Excerpt…

Langley, Virginia
October 19, 2004

Hugh’s temper was not improved by the sight of his overflowing mailbox or by the stack of message slips held down on his desk by the soapstone bear paperweight.  The bear had been a gift from Sara the last Christmas they were in high school together.  He looked at it, fulminating.  He wanted to pick it up and heave it through the window.

He didn’t, of course, but sitting on the impulse just pissed him off more.

There had, in fact, been no moment during which he had not been thoroughly pissed off since he woke up alone in his Anchorage hotel room yesterday morning, and then just to ice the cake he’d had to run for his plane.  His admin assistant had taken one look at his face as he came in the door this morning and speech had literally withered on her tongue.  He took a deep breath and let it out, uncapped his vente quadruple shot americano, took a big swallow to get his heart started, and began wading through the mess.

There was the usual assortment of pleas for help from agents and informers in the field, from Tokyo to Taiwan to Ho Chi Minh City to Shanghai to Bangkok to Singapore to Calcutta.  They wanted to pay off a source, they needed to verify intelligence, they had had to bribe a local official for a satellite uplink.  The official had discovered who he was really dealing with and had doubled the already astronomical price.  Hugh was in no mood to be generous with the hard-earned tax dollars of the American citizen this morning and he rejected all but one request out of hand.

A high-ranking Pakistani military officer had made an oblique approach to a junior officer of the American embassy at a cocktail party in Karachi and the consul had handed the contact off to the case officer in Delhi, who had confirmed the identity of the officer in question and was recommending the agency make the officer an offer for his services.  A walk-in snitch, Hugh’s favorite kind, and he emailed the case officer to proceed.  There was too damn little in the way of human source intelligence available to the Directorate of Intelligence these days and he was willing to investigate every possible source.  There were a dozen open cases that needed monitoring, some that needed orders issued for further action, and one that needed closing, because the source had disappeared, which meant he had probably been discovered, which meant that he was either dead or in the wind.  The intel the source had produced had bordered on hearsay and speculation, but he’d been on the payroll for six years, during which time he’d come up with maybe three really useful pieces of information, one concerning the sale of CBRN weapons components to North Korea, and the case officer in Shanghai had thought they ought to do something for the family.  Hugh almost rejected this request, too, until he realized he was in no frame of mind to be making this kind of decision.  He emailed the man in Shanghai and told him to do what he thought appropriate within budgetary constraints.

The phone rang.  He snatched it up.  “What?”

The voice on the other end said, “Sadly, that does not sound like the voice of someone who just got laid.”

Dana sez–

In February 2004 I did a Bering Sea ridealong on USCGC Alex Haley. Sixteen days at sea, the first morning of which I woke up, sat up, and threw up. Yeah, baby. But it was an amazing experience, nothing at all like anything I’d ever done before, and inspired Blindfold Game. I will be forever grateful to one of the most hospitable and hardest working services in the world, the United States Coast Guard.

My price for the trip was to write a daily blog on my website so that friends and families of the crew could ride along with us. I have collected those blog posts in an ebook, On Patrol with the US Coast Guard.

Chatter blindfold game On Patrol with the US Coast Guard us coast guard