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3 episodes with M60
3 episodes with M60
2 episodes with M60
2 episodes with M60
2 episodes with M60
2 episodes with M60
2 episodes with M60
2 episodes with M60
2 episodes with M60
Cette semaine, Benoit et Alain reçoivent Alain Blondeau, propriétaire d’un atelier mécanique qui parle de la nouvelle réalité des coûts d’entretien en automobile. En essai routier, Alain a cinq propositions estivales et Benoit a pris la route avec une BMW i4 M60 pour ce dernier épisode de la saison. Bon été à tous!Voir https://www.cogecomedia.com/vie-privee pour notre politique de vie privée
BMW es hoy un símbolo de estatus, ingeniería de precisión y placer de conducción. Sin embargo, detrás de los colores de M y las elegantes carrocerías bávaras, se esconde una historia repleta de decisiones éticas cuestionables, fracasos financieros que casi borran la marca del mapa y fallos mecánicos que dejaron tirados a miles de clientes. En este análisis profundo de Garaje Hermético, no venimos a juzgar con los ojos del presente, sino a relatar los hechos que, seguramente, en Múnich preferirían olvidar. La herencia de los Quandt y el Tercer Reich La historia de BMW no se puede entender sin la familia Quandt, actuales accionistas mayoritarios. Pero su ascenso al poder está ligado a uno de los periodos más oscuros de la humanidad. Günther Quandt, el patriarca, no fue un simple empresario atrapado en la guerra. Se unió al partido nazi en 1933 y su exmujer, Magda, terminó casándose con Joseph Goebbels. El joven Harald Quandt creció llamando "tío" a Adolf Hitler. Más allá de los vínculos sociales, la realidad industrial fue aterradora. Estudios financiados por la propia familia décadas después confirmaron que en sus fábricas trabajaron cerca de 50.000 prisioneros de campos de concentración en condiciones de esclavitud. Aunque la BMW actual realiza labores de reparación moral mediante fundaciones, la sombra del trabajo forzado es una mancha que permanece en el ADN de su capital fundacional. 1959: El día que BMW casi desaparece A finales de los años 50, BMW era una empresa herida de muerte. Su estrategia de producto era un despropósito: por un lado, fabricaban el modesto Isetta, un microcoche que apenas dejaba beneficios; por otro, el espectacular pero ruinoso BMW 507, un coche tan caro de producir que la marca perdía dinero con cada unidad entregada. Solo se fabricaron 252 unidades, y cada una de ellas era un clavo más en el ataúd de la compañía. La situación llegó al límite el 9 de diciembre de 1959. El consejo de administración presentó un plan para vender la empresa a Daimler-Benz. BMW estaba a punto de convertirse en una planta de ensamblaje de carrocerías para Mercedes. Sin embargo, en una asamblea mítica, los trabajadores, concesionarios y pequeños accionistas bloquearon la venta en un estallido de orgullo bávaro. Fue entonces cuando Herbert Quandt decidió arriesgar su fortuna personal, aumentando su participación al 50% y financiando la "Neue Klasse", la serie de coches que salvó a la marca y dio origen a lo que hoy conocemos como la Serie 3. El desastre de Rover: El "Paciente Inglés" En 1994, BMW intentó jugar a ser un imperio global comprando el Grupo Rover por una suma multimillonaria. Lo que parecía un movimiento maestro para adquirir marcas británicas icónicas como Land Rover, MG y Mini, se convirtió en una pesadilla de gestión. El choque cultural entre la estricta ingeniería alemana y la ineficiente estructura británica fue total. BMW inyectó miles de millones de marcos en fábricas que no lograban alcanzar los estándares de calidad requeridos. Tras seis años de pérdidas sangrientas, en el año 2000, BMW decidió desmantelar el grupo. Se quedaron con Mini, vendieron Land Rover a Ford y, en un acto de desesperación financiera, "regalaron" los restos de Rover y MG al consorcio Phoenix por la ridícula cantidad de 10 libras esterlinas. Se estima que esta aventura le costó a los bávaros unos 4.000 millones de euros de la época, una de las peores operaciones en la historia de la automoción. Diseño y mecánica: Las sombras en el producto BMW significa Bayerische Motoren Werke (Fábricas de Motores de Baviera), pero incluso los maestros del motor cometen errores imperdonables. En los años 90, el uso del recubrimiento de Nikasil en los cilindros de los motores V8 tipo M60 resultó en un desastre técnico; el azufre de la gasolina degradaba el material y destruía la compresión del motor, obligando a sustituir miles de bloques en garantía. La avaricia moderna: El hardware bloqueado Incluso en la era actual, BMW ha logrado manchar su imagen. En 2022, la marca intentó implementar un modelo de suscripción para funciones que el coche ya traía instaladas físicamente, como la calefacción de los asientos. Los clientes, que ya habían pagado decenas de miles de euros por sus vehículos, se encontraron con que debían pagar una cuota mensual de 18 euros para "desbloquear" el software de un hardware que ya era suyo. La reacción global fue tan feroz y cargada de memes que BMW tuvo que recular en 2023, admitiendo que el experimento de los micro-pagos en coches de lujo había sido un error de percepción desastroso.
Le printemps est enfin arrivé, et votre véhicule en porte probablement les stigmates, dans cet épisode, on reçoit Jesse Caron du CAA-Québec qui nous parle de l’entretien du printemps et des choses que l’on peut faire soi-même sur son véhicule. À l'essai: La puissance silencieuse vs la réinvention d'une icône! Alain a pris le volant du BMW i4 M60 et Benoit a roulé le nouveau Jeep Cherokee 2026, qui change de vocation.Voir https://www.cogecomedia.com/vie-privee pour notre politique de vie privée
It's EV News Briefly for Monday 02 March 2026, everything you need to know in less than 5 minutes if you haven't got time for the full show.Patreon supporters fund this show, get the episodes ad free, as soon as they're ready and are part of the EV News Daily Community. You can be like them by clicking here: https://www.patreon.com/EVNewsDailyBMW USA SHOP LEAK POINTS TO 2027 LINEUPA leak on BMW USA's online shop revealed two fully electric i3 sedan variants — the i3 40 xDrive and i3 50 xDrive — confirmed for the US in 2027, sharing the Neue Klasse platform with the iX3 and featuring Gen6 batteries, 800-volt hardware, and an iDrive X interior. The 2027 lineup also adds a first-ever iX4 coupe-SUV in two variants, an iX3 in three configurations launching in North America this summer, an electric iX5, and an i3 M60 alongside a full electric M3 positioned as the spiritual successor to today's M3 Competition.TESLA BERLIN RUNS HALF FULL AS UNION ROW SIMMERSTesla's Gigafactory Berlin produced 211,235 vehicles in 2024 against a stated annual capacity of 375,000 — a 56% utilisation rate — and output has since declined further, with the factory now reportedly running at around 40% capacity and BYD outselling Tesla in Europe in January 2026. Labour tensions are deepening ahead of works council elections, with IG Metall pursuing collective wage agreements similar to those at Volkswagen and BMW, while Tesla filed a criminal complaint against a union member and Elon Musk warned that "outside organisations" could hinder the site's ambition to become Europe's largest factory complex.T&E: LOCAL BATTERIES COULD CUT COST GAPA Transport & Environment report argues the EU can shrink the cost gap between domestically made and Chinese batteries from 90% to around 30% through scaled-up local production, with higher automation and lower scrap rates potentially cutting the gap to $14 per kWh by 2030 — equivalent to roughly €500 on an average EV. The findings align with the EU's forthcoming Industrial Accelerator Act, which targets ~70% local content thresholds for publicly supported EVs, though some carmakers warn this risks making batteries prohibitively expensive while T&E's Julia Poliscanova calls it "a sovereignty premium worth paying," particularly given China's export restrictions on critical minerals.TRIBUNAL BACKS 5% VAT ON SOME PUBLIC CHARGINGA UK tax tribunal has ruled against HMRC in a case brought by community charging operator Charge My Street, finding that a de-minimis clause in the VAT Act 1994 — capping "domestic" supplies at 1,000 kWh per month per customer — can qualify most neighbourhood charge points for the 5% reduced VAT rate rather than the 20% rate currently applied to public charging. The ruling is significant for drivers without off-street parking, though it also raises commercial complications, as many charge point operators have multi-year contracts priced on 20% VAT, and it opens the door to networks gaming the threshold by splitting sites or charger banks into separate "premises".