Chapter 348

Saturday afternoon Andy sent me back pictures taken of the villa from one of the choppers with a very good camera. His e-mail had the GPS coordinates of the villa.

Andy included the tool list as he called it; all of it, with the exception of a few things, we had in the armory. The things we did not have Andy had sent links to online sites that carried the items. Andy included the rush order that I was to place and have it shipped next day to the embassy.

Andy wanted four Dragon X12 RTF KDE Drones that were $31,000 apiece, eight extra batteries with chargers that were a thousand each plus four cameras; two of the cameras were $4000 each and two were $25,000 each. By the description, the last two were infrared; the kind that could see the heat signature of people in buildings.

There were several interesting things about the order he wanted. One was the cameras were live feed to a laptop and Andy wanted four laptops to go with them. The next thing was that the drones could carry a hundred pounds of weight and with the extra battery packs, could fly well over an hour. The package was a lot of money, but all of it could be used later over and over, even at the compound for training.

I was using a three half-day work schedule at KCC for the next few weeks. The first thing I did Monday morning was order all the things Andy wanted and sent him copies of the order, in case he wanted to change or add anything. I also instructed Marcy to upgrade Andy’s credit card limits. Marcy was going to kill me when she saw these invoices.

Things were back to normal at KCC; I had a quiet morning. The visit by Bob Jackson was cordial and quick.

On the way back to the gym I stopped at the airport and went to the agency hangar. I had questions for Kevin Parks. I basically wanted to know how much of the rules he would bend for me in a discreet way.

I asked, “How often do the satellites go over North-east Africa?”

“Several times a day; what areas are you interested in?” Kevin replied.

I gave him the GPS of the villa. He punched in the numbers; then he looked at me a little strange.

“There is a whisper in the wind about a sweet little OPS your guys are said to have pulled off. Is this connected?” Kevin asked.

“Call it follow up,” I replied.

“That location is in the direct path of several satellites that routinely monitor Morocco, Algeria and Libya. What do you need?” Kevin said.

“A couple of good images a day, then Wednesday and Thursday a lot - including thermals if possible - sent to my email account,” I replied.

“Off the record, I assume,” he asked.

“Absolutely,” I replied.

In the terminal building I stopped by Lorrie’s office, “I need the G550 Wednesday through at least Friday morning; the flight is to Morocco. I want to leave at midnight Tuesday. I want to be there at first light.”

“Then on Sunday, one of the C130s with all the jump seats put back in needs to do a round robin to Rabat to exchange the team there. The flight needs to leave real early Sunday to make the exchange in one day,” I said.

Monday afternoon I went with Jenny and the boys for their first doctor visit. All three were fine and fit as a fiddle. Jenny had lost weight - ten pounds - since she had left the hospital. The boys had put on a pound each.

At our nightly meeting I stressed that the training for the group in the gym had to be finished by Thursday evening so that all day Friday could be on hostage rescue training when I returned. They needed Saturday off to finish any personal items before returning to Rabat.