The Los Alamos mission was over. I stood in the high-altitude sunshine, not enough oxygen in the air, and no protection from the high-altitude beating sun’s rays as I reflected. Somehow, I felt let down. Nothing had happened. It was almost like being a house painter who’s finished with the job, but without any ability to review and appreciate the work or have anyone criticize or compliment it. At least Korea had provided excitement, more in keeping with what little reality I’d gained over the years watching and reading espionage material. Neither John Le Carre nor Ludlum had approached anything dealing with either real situations or real equipment (and the lack of it) or operational moves. When I’d mentioned that to my wife early on, her only reply had bitten deep, but at least she’d delivered it with a laugh; “They write fiction, stupid.”

I drove the modified Mercedes back to Albuquerque, the trip almost all downhill, so I could go as fast as the little former tractor engine powering the heavy car would do. Down the La Bajada Pass part of the freeway, I got it to run at 106 miles per hour before coming down to a more level surface. Kingsley and Nguyen kept the Rover a respectful distance behind but never passed. I knew that neither man would have such a thought cross his mind. The darkest thought occurred to me as I drove, the Becker radio and speakers belting out “Whiter Shade of Pale: “…She said, “There is no reason, and the truth is plain to see, that I wandered through my playing cards, and could not let her be, no one of sixteen vestal virgins who was leaving for the coast…”. The words made no sense, but the mood was right down my alley. What was I going to do in life, or even in the CIA, without those irreplaceable men in my life? Would my life turn a ‘whiter shade of pale?’

It was true, like in the lyrics, that I would be, no doubt, going to the coast, although more likely over it on my way to Hawaii. The tall, elegant, and taciturn man in whatever the reality of the basement of the Los Alamos hospital was had been flatly, analytically, but convincingly revealing. I believed him, although why he said what he’d said I could not understand. The CIA was proving to be a much stranger group to work with than I would ever have believed before working with it.

Without the heavy load the 240D drove with its rear end about six to eight inches higher in the air. For a car that would only get to sixty miles per hour on level ground in over twenty seconds, it looked more like it was something modified to run at a drag strip. That look wasn’t going to work with my wife, not on her car. She and the kids loved the poorly performing thing, and I had to admit that I liked it quite a bit too. It was the only vehicle I would get in and out of, slam the door, and then do it again to listen to the closing bank vault door sound produced.

I drove straight to the Amos guys at the auto body shop to see if I could get the work done quickly, as I wasn’t going to park the Benz in my driveway looking the way it did.

Mary was home when I called to let her know that I was in the clear, coming back, and would be taking the iodine tablets, like Nguyen and Kingsley, for some time to come. I didn’t tell her I was already back in Albuquerque because I had to clear some things up first that I didn’t want to talk to her over a telephone line. That the Agency monitored all our home telephone conversations was bothersome, and always had to be kept in mind when we talked. We needed my job, the house, the cars and the insurance office, and money. So far, no one had ever mentioned anything we talked about, but that didn’t mean they weren’t constantly evaluating everything.

The next call I made was to Herbert.

“What’s going on in Hawaii?” I asked briskly, without saying hello or giving him any end-of-mission report…not that one could truly be given over a non-secure telephone line.

“The Agency acquires, accumulates, and stores information,” he replied, matter-of-factly. “It does not give it out unless action or necessity of another order is called for.”

“Who told you anything about Hawaii?” he then asked.

I repeated the very words he’d used on me back to him, but he didn’t laugh at the absurdity of what either of us had said.

“You need to go to a secure location,” he responded, after a slight delay.

“And where would that be?” I asked, “There’s no embassy or consulate I know of around here.”

“Go to the Agency office,” he shot back, truly surprising me.

“There’s an office in Albuquerque?” My shock in hearing of such a thing or place is evident in my tone.

“Go to Kirtland and enter the National Atomic Museum. The second unmarked door to the right of the main entrance will open when they see you on the hidden camera.”

“The Agency has a regular office in Albuquerque? Why wasn’t I told before? “I asked, shaking my head at the apparent lack of logic, or what seemed apparent to me.