ŠKODA OPENS €205M CTP BATTERY PLANT IN CZECHIAŠkoda has opened a €205 million (~$216M), 55,000 m² battery production facility at Mladá Boleslav, making it the Volkswagen Group's largest BEV battery system site and the first VW Group plant in Europe to manufacture cell-to-pack (CTP) systems at scale. The line produces over 1,100 battery systems per day — targeting up to 335,000 annually — and Škoda's switch to LFP cells has cut battery production costs by 30% compared to its previous MEB systems.MG CLOSES IN ON EUROPEAN FACTORY PLANMG has narrowed its European factory search to five countries, aiming to begin production by 2027 to circumvent the EU's 45% tariff on Chinese-built BEVs — a levy that caused MG's European BEV sales to fall 33% to 48,479 units last year, even as overall European sales rose 26% to 307,282 units in 2025. MG Europe head William Wang declared "it's time to build local," positioning the brand as a European marque rather than a Chinese import, as rivals BYD, Chery, and Leapmotor also race to establish European manufacturing footholds.CITROËN UPDATES C5 AIRCROSS PHEV FOR EURO 7Citroën has refreshed the C5 Aircross plug-in hybrid with a new 21.5 kWh battery (17.8 kWh usable), delivering up to 96 km (60 miles) of WLTP combined electric range — a 33% improvement over the outgoing model and ahead of rivals like the Peugeot 3008 Hybrid4 (69 km) and Ford Kuga PHEV (64 km). Priced in the €40–50k range, Citroën positions the updated C5 Aircross as one of the most tax-efficient family SUVs in the mainstream segment across EU markets while still targeting Euro 7 compliance.CANADIAN TRIAL PEGS ELECTRIC SEMI SAVINGS AT $157,126A real-world Canadian trial by FPInnovations' PIT Group and Transport Canada tracked two commercial fleets over 12 months and more than 200,000 km of Montreal-area operations, projecting savings of $157,126 per truck over six years — described as the most comprehensive dataset of its kind outside controlled demonstrations. The study compared the Freightliner eCascadia (BEV) directly against the diesel Cascadia and found that despite the electric truck's higher purchase price, higher-than-expected maintenance costs, and lower residual value, a six-year saving still emerged and may prove conservative.DENZA D9 ELECTRIC MPV ARRIVES IN AUSTRALIADenza has launched the D9 electric MPV in Australia from A$85,990, powered by a 103.3 kWh Blade Battery with 200 kW DC fast charging, 11 kW AC charging, and V2L capability across both variants, all built on BYD's e-Platform 3.0 with a cell-to-body battery structure. The seven-seat, three-row cabin targets the premium end of the people-mover segment with nappa leather, open-pore white ash wood trim, a 14-speaker Dynaudio sound system, adaptive suspension, and second-row captain's chairs offering over 900 mm of legroom, massage, and individual screens.CHINESE CAR BRANDS SPLIT US BUYERSA Cox Automotive survey of 802 prospective US car buyers found the country almost evenly divided — 38% would consider Chinese brands if available, 39% would not — with Gen Z showing notably higher openness at 69%. Chinese brands remain locked out of the US market by high tariffs and software regulations, but cost pressure is a key driver of interest, with 68% of open buyers expecting lower prices against an average new car price of $50,000, while BYD has already surpassed Tesla in European EV sales.
Nyt on tarjolla makiaa! Henri Posa nimittäin kävi Unkarissa koeajamassa ei yhtä, vaan kaksi Rolls-Roycen uutuutta ja ottaa meidät nyt mukaan muun muassa täyssähköisen Spectren rattiin. Arttu Toivonen taas kertoo, kuinka siitä BMW iX:n uuden version jarrutestissä kävi. Arttu on lisäksi ehtinyt testata BMW i4 M60:n.
En lytter lurer på om han skal ha en BMW i4 M60 eller nye iX3. David og Håkon har svaret. Forøvrig har David vært i Øst-Europa for å kjøre fire forskjellige Rolls-Royce-modeller. Er det bare digre, dyre BMW-er, eller har britene gjort noe mer spesielt? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In Episode 214 of the Transition Drill Podcast, John Cizin shares his story from hauling hay in the fields of Northern California to carrying the M60 as a Navy SEAL, but first he started as a Corpsman and almost went special operation with the Marine Corps, and later fighting Raised in a family of public servants, and Navy veterans, he entered the Navy as a corpsman and found himself drawn to the challenge of special operations. His path through BUD/S, his role in the SEAL Teams, and his determination to always push for excellence marked him as a quiet professional who never backed down from hard work.When he chose to leave the Navy, John transitioned almost immediately into the fire service, beginning a second career where lives depended on preparation and teamwork. His journey reveals how the lessons of small unit tactics transferred to firehouses and city streets. Yet alongside the triumphs came challenges. Injuries from parachute accidents, the unseen effects of traumatic brain injury, and the weight of PTSD surfaced years later, forcing him to confront both his body and his mind.John speaks candidly about addiction, the toll of trauma, and the turning points that allowed him to rebuild. His experiences highlight the importance of humility, strong networks, and discipline in the face of adversity. For veterans and first responders, his story delivers hard truths and lasting hope.The best podcast for military veterans, police officers, firefighters, and first responders preparing for veteran transition and life after service. Helping you plan and implement strategies to prepare for your transition into civilian life.Follow the show and share it with another veteran or first responder who would enjoy this.CONNECT WITH THE PODCAST:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paulpantani/WEBSITE: https://www.transitiondrillpodcast.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulpantani/SIGN-UP FOR THE NEWSLETTER:https://transitiondrillpodcast.com/home#aboutQUESTIONS OR COMMENTS:paul@transitiondrillpodcast.comSPONSORS:Trident CoffeeGet 15% off your purchaseLink: https://tridentcoffee.comPromo Code: TDP15GRND CollectiveGet 15% off your purchaseLink: https://thegrndcollective.com/Promo Code: TRANSITION15Total Force Plus ConferenceLink: https://totalforceplus.orgPendleton Surf ClubLink: https://pendletonsurfclub.com
In dieser Episode des MainAthlet Leichtathletik Podcasts tauchen wir tief ein in ein sportliches Highlight der Masters-Saison 2025: den Interland-Vergleichskampf in Den Haag. Gemeinsam mit Boyke Seemann, Teammanager der deutschen Masters-Nationalmannschaft, blicken wir hinter die Kulissen eines traditionsreichen Wettkampfs, der nach siebenjähriger Pause sein Comeback feierte.Die Interlands sind kein gewöhnlicher Wettkampf – sie sind ein internationaler Teamvergleich zwischen Deutschland, den Niederlanden, Belgien und Frankreich, bei dem Spitzenleistungen und Teamgeist Hand in Hand gehen. Früher waren sie fester Bestandteil des europäischen Leichtathletik-Kalenders, bis sie kurz vor der Corona-Pandemie einschliefen. Dank des Engagements von Athlet:innen und Teammanager:innen wie Boyke Seemann wurde das Event 2025 neu belebt – und das mit großem Erfolg.Teamspirit, Taktik und TraditionBoyke berichtet von der besonderen Atmosphäre direkt an der Nordsee, wo Athlet:innen morgens beim Aufwärmen das Meeresrauschen hören konnten. Das Ziel war klar: Deutschland wollte den Pokal holen – und das Team setzte alles daran. Mit Nationalhymne, Fahnenhissung und internationalen Freundschaften begann das Wochenende, doch auf der Bahn, im Wurfkreis und in den Sprunggruben zählte nur eins: Leistung.Besonders spannend: Das Punktesystem. Hier fließen nicht nur die Leistungen in absoluten Zahlen ein, sondern auch der Altersklassenfaktor – was bedeutet, dass eine W70-Athletin im Hochsprung oft mehr Punkte holen kann als eine deutlich jüngere Konkurrentin. Dieses System erfordert clevere Teamaufstellungen und taktisches Geschick.Herausragende LeistungenVon Roland Gröger (M60) über 400 m in 55,05 Sekunden, bis zu Wurfmaschinen wie Ralf Mordhorst (Diskus 56,50 m) und Holger Klose (Hammerwurf 58,73 m) – das deutsche Team überzeugte auf ganzer Linie. Auch die Frauen glänzten: Jeannette Denz und Martina Greithammer dominierten das Kugelstoßen, Dana Prada und Aurica Gründer sprangen weit über 5,50 m.Emotionaler Höhepunkt: Das Comeback von Jennifer Gartmann nach schwerer Verletzung – und das ausgerechnet bei den Interlands. Ein Moment, der für viele im Team Gänsehaut bedeutete.Staffel-Drama und WeltrekordeZum Abschluss des Wettkampftages gab es einen echten Knaller: Die deutsche Mixed-4x400-m-Staffel lief in 3:50,72 Minuten Weltrekord. Auch die zweite Staffel, besetzt mit M55-Athleten, hatte den Weltrekord im Visier und gewann souverän ihren Lauf. Hier zeigte sich, wie wichtig Motivation, Taktik und Teamunterstützung sind – und wie laut ein Teammanager an der Bahnlinie werden kann.Mehr als nur ein WettkampfNeben sportlichen Höchstleistungen lebte der Interland Masters 2025 vom Miteinander der Nationen, von der Wiedersehensfreude und der Wertschätzung unter Athlet:innen. Abends am Strand saß das Team noch immer beisammen – der Pokal in der Mitte, die Sonne im Untergang.Ausblick auf 2026Die Planungen für die nächsten Interlands laufen bereits. Ob in Belgien oder vielleicht sogar in Deutschland – Boyke und sein Team wollen den Schwung mitnehmen. Fest steht: Die Interlands sind zurück, und die Masters-Leichtathletik hat ein weiteres Highlight im Kalender. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Double Tap Episode 418 This episode of Double Tap is brought to you by: Swampfox Optics, Medical Gear Outfitters, Blue Alpha, Bowers Group, Night Fision, and Matador Arms Welcome to Double Tap, episode 418! Your hosts tonight are Jeremy Pozderac, Aaron Krieger, Nick Lynch, and me Shawn Herrin, welcome to the show! GOALS August 9th and 10th in Knoxville, Tennessee. Knoxville Convention Center Free to GOA members https://events.goa.org/goals/ If you were at GunCon and are attending GOALS. Don't forget to get some pics with the cast to claim your free shirt. - Dear WLS Jordan F - "I've got a 1966 made Winchester Model 70 in .270 WIN that I picked up with a 1-3 x 32 Weaver scope on it. I can only assume with such a tiny magnification who ever had this rifle before me didn't shoot more than 50 yards , I'm thinking it was set up as a deer rifle. I'd like to take it out to 100 yards at least, intent is to be a general purpose rifle and not just set up for deer/50 yards or less. What magnification would you guys recommend I look at/for? Also looking at picking up a new rifle in 338 Lapua, what magnification would you recommend for this one? Have access to a 300 yard range for this one, hopefully can find a longer range someday. Thanks, Jordan" Hugh G. Clit - "How many stoppages is too many for your main squeeze AR? I've recently started trying to train more. I w been using a cmmg 22 conversion to shoot at least 500 rds per month of drills. Normally about 150 rds at a range trip. Then I finish the range trip by shooting a mag of 55gr 556 ammo. But my rifle normally has a hard time getting through the 556 mag. Having a failure to fire every 5 or 6 rds. I'm thinking it's because of how dirty the 22 lr is. But if I do t shoot the 22 lr ammo. I get a stoppage every 2 or 3 mags. Is that normal? Should I be able to get through 100 rds without an issue? How many times do you expect to have a malfunction per 500 rds?" a-in-your-face s. - "I was watching a JaredAF video where he was talking about lead levels and lead exposure. He shoots a lot and reloads and had is blood lead level tested and it was 5x the normal level. The amount of shooting I do is very cyclic, from 10-15k rounds a year when I was shooting competition to very little in the last year. If I had high levels they have probably lowered by now. But lately I have been introducing my kids to shooting and trying to at least teach them about exposure and hand washing (and keeping your hands out of your mouth). Do any of you guys have concern for lead levels and lead exposure, particularly Shawn who shoots a lot and Jeremy who spends tons of time at an indoor range? Is this something that yall even think about? #no_notes #SSB" Kyle R - It's the mid 80's .The WLS SSB Team has been convicted of crimes they did not commit and escaped into the Ohio underground. Colonel Lynch (not Nick) and his team has them pinned down in an active airplane hanger. You each need to choose a character, but not the obvious one. Therefore no Jeremy Pozracus, Hannibal Herron, Nick the Faceman, or Howling Mad Moses. Savage can remain the female reporter that follows them around. You can choose 1 of 2 weapons from each of the following 4 categories to disperse 1 of to each member. Pistol- Hi-Power or 1911. Rifle- M16A1 or Mini-14. SMG- Thompson or Micro-Uzi and a heavy machine gun-M60 or M2. How does the SS-B Team get out of this one? AR Drew - I am looking for a short (under 10”) bolt action 300blk. Ideally it would be 1/5 twist and I would only shoot suppressed. My question for Jeremy is how important is that fast twist on a short barrel with subsonic 300blk? The twist really limits options to the B&T SPR300 (about $5k), the Q Mini Fix (about $2500 dealer cost but Q), the Christensen Arms MPP (about $2k when you can find them), or more custom options like Black Collar Arms. What does the crew recommend?
Send us a textFIRST BLOOD SPECIAL NOTE: SEASON 15 OF THE GOOD, THE POD AND THE UGLY CELEBRATES THE USE OF THE PRACTICAL AND DIGITAL EFFECT KNOWN AS THE SQUIB. IRL GUN VIOLENCE IS INTOLERABLE AND RENOUNCED BUT... CINEMATIC VIOLENCE WILL BE CELEBRATED IN A WAY WILL DISTURB SOME LISTENERS. FIRST BLOOD (1982), a.k.a. Rambo I! Surely the best possible pick for TGTPTU's Season 15 – Squib Season. An‘80s action flick, special forces, small town cops, a M60 machine rifle capable of firing 600 rounds a minute… Unless… Perhaps… Could it be the sequels changed the original movie, that actually the Rambo series starts not as the rah-rah patriotic killer of anonymous foreign brown peoples with knife, machine gun, and explosive-tipped arrows? Affirmative. (Yes.) After years in development hell trying to adapt an early 70s anti-war novel about a young returning soldier-drifter (perhaps even younger than pod host Thomas and season guest Jack) with PSTD from his time as an elite killer in Vietnam, the movie First Blood went through three production companies and eighteen screenplays--including pod fav and former 4x4 season director John Frankenheimer attached at one point and Paul Newman, Al Pacino, Steve McQueen (who liked the jailbreak+motorcycle chase), Eastwood, DeNiro, Nolte, and Michael Douglas all considered for the role--as a nearly a decade passed from the actions of the undeclared war in ‘Nam contemporary with the novel and the protagonist subsequently aged up in the movie's contemporary Regan-era world. Other elements in adapting the book for the screen included giving Rambo a first name (John); omitting alternating storylines between Rambo and Sheriff Teasle; reducing the vet's body count from intentional dozens killed in the forest and back in town to one confirmed death falling from a helicopter after John Rambo throws a rock (with three additional possible from a vehicle wreck and gunshot wound), and giving Rambo a good cry at the film's end. But while changes made, one thing unfortunate for the pod was maintained adapting the book into movie: Neither has blood squibs. While a tree gets shot and a wall explodes in simulated gunfire, few people get plugged on screen in this action film, and those who do are sans exploded condoms of red liquid and juicy matter. Despite the franchise reputation to be parodied in pod fav Hot Shots! Part Deux (1993), this initial entry in the Rambo film pentalogy is relatively bloodless. (Here might be a good place for a parenthetical on how this film was selected by bookworm Thomas who's expressed subversive reservations about the violence inherent in this season of the pod.) This ep: Jack returns to the pod, Thomas presents the book report, Ken postulates that shooting the picture during an unexpectedly cold Canadian autumn might be why the sequels take place in warmer climes, Ryan continues his disgusting habit of recommending other film podcasts, and Sidney Poitier's Ghost Dad (1990) reenters the chat. Note: Former presidential candidate Ross Perot's involvement with Vietnam War POW/MIA in the 80s, playability reviews of the NES and arcade Rambo video games, and episode-by-episode recaps of the 1986 Saturday morning Rambo cartoon series were all cut for brevity. THEME SONG BY: WEIRD A.I.Email: thegoodthepodandtheugly@gmail.comFacebook: https://m.facebook.com/TGTPTUInstagram: https://instagram.com/thegoodthepodandtheugly?igshid=um92md09kjg0Bluesky: @goodpodugly.bsky.socialYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6mI2plrgJu-TB95bbJCW-gLetterboxd (follow us!):Podcast: goodpoduglyKen: Ken KoralRyan: Ryan Tobias
This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. Out of nowhere, my Firefox browser on my Mac mini started automatically adding every page I visited to my bookmarks. At first, I thought it was a bug after recent update —maybe a misconfigured setting or similar. But when I searched for a fix, Google suggested something alarming: Scan for malware. And guess what? The source of my trouble turned out to be an 4 SVG files hiding malicious code. That's right—those innocent-looking vector graphics files we use every day for logos, icons, and web design? They can secretly carry malware. In my case those were the files, a logos of reputable delivery companies like deliveroo and JustEat which I have downloaded while I was updating a website for my client. Today, we're breaking down how SVG files are being weaponized, why they're so effective, and how to protect yourself. example of svg file Provide feedback on this episode.
