Word: cruiser
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...animals so often seem mirages: now you see them, now you don't. Later, just after dusk, Abyssinian nightjars discover the magic wash of the headlight beams. The birds flit in and out of the barrels of light, like dolphins frisking before a boat's prow. The Land Cruiser jostles, in four-wheel drive, across black volcanic stones toward the camp, the driver steering by the distant light-speck of the cooking fire...
Inside the steamboat's Aft Cabin Lounge, an American peace cruiser spoke to Grechko in a loud voice, enunciating with that exaggerated care that is used to breach the language gap. "I couldn't go on the Volga Peace Cruises because I'm afraid to fly," she said slowly, referring to the seven such voyages down the U.S.S.R.'s Volga River, which first began in 1982. "So I took a train to get to this one." Smiling, Grechko paused for a moment to look away from the woman, as though he did not understand her. "I know," he said finally...
More serious doubts surrounded the Harpoon missiles launched by the Navy cruiser Yorktown in a night action. At first the Navy claimed that a Libyan patrol boat 38 miles away had been hit. But officials later backed off, admitting that the cruiser may have been shooting at a "mirage." If the gunboat was for real, ask critics, did the Harpoons (cost: $944,000 each) miss? And if the Yorktown was shooting at a mirage, what does that say about the $1 billion cruiser's complex, highly sensitive Aegis radar defense system...
Despite that firepower, Libya is far from unprotected. Its air force includes some 480 Soviet and aging French-built aircraft. More ominously, a Kresta-class Soviet cruiser is anchored in Libyan waters. Seven other Soviet warships are nearby in the Mediterranean. If Gaddafi should rise to the bait and try forcibly to counter any U.S. movement across his line in the gulf, a prime U.S. retaliatory target might be the SA-5 antiaircraft sites that recently became operational at an airfield south of the Libyan city of Surt. One complication in hitting the sites: an attack could result in casualties...
While testing Gaddafi's responses, the U.S. also tested Soviet defenses by sending the cruiser Yorktown and the destroyer Caron into the Black Sea, where $ they sailed within six miles of the Crimean peninsula near the port of Sevastopol...