Word: airstrips
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Saba: Talking Rock. After the white-knuckle landing on Saba's mini-airstrip, navigating the island's single tortuous road provides more sustained excitement, particularly if the cab driver is Bobby Every, whose red taxi carries the bumper sticker: ISLAND TOURS, REASONABLE STORIES. Everyone has stories to tell, many about the far corners of the earth to which Sabans have voyaged as sailors. Though anecdotes, reasonable and unreasonable, are the island's main crop, fishermen, farmers and craftsmen also do well...
...East by obtaining bases there. Egypt and Israel have already offered use of their faculties; in the Indian Ocean region, Oman, Somalia and Kenya have indicated that they would be receptive to a U.S. request for bases. Currently, the only U.S. military installation in the Indian Ocean is an airstrip on the tiny island of Diego Garcia, about 1,000 miles off India's coast...
...King Hussein. When the King's troops began retaliating against the fedayeen, it looked as if the Soviet-backed regimes of Iraq and Syria might intervene. To complicate matters further, guerrillas hijacked four foreign airliners in early September and directed three of them to a dirt airstrip 30 miles from the Jordanian capital of Amman: there they held hundreds of passengers as ransom for imprisoned fedayeen. "Black September," the climactic clash between Hussein and the guerrillas who increasingly threatened his rule, was beginning to unfold. To weigh the situation, Kissinger activated his crisis committee, the Washington Special Action Group...
...West. They seized millions of dollars' worth of drugs and airplanes, and scores of smugglers who had figured the harsh, 13,000-sq.-mi. wastes of the desert could serve as a safe private landing field. In one successful two-week camp-out near a remote airstrip, his team bagged a DC-10, two tons of marijuana, a four-wheel-drive truck and four smugglers...
Lawrence's biggest coup was the locally famous Norman-Taylor case. In 1975 nearly 20 agents gave up on a remote airstrip vigil when a smuggler's plane coming in was accidentally spooked and did not return. Changing tactics, Lawrence followed the faint tracks of two trucks that had passed by the site. Forty miles away at 4 a.m. he found tire marks where an airplane had landed on the concrete highway, then a roadside spot marked by footprints, broken shrubbery and more tire tracks. Ten miles later at a dirt turnoff, he found fresh tire tracks that...