Dive into the ultimate Rambo First Blood finale with First Blood: Nothing Is Over Part 4! In this exciting conclusion of the It's a Long Road podcast series, we unpack the iconic Sylvester Stallone film with special guest Brent, a lifelong Rambo fan and wrestling enthusiast. From hidden trivia about Delmare Barry's widow—revealed as Thelma Towns Gibson—to dissecting Rambo's call sign “Raven” and the M60 gun scene, this episode is packed with First Blood insights. We explore Stallone's legacy, the Vietnam War themes, and even tie in wrestling nostalgia with Hulk Hogan's Rocky 3 cameo. Perfect for Rambo fans, movie buffs, and trivia lovers—don't miss this deep dive into the action classicThe Rambo Trivia Book: 200 questions from First Blood to Last Blood Watch on YouTubeJoin the FB group https://bit.ly/3in5DXzJoin the Twitter https://bit.ly/344oSBUJoin the Discord https://discord.gg/aQyx9y9ZZdJoin the Patreon https://bit.ly/3jJb7wH email: ramboseriespodcast@gmail.com
Dive into the ultimate Rambo First Blood finale with First Blood: Nothing Is Over Part 4! In this exciting conclusion of the It's a Long Road podcast series, we unpack the iconic Sylvester Stallone film with special guest Brent, a lifelong Rambo fan and wrestling enthusiast. From hidden trivia about Delmare Barry's widow—revealed as Thelma Towns Gibson—to dissecting Rambo's call sign “Raven” and the M60 gun scene, this episode is packed with First Blood insights. We explore Stallone's legacy, the Vietnam War themes, and even tie in wrestling nostalgia with Hulk Hogan's Rocky 3 cameo. Perfect for Rambo fans, movie buffs, and trivia lovers—don't miss this deep dive into the action classicThe Rambo Trivia Book: 200 questions from First Blood to Last Blood Watch on YouTubeJoin the FB group https://bit.ly/3in5DXzJoin the Twitter https://bit.ly/344oSBUJoin the Discord https://discord.gg/aQyx9y9ZZdJoin the Patreon https://bit.ly/3jJb7wH email: ramboseriespodcast@gmail.com
Interview with Robert "RJ" Thomas retired Navy Seal.Years of Service: 1963-1995This is Episode 100, featuring Navy Seal RJ Thomas, who has been twice nominated for the Medal of Honor and is a recipient of the Navy Cross.On March 23, 1969, United States Navy Seal Robert J “R.J.” Thomas was flying in one of two Seawolf helicopters that were on a scouting mission near Nuy Da Dung Mountain in Vietnam. As the helicopter approached the mountain, they came under heavy weapons fire and were shot down from about 300 feet with no time for the helicopter to autorotate. RJ was hanging out the side door on a gunner belt when several rounds came through the helo, fragmenting and hitting him in the chest. As the helicopter hit the ground, RJ was thrown about 40 feet from the helicopter crash. RJ was stripped of his sidearm, and his Stoner 64A machine gun had been bent, rendering it inoperable. He had compression-fractured vertebrae and multiple impact wounds to his torso, knee, and hand, and his nose was nearly torn from his face. RJ made his way back to the helicopter, which was now on fire. RJ was able to drag the unconscious pilot Dick Barr from his seat and drag him away from the flames. It was around this time that the second helicopter landed and was able to drop door gunner Dan Riordan to assist, and both were able to get gunner Rick Abbott free and away from the helicopter. They were unable to save anyone else as the fire engulfed the helicopter. The enemy began moving toward the survivors to kill or capture them. As RJ observed his surroundings, he realized the only thing he had left to shoot was the pilot's 1911A1 .45 pistol. The pilot had two fully loaded magazines as well as a chest strap with an extra 45-50 rounds. Shielding Barr's body with his own and using Barr's body and helmet as a stable platform, RJ began shooting the oncoming enemy. At some point, Barr regained consciousness and began loading magazines for Thomas as they went empty.One thing in RJ's favor was the fact that in order for the enemy to get to him, they had to come over a dike about 100 yards away. Each time the enemy would stick their heads up over the dike, RJ would shoot them. RJ was able to hold off the enemy for nearly 40 minutes with a handgun. A rescue helicopter was finally able to land, and as RJ gave a final push to load Barr into the helo, his back gave out, and he fell to the ground. It was at this point that an enemy fighter had rushed to the front of the helicopter where there were no weapons. As the fighter raised his rifle to shoot the rescuing helicopter pilots, RJ shot and killed him with his .45. RJ was finally able to make it back into the helicopter and took over the gunner's position and the M60 machine gun. It was in this position that RJ delivered more retribution for his fallen comrades before the helicopter flew to safety.It should be noted that as the rescue chopper came in and landed, its crew noticed many dead enemy soldiers lying on the ground. Their distances from the downed helo were from 3 to about 150 yards, all shot by RJ with his M1911 .45 ACP.For his incredible courage under fire, the Army nominated RJ Thomas twice for the Medal of Honor but both times the nominations were denied. The Navy declined because RJ was an enlisted man and believed the first Medal of Honor should have been awarded to an officer. Thomas was instead awarded the second highest Navy medal, the Navy Cross, after acknowledging that Thomas had only killed one enemy soldier who had charged the helicopter. In addition to the Navy Cross, RJ was also awarded the Bronze Star, Combat V, Purple Heart, and Cross for Gallantry.RJ Thomas retired in 1995 as a Commander. He won numerous firearms matches in the military and as a civilian. He qualified as a Distinguished Marksman with the handgun and rifle and for years was acknowledged as the best shooter in the Navy. Thomas is known for instituting the Naval Special Warfare Sniper program, and the people who worked for him say he was one of the best leaders they ever worked for.
