Word: cargos
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...concrete shuttle landing strip at Kennedy until early next year. Reason: Challenger's next flight involves both a nighttime lift-off and landing, while on the mission after that, a refurbished Columbia, NASA'S other operational shuttle, will return to orbit carrying the heaviest single cargo to date, the 34,500-lb. European-built space lab. NASA does not want to risk a landing on the relatively narrow, marsh-lined Kennedy runway during either mission...
Halfway through a routine nine-day crossing of the Atlantic, below a scalding sun on a lazy late afternoon, a deck hand aboard the Venezuelan cargo ship Maracaibo suddenly spotted a ship drifting aimlessly in the hazy distance. Captain Humberto León Dorante steamed toward the mysterious vessel and tried to establish radio contact with it. When he received no response, he slowly circled the ship three times to look for signs of life or danger. Then he dispatched an armed three-man expedition to board it. Shortly thereafter, León radioed Venezuelan navigation headquarters with his findings...
...mystery lay above the engine room in the Cloud's cargo hold, where 5,000 wooden boxes labeled TNT were stored. Each box contained two 122-mm shells, a caliber used exclusively in Soviet-manufactured field guns and howitzers. The Venezuelans determined that the crew had probably thought it could not control the fire, and that the ammunition was about to blow the ship to pieces. Said Captain León: "They were on a floating bomb...
...Maracaibo began to tow the Cloud to Turiamo Naval Base, nine Venezuelan infantes, or marines, parachuted onto the deck of the mystery ship. They learned from the engine-room log that the Cloud had picked up its hot cargo in Yugoslavia in March. The last stop, probably only a few hours before the fire, had been Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, 155 miles off the northwest coast of Africa. Venezuelan Defense Ministry officials believe that the Cloud's three British and nine Ghanaian sailors were picked up by a Panamanian liner and taken to Senegal. The Cloud then...
According to the Cloud's documents, the ship was on a perfectly legal mission, heading for Nigeria to unload its cargo. Although the Venezuelans initially thought the weapons could have been destined for Cuba or Nicaragua, the Nigerian embassy in Caracas and the ship's Greek owners confirmed the destination. That did not answer the question of why, for 62 days, no one bothered to search for the Cloud or claim its explosive cargo...