Cruiser Quotes

If you keep doing that, you’ll be turning in another wrecked PT Cruiser.” “You said you wanted to drive,” Taylor whispered teasingly as she nibbled at his neck. “Because I’m the man.” “Fine. I’ll stop then, if that’s really what you want . . .” The car careened wildly as it took the next corner. “Fuck it,” Jason groaned. “I’ll buy you a new car.

And seriously…It’s clear that General Lee can outrun a police cruiser. Why doesn’t Rosco just go to the Duke farm and arrest them when they’re not in the car?

Most people, when they imagine New England, think about old colonial homes, white houses with black shutters, whales, and sexually morbid WASPs with sensible vehicles and polite political opinions. This is incorrect. If you want to get New England right, just imagine a giant mullet in paint-stained pants and a Red Sox hat being pushed into the back of a cruiser after a bar fight.

As each person's sandal hits the pier, a sociolinguistic transformation from cruiser to tourist is effected.

Come with me to the Pacific Design Center.” “Why?” “Because I need help picking out a new couch,” he said, peering up at her uncertainly. “Isn’t that what friends do?” “Okay.” “Okay.” “Should we go?” Taylor went back inside her apartment and grabbed her keys. As she followed Jason out to his car, she tapped him on the shoulder. “Hey—can I drive the Aston Martin?” “No.” “But isn’t that what friends do?” “No.” “My, my, you’re awfully grumpy today . . . Is something wrong?” “Buckle up, sweetheart,” he told her. “This ain’t no PT Cruiser.

But before I could pull back onto the highway, the blue and red flashing lights of a police cruiser lit up behind me. I watched as the officer, wearing a mask, approached. He motioned for me to put on a mask and open my window. How could I put on a mask? I didn’t have one. I mouthed, no mask. He pulled one out of his uniform jacket pocket. One of those despicable thin blue paper masks. Now what the hell good was that going to do either of us?

A rap at the back door made her jump, and she peered through the window for a long time before she eased open the door a crack. She left the security chain on. 'What do you want, Richard?' Richard Morrell's police cruiser was parked in the drive. He hadn't flashed any lights or howled any sirens, so she supposed it wasn't an emergency, exactly. But she knew him well enough to know he didn't pay social visits, at least not to the Glass House. 'Good question,' Richard said. 'I guess I want a nice girl who can cook, likes action movies, and looks good in short skirts. But I'll settle for you taking the chain off the door and letting me in.

Most craft give a nod, however brief and unfriendly, towards beauty. Vogon ships did not nod towards beauty. They pulled on ski masks and mugged beauty in a dark alley They spat in the eye of beauty and bludgeoned their wait through the notions of aesthetics and aerodynamics. Vogon cruisers did not so much travel through space as defile it and toss it aside.

Emma was a shocking driver, simultaneously sloppy and petrified, and for the first fifty miles had been absent-mindedly driving with her spectacles on top of her contact lenses so that other traffic loomed menacingly out of nowhere like alien space cruisers.

La memoria es como libro en el cual se escribe toda nuestra vida. Algunas veces deseamos cerrarlo y olvidarlo para no recordar todos los escabrosos detalles, y otras veces deseamos abrirlo y observarlo detenidamente, queriendo volver a sentir lo mismo que sentimos en aquel momento.

Off the southeast tip of Italy a young Austrian U-boat commander named Georg von Trapp, later to gain eternal renown when played by Christopher Plummer in the film The Sound of Music, fired two torpedoes into a large French cruiser, the Leon Gambetta. The ship sank in nine minutes, killing 684 sailors.

A memory stabbed him, as sharp as a blade. He’d floated alone in an escape pod over Ryloth once, spinning high over its surface, after crashing a cruiser into a droid control ship. Another name bobbed up and broke the surface of the sea of memory. Ahsoka. He’d called her “Snips” sometimes. He pushed the errant recollection aside and focused on his task.

Question." "Yes," Candace asked expectantly, eyes fixed on the dark street ahead. "Have you ever had to chose sides between a friend and a boyfriend?" Candace nodded. "Which side are you suppose to pick?" "The right one." "What if they're both right?" "They're not." "But they are," Melody insisted. "That's the problem." "No." Candace slowly rolled past a police cruiser. "They both think they're right. But who do you think is right? Which side represents the thing you think is worth fighting for?" Melody glanced out the window as though she was expecting the answer to be revealed on a neighbor's lawn. Every house except hers had the lights turned off. "I dunno." "You do," Candace insisted. "You just don't have the courage to be honest with yourself. Because then you'd have to do the thing you don't want to do, and you hate doing anything that's hard. Which is why you gave up singing and why you have no life and why you've always been a -" "Um okay! Can we get back to the part where you were sounding like Oprah?" "I'm just saying, Melly, what would you do if you weren't afraid? That's your answer. That's your side." She turned into the circular driveway and put the SUV in PARK. "And if you don't choose it, you're lying to yourself and everyone around you." She opened the door and grabbed her purse. "Oprah out!" The door slammed behind her.

Six: everyone - and when I say everyone, I mean absolutely, positively everyone, from the librarians to the students to the staff to the oldest, cruiser janitor - was piss-down-their-legs scared of Miles Richter. Of all the crazy things I heard about East Shoal, that was the only thing I couldn't believe.

One of the few freedoms that we have as human beings that cannot be taken away from us is the freedom to assent to what is true and to deny what is false. Nothing you can give me is worth surrendering that freedom for. At this moment I'm a man with complete tranquillity...I've been a real estate developer for most of my life, and I can tell you that a developer lives with the opposite of tranquillity, which is perturbation. You're perturbed about something all the time. You build your first development, and right away you want to build a bigger one, and you want a bigger house to live in, and if it ain't in Buckhead, you might as well cut your wrists. Soon's you got that, you want a plantation, tens of thousands of acres devoted solely to shooting quail, because you know of four or five developers who've already got that. And soon's you get that, you want a place on Sea Island and a Hatteras cruiser and a spread northwest of Buckhead, near the Chattahoochee, where you can ride a horse during the week, when you're not down at the plantation, plus a ranch in Wyoming, Colorado, or Montana, because truly successful men in Atlanta and New York all got their ranches, and of course now you need a private plane, a big one, too, a jet, a Gulfstream Five, because who's got the patience and the time and the humility to fly commercially, even to the plantation, much less out to a ranch? What is it you're looking for in this endless quest? Tranquillity. You think if only you can acquire enough worldly goods, enough recognition, enough eminence, you will be free, there'll be nothing more to worry about, and instead you become a bigger and bigger slave to how you think others are judging you.

They say you can never go home again." Bartholomew Quasar leaned back in his deluxe-model captain's chair as the star cruiser raced toward Earth. "But I tend to disagree.

Sunny called the cops. Twenty minutes later, a police cruiser quietly pulled up to the building with its lights off. A highly agitated Sunny told the officer that an employee had quit and departed with company property. When the officer asked what he’d taken, Sunny blurted out in his accented English, “He stole property in his mind.

She glanced over her shoulder to look at the forty-foot cabin cruiser where Captain Tarwater posed on the bow looking like an advertisement for a particularly rigid laundry detergent - Bumstick Go-Be-Bright, perhaps

In October 1944, we were cruising near Samar, getting ready to help lead the invasion of the Philippines. We had thirteen ships in our group, which sounds like a lot, but aside from the carrier, it was mainly destroyers and escorts, so we didn’t have much firepower. And then, on the horizon, we saw what seemed like the entire Japanese fleet coming toward us. Four battleships, eight cruisers, eleven destroyers, hell-bent on sending us to the bottom of the sea.

Below the bows of the Arrawa a child’s coffin moved onto the night stream. Its paper flowers were shaken loose by the wash of a landing craft carrying sailors from the American cruiser. The flowers formed a wavering garland around the coffin as it began its long journey to the estuary of the Yangtze, only to be swept back by the incoming tide among the quays and mud flats, driven once again to the shores of this terrible city (279).

One if by Land Cruiser. Two if by C-class Mercedes. The bougies are coming! The bougies are coming!

The Rindhalu cruisers Sword of Darmok and Spear of Jalad performed a stealthy jump into the far reaches of the Tanagra

Undersecretary of State Robert Lansing, number two man in the State Department, tried to put this phenomenon into words in a private memorandum. “It is difficult, if not impossible, for us here in the United States to appreciate in all its fullness the great European War,” he wrote. “We have come to read almost with indifference of vast military operations, of battle lines extending for hundreds of miles, of the thousands of dying men, of the millions suffering all manner of privation, of the wide-spread waste and destruction.” The nation had become inured to it all, he wrote. “The slaughter of a thousand men between the trenches in northern France or of another thousand on a foundering cruiser has become commonplace. We read the headlines in the newspapers and let it go at that. The details have lost their interest.

What did you do to Eduardo?” “I don’t know any Eduardo!” Mac wheezed. I twisted his arm a fraction more. He cried out. “I know your name is Mac. I know that’s your redneck cousin Leroy. I know you’re in Eduardo’s territory, muscling in on his gig, and I know that you stole the FJ Cruiser from his fiancée. Look at me. Look at my eyes.” Mac looked up at me. His face went white. My voice was barely above a whisper, but I sank a lot of rage into it. “Eduardo is my friend. His fiancée is my friend. She is his sister.” I pointed at Curran. “Tell me everything you know or I’ll break your arm right here.” I tapped his shoulder. “Then I’ll keep breaking it here and here and here. No amount of medmagic and steel pins will fix it. It’ll never work right again and it will always hurt.

—¿Cómo una persona puede sentirse sola cuando está rodeada de gente? —le pregunté. —Supongo que en eso consiste la soledad —me respondió—. En aislarte cuando se supone que tienes que sentirte rodeada.

A royal seal for her and a wide-open starscape for me. Nothing between me and the rest of the galaxy but time and cruiser fuel. I raise my glass high and drink it all down. That’s a toast I can get behind.

Captain Copeland picked up the intercom mike and addressed the Roberts’s crew. That he was speaking for himself struck Ens. Jack Moore as unusual and urgent. Normally seaman Jack Roberts was the public address voice of his namesake warship. His southern drawl was all but unintelligible to anyone not acquainted with Dixie’s rhythms and diphthongs. But the skipper’s diction was as crisp as a litigator’s. He was talking fast and sounding more than a little nervous. “A large Japanese fleet has been contacted. They are fifteen miles away and headed in our direction. They are believed to have four battleships, eight cruisers, and a number of destroyers. “This will be a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected. We will do what damage we can.

The disaster had an important secondary effect: because two of the cruisers had stopped to help survivors of the initial attack and thus made themselves easy targets, the Admiralty issued orders forbidding large British warships from going to the aid of U-boat victims.

Y, entonces, en ese instante que tan solo dura un segundo, el cerebro se encarga de abrir la cerradura del cofre en el cual guardas todo lo que aprecias. Cede de tal manera que la tapa se abre y todo lo que hay en el interior sale de forma tan rápida y tan fugaz que no puedes detenerlo.

At 1:37 P.M. mountain time, Tierney climbed into the shotgun seat of the cruiser and said, ‘How fast does this go?’ ‘Sir! This vehicle will go one hundred and thirty miles an hour and I am a Mormon sir and I am not afraid to drive it at that speed sir because I am confident that I will avoid hell. Sir!

Off the southeast tip of Italy a young Austrian U-boat commander named Georg von Trapp, later to gain eternal renown when played by Christopher Plummer in the film The Sound of Music, fired two torpedoes into a large French cruiser, the Leon Gambetta. The ship sank in nine minutes, killing 684 sailors. “So that’s what war looks like!” von Trapp wrote in a later memoir. He told his chief officer, “We are like highway men, sneaking up on an unsuspecting ship in such a cowardly fashion.” Fighting in a trench or aboard a torpedo boat would have been better, he said. “There you hear shooting, hear your comrades fall, you hear the wounded groaning—you become filled with rage and can shoot men in self defense or fear; at an assault you can even yell! But we! Simply cold-blooded to drown a mass of men in an ambush!

Our guns couldn’t even reach them when they opened fire. So what do we do? Knowing we didn’t stand a chance? We engaged. The Battle of Leyte Gulf, they call it now. Went straight for them. We were the first ship to start firing, the first to launch smoke and torpedoes, and we took on both a cruiser and a battleship. Did a lot of damage, too. But because we were out front, we were the first to go dead in the water. A pair of enemy cruisers closed in and began firing, and then we went down.

Sometimes, when things look terrible...you just need to find the right move to turn the whole game around. When you find it you feel great.

If I'm going to have a fight I got to see the win in it so I'll know what I'm fighting for.

Her brown eyes flashed like headlamps on a police cruiser, cameras at a Superbowl kickoff, lightning over Frankenstein’s castle.

My Caprice was a spacious cruiser, well insulated from the world—one motored along the highways as if sitting in a middle-class living room equipped with an engine and tires.

She [Lady Budd] was dressed in a manner to be described as impregnable, like a long, neat, up-to-date battle-cruiser.

The cop motioned the ambo forward, his beckoning arm seeming to stutter in the swinging blue glare of the lightbar atop his cruiser.

The enemy was not waiting for death, they hit back, concentrating all their fire on the cruiser Never Tell Me The Odds, knocking back that ship’s shields and forcing it to break away.

For my part, whether sailing in cruiser or dinghy, I shall remain myself. My sails are not puffed out with the north wind in my favour, nor am I beating into the southern gales of affliction.

Naval combat offered nowhere to run, no foxholes to dive into. You had no way to know whether the next round would fall ahead of you, behind you, to the left or right, or come burning straight in, right down Lucifer’s pike. No degree of personal cleverness could fuse or deflect a shell bound in a particular sailor’s direction. Against a faster, more powerful opponent, a sailor had neither the hope to vanquish him nor the possibility to flee. The Roberts had no way out but through this enemy cruiser. There thus remained only the duty to engage it. No one shirked from that duty.

