in Leopoldville and fly to Gabon than to get ground transportation across the river. We’d pick up Brazzaville on the way back.

As soon as we were finished in Leopoldville, we flew to Gabon, then Equatorial Guinea. We’d train in Abidjan, The Ivory Coast on Friday and spend the weekend in Liberia, where the national language was English. No surprise there. Liberia was an American colony, populated by former slaves shipped back to Africa before the Civil War.

I had to stop and wonder about American—maybe all of European—mentality. Way back when, we thought it was just fine to kidnap Africans and enslave them to work on plantations in the New World. Then we thought it was just as much our right to colonize an area of Africa already inhabited by natives and ship the unwanted slaves back to Africa. After all, it was all Africa, right? What difference did it make as to where in Africa they came from or how many generations they’d lived in America?

And these places we were visiting were all former colonies of some European country. They came in, stripped the land of its resources, set up governments of white men to rule over the black natives, because it was somehow ‘their right.’ I was more convinced than ever that apartheid in South Africa, Rhodesia, Angola and other areas of Africa needed to be destroyed.

Then, maybe I’d start working to destroy the suppression of Native Americans, too.

From Liberia, we went to Sierra Leone, Guinea, Senegal, and Mali. By that time, we were all about exhausted from the trip, but after the weekend in Mali, we went to Cameroon, and finally to Brazzaville. Wednesday, we all got up early and headed to the airport for the marathon journey home by way of Ethiopia. After twelve hours of flight time, we finally made it home, tumbled into bed with our loved ones, and made a very untraditional Thanksgiving Dinner the next day.

We spent the weekend packing for our vacation in the US. On Sunday, Ronda and I went to the office to transfer courier packets and confirm all our travel reservations to London and back to the US. We found the embassy to be scurrying about to arrange for an official visit of the Sultan to the US in January. I understood the ambassador would overlap his time in the US with ours. I didn’t expect to be called on for anything in that regard, though.

We took off with Robert on Monday and visited the embassy in Bahrain, then in Qatar, and finally in our neighbors, the UAE. Everything went smoothly, and we were back home on Thursday night to get everything assembled for our flight to London on Friday.