"And, so, how is it with Kurt, and has Kurt heard the news?"
The hunky black Mobile-Alabama born Marine lieutenant, Tyrone Williams, dropped into the seat on my right in the National Photographic Interpretation Center--NPIC--at M and 1st Streets Southeast in Washington, D.C., said this as he applied a strong hand on my back that would look like being comradely to others but that I knew signaled mastery. He had long had my number--and my ass, as well.
Simultaneously, the equally hunky Iowa wheat-fed blond Army lieutenant, Buck Olsen, dropped into the chair on my left and gave me a big grin. He'd long had my ass as well. The two of them were equally comfortable with each other in relationship to me, as they had been happy with sharing me simultaneously. Most of this had occurred before all three of us drew NPIC assignments, though.
"It's fine with Kurt," I answered, and it
was
fine that the two of them were paying attention to me but maybe not so fine that they were doing so in the center of one of the intelligence community's holies of holies where, in 1970, it wasn't the least bit safe for one top-secret-cleared male employee to show as too chummy with others. My history with these two went way beyond chummy and back to before we all landed in jobs at NPIC. We'd agreed to keep it cool here--for all of our sakes.
We had trained together--Buck and me at twenty-three and Tyrone at twenty-five the previous summer in satellite photography interpretation at Offutt Air Force base in Omaha, Nebraska, as part of the elite force service and civilian intelligence agencies selected for this burgeoning type of intelligence collection. I was there from the CIA, which was administering the programs. We trained at Offutt in huge airplane hangars shared with a small fleet of the sleek SR71 photoreconnaissance planes. We learned to interpret photos they took but more so those taken from the ever-developing Talent-Keyhole satellite-collection systems. The current generation of those was the KH-8, which had an extraordinary definition capability covering a vast swatch of contiguous territory.
We were all young, although most came with master's degrees. The technology required highly specialized skills. A few, like me, were starting families already. I had a wife, Jenny, and a son under one, Kenny, and we were housed in apartments. Most, like Tyrone and Buck, though, were elite servicemen, unencumbered and living in bachelor officers' quarters on the base.
All young, virile, and active, set on a keen edge of tension and hedonism, we played as hard with each other--on the baseball field and tennis courts--as we studied in a three-month course to master our new careers. As with most men and team sports, we sorted each other out in the showers, the better the sculpting of the body and the size of the equipment, the higher in the pecking order. The big black bull, Tyrone Williams, was at the top of the "finely honed" pecking order in our class. Of course, all having passed security clearances, there should have needed to be any sorting in that way, but there was, even with the straight guys included. Size mattered. This was the hedonist seventies, and sexual exploration managed to get past lie detectors. The polygraphers hadn't caught up with what the right questions were to weed out the bisexuals.
The straights quickly came and went in the showers. Those with expanded interests, the gays and bisexuals, stayed longer and established an order. Although I was happily married and a father, I was highly sexed, good-looking enough to turn heads of both females and males, and of bisexual interests. For me sex was sex was sex. Society hadn't caught up with the concept of bisexual yet. Jenny was to continue to enjoy pregnancies down through the years and I would have interests left over. In those Offutt Base shower rooms, sorting out put me on my knees, and I became proficient at soft mouth work and at occasionally taking a cock in the ass. I preferred the latter. I was regularly used by both Tyrone and Buck in that period, both in the showers and wherever else we could manage. They both made clear I was their preferred punch.
And here we all were, the three of us assigned back to the central photographic interpretation hub, Building 213, on the corner of Washington's historic Navy Yard.
"I'm fine," I repeated, "but, no, I haven't heard anything. Is it about the change in our shifts tomorrow to evening because a satellite has dropped its load of KH-8 coverage and they want an immediate readout?" This technology hadn't been developed in synch very well yet. The satellites did a great job of film and putting the film in buckets. Communications and delivery hadn't caught up to that in sophistication yet, though. The payloads were dropped into the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean, and the film buckets had to be snatched out of the air as they came down by Air Force plane nets--actual nets on the end of poles, thrust out from moving jets and trying to bring the bucket in just as an outfielder in baseball would. About a third of the time the grab wasn't made and the film went into the drink.
If successfully snatched, the buckets went to the West Coast, where multiple copies of the film were produced to be sent back to NPIC on the East Coast by jet. Here the various intelligence organization components did separate readouts in different ways. Buck, Army, but working for the central NPIC component with civilians as well, had a square plot of land in Korea that he had to do a total readout on each time film over that was available. He was looking for change in all areas, industrial as well as military and defense works on that area of land. I was in the Agency's shop. We worked strategically. I followed all of China's land borders with other nations on ground forces issues. I looked at both sides of these borders to discern what, if anything, new was happening in border army dispositions. I had no idea what Tyrone's Marine detachment looked for, nor did I ask.
"Don't tell me," I said, as the two grinned at me. "They didn't catch the bucket, did they? There will be no film to interpret tomorrow night."
"Bingo," Tyrone said. "They've called off the evening shift."
"Well, shit," I said. We made extra pay for the evening shifts. With Jenny popping a baby every year, I always needed money. "There goes a new TV set."
"Not necessarily," Tyrone said and I could see Buck nodding his head in agreement. "You have time you can take off, don't you? You don't have to tell your wife there's no evening shift to work tomorrow. We haven't had an opportunity to really party together--the three of us--not at Offutt and not here yet either. And we think you'd be really good to party with. Take off tomorrow night and come out with us. I think we could stand you a TV set for showing the two of us a good time."
"You'd pay me to fuck me?"