In a battle involving so many fighters and bombers, one of the most valuable ships to the fleet at this precise moment was proving to be a ship that didn’t always see a lot of love or action—the flak cruisers.

Glaring, Kai leaned back against the headrest. "I'm already uncomfortable with you piloting this ship and being in control of my life. Try not to make it worse." "Why does everyone think I'm such a bad pilot?" "Cinder told me as much." "Well, tell Cinder I'm perfectly capable of flying a blasted podship without killing anyone. My flight instructor at the Andromeda - which is a very prestigious military academy in the Republic, I will have you know-" "I know what Andromeda Academy is." "Yeah, well, my flight instructor said I was a natural." "Right," Kai drawled. "Was that the same flight instructor who wrote in you official report about your inattentiveness, refusal to take safety precautions seriously, and overconfident attitude that often bordered on ... what was the word she used>? 'Fool-hardy', I think?" "Oh, yeah. Commander Reid. She had a thing for me." The radar blinked, picking up a cruiser in the far distance, and Thorne deftly changed directions to keep them out of its course. "I didn't realize I had a royal stalker. I'm flattered, Your Majesty." "Even better - you had an entire government team assigned to digging up information on you. They reported twice daily for over a week. You did run off with the most-wanted criminal in the world, after all.

would have breached a fundamental maritime code, the cruiser rules, or prize law, established in the nineteenth century to govern warfare against civilian shipping. Obeyed ever since by all seagoing powers, the rules held that a warship could stop a merchant vessel and search it but had to keep its crew safe and bring the ship to a nearby port, where a “prize court” would determine its fate. The rules forbade attacks against passenger vessels.

Austrian U-boat commander named Georg von Trapp, later to gain eternal renown when played by Christopher Plummer in the film The Sound of Music, fired two torpedoes into a large French cruiser, the Leon Gambetta. The ship sank in nine minutes, killing 684 sailors. “So that’s what war looks like!” von Trapp wrote in a later memoir. He told his chief officer, “We are like highway men, sneaking up on an unsuspecting ship in such a cowardly fashion.

Jake, did you see anything? I didn’t.” “Nothing, Captain.” “Astrogator?” “Just blankness. Please, can we have the lights on?” I flipped on the overhead lights. “Science Officer?” “USS Enterprise being chased by a Klingon cruiser.” “Sharpie, that’s a false report. The Enterprise doesn’t run from just one Klingon cruiser.” “It was going boldly where no man has gone before. Aside from that, I didn’t see a thing. Let’s try another universe; this one stinks.

Under these circumstances, battleships of the Dreadnought design, better suited for warfare in the confined space of the North Sea, appeared more useful than battle cruisers, whose potential global range was no longer as relevant.

Hamish Alexander-Harrington knew his wife as only two humans who had both been adopted by a pair of mated treecats ever could. He'd seen her deal with joy and with sorrow, with happiness and with fury, with fear, and even with despair. Yet in all the years since their very first meeting at Yeltsin's Star, he suddenly realized, he had never actually met the woman the newsies called "the Salamander." It wasn't his fault, a corner of his brain told him, because he'd never been in the right place to meet her. Never at the right time. He'd never had the chance to stand by her side as she took a wounded heavy cruiser on an unflinching deathride into the broadside of the battlecruiser waiting to kill it, sailing to her own death, and her crew's, to protect a planet full of strangers while the rich beauty of Hammerwell's "Salute to Spring" spilled from her ship's com system. He hadn't stood beside her on the dew-soaked grass of the Landing City duelling grounds, with a pistol in her hand and vengeance in her heart as she faced the man who'd bought the murder of her first great love. Just as he hadn't stood on the floor of Steadholders' Hall when she faced a man with thirty times her fencing experience across the razor-edged steel of their swords, with the ghosts of Reverend Julius Hanks, the butchered children of Mueller Steading, and her own murdered steaders at her back. But now, as he looked into the unyielding flint of his wife's beloved, almond eyes, he knew he'd met the Salamander at last. And he recognized her as only another warrior could. Yet he also knew in that moment that for all his own imposing record of victory in battle, he was not and never had been her equal. As a tactician and a strategist, yes. Even as a fleet commander. But not as the very embodiment of devastation. Not as the Salamander. Because for all the compassion and gentleness which were so much a part of her, there was something else inside Honor Alexander-Harrington, as well. Something he himself had never had. She'd told him, once, that her own temper frightened her. That she sometimes thought she could have been a monster under the wrong set of circumstances. And now, as he realized he'd finally met the monster, his heart twisted with sympathy and love, for at last he understood what she'd been trying to tell him. Understood why she'd bound it with the chains of duty, and love, of compassion and honor, of pity, because, in a way, she'd been right. Under the wrong circumstances, she could have been the most terrifying person he had ever met. In fact, at this moment, she was . It was a merciless something, her "monster"—something that went far beyond military talent, or skills, or even courage. Those things, he knew without conceit, he, too, possessed in plenty. But not that deeply personal something at the core of her, as unstoppable as Juggernaut, merciless and colder than space itself, that no sane human being would ever willingly rouse. In that instant her husband knew, with an icy shiver which somehow, perversely, only made him love her even more deeply, that as he gazed into those agate-hard eyes, he looked into the gates of Hell itself. And whatever anyone else might think, he knew now that there was no fire in Hell. There was only the handmaiden of death, and ice, and purpose, and a determination which would not— couldnot—relent or rest. "I'll miss them," she told him again, still with that dreadful softness, "but I won't forget. I'll never forget, and one day— oneday, Hamish—we're going to find the people who did this, you and I. And when we do, the only thing I'll ask of God is that He let them live long enough to know who's killing them.

America, secure in its fortress of neutrality, watched the war at a remove and found it all unfathomable. Undersecretary of State Robert Lansing, number two man in the State Department, tried to put this phenomenon into words in a private memorandum. “It is difficult, if not impossible, for us here in the United States to appreciate in all its fullness the great European War,” he wrote. “We have come to read almost with indifference of vast military operations, of battle lines extending for hundreds of miles, of the thousands of dying men, of the millions suffering all manner of privation, of the wide-spread waste and destruction.” The nation had become inured to it all, he wrote. “The slaughter of a thousand men between the trenches in northern France or of another thousand on a foundering cruiser has become commonplace. We read the headlines in the newspapers and let it go at that. The details have lost their interest.

I will grant you, however, that the jet fighter does look better than a combine. Other things that look better than a combine include most wheelbarrows, your chest freezer, the marabou stork, the Chrysler PT Cruiser and Kim Jong-un’s hair.

Outside, the engine-sound of the Desperation police-cruiser grew fatter and closer. A little farther off, the coyotes howled. To David that howling had begun to sound like the laughter of lunatics after the keepers have decamped the asylum.

Mr, Truman was jubilant. President Truman. True man; what a strange name, come to think of it. We refer to Jesus Christ as true God and true Man. Truman is a true man of his time in that he was jubilant. He was not a son of God, brother of Christ, brother of the Japanese, jubilating as he did. He went from table to table on the cruiser which was bringing him home from the Big Three conference, telling the great news; "jubilant" the newspapers said. Jubilate Deo. We have killed 318,000 Japanese.

You have to have money these days. The roads are falling apart, so you need a Pajero or a Land Cruiser. The phone lines are erratic, so you need a mobile. The colleges are overrun with fundos who have no interest in getting an education, so you have to go abroad. And that’s ten lakhs a year, mind you. Thanks to electricity theft there will always be shortages, so you have to have a generator. The police are corrupt and ineffective, so you need private security guards. It goes on and on. People are pulling their pieces out of the pie, and the pie is getting smaller, so if you love your family, you’d better take your piece now, while there’s still some left. That’s what I’m doing. And if anyone isn’t doing it, it’s because they’re locked out of the kitchen.

The thought should have comforted Bobby but it didn’t. He found himself thinking of what William Golding had said, that the boys on the island were rescued by the crew of a battle-cruiser and good for them . . . but who would rescue the crew? That was stupid, no one ever looked less in need of rescuing than Rionda Hewson did at that moment, but the words still haunted Bobby. What if there were no grownups? Suppose the whole idea of grownups was an illusion? What if their money was really just playground marbles, their business deals no more than baseball-card trades, their wars only games of guns in the park? What if they were all still snotty-nosed kids inside their suits and dresses? Christ, that couldn’t be, could it? It was too horrible to think about.

For in their interflowing aggregate, those grand fresh-water seas of ours,--Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan,--possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the ocean's noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of races and climes. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles, even as the Polynesian water do; in large part, are shored by two great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long maritime approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East, dotted all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by batteries, and by the goat-like craggy guns of Mackinaw; they have heard the fleet thunderings of naval victories; at intervals, they have yield their beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash from out their pelty wigwams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs gives robes to Tartar Emperors; they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer, and the birch canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew.

He stood there looking out across the desert. So quiet. Low hum of wind in the wires. High bloodweeds along the road. Wiregrass and sacahuista. Beyond in the stone arroyos the tracks of dragons. The raw rock mountains shadowed in the late sun and to the east the shimmering abscissa of the desert plains under a sky where raincurtains hung dark as soot all along the quadrant. That god lives in silence who has scoured the following land with salt and ash. He walked back to the cruiser and got in and pulled away.

Old Harry, who knew more about boats and the sea than anybody I knew, was sleeping off last night's tequila on my big cruiser/houseboat, Stella. She'd been named after Gail Russell's character in an old classic film titled, The Uninvited. It was Harry's favorite movie.

Sitting in the cruiser, staring through this memory, she wondered why it was so hard for a headstrong woman in this world, in this country—why she had to be so alone to be who she was, and not just Valdivia herself, but every woman who is a lone wolf on the slick, icy tundra. 

Since the late 1980s, woodworkers and cabinet makers have used vacuum press systems to build curved furniture and architectural components of all sizes and shapes—and, in many cases, to laminate inexpensive materials with exotic veneers. The method was born out of the aircraft manufacturing industry

in and out of traffic. “She’s breaking about eighteen laws right now,” I said to Downy, tucking the card back into my pocket. “Yeah, but she’s fucking hot doing it. I’d let her off with a warning,” Downy grinned before walking to his cruiser and pulling out of the parking lot. “Me too,” I murmured to no one.

. . . the first leg of their journey from humanity to cattle; with sorting and feeding and starvation and suffocation and pestilence and death; with slave ship stenches and mutinies of crew and cargo; with the jettying of cargoes before the guns of British cruisers; with auction blocks and sales and profits and losses

Intended to sound the alarm and raise England’s level of naval preparedness, the story was entertaining, and frightening, but was widely deemed too far-fetched to be believable, for Captain Sirius’s behavior would have breached a fundamental maritime code, the cruiser rules, or prize law, established in the nineteenth century to govern warfare against civilian shipping. Obeyed ever since by all seagoing powers, the rules held that a warship could stop a merchant vessel and search it but had to keep its crew safe and bring the ship to a nearby port, where a “prize court” would determine its fate. The rules forbade attacks against passenger vessels. In

She leaned forward, pressing her lips against his, sensations he burned for during all those hours on cruisers and shuttles, when the hum of a lightsaber and the chatter of clone commanders stole his attention. He leaned in to her, their hands releasing to roam elsewhere, leaving them in a timeless space where only they existed.

The Midway battle was crucial. In exchange for 307 lives, the Yorktown and a destroyer, and 147 airplanes, the American fleet had destroyed four Japanese carriers, more than three hundred planes, a cruiser and a destroyer, and nearly five thousand Japanese sailors and airmen. It has been called, with justification, “the turning point” in the Pacific war.

Life is about more than just maintaining oneself, it is about extending oneself. Otherwise living is only not dying - SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR (1908-1986)

There’s an old saying on Earth to the effect that in a kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

Chaos that closely resembled panic awaited. Shuttles raced to the presumed safety of the planet below while fighters crisscrossed the perimeter of the station. Platoon-sized formations of frigates and several cruisers formed up and accelerated away. To where the approaching attackers were located? She didn’t give a damn what her mother said in public. This was a bona fide insurrection.

Bright headlights and wailing sirens approached the dormitory parking lot. They were the village fire trucks, painted red and carrying tanks of water. One of the four trucks came to a stop in front of the police cruiser. The two firefighters hanging from beside the driver’s seat leapt onto the ground and approached the police car. They were shocked to find a man handcuffed and bound to the car door. They were floored when they realized that the man was a police officer. The firefighters approached the police officer, who stood hanging his head. Next to his head — on the doorframe — was posted a note. [I set fire to an empty room and decided to arrest myself. I’m sorry for all the trouble. I must have gone crazy for a moment. I’m very very very very very very sorry.] The firefighters silently exchanged glances.

As Herman Wouk wrote in War and Remembrance, ‘The vision of Sprague’s three destroyers--the Johnston, the Hoel, and the Hermann--charging out of the smoke and the rain straight toward the main batteries of Kurita’s battleships and cruisers, can endure as a picture of the way Americans fight when they don’t have superiority. Our schoolchildren should know about that incident, and our enemies should ponder it.

my government at once.” “Sit down, Hardin. I am not declaring war, and you are not communicating with your government at all. When the war is fought—not declared, Hardin, fought—the Foundation will be informed of it in due time by the nuclear blasts of the Anacreonian navy under the lead of my own son upon the flagship, Wienis, once a cruiser of the Imperial navy.” Hardin frowned. “When will all this happen?” “If you’re really interested,

Built to naval specifications, with gun mountings on a reinforced deck and turbine engines capable of 25 knots, the Lusitania was requisitioned as an armed merchant cruiser at the outbreak of war, painted grey, then promptly returned to the Cunard Line after the Admiralty realized that the ship, at or near top speed, consumed nearly 1,000 tons of coal per day. The high cost of fuel and of the crew of 800 required to man her could be taken in its stride by a private firm

And yet, despite my misgivings, I felt a certain wild joy. I was a heavy cruiser, a machine of death and conflict. Hiding, no matter how pressing the strategic necessity, felt like cowardice. I had done it because I had to; but now I was rising to meet my foe head-on, and I had forgotten how heady and intoxicating it could feel. I was charging the enemy from the depths of a furnace, my hull glowing and my torpedo tubes primed and ready to fire. What could be more glorious?

