Plane Spotting Quotes

Nagumo was suddenly on his own. At this crucial time, the cost of his failure to learn the complicated factors that played into carrier operations suddenly exploded. Now, when every minute counted, it was too late to learn the complexities involved in loading different munitions on different types of planes on the hangar deck, too late to learn how the planes were organized and spotted on the flight decks, too late to learn the flight capabilities of his different types of planes, and far too late to know how to integrate all those factors into a fast-moving and efficient operation with the planes and ordnance available at that moment. Commander Genda, his brilliant operations officer, couldn’t make the decisions for him now. It was all up to Nagumo. At 0730 on June 4, 1942, years of shipbuilding, training, and strategic planning had all come to this moment. Teams of highly trained pilots, flight deck personnel, mechanics, and hundreds of other sailors were ready and awaiting his command. The entire course of the battle, of the Combined Fleet, and even perhaps of Japan were going to bear the results of his decisions, then and there.

Most people hear an airplane in the sky and think, ‘There’s an airplane,’ and go back to what they were doing. A few folks look around for the airplane, try to figure out what kind of plane it is, and watch it from the time they spot it to the time it disappears on the horizon, maybe after that. Those kids are the ones who will be pilots." He pointed at me. "I knew that about you. I’ve just been waiting for you to show up.

We got there without being spotted. I pulled her in, then shut the door, pressing my back to it and exhaling like an epileptic pilot who'd just landed a cargo plane full of dynamite.

1. I told you that I was a roadway of potholes, not safe to cross. You said nothing, showed up in my driveway wearing roller-skates. 2. The first time I asked you on a date, after you hung up, I held the air between our phones against my ear and whispered, “You will fall in love with me. Then, just months later, you will fall out. I will pretend the entire time that I don’t know it’s coming.” 3. Once, I got naked and danced around your bedroom, awkward and safe. You did the same. We held each other without hesitation and flailed lovely. This was vulnerability foreplay. 4. The last eight times I told you I loved you, they sounded like apologies. 5. You recorded me a CD of you repeating, “You are beautiful.” I listened to it until I no longer thought in my own voice. 6. Into the half-empty phone line, I whispered, “We will wake up believing the worst in each other. We will spit shrapnel at each other’s hearts. The bruises will lodge somewhere we don’t know how to look for and I will still pretend I don’t know its coming.” 7. You photographed my eyebrow shapes and turned them into flashcards: mood on one side, correct response on the other. You studied them until you knew when to stay silent. 8. I bought you an entire bakery so that we could eat nothing but breakfast for a week. Breakfast, untainted by the day ahead, was when we still smiled at each other as if we meant it. 9. I whispered, “I will latch on like a deadbolt to a door and tell you it is only because I want to protect you. Really, I’m afraid that without you I mean nothing.” 10. I gave you a bouquet of plane tickets so I could practice the feeling of watching you leave. 11. I picked you up from the airport limping. In your absence, I’d forgotten how to walk. When I collapsed at your feet, you refused to look at me until I learned to stand up without your help. 12. Too scared to move, I stared while you set fire to your apartment – its walls decaying beyond repair, roaches invading the corpse of your bedroom. You tossed all the faulty appliances through the smoke out your window, screaming that you couldn’t handle choking on one more thing that wouldn’t just fix himself. 13. I whispered, “We will each weed through the last year and try to spot the moment we began breaking. We will repel sprint away from each other. Your voice will take months to drain out from my ears. You will throw away your notebook of tally marks from each time you wondered if I was worth the work. The invisible bruises will finally surface and I will still pretend that I didn’t know it was coming.” 14. The entire time, I was only pretending that I knew it was coming.

There was no Disney World then, just rows of orange trees. Millions of them. Stretching for miles And somewhere near the middle was the Citrus Tower, which the tourists climbed to see even more orange trees. Every month an eighty-year-old couple became lost in the groves, driving up and down identical rows for days until they were spotted by helicopter or another tourist on top of the Citrus Tower. They had lived on nothing but oranges and come out of the trees drilled on vitamin C and checked into the honeymoon suite at the nearest bed-and-breakfast. "The Miami Seaquarium put in a monorail and rockets started going off at Cape Canaveral, making us feel like we were on the frontier of the future. Disney bought up everything north of Lake Okeechobee, preparing to shove the future down our throats sideways. "Things evolved rapidly! Missile silos in Cuba. Bales on the beach. Alligators are almost extinct and then they aren't. Juntas hanging shingles in Boca Raton. Richard Nixon and Bebe Rebozo skinny-dipping off Key Biscayne. We atone for atrocities against the INdians by playing Bingo. Shark fetuses in formaldehyde jars, roadside gecko farms, tourists waddling around waffle houses like flocks of flightless birds. And before we know it, we have The New Florida, underplanned, overbuilt and ripe for a killer hurricane that'll knock that giant geodesic dome at Epcot down the trunpike like a golf ball, a solid one-wood by Buckminster Fuller. "I am the native and this is my home. Faded pastels, and Spanish tiles constantly slipping off roofs, shattering on the sidewalk. Dogs with mange and skateboard punks with mange roaming through yards, knocking over garbage cans. Lunatics wandering the streets at night, talking about spaceships. Bail bondsmen wake me up at three A.M. looking for the last tenant. Next door, a mail-order bride is clubbed by a smelly ma in a mechanic's shirt. Cats violently mate under my windows and rats break-dance in the drop ceiling. And I'm lying in bed with a broken air conditioner, sweating and sipping lemonade through a straw. And I'm thinking, geez, this used to be a great state. "You wanna come to Florida? You get a discount on theme-park tickets and find out you just bough a time share. Or maybe you end up at Cape Canaveral, sitting in a field for a week as a space shuttle launch is canceled six times. And suddenly vacation is over, you have to catch a plane, and you see the shuttle take off on TV at the airport. But you keep coming back, year after year, and one day you find you're eighty years old driving through an orange grove.

What the hell was that?” one of them asked. “Jackal,” Irene stated quietly while watching city streets turn to suburb. They weren’t taking her to a main airport but a small airstrip. One built exclusively for private planes. “Did she just call us jackals?” one of them joked. Irene grinned which wiped the smile off the man’s face. “No. I said the howl you heard was jackal.” She looked at Jenny. “They’ll be coming for you.” Jenny glanced at the men and back at her. She looked terribly concerned she had a lunatic in the car with her. “The jackals will be coming for me?” “No. The wolves.” Jenny sighed. “Why oh why do I always get the nutcases?” “Oh!” Irene pointed excitedly. “See that spot up there?” “What about it?” “That’s where it all started. Where I crossed the Rubicon.” Exasperated, Jenny snarled, “What the fuck are you talking about?” “It’s feeding time,” Irene whispered. “That’s it.” Jenny threw up her hands. “We’re so medicating her.

Hot.” The last word, barely a whisper, lost itself in my hair as he pressed his lips to that spot just below my ear that can, apparently, flip the off switch in my brain. Before I realized it my hands were inside that jacket, stroking the hard planes of his chest and stomach. And then, as if moving without any prompting from me they reached down, undid his belt, pulled it loose, and…“Ahhh, that feels great,” I moaned.“I am completely grossed out over here!” Cassandra informed us.Vayl, who’d been peering down at me with an expression of utter disbelief, stared at Cassandra over the top of my head. “It is not what you think,” he assured her.“As if I’d do something that disgusting,” I said, pulling away from him, but keeping the belt, because the buckle relieved the itching so much better than fingernails. I continued using it to scratch the inflamed skin across my stomach as I sat down by Cassandra. “You are pathetic,” she told me. “I’d get all offended, but I’m pretty sure you’re right.

This is what comes from the wrong kind of attentiveness. People get brain fade. This is because they've forgotten how to listen and look as children. They've forgotten how to collect data. In the psychic sense a forest fire on TV is on a lower plane than a ten-second spot for Automatic Dishwasher All. The commercial has deeper waves, deeper emanations. But we have reversed the relative significance of these things. This is why people's eyes, ears, brains and nervous systems have grown weary. It's a simple case of misuse.

Justin: I am falling so in love with you. Her body electrified. Celeste wiped her eyes and read his text again. The drone of the plane disappeared; the turbulence was no more. There was only Justin and his words. Justin: I lose myself and find myself at the same time with you. Justin: I need you, Celeste. I need you as part of my world, because for the first time, I am connected to someone in a way that has meaning. And truth. Maybe our distance has strengthened what I feel between us since we’re not grounded in habit or daily convenience. We have to fight for what we have. Justin: I don’t know if I can equate what I feel for you with anything else. Except maybe one thing, if this makes any sense. Justin: I go to this spot at Sunset Cliffs sometimes. It’s usually a place crowded with tourists, but certain times of year are quieter. I like it then. And there’s a high spot on the sandstone cliff, surrounded by this gorgeous ice plant, and it overlooks the most beautiful water view you’ve ever seen. I’m on top of the world there, it seems. Justin: And everything fits, you know? Life feels right. As though I could take on anything, do anything. And sometimes, when I’m feeling overcome with gratitude for the view and for what I have, I jump so that I remember to continue to be courageous because not every piece of life will feel so in place. Justin: It’s a twenty-foot drop, the water is only in the high fifties, and it’s a damn scary experience. But it’s a wonderful fear. One that I know I can get through and one that I want. Justin: That’s what it’s like with you. I am scared because you are so beyond anything I could have imagined. I become so much more with you beside me. That’s terrifying, by the way. But I will be brave because my fear only comes from finally having something deeply powerful to lose. That’s my connection with you. It would be a massive loss. Justin: And now I am in the car and about to see you, so don’t reply. I’m too flipping terrified to hear what you think of my rant. It’s hard not to pour my heart out once I start. If you think I’m out of mind, just wave your hands in horror when you spot the lovesick guy at the airport. Ten minutes went by. He had said not to reply, so she hadn’t. Justin: Let’s hope I don’t get pulled over for speeding… but I’m at a stoplight now. Justin: God, I hope you aren’t… aren’t… something bad. Celeste: Hey, Justin? Justin: I TOLD YOU NOT TO REPLY! Justin: I know, I know. But I’m happy you did because I lost it there for a minute. Celeste: HEY, JUSTIN? Justin: Sorry… Hey, Celeste? Celeste: I am, unequivocally and wholly falling in love with you, too. Justin: Now I’m definitely speeding. I will see you soon.