“You keep talking but not saying anything, like there’s a telephone directory stored somewhere. You are smarter than this.”

The receiver went dead in my hand, as I smiled at it ruefully. Herbert was right, of course. There would be no directory, and with some very good reasons. Anyone going to a known Agency office would be noted and then burned as an agent with any forces out in the world that had some sort of need or want to know. Going to a consulate or embassy was a wiser choice when one was nearby and available, but that wasn’t an option when moving around in the States.

The car restoration took only an hour, which the three of us spent at Benningan’s restaurant in the Uptown area of Albuquerque. We went there to wait and drink coffee simply because it was the very first restaurant I’d ever gone to after moving to New Mexico. I loved the layout, the old rock playing in the background, and the hustle and bustle of the business community that frequented it.

I let both of my companions know that as soon as I dropped the Benz at home we’d be going back to the base. I got no questions nor arguments, but then I’d expected none. Truer followers could not be found to replace them which once again caused my thoughts to turn a bit dark.

Mary had been part of the decision to exclude her from accompanying to Los Alamos and I’d made sure to tell her about the modifications to her prized ‘green hornet’ of a German underpowered luxury car. I left her in the driveway, surprised by how intensely she was examining every part of the car that’d been modified.

My official but truly fake Marine Corps officer I.D. card worked, as it always had, to get us through the main gate of the base. The staff sergeant who examined the card seemed squared away and knowledgeable. I asked him how civilians without proper military identification got through the gate to go through the museum. He said that museum civilians got a special short-term pass, and everyone in such a visiting vehicle had to surrender their identification documents.

“The base has Manzano Mountain nuclear warhead storage right off in the distance there,” I said, pointing at the not-so-distant mountain and smiling at the staff sergeant.

“The museum is a quarter mile down this main road,” the staff sergeant replied, without a smile. “You can’t miss it, or should I say, don’t miss it.”

I drove slowly forward, realizing too late that I should have kept my mouth shut. The sergeant’s tone had been vaguely threatening. Most people, military or otherwise, likely were unaware of the nuclear weapons storage facility, and even discussing that had raised suspicion in the Marine’s mind. Once again, I knew I was still making one mistake after another in being what I was going to be expected to be…and training was the only hope I had in helping me to figure out what that was.

The museum was as described in the location. The outside of the building was plated with aluminum or some other fairly shiny metal. The entrance was made up of two double doors of glass and much more glass with windows penetrating the walls for as far as the eye could see. I walked inside, leaving Kingsley and Nguyen to wait with the Range Rover. The second door was as described by Herbert. White in color, like several more that had titles painted on them. I got ready to stand in front of the door, but even with no camera visible, I was noticed immediately, and the door opened in front of me. I walked inside, and the door closed automatically behind my back.

There was no one there. I stood and looked around at the half wall cubicles that businesses used who had a lot of employees working the phones or doing paperwork separately but together. An overhead speaker informed me what to do.

“Take the hall to your left and enter any of the closed doors. You’ll find a telephone in each. The handset you pick up will ring the person of your intent.”

I picked a door at random, opened it, and went inside. The door, once again, closed behind me. A single black old-fashioned Bakelite black phone sat alone atop the only desk. It was a pushbutton, however not with a rotary dial. For some reason, the whole setup made me feel that I was part of a truly secret organization. Everything just clicked into place like a silently running, well-oiled watch. I picked up the receiver but didn’t have to dial. There was a short buzzing sound coming through the earpiece before Herbert’s voice came through.

“Your mission was quite a success,” he began. “Nobody noticed a thing from beginning to end. Congratulations.”

“Except now I glow in the dark,” I replied, although Herbert ignored the joke and went on.

“The iodine won’t hurt you, and we have a bit more to do.”

“Tony Herbert, sir, my control officer, at what point am I going to enter training so I can become really good at doing all this?” I asked, my tone one of near begging. Despite my evident successes so far, I felt incompetent and so very capable of making the most foolish of mistakes.

“Oahu is training,” Herbert said.

“I thought Charm School was in New Jersey, with side trips for explosives, sniping, and other specialty stuff in Utah, Nevada, and California. What training is out in Hawaii, and where on Oahu? I was raised there for God’s sake, and I never heard of any training facility for intelligence agents, and my dad was the harbor master at Pearl.”