In 2019, Loti Nambombe was on the brink of taking his own life. He was standing on the edge of Manchester's M60, ready to jump, when a passerby stopped and talked him down. The night was a blur for Loti, and in the years that follow he tells people about the stranger who saved his life. Now, five years later, he wants to find him. But all he's got is a name...Andy. In Finding Andy, host and journalist Jake Warren wants to reunite Loti with the man who saved him, and gain closure for both of them. Finding… is a Message Heard production. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
GB2RS News Sunday the 15th of September The news headlines: The RSGB is looking for its next Youth Champion Success for an RSGB member at the IARU ARDF Championship Today is the last chance to book early bird tickets for the RSGB Convention The RSGB is looking for its next volunteer Youth Champion. This could be one role or split between people who focus on different aspects of it. The Youth Champion will work closely with RSGB Board Liaison Ben Lloyd, GW4BML and the RSGB Outreach Team to ignite interest and develop links with schools, universities, Scouts, Guides and the general public. They will also help to support current young amateurs and motivate them to try new things within amateur radio after they gain their license. This role needs someone proactive, good at building relationships with young people, and passionate about inspiring the next generation of radio amateurs. For the full role description go to rsgb.org/volunteers and if you would like to apply or find out more, contact Ben Lloyd via gw4bml@rsgb.org.uk The 24th IARU Region 1 ARDF Championships in Bulgaria saw an RSGB member on the podium. David Williams, M3WDD took the silver medal position in the M60 category of the 144MHz Classic five-transmitter race at the Championships held at Primorsko, Bulgaria earlier this month. David had come so very close to winning being only 14 seconds behind the winner Jozef Simecek of Slovakia. There were four races altogether. The week of competition started with the Sprint race on 80m followed the next day by the 2m five-transmitter Classic race for the M60 category in which David did so well. A well-earned rest day followed and after that came the 80m five-transmitter race. The week ended with the Foxoring event, a combination of direction finding and orienteering, again using the 80m band. You can see the results in full, and read more about ARDF, at rsgb.org/ardf Don't forget that the RSGB Convention early bird price ends today, Sunday the 15th of September. There's a range of great presentations planned, a fantastic microcontroller workshop to take part in, as well as all the fabulous social opportunities to enjoy like the Gala Dinner. Go to rsgb.org/convention to find out more and book your tickets. Have you ever tried LoRa? Or Node Red? Have you used the Raspberry Pico for coding or played a Morse game with an Arduino? These are just some of the great activities on the RSGB's website that are available for National Coding Week which begins this Monday, the 16th of September. Whether you fancy doing something different for a club night or would like to sample something new just for fun, there's an activity to inspire you! You could even try combining your love of amateur radio with the software interests of a young family member. The RSGB is offering nine activities this year so head over to rsgb.org/coding and get involved. The next Bletchley Park 1940s weekend is taking place on the 21st and 22nd of September. If you are visiting for the event, make sure you drop into the RSGB National Radio Centre where you'll be able to see several World War Two receivers on display. Don't forget that RSGB members can get free entry to Bletchley Park, which also includes admission to the RSGB National Radio Centre. You can access this fantastic offer by logging into the RSGB membership portal via rsgb.org/members and selecting ‘Visit Bletchley Park'. Don't forget that National Hamfest 2024 is coming up on the 27th and 28th of September and promises to be an unforgettable celebration of all things amateur radio. As always, the traders and manufacturers are lining up to bring you the best in amateur radio equipment and accessories. Many exhibitors will be offering exclusive deals, making it the perfect time to upgrade your gear or add new items to your shack. For more information and to purchase your tickets, visit nationalhamfest.org.uk And now for details of rallies and events The Broadcast Engineering Museum near Gainsborough in Lincolnshire is new and a work in progress, so it only opens a few days each year. Today, from 11 am to 4 pm, the Museum is having an open day. The Museum contains a vast collection of historic broadcasting equipment and memorabilia, some restored and working, on display in a former RAF sergeants' mess. Free parking is available on-site. For more information email contactus@becg.org.uk or visit becg.org.uk The British Vintage Wireless Society is holding a swap meet and auction today, the 15th at the Weatherley Centre, Eagle Farm Road, Biggleswade, Bedfordshire, SG18 8JH. Stallholders can gain entry from 9 am. Admission for visitors will be available from 9.30 am for £8. The auction starts at 12.30 pm and hot and cold refreshments will be available all day. For more information visit bvws.org.uk or email Jeremy Owen, G8MLK at secretary@bvws.org.uk The East Midlands Ham and Electronics Rally is taking place on Saturday the 21st of September. The venue will be Beckingham Village Hall, Southfield Lane, Doncaster, DN10 4FX. The doors will be open for visitors from 9.30 am until 4 pm and admission will cost £3 per person. Disabled access will be available from 9.15 am. For more information, including booking and contact details, visit g0raf.co.uk/rally Weston Super Mare Radio Society Radio and Electronics Rally will take place on Sunday the 22nd of September from 10 am. The venue will be The Campus Community Centre, Worle, Weston super Mare, BS24 7DX. For further information and to book a table email westonradiosociety@gmail.com Now the Special Event news To celebrate the G-QRP Club's 50th anniversary special callsign G5LOW, and all its regional variants, will be QRV until the 30th of September. In addition, several overseas stations will be joining in with the event. For more information, including details of commemorative certificates that will be available for chasers, visit tinyurl.com/GQRP50 Advance notice now that during October and November, special callsign PZ5JT will be back on the air from Surinam during the jungle training of the Royal Dutch Army and Marines. The station is operated by personnel from the signal regiment and they will be working on the 40, 20, 17, 15 and 10m bands using SSB. Operators will be using in-service military L3Harris radios from different locations and will welcome your call. Now the DX news Carl Gorse, 2E0HPI will be operating from multiple locations for the Parks On The Air scheme around the Lancashire area from tomorrow, the 16th, to Friday the 20th of September. He will be using Yaesu FT-857d and Xiegu G90 transceivers with 20W. Listen out for Carl on all bands from 160 to 10m using FT4, FT8 and SSB. Maxim, OH7O will be active as 3D2YY from Viti Levu, OC- 016, on Fiji until the 19th of September. He will operate mostly SSB and some slow CW on the 40 to 10m bands, and possibly the 80m band, from different locations around the island. See QRZ.com for more information. Now the contest news Today, the 15th, the 70MHz Affiliated Societies Contest runs from 0900 to 1200UTC. Using all modes on the 4m band, the exchange is signal report, serial number and locator. The Worked All Europe DX SSB Contest started at 0000UTC on Saturday the 14th and runs until 2359UTC today, Sunday the 15th of September. Using SSB on the 80 to 10m bands, where contests are permitted, the exchange is signal report and serial number. Today, the 15th, the UK Microwave Group 24 to 76GHz Contest runs from 0900 to 1700UTC. Using All modes on 24 to 76GHz frequencies, the exchange is signal report, serial number and locator. Also, today, the 15th, the IRTS 70cm Counties Contest runs from 1300 to 1330UTC. Using SSB and FM on the 70cm band, the exchange is signal report, serial number and locator. Irish stations also give their county. The IRTS 2m Counties Contest is also taking place today, the 15th, from 1300 to 1500 UTC. Using SSB and FM on the 2m band, the exchange is signal report, serial number and locator. Irish stations also give their county. Also today, the 15th, the British Amateur Radio Teledata Group Sprint PSK63 Contest runs from 1700 to 2100UTC. Using PSK63 on the 80 to 10m bands, where contests are permitted, the exchange is your serial number. Tomorrow, the 16th, the RSGB FT4 Contest runs from 1900 to 2030 UTC. Using FT4 on the 80 to 10m bands, the exchange is your report. On Tuesday the 17th, the 1.3GHz UK Activity Contest runs from 1900 to 2130 UTC. Using all modes on 1.3GHz frequencies, the exchange is signal report, serial number and locator. On Thursday the 19th, the 70MHz UK Activity Contest runs from 1900 to 2130 UTC. Using all modes on the 4m band, the exchange is signal report, serial number and locator. On Sunday the 22nd, the Practical Wireless 70MHz Contest runs from 1200 to 1600UTC. Using all modes on the 4m band, the exchange is signal report, serial number and locator. Now the radio propagation report, compiled by G0KYA, G3YLA, and G4BAO on Thursday the 12th of September 2024 Last week showed that HF conditions are improving as we head into the autumn. With a solar flux index still above 200, there was plenty of DX available to work. CDXC members reported working VP6WR on the Pitcairn Islands, KH8T on American Samoa and 3D2USU on Fiji, which is not a bad catch for early September. A little closer to home, 9A168TESLA in Croatia has been popping up for short periods celebrating the 168th anniversary of the birthday of electrical pioneer Nikola Tesla. Watch DX Summit closely for operating times. The daylight maximum useable frequency, or MUF, over 3,000 kilometres remains above 28MHz on the whole, although a raised Kp index tends to reduce this. Geomagnetic conditions remained relatively calm with the Kp index below 3 all week. That changed on Thursday the 12th as material from a coronal mass ejection, or CME passed the ACE spacecraft in the early hours. The solar wind speed increased to more than 500 kilometres per second and the Bz swung south. On Thursday the 12th, the Kp index was 5 and the Met Office Space Weather department was forecasting potentially unsettled conditions for this weekend, ending today the 15th. At the same time an X-class flare occurred, with lowered MUFs due to increased D-layer absorption. Two large coronal holes on the Sun's surface are also now Earth-facing and threaten to add to the solar wind this weekend. According to NOAA's predictions, the solar flux index should stay in the 210 to 225 range next week, although a large number of spots are about to rotate off the Sun's visible disk. This may be compensated by an active region that's about to rotate into view. This has been emitting C-Class and lower-level M-flares and could potentially be the same region that produced several energetic eruptions off the far side of the Sun over the past week. Time will tell. And now the VHF and up propagation news from G3YLA and G4BAO The heavy showers at the end of last week produced some good rain scatter, but no QSOs in the UK were noted due to the showers not coinciding with GHz contests and few suitable home stations were active to take advantage of them. After a gradual build-up of pressure over this weekend, ending the 15th, high pressure is suggested by most models during the coming week. However, there is some uncertainty about the position of the high. Currently, models are favouring the north of Britain and this means that in the south, although still on the edge of high pressure, there could be a brisk northeasterly breeze, which may weaken the inversion prospects. It's not clear if the Tropo will be functioning in time for the 70MHz Affiliated Societies Contest today, the 15th, but should be helpful for the 1.3GHz UK Activity Contest on Tuesday the 17th and the 70MHz UK Activity Contest on Thursday the 19th. Solar conditions are still likely to offer the chance of the occasional elevated Kp index, which is a good sign of possible aurora. It will be interesting to see how things evolve this weekend, ending the 15th, as a series of expected CMEs are due to reach Earth. The amateur bands between 10m and 2m are the ones to check as well as looking out for ‘watery' sounding signals on the HF bands. Remember it doesn't have to be dark for radio aurora, so don't wait for dusk before checking. Meteor scatter is mainly down to random activity in the coming week. However, with the September Epsilon Perseids stream still active until the 21st, having peaked on the 9th, conditions may be slightly enhanced. For EME operators, Moon declination is negative but rising and going positive again on Wednesday the 18th. Moon visibility windows will continue to rise while path losses decrease as we approach perigee on Wednesday the 18th. 144MHz sky noise is moderate for the whole of next week. And that's all from the propagation team this week.