Cat spots breast cancer missed by the finest doctor in the land. Llama successfully pilots crashing plane to a safe and happy landing (I might have made one of those up).

In the first place, I was standing still. Having banked right in order to correct a sudden drift, I saw the landscape freeze abruptly where it was and remain jiggling on the same spot. I was making no headway. My wings had ceased to nibble into the outline of the earth. I could see the earth buckle, pivot - but it stayed put. The plane was skidding as if on a toothless cogwheel.

To distract himself he started making a mental list of all the ways he could leave Chapel Bluff. He could go by train. Plane. Motorcycle. Last night Beverly had invited all three of them - him, Ryan, and Tyler - to stay for dinner. Matt had refused. Ryan had likewise refused because his wife had dinner waiting for him at home. Tyler had leapt at the chance. Matt had been the one who'd decided to put distance between himself, Kate, and Beverley. Even so, it rankled that Tyler had slipped right into his empty spot at the dinner table. That Kate had found someone so much more charming than him to talk to. That Kate seemed so delighted to turn her back on him. He could leave by four-wheeler. Mountain bike. Skateboard. "You're a design genius, young lady." Tyler said to Kate. "That's a perfect place for that sideboard." "Why thank you," Kate replied. Matt ground his teeth and imagined leaving by Greyhound bus. He'd even have settled for a horse. Hot air balloon. Donkey cart.

There was nothing green left; artillery had denuded and scarred every inch of ground. Tiny flares glowed and disappeared. Shrapnel burst with bluish white puffs. Jets of flamethrowers flickered and here and there new explosions stirred up the rubble. While I watched, an American observation plane droned over the Japanese lines, spotting targets for the U.S. warships lying offshore. Suddenly the little plane was hit by flak and disintegrated. The carnage below continued without pause. Here I was safe, but tomorrow I would be there. In that instant I realized that the worst thing that could happen to me was about to happen to me.

Months later, I learned that what happened that first day at restorative yoga hadn’t been entirely spiritual—I hadn’t just found the exact spot on the astral plane to tap into my sacred core. Instead, my instructor’s techniques happened to be the perfect mechanism to turn down my DMN. The default mode network is so-called because if you put people in an MRI machine for an hour and let their minds wander, the DMN is the system of connections in our brain that will light up. It’s arguably the default state of human consciousness, of boredom and daydreaming. In essence, our ego. So if you’re stuck in a machine for an hour, where does your mind go? If you’re like most people, you’ll ruminate on the past or plan your future. You might think about your relationships, upcoming errands, your zits. And scientists have found that some people who suffer from depression, anxiety, or C-PTSD have overactive DMNs. Which makes sense. The DMN is the seat of responsibility and insecurity. It can be a punishing force when it over-ruminates and gets caught in a toxic loop of obsession and self-doubt. The DMN can be silenced significantly by antidepressants or hallucinogenic substances. But the most efficient cure for an overactive DMN is mindfulness. Here’s how it works: In order for the DMN to start whirring, it needs resources to fuel its internal focus. If you’re intently focused on something external—like, say, filling out a difficult math worksheet—the brain simply doesn’t have the resources to focus internally and externally at the same time. So if you’re triggered, you can short-circuit an overactive DMN by cutting off its power source—shifting all of your brain’s energy to external stimuli instead.

Bath" The day is fresh-washed and fair, and there is a smell of tulips and narcissus in the air. The sunshine pours in at the bath-room window and bores through the water in the bath-tub in lathes and planes of greenish-white. It cleaves the water into flaws like a jewel, and cracks it to bright light. Little spots of sunshine lie on the surface of the water and dance, dance, and their reflections wobble deliciously over the ceiling; a stir of my finger sets them whirring, reeling. I move a foot and the planes of light in the water jar. I lie back and laugh, and let the green-white water, the sun-flawed beryl water, flow over me. The day is almost too bright to bear, the green water covers me from the too bright day. I will lie here awhile and play with the water and the sun spots. The sky is blue and high. A crow flaps by the window, and there is a whiff of tulips and narcissus in the air.

Who else had ever met the business-end of a bolt of lightning in mid-flight, as he had just now, flying blind through a storm, lost a wing, managed to come down still alive even if it is on a wooded mountainside, to cut the contact at the moment of crashing so that he wasn't roasted alive, and crawl out with just a wrenched shoulder and a lot of cuts and bruises? He couldn't bail out because he was flying too low, hoping for a break through the clouds through which to spot something flat enough to come down on; he doesn't like bailing out anyway, hates to throw away a good plane. ("Jane Brown's Body")

The man with the dark hair sighs, and explains that his friend won’t be coming back, and thus she won’t be paid for her time, or for her trouble. And then, seeing the hurt in her eyes, and taking pity on her, he examines the golden threads in his mind, watches the matrix, follows the money until he spots a node, and tells her that if she’s outside Treasure Island at 6:00 A.M., thirty minutes after she gets off work, she’ll meet an oncologist from Denver who will just have won $40,000 at a craps table, and will need a mentor, a partner, someone to help him dispose of it all in the forty-eight hours before he gets on the plane home. The words evaporate in the waitress’s mind, but they leave her happy. She sighs and notes that the guys in the corner have done a runner, and have not even tipped her; and it occurs to her that, instead of driving straight home when she gets off shift, she’s going to drive over to Treasure Island; but she would never, if you asked her, be able to tell you why.

Remarkable, if for nothing else, because of this, that all of those men and women who stayed for any reason left behind them some monument, some structure of marble and brick and stone that still stands; so that even when the gas lamps went out and the planes came in and the office buildings crowded the blocks of Canal Street, something irreducible of beauty and romance remained; not in every street perhaps, but in so many that the landscape is for me the landscape of those times always, and walking now in the starlit streets of the Quarter or the Garden District I am in those times again. I suppose that is the nature of the monument. Be it a small house or a mansion of Corinthian columns and wrought-iron lace. The monument does not say that this or that man walked here. No, that what he felt in one time in one spot continues. The moon that rose over New Orleans then still rises. As long as the monuments stand, it still rises. The feeling, at least here...and there...it remains the same.

The pilot of a new jet plane was winging over the Catskills and pointed out a pleasant valley to his second in command. “See that spot?” he demanded. “When I was a barefoot kid, I used to sit in a flat-bottomed rowboat down there, fishing. Every time a plane flew by I would look up and dream I was piloting it. Now I look down and dream I am fishing.

It is almost impossible to understand the extent to which upheaval agitated, and by that very fact had temporarily enriched, the mind of M. de Charlus. Love in this way produces real geological upheavals of thought. In the mind of M. de Charlus, which only several days before resembled a plane so flat that even from a good vantage point one could not have discerned an idea sticking up above the ground, a mountain range had abruptly thrust itself into view, hard as rock--but mountains sculpted as if an artist, instead of taking the marble away, had worked it on the spot, and where there twisted about one another, in giant and swollen groupings, Rage, Jealousy, Curiosity, Envy, Suffering, Pride, Astonishment, and Love.

Aren’t you coming with us?” I feel his hand on my cheek. I know what this means and I slap his hand away. “You’re coming with us, Evan,” I say. “There’s something I have to do.” “That’s right.” My hand flails for his in the dark. I find it and pull hard. “You have to come with us.” “I’ll find you, Cassie. Don’t I always find you? I—” “Don’t, Evan. You don’t know you’ll be able to find me.” “Cassie.” I don’t like the way he says my name. His voice is too soft, too sad, too much like a good-bye voice. “I was wrong when I said I was both and neither. I can’t be; I know that now. I have to choose.” “Wait a minute,” Ben says. “Cassie, this guy is one of them?” “It’s complicated,” I answer. “We’ll go over it later.” I grab Evan’s hand in both of mine and press it against my chest. “Don’t leave me again.” “You left me, remember?” He spreads his fingers over my heart, like he’s holding it, like it belongs to him, the hard-fought-for territory he’s won fair and square. I give in. What am I going to do, put a gun to his head? He’s gotten this far, I tell myself. He’ll get the rest of the way. “What’s due north?” I ask, pushing against his fingers. “I don’t know. But it’s the shortest path to the farthest spot.” “The farthest spot from what?” “From here. Wait for the plane. When the plane takes off, run. Ben, do you think you can run?” “I think so.” “Run fast?” “Yes.” He doesn’t sound too confident about it, though. “Wait for the plane,” Evan whispers. “Don’t forget.” He kisses me hard on the mouth, and then the stairwell goes all Evanless.

An oceanic expanse of pre-dawn gray white below obscures a checkered grid of Saskatchewan, a snow plain nicked by the dark, unruly lines of woody swales. One might imagine that little is to be seen from a plane at night, but above the clouds the Milky Way is a dense, blazing arch. A full moon often lights the planet freshly, and patterns of human culture, artificially lit, are striking in ways not visible in daylight. One evening I saw the distinctive glows of cities around Delhi diffused like spiral galaxies in a continuous deck of stratus clouds far below us. In Algeria and on the Asian steppes, wind-whipped pennants of gas flared. The jungle burned in incandescent spots in Malaysia and Brazil. One clear evening at 20,000 feet over Manhattan, I could see, it seemed, every streetlight halfway to the end of Long Island. A summer lightning bolt unexpectedly revealed thousands of bright dots on the ink-black veld of the northern Transvaal: sheep.

In a remarkably steady voice, Sadie whispered, "Last night should never have happened." "The only thing about last night that shouldn't have happened was the way it ended," Killian rasped.... "Is that so?" Sadie pulled his shift loose from his jeans and slipped her fingers underneath before trailing them along the hard planes of his stomach. Arching one eyebrow, she held his heavy-lidded gaze and unsheathed her fangs. "How do you suppose it should have ended?" "The same way it should end every night from now on," he growled. Killian slid both hands into her long hair. Sadie shivered when his fingertips grazed her scalp. He pressed his hips against her before slipping his thigh between her legs. Sadie gasped with pleasure as he put pressure on just the right spot, and when a moan escaped her parted lips, a cocky grin emerged on his. Killian tightened his grip on her hair and leaned in so his mouth was just a breath away. "Every single night should end with me buried deep inside you.