“You live in Albuquerque and had no idea there was a CIA office right under your nose,” Herbert shot back. “UDT training command is on Ford Island, there.”

“Ford Island, UDT, like Frogmen, do you have to swim on and off the island?”

“You won’t miss Christmas,” Herbert replied, as if that had anything to do with anything as far as the Agency was concerned.

I was coming to find that the care and keeping of its agents was very much CIA concern but not necessarily the comfort or family of the men and women who worked with or for them. In my days as a real Marine, it had been quite common to hear some talk about the families of the men, even officers’ families. “If we wanted you to have a wife and family we’d have issued you those things,” was a not too uncommon expression.

“I’m not going,” I said, shocking Herbert into silence for almost a minute.

“You’re not going,” he finally replied. “What’s this new wrinkle? You were raised out there, know the culture, the language, and the twists and turns of the strange cultural mix.”

“Okay, I’ll go, but I promised my wife that I would never visit the islands without her at my side. Is that in the budget for this school?”

“That’s a problem,” Herbert replied, his voice almost a whisper. “Sit tight where you are, and I’ll call you back momentarily.”

The phone handset went back to buzzing softly. I hung it up and then pulled out the desk chair to sit and wait. My thoughts were all about temporary additional duties and pay, which would have to be stretched to the max to cover my wife’s air travel and hotel stay, along with the kids.
The phone rang. I picked it up before it could ring twice.

“Well,” I said, before Herbert could say anything. But it wasn’t Herbert on the line.

“This is Robert Clayton Ames, Chief of Field Operations,” the hard, precise, and unemotional voice said.

“Yes, sir,” was all I could think to say. I had a very strong feeling that the chief of any operation, at the upper levels of the Agency, seldom talked to agents in the field, and even less seldom to those who were as yet untrained in field work.

“We have some hard and fast rules you have not learned about yet,” Ames said, waiting a few seconds for his words to sink in before going on. There was no question, so I waited with him.

“We do not allow, under any circumstances, family, friends, civilians, or those not assigned field posts to go on missions,” the disembodied voice stated before only silence could be heard through the handset as I waited for more.

I stared at the wall in front of me, trying to take in what the man was trying to say. I’d just come off a mission where it had been recommended that I take my wife along to shop in Santa Fe to provide deeper cover for that mission. Was Mr. Ames stating something for the record so the Agency would be absolved if some family member or friend was injured do to my work? It made little sense that it would be anything else. The apparent rigid rules of field conduct were, in fact, about as malleable as soft putty.

“The UDT training can’t be counted as being a mission, can it? I asked, before concluding, after a few seconds without a sound from the receiver, that Mr. Ames was gone.

“I’m here,” Herbert said before I could hang up. “I have a marginal solution if you’ll accept it.”

That I might be the one to decide or accept anything, other than to cause my own early resignation, took me by surprise. I waited for him to go on with whatever the ‘marginal solution’ might be.

“Kauai. You wife and daughter can wait for you on the island of Kauai at a place called the Princeville Resort located just above the village of Hanalei. That distance should preclude the invoking of the family and friends rule, and you can tell Mary that its part of your Christmas gift to her.” Herbert stopped talking and waited.

I thought over the offer, but then the whole question of the thing leaped out at me.

“What mission? The UDT training is not a mission. I was thinking the wrong way when I spoke to Mr. Ames. What is the mission, since it’s not the training?”

“Neither I nor the Chief of Operations can tell you that, even over a secure line,” Herbert replied, his voice beginning to show some discomfort.

“Then give me a hint,” I replied, wondering why he hadn’t hung up in his usual abrupt style yet.

Whatever the mission was required that I be properly prepared to handle it, which, with UDT training, meant that it was underwater somewhere off Oahu.

The phone went silent, although I could hear vague conversational comments in the background, but could not make out what was being said. If Herbert was with the Chief of Field Operations personally, at his low level in the field system, then whatever they were talking about was a big deal indeed. Why he’d mentioned lying to Mary about the mission also surprised me. I wouldn’t do that, not if there was any element of risk whatsoever, even with Kauai a bit over a hundred miles across very deep ocean from Oahu.

