Chapter 439

After a long night of explanations and comforting and more explanations, along with a big breakfast, I went to my office to start my day.

When I opened my email I wished I had gone to the gym instead. There were hundreds of new ones since I had looked on the flight back.

I began with those marked important and spent a couple hours finishing them up before I needed a break.

Ching Lee sent me all the pictures she had taken while I was disarming the vest, including several close ups. I looked them over and saw nothing unusual, then sent them to Ben-David.

The gym was quiet for the first time in months. All the training was done with all the embassies staffed to the contract levels. The regular gym customers were making the best of it.

The only training scheduled would be the new staff for KCC. Jason was meeting with the current employees next week. Hopefully all the current employees would stay on; I had worked with them for several years and they worked together well as a group.

I drove to Morton Field to see Lorrie. I spent time going over the flight issues that appeared last night. Not that it surprised me, but Lorrie had been looking for a while. She called it part of her long range planning.

Lorrie handed me a folder of aircraft she had researched over the last couple of months that were immediately available for purchase. Her first choice was on top followed by the second. Then she had the data to prove her needs and possible revenue streams to make it work.

I asked if she has asked Robby’s opinion. “This one,” she said as she handed me the spec sheet from the top of the folder. Along with the spec sheet was a distance chart from Morton Field. It would do everything I thought we would ever need; but then I thought that when we bought the Bombardiers and again with the C130s.

I asked about the money and was surprised that it was no more than the price of a new G550. It was three years old and still showed 0 hours on the logs. I wondered how anyone could spend that kind of money and just park it on the tarmac. Everything deteriorated just setting and also lost value.

I understood why and how the Saudi broker did it when we bought one of the G5s; they had hundreds of billions of petro dollars to play games with and no taxes.

This plane was in California; the land of crazy taxes, laws and fruitcakes. Maybe the fruitcake part explained it all; a fruitcake with money.

Marcy had looked at expanding by adding several sites in California, but quickly decided against it last year. She found out the taxes were 10 times higher than any other state and that California had the highest rate of missing rental cars in the nation.

They were driven across the border never to return. Mexico was off limits to repo men or recovery teams.

I took the spec sheet, plane info and broker info with me. I would meet with Marcy this afternoon so she could get the ball rolling.

I talked with Lorrie and the airport restaurant manager about tomorrow afternoon’s party. We were going to use the big agency meeting room for it. All four of the Iowa National Guard C130s that had been in Africa were coming back tonight and early tomorrow morning. The two that were doing the freight run would do their last run tonight.

General McVee was flying in with the twelve other crews that had done flying for us. All eighteen Iowa air transport crews had flown to, from or around Africa in the last 10 weeks. They had flown enough hours on our nickel to meet their time requirements for another year.

The four C130s we owned had been inspected and recertified for another year while the Guard was flying freight runs for us. They had given our pilots a break that we used to get the pilots recertified.

Tonight the C5 would be back from Thailand; it was another secret flight for the agency. Tomorrow and Sunday it would be inspected and loaded for the flight to Kampala. I was initially worried that much of the flight would be a waste.

Now that was not the case, we had 100,000 pounds of canned food, 10 crates of medial equipment and thousands of doses of medicines for the good doctors. Plus we loaded the chopper I was going to leave in the hangar at Entebbe.

Phil, Robin, Rachael, Bob, Gordon, and 10 of the RRT (including Andy) were going, along with Vicky and me. The 10 had been instrumental in building the tables and things for the Nimule camp. They wanted to be a part of the humanitarian mission again. Andy insisted that we take security personnel so that worked out.

We were taking two mechanics who were going to reassemble the chopper blades and test it, plus inspect the one assigned to the Kampala embassy. Then they were taking commercial flights to do annual inspections on our other 407 helicopters that were close by; they were due - as were others - soon.