They advanced on a zigzagging track as a measure against enemy submarines, but that required mass-choreographed maneuvers that could easily go awry. When one of the cruisers missed a turn and dropped out of position, her captain received a sarcastic message by blinker light from Admiral Halsey: “May I suggest that if at all convenient you get where you belong?” Shortly afterward, he received another: “Have you any officer aboard able to judge distance accurately within 6,000 yards?

So while you may be reading this sitting comfortably in your semi-detached in Cricklewood, a hundred Universes over, Captain Lars Felder of the Hyperion Space Command is manoeuvring his Nimwad attack fighter into the final strike position for an attack on a Zykon Death Cruiser. And fifteen Universes over from that, Ug is still trying to figure out how to make that bright yellow stuff that hurts when you put your hand in it but makes you feel so warm and comfortable when you sit next to it on cold nights.

If your goal as a skatemaker is to produce skateboard decks in quantity and achieve consistent results each time—whether as a hobby or a business—you’ll need to employ some of the same concepts in your garage shop that professionals employ in the factory.

What you got in the sack son? He peered from under the load at his inquisitor lounging in the open window of a halted cruiser. He shifted the weight a little higher on his shoulder. Bats, he said. Bats. Yessir. What, ballbats? No, them little'ns. Flittermouses. The policeman's face bore a constant look of tolerant interest. Set the sack down son and let's see what all you got there. Harrogate rolled the sack from his shoulder and lowered it to the paving and spread the drawstring mouth with his thumbs. A musky smell rose. He tilted it slightly policeward. The officer thumbed his cap back on his head and bent to see. A prefiguration of the pit. Vouchsafed a crokersack vision of hell's floor deep with the hairy damned screaming mute and toothy toward the far and heedless city of God. He raised his head and looked at the waiting Harrogate and he looked at the bright sky above Knoxville and he turned to the driver. You know what he's got in that sack? What's he got? Dead bats. Dead bats. Right. Well.

especially Courageous and Glorious, had expended prodigious amounts of ammunition. Courageous had fired ninety-two 15″ shells, Glorious fifty-seven, for one hit, shared between them, on one of the light cruiser Pillau’s gunshields. The two ships had also fired 180 4″ High Explosive and two hundred and thirteen 4″ common shell, for no result whatever. The light cruisers had done no better: they fired 2,519 6″ shells to achieve a total of three hits. Repulse, who had fired the last shots in the battle, had one hit on Königsberg,

Look at that, Kovacs. We’re drinking coffee so far from Earth you have to work hard to pick out Sol in the night sky. We were carried here on a wind that blows in a dimension we cannot see or touch. Stored as dreams in the mind of a machine that thinks in a fashion so far in advance of our own brains it might as well carry the name of god. We have been resurrected into bodies not our own, grown in a secret garden without the body of any mortal woman. These are the facts of our existence, Kovacs. How, then, are they different, or any less mystical, than the belief that there is another realm where the dead live in the company of beings so far beyond us we must call them gods?” --- Or maybe it was just that I’d been there, to the legendary home of the human race, and now, looking up, I could imagine, a single astronomical unit out from the glimmering star, a world in spin, a city by the sea dropping away into darkness as night came on, or rolling back up and into the light, a police cruiser parked somewhere and a certain police lieutenant drinking coffee not much better than mine and maybe thinking…

She also saw an interesting sight. On a curve not far from Little Rock a busload of Elks had turned over. The bus was on its right side in the ditch, the front wheels still slowly turning, and the Elks were surfacing one at a time through the escape hatch on the left side, now topside. One Elk was lying on the grass, maybe dead, no ball game for him, and others were limping and hopping about and holding their heads. Another one, in torn shirt-sleeves, was sitting on a suitcase on top of the bus. He was not lifting a finger to help but as each surviving brother Elk stuck his head up through the hatchway, he gave a long salute from his compressed-air horn. The big Trailways cruiser began to slow down. When the man saw this he turned with his noise device and hooted it -- there could be no mistake -- at the driver. Norwood was talking to a man with bulging eyes across the aisle who had gone broke in Mississippi selling premium beer for $3.95 a case on credit, and they both missed it, that hooting part. They did help load the injured into ambulances. The former tavern keeper found a silver dollar in the grass and kept it.

You Kowalskis have always gotten a little carried away.” This wasn’t Mitch’s first traffic stop. He knew it was best to be polite to the cop, who was just doing his job, and neither offer lame excuses nor get belligerent. But Durgin was too much. “We got carried away sometimes when we were young and stupid. Most kids do. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit here and take shit from you because you lost control of the new cruiser and rolled it into a ball. I’m not a kid anymore and I’m not going to be spoken to like one. Write me the damn ticket and get on with your life.

at the moment—and looking for other boats. Kelly advanced the port throttle a notch farther as he turned the wheel, allowing Springer to pivot all the more quickly in the narrow channel, and then he was pointed straight out. He advanced the starboard throttle next, bringing his cruiser to a mannerly five knots as he headed past the ranks of motor and sail yachts. Pam was looking around at the boats, too, mainly aft, and her eyes fixed on the parking lot for a long couple of seconds before she looked forward again, her body relaxing more as she did so. “You know anything about boats?” Kelly asked. “Not much,” she admitted, and for the first time he noticed her accent. “Where you from?” “Texas. How about you?” “Indianapolis, originally, but it’s been a while.” “What’s this?” she asked. Her hands reached out to touch the tattoo on his forearm. “It’s from one of the places I’ve been,” he said. “Not a very nice place.” “Oh, over there.” She understood. “That’s the place.” Kelly nodded matter-of-factly. They were out of the yacht basin now, and he advanced the throttles yet again. “What did you do there?” “Nothing to talk to a lady about,” Kelly replied, looking around from a half-standing position. “What makes you think I’m a lady?” she asked. It caught him short, but he was getting used to it by now. He’d also found that talking to a girl, no matter what the subject, was something that he needed to do. For the first time he answered her smile with one of his own. “Well, it wouldn’t be very nice of me if I assumed that you weren’t.” “I wondered how long it would be before you smiled.” You have a very nice smile, her tone told him. How’s six months grab you? he almost said. Instead he laughed, mainly at himself. That was something else he needed to do. “I’m sorry. Guess I haven’t been very good company.” He turned to look at her again and saw understanding in her eyes. Just a quiet look, very human and feminine, but it shook Kelly. He could feel it happen, and ignored the part of his consciousness that told him that it was something he’d needed badly for months. That was something he didn’t need to hear, especially from himself. Loneliness was bad enough without reflection on its misery. Her hand reached out yet again, ostensibly to stroke the tattoo, but that wasn’t what it was all about. It was amazing how warm her touch was, even under a hot afternoon sun. Perhaps it was a measure of just how cold his life had become. But he had a boat to navigate. There was

Pedaling down Dune Drive on a red beach cruiser, Dani ahead of her and Vanessa behind her, is a transporting experience. The night is quiet; the air on her face is soft; her hair streams behind her; the stars above are as brilliant as stars in a children's book. They could be nine years old, or fifteen, or twenty-one; they've ridden bikes down Dune Drive at all of those ages and all of the ones in between. There must have been so much more to those summers, but what she remembers are the two weeks she spent in Avalon with Dani and Vanessa—two weeks that always went by too quickly, but that in memory stretch to fill an entire season.

As the streets begin to overflow with police cruisers and satellite vehicles, with fire trucks and ambulances on high alert, you continue walking ever northward, back towards the interstate that delivered you into Oklahoma City. And as the news helicopters begin circling overhead, you hitch a ride out of town with a trio of suburban carpoolers eager to flee their city in ruins. Settling into the backseat of a Range Rover next to a dazed, bespectacled CPA—'Who would do such a thing?' she mutters, over and over, in disbelief—you brush your fingers across your forehead, feeling, for the first time, the lumpy, coagulated texture of the dried blood that coats your naked skin like a shell.

This effort notwithstanding, however, certain British institutions were not be trifled with: “Sent hands to tea at 3:30 with Indefatigable to go to tea after us,” Kennedy recorded in his action report. By 3:45 p.m., Goeben and Breslau were pulling away into a misty haze; at 4:00, Goeben was only just in sight against the horizon. Dublin held on, but at 7:37 p.m. the light cruiser signaled, “Goeben out of sight now, can only see smoke; still daylight.” By nine o’clock, the smoke had disappeared, daylight was gone, and Goeben and Breslau had vanished. At 9:52 p.m., on Milne’s instructions, Dublin gave up the chase. At 1:15 a.m., a signal from Malta informed the Mediterranean Fleet that war had begun.

He reached the Devil’s River Bridge at sundown and half way across he pulled the cruiser to a halt and turned on the rooflights and got out and shut the door and walked around in front of the vehicle and stood leaning on the aluminum pipe that served for the top guardrail. Watching the sun set into the blue reservoir beyond the railroad bridge to the west. A westbound semi coming around the long curve of the span downshifted when the lights came into view. The driver leaned from the window as he passed. Dont jump, Sheriff. She aint worth it. Then he was gone in a long suck of wind, the diesel engine winding up and the driver double clutching and shifting gears. Bell smiled. Truth of the matter is, he said, she is.

Another former chess player shared his own fond memory of Thiel from this era. Around the spring of 1988, the team was driving to Monterey for a tournament, with Thiel behind the wheel of the Rabbit. They took California’s Route 17, a four-lane highway that crosses the Santa Cruz Mountains and is regarded as one of the state’s most dangerous. The team was in no particular hurry, but Thiel drove as if he were a man possessed. He navigated the turns like Michael Andretti, weaving in and out of lanes, nearly rear-ending cars as he slipped past them, and seemed to be flooring the accelerator for large portions of the trip. Somewhat predictably, the lights of a California Highway Patrol cruiser eventually appeared in his rearview. Thiel was pulled over, and the trooper asked if he knew how fast he was going. The young men in the rest of the car, simultaneously relieved to have been stopped and scared of the trooper, looked at each other nervously. “Well,” Thiel responded, in his calmest, most measured baritone. “I’m not sure if the concept of a speed limit makes sense.” The officer said nothing. Thiel continued: “It may be unconstitutional. And it’s definitely an infringement on liberty.” The officer looked at Thiel and the geeks in the beater car and decided the whole thing wasn’t worth his time. He told Thiel to slow down and have a nice day. “I don’t remember any of the games we played,” said the man, now in his fifties, who’d been in the passenger seat. “But I will never forget that drive.

You had a jumpship and you gave it away?” Nikki’s eyes widened in astonishment. “Do you have any more?” “Not at present. Oh, look, a General-class cruiser.” Miles reached for it. “My father commanded one of those, once, I believe. Do you have any Betan Survey ships . . . ?” Heads bent together, they laid out the little fleet on the floor. Nikki, Miles was pleased to find, was well-up on all the tech-specs of every ship he owned; he expanded wonderfully, his voice, formerly shy around Miles-the-weird-adult-stranger, growing louder and faster in his unselfconscious enthusiasm as he detailed his machinery. Miles’s stock rose as he was able to claim personal acquaintance with nearly a dozen of the originals for the models, and add a few interesting nonclassified jumpship anecdotes to Nikki’s already impressive fund of knowledge.

that’s how things are. A day is like a whole life. You start out doing one thing, but end up doing something else, plan to run an errand, but never get there.… And at the end of your life, your whole existence has that same haphazard quality, too. Your whole life has the same shape as a single day.” “I guess it’s one way to look at things,” Grant said. “No,” Malcolm said. “It’s the only way to look at things. At least, the only way that is true to reality. You see, the fractal idea of sameness carries within it an aspect of recursion, a kind of doubling back on itself, which means that events are unpredictable. That they can change suddenly, and without warning.” “Okay …” “But we have soothed ourselves into imagining sudden change as something that happens outside the normal order of things. An accident, like a car crash. Or beyond our control, like a fatal illness. We do not conceive of sudden, radical, irrational change as built into the very fabric of existence. Yet it is. And chaos theory teaches us,” Malcolm said, “that straight linearity, which we have come to take for granted in everything from physics to fiction, simply does not exist. Linearity is an artificial way of viewing the world. Real life isn’t a series of interconnected events occurring one after another like beads strung on a necklace. Life is actually a series of encounters in which one event may change those that follow in a wholly unpredictable, even devastating way.” Malcolm sat back in his seat, looking toward the other Land Cruiser, a few yards ahead. “That’s a deep truth about the structure of our universe. But, for some reason, we insist on behaving as if it were not true.

At a time when travel is for many easy and anodyne, their voyages through the Sahara, the Balkans or across the Mediterranean – on foot, in the holds of wooden fishing boats and on the backs of land cruisers – are almost as epic as those of classical heroes such as Aeneas and Odysseus. I’m wary of drawing too strong a link, but there are nevertheless obvious parallels. Just as both those ancient men fled a conflict in the Middle East and sailed across the Aegean, so too will many migrants today. Today’s Sirens are the smugglers with their empty promises of safe passage; the violent border guard a contemporary Cyclops. Three millennia after their classical forebears created the founding myths of the European continent, today’s voyagers are writing a new narrative that will influence Europe, for better or worse, for years to come.

