Interpol

The Twelve: A Novel (Book Two of the Passage Trilogy) [2012]

Justin Cronin

Page 87 of 593 (Amazon Kindle Version)


The Ferrari had died as Kittridge was pulling into the parking area. By this time the car was bucking like a half-broke horse, plumes of oily smoke pouring from the hood and undercarriage. There was no mistaking what had happened: Kittridge's rocket ride out of the parking ramp - that leap into space and then the hard bang on the pavement - had cracked the oil pan. As the oil had drained away, the motor gradually overheated, metal expanding until the pistons had seized in their cylinders.

Sorry about your car, Warren. It sure was good while it lasted.

After what he'd seen in the stadium, Kittridge needed some time to collect himself. Jesus, what a scene. It wasn't anything he couldn't have predicted, but staring it in the face was something else. It sickened him to the core. His hands were actually shaking; he thought he might be ill. Kittridge had seen some things in his life, horrible things. Bodies in pits lined up like cordwood; whole villages gassed, families lying where they'd fallen, their hands reaching out in vain for the last touch of a loved one; the indecipherable remains of men and women and children, blasted to bits in a marketplace by some lunatic with a bomb strapped to his chest. But never anything even remotely on this scale.








posted by Kerry Burgess - H.V.O.M at 8:28 PM Thursday, September 15, 2005


The other dream I had was about fighting some kind of aliens. I'm not sure if this dream happened before the one I wrote about above or if it happened later. In this dream, I am still in the Navy, but I am wearing some kind of camoflauge uniform, maybe army or marines. These aliens have invaded a subway and there are a lot of travelers around in danger. I am about to drop from exhaustion after 36 hours of fighting, we have been retreating and I am separated from the other soldiers. I am carrying two heavy packs, trying to find another unit to group up with, with passengers stream through the facility, they are even getting on the trains as some of them are still coming through. I have lost my rifle somewhere. I still have plenty of ammo, but I can't find a rifle. A woman at a coffee kisok says something to me that I don't remember, she has dried blood on her hands as she is preparing coffee. Then I am outside and I have found an armory where I get another rifle. I start heading back to the subway. A woman drives up in a car and asks me if I am who she thinks I am. But I can't remember seeing her actually in the car, all I can remember is seeing her buried in the dirt with only her talking face exposed. That is all I remember.








Posted by Kerry Burgess - H.V.O.M at 3:06 AM Tuesday, January 10, 2012


Also, "Salesman." I saw that in a dream while sleeping recently. I saw myself going through an induction process in the United States Marine Corps and I woke up understanding that I was dreaming of my actual experience in 1990. I saw a document that indicated I was being inducted to the United States Marine Corps with the officer grade of Chief Warrant Officer 2. I saw in the dream another document associated with my induction and that document indicated I had been assigned the informal name "Salesman."








Posted by Kerry Burgess - H.V.O.M at 12:10 PM Monday, May 09, 2011


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1632091/quotes

IMDb

The Internet Movie Database

Memorable quotes for

"NCIS: Los Angeles"

Little Angels (2010)


Special Agent G. Callen: [after reading Sam's file] He never said anything.

Henrietta 'Hetty' Lange: In our line of work, we're all haunted by nightmares. Stay close to your partner.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_B._Parker

Frank B. Parker

Frank B. Parker is a fictional character in the television series Seven Days, played by Jonathan LaPaglia. He is the lead chrononaut for the NSA's "Backstep" program. Before being recurited for Backstep, Parker served as a Lieutenant in the Navy SEAL Teams, and an intelligence operative for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He now lives in the NSA Backstep facility at Area 51 in Groom Dry Lake, Nevada, code-named "Never Never Land," or "NNL" for short.


