Word: cactus
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...quarter of R. and D. funds--some $10 billion, a 50% increase over last year--are for classified or "black" programs deemed too sensitive by the Pentagon to be publicly divulged. The secrecy has set off the inevitable guessing game over such code names as Seek Axle, Have Flag, Cactus Plant and Theme Castle. Some experts believe that Aurora is the budget heading for "stealth" technology, which one day could make a plane or cruise missile invisible to enemy radar. Aurora's price tag: $80 million in 1986 and a hefty $2.3 billion...
Pickens moves with cloak-and-dagger stealth once he decides which firm to attack. Only a few Mesa insiders like Financial Vice President David Batchelder, 35, know the target. To keep its identity secret, Pickens gives it a code name (Gulf was "Barrel Cactus," for a plant in Pickens' office), which he uses while accumulating the company's stock. Money for the purchases is funneled in chunks of up to $50 million to Broker Alan Greenberg at the Wall Street firm of Bear, Stearns, and to other securities houses. Pickens transfers the huge sums from numbered bank accounts around...
Long lines and empty shelves may be common in many other parts of Eastern Europe, but the shop windows of Budapest display everything from stylish eyeglass frames and fur coats to swimming rafts and potted cactus plants. The main market near Váci Street is a colorful cornucopia of scarlet paprika garlands, pigs' heads on hooks, mounds of emerald melons and fish tanks teeming with carp...
Howie, now clad in camouflage fatigues with matching loafers, crouches behind a cactus cradling a gun. A figure tiptoes out from behind a rock 30 ft. away. Howie fires; a pellet of red paint splatters across the man's chest...
Riding into this prickly cactus patch are Presidential Contenders Walter Mondale, Gary Hart and Jesse Jackson, for whom the May 5 caucuses loom as a High Noon. Actually, a more apt Texas metaphor for Hart might be the Alamo. Reeling from his defeats in Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania and, last week, Missouri, he vowed to start winning again in the West. A bad loss in the Lone Star State could start the vultures circling. For Jackson, the state's large Hispanic vote tests his ability to make his "rainbow coalition" a bit less monochromatic than it has been...