… and one day, after Mahlke had learned to swim, we were lying in the grass, in the Schlagball field. I ought to have gone to the dentist, but they wouldn't let me because I was hard to replace on the team. My tooth was howling. A cat sauntered diagonally across the field and no one threw anything at it. A few of the boys were chewing or plucking at blades of grass. The cat belonged to the caretaker and was black. Hotten Sonntag rubbed his bat with a woolen stocking. My tooth marked time. The tournament had been going on for two hours. We had lost hands down and were waiting for the return game. It was a young cat, but no kitten. In the stadium, handball goals were being made thick and fast on both sides. My tooth kept saying one word, over and over again. On the cinder track the sprinters were practicing starts or limbering up. The cat meandered about. A trimotored plane crept across the sky, slow and loud, but couldn't drown out my tooth. Through the stalks of grass the caretaker's black cat showed a white bib. Mahlke was asleep. The wind was from the east, and the crematorium between the United Cemeteries and the Engineering School was operating. Mr. Mallenbrandt, the gym teacher, blew his whistle: Change sides. The cat practiced. Mahlke was asleep or seemed to be. I was next to him with my toothache. Still practicing, the cat came closer. Mahlke's Adam's apple attracted attention because it was large, always in motion, and threw a shadow. Between me and Mahlke the caretaker's black cat tensed for a leap. We formed a triangle. My tooth was silent and stopped marking time: for Mahlke's Adam's apple had become the cat's mouse. It was so young a cat, and Mahlke's whatsis was so active – in any case the cat leaped at Mahlke's throat; or one of us caught the cat and held it up to Mahlke's neck; or I, with or without my toothache, seized the cat and showed it Mahlke's mouse: and Joachim Mahlke let out a yell, but suffered only slight scratches. And now it is up to me, who called your mouse to the attention of this cat and all cats, to write. Even if we were both invented, I should have to write. Over and over again the fellow who invented us because it's his business to invent people obliges me to take your Adam's apple in my hand and carry it to the spot that saw it win or lose.

When Jim found a bone that had been part of somebody’s hand, I understood that this wasn’t just Carole Lombard’s story. It was the pilot’s story and the co-pilot’s and the stewardess’s. It was the story of 15 Army Air Corps personnel who perished, men as young as 19 and as “old” as 28, and it was the story of three other civilians, all of whom died right there, on the spot where I stood shivering in the fading October sunshine at 7,700 feet. I started writing on the plane ride home and haven’t stopped since. I have had extreme good fortune in my research, accessing the complete Civil Aeronautics Board investigation, including the exhibits and testimony. I have examined the U.S. House of Representatives

So what does all this mean if you desperately want to persuade someone who doesn’t want to be persuaded? The first step is to appreciate that your opponent’s opinion is likely based less on fact and logic than on ideology and herd thinking. If you were to suggest this to his face, he would of course deny it. He is operating from a set of biases he cannot even see. As the behavioral sage Daniel Kahneman has written: “We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.” Few of us are immune to this blind spot. That goes for you, and that goes for the two of us as well. And so, as the basketball legend-cum-philosopher Kareem Abdul-Jabbar once put it, “It’s easier to jump out of a plane—hopefully with a parachute—than it is to change your mind about an opinion.

Often the flak was so thick the men could smell it through their oxygen masks; and the concentrated barrages exploded with such force that the concussions would have driven the pilots through the roofs of their planes had they not been strapped in. On some planes, men sat on sheets of lead to protect their genitals. Helpless in the flak field, all they could do was sit and take it. This was when pilots and crewmen alike learned that it was possible to sweat at 40 degrees below zero. Bombardier Theodore Hallock was not a praying man, but when he was in a tight spot over the target he would whisper to himself, “God, you gotta. You gotta get me back. God, listen, you gotta.” Many of the men promised the Almighty that if they got through they’d swear off liquor and women. Hallock said he never promised that “because I figured that if God was really God he’d be bound to understand how men feel about liquor and women.

Viktor Frankl used the metaphor of geometric dimensions to illustrate challenges in perception and understanding. Just as a three-dimensional cylinder projected onto a two-dimensional plane can appear as different shapes depending on the angle, our perspectives are limited by the "conceptual dimensions" we inhabit. Focusing on one framework or worldview casts blind spots on issues outside its purview. Like the cylinder, reality contains more complexity than any single viewpoint can capture. What appears contradictory from a limited vantage point may be reconciled from a broader perspective. Self has this broad perspective. Frankl suggested cultivating multi-dimensional awareness (Self's awareness) to overcome biases and grasp truth more wholly. Though we cannot transcend our situatedness (parts and ego), we can seek to understand the diverse dimensions that comprise the fullness of reality. Awareness of our frames allows us to interpret experiences with more wisdom and nuance.

Well, we better hide way out there where the crawdads sing. I pity any foster parents who take you on.” Tate’s whole face smiled. “What d’ya mean, where the crawdads sing? Ma used to say that.” Kya remembered Ma always encouraging her to explore the marsh: “Go as far as you can—way out yonder where the crawdads sing.” “Just means far in the bush where critters are wild, still behaving like critters. Now, you got any ideas where we can meet?” “There’s a place I found one time, an old fallin’-down cabin. Once you know the turnoff, ya can get there by boat; I can walk there from here.” “Okay then, get in. Show me this time; next time we’ll meet there.” “If I’m out there I’ll leave a little pile of rocks right here by the tyin’-up log.” Kya pointed to a spot on the lagoon beach. “Otherwise, I’m ’round here somewhere and will come out when I hear yo’ motor.” They puttered slowly through the marsh, then planed off south through open sea, away from town. She bounced along in the bow, wind

She is waiting for me when I step outside of school at the end of the day, her sturdy frame standing by the passenger door of my papaw's small truck, waving. Yes,waving-ildly, with both arms in the air,and catching herself on the door when she loses her balance. Mortified,I attempt a nonchalant wave to the other girls on my squad. Practice actually went well today.I like the girls and I'm on top of all the pyraminds, which is cool. What is not cool is my grandmother shouting my name and motioning at me like an escaped mental patient who has taken a day job landing planes.I sprint over to their truck, which is parked diagonally across to handicapped spots, as quickly as I can. "I'm here, gosh! Stop yelling," I say. "Comee here, baby," she says, and before I know it, she's pressing me against her massive bosom in a bear hug, slapping my back and cooing into my ear. "You're Mamaw's baby, ain't ya? Yes, Mamaw's sure happy to see you." There is no escape.Because I am too short and scrawny and no match for her brute grandchild-love strength, I wait it out.

Violet’s not getting out of our sight,” Arion adds. There’s a moment of just staring…like everyone is trying to silently argue. “No one naked in my car,” Mom states when I just stand in my spot, waiting on them to hurry through the push and pull. You really can tell how thick the air is when too many alphas are in the room at one time, but weirdly it never feels this way when it’s just the four of them. Unless punches are thrown. Then it gets a little heavier than normal. Arion pulls on his clothes, and threads whir in the air as I quickly fashion Emit a lopsided toga that lands on his body. Everyone’s gaze swings to him like it’s weird for him and normal for me to be in a toga. Awesome. Damien muffles a sound, Emit arches an eyebrow at me, and Arion remains rigid, staying close to me but never touching me. All of us squeezing into a car together while most of them hate each other…should be fun. The storm finally stops before we board the elevator, and it’s one of those super awkward elevator moments where no one is looking at anyone or saying anything, and everyone is trying to stay in-the-moment serious. We stop on the floor just under us, after the longest thirty-five seconds ever. The doors open, and two men glance around at Emit and I in our matching togas, even though his is the fitted sheet and riding up in some funny places. He looks like a caveman who accidentally bleached and shrank his wardrobe. I palm my face, embarrassed for him. The next couple of floors are super awkward with the addition of the two new, notably uncomfortable men. Worst seventy-nine seconds ever. Math doesn’t add up? Yeah. I’m upset about those extra nine seconds as well. Poor Emit has to duck out of the unusually small elevator, and the bottom of his ass cheek plays peek-a-boo on one side. Damien finally snorts, and even Mom struggles to keep a straight face. That really pisses her off. “You’re seeing him on an off day,” I tell the two guys, who stare at my red boots for a second. I feel the need to defend Emit a little, especially since I now know he overheard all that gibberish Tiara was saying… I can’t remember all I said, and it’s worrying me now that my mind has gone off on this stupid tangent. I trip over the hem of my toga, and Arion snags me before I hit the floor, righting me and showing his hands to my mother with a quick grin. “Can’t just let her fall,” he says unapologetically. “You’re going to have to learn to deal with that,” she bites out. She has a very good point. I don’t trip very often, but things and people usually knock me around a good bit of my life. The two guys look like they want to run, so I hurry to fix this. “Really, it’s a long story, but I swear Emit—the tallest one in the fitted-sheet-toga—generally wears pants…er…I guess you guys call them trousers over here. Anyway, we had some plane problems,” I carry on, and then realize I have to account for the fact we’re both missing clothing. “Then there was a fire that miraculously only burned our clothes, because Emit put all my flames out by smothering me with his body,” I state like that’s exactly what happened. Why do they look so scared? I’m not telling a scary lie. At this point, I’ve just made it worse, and fortunately Damien takes mercy, clamping his hand over my mouth as he starts steering me toward the door before I can make it…whatever comes after worse but before the worst. “Thank you,” sounds more like “Mmdi ooooo,” against his hand, but he gets the gist, as he grins. Mom makes a frustrated sound. “Another minute, and she’d be bragging about his penis size in quest to save his dignity. Did you really want to hear that?” Damien asks her, forcing me to groan against his hand.

