Word: tankerful
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McCain oversaw the investigation that helped derail the $23 billion Pentagon deal to lease Boeing tanker airplanes to the Air Force. Investigators found that the company's CFO had violated conflict-of-interest rules, and the scandal landed both him and a high-ranking Pentagon procurement official, who said she had steered other contracts to Boeing, in jail. McCain says he is not on a vendetta against Boeing but continues to have concerns about the Pentagon's procurement processes. "There are a lot of big-ticket items," says McCain. "It is going to be a very tough year." --By Sally...
Maupin's mission last April 9, Good Friday, was to ride shotgun on a fuel tanker that was part of a mile-long convoy. Under the protection of part of the 724th, civilian contractors were hauling diesel fuel in 17 tanker trucks across 60 miles from the U.S. military's main logistics base at Camp Anaconda in Balad to Baghdad International Airport. Just west of Baghdad at about 10:30 a.m., the convoy came under sudden attack on the six-lane Abu Ghraib Expressway. "We're taking fire in the rear!" radioed a truck driver. Within seconds, the entire convoy...
...soldier behind Maupin's tanker saw it explode, swerve off the highway and plunge into a ditch. "They were hammering the daylights out of us," says Thomas Hamill, the civilian convoy commander. "I believe they were planning on taking everybody in that convoy out." While the insurgents failed in that goal, they did kill at least six Americans among the roughly 50 in the convoy. The bodies of four civilians and two soldiers from the 724th, Specialist Gregory Goodrich and Sergeant Elmer Krause, have been recovered. Hamill was taken prisoner and escaped after a month. One of the authors...
...Nurdin's last "offer" was a year ago when a middleman sought a crew to bring in a Taiwan-flagged tanker, the Luen Fatt, after it had been hijacked. Nurdin and 13 other sailors steered the ship to the virtually unregulated waters around Batam, he says. Within hours, the cargo of diesel oil was unloaded and the 1,249-ton tanker repainted, renamed and on its way to a broker. Sometimes, Nurdin continues, his clients want only the "skin," which means just the vessel, of a certain size, length and capacity, while at other times it's only the "guts...
...Scenarios of a terrorist strike in the strait vary, but they usually involve hijacking a tanker carrying chemicals, oil or liquefied natural gas. Blowing up an entire tanker is difficult?crude oil does not catch fire easily, for example?but it's not too hard to blast a hole in one so that its cargo is released, creating a maritime disaster. There's also the economic impact. When the oil tanker Limburg was attacked off the coast of Yemen in October 2002, insurance costs for calls to the country's ports rose by some $150,000 per ship. Such...