Star Wars introduced a new way for using the five screen speakers [in theaters]. By pushing left and right sound channels to the farthest out speakers the pair just inside those was made available. Lucas' mixers then placed low frequency effects in those speakers, and named it the 'baby boom' channel. Human ears can hear frequencies up to around 20,000 hertz, and down to around 20 Hertz for very low sounds. Below that you don't *hear* the sound, but if the 'volume' is 'loud' enough, you can *feel* the sound. Super-low frequencies affect us emotionally, usually inducing something like fear. We feel them during earthquakes. Lucasfilm put sound effects in the baby boom channel for audiences to feel--for instance, in the opening shot of Star Wars where the little diplomatic ship is running from the Imperial Cruiser. It's no wonder this is one of the most memorable and ominous shots in cinematic history. It was not only cool looking, but cool *sounding*

In the 1950s, the standard bike had been the cruiser design, a gargantuan fender-covered machine built exclusively for adults. There was only one speed (slow) and you stopped the bike by reversing the pedals and pressing down hard. In 1962, however, Schwinn designer Al Fritz had an idea. He’d heard about a new youth trend centered in California: retrofitting bicycles with drag-racing motorcycle accoutrements. “Choppers” — custom motorcycles with long handlebars — were all the rage. Fritz introduced chopper elements into his new design. The Schwinn Stingray was born. It had smaller, 20-inch tires — with flat racing treads — and high handlebars and a banana seat. Sales were initially disappointing — parents didn’t want their children riding such an odd looking bike — but as the Stingray began making its way into America’s neighborhoods, every kid had to have one. And every bike manufacturer began manufacturing bikes just like it — a style we referred to as the “spider” bike.

I wasn’t sure what to do. I knew that the main house was about a quarter mile up the drive. I could leave my car here and walk it. See what’s what. But what would be the point? I hadn’t been up here in six years. The retreat probably sold the land, and the new owner probably craved privacy. That might explain all this. Still it didn’t feel right. What would be the harm, I thought, in going up and knocking on the door of the main house? Then again, the thick chain and no trespassing signs were not exactly welcome mats. I was still trying to decide what to do when a Kraftboro police cruiser pulled up next to me. Two officers got out. One was short and stocky with bloated gym muscles. The other was tall and thin with slicked-back hair and the small mustache of a guy in a silent movie. Both wore aviator sunglasses, so you couldn’t see their eyes. Short and Stocky hitched up his pants a bit and said, “Can I help you?” They both gave me hard stares. Or at least I think they were hard stares. I mean, I couldn’t see their eyes. “I

The frightened soul ran into the wine cellar with the steel door. I’m safe, Calloway thought, but he was dead wrong. Railrunner’s claws slashed through the steel door. They cut through the metal like butter. He then began to pull the door off its hinges. Suddenly a smoke bomb fell to the floor, making the place vaporous, but Railrunner’s eyes could see through it. He discovered the flashing lights of squad cars. His eyes narrowed and he growled low in his throat. “Come on out with your hands up!” an officer yelled. Railrunner walked upright towards the entrance. He then pushed the doors off their hinges and stood in the line of fire. “It’s a - roller coaster?” One of the police said baffled, the gun shaking in his hand. Railrunner crossly walked up to the police. They began to fire, their bullets simply bouncing off of him. He then grabbed the front bumper of the cruiser, and tossed it like a toy. It smashed into another car. Railrunner flung an officer out of his way and roared in sheer amusement. Within a blink of an eye he obliterated the small police force.

Even seasoned military men found it difficult to believe what they were seeing, and admitted to feeling bewildered and disorientated as the attack unfolded. The notion that an actual raid was underway was slow to enter their minds. In the eyewitness accounts, that pattern of belated comprehension is repeated again and again. A plane approaches. ( “Why are those planes flying so low?”) American ground-based antiaircraft guns fire at the intruder. (“Why are the boys shooting at that plane?”) A bomb drops. (“What a stupid, careless pilot, not to have secured his releasing gear.”) It explodes. ( “Somebody goofed big this time. They loaded live bombs on those planes by mistake.”) As the plane turns upward, the Japanese “Rising Sun” insignia comes into view on the underside of the wings. ( “My God! They’re really going all-out! They’ve even painted the rising sun on that plane!”) An American ship explodes. ( “What kind of a drill is this?”) Even then, some men refused to believe that a war had begun that morning—perhaps, as Commander A. L. Seton of the light cruiser St. Louis first guessed, the attacker was “a lone, berserk Japanese pilot who somehow had gotten to Pearl and now would be in trouble with his navy and ours.

They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles, even as the Polynesian waters do; in large part, are shored by two great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; the furnish long maritime approaches to out numerous territorial colonies from the East, dotted all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by batteries, and by the goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they have heard the fleet thunderings of naval victories; at intervals, they yield their beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash from out their peltry wig-wams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered forest, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs give robes to Tartart Emperors; they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer, and the beech canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew.

exchanging practically all the British infantry and artillery in India for Territorial batteries and battalions, and the formation of the 27th, 28th and 29th Divisions of regular troops. The New Zealand contingent must be escorted to Australia and there, with 25,000 Australians, await convoys to Europe. Meanwhile the leading troops of the Canadian Army, about 25,000 strong, had to be brought across the Atlantic. All this was of course additional to the main situation in the North Sea and to the continued flow of drafts, reinforcements and supplies across the Channel. Meanwhile the enemy’s Fleet remained intact, waiting, as we might think, its moment to strike; and his cruisers continued to prey upon the seas. To strengthen our cruiser forces we had already armed and commissioned twenty-four liners as auxiliary cruisers, and had armed defensively fifty-four merchantmen. Another forty suitable vessels were in preparation. In order to lighten the strain in the Indian Ocean and to liberate our light cruisers for their proper work of hunting down the enemy, I proposed the employment of our old battleships (Canopus class) as escorts to convoys. Besides employing these old battleships on convoy, we had also at the end of August sent three others abroad as rallying points for our cruisers in case a German heavy cruiser should break out: thus the Glory was sent to Halifax, the Albion to

the hand like a beggar’s upheld with the fingers forming a suggestion of what he deserves and desires to receive, shaping the alms, thumb almost touching finger tips, as though on the tip of the tongue he’s about to say in sleep and with that gesture what he couldnt say awake: ‘Why have you taken this away from me, that I cant draw my breath in the peace and sweetness of my own bed but here in these dull and nameless rags on this humbling stoop I have to sit waiting for the wheels of the city to roll,’ and further, ‘I dont want to show my hand but in sleep I’m helpless to straighten it, yet take this opportunity to see my plea, I’m alone, I’m sick, I’m dying – see my hand up-tipped, learn the secret of my human heart, give me the thing, give me your hand, take me to the emerald mountains beyond the city, take me to the safe place, be kind, be nice, smile – I’m too tired now of everything else, I’ve had enough, I give up, I quit, I want to go home, take me home O brother in the night – take me home, lock me in safe, take me to where all is peace and amity, to the family of life, my mother, my father, my sister, my wife and you my brother and you my friend – but no hope, no hope, no hope, I wake up and I’d give a million dollars to be in my own bed – O Lord save me –’ In evil roads behind gas tanks where murderous dogs snarl from behind wire fences cruisers suddenly leap out like getaway cars but from a crime more secret, more baneful than words can tell. The woods are full of wardens.

Piña Colada Cheesecake This tropical twist on my mother’s old-fashioned cheesecake was a hit at cruiser gatherings. For the crust 1 cup graham cracker crumbs 1⁄2 cup sweetened shredded coconut 1⁄3 cup melted butter For the filling 11⁄2 pounds cream cheese, softened 2⁄3 cup sugar 4 eggs 3 tablespoons dark rum 1 cup sour cream 3⁄4 cup cream of coconut (see Tips, below) 2⁄3 cup well-drained crushed pineapple (about 1 19-oz can) 1. Preheat oven to 350°F. 2. To make the crust, combine graham cracker crumbs and coconut with melted butter. Press into the bottom of a 10-inch springform pan. Bake for 10 minutes until lightly browned. Set aside to cool while you make the filling. 3. To make the filling, beat cream cheese and sugar until smooth. Add eggs one at a time, beating until blended. Mix in rum, sour cream, cream of coconut, and well-drained pineapple. 4. Spread evenly on prepared crust and bake about 50–60 minutes on middle rack of preheated oven, until edges are set and center moves just slightly when you shake the pan. 5. Run a knife around the inside of pan to loosen cheesecake. Allow cake to cool completely on a wire rack. Cover and refrigerate until well chilled or overnight. Remove from springform pan before serving. Serves 16 Tips • Garnish the cheesecake with slices of tropical fruit, such as fresh pineapple or mango. • Don’t confuse cream of coconut with coconut milk or coconut cream. Used to make drinks (such as piña coladas) and desserts, cream of coconut is thick, syrupy, heavily sweetened coconut milk. Coco Lopez is one popular brand.

Chuckie: My Uncle Marty. Will knows him. That guy fuckin' drinks like you've never seen! One night he was drivin' back to his house on I-93. Statie pulls him over. All: Oh shit. Chuckie: Guy's tryin' to walk the line but he can't even fuckin' stand up, and so my uncle's gonna spend a night in jail. Just then there's this fuckin' BOOM like fifty yards down the road. Some guy's car hit a tree. Morgan: Some other guy? Chuckie: Yeah, he was probably drunker than my Uncle, who fuckin' knows? So the cop goes "Stay here" And he goes runnin' down the highway to deal with the other crash. So, my Uncle Marty's standin' on the side of the road for a little while, and he's so fuckin' lit, that he forgets what he's waitin' for. So he goes, "Fuck it." He gets in his car and drives home. Morgan: Holy shit. Chuckie: So in the morning, there's a knock on the door it's the Statie. So my Uncle's like, "Is there a problem?" And the Statie's like "I pulled you over and you took off." And my Uncle's like "I never seen you before in my life, I been home all night with my kids." And Statie's like "Let me get in your garage!" So he's like "All right, fine." He takes around the garage and opens the door and the Statie's cruiser is in my Uncle's garage. All: No way! You're kiddin'! Chuckie: No, he was so hammered that he drove the police cruiser home. Fuckin' lights and everything! Morgan: Did your Uncle get arrested? Chuckie: The fuckin' Trooper was so embarrassed he didn't do anything. The fuckin' guy had been drivin' around in my Uncle's car all night lookin' for the house.

When the attendant at Britz Rentals of Australia whipped around in our prepaid-in-full honeymoon car, my eyes grew wide and I knew we were in trouble. It was an SUV, yes, and a Toyota Land Cruiser at that--just as Marlboro Man had ordered. It was white and clean and very shiny. And painted in huge bright orange and royal blue lettering across the hood, the roof, all four doors, and the tailgate of the vehicle, were scrawled the enormous words: BRITZ RENTALS OF AUSTRALIA. I could see Marlboro Man’s jaw muscles flex as he beheld his worst nightmare playing out in front of his eyes. He could hardly even bear to gaze upon such an attention-grabbing abomination, let alone conceive of driving it all over an entire continent. Unfortunately, our last-minute attempts to trade to another vehicle proved to be futile; even if Britz hadn’t been completely booked that week, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Every single car in their fleet was smeared with the exact same orange and blue promotional graffiti. Having no other transportational alternative, we set off on our drive, a black cloud of conspicuousness and, in Marlboro Man’s case, dread following us everywhere we went. Being an attention-seeking middle child, I didn’t really mind it much. But for Marlboro Man, this was more than his makeup was programmed to handle. As far as he was concerned, we were the Griswolds, and the Land Cruiser was our Family Truckster. It was a pox on what might have been the perfect honeymoon. Except for my inner ear disturbance. And the vomiting. And the slightly marsupial undertone to the hamburgers.

Jesus Christ!" Foraker's shocked exclamation burned across the bridge like a buzzsaw, and Caslet's mouth fell open as his plot suddenly changed. One instant, his ship was charging into the teeth of two opponents' fire; the next instant, there were no opponents. The warships' acceleration had carried them within less than three hundred thousand clicks of the Manty merchantman, which had suddenly rolled back down to present her own broadside to them. Eight incredibly powerful grasers smashed out from the "unarmed freighter" like the wrath of God, and the second raider destroyer simply vanished. A single pair of hits on the light cruiser burned through her sidewall as if it hadn't even existed, and her after third blew apart in a hurricane of splintered and vaporized plating. Three of Shannon's shipboard lasers added their own fury to her damage, chewing huge holes in what was left of her hull, but they were strictly an afterthought, for that ship was already a helpless hulk. "We're being hailed, Skipper," Lieutenant Dutton said shakenly from Communications. Caslet just looked at him, unable to speak, then looked back down at his plot and swallowed as the unmistakable impeller signatures of a full dozen LACs drifted up from the "freighter's" gravitic shadow and locked their weapons on his ship. "Speaker," he rasped. "Unknown cruiser, this is Captain Honor Harrington of Her Majesty's Armed Merchant Cruiser Wayfarer," a soprano voice said quietly. "I appreciate your assistance, and I wish I could offer you the reward your gallantry deserves, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to surrender.

A BLESSING FROM MY SIXTEEN YEARS’ SON I have this son who assembled inside me during Hurricane Gloria. In a flash, he appeared, in a tiny blaze. Outside, pines toppled. Phone lines snapped and hissed like cobras. Inside, he was a raw pearl: microscopic, luminous. Look at the muscled obelisk of him now pawing through the icebox for more grapes. Sixteen years and not a bone broken, not a single stitch. By his age, I was marked more ways, and small. He’s a slouching six foot two, with implausible blue eyes, which settle on the pages of Emerson’s “Self Reliance” with profound belligerence. A girl with a navel ring could make his cell phone buzz, or an Afro’d boy leaning on a mop at Taco Bell— creatures strange as dragons or eels. Balanced on a kitchen stool, each gives counsel arcane as any oracle’s. Dante claims school is harshing my mellow. Rodney longs to date a tattooed girl, because he wants a woman willing to do stuff she’ll regret. They’ve come to lead my son into his broadening spiral. Someday soon, the tether will snap. I birthed my own mom into oblivion. The night my son smashed the car fender, then rode home in the rain-streaked cop cruiser, he asked, Did you and Dad screw up so much? He’d let me tuck him in, my grandmother’s wedding quilt from 1912 drawn to his goateed chin. Don’t blame us, I said. You’re your own idiot now. At which he grinned. The cop said the girl in the crimped Chevy took it hard. He’d found my son awkwardly holding her in the canted headlights, where he’d draped his own coat over her shaking shoulders. My fault, he’d confessed right off. Nice kid, said the cop.

