High Flight Quotes

“At two hundred fifty feet in length with a surfaced displacement of 2,200 tons, the Samisho was not a small boat. Built to the 0+2+ (1) Yuushio-class standards at Kawasaki’s shipyards in Kobe, she’d begun service in 1992, and last year she’d been brought back to the yards for a retrofit.

Now she was state of the art, an engineering and electronics marvel even by U.S. naval standards. She was a diesel boat, but she was fast, capable of a top speed submerged of more than twenty-five knots and a published diving depth in excess of one thousand feet.

Her electronic detection systems and countermeasures by Hitachi were better than anything currently in use by any navy in the world, and her new Fuji electric motors and tunnel drive were as quiet as any nuclear submarine’s propulsion system, and much simpler to operate. The Samisho could be safely operated, even on war footing, with fifty men and ten officers—less than half the crew needed to run the Los Angeles-class boats, and one-fourth the crew needed for a sub-hunting surface vessel”
― David Hagberg, High Flight

“The road climbed higher into the mountains of Nikko National Park, the terraced farm fields giving way grudgingly to forests of tiny trees that seemed to be trimmed, the growth around them carefully cultivated. From a narrow defile the car was passed through a massive wooden gate that swung on a huge arch ornately carved with the figures of fierce dragons. From there a perfectly maintained road of crushed white gravel led up the valley to a broad forested ledge through which a narrow stream bubbled and plunged over the sheer edge. The view from the top was breathtaking. Perched on the far
edge was a traditionally styled Japanese house, low to the ground and rambling in every direction. Tiled roofs, rice-paper screens and walls, carved beams, courtyards, broad verandas, gardens, ponds, and ancient statues and figures gave the spot an unreal air, as if it were a setting in a fairy tale”
― David Hagberg, High Flight

“They came in two teams, leapfrogging out of the city, Isaacs and Ireland in a plain Toyota van and Shapiro and Littell in a four-wheel-drive Subaru. Greg Isaacs got out of the lead car about twenty-five yards from the big gate and immediately started through the thick woods up the mountain. At thirty-eight he was in the best physical shape of the four CIA legmen, so he’d been volunteered for this part of the mission. The others waited on the main road, one car well above the gate, the other retreating to the highway at the bottom of the valley about four miles away. Isaacs carried a powerful pair of binoculars, a sound amplifier with a small parabolic pickup dish, and a walkie-talkie.
The first hundred yards were relatively easy, but then the slope sharply steepened, and until he finally made it to the crest of the defile Isaacs wasn’t sure he could do it without mountain-climbing equipment. At the top he
found himself at one end of a long ledge, the mountains rising in the back and a sheer cliff plunging five or six hundred feet in the front. A big house was perched at the edge of the dropoff about two hundred yards away. Isaacs raised his binoculars and saw McGarvey seated with another man on a veranda.
Isaacs keyed his walkie-talkie. “I have him.”
― David Hagberg, High Flight