From the Author Matthew 16:25 says, “For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”  This is a perfect picture of the life of Nate Saint; he gave up his life so God could reveal a greater glory in him and through him. I first heard the story of Operation Auca when I was eight years old, and ever since then I have been inspired by Nate’s commitment to the cause of Christ. He was determined to carry out God’s will for his life in spite of fears, failures, and physical challenges. For several years of my life, I lived and ministered with my parents who were missionaries on the island of Jamaica. My experiences during those years gave me a passion for sharing the stories of those who make great sacrifices to carry the gospel around the world. As I wrote this book, learning more about Nate Saint’s life—seeing his spirit and his struggles—was both enlightening and encouraging to me. It is my prayer that this book will provide a window into Nate Saint’s vision—his desires, dreams, and dedication. I pray his example will convince young people to step out of their comfort zones and wholeheartedly seek God’s will for their lives. That is Nate Saint’s legacy: changing the world for Christ, one person and one day at a time.   Nate Saint Timeline 1923 Nate Saint born. 1924 Stalin rises to power in Russia. 1930 Nate’s first flight, aged 7 with his brother, Sam. 1933 Nate’s second flight with his brother, Sam. 1936 Nate made his public profession of faith. 1937 Nate develops bone infection. 1939 World War II begins. 1940 Winston Churchill becomes British Prime Minister. 1941 Nate graduates from Wheaton College. Nate takes first flying lesson. Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. 1942 Nate’s induction into the Army Air Corps. 1943 Nate learns he is to be transferred to Indiana. 1945 Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan by U.S. 1946 Nate discharged from the Army. 1947 Nate accepted for Wheaton College. 1948 Nate and Marj are married and begin work in Eduador. Nate crashes his plane in Quito. 1949 Nate’s first child, Kathy, is born. Germany divided into East and West. 1950 Korean War begins. 1951 Nate’s second child, Stephen, is born. 1952 The Saint family return home to the U.S. 1953 Nate comes down with pneumonia. Nate and Henry fly to Ecuador. 1954 The first nuclear-powered submarine is launched. Nate’s third child, Phillip, is born. 1955 Nate is joined by Jim Elliot, Ed McCully, Peter Fleming and Roger Youderian. Nate spots an Auca village for the first time. Operation Auca commences. 1956 The group sets up camp four miles from the Auca territory. Nate and the group are killed on “Palm Beach”.

Few grown humans can normally survive a fall of much more than twenty-five or thirty feet, though there have been some notable exceptions—none more memorable perhaps than that of a British airman in World War II named Nicholas Alkemade. In the late winter of 1944, while on a bombing run over Germany, Flight Sergeant Alkemade, the tail gunner on a British Lancaster bomber, found himself in a literally tight spot when his plane was hit by enemy flak and quickly filled with smoke and flames. Tail gunners on Lancasters couldn’t wear parachutes because the space in which they operated was too confined, and by the time Alkemade managed to haul himself out of his turret and reach for his parachute, he found it was on fire and beyond salvation. He decided to leap from the plane anyway rather than perish horribly in flames, so he hauled open a hatch and tumbled out into the night. He was three miles above the ground and falling at 120 miles per hour. “It was very quiet,” Alkemade recalled years later, “the only sound being the drumming of aircraft engines in the distance, and no sensation of falling at all. I felt suspended in space.” Rather to his surprise, he found himself to be strangely composed and at peace. He was sorry to die, of course, but accepted it philosophically, as something that happened to airmen sometimes. The experience was so surreal and dreamy that Alkemade was never certain afterward whether he lost consciousness, but he was certainly jerked back to reality when he crashed through the branches of some lofty pine trees and landed with a resounding thud in a snowbank, in a sitting position. He had somehow lost both his boots, and had a sore knee and some minor abrasions, but otherwise was quite unharmed. Alkemade’s survival adventures did not quite end there. After the war, he took a job in a chemical plant in Loughborough, in the English Midlands. While he was working with chlorine gas, his gas mask came loose, and he was instantly exposed to dangerously high levels of the gas. He lay unconscious for fifteen minutes before co-workers noticed his unconscious form and dragged him to safety. Miraculously, he survived. Some time after that, he was adjusting a pipe when it ruptured and sprayed him from head to foot with sulfuric acid. He suffered extensive burns but again survived. Shortly after he returned to work from that setback, a nine-foot-long metal pole fell on him from a height and very nearly killed him, but once again he recovered. This time, however, he decided to tempt fate no longer. He took a safer job as a furniture salesman and lived out the rest of his life without incident. He died peacefully, in bed, aged sixty-four in 1987. —

A man can survive ten years--but twenty-five, who can get through alive? Shukhov rather enjoyed having everybody poke a finger at him as if to say: Look at him, his term's nearly up. But he had his doubts about it. Those zeks who finished their time during the war had all been "retained pending special instructions" and had been released only in '46. Even those serving three-year sentences were kept for another five. The law can be stood on its head. When your ten years are up they can say, "Here's another ten for you." Or exile you. Yet there were times when you thought about it and you almost choked with excitement. Yes, your term really _is_ coming to an end; the spool is unwinding. . . . Good God! To step out to freedom, just walk out on your own two feet. But it wasn't right for an old-timer to talk about it aloud, and Shukhov said to Kilgas: "Don't you worry about those twenty-five years of yours. It's not a fact you'll be in all that time. But that I've been in eight full years--now that is a fact." Yes, you live with your feet in the mud and there's no time to be thinking about how you got in or how you're going to get out. According to his dossier, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov had been sentenced for high treason. He had testified to it himself. Yes, he'd surrendered to the Germans with the intention of betraying his country and he'd returned from captivity to carry out a mission for German intelligence. What sort of mission neither Shukhov nor the interrogator could say. So it had been left at that- -a mission. Shukhov had figured it all out. If he didn't sign he'd be shot If he signed he'd still get a chance to live. So he signed. But what really happened was this. In February 1942 their whole army was surrounded on the northwest front No food was parachuted to them. There were no planes. Things got so bad that they were scraping the hooves of dead horses--the horn could be soaked In water and eaten. Their ammunition was gone. So the Germans rounded them up in the forest, a few at a time. Shukhov was In one of these groups, and remained in German captivity for a day or two. Then five of them managed to escape. They stole through the forest and marshes again, and, by a miracle, reached their own lines. A machine gunner shot two of them on the spot, a third died of his wounds, but two got through. Had they been wiser they'd have said they'd been wandering in the forest, and then nothing would have happened. But they told the truth: they said they were escaped POW's. POW's, you fuckers! If all five of them had got through, their statements could have been found to tally and they might have been believed. But with two it was hopeless. You've put your damned heads together and cooked up that escape story, they were told. Deaf though he was, Senka caught on that they were talking about escaping from the Germans, and said in a loud voice: "Three times I escaped, and three times they caught me." Senka, who had suffered so much, was usually silent: he didn't hear what people said and didn't mix in their conversation. Little was known about him--only that he'd been in Buchenwald, where he'd worked with the underground and smuggled in arms for the mutiny; and how the Germans had punished him by tying his wrists behind his back, hanging him up by them, and whipping him. "You've been In for eight years, Vanya," Kilgas argued. "But what camps? Not 'specials.' You bad breads to sleep with. You didn't wear numbers. But try and spend eight years in a 'special'--doing hard labor. No one's come out of a 'special' alive." "Broads! Boards you mean, not broads." Shukhov stared at the coals in the stove and remeinbered his seven years in the North. And how he worked for three years hauling logs--for packing cases and railroad ties. The flames in the campfires had danced up there, too--at timber-felling during the night. Their chief made it a rule that any squad that had failed to meet its quota had to stay In the forest after dark.

Again and again, the question was asked: What made the Poles so good? The answer wasn’t simple. Generally older than their British counterparts, most Polish pilots had hundreds of hours of flying time in a variety of aircraft, as well as combat experience in both Poland and France. Unlike British fliers, they had learned to fly in primitive, outdated planes and thus had not been trained to rely on a sophisticated radio and radar network. As a result, said one British flight instructor, “their understanding and handling of aircraft was exceptional.” Although they appreciated the value of tools such as radio and radar, the Poles never stopped using their eyes to locate the Luftwaffe. “Whereas British pilots are trained…to go exactly where they are told, Polish pilots are always turning and twisting their heads to spot a distant enemy,” an RAF flier noted. The Poles’ intensity of concentration was equaled only by their daring. British pilots were taught to fly and fight with caution. The Poles, by contrast, had been trained to be aggressive, to crowd and intimidate the enemy, to make him flinch and then bring him down. After firing a brief opening burst at a range of 150 to 200 yards, the Poles would close almost to point-blank range. “When they go tearing into enemy bombers and fighters they get so close you would think they were going to collide,” observed one RAF flier. On several occasions, crew members of Luftwaffe bombers, seeing that 303’s Hurricanes were about to attack, baled out before their planes were hit. On September 15, the Poles of

A city is different things to us at different times - of the day, of the year, of our life. Many years have passed since I was in the backseat of the car, taken with the razzle-dazzle. Today, I'm more drawn to the neighborhood coffee shops, or modest old parks like Abingdon Square in Greenwich Village, where farmers come to sell cheese and eggs under the London Plane trees. I have a soft spot for the little urban island like McCarthy Square, with its birdhouses - some with simple peak roofs; others with multiple stories and decks, made of miniature wood logs, like ski chalets - that poke out from shrubs and evergreens. I like the quiet of the West Village in the morning, where sidewalk chalkboards outside restaurants and coffee shops promise caffeine and better days, and streets paved with setts - Jane, West 12th, Bethune, Bank - feed into Washington Street like streams emptying into a river.

There were two reasons for this. First, the Americans had finally received intelligence regarding the Japanese carrier fleet. Earlier that morning (at about 5:00 a.m.), reports from several patrolling flying boats came in, so by the time the Japanese carrier planes hit Midway, the base’s own bombers were airborne on their way to hit those same carriers. Second, the fully alerted base had picked up the incoming air attack on radar, and the Japanese planes had also been spotted by one of the PBY’s, enabling all of the defending fighters to be scrambled for defense.

While I was in the partisan unit, I received a letter from my husband by some miracle. This was such a joy, so unexpected, because for two years I had heard nothing from him. And then a plane dropped some food, ammunition…And the mail…And in the mail, in this canvas bag, there was a letter—for me. Then I wrote a letter to the Central Committee. I wrote that I would do anything so long as my husband and I were together. We waited for the plane, it was nighttime and pitch-dark. And some sort of plane was circling over us, and then it dumped bombs on us. It was a Messerschmitt. The German had spotted our camp and circled back again. And at the same time our plane, a U-2, arrived and landed just by the fir tree where I was standing. The pilot barely landed and immediately began to take off again, because he saw that the German was circling back and would start shooting again. I took hold of the wing and shouted, “I must go to Moscow, I have permission.” He even swore: “Get in!” And we flew together, just the two of us. I figured out from the postal code where my husband was fighting... They said, “You know, it’s very dangerous where your husband is…” I sat there and wept, so he took pity on me and gave me the pass. “Go out to the highway,” he said. “There’ll be a traffic controller, he’ll tell you how to go.” I arrive at the unit, everybody’s surprised, “Who are you?” they ask. I couldn’t say I was a wife. I tell them—his sister. “Wait,” they tell me, “it’s a four-mile walk to the trenches.” They told him that his sister had arrived. What sister? They say, “The redhead.” His sister had black hair. So he figured out at once what sister. I don’t know how he managed to crawl out of there, but he came soon, and he and I met. What joy… Suddenly I see the superiors coming to the dugout: the major, the colonel. Everybody shakes my hand. Then we sat down and drank, and each of them said something about a wife finding her husband in the trenches. That’s a real wife! The next day my husband was wounded, badly wounded. We ran together, we waded together through some swamp, we crawled together. The machine guns kept rattling, and we kept crawling, and he got wounded in the hip. With an exploding bullet, and try bandaging that—it was in the buttock. It was all torn open, and mud and dirt all over. We were encircled and tried to break out. There was nowhere to take the wounded, and there were no medications. When we did break through, I took my husband to the hospital. I buried him on January 1, and thirty-eight days later I gave birth to a son.