Ariella; lethal and lovely.Based on a post by ronde, in 2 parts. Listen to the ► Podcast at Steamy Stories.Packed and Stacked.She was maybe twenty-five, and even in the battle dress she was wearing, she looked slender. I couldn’t tell much else about her except she looked a little the Arabic women I’d seen in Afghanistan. I was sure about two things though; the rifle was an Israeli M 89 SR sniper rifle, and she sounded very serious when she spoke.“What are you doing here?” she demanded.Since I was armed to the teeth and had just shot a guy, my story about being a tourist and out taking some pictures wasn’t going to work very well. The truth would work better unless she was one of the traffickers. I didn’t think she was though. If she had been, she’d have just shot me while she had the chance.“I’m an American. This guy hired me to track down some gold he thought was hidden in an old led mine. This is where the led mine is supposed to be located. I hadn’t counted on there being anybody else here.”She smiled then.“You’ll be Dale Stevenson, right?”“Yeah. How do you know that?”She was still smiling.“We can talk about that later. Right now, we need to take care of the guys who are going to come down that road in a couple of minutes.”Showdown looming.When the truck finally came into view, the men looked a little hesitant and the woman told me why.“They’re taking it slow because they don’t know who’s out here. If it was the Argentine Army, the traffickers would have known they were coming and they wouldn’t be here. That’s because they pay certain people in the Army to protect them. They would just relocate and the Army could appear to be doing their job because they discovered the camp. Once they figure out where we are, they won’t stop until we’re dead or they are so I hope you’re a good shot. During my briefing they said you are.”It was about then the truck came creeping down the road. The woman sighted through the rifle scope and with two quick shots; she shot the driver and smashed in the receiver of the M60.The men bailed out of the pickup and clustered up behind it, then talked for a while before another man pulled the dead driver out of the truck, got back in, started the engine, and started it back down the road. The other men followed behind it with their rifles ready. When they got close enough to see their faces, most of them looked scared.The woman was looking through the scope on her rifle when she whispered.“They’re still looking for where the shots came from, Oh, one of them just pointed in the direction of the man you shot. They think the shots came from those rocks over there. They’ll keep the truck between them and the rocks until they’re pretty close, and then jump out from behind it and start firing at those rocks and any other cover they see. We’ll have to take them before they spread out too much. I’ll take out the driver and the ones in the lead. You start at the rear and work your way toward the truck.”The truck continued to creep down the road, and when they were about ten meters from the main road, the men began to move up the side of the truck. She took out the driver and that was my signal. I sighted in on the man furthest from the truck and fired.The whole thing took less than a minute. I saw one man running back toward the camp, but he didn’t make it. The woman’s shot dropped him face first in the dirt of the road.Well, like I said, my original intention was to retreat if possible. Now, we’d shot a bunch of people based on what the woman had said, and I didn’t have the slightest idea who the hell she was or who they were. The only thing I was sure of was I was in deep shit and it was probably going to get deeper.I turned to look at the woman. She was in the process of changing magazines on her rifle. She slammed the full magazine into the magazine well, checked the chamber for a live round, and then looked up and smiled.“I guess you’re as good as they said. You only missed twice.”She was beginning to piss me off by telling me what to do and then criticizing me for how I did it.“Yeah, well, it’s been a while since I’ve been in a firefight. Since you seem to know everything about me and what just happened, what do we do now?”She stood up, shouldered the rifle, and frowned.“I’ve been watching that camp for a week waiting for you to get here, and I counted twelve men. That means there are five left. They’ll wait a while for these men to come back, but when they don’t they’ll send at least two to find out what happened. We need to get to that camp before they do that.”“And what do we do when we get there? I don’t really like shooting people when I don’t know which side they’re on.”She smiled again.“They’re on the side that would kill both of us without even thinking about it. Does that help?”Moving to a safer place.We kept to the rocks until we got to the trees, and then made our way to the camp by walking a few meters from the road. Two men were just walking to the second truck when we got there. The woman tapped me on the shoulder and when I looked she pointed at the shack and held up three fingers, the pointed to me.Without waiting for an answer, she sighted down the scope of her rifle. A second later, the guy starting to climb in the driver’s seat grabbed his chest and then fell down. It was maybe two seconds later and after the other guy started running back to the shack that he went down with a bullet in his back.That was about when the other three came running out of the shack with their rifles. I took them out with three shots. Then, we waited to see if any of them were going to get up or if there were any more in the shack. After five minutes, all was quiet, so the woman stood up.“That should be all of them. Let’s go see what they have in the shacks.”I noticed she didn’t shoulder the rifle this time, and she didn’t just walk out into the clearing. She ran to take cover behind the truck first. I followed her and kept watching our flanks and rear.Once we were at the truck, she peeked around it at the shack, then ran the three meters to the corner. Once she was there, she motioned for me. I knew what she wanted me to do because it was a standard method of entering a building used by US Army Rangers. I ran to the other corner. Once I was there, we started working our way to the door.Her count had been right. There was nobody in the smaller shack. It was evidently sort of a barracks and mess hall, because there were four cots on one side. On the other side was a table and a small wood-burning stove.We left the shack and repeated the same thing on the larger shack. When we pushed open the door there, I saw the reason the traffickers were there.Inside that shack and in a clump were six young girls holding on to each other because they were terrified. Two looked like the women I’d seen in Buenos Aires, but the other four were definitely Asian.The woman rattled off something in Spanish, and then something in what I guessed was French. It looked to me like the girls relaxed a little then. The two Hispanic girls smiled, and two of the Asian girls said something back to her and then started jabbering away at the other two.The woman turned to me and smiled.“I just told them we were here to rescue them. The girls who talked to me are Vietnamese girls and they understood French. They said they’ve been here for two weeks. The other two Asian girls are from Taiwan and they speak Chinese. The two Vietnamese girls are telling them what I said. Now we have to get them somewhere safe. I can take care of that.”The woman pulled what looked like a cell phone from her vest and tapped the screen, then held it to her ear. A few seconds later, she said, “Secure. Six kittens”. She got an answer, said, “Ready in fifteen”, then tapped the screen again. As she put the cell phone back in her vest, she smiled.“You’re wondering how I got a cell phone to work out here aren’t you? It is a cell phone so if I were to be captured, it won’t raise any suspicions. It works just like any other cell phone except it will only communicate with our own cell towers. My group has a mobile tower about six kilometers from here. They’ll meet us at the road in about fifteen minutes.”Like she said, about fifteen minutes later, a bus drove up and stopped where the road to the camp met the main road. Once the six girls were on board, the bus drove off and left the woman and me standing there in the road. I asked her why she didn’t get on the bus too. She smiled.“I’ll tell you on the way back to their camp. We have a few things left to do.”Her story explained a lot about her and how she knew so much about me.“My name, my real name, is Ariella. You don’t need to know my last name."Ariella is Hebrew for "Lioness of God”. My father named me that because he said I was so much like my grandfather. My grandfather was killed during the rebellion in the Warsaw ghetto. My other grandparents were sent to Treblinka where they were killed.