Thursday, October 19, 2017

First Paragraph

And so it came to this: Dannie Stamp, bitter, brokenhearted, packed into a sterile cubicle on an upper floor of The Tower, staring off into the hazy shimmer of the oppressive heat, watching the planes taking off and landing at O'Hare Airport. The end-of-summer sirocco reminded him of better days back home in Persia, Iowa, where his father would worry over the corn burning up before the harvest. Even after half a lifetime doing the top secret work of the Air Force, Dannie still had his farm-boy drawl, still came across as the boy from the sticks. The corporate headquarters of Motorola, largest electronics company in America, with its crisp pressed suits and its mahogany boardroom tables - the arena where the big shots plotted against the Japanese - this was not his bailiwick. Dannie was a "Chandler guy," one of the engineering geeks from The Lab in Chandler, Arizona, and he would have preferred to get back there as quickly as possible. But he had been ordered here by the boss. Motorola chairman Chris Galvin told him he couldn't leave. He had to stay through the holiday weekend, so that he could be summoned at any moment. Dannie Stamp was the designated executioner.

- From Eccentric Orbits: The Iridium Story: How the Largest Man-Made Constellation in the Heavens Was Built by Dreamers in the Arizona Desert, Targeted for Destruction By Panicked Executives, and Saved by a Single Palm Beach Retiree Who Battled Motorola, Cajoled the Pentagon, Wrestled with Thirty Banks, Survived an Attack by Congress, Infiltrated the White House, Found Allies Through the Black Entertainment Network, and Wooed a Mysterious Arab Prince to Rescue the Only Phone That Links Every Inch of the Planet by John Bloom

[I just started this and it is very hard to put down. Fascinating.]

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