On a trip to Korea, Thiel’s corporate credit card was declined as he tried to purchase a return ticket home. The investors he had met with were only too happy to furnish a first-class plane ticket—which they did on the spot. “They were excited beyond belief,” Thiel remembered. “The next day, they called up our law firm and asked, ‘What’s the bank account we need to send the money to?’ ” The crazed nature of it all confirmed Thiel’s suspicions about the market. “I remember thinking to myself that it felt like things couldn’t get much crazier, and that we really had to close the money quickly because the window might not last forever,” he said. The final $100 million figure actually disappointed some on the team. Confinity and X.com had secured verbal commitments for double that amount, and some on the team had wanted to hold out for the remaining funding or push for a billion-dollar valuation. Thiel disagreed, urging Selby and others on the financing team to turn handshakes into actual checks, to get term sheets signed, and have deposits confirmed. “Peter kicked everyone’s asses to get that funding round done,” David Sacks remembered. Many Confinity employees—who had seen Thiel at his toughest—rarely remember him this insistent. “If we don’t get this money raised,” Howery recalled Thiel saying, “the whole company could blow up.

Bro,” Leo said, “if I get any closer, he’ll spot us. Bronze dragon ain’t exactly a stealth plane.

Support the autistic person in their quirky hobbies and obsessions; these are the moments they’re at their happiest. Whether it’s a K3 show or an afternoon of plane spotting, embrace it. Don’t laugh at anyone, don’t mock people. Don’t say “You want to see that movie again?” or “You already have five hundred Star Wars figurines!”, but look into it and find out what makes that one particular figurine so special. People who are as happy as a child when indulging in their hobbies, that’s something I really love to see.

A woman’s voice came wailing on the wind. Norman looked up and spotted Sandra high up on an even steeper funnel of snow and ice. She was crying: ‘Your father is dead. What are we going to do?’ One of her shoulders was hanging weirdly. There was a bloody wound on her forehead, matted with hair. Then he saw his dad, still in his seat but slumped awkwardly forward. Norman turned around on the steep slope and inched over towards him, sneakers pathetically trying to hold an edge. He slipped and almost plummeted like a bobsleigh down the mountain. He caught a hold. Then he started crawling back up. It took him thirty minutes to climb 6 m (20 ft). His dad was doubled over. ‘DAD!’ No response. Snow was falling on his father’s curly hair. Above him, Sandra sounded delirious. By the time he was four, Norman had skied every black run at Mammoth. On his first birthday, his dad had him strapped to his back in a canvas papoose and took him surfing. Reckless, perhaps, but it had given the boy an indomitable spirit. Eleven-year-old Norman hugged his dad for the last time then tracked back across the slope to see what he could salvage from the wreckage. There were no ice axes or tools, but he did find a rug. He took it and scrabbled back to Sandra. She couldn’t move. Somehow he got her under the ragged remains of the plane’s wing and they wrapped themselves in the rug and fell into an exhausted sleep. Norman was woken around noon by a helicopter. He leapt up, trying to catch the crew’s attention. They came very, very close but somehow didn’t see him. They were going to have to get off this mountain themselves. A brief lull in the storm gave them a sudden view. The slope continued beneath their feet, sickeningly sheer, for hundreds of feet. Then lower down there were woods and the gully levelled a little before a massive ridgeline rose again. Beyond that lay a flatter meadow of snow and, at the edge of the world, a cabin. Sandra wanted to stay put. She was ranting about waiting for the rescuers. For a moment Norman nearly lay down beside her and drifted off to sleep. The

The highlight of this propaganda campaign came in November 1959, in comic-opera style. Johnny Abbes was in general charge of the anti-Betancourt activities, and he now conceived the idea of sending an airplane over Caracas to drop leaflets whose message would incite an uprising. Thousands of leaflets were loaded aboard, and the plane departed in the direction of South America. But the pilot couldn't find Caracas. Worse, he couldn't find Venezuela, or even South America, although these are not small targets. Blundering around the Caribbean in misery and confusion, he was happy to find a spot of land underneath him, and he released the leaflets, which came fluttering down on astonished Dutchmen who inhabit the island of Curaçao, miles off the coast of Venezuela.

I looked closer into the mirror, leaning over the dresser, and spotted a bunch of nasty crow’s feet that weren’t attached to any birds. No, they were attached to my once bright green eyes that now held more bags under them than the bottom of a cargo plane.

Henry We met on an airplane (economy class) and kissed most of the flight home. Over the Atlantic, we decided to fall in love. When the plane touched down at JFK, he hadn’t changed his mind. When he carried me over the threshold of my apartment, no Mrs. Wattlesbrook lurked in the shadows. While he was in the kitchen, I picked Pride and Prejudice out of my (miraculously) sill-living houseplant and tucked it into a harmless spot beside all the other DVDs, spine out and proud. We’re going to order in tonight.

A sense of humor was essential survival equipment in the palace jungle—but nothing too clever. So was an ability to enjoy food and drink. To these I secretly added an ability to enjoy plane-spotting. It turned out to be quite useful. Many of my tensest moments were experienced in royal airplanes, but surprisingly often I could deflect the Princess’s fiercest rocket with a calculated display of nerdish interest in what I could see out of the window. As it happened, I was able to indulge this lonely vice almost immediately as I caught the bus back to Heathrow. Farewells at KP were polite but perfunctory, and Richard and Anne gave no hint as to the outcome of my interview. Richard ventured the comment that I had given “a remarkable performance,” but this only added to the general air of theatrical unreality. I was pretty sure I had eaten my first and last royal Jersey royal potato. Back in Scotland, my despondency deepened as I inhaled the pungent aroma of my allocated bedroom in the Faslane transit mess. It was not fair, I moaned to myself, to expose someone as sensitive as me to lunch with the most beautiful woman in the world and then consign him to dinner with the duty engineer at the Clyde Submarine Base. And how could I ever face the future when every time the Princess appeared in the papers I would say to myself—or, far worse, to anyone in earshot—“Oh yes, I’ve met her. Had lunch with her in fact. Absolutely charming. Laughed at all my jokes . . .” Now thoroughly depressed, I was preparing for a miserable night’s sleep when I was interrupted by the wardroom night porter. He wore a belligerent expression so convincing that it was clearly the result of long practice. No doubt drawing on years of observing submarine officers at play, he clearly suspected he was being made the victim of a distinctly unamusing practical joke. In asthmatic Glaswegian he accused me of being wanted on the phone “frae Bucknum Paluss.” I rushed to the phone booth, suddenly wide-awake. The Palace operator connected me to Anne Beckwith-Smith. “There you are!” she said in her special lady-in-waiting voice. “We’ve been looking for you everywhere. Would you like the job?

Cooper grinned at me. “So, are you going to see me off at the airport? Stand in the terminal lounge, staring out the window, waiting for my plane to take off?” I snorted. “Um, no. I was going to drop you off at the departure terminal so I didn’t have to get a parking spot.” He gaped and narrowed his eyes. “When you get home, do me a favour and Google the word chivalry,” he said flatly. “It’s spelled c-h-i-v—” “Shut up,” I said with a laugh. “Or even look up the definition of ‘nice boyfriend’. I’m pretty sure it says ‘does not drop off loved one at terminal gate’ or ‘does not tell boyfriend to shut up’.

BEHIND THE WALL The Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, twenty-five years ago this month, but the first attempts to breach it came immediately after it went up, just past midnight on August 13, 1961. The East German regime had been secretly stockpiling barbed wire and wooden sawhorses, which the police, who learned of their mission only that night, hastily assembled into a barrier. For many Berliners, the first sign that a historic turn had been taken was when the U-Bahn, the city’s subway, stopped running on certain routes, leaving late-night passengers to walk home through streets that were suddenly filled with soldiers. As realization set in, so did a sense of panic. By noon the next day, as Ann Tusa recounts in “The Last Division,” people were trying to pull down the barbed wire with their hands. Some succeeded, in scattered places, and a car drove through a section of the Wall to the other side. In the following weeks, the authorities began reinforcing it. Within a year, the Wall was nearly eight feet high, with patrols and the beginnings of a no man’s land. But it still wasn’t too tall for a person to scale, and on August 17, 1962, Peter Fechter, who was eighteen years old, and his friend Helmut Kulbeik decided to try. They picked a spot on Zimmerstrasse, near the American Checkpoint Charlie, and just after two o’clock in the afternoon they made a run for it. Kulbeik got over, but Fechter was shot by a guard, and fell to the ground. He was easily visible from the West; there are photographs of him, taken as he lay calling for help. Hundreds of people gathered on the Western side, shouting for someone to save him. The East German police didn’t want to, and the Americans had been told that if they crossed the border they might start a war. Someone tossed a first-aid kit over the Wall, but Fechter was too weak to pick it up. After an hour, he bled to death. Riots broke out in West Berlin, and many asked angrily why the Americans had let Fechter die. He was hardly more than a child, and he wanted to be a free man. It’s a fair question, though one can imagine actions taken that day which could have led to a broader confrontation. It was not a moment to risk grand gestures; Fechter died two months before the Cuban missile crisis. (When the Wall went up, John F. Kennedy told his aides that it was “not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”) And there was something off key about Germans, so soon after the end of the Second World War, railing about others being craven bystanders. Some observers came to see the Wall as the necessary scaffolding on which to secure a postwar peace. That’s easy to say, though, when one is on the side with the department stores, and without the secret police. Technically, West Berlin was the city being walled in, a quasi-metropolis detached from the rest of West Germany. The Allied victors—America, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union—had divided Germany into four parts, and, since Berlin was in the Soviet sector, they divided the city into four parts, too. In 1948, the Soviets cut off most road and rail access to the city’s three western sectors, in an effort to assert their authority. The Americans responded with the Berlin Airlift, sending in planes carrying food and coal, and so much salt that their engines began to corrode. By the time the Wall went up, it wasn’t the West Berliners who were hungry. West Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder , or economic miracle, was under way, while life in the East involved interminable shortages. West Berliners were surrounded by Soviet military encampments, but they were free and they could leave—and so could anyone who could get to their part of the city. The East Berliners were the prisoners. In the weeks before the Wall went up, more than a thousand managed to cross the border each day; the Wall was built to keep them from leaving. But people never stopped trying to tear it down.

