Moscow Mule Part 1
(a true story)
My heart fluttered and all breath left my body as I walked out of the rest stop and didn’t see Alex, Sergei or the 18 wheeler in the spot that I had left them. The gargantuan exhaust-filled semi truck park outside of Chicago seemed to bend and swirl around me as I ran through my now very limited options, all while still wearing the same dubiously dirty jeans and torn t-shirt for 36 hours and counting. In the spring of 2000, cell phones weren’t available and, earlier in the surprise debriefing, the Air Force officers never actually told us what to do if we had any problems. They only mentioned that if they could give us each a firearm they would, but they can’t. Which prompted my non-military friend, who had also agreed to be a chaperone, to blurt out: “Then why bring it up?”
A day before, that same non-military friend asked me if I wanted a job moving and packing the then-closing Lowry Air Force base so they could move out East. It was supposed to be a long, physical but lucrative, 10- to 12-hour day on a Saturday, when I desperately needed some cash. We arrived early to find out we were going to be working in large computer silos that housed thousands of small computer cartridges that had to be removed by hand from annoyingly-snug slots like big plastic teeth. The cartridges could only be accessed by a tiny crack of a walkway in each silo that was about 6 feet tall and so narrow we couldn’t turn around in them. It would take two people around two hours to clear out one silo, and with each stale second of not being able to turn or move my shoulders, the work became increasingly unpleasant. The day was a blur of cardboard boxes, cramped walkways and plastic cartridges that I was more than happy to be over with.
After we were done working, my friend and I sat in a very large and very blue waiting room with the rest of the workers and waited to get paid. That is when a couple of stern Air Force officers walked in and proceeded to tell us that they needed some volunteers to chaperone the boxes that we just packed out to Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. They went on to tell us that those cartridges we had been pulling all day contained the payroll for the entire United States Air Force, and that while we were in the silos there was some sort of international incident between Russia and America in international air space. As luck would have it, the scheduled drivers of the semi-trucks we packed were, of course, Russian nationals. All of these facts required them to have a more heightened security response with the transport of the cartridges. They then asked for volunteers to ride with and keep an eye on, these drivers for the 36- to 40-hour drive out to the new base in Pennsylvania. They told us that, though the chances were small, these men could be Russian operatives trying to get sensitive information, and that we should be careful. This is when they mentioned not being able to give us guns, but wishing they could, which obviously didn’t do much for morale. All of the quiet nervousness immediately evaporated however as they told us that we would each make $3,000 for the drive out, and be put up one night, then flown back to Colorado the next day. The idea of making that amount of money in two days squelched any fear I had and I threw my hand up.
To be continued…