“Okay,” Herbert said, as if he was more confident in a solution than he’d sounded earlier. “Werner Erhard,” he said, “in what way did he get our full attention?”

I literally held the phone’s receiver away from me as I thought. I reviewed the mission with Werner. There had been that one word reply from him at a very critical moment. That one word had changed everything.

Nuclear, I wanted to whisper in response, but I knew better. Herbert hadn’t been beating around the bush for no reason at all. Nuclear. I was fast becoming a nuclear transport and recovery agent of the United States National Labs, or maybe even for the Atomic Energy Commission. I had no idea, but the fact that Ames had come on the line to talk to me spoke directly to me in ways that Herbert’s could never have done.

I said nothing, rolling everything that had been discussed since the one word in my own life had come at me. I hadn’t spoken it. I’d received it, just like I had Werner’s single word. My father had talked for a bit about the nuclear weapons storage at Pearl Harbor, off in one of the many arms of water that spread out like an octopus from the main harbor. Almost all of those estuaries and mini harbors were unused or had mothballed ships stored in them. The nuclear warheads were on hand to load into submarines for their ASROC systems, for some of their torpedoes, and for the ‘boomer’ ICBM Ohio class subs to re-arm with warheads, should it come to that.

“The artifact,” I said, not knowing why I was saying the word to Herbert.

Somehow, I had become, like the commander of the beach patrol at the Western White House in San Clemente, a small figure but one with potentially major importance. That the only importance, even back in the Ashau Valley of Vietnam, had been fleeting, this time it was traveling with me, although for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out where it would lead, except to the handling of another bit or chunk of nuclear-enriched material.

I knew, without even bringing my wife’s terrifically objective and analytical skills into play, that there was a bomb out there off Oahu. Somehow, it had gotten away and had to be retrieved, and it was underwater. The UDT training for me kept me at the very point, with the well-trained and so experienced Frogmen of great fame, would be working in support of whatever I had to do. I knew I was being afforded an uncommon place among the scientific community. I was being accepted as knowing and understanding the handling of nuclear warheads without having a shred of physics training, following two courses in High School. I also knew that I was accepted as someone who would keep whatever secrets about the mission that had to be lying there on the bottom of the ocean.

“Thank you,” I said when Herbert failed to reply.

I knew he understood without any further conversation, as I did. There was no turning down the mission, although I would talk to my wife about breaking my word about never going to Hawaii without her. I would not leave her behind, but if she was able to read the danger, then I would accept her backing down and letting me go it alone.

“For what?” Herbert asked back.

“For letting me know in your way. I’m in, of course, as I would imagine that a lot of lives might be on the line here and you guys are hopefully better at the selection process than I will likely ever be.”

There seemed to be no point in complaining about anything. I was financially and career orientation trapped, and I knew it.

“What are the arrangements for all this?” I asked.
“Mac will be at the airport with the Starlifter for your immediate transport. Your wife and kids will be provided civilian travel to Kauai tomorrow and a room at the Princeville Resort, as promised, until you can get back and forth to see them. The training is rigorous, even for a swimmer like you, so I make no promises about time being available for social reasons.”

“When’s the plane coming in?” I inquired, as I hadn’t even been home since coming back from Los Alamos.

“In the air, with Mac aboard,” Herbert replied. “I’m sorry, but once again, you’ll be flying without reserves and heading directly in. The UDT course is usually three weeks long, but you’ve got to complete the training in a matter of days.”

“What kind of depth are we talking about?” I asked, as although I wasn’t a SCUBA qualified diver, I knew quite a bit about deep diving and the effects of the bends if following the dive tables for time underwater were not rigidly obeyed.

“They tell me that it’s about a thousand.”

“A thousand what?” I asked, wondering what the man was talking about in terms of diving underwater. Herbert didn’t reply, so I tried another tack.

“No one can dive to a thousand feet unless in a bathysphere or special submarine,” I said.

“Technology has changed, as you will discover,” Herbert replied, before hanging up.