Showing results by author "Steven J. Pickering" in All Categories

L'été 1916 était arrivé comme un four. L'océan était le grand soulagement. Frais, vaste et—pensait-on—sûr. S'immerger dans ses eaux après des jours d'air étouffant de la ville, c'était se sentir renaître. Le sel brûlait la saleté de la fumée de charbon, la chaleur, le stress. Les femmes s'avançaient dans l'eau jusqu'aux genoux, riant nerveusement des vagues, tandis que les jeunes hommes nageaient hardiment au-delà des cordes, tranchant l'eau de larges mouvements. Mais sous la surface scintillante, la mer gardait ses propres secrets dangereux.

The wind never truly dies in the Urals. It prowls the valleys and ridgelines like a restless spirit, rattling bare birches, hissing across the frozen stone. At night it screams—long, feral cries that curl around the peaks like warning songs. The Mansi hunters had long ago given one of those mountains a name: Kholat Syakhl, the Mountain of the Dead.

The summer of 1916 had come on like a furnace. June had been blistering, the kind of month that drove city dwellers out of their brick apartments in Philadelphia and New York, down toward the promise of breezes off the Atlantic Ocean, in Jersey shore towns like Beach Haven, Spring Lake, Asbury Park, and Matawan... But beneath the glittering surface, the sea held its own dark relentless man-eating secret.

What began as one man's audacious airline hijacking, extortion and theft of $200,000 in ransom money, and subsequent escape and disappearance, transformed over the years and decades from a simple criminal act into a tale of myth and folklore—making the name, D.B. Cooper, an true American legend.