When after a few days the party relocated to Kazakhstan on an ancient plane chartered by NASA, the mood became even more festive. Jet lag, frigid temperatures that shocked even Canadians and a complete absence of language skills were apparently remedied with wild nights in various Baikonur “hot spots.” When Helene and the kids trooped over from the hotel to see me for the hour or two we were allotted to be together each day, they brought increasingly colorful stories about sensible, hard-working relatives and friends who had, the night before, morphed into vodka-loving party animals with a taste for wearing other people’s bras draped on their heads like berets.

I want them to come get us right now.” The little girl drew her mouth down in a pout. “I’m all dirty and hungry. I’m cold too.” “Poor little princess,” her brother mocked. “I’ve got something you can eat.” Kobie’s smile brightened before he dashed across the small clearing to retrieve his backpack. “Just how long are we going to be stuck here?” Wade demanded. He took a step toward the others who were gathered around the fire, then coughed as a wave of thick smoke hit him. “I have important business in Chicago.” “Oh yeah, real important,” Bryan sneered. “You’re just afraid your girlfriend might find someone else before you get back.” “Bryan!” Chelsea spoke in a warning voice. Wade took a step toward his son, his fists clenched and fury showing on his face. Web shifted his weight, prepared to intercede should Wade attempt to strike his son. “Look! M&Ms!” Kobie stepped between the combatants, waving a large package of the candy-coated chocolate pieces over his head, oblivious to the confrontation between Bryan and Wade. He hurried to Rachel’s side. “My grandma gave them to me, but you can have some.” “Perhaps you can share with everyone,” Shalise said. “I think we’re all hungry.” “And thirsty,” Emily added. “Don’t you think it’s ironic that we spent all that time and effort escaping water, and now we don’t have any to drink?” “Actually we do.” It was Cassie’s turn to retrieve her backpack. From its depths she produced a plastic bottle of water and three granola bars, which she quartered and passed around. The tiny squares of breakfast bars and a handful of candy were soon washed down with a squirt of water from the plastic bottle. Web listened for more planes as he munched on his share of the meager rations. Occasionally he caught the drone of the small plane that had flown over earlier, but it seemed to be concentrating its attention on the other side of the main canyon. He wished he could communicate with the sheriff or the pilot of that plane, but his radio and supplies had been left behind in his cruiser. He wouldn’t even have been able to light a fire last night if Bryan hadn’t slipped him a cigarette lighter when his mother wasn’t looking. Gage walked up beside him.“How bad is the slide?” the younger man asked. Web knew he was referring to the slide blocking the trail out of the canyon. “There’s no way we can cross it.” “And there’s no way a chopper can set down here.” Gage answered back, gesturing at the small clearing where they sat dwarfed by towering pines. “By now the water will have receded a great deal, but it will be days before we’ll be able to walk out.” Gage hadn’t heard Cassie approach, but he nodded his head at her words, acknowledging that her judgment was correct. “That means we’ve got to find a spot where the rescuers can reach us.” Gage stared thoughtfully at the steep mountain towering above them. “There is a place . . .” Gage paused and Web turned to him, anxious to hear what he might suggest that could possibly lead them out of this nightmare. CHAPTER 5 Shalise sat beside Chelsea Timmerman on one of the logs near the fire pit. They changed position each time a fickle breeze shifted the plume

One only had to go to Kabul airport to see a classic example of the aid community helping itself rather than Afghans. The scariest part of going to Afghanistan was flying in from Dubai on the state airline Ariana. Its planes were in such bad condition that they were banned from most places on earth. Even the model plane in the sales office was held together by sticking plaster and elastic bands. The UN has its own airline to fly staff in and out of danger spots, so it quickly began its own service from Dubai or Islamabad to Kabul. As I stood nervously fiddling with my Ariana boarding pass, I would enviously watch the foreign aid workers and diplomats boarding the shiny UN planes. What I didn’t realise was that the millions of dollars to subsidise this service was coming from the money pledged to help Afghanistan. Ghani was indignant. ‘The first thing the UN system provided through the $1.6 billion of donor money channelled to UN agencies in 2002 was an airline devoted to serving UN staff, and occasionally (after much lobbying) some Afghan government officials.

The Shiva and Shakti—the masculine and feminine—join within Sahasrara to create brahma-ranhdra, the transcendence of both. Within this chakra, the individual personality dissolves into the essence of the all. This is the chakra of one thousand petals. These petals represent the fifty letters of the Sanskrit alphabet along with their twenty permutations. The magnitude of these vibrations enhances the seventh chakra’s role in governing and coordinating the other chakras. This chakra is unique in many ways. All other chakras feature upward-pointing lotuses. In the Sahasrara, the lotuses point downward, symbolizing freedom from the mundane, and divine rain from its petals. Some yogis actually report that having achieved this chakra, the fontanel (soft spot) atop the head dampens with the “dew of divinity.” FIGURE 5.12 SEVENTH CHAKRA: SAHASRARA The Sahasrara chakra was not considered an in-body chakra in the classical Hindu system. Traditionally, it is pictured as lying atop the head. More contemporary systems establish it in the top of the head. No matter which location you prefer, the idea is the same: it represents a space unto itself. Sahasrara creates the fifth kosha, the anandamaya sheath that doubles as the causal body. After ascending to the Sahasrara, we shift this sheath and become free from the constraints of the physical realm as well as the “wheel of life,” the vehicle that initiates reincarnation. Once released from the causal body, we enter one of the three higher planes, or koshas, beyond the body, the Satyaloka, or “abode of truth.” We also achieve samadhi, or the state of bliss and beingness associated with transcendence. This state is associated with the teachings of Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita and the eighth branch of Patanjali’s classification of yoga. (See “Patanjali’s Eight-Step Method of Yoga”.) There are many layers of samadhi, the highest involving an identification with the highest states of consciousness, and finally, the individual is absorbed into the all. The Sahasrara is considered beyond most symbolic representations, although the chakra is usually perceived as white. The Sahasrara is considered beyond senses, sense organs, and vital breath. As such, it is often described without a seed syllable, as shown in figure 5.12, although some sources depict it with an OM.

Benny sits next to me on the porch swing, and we rock back and forth in aware silence. I can barely make out the shape of the house next door through the trees but can see the smoke curling from the chimney, the glow of their outdoor Christmas lights through the branches. The branches. I look up warily. Across the yard, I think I spot the snow-covered branch that cracked me on the head, and I point at it, growling, “You will not get me tomorrow, you fucker.” Benny goes still. “Are you gonna tell me what’s going on?” “It won’t matter.” He studies me. “Why not?” “Because this is the fourth time I’ve been in this day, and no matter what I try to do differently, I keep coming back.” “Like Groundhog Day?” “Is that a movie?” He scrubs a hand down his face. “God, you’re young. I still think it’s one of the weirdest traditions, believing spring is determined by a groundhog’s shadow. Spring starts on the same day every year where I’m from.” I must be staring at him in bewilderment, because he nods. “Yes, Maelyn, Groundhog Day is a movie.” “Then yes. No matter what I do, I keep getting clobbered and waking up on the plane.

For us to solve our problems as quickly and painlessly as possible, we want to be completely clear about the real problem hidden underneath the roots. Asking “What is the real problem you are trying to solve?” sounds simple. Knowing the true problem you are trying to solve and then solving it, however, isn’t always easy. Experts in air navigation understand how important it is to stay perfectly on course. If a pilot steers a plane one degree off course, they will be 92 feet off course by the time they’ve traveled one mile. Pilots don’t get to miss the runway by 92 feet. The clearer you are about your own problem, the more likely you are to land in the right spot.

People get brain fade...They've forgotten how to collect data. In the psychic sense a forest fire on TV is on a lower plane than a 10-second spot for Automatic Dishwasher All. The commercial has deeper waves, deeper emanations.

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Pulsed lasers produce incredibly short bursts of electromagnetic energy. For example, a pulsed femtosecond laser produces a flash of light that lasts for femtoseconds to a picosecond (a picosecond is one trillionth of a second, a femtosecond is one thousandth of a picosecond), instantly followed by another (and so on). These lasers brought about the possibility of exciting fluorophores with two photons of only half the necessary energy, but they need to arrive almost simultaneously to generate the ejection of a photon. Infrared pulsed lasers penetrate living tissue more effectively, with the advantage that fluorescence is achieved from much deeper in the tissue than normal fluorescence, where the depth of penetration is limited by multiple light scattering events. Multiphoton microscopy (mainly two photon in practice, but also feasible as three or more photons) allows imaging from as deep as a millimetre (one thousand micrometres), an improvement of several hundred micrometres over fluorescence confocal microscopy. A second advantage of two photon excitation is that it forms as a single spot in the axial plane (z axis) without the ‘hourglass’ spread of out of focus light (the point spread function) that happens with single photon excitation. This is because the actual two photon excitation will only occur at the highest concentration of photons, which is limited to the focal plane itself. Because there is no out of focus light, there is no need for a confocal pinhole, allowing more signal to reach the detector. Combined with the increased depth of penetration, and reduced light induced damage (phototoxicity) to living tissue, two photon microscopy has added a new dimension to the imaging of living tissue in whole animals. At the surface of a living brain, remarkable images of the paths of whole neurons over several hundred micrometres can be reconstructed as a 3D z section from an image stack imaged through a thinned area of the skull in an experimental animal. Endoscopes have been developed which incorporate a miniaturized two photon microscope, allowing deep imaging of intestinal epithelium, with potential to provide new information on intestinal diseases, as most of the cellular lining throughout our gut is thin enough to be imaged in this way. So far a whole range of conditions including virtually all the cancers of the digestive tract as well as inflammatory bowel disease have been investigated, reducing the need for biopsies and providing new insights as to the nature of these conditions.