“My father was ten years old then, and during the fighting, some people in the Polish resistance smuggled him out of the ghetto and into the forest. From there, he was taken to a Catholic monastery where he was baptized as a Catholic so the Germans wouldn’t arrest and take him to a concentration camp. He had to learn how to act like a Catholic boy in a very short time, but he was a smart boy and survived the war that way."When the war ended, my father was taken to France and placed with Catholic foster parents. He grew up on a vineyard near Langon and learned to speak French, but he never forgot he was Jewish. As soon as he reached the age of nineteen, he left France for Israel and began searching for any relatives who survived the camps. He found no one with the same last name who remembered his father or mother. Instead, he found Miriam, the woman he would marry and the woman who would become my mother."Her past was much like my father’s, though she was French. Her parents placed her with Catholic friends when the Nazi’s began arresting French Jews. She was later taken to Spain and raised by a family there. She was only eighteen when she went to Israel in hopes of finding her family. She found a job to support herself working in the government, and that is how she met my father."From my mother, I learned to speak and write Spanish. From both my father and mother, I learned to speak and write French and Hebrew."When I was eighteen, I was conscripted into the Israeli Defense Force. Because my testing showed I had an aptitude for languages, when I finished basic and combat training, I was sent to a school to learn to speak and write Arabic. After that school, I was transferred to the Combat Intelligence Collection Corps. I was made part of Sayeret Matkal, the Israeli Special Forces branch that does recon and intelligence gathering behind enemy lines. I can’t tell you what I did there."When I finished my service, a man came to see me and asked if I’d like to help Israel in a different way. What he told me sounded exciting, so I accepted and became part of the Duvdevan Unit. I spent two years dressed in civilian clothes in several Arab countries gathering intelligence on terrorist organizations. A year ago, I was identified by one of the radical Islamic organizations as an Israeli agent and had to leave the Middle East or I’d have been killed. I was assigned to Argentina to gather intelligence on the Neo-Nazi groups that are located here and to some extent, in Brazil and other South American countries."The men we just killed are part of a Neo-Nazi group who call their organization Ahner. They took their name from the Nazi Germany think-tank known as Ahnenerbe. Their ideology is the same as the German Nazi party. They advocate the elimination or enslavement or all races they consider inferior, and they finance their operations by trafficking in sex slaves of those same races. That’s what they’re doing out here; financing their operations. I was assigned to stop them."The camp you saw is a lay-over point between the ports in Chile where they land the girls and wherever they’re going next. It might be the brothels in Buenos Aires, Mexico, almost any country including the US. They will kill anyone who tries to stop them. Do you feel better about what we did now?”I’d heard of the Duvdeven Unit of the Israeli Special Forces, but the name was about all I’d heard. Nobody, not even the CIA guys I worked with, knew much about what the Duvdeven Unit did, or if they knew, they weren’t telling anybody. All that was known was they were Israelis who were fluent in Arabic and dressed in the clothing of the local population. Supposedly they infiltrated the ranks of the terrorists and sent that information back to Israel. There were rumors about assassinations of high-ranking terrorist officials, but that’s all they were, just rumors.That knowledge explained a lot of things about Ariella. I knew the Israeli Special Forces are among the most highly trained fighting forces in the world and were as good as our own US Army Rangers and Navy SEALs. To work undercover in the situations in Afghanistan and Iran would require more than training though. It would require an immense amount of self-confidence and as one of my Ranger instructors had once said, “balls big enough to need a wheelbarrow”.It also explained how much she knew about me. The CIA in the Middle East and the Israeli Special Forces have a very close working relationship. All it would take is for someone in the ISF to request information about me and they’d have it. What I didn’t understand is why they were interested in what I was doing in Argentina.“OK, I understand why you’re here, but you said you were waiting on me for a week. It’s not that I don’t appreciate you bailing my ass out of trouble, but why are you so interested in why I’m here?”Ariella stopped walking then and turned to face me.“Because Marcus Richter hired you.”I was confused again.“Richter isn’t a Neo-Nazi. He’s a dealer in international currencies.”Ariella smiled.“That’s what he told you, and he is, but his story is more detailed than that.At the end of World War Two, the Allies were looking for a German banker named Heinrich Richter because he was responsible for sending much of the gold pillaged by the German Army to Swiss banks. They wanted his records and his testimony so they could return the gold to the appropriate countries.Israel was very interested as well, because a significant amount of that gold came from Jews in the countries Germany overran. The Allies were closing in on him when he disappeared. The rumor was he was able to escape to Argentina. Through our intelligence efforts in Argentina, we learned he did indeed relocate to Argentina where he married a local woman with high status in the government. Unfortunately, we learned that information after he died."For several years, we monitored the activities of his wife and son, the same Marcus Richter who spoke with you. His mother appears to have retired to an estate in the country with a private nurse, and no one other than Richter visits or telephones her. In our observations of Richter though, it was soon evident he has close connections with several Neo-Nazi groups in Argentina. We suspected he was using his business to launder money for them, but we were never able to positively tie his financial dealings to them. Richter is smart and he uses Swiss banks for all the transfers. Getting information from a Swiss bank is something even Israel can not easily do. The reason is the amount of Nazi gold still held in those banks."We needed a way to stop him, so we laid a trap for him. We forged the hallmark on a single gold bar and arranged for another currency trader who supports our cause to contact him. We also planted the story about the submarines through another of our contacts in Argentina, a former member of the ISF who emigrated from Germany to Argentina a few years ago. The man who told Richter about the smelter was another of our contacts who casually related the story to Richter’s assistants. The story about the mine and its location has been rumored in Argentina for years so once we had located the smelter for him, Richter assumed the gold must be in the mine, just as we intended.The rest of the story you already know, except that the money you are being paid came from the treasury of Ahner. We know that information through the efforts of a man who is the son of a Jewish man and his Argentine wife. He grew up in Buenos Aires and is fluent in Spanish. He has infiltrated Ahner and relays information on their activities to my unit.”I was beginning to understand now and I didn’t feel good about the whole deal.“So, there is no gold?”Ariella smiled.“We believe there is a cache of Nazi gold somewhere in Argentina, but it is not likely to be found. All the people who knew of it are dead by now and as far as we’ve been able to determine, they didn’t pass the information on to anyone. As for any gold here in a led mine, well, there is a led mine a few kilometers from here, but it doesn’t have any gold.”“So I came down here for nothing?”“Oh no, you are going to be very useful. When you go back and tell Richter there is no gold here, he’ll have to relay that to Ahner. In the past, his contracts with Ahner have been that he is paid an advance which would be returned should his work not be successful. Since he will have failed in this attempt, Anher will demand that Richter return the advance.He won’t be able to do that because as we speak, the US is quietly in the process of freezing all his US bank accounts and arranging for a transfer from his Swiss bank would take too long"It would be my guess that when Ahner can’t get their money back, Marcus Richter will suddenly disappear and never be found. That is what happened to the last person who promised something to Ahner and then didn’t deliver. As I said, they will kill anyone without even a second thought.”“It sounds like I need to start sleeping with a pistol from now on. Thanks a lot.”Ariella shook her head.“No. You’re in no danger. We know Richter never disclosed your identity to Ahner, and the ammunition for both our rifles and your pistol are common to weapons issued to the Argentine Army and of the same manufacturer. When we leave, I’ll leave some evidence that it was the Argentine Army that attacked the camp. That does happen from time to time, usually when some company commander decides he isn’t being paid well enough to keep protecting them.”When we got back to the camp, Ariella took off her backpack.