At some point, Parker joined the Navy, serving in the Navy SEAL Teams, where he gained a reputation while going through training for not being a team player. While serving in Somolia, presumably during Operation Gothic Serpent of Black Hawk Down-fame, Parker was captured by Somali Militants and placed into a hot box. He was rescued by a team led by Craig Donovan, a friend and fellow SEAL who would later serve with Parker at the Backstep Program. Unfortunately the hot box experience scarred him mentally, leading to bouts of claustrophobia and flash-backs. Parker went on to work for the CIA's Special Activities Division, before suffering a mental breakdown while working an operation in Honduras, leading the government to deem him a threat to national security. He was subsequently locked away at the CIA's mental institution, Hanson Island, off the coast of North Carolina, where he was initially approached by the NSA to work for the Backstep Program.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Sarajevo

Siege of Sarajevo

The Siege of Sarajevo is the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare. Serb forces of the Republika Srpska and the Yugoslav People's Army besieged Sarajevo, the capital city of Bosnia and Herzegovina, from April 5, 1992 to February 29, 1996 during the Bosnian War.

After Bosnia and Herzegovina had declared independence from Yugoslavia, the Serbs, whose strategic goal was to create a new Serbian State of Republika Srpska (RS) that would include part of the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina, encircled Sarajevo with a siege force of 18,000 stationed in the surrounding hills, from which they assaulted the city with weapons that included artillery, mortars, tanks, anti-aircraft guns, heavy machine-guns, multiple rocket launchers, rocket-launched aircraft bombs, and sniper rifles. From May 2, 1992, the Serbs blockaded the city. The Bosnian government defence forces inside the besieged city were poorly equipped and unable to break the siege.

It is estimated that nearly 10,000 people were killed or went missing in the city, including over 1,500 children. An additional 56,000 people were wounded, including nearly 15,000 children. The 1991 census indicates that before the siege the city and its surrounding areas had a population of 525,980. There are estimates that prior to the siege the population in the city proper was 435,000.



http://www.divxmoviesenglishsubtitles.com/C/Cast_Away.html

Cast Away.


(TV) 'Just days before Santa departs on his annual gift-giving venture,
'he's been declared physically fit to fly.
'Santa got checked out at the VA Hospital in Augusta, Georgia.
'After doctors declared the jolly old elf in tiptop shape,
'Santa took off into the wild blue yonder for an early start.
'In Sarajevo, he spent the day with children,
'handing out presents
'and even helping them decorate the special Christmas tree.'



http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120844/quotes

IMDb

The Internet Movie Database

Memorable quotes for

Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)


Data: I seem to be missing several memory engrams.


excerpt ends Posted by Kerry Burgess - H.V.O.M at 12:10 PM Monday, May 09, 2011








http://www.icty.org/en/about/office-of-the-prosecutor/history

United Nations

International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia

History

The Early Years: 1993-1997

Maturity: 1997-2004

Completion: 2004 to date

The UN Security Council’s 1993 decision to create the Tribunal was a bold and innovative response to the conflict and crimes then taking place in the former Yugoslavia. But while the concise Statute provided by the Security Council was clear about the crimes over which the Tribunal had jurisdiction, there was little or no precedent to guide the practical work of the first such international court since the post-Second World War Nuremberg and Tokyo trials. The Tribunal's "pioneers" had to build a unique international criminal justice system practically from scratch.

When the first judges arrived at the Tribunal in November 1993, there were no rules of procedure, no cases and no prosecutor. Professional and qualified staff had to be recruited quickly and their often quite different experiences and methods of work from national systems needed to be merged into a functioning international criminal prosecution system. Both the Tribunal's opponents and its well-wishers were uncertain of its success.

By the time the first prosecutor arrived in August 1994, the judges had drafted the Rules of Procedure and Evidence, and the Deputy Prosecutor had set up the structures of the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP), recruited the first investigators and begun mounting investigations in what was, in some cases, hostile territory.

Investigating war crimes is not typical police work. The crimes that the OTP has to deal with were often massive events covering wide areas. Some took place over the course of many months and were highly organised. They involved regular soldiers, armed police, paramilitaries, politicians, and ordinary civilians. There are also many witnesses of different types, including victims and survivors, experts, internationals and insiders. The Tribunal was created to concentrate on the most serious crimes and the people most responsible for them. Wherever possible, investigations have therefore focused on the leaders who could be regarded as most responsible for the crimes, because even heads of state are not above the law.