Now the moment had arrived. Birgit took her place beside him in the command car. She pulled up her large striped cotton dirndl skirt made by her fellow national, Katya of Sweden, and looked around with an excited smile. But to onlookers it was more like the strained expression of a Swedish farm woman in a Swedish outhouse in the dead of a Swedish winter. She was trying to restrain her excitement at the sight of all those naked limbs in the amber light. From the shoulders up she had the delicate neckline and face of a Nordic goddess, but below her body was breastless, lumpy with bulging hips and huge round legs like sawed-off telegraph posts. She felt elated, sitting there with her man who was leading these colored people in this march for their rights. She loved colored people. Her eyeblue eyes gleamed with this love. When she looked at the white cops her lips curled with scorn. A number of police cruisers had appeared at the moment the march was to begin. They stared at the white woman and the colored man in the command car. Their lips compressed but they said nothing, did nothing. Marcus had got a police permit. The marchers lined up four abreast on the right side of the street, facing west. The command car was at the lead. Two police cars brought up the rear. Three were parked at intervals down the street as far as the railroad station. Several others cruised slowly in the westbound traffic, turned north at Lenox Avenue, east again on 126th Street, back to 125th Street on Second Avenue and retraced the route. The chief inspector had said he didn’t want any trouble in Harlem. “Squads, MARCH!” Marcus shouted over the amplifier.

whose red painted faces flash from out their peltry wigwams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs give robes to Tartar Emperors; they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer, and the beech canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew. Thus, gentlemen, though an inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean born, and wild-ocean nurtured; as much of an audacious mariner as any. And for Radney, though in his infancy he may have laid him down on the lone Nantucket beach, to nurse at his maternal sea; though in after life he had long followed our austere Atlantic and your contemplative Pacific; yet was he quite as vengeful and full of social quarrel as the backwoods seaman, fresh from the latitudes of buckhorn handled Bowie-knives. Yet was this Nantucketer a man with some good-hearted traits; and this Lakeman, a mariner, who though a sort of devil indeed, might yet by inflexible firmness, only tempered by that common decency of human recognition which is the meanest slave's right; thus treated, this Steelkilt had long been retained harmless and docile. At all events, he had proved so thus far; but Radney was doomed and made mad, and Steelkilt—but, gentlemen, you shall hear.

THE SK8 MAKER VS. GLOBAL INDUSTRIALIZATION This new era of global industrialization is where my personal analogy with the history of the skateboard maker diverges. It’s no longer cost-effective to run a small skateboard company in the U.S., and the handful of startups that pull it off are few and far between. The mega manufacturers who can churn out millions of decks at low cost and record speed each year in Chinese factories employ proprietary equipment and techniques that you and I can barely imagine. Drills that can cut all eight truck holes in a stack of skateboard decks in a single pull. CNC machinery to create CAD-perfect molds used by giant two-sided hydraulic presses that can press dozens of boards in a few hours. Computer-operated cutting bits that can stamp out a deck to within 1⁄64 in. of its specified shape. And industrial grade machines that apply multicolored heat-transfer graphics in minutes. In a way, this factory automation has propelled skateboarding to become a multinational, multi-billion dollar industry. The best skateboarders require this level of precision in each deck. Otherwise, they could end up on their tails after a failed trick. Or much worse. As the commercial deck relies more and more on a process that is out of reach for mere mortals, there is great value in the handmade and one of a kind. Making things from scratch is a dying art on the brink of extinction. It was pushed to the edge when public schools dismissed woodworking classes and turned the school woodshop into a computer lab. And when you separate society from how things are made—even a skateboard—you lose touch with the labor and the materials and processes that contributed to its existence in the first place. It’s not long before you take for granted the value of an object. The result is a world where cheap labor produces cheap goods consumed by careless customers who don’t even value the things they own.

He nearly got caught speeding, at the last minute spotting a state trooper’s cruiser lurking behind a billboard.

There was a small white house on the valley floor. Next to it was Legerski’s cruiser and Jimmy’s Jeep Wagoneer. He parked next to Jimmy’s Jeep and climbed out of the Buick with the ammo cans from the seat. But instead of walking toward the sagging front door of the house he went to the side where there was a thick concrete abutment emerging from the ground. He leaned over and grasped the steel handle of the door and pulled. It was unlocked. As he went down the wide stairs, his rage suddenly morphed into absolute calm and he became the Lizard King without even willing it to happen.

I sensed his support for my little mission, even his hopeful conviction that I might be able to add the balanced weight of a mature and considered judgment to his pure observations. This is a parent’s task, after all. I put the glasses to my face and peered through the gathering dark. Beneath the cloud of vaporized chemicals, the scene was one of urgency and operatic chaos. Floodlights swept across the switching yard. Army helicopters hovered at various points, shining additional lights down on the scene. Colored lights from police cruisers crisscrossed these wider beams. The tank car sat solidly on tracks, fumes rising from what appeared to be a hole in one end.

ALPR is?” she asked. “Automated license-plate recognition,” Evan said, relieved to be back on familiar turf. “Police cruisers have sensors embedded in the light bars that scan the plates of all surrounding vehicles. They can swallow numbers eight lanes across on cars going in either direction up to eighty miles per hour.

Wars battle cruiser has had sex with Edward Scissorhands, and what it does is breathtaking. The operator drives up to the tree and tells the machine what sort

Heah,” said the voice, “is a message that has just come in. The motor cruiser Anubis which by earlier reports had trouble off the North African coast has arrived safely at Madeira. Among the passengers are the Bishop of Barchester and Mrs.—” at which point the Dean turned it off. There was a silence, compounded of such mixed elements that we shall not attempt to analyse them. “I must say,” said Mrs. Joram, looking pensively at old Mrs. Brandon’s diamond on her lovely hand, “that after all these years it would be quite uncomfortable not to have someone at the Palace that one can really dislike.

Plus, falling property values now ride through the trees like an odorless, colorless mist settling through the still air where all breathe it in, all sense it, though our new amenities—the new police cruisers, the new crosswalks, the trimmed tree branches, the buried electric, the refurbished band shell, the plans for the 4th of July parade—do what they civically can to ease our minds off worrying,

The deceptive measures obviously were working. And Tokyo must have felt quite self-satisfied, for everything possible had been done. The authorities had even brought busloads of sailors from the Yokosuka Naval Barracks and paraded them conspicuously all over town on sight-seeing tours. At 1:20 A.M. a last message was relayed by Tokyo from Honolulu: “December 6 (Local Time) Vessels moored in Harbor: 9 Battleships; 3 Class-B Cruisers; 3 Seaplane Tenders; 17 Destroyers. Entering Harbor are 4 Class-B Cruisers; 3 Destroyers. All Aircraft Carriers and Heavy Cruisers have departed Harbor … No indication of any changes in U.S. Fleet or anything else unusual.” More regrets that the carriers were gone. Some even wondered whether the raid should be called off. But Admiral Nagumo felt there was no turning back now. Eight battleships were bound to be in port, and it was time to stop worrying “about carriers that are not there.

No one was more aware of what a gamble kido butai was than its brilliant creator, Admiral Isoroku Yamamato. He had no illusions about Japan’s chances in a war with the industrial power of the West. But his patriotism, his intellect, his love of gambling had all been challenged. If his more headstrong colleagues must go to war, and if they intended to do so by seizing the oil of Dutch Indonesia and rubber of British Malaya, then the only way to succeed was by neutralizing the might of the U.S. Navy on the Japanese flank. And the only way to do that was by surprise. It was, as it turned out, a grave miscalculation, one that Yamamoto did not live to see realized. Commander Kikuichi Fujita of the cruiser Tone foresaw the consequences graphically: “I think this sortie is going to be like going into a tiger’s lair to get her cubs.

Whatever anxiety crew members on the Arizona and throughout the Pacific Fleet felt about the future would have been heightened had they known that on this same Thanksgiving day, the War and Navy departments in Washington issued what came to be called their “war warning” to all commands: “negotiations with Japan looking toward stabilization of conditions in the Pacific have ceased and an aggressive move by Japan is expected within the next few days.” At Pearl Harbor, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, met with Vice Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr., the commander of his carrier forces, and Army Lieutenant General Walter C. Short, commander of land forces in Hawaii. Kimmel and Halsey had already organized task forces of cruisers and destroyers around the three aircraft carriers then operating in the Pacific: Lexington (CV-2), Saratoga (CV-3), and Enterprise (CV-6). To guard against a concerted attack or sabotage, they adopted a general protocol that only one carrier task force would be in Pearl Harbor at any one time. At the moment, this meant alternating between Lexington and Enterprise because Saratoga had yet to return to Hawaiian waters after a lengthy overhaul at Bremerton. A similar alternating routine was supposed to be in place among the three battleship divisions. Of the nine battleships in those three-ship divisions, Colorado was currently in Bremerton undergoing its own overhaul. With the war warning in hand, Admiral Kimmel and General Short concerned themselves primarily with the outer boundaries of their commands and not with Hawaii itself. The chief topic they discussed with Halsey was the delivery of aircraft to reinforce garrisons on Wake and Midway islands. Short wanted to deploy Army squadrons of new P-40s, but Halsey quoted an arcane regulation that Army pilots were required to stay within fifteen miles of land and asked what good they would be in protecting an island.

First, the property loss: •  U.S. Navy aircraft: 31 damaged; 92 destroyed •  U.S. Army Air Corps aircraft: 128 damaged; 77 destroyed • Battleships: 6 damaged; 2 destroyed • Cruisers: 3 damaged • Destroyers: 3 damaged • Auxiliaries: 4 damaged; 1 destroyed

The battle of Leyte Gulf was short, lasting only from October 23–26, 1944. But don’t let the duration fool you. The Philippine Sea, around the chain of islands where the battle was fought, was a roiling cauldron for those four days. On the morning of the 23rd, that sea held the largest assemblage of ships, in terms of tonnage, the world had ever seen. By the evening of the 26th, Leyte Gulf had taken more tonnage to its murky depths than in any other naval battle in history. The Japanese lost four aircraft carriers, three battleships, six heavy cruisers, four light cruisers, 12 destroyers, one destroyer escort, over 600 planes, and 10,500 sailors and pilots. The Allied forces, on the other hand, lost one light carrier, two escort carriers, two destroyers, one destroyer escort, around 200 planes, and a little more than a thousand men. As a result of this devastating blow, Japan never again launched a major naval offensive.

Rather than return to home ports on the West Coast, American battleships and aircraft carriers, along with escorting cruisers, destroyers, and support ships, stayed in Hawaiian waters, mostly mooring within the confines of Pearl Harbor when not at sea. Former assistant secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt, now president of the United States, ordered the move as a show of force to Japan, signaling that America would not condone its further aggression in the western Pacific. The results were not encouraging. Japan did not so much as pause in its drive into China. Almost everyone else, from the commander in chief of the US Fleet, Admiral James O. Richardson, down to the greenest seaman on the Arizona, thought the Hawaiian deployment was a bad idea.

Few could dispute Esther Ross’s claim that the Arizona was a cutting-edge weapon of its day. The behemoth was built to project American power and counter any aggressor on the high seas. Battleships made completely of steel were themselves relatively new. America’s earliest were the Texas and the Maine, commissioned within a month of each other in 1895. Barely over three hundred feet in length and displacing only sixty-seven hundred tons, they in retrospect have been termed coastal defense battleships or, in the case of the Maine, a mere armored cruiser. The Maine blew up under mysterious circumstances in Havana Harbor, Cuba, in February 1898, and its sinking became a rallying cry during the subsequent Spanish-American War. Short-lived though the war was, it underscored the importance of a battleship Navy. In one storied episode, the two-year-old battleship Oregon raced from the Pacific coast of California all the way around Cape Horn and into the Atlantic to take part in the Battle of Santiago off Cuba. It was a bold display of sea power, but the roundabout nature of the voyage set thirty-nine-year-old Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt to thinking about the need for a canal across the Isthmus of Panama. By 1900, the United States Navy floated five battleships and had seven more under construction. Beginning with the Indiana (BB-1), commissioned at the end of 1895, they were each given the designation “BB” for battleship and a number, usually in chronological order from the date when their keels were laid down. Save for the anomaly of the Kearsarge (BB-5), all bore the names of states.

Everyone hates the Bulgarians. The UN pays countries cash to send soldiers on peacekeeping missions. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Bulgaria lost its subsidies and was broke. The Bulgarian government wanted money but didn’t want to send their best-trained troops. So, the story goes, they offered inmates in the prisons and psychiatric wards a deal: put on a uniform and go to Cambodia for six months, you’re free on return. All you have to do is stand guard and give away food, they said, the UN is not a real military. A battalion of criminal lunatics arrives in a lawless land. They get drunk as sailors, rape vulnerable Cambodian women, and crash their UN Land Cruisers with remarkable frequency.

grab my medical textbook from the Land Cruiser and find beriberi next to scurvy and rickets. It says that in Ceylon beri, beri! meant ‘I can’t, I can’t!’ First you can’t stand and then you can’t even sit up and in the end you quietly succumb on your back. Progressive, inexorable weakness leading to death – it fits perfectly. We have an outbreak of beriberi.

Boyle looked at Kelly. He was a slightly-built young man with pale anonymous hair and eyes, and as a cadet in the torpedoed cruiser, Cressy, in 1914, had been as near to death as he was ever likely to be when he’d been dragged by Kelly to a raft and pushed aboard. In Boyle’s eyes there never was and never would be again anybody quite like Kelly Maguire.

