In part, this was doubtless due to the shared experience of the in-flight lessons on casino gambling and scams taught by Tullie Bascom and the instructors from the school he ran for casino dealers.
I will not attempt to detail the techniques for cheating and detecting cheats which were imparted in these lessons, as it is my intention to chronicle the career of my employer, not to provide a training manual for larceny at the gaming tables. Since it to say that the instruction was sufficiently challenging and intense that it drew the force together, in part to practice on each other, and in part to swap tales of embarrassing slips and failures.
Watching the eagerness with which the company attacked their lessons, however, I could not help but wonder if they were preparing for the upcoming assignment, or if, perhaps, they were rabidly squirreling away information for their personal use.
Apparently I was not the only one this occurred to …
Tullie Bascom’s report had run long, much longer than anyone had expected after he appeared for the meeting without notes. Twenty-five years of working casinos, mostly as a pit boss, however, had sharpened his eye and memory to a point where he rarely wrote anything down-names or numbers. Instead, he appeared to speak off the top of his head, rattling on for hours as he reviewed each of his students’ strengths and weaknesses, while the commander and the two junior officers flanking him filled page after page on their notepads with his insightful comments.