The Early Years: 1993-1997

The first investigators faced a major challenge: the investigation of alleged crimes while the conflicts in Croatia (1991-5) and Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992-5) were still ongoing. The UN protection force (UNPROFOR) deployed in both of these states did not control security on the ground and often warring parties refused to permit Tribunal investigators access to reported crime scenes or witnesses.

In this start-up period, the OTP utilised and built upon the work of the UN Commission of Experts, a fact-finding body established by the Security Council, whose earlier work had demonstrated that serious crimes were being committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), as well as Croatia. Information was also available from States and from a number of non-governmental organisations and humanitarian agencies who were operating in the region during the conflict. National and international media were another source of information. Nevertheless, it was vital for investigators to go directly to the victims and survivors to record their first-hand accounts by way of formal statements that would become the basis of evidence in court.

Many of the first available witnesses were victims who had fled from Bosnia and Herzegovina and found themselves refugees in other countries. They had been held in detention camps and had been the subject of "ethnic cleansing". Many had harrowing tales to tell of personal tragedy, suffering and loss. Most countries, however, lacked experience in cooperating with international prosecutors and investigators, and few legal mechanisms were in place. In the early years, the OTP therefore did a lot of work establishing the necessary legal agreements and sending teams of investigators to interview witnesses and to record their statements.

The Prosecutor personally invested much time and energy to build the credibility of the OTP and to obtain the cooperation of states. Many commentators in the international and diplomatic community were sceptical that the ICTY could function effectively or achieve results. In some parts of the former Yugoslavia, there was downright refusal to accept the legitimacy of the Tribunal, and clear obstruction of its work. Although in the establishment of the Tribunal there had been general agreement that there could be no lasting peace without bringing war criminals to justice, the reality of sharing information and coming forward to give evidence proved to be a stumbling block for many individuals and institutions.

It was important for the ICTY to demonstrate that international prosecutions were a reality. The first investigations centered on the reported widespread and horrific attacks on Bosnian Muslims and Croats in the Prijedor area of northwestern Bosnia, and the first case before the ICTY concentrated particularly on the notorious Omarska, Keraterm and Trnopolje Serb-run detention camps. Duško Tadic, the accused in that case, had been in custody in Germany and was being investigated there for similar crimes. The ICTY Prosecutor asserted the Tribunal's primacy over national courts and insisted on the case being transferred to The Hague.

Although the Tadic case was the first to go to trial, the first person to be indicted before the Tribunal was Dragan Nikolic, a commander in the Sušica detention camp in Bosnia established by Serb forces in June 1992. He was indicted on 4 November 1994. As the cases against Tadic and Nikolic would later prove, both were vicious men in the service of the Bosnian Serb authorities who tortured and murdered Bosnian Muslim civilians, but they were not part of the political or military leadership. Heavy expectations were placed on the Tribunal in these early stages of its existence to indict suspected perpetrators, but the institution was not then able to build up credible evidence to indict the leaders who masterminded the criminal campaigns. As a result, many of the early indictments were issued against relatively low and intermediate level alleged perpetrators whom eyewitness survivors and victims had identified as committing crimes in camps and similar locations. However, this so-called ‘pyramid’ approach, where low-ranking military and other officials are held to account for their actions, would over time enable investigators to build up cases against their superiors and ultimately the main architects of the crimes.

The Nikolic case highlights a major problem that would handicap the Tribunal for many years, but was especially acute in the early years: the Tribunal’s inability to arrest suspects and the deliberate obstacles placed in its path by some parties. Nikolic, indicted in 1994, did not come into the Tribunal’s custody until 2000. With the indictment of the Bosnian Serb military and political leaders Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadžic in 1995, a consistent pattern of obstruction towards the Tribunal was established by Bosnian Serb authorities. They were not alone in their refusal to arrest and transfer suspects or meet their obligations towards the Tribunal. Both Croatia and Serbia obstructed the Tribunal’s work, with the authorities in Belgrade demonstrating the most consistent open hostility towards the ICTY.

The Tribunal’s indictment of Mladic and Karadžic less than two and half years after its establishment demonstrated how far the Tribunal had developed in investigating and building credible charges against military and political leaders.

The conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as Croatia, concluded before the end of 1995. The following year, 1996, with peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, was a significant year in the Tribunal’s history. The organisation was, for the first time in many cases, able to send investigators to alleged crime scenes. The most significant single development concerned the massive investigation into the events that took place in Srebrenica during and after the fall of the former UN ‘safe haven’ in July 1995.

Despite the denial of Serb and other authorities that any crimes had taken place, Tribunal investigators used the testimony of survivors, satellite photography, archaeologists, anthropologists, dog teams and a variety of other specialised teams and experts to search for evidence of mass executions and mass graves. The OTP’s investigations discovered dozens of mass graves, containing the remains of thousands of civilians, many with their hands tied behind their backs with wire, blindfolded with a rag and a bullet hole in the back of their head. The findings of the Tribunal’s exhumation programme that began in the summer of 1996 formed a critical component in the prosecution’s case against persons who were later tried and found guilty for their role in the genocide committed by Serb forces there. More than a decade later, national authorities are continuing the exhumation work with harrowing findings








from my private journal as Kerry Burgess: 01/26/08 6:18 PM
A few times I have thought I was regaining memories of discovering murder victims in the course of my work as a police officer and detective. I feel a mild sense of dread that is probably from being able to recognize the signs of what I am about to see and I have seen it a lot. Probably too much.








from my private journal as Kerry Burgess: 05/04/09 11:27 PM
Oh yeah, now I remember. The dream did not seem to end there. The next series of scenes I remember were then of here in Seattle. For some reason, I was out on Aurora Blvd., or so it seemed based on the scenes I can still visualize to some degree and I seemed to be several miles north of downtown and I could see the Seattle skyline to the south. This first scene was in daytime and I could see there was a large fire to the west where Bellevue and Redmond would be but my sight was obscured by a large hill in that direction and the fire was beyond that hill. I was also aware that I had probably been exposed to ionizing radiation from the nuclear bomb blast and I did not know how much. At some point around that time I also seemed to note there was a large fire in the Seattle skyline but that is not a clear in my mind as the fire towards Bellevue and Redmond. That could just mean that I was looking directly at Seattle when that area was hit again. I don't know. Then the next scene I remember seemed to be night time and I was traveling with three other people but I cannot remember enough detail to articulate any of that. I vaguely recall some details that make me think we where along Aurora Avenue and near to Shoreline to the north. There was an area we walked to where someone had just dug several holes in the ground and the holes were freshly dug and I could see a shovel nearby and I think I took the shovel. I pondered over how the holes did not seem to be graves but I don't know what they were for. They could have been for small trees I guess but they were probably too close together. There was also a sense during the dream that I should know better than to take that shovel because I was a lawyer and I shouldn't just take it away from there. I think that was the last part of the dream. I don't think there was anything else after that point other than the next dream where I seemed to be thinking about that dream while in another dream and then dreaming of this time now where I am writing about those dreams.








The Twelve: A Novel (Book Two of the Passage Trilogy) [2012]

Justin Cronin

Page 88 of 593 (Amazon Kindle Version)


"Is that a real AK?" he said pointing.

"Quiet, Tim." Drawing him closer, the girl lifted the hammer, ready to swing. "Who the hell are you?"

Kittridge's hands were still raised. For the moment, the notion that the hammer presented an actual threat was something he was willing to indulge. "My name's Kittridge. And yes," he said, speaking to the boy, "it's a real AK. Just don't go thinking I'll let you touch it, young man."

The boy's face lit with excitement. "That's *cool*.

Kittridge lifted his chin towards the driver, who was now gazing intently as his shoes. "Is he okay?"

"He doesn't like to be touched is all." The girl was still studying Kittridge warily. "The Army said to come here. We heard it on the radio."

"I expect they did. But it looks like they've flown the coop on us. Now, I don't believe I caught your names."

The girl hestitated. "I'm April. This is my brother, Tim. The other one is Danny."

"Pleased to meet you, April." He offered his most reassuring smile. "So do you think it would be all right with you if I put my hands down now? Seeing as we've all be properly introduced."

"Where'd you get that rifle?"

"Outdoor World. I'm a salesman."

"You sell guns?"



- posted by Kerry Burgess 2:08 PM Pacific Time Spokane Valley Washington USA Friday 02 November 2018