The attack started at Wheeler and Ford Island at 0755, while the torpedo planes attacked the battleships at 0757. The grounded aircraft were attacked at 0800 and the horizontal bombers got into action about 0805. It was estimated that although the 250 kilogram bombs would not pierce the armored decks of the battleships they would be effective against cruisers and carriers. But finding no carriers present, these bombs were directed against battleships.

I didn’t think Old Man Winston down of Ash Grove’s Sheriff’s Department would be able to do anything about my rageful and vindictive stalker. Sheriff Winston picked up takeout last week atop his lawnmower because the police cruiser’s battery died. Was he going to mow my stepdad to death?

To Toussaint’s dismay, British cruisers patrolling the waters off Saint-Domingue strictly enforced these limits on maritime activity.

damaged light cruiser Juneau blew up after a magazine explosion on passage to the repair base at Espíritu Santu,

Three times Hoffman requested the Rawalpindi to stop and take her crew into safety, but the auxiliary cruiser showed no inclination to comply with the requests.

It was not until another innocuous card appeared in the window one day, requesting: “Fertile womens, lovin God, inquire within,” that anyone had given it a thought. Two white cops in a cruiser who had been driving by the house on their normal patrol every day for the past year were proceeding past as usual when the cop beside the driver shouted, “Whoa, man! You see what I see?” The driver stamped on the brakes and backed up so he Could see too. “Fertile womens …” he read. That was as far as he got. They both had the same thought. What would a colored convent want with “fertile womens”? Fertile womens was for fools, not God.

It also causes the navy to defer bridge upgrades and installations of vital equipment. Cruisers and destroyers throughout the Western Pacific had different bridge layouts, control stations, radars, and other sensors. The report noted that sailors from one ship couldn’t expect to cross to another ship of the same class and find familiar equipment or layouts. Following report recommendations, Davidson sought to improve basic seamanship skills, deploy common bridge and equipment sets across the Pacific Fleet, and start a new Japan-based waterfront unit to assess ships and crews to make sure both were ready for deployment. The changes would start with the region and expand fleet- and navy-wide to revamp training and readiness across the board.

Murmansk. At last, the British cruiser reached Murmansk, where an inspection of the damage suggested that she had been hit by a British torpedo whose steering gear had probably malfunctioned in the severe cold.

30 April, Lieutenant Max-Martin Teichert maneuvered his U-456 into firing position and released a salvo against the British cruiser Edinburgh, which was hit by two torpedoes. Her cargo included four and a half tons of gold, payment for the British aid to the Soviet Union.

I guess it’s no surprise that the beat cops were gone right after the riots of sixty-eight. I saw the transition from foot patrol to riding around in police cruisers, looking for any black man to harass. Don’t hang out on a corner with more than three guys. You will get stopped and questioned because in Brownsville we all look alike and racial profiling was the norm.

Do you think your dad—” “Not yet, and no. But the sheriff and some state troopers were over. I heard some stuff. They think the body’s been in there at least ten or fifteen years.” Excited as she was by all the action, it also made her sad. “Can you believe that? Not knowing where your kid has been for the last fifteen years. Not knowing if she’s still alive or dead.” When Laura Lynn and Marcus exchanged a look, she frowned. “What?” “Do you know how many kids die around here? Or go missing?” When Mandy shook her head, Marcus continued. “A lot. Like, a lot a lot.” “How?” she asked. “Why?” “Lots of reasons,” Laura Lynn said. “Cancer. Running away. Murder. There are lots of stories like that. Kids going crazy and sent to insane asylums.” Marcus sat straighter in his chair. “I don’t believe all of them. Jake used to try to freak me out by telling me if I didn’t clean my room, all the kids from the mental hospital would escape and eat me alive.” He glanced to the side and shook his head. “What an asshat.” “Who’s Jake?” Mandy asked. “My older brother. He’s in college now.” Marcus started in on his sandwich, talking through a mouthful of food. “But he said his friend’s brother died that way. Some rare disease or something. Totally incurable.” “That’s pretty weird,” Mandy said. “Maybe that’s what happened to the girl in the septic tank,” Laura Lynn offered. “Maybe she went crazy and fell in.” “And what?” Marcus asked. “Her parents just closed it up and forgot about her? I doubt it.” “Then it was probably murder,” Mandy said. Another thrill went through her, but a twinge of fear followed this one. “We should look into it. Do our own investigation.” Laura Lynn and Marcus both looked down at their plates. Marcus was the first to answer. “I don’t know about that.” “What?” Mandy felt confused. She had figured at least Marcus would be into the idea, even if Laura Lynn wasn’t. “Aren’t you a computer genius? You could help me solve the case! We’d be heroes.” “It’s not worth it.” When he looked up again, he was deadly serious. “A lot of people have gone missing over the years, Mandy. Not just kids. It’s better to just keep your head down. Don’t cause any trouble.” Mandy blanched. When she looked at Laura Lynn for support, she saw her friend nodding in agreement. Mandy sat back in her chair with a huff, the turkey and cheese sandwich untouched. So much for showing Bear she could take care of herself by solving this on her own. 9 Bear pulled his truck next to McKinnon’s cruiser and put it in park. He hopped out and met her around the side of her car. “A graveyard? This is about to get real interesting, or real weird.” “Let’s hope it gets interesting,” McKinnon said. The slam of her door echoed through the surrounding trees, and the two of them trudged their way up a set of steps to the cemetery. Bear had passed it a few times as he’d driven around town. It was the biggest within a twenty-mile radius, but it wasn’t huge. The gravestones were crammed near each other, filling the entire plot of land to the brim. There was a short wrought-iron fence around the perimeter and a plaque that read “April Meadows Cemetery” in block letters. A few trees were scattered around, along with a couple of larger headstones, but most of the markers were small and modest. The paths were skinny and winding, as though they had been an afterthought. “What’re we doing here?” Bear

Granted! Yet no trader since has been captured. No trade ship but has had the speed to escape at choice. No trade ship but has had a screen that could take all the beating a light cruiser could give it, should it choose to fight. And no trader but has fought to death when occasion warranted. Traders have been traced as the leaders and instigators of the guerrilla warfare on occupied planets and of the flying raids in occupied space.

Fending off the cruisers and the gropers had become a reflex response.

Salvage experience proved that a fair proportion of Japanese bombs and torpedoes failed to explode. This was especially true of the 800 kilogram bombs dropped from about 10,000 feet. These were made over from armor-piercing shells of 14 or 15-inch size, and were intended to pierce the armored decks of battleships, aircraft carriers, or cruisers. They had an explosive charge of about 430 pounds. On the other hand, the 250 kilogram bombs used by dive-bombers were very effective and were frequently mistaken for incendiary bombs by our forces. The explosive charge of these bombs was about 135 pounds.

Yes, I didn't plan to be gone so long," apologized Tom. "But I thought while I was there I might as well go all the way with her." "And did you?" "Yes. In the electric runabout. I wanted to come back and get the airship, but she said she wanted to look nice when she met her relatives, and as yet airship travel is a bit mussy. Though when I get my cabined cruiser of the clouds I'll guarantee not to ruffle a curl of the daintiest girl!

CHAPTER 2 Space Academy, U.S.A.! This was the dream and goal of every boy in the thrilling year 2354, when mankind had reached out beyond the bounds of Earth and had conquered space, colonizing planets and blazing trails to distant worlds deep in the black void of the outer universe. To support the ever-growing need for trained spacemen to man the rocket ships that linked the planets and distant satellite outposts, the Solar Alliance, the government of the solar system, had erected Space Academy. It was there that the most promising boys were trained to become members of the Solar Guard to patrol the space lanes and keep peace in the universe. Organized into tight, hard-hitting units of three, the Academy cadets were trained to work together under the most severe conditions. Their waking hours were spent in one of two places; in powerful rocket cruisers, blasting through space on endless training missions, or at the Academy in classrooms and lecture halls, where they studied everything from the theory of space flight to the application of space laws. A very important course of study was the theory of government. For, above all else, the Solar Alliance was a government of the people. And to assure the survival and continuance of that democratic system, the officers of the Solar Guard functioned as the watchdogs of the space democracy, entrusted with the vital mission of making sure the government reflected the will of the people.

Passenger ships continued crossing the Atlantic during the early part of the war in the belief that they were of no strategic value to the enemy. That view changed on May 7, 1915, when a German U-boat sank the Lusitania off the Irish coast, with the loss of 1,198 lives, an action that helped drag America into the war. The Arabic, the ship that had brought Wallace Hartley’s body back from Boston, was torpedoed in August 1915. The great liners were repainted in dull grays or with dazzle camouflage and put to military use. The Olympic became a troop ship, as did the Megantic. The Mauretania at first carried troops during the campaign in Gallipoli, and then became a floating hospital. The Oruba was scuttled in Greece to create a breakwater, the Carmania became an Armed Merchant Cruiser fitted with eight 4.7-inch guns, and a U-boat sank the Carpathia off the east coast of Ireland in July 1918.

Daniel Inouye, a nisei senior at McKinley High School long before he became a U.S. senator, furiously pedaled his bike to help at an aid station. He looked up into the sky and said to himself: “You dirty Japs!” On cruiser San Francisco an engineer came topside to join Ensign John Parrott. “I thought I’d come up and die with you.” Rear Admiral William Furlong stood on the bridge wing on Helena. A gunner called: “Excuse me, admiral, would you mind moving so we can shoot through here?” An officer playing golf went into a sand trap after his ball to find a soldier there shooting a rifle into the air. A bomb blew off a comer of a guardhouse. The inmates rushed out to help set up a .50 caliber machine gun. The phone rang in a Hickam hangar and someone reflexively picked it up. The caller wanted to know what all the noise was about. Kimmel stood in a window at his headquarters as a spent bullet tumbled in the window and hit him on the chest, smudging his whites. “It would have been better if it killed me,” he said. Down the hall Layton, Kimmel’s intelligence officer, caught sight of Admiral Bye who the day before had said the Japanese would never attack the United States. He was wearing a life jacket, his whites smeared with oil, staring wordlessly into the middle distance. “Soc” McMorris appeared: “Well, Layton, if it’s any satisfaction to you, we were wrong and you were right.” •

Normally a battle cruiser like the Pale Lightning is more than a match for mercs. But in the Ghost Sector, things have become more dangerous. It has always been a base of operations for raiders, because sensible people don’t want to go anywhere near the Fourth Colony.

CHAPTER 33 PULLER WAS FOLLOWING LANDRY over to her place. She was ahead of him in a dark blue, white-topped Toyota FJ four-by-four Cruiser. It looked rugged and durable and ready to roll on asphalt or sand, which was probably why she had purchased it.

On the first day of operation Weser-Uebung, the Oslo garrison ignominiously dispatched Germany's newest heavy cruiser, the Bluecher, with an ancient coastal battery bought second-hand from Krupp. Then the Royal Navy sank the entire fleet of ten modern destroyers that had delivered the German landing party to the Narvik fjords. Finally, Raeder sent two more heavy cruisers into Norwegian waters, the Gneisenau and the Scharnhorst, only for them to be disabled by British torpedoes.

Nearly two years after the assault on Mr. Henderson, more than 60 police cruisers and one-third of the city’s on-duty force engaged in a high-speed chase after officers mistook a car’s backfiring for gunfire. It ended when officers killed the two unarmed occupants by firing 137 rounds into their vehicle.

February, 1874.—No further incident occurred worthy of special notice. At last the coast town of Bagamoio came in sight, and before many hours were over, one of Her Majesty's cruisers conveyed the Acting Consul, Captain Prideaux, from Zanzibar to the spot which the cortége had reached. Arrangements were quickly made for transporting the remains of Dr. Livingstone to the Island some thirty miles distant, and then it became perhaps rather too painfully plain to the men that their task was finished.

One of the real reasons that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is so intent on remaining loyal to Syria’s Dictator Bashar Al-Assad, is that in January 2017, Russia and Syria signed a lease to extend Russia's control of its naval facility in the port of Tartus, Syria for 49 years. As with the United States Naval Base in Guantanamo, Cuba, the Russians have sovereign rights over the territory, considered a Material-Technical Support Point and not technically a naval base. The piers are large enough to accommodate four medium-sized vessels but not any of their larger ships of the line, including cruisers or their aircraft carrier. The facility which gives Russia a warm water port, consists of office space, two storage buildings, barracks and a parking garage for about six vehicles. Under the terms of this lease agreement, the Russians also operate Khmeimim Air Base located south-east of the city of Latakia, Syria. The present lease for these military facilities has an extension clause for an additional 25 years.

Aluminum Hulls In 1931 England, aluminum was used in the construction of the Diana II, a 55 foot express cruiser, which is still in use. Aluminum is non-magnetic and is almost never found in the elemental state. As a ductile metal it is malleable and has about one-third the density and stiffness of steel. Aluminum is a corrosion resistant, easily machined, cast, drawn and extruded, however the procedure to weld it is more difficult and different from other metals. In 1935 the Bath Iron Works in Maine, built an experimental hull for Alcoa. Named the Alumette, it was floated to the James River in Newport News, Virginia for the purpose of testing its structural properties. The MV Sacal Borincano was an all-aluminum constructed Roll on Roll off, or Ro-Ro ship, designed to carry 40 highway trailers between Miami, FL and San Juan. PR. The relatively small ship was 226 feet in length and has a displacement of 2000 tons. The South Atlantic and Caribbean Line Inc. operated the vessel which was constructed by American Marine in 1967, with help from the Reynolds Metal Company. The vessel was constructed completely of heli-arced aluminum plates to achieve a working speed of 14 knots with a diesel electric power plant of 3000 hp generating 2240kW.