forced to join the fighting, which was why their families and communities—including Salva’s schoolmaster—had sent the boys running into the bush at the first sign of fighting. Children who arrived at the refugee camp without their families were grouped together, so Salva was separated at once from the people he had traveled with. Even though they had not been kind to him, at least he had known them. Now, among strangers once again, he felt uncertain and maybe even afraid. As he walked through the camp with several other boys, Salva glanced at every face he passed. Uncle had said that no one knew where his family was for certain . . . so wasn’t there at least a chance that they might be here in the camp? Salva looked around at the masses of people stretched out as far as he could see. He felt his heart sink a little, but he clenched his hands into fists and made himself a promise. If they are here, I will find them. After so many weeks of walking, Salva found it strange to be staying in one place. During that long, terrible trek, finding a safe place to stop and stay for a while had been desperately important. But now that he was at the camp, he felt restless—almost as if he should begin walking again. The camp was safe from the war. There were no men with guns or machetes, no planes with bombs overhead. On the evening of his very first day, Salva was given a bowl of boiled maize to eat, and another one the next morning. Already things were better here than they had been during the journey. During the afternoon of the second day, Salva picked his way slowly through the crowds. Eventually, he found himself standing near the gate that was the main entrance to the camp, watching the new arrivals enter. It did not seem as if the camp could possibly hold any more, but still they kept coming: long lines of people, some emaciated, some hurt or sick, all exhausted. As Salva scanned the faces, a flash of orange caught his eye. Orange . . . an orange headscarf . . . He began pushing and stumbling past people. Someone spoke to him angrily, but he did not stop to excuse himself. He could still see the vivid spot of orange—yes, it was a headscarf—the woman’s back was to him, but she was tall, like his mother—he had to catch up, there were too many people in the way— A half-sob broke free from Salva’s lips. He mustn’t lose track of her! Chapter Twelve Southern Sudan, 2009

During the team’s flight back home to New York, Scott—who played ten scoreless minutes and was shooting 30 percent and averaging 2.9 points through his first fifteen games—sought to lighten the mood, cracking jokes on the plane. In a way, this was who Scott had always been: a lighthearted person who often looked for ways to laugh in overly tense situations. By contrast, that was not who Van Gundy was. The coach, often miserable in normal circumstances, was far more miserable after losses. Following home defeats, those who traversed the Garden’s hallways knew they might hear Van Gundy shouting, tipping over his desk, or punching a wall in his office. And whenever the Knicks played on the road—win or lose—Van Gundy usually had limited patience for outbursts on the team plane. “We were on a flight coming back from a preseason [win], and I got in trouble for yelling, ‘Yes! Let’s go Mets!’ after they clinched a spot in the World Series [in 2000],” says Hamdan, the club’s assistant trainer. “The next day, he calls me into his office and says I need to have more respect for the sanctity of winning and losing. And I told him: ‘Jeff, the sanctity of winning and losing is why I yelled “Let’s go Mets!” They just made the World Series!’ And he just looks at me and says, ‘Get the fuck outta my office.’ ” Van Gundy let Hamdan slide with a warning. But Scott wouldn’t enjoy that same grace. Seeking to send a message, the coach made a bold, unilateral choice to bypass Grunfeld and cut Scott from the team the morning after the flight.

One of the most famous figures to illustrate this skill is the mathematician Abraham Wald (Mangel and Samaniego 1984). During World War II, he was asked to help the Royal Air Force find the areas on their planes that were most often hit by bullets so they could cover them with more armour. But instead of counting the bullet holes on the returned planes, he recommended armouring the spots where none of the planes had taken any hits. The RAF forgot to take into account what was not there to see: All the planes that didn’t make it back. The RAF fell for a common error in thinking called survivorship bias (Taleb 2005). The other planes didn’t make it back because they were hit where they should have had extra protection, like the fuel tank. The returning planes could only show what was less relevant.

I loved doing it myself. I’d get down low, turn my plane up on its side, and fly right over a town. Once we had a spot picked out, we’d land, go find out who owned the property, and try to negotiate the deal right then. That’s another good reason I don’t like jets. You can’t get down low enough to really tell what’s going on, the way I could in my little planes. Bud and I picked almost all our sites that way until we grew to about 120 or 130 stores. I was always proud of our technique and the results we got. I guarantee you not many principals of retailing companies were flying around sideways studying development patterns,

His face was as it had been in the sunlight of the moment when she had seen it for the first time: a face of merciless serenity and unflinching perceptiveness, without pain or fear or guilt. She thought that were it possible for her to stand looking at him, at the straight lines of his eyebrows over the dark green eyes, at the curve of the shadow underscoring the shape of his mouth, at the poured-metal planes of his skin in the open collar of his shirt and the casually immovable posture of his legs—she would wish to spend the rest of her life on this spot and in this manner. And in the next instant she knew that if her wish were granted, the contemplation would lose all meaning, because she would have betrayed all the things that gave it value.

As the Val dive-bombers sought other targets in addition to the Nevada, they found the battleship Pennsylvania as it sat in Dry Dock No. 1 along with two destroyers, Cassin and Downes. The lone occupant of Dry Dock No. 2 nearby was the destroyer Shaw. Several attacking planes dropped 550-pound bombs on the Shaw. Two penetrated the main deck near the five-inch guns forward of the bridge. A third went clean through the bridge superstructure and ruptured fuel tanks, setting the front half of the Shaw ablaze. This fire caused the forward magazines to detonate just as they had on the Arizona. A huge explosion, second only to that on the Arizona, sent a mass of flames and mangled metal into the air. A great deal of it landed on the decks of the nearby Nevada, making it twice in less than an hour that the battleship had come under such an assault. Meanwhile, the Shaw broke in two. Finding Hospital Point not so hospitable, a tug pushed the Nevada off the beach and across the channel to a new resting spot aground on Waipio Peninsula across from Ford Island. As Robert Meyer observed, the battleship “kept its deck above water but not by much.” Meanwhile, the Arizona and the rest of the battleships strewn along Battleship Row were not going anywhere.1

I stepped closer and put both of my hands on his chest. Part of me still half expected to feel a heartbeat, a warm and yielding male body beneath my palms. But Frederick's chest was cool and almost unnaturally solid where I touched him, no rhythmic thumping where one would have been if he were still human. Fortunately--- or, unfortunately--- my heart was beating more than enough for the both of us. Frederick was right. The fabric of his shirt was soft. I slowly slid my hands back and forth over the waffle-knit material, reveling in how silky it felt beneath my fingertips, how delicious the contrast was with the hard planes of the chest beneath. But I didn't. The shirt he was wearing was nice enough. But that wasn't what kept me rooted to the spot, what kept my hands on his body long beyond what he'd probably imagined when he asked me to do this. I'd known he was muscular, but now that I was actually touching him I realized he was all but made of muscle. Had he been this physically fit when he was still human, I wondered? Or was being built like a professional athlete a physiological peculiarity unique to vampires? Either way, I could feel his pectorals bunch and flex beneath my palms as I touched him, could feel his sharp intake of breath when I grew bolder and started gently tracing his collarbones with my thumb. His eyes were still trained on me, but growing glazed and unfocused. "How..." He stopped, his eyes drifting closed. When he opened them again there was a heat in his gaze that made the department store, the rest of the world, fall away. He inclined his head towards me, his mouth scant inches away from mine. I could feel each one of his breaths against my lips, cool and sweet. My heart raced. My knees wobbled. "How does it feel?

I imagined becoming lost in some spiritual plane. Would my body stay here while my mind fled, never to return? “I still want to learn,” I said eagerly despite these risks. “Then close your eyes, Yaga, and raise your arms up to the sky.” Dusha’s voice was soft and reverent. “Can you feel the cyclone of energy above you in the sky?” I raised my arms and immediately sensed a force pressing against my fingers, as if the clouds were slowly creeping toward the Earth, toward me. “Feel your body, Yaga, hollow, waiting to be filled!” chanted Dusha. “It is only with your entire being that you can tap into this place of earth magic, this spot of spiritual power. Feel the energy from the sky and draw it into your body with your arms!” I felt my heart pounding and my blood heating, then my body emptying. I allowed the energy from the sky to flow into me through my arms until a warm light burst into my every cell, my every organ, my very skin—natural energy, the magic of the earth, spiritual power. It crackled until my entire being vibrated with it, as if I had come in contact with a lightning bolt and swallowed it whole. Though I had always been attuned to nature, I had never felt it to this extent or felt such power in the earth magic. I had never known how to accept nature into my own body and harness it. Indeed, how to be aware of my body at all. Dusha was right—Mother had taught me the immortal side of earth magic, of doing without awareness, without feeling. With Dusha, I learned to listen to the natural world around me, not only to the sky, the trees, the waters, the very air, but also to myself.

Sabrina surely had one dead ex-boyfriend on her record. But did Martina have a deceased ex-boyfriend in her past too? Biggie’s words swirled in my head, mixing with the reality I faced: ’Sabrina reminding me of Lil Cease with her crocodile teeth, the warpath we rode apart and together, our laughter, our tears—my tears, their laughter—the player haters, the cocaine-snorting bitches, the cats with no dough, try to play me at my show, pull up and crack doors, short-change bitches with 5 to 20 euro notes not enough to powder their beak and nose. They still tickle me, Sabrina and them midgets cripple me, make me as hard as Martina's nipples be, I'm sour like a pickle be. You disobey the rules. Now the year’s new and I want my spot back; fake two, all the planes I flew, all the bitches I went through, mothersnuggers mad, cause I’m blue, bitches envy us, too many bitches in my club guard your dogs before I stick you for your re-up, maniacs put my name in raps, living by hugs from fake friends, your whole life you live sneaky, you burn when you creep me, you slipping try to break me, living by my love, hating me, they like to hustle backward, Acid rain, Cadillac Fleetwood look what you made me do, you made me and my girl Marine blue make you, open the safe too’ Della Reese had been on my mind since a while as if she wanted to tell me something a wisdom she wanted to share with me. The lyrics and the words the bad people played mindgames with me kept mixing up in my head. ’Maniacs put my name in raps; the club is dead without me they can hustle only backwards with all the beef against me. Blunt wraps and Dutchies, all the smoking accessories; they can't touch me. One third is on me. Martina's butt a public touchy-touchy. My enemies holding their cats shaky. Sabrina is dead or alive, her ghost is under me.

