Word: vessels
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...LIFE. For the 651 passengers and 390 crewmen and relatives aboard the liner, it was indeed a Christmas they would never forget. In the dead of night, four days out of Southampton last week, the Lakonia was swept by a raging, uncontrollable fire that left the 20,314-ton vessel an abandoned, gutted ruin. Of the 1,041 persons aboard, 91 were known dead and 64 more were missing in the rolling Atlantic swells...
...troop ship. Unlike newer ships, her bulkheads below deck were wood-paneled and her wiring system was oldfashioned; three times, under the Dutch, the liner was hit with small fires that were easily brought under control. A year ago, with passenger traffic proving unprofitable, the Dutch owners sold the vessel to the Greek Line. The Greeks reoutfitted the ship from bow to stern and changed her name-which, in the superstitious lore of the sea, is a dread omen of danger...
More than 3,000 miles away, the distress signals were picked up by a U.S. Coast Guard station. The Lakonia's position was immediately fed into an AMVER (Atlantic Merchant Vessel Report) computer, which plots the location, course and speed-and records such information as whether a doctor is on board-of some 850 merchant ships in the North Atlantic. Within moments, the computer's memory drums typed out the names of five vessels within 100 miles of the Lakonia, and urgent messages were flashed to them to proceed to the stricken liner. The five were the Argentine...
...agents" of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Several of the prisoners, he said, had been captured Oct. 21 while attempting a night landing on the western tip of the island, coming ashore in two launches from a "mother ship" that Castro identified as the Rex, a 170-ft. vessel flying the Nicaraguan flag and operating out of West Palm Beach. The raiders were armed with two .30-cal. machine guns on each of the launches, and the Rex was loaded for bear: a 75-mm. cannon, two 57-mm. and five twin 20-mm. cannon. In seven months, continued Castro...
...much truth was there to Castro's story? There seems to be some. A 174-ft. vessel called the Rex, a converted U.S. Navy patrol boat flying a Nicaraguan flag and carrying radar, searchlights and a heavy crane, has indeed been tied up at West Palm Beach. Port fees are paid by the SeaKey Shipping Co., known only by a Miami post office box. The Rex's voyages are shrouded in mystery. It engages in electronic and oceanographic research, says a Miami oil executive who claims to own the ship. On her last sailing...