According to the Treaty of Versailles, the post World War I German Navy was only permitted to have six light cruisers. One of these was the Emden, with a length of over 508 feet and a draft of 17 feet 5 inches. She was launched on January 7, 1925 and commissioned over nine months later on October 15, 1925. The light cruiser had a standard displacement of 5,400 tons, and was the only ship ever constructed in her class. She was built by the Reichsmarine shipbuilding company in Wilhelmshaven, Germany. As a new ship the Emden became the German Navy’s training ship and conducted several world cruises to train future naval officers. In September of 1934, Kapitan Karl Dönitz, the future commander of the German Navy, the Kriegsmarine, took command of the ship and remained her master until the following year. The Emden visited Cape Town in December of 1934 and was there for the Christmas celebration at the Cape Town German Club, described on page 30 of “Suppressed I Rise.” It was then that Adeline danced with the renowned Captain Dönitz, who would later replace the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, as the head of state in Germany. The cruiser Emden was severely damaged by British bombers in February of 1945. On May 3, 1945, the Germans scuttled the ship, to prevent her from being captured by the Allies. Ultimately in 1949, the ship was taken for scrap. Her bow ornament is still on display at the popular Deutsches Museum in Munich.

a Marine company or two had less tactical value than a cruiser, let alone a battleship.

In an episode characteristic of the U.S. tactical intelligence effort during Midway, the attacks on this modest force had repeatedly been reported as being against one or two “battleships”. It was only later in the evening that aerial photography confirmed the sunken vessel had been the heavy cruiser Mikuma, with her damaged sister ship Mogami getting away. The brave defense of this little force over two days, and the fact that three out of the four ships eventually made it back to port, stands testimony to the professionalism and abilities of the Imperial Japanese Navy.

The Wildcats tore into the Vals as they climbed prior to making their dives, and 11 of the 18 attacking dive bombers were shot down before they could even begin their bomb run. Others were knocked down by flak as they bore in on the Yorktown. It would not be enough to save the ship from damage, however. By 12:30, the Yorktown had taken three bomb hits, damaging the flight deck, starting a series of fires, and stopping her engines. At 12:38, Admiral Fletcher moved his command to the heavy cruiser Astoria. The returning Japanese pilots reported that they had left an American carrier ablaze and at least crippled. This would end up causing an important misunderstanding in the Japanese command. Less

When the boys were gone, Adam walked down the path to the police cruiser. He wondered what the neighbors would think, but he really didn’t give a crap. He tapped Len Gilman on the shoulder and said, “If this is about that stupid lacrosse money—” “It’s not,” Len said, his voice a door slamming shut. They

Corsetti pulled up and parked on 52nd Street in front of an apartment near the river. He put the cop light on top of the cruiser. “Keep the fucking traffic buzzards from hauling it off to the tow lot,” he said.

The image of Griff being handcuffed while spread-eagled against a police cruiser had been beamed to screens around the world, but the press wasn’t interested in documenting his innocence.

He hadn’t noticed the traffic when he’d left the counter, but by now the streets clearly had a clog. The roads became more flooded as he approached 144th. His block looked positively underwater. Three police cruisers—Ford Model T Tudor Sedans—were parked midway down the block, a much bigger Police Emergency Services Truck behind them.

Sometimes this habit of using an entire book to tackle a single issue seems positively reckless. When the captain of your little pleasure cruiser spots a ferry hull looming over the horizon, do you really want him to reach for a copy of How to Avoid Huge Ships? Or would you rather that he kept his attention on the wheel?

A large Japanese fleet has been contacted. They are fifteen miles away and headed in our direction. They are believed to have four battleships, eight cruisers, and a number of destroyers. This will be a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected. We will do what damage we can.

One winter in Manila in the mid-1930s, Wylie walked into the wardroom of his ship, the heavy cruiser Augusta (Captain Chester W. Nimitz commanding), and encountered a “fist-banging argument” between two of the ship’s up-and-coming young officers. At issue was what it took to become skilled at rifle or pistol marksmanship. One officer, Lloyd Mustin, said that only someone born with a special gift could learn to do it well. The other, a marine named Lewis B. Puller, said, “I can take any dumb son of a bitch and teach him to shoot.” Mustin would go on to become one of the Navy’s pioneers in radar-controlled gunnery. Puller would ascend to general, the most decorated U.S. Marine in history. Gesturing to Wylie standing in the doorway, Chesty Puller declared, “I can even teach him.” A ten-dollar bet ensued. The next time the Augusta’s marine detachment found time to do their annual qualifications at the rifle range, Wylie was Puller’s special guest. And by the end of the experiment, he was the proud owner of a Marine medal designating him an expert rifleman. The experience helped Wylie understand both native gifts and teachable skills and predisposed him to work with the rural kids under him. Now he could smile when the sighting of an aircraft approaching at a distant but undetermined range came through the Fletcher’s bridge phones as, “Hey, Cap’n, here’s another one of them thar aero-planes, but don’t you fret none. She’s a fur piece yet.” Wylie was a good enough leader to appreciate what the recruits from the countryside brought to the game. “They were highly motivated,” he said. “They just came to fight.

I glanced over and saw the sheriff, Angus Betts, sitting in his cruiser, watching us. Even seated, the sheriff was an intimidating figure. He was over six feet tall with a tightness about him that seemed to start at his waist and move up across his chest and into his neck and jaws, and he had a nose that was exceptionally thick for a white man's. I guessed him to be in his late thirties or early forties because of the way his hazel eyes stared out at the world with what appeared to be boredom, as though he had seen it all before and would not be surprised by anything or anybody.

it was decided that US cruisers should not carry torpedoes, the only cruisers in the Western navies not to carry torpedoes as a matter of policy. The Houston’s six torpedo tubes, like those of most US cruisers, had been removed. This left American cruisers at a severe disadvantage, especially in combat against enemy battleships with their stronger armor.

the hallway to the front door where the keys to the cruiser

It was downright harrowing to be airborne while battleships offshore were bombarding targets ashore. Pilots flying gunnery spotting missions became sandwiched in an invisible corridor between salvos from the big ships offshore. While they spotted shell bursts and called in corrections, fourteen-hundred-pound battleship shells flew overhead in trios, plainly visible to the eye. Below, the smaller warheads of the cruisers whizzed past.

was already standing in his driveway with the door of his silver PT Cruiser wide open, ready to climb in and drive away.  He was confused,

left the PT Cruiser unlocked in the driveway and returned

windows and doors.  His thoughts kept returning to the parked PT Cruiser in the driveway. 

remained constantly distracted, his thoughts and eyes inexorably drawn to the parked PT Cruiser and the unknown roads it promised to carry him down. Each time he forced

It feels as honest as the day is crummy that I begin this tale of total desperation and woe with me, my pukey sister, Georgia, and Leonardo the Silent sitting like rotting sardines in the back of a Hills Village Police Department cruiser.

Worldwide Long Range Solutions Special Interest Group [ ¤ SIG AeR.WLRS 253787890.546]. Space Colonization Subgroup. Open discussion board. Okay, so imagine we get past the next few rough decades and finally do what we should have back in TwenCen. Say we mine asteroids for platinum, discover the secrets of true nanotechnology, and set Von Neumann "sheep" grazing on the moon to produce boundless wealth. To listen to some of the rest of you, all our problems would then be over. The next step, star travel, and colonization of the galaxy, would be trivial. But hold on! Even assuming we solve how to maintain long-lasting ecologies in space and get so wealthy the costs of star-flight aren't crippling, you've still got the problem of time. I mean, most hypothetical designs show likely starships creeping along at no more than ten percent of the speed of light, a whole lot slower than those sci-fi cruisers we see zipping on three-vee. At such speeds it may take five, ten generations to reach a good colony site. Meanwhile, passengers will have to maintain villages and farms and cranky, claustrophobic grandkids, all inside their hollowed-out, spinning worldlets. What kind of social engineering will that take? Do you know how to design a closed society that'd last so long without flying apart? Oh, I think it can be done. But don't pretend it'll be simple! Nor will be solving the dilemma of gene pool isolation. In the arks and zoos right now, a lot of rescued species are dying off even though the microecologies are right, simply because too few individuals were included in the original mix. For a healthy gene pool you need diversity, variety, heterozygosity. One thing's clear, no starship will make it carrying only one racial group. What'll be needed, frankly, are mongrels… people who've bred back and forth with just about everybody and seem to enjoy it.

Thank fuck the camera loved him more than he loved himself. He could recline on silk sheets for cologne or seethe in a sportscar. His life became the silk sheet he had once reclined upon: smooth, compliant and without substance. In pursuit of that something, he enterprised. His upbringing on Lake Como receded as he found himself sipping sangria on a Monte Carlo balcony, basking on his cruiser in Cannes or cheering Chelsea within a glass suite above the stands. Whether he felt dead inside wasn’t up for discussion.

We drove back to the doughnut shop where I’d left my car, idling past once on U.S. 1 while we looked for any sign of untoward activity, Legal or Otherwise, around my car. There was no sign of anything: no police cruiser or unmarked car, and as far as we could see, there was no conga line of swarthy killers with machine guns, either.

A blast of what felt like a Canadian wind had him hurrying to zip closed his shearling jacket and pull the collar up to protect his neck. He trudged through the drifting snow toward the driver’s side window of the speed freak, careful to keep behind the line of his cruiser in case any other idiots were on the road today.

And the true inspiration, the sparkling grace note of genius that brings his masterpiece to life, is the soprano counterpoint: a syncopated sequence of exterior hatches in the outer hull sliding open and closed and open again, subtly altering the aerodynamics of the ship to give it just exactly the amount of sideslip or lift or yaw to bring the huge half cruiser into the approach cone of a pinpoint target an eighth of the planet away.

Hurricane whale cruiser, which Karen’s friend Ronnie

Ten days before the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, a plan circulated briefly, never to be executed, providing for the creation of a “surface attack group” under Fletcher’s cruiser boss, Rear Admiral Carleton H. Wright, drawing the battleship North Carolina, the heavy cruisers Minneapolis, San Francisco, New Orleans, Portland, and Salt Lake City, the Atlanta, and four destroyers into a single fighting force should the Japanese fleet come within gun range. Those ships were finally reckoned too valuable to spare in missions other than antiaircraft defense.

Reynaud. That June, the decision-making suddenly speeded up. Monnet drafted his proposal on Thursday, 13 June. The next evening he already had a correction to make: ‘Paris might fall’ became ‘Paris has fallen’. On Sunday, 16 June the final communiqué was drawn up. ‘At this most fateful moment in the history of the modern world . . . The two governments declare that France and Great Britain shall no longer form two nations, but one, single Franco-British union.’ Early that evening de Gaulle flew with the document from London to Bordeaux, the seat of the French government at the time. Churchill and a few members of the cabinet were to make the crossing to France that night by cruiser, to add their signatures. But while the British

Let the fortifications of the sea-coasts and the fleets of battle-ships and cruisers on the ocean be commensurate with the vast national interests and honor intrusted to their protection and defense; let the standing army be sufficient to discharge the duties which require long and scientific education and training, and to serve as models and instructors for the millions of young citizens: then will the United States, by being always ready for war, insure to themselves all the blessings of peace, and this at a cost utterly insignificant in comparison with the cost of one great war.

The Omanis had feasts called haflas where they’d bring a goat in and cook it in the fire. It was always a fantastic gathering. They’d turn up in their Land Cruisers in the middle of nowhere, put the carpets out, and start a fire up. Sometimes they’d tow in a small water bowser as well. There was a huge amount of ritual involved; the animal was treated with immense respect before it was killed, in accordance with Islam.

I smiled. “Hey, ‘Eve,’” I said. “Think you’ve got some uninvited guests.” Now they were on three monitors. Teams of men in uniform black, huddled down behind riot shields, forcing their way into the Enclave lobby. A tear-gas grenade exploded on one camera, blanketing the lens in white smoke. On the parking lot view, a swarm of police cruisers ringed the building. “Oh, hey,” I said. “Looks like the whole Vegas Metro SWAT division is here. Plus the FBI, Homeland Security, and probably the IRS for good measure.” Lauren shook her head wildly. Her plants quivered. “What? How? They have no reason to be here, no evidence against me!

Professor Craig Franklin of the University of Queensland mounted a crocodile research partnership with Steve. The idea was to fasten transmitters and data loggers on crocs to record their activity in their natural environment. But in order to place the transmitters, you had to catch the crocs first, and that’s where Steve’s expertise came in. Steve never felt more content than when he was with his family in the bush. “There’s nothing more valuable than human life, and this research will help protect both crocs and people,” he told us. The bush was where Steve felt most at home. It was where he was at his best. On that one trip, he caught thirty-three crocs in fourteen days. He wanted to do more. “I’d really like to have the capability of doing research on the ocean as well as in the rivers,” he told me. “I could do so much more for crocodiles and sharks if I had a purpose-built research vessel.” I could see where he was heading. I was not a big fan of boats. “I’m going to contact a company in Western Australia, in Perth,” he said. “I’m going to work on a custom-built research vessel.” As the wheels turned in his mind, he became more and more excited. “The sky’s the limit, mate,” he said. “We could help tiger sharks and learn why crocs go out to sea. There is no reason why we couldn’t help whales, too.” “Tell me how we can help whales,” I said, expecting to hear about a research project that he and Craig had in mind. “It will be great,” he said. “We’ll build a boat with an icebreaking hull. We’ll weld a can opener to the front, and join Sea Shepherd in Antarctica to stop those whaling boats in their tracks.” When we got back from our first trip to Cape York Peninsula with Craig Franklin, Steve immediately began drawing up plans for his boat. He wanted to make it as comfortable as possible. As he envisioned it, the boat would be somewhere between a hard-core scientific research vessel and a luxury cruiser. He designed three berths, a plasma screen television for the kids, and air-conditioned comfort below deck. He placed a big marlin board off the back, for Jet Skis, shark cages, or hauling out huge crocs. One feature that he was really adamant about was a helicopter pad. He designed the craft so that the helicopter could land on the top. Steve’s design plans went back and forth to Perth for months. “I want this boat’s primary function to be crocodile research and rescue work,” Steve said. “So I’m going to name her Croc One.” “Why don’t we call it For Sale instead?” I suggested. I’m not sure Steve saw the humor in that. Croc One was his baby. But for some reason, I felt tremendous trepidation about this boat. I attributed my feelings of concern to Bindi and Robert. Anytime you have kids on a boat, the rules change--no playing hide-and-seek, no walking on deck without a life jacket on. It made me uncomfortable to think about being two hundred miles out at sea with two young kids. We had had so many wild adventures together as a family that, ultimately, I had to trust Steve. But my support for Croc One was always, deep down, halfhearted at best. I couldn’t shake my feeling of foreboding about it.