Have we got a room for them?” “We have. But not here. On the kibbutz. A couple of their girls have taken them over. Reliable people. They will be right.” “They may well need be. Have we got time to get up this afternoon? What time is nightfall here?” “You’ve got two hours, Thomas.” “Not enough by the time we’ve changed into flying gear and got back here. Cockpit familiarisation only. How are you off for ground crew?” “Two flight sergeants and a sufficiency of aircraftmen of all grades. All of them have worked Hurricanes before. Three of them were with you, in fact, in the Desert. That’s one area in which we have not been let down. I have painted the planes up in three Flights, numbers and colours. Serial numbers are on as well. You are Red One, I presume?” “I am. Jack is Green One. Patrick Red Two. Michael, Blue Two.” “Got you. Let’s get you sitting in. We can get the belts right and adjust the seats. I’ll put a parachute pack in each.” The smell was immediately familiar – glycol and petrol predominating, a faint overlay of sweat. Thomas sat in and instinctively set the seat just so and twitched the belts exactly as he wanted them. He glanced at the controls and examined the screen in front of him for specks and cracks. “Flight! There’s a grease smear lower left and what looks like a row of paint specks across the right.” “Let me see… Got ‘em, sir! Balderstone, you ‘orrible object! You was told to clean the screen and polish it good!” “Told us to get it done afore us were finished, Sarge. Ain’t finished yet!” “You bloody well will be if this screen is not perfect one hour from now!” “Yes, Sarge.” “A useless object, sir, but he was a window cleaner before he got called up. One thing, the only thing, he can do, is clean a screen.” “Get him to work them all then, Flight. The screens must be spotless, you know that. A Me at two thousand yards looks like nothing more than a spot.” “Knows that, sir. Not to worry, sir. Mr Mason-Holmes a little bit new, is he, sir?” “Green as grass. Don’t worry about him. Either he’ll learn quickly or…” “Exactly, sir. He’ll be a veteran at the end of the week or we won’t have to concern ourselves about him.” Thomas nodded. They looked at Patrick and shrugged simultaneously. “Now then, sir. We have twelve ground crews exactly, one for each pilot, and likely one spare by the end of the week for rotation purposes.” “I’ll leave that with you, Flight. Don’t let your people get too tired. If needs be, I can ground

Scratch beneath the thin veneer of glamour and much of the routine work of MI6 was a form of glorified train-spotting – with a little plane- and boat-spotting thrown in.

One of the most famous figures to illustrate this skill is the mathematician Abraham Wald (Mangel and Samaniego 1984). During World War II, he was asked to help the Royal Air Force find the areas on their planes that were most often hit by bullets so they could cover them with more armour. But instead of counting the bullet holes on the returned planes, he recommended armouring the spots where none of the planes had taken any hits. The RAF forgot to take into account what was not there to see: All the planes that didn’t make it back. The RAF fell for a common error in thinking called survivorship bias (Taleb 2005).

During the previous year, analyses of tens of thousands of ground samples were done, samples from near Unit 4 and at the distance of hundreds of kilometers. Planes and helicopters equipped with special instruments explored over the territories of Ukraine, Byelorussia, Russia. Data from foreign colleagues was received. Numerous “cesium spots”—locations of radioactive cesium—were found. And all of that showed that not more than 5% of the fuel—uranium particles with nonflying radionuclides—had been thrown out of the Unit.

They want me to believe that 16 Arabs who never flown a passenger jet were capable of navigating a plane at over 400 mph directly into their targets without any threat from the most powerful armed forces in the world and in the most protected airspace in the world. These same people want me to also believe that Building 7, that wasn't hit by any plane, fell to the ground as well. All one needs to know is that both Building 7 and the exact spot on the pentagon that was hit stored the investigation files that would have placed some very wealthy people in prison.

A net of human surveillance had been thrown over the neighborhood. He’d picked out a couple of them. Men who were too fit and too clean-cut. They were Agency muscle, ex–special operations types. They were excellent with a gun and terrific to have on your team if things went sideways, but they were too visible and Harmon had requested no babysitters. His request, though, had been ignored. He had also asked that they buy the woman a plane ticket so he could conduct the meeting in a nice, anonymous airline lounge out at Hong Kong International. It was a controlled environment. Much harder to bring weapons in. Easier to spot trouble before it happened. Tradecraft 101. That request had also been ignored. Langley felt the airport was too controlled and therefore too easy for the Chinese to tilt in their favor. The CIA wanted a public location with multiple evacuation routes. They had cars, safe houses, changes of clothes, medical equipment, fake passports, and even a high-speed boat on standby.

This isn’t right, that’s your first thought, something’s wrong here, that plane is much too low. You happen to have a movie camera with you. A video camera. You point the camera up in the air, and less than ten seconds later you see that plane slam into the side of a skyscraper. A tower. A building more than a hundred stories tall. You film the plane as it bores its way into the tower. An explosion, a ball of fire, wreckage flying everywhere. Six months later you are charged with a murder. The police search your house and find the film with the passenger plane drilling its way into the tower. Are the detectives allowed to assume that you have always had little respect for human life, because you filmed the deaths of hundreds, perhaps thousands of people? Simply because you happened to be there, on the spot?

saw a “blond guy”—as he was so vividly described—if it’s him. But how hard can he be to spot, right? He’s her twin, he’ll look like her. “I can’t wait to go on this vacation! Me, Mom, my aunt, my mall-loving cousins and Miami Beach!” She chattered endlessly, which is why she’s dubbed Chatterbox Lilly. And, as often happens, I phased out. I wish Mom took me on a three week “educational” vacation and kept me out of school! But I barely see my mom. She’s a cultural anthropologist—she travels all the time. So I’m stuck home with Dad, a novelist. He spends all day in his office and gives me the be-home-by-ten-each-night lecture every morning. Speaking of which, I figured I really should go. Her brother’s plane was even later than we were, and I couldn’t wait any longer. I sighed uncomfortably, just as she laughed. “What?” I asked. “You know, I don’t even know what to say to him! We’re not even that close! It’s weird.” “Recap. Why is he moving in with you all of the sudden?” And why was I not informed he exists before he had to? She popped a bubble noisily. “He said he needs a change of scenery! Personally, my idea of change of scenery is someplace where I can’t freeze to death getting from the front door to the car!

Later that week, on the plane home, Ross wrote me a scathing eleven-page confidential report. He called my "$2 billion by 2020" vision "statistically impossible" and "ridiculous," and listed my blind spots as a leader. "Charity: water is a shop of 15 people, but a team of exactly one. You," Ross wrote. "You control everything, You even run everything. You are the product design guy. The merchandising guy. The fundraising guy. The message guy. Probably even the check-signing guy ... Metaphorically, if you're still in the club biz, you can either be the bartender or running the show ... You can't mix the drinks and run the whole club." Ross said I needed to start thinking like a CEO, which meant grow up, stop worrying about day-to-day details, and start focusing on big-picture, multi-year goals. "Whether history records you as a success or failure," Ross warned, "will depend on whether you can shift from living in today to living in tomorrow." It was some of the best advice I'd ever gotten. p221

Once I was at my plane’s cruising altitude, I headed south, toward the range I’d been frequenting for the last ten years. My favorite spot to land was about a three-hour flight from Two Rivers and about one hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle. It wasn’t on the way to anything, and I’d never once seen another plane or person while there. It was isolated heaven. It was also bear country, and the grizzlies were plentiful. As were the wolves. That was why I had a rifle strapped to the outside of the plane, and I never went anywhere without it. While I lived for photographing animals doing what animals did, I had no intention of becoming their dinner

On June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold, a businessman from Boise, Idaho, was flying a small plane near Mount Rainier when, according to Associated Press reports, he spotted a chain of nine “saucer-like” objects above and east of the mountain. Brilliant in the sun, these objects darted toward Mount Adams at “an incredible speed” that he estimated to be at least 1,200 miles per hour. Arnold’s story of saucer-shaped objects initiated a UFO craze that has not abated. Analyses by meteorologists and other scientists suggest that Mr. Arnold did not spot a visitor from another world, but rather a mountain wave cloud, a frequent visitor to the mountainous Pacific Northwest.

Then Jacob took fresh rods of poplar and almond and plane trees, and peeled white stripes in them, exposing the white which was in the rods. He set the rods which he had peeled in front of the flocks in the gutters, even in the watering troughs, where the flocks came to drink; and they mated when they came to drink. So the flocks mated by the rods, and the flocks brought forth striped, speckled, and spotted. Jacob separated the lambs, and made the

The US military had this huge generator they needed to get to an airfield site they were planning in the south. This was a remote area, and aside from a few pockets of US troops, it was completely under bandit control. There was no fuel available for miles around the landing spot, and none of the outfits we approached would touch it with a bargepole. They all kept saying, “We’ll never get out again, how can we take off from an unprepared airfield with no fuel?” ‘The job was priced at between sixty thousand and seventy thousand dollars, but one day there’s a phone call from these Russian guys. They said, “We’ll do it, but it’ll cost you two million dollars, in advance.” The Americans didn’t really have a choice by this stage, so they paid. And sure enough, right on time, this ex-Soviet air force crew flew in, with the generator, in this battered old Il-76, unloaded the generator, then sat down for a leisurely smoke. ‘Just as all the Americans were wondering how on earth they were going to fly out again, there’s a cloud of dust and up clatters this old minibus driven by some Afghan bloke – and these airmen just get in and drive off. The Yanks were all going, “Hey, how will you get the plane back?” And the crew just said, “We won’t. It’s an old one – we only bought it for this job, and we’re ditching it here.” Half a million dollars it cost them, and they held it together with string just long enough to land, then cleared off one and a half million dollars in profit and left it to rust. It’s still there.

The northern end of the Maginot Line was many kilometers away. The bulk of the French forces were positioned along that line, waiting for a frontal German attack that Luc now realized would never come. The Nazis had achieved what the generals and politicians in Paris said was impossible. They had carefully navigated their way through the Ardennes. They had used the trees as cover to keep French reconnaissance planes from spotting them. And now they were launching a devilishly clever sneak attack. They were outflanking the French forces. They were about to skirt right around them and attack them from behind.

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