He was young—in his early twenties—and strikingly refuted the myth that fair-haired people cannot tan well; wherever skin showed, it looked like dark walnut laced with strands of platinum blond hair. The four stripes on his sleeve denoted the rank of a Staff Sergeant, and although the temperature was touching ninety-eight degrees, the armpits of his khaki uniform displayed no damp sweat stains. The collar on his shirt was open and missing a tie; a custom normally allowed at Air Force facilities located in warm atmospheres.

He leaned forward and adjusted the louvers on the air conditioner so that the cool air ran up his legs. The new position seemed to satisfy him, and he smiled at the refreshing tingle. Then, clasping his hands behind his head, he relaxed backward, staring at the metal ceiling.

The everpresent thought of Minneapolis and the girls parading Nicollet Avenue crossed his mind. He counted again the fifty-four days left to endure before he was rotated back to the States. When each day came it was ceremoniously marked off in a small black notebook he carried in his breast pocket.

Yawning for perhaps the twentieth time, he picked up a pair of binoculars that were sitting on the window ledge, and surveyed the parked aircraft that rested on the dark asphalt runway stretching beneath the elevated control tower.

The runway lay on the island of Thasos in the northern part of the Aegean Sea. The island was separated from the Greek Macedonia mainland by sixteen miles of water, appropriately called the Thasos Strait. The Thasos land mass consisted of one hundred and seventy square miles of rock, timber and remnants from classical history dating back to 1000 B.C.

Brady Field, as generally termed by the base personnel, was constructed under a treaty between the United States and the Greek government in the late nineteen sixties. Except for ten F-105 Starfire Jets, the only other permanently based aircraft were two monstrous C-133 Cargomaster transports that sat like a pair of fat silver whales, glistening in the blazing Aegean sun.