He straightened and crossed his arms. He wanted her to forget: forget about her family and what she’d left behind. He wanted her sass, not her sorrow. And he wasn’t above baiting her to get it. He fixed a stern expression on his face and jutted a chin at the car. “Get busy, little girl. As much as I’d love to clean out this garbage pit of a car, I don’t have a Dumpster available. Trash bags alone won’t get the job done.” She shot up, planting her hands on her hips. “What did you say?” Yes, there it was: the fire she hid under those layers of Catholic guilt. He cocked a brow. “What’s your objection? That I called you little girl, or messy?” She threw her shoulders back, thrusting out breasts that were almost lost in Gracie’s too-big T-shirt. “Both!” “I call it like I see it.” He shrugged a shoulder. “What are you going to do about it?” Her mouth fell open, and her eyes flashed all sorts of interesting variations of green. She stepped forward and poked him in the center of his chest. “You . . . you . . . ,” she sputtered. He leaned in close, sucking in the scent of lavender, breathing in her hint of wildness. Jesus, he wanted her. He needed every ounce of control to not take her mouth in a hard, brutal fuck-you-where-you-stand kiss. Instead he whispered, “You what?” With another hard jab of her sharp, white-tipped nail, she stomped a foot, temper riled. “You, you jerk!” “Come on, you can do better than that, can’t you?” He paused, waiting one delicious beat that made her lean in closer. “Little girl?” “You arrogant, egotistical . . .” With a strangled scream, she hauled back and punched him in the chest, hard enough that some of the air in his lungs whooshed out. Before she could strike again, he snagged her wrist, caught her around the waist with his free hand, and pulled her close. Her cheeks were flushed a pretty pink. Body rigid, she met his gaze with fiery defiance. He searched her face and found what he was looking for under her righteous, indignant temper: excitement. Hunger. He tightened his hold, pressing along her spine to force her the last couple of inches she needed to be flush against him. He needed one taste of that mouth. But before he could give in to the impulse that was riding him hard, a police cruiser pulled into the parking lot and flashed its lights. “Ah, fuck.” He dropped his hold. Impeccable timing.

him, but Officer Agabe-Diaz reached him first, then everything seemed to happen at once: The mortuary assistants bumped the gurney against the doorjamb, jostling the black vinyl body bag. The uniformed officers rushed to help them as Patrick came running toward the stretcher, bursting into tears. Officer Agabe-Diaz scooped Patrick up just before he got there, then turned and handed him screaming and crying to Mary, who hugged him as tightly as she could, almost falling onto the couch with him, so he would have a soft place to land as Officer Agabe-Diaz hustled the other police officers, the mortuary assistants, and the gurney out of the house and slammed the door closed behind them. “Pops, Pops, Pops!” Patrick screamed at the top of his lungs, blasting Mary’s eardrums, but she held him tightly, trying to soothe him, telling him it would be okay and holding him on the couch, making him stay so that he didn’t run back to the door and pull it open. She couldn’t hear anything outside over his screaming, but she could see headlights flash outside the window, so she knew the police cruisers were starting their engines and the mortuary assistants were loading the gurney inside the black van. Mary prayed that if she could just hold Patrick on the couch and hug him through the worst thing that had ever happened to him, then he would finally cry himself into a heartbroken sleep. Which was exactly what happened.   CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl argued that a life purpose is not some mystical fairy tale, but the reality of every single human being on our planet. What is more, having an understanding of your life’s purpose has life-saving potential. He observed this while being detained in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Similar experiences were recounted by the survivors from USS Indianapolis, a United States heavy cruiser that was sunk at the end of the World War II. The need to maintain radio silence meant nobody in naval command knew about the attack until days afterwards. The survivors had several nights in the water before rescue came. They reported that virtually everybody wanted to give up their struggle for life at one point or another. The effort to stay afloat so long was overwhelming. Some did give up and died. But the rest, when tempted to quit the effort, focused on their reasons to keep fighting. They encouraged each other with thoughts of people who depended on them in their civil lives: spouses, parents, siblings, and kids. If someone had no one to live for, others would tell them about those in their future who would surely need them—their future spouses and kids. They had a reason to survive: wanting to be there for others who needed them. Those sailors became committed to fulfill this, and their commitment was enough to keep them alive. A good reason is a magnificent tool. A reason-powered motivation can save your life in more than one way. We’ve seen how a reliance on emotion-filled inspiration derived from others doesn’t ultimately motivate you at all if your core values are not involved. However, that does not mean that emotions won’t help you. Far from it. Just be aware of the limitations of relying on your emotions to power consistent action. Emotions are elusive in their nature, but as long as they last, they can boost your abilities many-fold. Emotions give you the ability to get fired-up to begin something. You’ve probably heard the saying, “Well begun is half done.” Starting is the action that magically produces progress. Consider things you’ve begun in the past. One moment you were doing nothing, so had exactly zero potential to reach your goal. Then you made a decision that you would do this and a surge of enthusiasm moved you forward. You were in motion; you’d started. An infinite ocean of possibilities had opened in front of you. Any decision to start something will have this effect.

I’m not letting anyone control me or any situation regardless of what one particularly annoying male may think.” His chuckle fills the line again, and I hate that with as mad as I am at him, it’s still sexy as hell. “You sure about that?” “Damn sure.” “You might want to double-check that hill you’re willing to die on.” “Why’s that?” I narrow my brow as I stare out at his cruiser. “Because I’ve already gotten what I came for.” “Yeah? What’s that?” “You to be thinking about me.” The line goes dead.

When Troubridge came to the Mediterranean to take over the armored cruisers and serve as deputy to Admiral Milne, his relationship with the Commander-in-Chief was correct but not warm.

No one has written a better description of this scene than Churchill himself: We may now picture this great fleet with its flotillas of cruisers steaming slowly out of Portland harbor, squadron by squadron, scores of gigantic castles of steel wending their way across the misty, shining sea, like giants bowed in anxious thought. We may picture them again as darkness fell, eighteen miles of warships running at high speed and in absolute darkness through the narrow Straits, bearing with them into the broad waters of the North the safeguard of considerable affairs. The strategic concentration of the fleet had been accomplished with its transfer to Scottish waters. We were now in a position, whatever happened, to control events and it was not easy to see how this advantage could be taken from us. A surprise torpedo attack, before or simultaneous with a declaration of war, was at any rate one nightmare gone forever. If war should come, no one would know where to look for the British fleet. Somewhere in that enormous waste of waters to the north of our islands, cruising now this way, now that, shrouded in storms and mists, dwelt this mighty organization. Yet from the Admiralty building we could speak to them at any moment if need arose. The king’s ships were at sea.

his faster, more powerful battle cruisers would gobble up armored cruisers “like an armadillo let loose on an ant-hill.

Men,’ said Jack, ‘I know damned well what’s going on. I know damned well what’s going on; and I won’t have it. What simple fellows you are, to listen to a parcel of makee-clever sea-lawyers and politicians, glib, quick-talking coves. Some of you have put your necks into the noose. I say your necks into the noose. You see the Ville de Paris over there?’ Every head turned to the line-of-battle ship on the horizon. ‘I have only to signal her, or half a dozen other cruisers, and run you up to the yardarm with the Rogue’s March playing. Damned fools, to listen to such talk. But I am not going to signal to the Ville de Paris nor to any other king’s ship. Why not? Because the Polychrest is going into action this very night, that’s why. I am not going to have it said in the fleet that any Polychrest is afraid of hard knocks.

I lived my life in compartments, a chapter at a time, with no overlaps, no connections.

Naval Warfare: For surface vessels and even submarines there was much continuity between the First and Second World Wars. The battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and submarines of the 1939-45 period were generally bigger, faster, and better armed than their 1914-18 predecessors but not fundamentally different. Indeed, they had not changed much since the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. Yet naval warfare was nevertheless transformed by the introduction of aviation. Fleets that were once built around battleships came to be built around aircraft carriers instead. Aircraft proved superior not just to conventional surface ships but also, in the Battle of the Atlantic, to submarines as well. German U-boats preying on Allied shipping were foiled through a variety of means including convoying of merchants ships and the use of radar and sonar. But the weapon that proved most effective was an aircraft dropping depth charges. The dispatch of long-range B-24s equipped with the latest radar to patrol the North Atlantic in 1943 helped to turn the tide against the U-boats. The proliferation of small escort carriers also allowed air cover for convoys even in the middle of the ocean. Submarines proved more effective in teh Pacific, where the vast distances precluded effective patrolling by aircraft and where the Japanese did not devleop the types of advanced antisubmarine techniques employed by the Allies in the Atlantic. U.S. submarines took a heavy toll on Japanese merchantmen and warships alike once they managed to fix the problems that bedeviled their Mark 14 torpedo early in the war. "A force comprising less than 2 percent of U.S. Navy personnel," naval historian Ronald Spector would write of U.S. submariners, "had accounted for 55 percent of Japan's losses at sea." The torpedo, whether launched by submarines, surface ships, or airplanes, proved the biggest ship-killer of the war.

Instead of the heavy cruiser types with which it equipped itself, the German Navy might have been better served by a class of well-armoured, fast, diesel-driven light cruisers of optimum armament for commerce-raiding purposes. This was not given consideration.

At about eight thirty in the morning on January 3, a lookout I had stationed at the top of the mountain came running toward me. “Enemy fleet sighted!” he cried. Clutching my binoculars, I hurried up the mountain. What the lookout had seen was an enemy fleet, all right. And what a fleet! As carefully as I could, I counted the vessels. There were two battleships, four aircraft carriers, four cruisers and enough light cruisers and destroyers to make up a total of thirty-seven or thirty-eight warships. What astonished me most, however, was not this awesome armada, but the host of troop transports that followed it. There must have been nearly 150 of them. As if that were not enough, the sea was literally peppered with landing craft—more than I could possibly count. The invasion of Luzon was about to begin.

The original intention of the Westwall was to guarantee to Hitler’s neighbours to his west that he had no territorial ambitions in that direction.

Thus, in 1950 it still had twelve carriers and twenty-nine cruisers, while the pages of Jane’s Fighting Ships for, say, 1952 still show a very considerable navy. It was not to be until after Suez (1956) and the defense-policy revolution of 1957 that the further drastic erosion occurred, and by 1970 the Royal Navy’s surface fleet had shriveled to three carriers and three cruisers.

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Gideon and Garza had hoped to find passage on a Nile River cruiser to Aswan, but at this late date everything was booked. So they’d done the next best thing and reserved a stateroom with two double beds on a small cruise ship making a circuit of the Red Sea.

The cruiser was his prize, and he’d fall to his death before he let another group of marauders steal what he had rightfully commandeered.

But we have soothed ourselves into imagining sudden change as something that happens outside the normal order of things. An accident, like a car crash. Or beyond our control, like a fatal illness. We do not conceive of sudden, radical, irrational change as built into the very fabric of existence. Yet it is. And chaos theory teaches us,” Malcolm said, “that straight linearity, which we have come to take for granted in everything from physics to fiction, simply does not exist. Linearity is an artificial way of viewing the world. Real life isn’t a series of interconnected events occurring one after another like beads strung on a necklace. Life is actually a series of encounters in which one event may change those that follow in a wholly unpredictable, even devastating way.” Malcolm sat back in his seat, looking toward the other Land Cruiser, a few yards ahead. “That’s a deep truth about the structure of our universe. But, for some reason, we insist on behaving as if it were not true.

President Taft, too, was preoccupied by the fate of his aide and frustrated by his inability to receive word of whether Archie might be on board the rescue ship. On Tuesday, Taft instructed the secretary of the navy to send out two scout cruisers, the Salem and the Chester, to establish radio contact with the Carpathia.

He had just reached the high-rise apartment building called Hamilton House, with the US flag and the Union Jack fluttering in the open windows, when a parade came in his direction. Trumpets, horns, and drums were playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” a familiar tune he had heard the American sailors whistle in the bar. It was a relief, a boost of confidence, to see the armed forces. So Miriam was right. With the Fourth Marines, the Americans were protected at least. He rushed to the sidewalk, stood behind three businessmen carrying file cases, a girl carrying a violin case, and an old woman walking with a cocker spaniel, and watched. The leading man in the parade wore an olive officer visor. Ernest recognized him; it was Colonel William Ashurst. He was singing, his face pale and etched with worries. Behind him were the Fourth Marines, all fitted in their jackets with utility pouches tucked snugly around their waists. As they marched, they each pulled the strap aslant across their chests, holding what could be a semiautomatic Garand rifle or maybe a Thompson submachine. The rhythm of the trumpets, the drums, and the singing lifted Ernest’s spirits. He walked along, following the parade, waving at the colonel, who didn’t pay him attention. When the regiment reached the wharf at the river, the singing stopped. The colonel saluted and shouted, and the regiment jumped into a large white liner behind the cruiser USS Wake. Someone in the crowd cried out, followed by a string of sobs. Someone else shouted, “God bless you! Goodbye!” It was a farewell parade. Ernest overheard someone say that the Americans were to sail for the Philippines. His heart dropped.

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