Chapter 54

Friday, Saturday and Sunday were golden; I spent all three days with my mates and kids. I took JJ and RJ back to Fort Smith Saturday afternoon. They were still collecting the empty brass shells from all the training that went on there.

There had been changes so the collecting was not as productive as it had been in the past. All training groups now spent time picking up their empties. Vicky was now sending them to a company that reloaded them for the savings.

Reloads were only used for training. The men in the field received only new ammo. There had been no problems with the reloads, but in life or death fight new was better - why chance it?

Monday Marine One carried my staff and me back to Washington. None of the girls were coming over this week. The girls needed to be there to help with everything, with the new babies in the house.

Then there were the critical meetings with the Indian and Pakistan ambassadors. Hopefully, I would have time to read the final reports before the Tuesday meetings with them.

The media dogs were screaming about not having a news conference for them; it had been several weeks. I was going to have to have one but there had been no announcement of a date or time. The surprise was on them - it was today at the normal daily press conference.

I had several topics I was going to drop on them to occupy the media for the rest of the month. I was going to dump so many policy and agency changes in that news conference that the media would have weeks of material to discuss. Some of the things I was going to throw out were bogus and outright misinformation.

I had to laugh after lunch; some of my staff asked when we were going back to Summers Road for another stay. In six hours, they were already fed up with the craziness that was DC.

They didn’t know it and weren’t going to be told about it until only a couple days before it happened, but we were going to spend three weeks at Deep Water Cay. That was one thing that the girls and I had discussed while I was staying at home.

They wanted to spend time away from the Washington madness. Being shot at in the Philippines had put a new emphasis on more time together and on vacation. We were going to wait a couple of months to allow the babies and the new mothers to get a routine set up.

In an hour I needed to be at Walter Reed Hospital so the experts could look at the bullet injury on my head. It wasn’t healing as fast or as nice as the White House doctor wanted. He was concerned that the bullet might have been impregnated with some kind of poison.

I arrived at Walter Reed at 1330. What was supposed to be a short trip took two hours. They scrapped, took biopsies and cleaned the area on my head where the bullet broke the skin and gave me a powerful IV antibiotic. The process they used hurt like hell.

Then they decided they needed to do my physical while I was there. The doctors drew more blood and I was put through another series of full body x-rays. After that there were all the scans they normally did.

I left with the White House doctor and a special tube of medication to put on the area under a band aid while they waited on the results of the biopsies.

There were now new rules for my convoys from the White House. No longer would they assemble at the White House. They would assemble randomly somewhere else, then make the swing to the White House parking lot where I would get into the car. Entering and leaving the parking lot was to take no more than four minutes.

The same was to apply whenever I left an event; they would assemble elsewhere, drive up to the loading area and then leave with me without any waiting.

The first time took fifteen minutes for the Secret Service to get it right. I feared there was going to be a big learning curve with all the changes.

Andy sent a text that was coded 911 for a VCATS call.

‘‘What do you have Andy?’’ I asked. Just as I did, the VCATS screen added Marcy and Vicky.

‘‘Pirates attacked the US flagged tanker ‘Chesapeake Blue’ as it made its way around the island of Anor, it was a hundred miles south west of the island’’ Marcy said.

Chesapeake Blue was one of the finished product tankers JBG owned. It was a fairly new tanker. JBG had three tankers, one we owned and two we leased. All three were finished product tankers. They were smaller than the crude super tankers.

They needed to be smaller than the super tankers to get to the ‘Pig Iron Point fuel depot in the bay. That fuel depot had the pipeline to the fuel storage tanks and the pipeline to the Morton fuel farm. The fuel farm at Pig Iron Point had been expanded multiple times.

It now had enough fuel tanks to hold a product tanker of jet fuel, or one carrying a mixed load of gasoline and diesel fuel. The latest addition was those big round tanks for liquid propane. I wondered why we needed tanks for that much propane.

Marcy answered that question. ‘‘It’s dirt cheap at the refinery, they consider it a waste product because there is little demand for it at those countries in that part of the world. We have high demand for it here and a reliable market for it. We had to have enough tank capacity to handle a tanker load to make the freight charges worthwhile.’’

‘‘Future investments near the refineries will create a local demand as manufacturing takes a foothold. There is also the possibility of using it to fuel several power plants that are on the drawing board; but there is strong competition from the available natural gas from the refineries,’’ Marcy said when I asked.

Marcy could always figure out a way to make money and grow the business.

The ships sailed the route from the refineries in Nigeria and Cameroon with jet fuel, gasoline and diesel fuel and now LPG.

‘‘The fast escorts had been released to return to the Nigerian refinery and had only been gone twenty minutes when the pirate’s ships started showing up on radar from the north east. The tanker made a series of defensive moves until the fast ships returned to sink the pirate boats.”