Chapter 289

It was hard to believe but tomorrow is Christmas Eve day and most operations were at reduced levels. All 10 of the colleges were on Christmas and New Years break. Their security departments were still working but at a much more relaxed pace. The offices were closed as was most of the airport. Lorrie did have several flights to Florida tomorrow with both Bombardiers.

Because Carson and Sabrina both lived close and had agreed to each work half a day to keep the terminal building open during the day to handle the passengers leaving and or returning. We had decided in our meeting that both planes were being left on the tarmac in front of the terminal.

Lorrie had scheduled half dozen or so flights that were returning tonight and the planes were going to be left on the tarmac in front of the hangar. Carson was going to work the second half of the day. We did not want her staying any longer than necessary the girls and I were going to park them away with the tug tomorrow afternoon.

All of us girls had watched and guided the guys pushing planes into the hangar. Jack and Robbie always put us girls on the tug and supervised us pushing planes around, "Just because you are the bosses, that doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to do the things everyone else can do. There may be times that you have to," Jack had said more than once.

I had nine hours to kill before Charlie was to make his call at midnight. So I worked in the office for three hours and then we had a normal meeting. This would be the last meeting until after day after Christmas, unless there was something important that that we had to deal with.

The flight details were discussed, including my desire to be up to take Charlie's call at midnight. It would give me some time to finish wrapping the last few Christmas gifts over at the office.

The flight had gone as we thought it would and the C130 should be back the day after Christmas without problems. Two of the six choppers would be in place and mechanics would have the two brought back to evaluate. Then there was the problem of getting the Blackhawk to South America next week in between the scheduled agency flights.

Supper was a joyous occasion; Jake and Mindy bought the house at the end of Summers Road. The family came back to the house to give us the happy news. It called for an impromptu supper. Pizza it was - six large - along with several orders of cheesy bread sticks made the order. We had plenty of beer here.

The pizza, beer and family time consumed two hours. When Jake and Mindy moved to Japan they gave away most of their furniture and household goods. In a way I felt bad that Jake had sold me his house but that is how fate works out. If I had not bought it someone else would have.

To make things right furniture shopping was going to happen after Christmas and there were no shortage of volunteers to help them set up a household.

Jake was planning on the reactor contract lasting 5 years, a couple more years for monitoring and then retiring. Now two and a half years later that plan fell apart.

I was relieved that he was coming home; spending that long with the radiation still leaking could not be good on the body no matter what the so-called experts said. I knew that Mom and Dad were excited to have all the family near them again.

At 11 Marcy and I went back over to the office with everyone else going to bed. Tonight was the night I slept with Marcy. Instead of waiting alone she was going to spend time with me in my office waiting for the call from Charlie. To our surprise there were still people in the gym working out, even though tomorrow was Christmas Eve.

All the offices had big well padded very comfortable chairs - mine included, even though I was gone most of the time. Those chairs were made for three hundred pound executives to sit in all day all day long.

After I sat back into the chair Marcy slid into my lap. With my arm around her I began showing her how the VCATS system worked. Together we looked over the list of countries marked by an asterisk. The asterisk indicated they were online and ready for use, but not active at the moment. Then I showed Marcy how Cindy's file put the names and places together with photographs of the people at each of the embassy sites.

I should have expected it; there were a lot of places active on VCATS around the world where it was daytime. Many of those places were now part of our security group.

In addition to the Mali and Sudan embassies in southern Africa I had people in Zanzibar Tanzania, Harare Zimbabwe, Luanda Angola, Windhoek Namibia, Morondava Madagascar, and Pretoria South Africa.