On Wings of Eagles

by Ken Follett

‘You know what the McDonald’s girl said to me, in a completely empty restaurant, when I asked for thirty hamburgers and thirty orders of fries?’ ‘What?’ ‘What they always say – “Is this to eat here or to go?”’

He succeeded – as he would many times during later life – because he was too dumb to know it was impossible.

‘What’s with the beard – you trying to get yourself fired?’ ‘I thought it might make me look less American here.’ ‘Did you ever see an Iranian with a ginger beard?’

Perot told himself that the military, which was running the airport, and the Ministry of Justice, for which Dadgar worked, were two separate government bureaucracies; and if one of them knew what the other was doing, or whom it was seeking, why, this would have to be the most efficient operation in the history of government.

like the deafening crack and roll of nearby thunder a moment before the lightning strikes.

Thunder _before_ lightning strikes? ???

His hopes were pinned on the notorious inability of government everywhere to let its right hand know what its left was doing.

It was like the joke about the tourist who asks a farmer for directions to London, and the farmer replies: ‘If I was going to London I wouldn’t start from here.’

Boulware was looking at a map. The journey was about five hundred miles through mountain country. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘There is no way this car is going to get us to the border by two o’clock tomorrow afternoon.’ ‘You don’t understand,’ Charlie said. ‘This man is a Turkish driver.’

with friends in the State Department a man had no need of enemies.

‘Be careful about picking a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel and paper by the ton.