Ariella; lethal and lovely.Based on a post by ronde, in 2 parts. Listen to the ► Podcast at Steamy Stories.Packed and Stacked.She was maybe twenty-five, and even in the battle dress she was wearing, she looked slender. I couldn’t tell much else about her except she looked a little the Arabic women I’d seen in Afghanistan. I was sure about two things though; the rifle was an Israeli M 89 SR sniper rifle, and she sounded very serious when she spoke.“What are you doing here?” she demanded.Since I was armed to the teeth and had just shot a guy, my story about being a tourist and out taking some pictures wasn’t going to work very well. The truth would work better unless she was one of the traffickers. I didn’t think she was though. If she had been, she’d have just shot me while she had the chance.“I’m an American. This guy hired me to track down some gold he thought was hidden in an old led mine. This is where the led mine is supposed to be located. I hadn’t counted on there being anybody else here.”She smiled then.“You’ll be Dale Stevenson, right?”“Yeah. How do you know that?”She was still smiling.“We can talk about that later. Right now, we need to take care of the guys who are going to come down that road in a couple of minutes.”Showdown looming.When the truck finally came into view, the men looked a little hesitant and the woman told me why.“They’re taking it slow because they don’t know who’s out here. If it was the Argentine Army, the traffickers would have known they were coming and they wouldn’t be here. That’s because they pay certain people in the Army to protect them. They would just relocate and the Army could appear to be doing their job because they discovered the camp. Once they figure out where we are, they won’t stop until we’re dead or they are so I hope you’re a good shot. During my briefing they said you are.”It was about then the truck came creeping down the road. The woman sighted through the rifle scope and with two quick shots; she shot the driver and smashed in the receiver of the M60.The men bailed out of the pickup and clustered up behind it, then talked for a while before another man pulled the dead driver out of the truck, got back in, started the engine, and started it back down the road. The other men followed behind it with their rifles ready. When they got close enough to see their faces, most of them looked scared.The woman was looking through the scope on her rifle when she whispered.“They’re still looking for where the shots came from, Oh, one of them just pointed in the direction of the man you shot. They think the shots came from those rocks over there. They’ll keep the truck between them and the rocks until they’re pretty close, and then jump out from behind it and start firing at those rocks and any other cover they see. We’ll have to take them before they spread out too much. I’ll take out the driver and the ones in the lead. You start at the rear and work your way toward the truck.”The truck continued to creep down the road, and when they were about ten meters from the main road, the men began to move up the side of the truck. She took out the driver and that was my signal. I sighted in on the man furthest from the truck and fired.The whole thing took less than a minute. I saw one man running back toward the camp, but he didn’t make it. The woman’s shot dropped him face first in the dirt of the road.Well, like I said, my original intention was to retreat if possible. Now, we’d shot a bunch of people based on what the woman had said, and I didn’t have the slightest idea who the hell she was or who they were. The only thing I was sure of was I was in deep shit and it was probably going to get deeper.I turned to look at the woman. She was in the process of changing magazines on her rifle. She slammed the full magazine into the magazine well, checked the chamber for a live round, and then looked up and smiled.“I guess you’re as good as they said. You only missed twice.”She was beginning to piss me off by telling me what to do and then criticizing me for how I did it.“Yeah, well, it’s been a while since I’ve been in a firefight. Since you seem to know everything about me and what just happened, what do we do now?”She stood up, shouldered the rifle, and frowned.“I’ve been watching that camp for a week waiting for you to get here, and I counted twelve men. That means there are five left. They’ll wait a while for these men to come back, but when they don’t they’ll send at least two to find out what happened. We need to get to that camp before they do that.”“And what do we do when we get there? I don’t really like shooting people when I don’t know which side they’re on.”She smiled again.“They’re on the side that would kill both of us without even thinking about it. Does that help?”Moving to a safer place.We kept to the rocks until we got to the trees, and then made our way to the camp by walking a few meters from the road. Two men were just walking to the second truck when we got there. The woman tapped me on the shoulder and when I looked she pointed at the shack and held up three fingers, the pointed to me.Without waiting for an answer, she sighted down the scope of her rifle. A second later, the guy starting to climb in the driver’s seat grabbed his chest and then fell down. It was maybe two seconds later and after the other guy started running back to the shack that he went down with a bullet in his back.That was about when the other three came running out of the shack with their rifles. I took them out with three shots. Then, we waited to see if any of them were going to get up or if there were any more in the shack. After five minutes, all was quiet, so the woman stood up.“That should be all of them. Let’s go see what they have in the shacks.”I noticed she didn’t shoulder the rifle this time, and she didn’t just walk out into the clearing. She ran to take cover behind the truck first. I followed her and kept watching our flanks and rear.Once we were at the truck, she peeked around it at the shack, then ran the three meters to the corner. Once she was there, she motioned for me. I knew what she wanted me to do because it was a standard method of entering a building used by US Army Rangers. I ran to the other corner. Once I was there, we started working our way to the door.Her count had been right. There was nobody in the smaller shack. It was evidently sort of a barracks and mess hall, because there were four cots on one side. On the other side was a table and a small wood-burning stove.We left the shack and repeated the same thing on the larger shack. When we pushed open the door there, I saw the reason the traffickers were there.Inside that shack and in a clump were six young girls holding on to each other because they were terrified. Two looked like the women I’d seen in Buenos Aires, but the other four were definitely Asian.The woman rattled off something in Spanish, and then something in what I guessed was French. It looked to me like the girls relaxed a little then. The two Hispanic girls smiled, and two of the Asian girls said something back to her and then started jabbering away at the other two.The woman turned to me and smiled.“I just told them we were here to rescue them. The girls who talked to me are Vietnamese girls and they understood French. They said they’ve been here for two weeks. The other two Asian girls are from Taiwan and they speak Chinese. The two Vietnamese girls are telling them what I said. Now we have to get them somewhere safe. I can take care of that.”The woman pulled what looked like a cell phone from her vest and tapped the screen, then held it to her ear. A few seconds later, she said, “Secure. Six kittens”. She got an answer, said, “Ready in fifteen”, then tapped the screen again. As she put the cell phone back in her vest, she smiled.“You’re wondering how I got a cell phone to work out here aren’t you? It is a cell phone so if I were to be captured, it won’t raise any suspicions. It works just like any other cell phone except it will only communicate with our own cell towers. My group has a mobile tower about six kilometers from here. They’ll meet us at the road in about fifteen minutes.”Like she said, about fifteen minutes later, a bus drove up and stopped where the road to the camp met the main road. Once the six girls were on board, the bus drove off and left the woman and me standing there in the road. I asked her why she didn’t get on the bus too. She smiled.“I’ll tell you on the way back to their camp. We have a few things left to do.”Her story explained a lot about her and how she knew so much about me.“My name, my real name, is Ariella. You don’t need to know my last name."Ariella is Hebrew for "Lioness of God”. My father named me that because he said I was so much like my grandfather. My grandfather was killed during the rebellion in the Warsaw ghetto. My other grandparents were sent to Treblinka where they were killed.“My father was ten years old then, and during the fighting, some people in the Polish resistance smuggled him out of the ghetto and into the forest. From there, he was taken to a Catholic monastery where he was baptized as a Catholic so the Germans wouldn’t arrest and take him to a concentration camp. He had to learn how to act like a Catholic boy in a very short time, but he was a smart boy and survived the war that way."When the war ended, my father was taken to France and placed with Catholic foster parents. He grew up on a vineyard near Langon and learned to speak French, but he never forgot he was Jewish. As soon as he reached the age of nineteen, he left France for Israel and began searching for any relatives who survived the camps. He found no one with the same last name who remembered his father or mother. Instead, he found Miriam, the woman he would marry and the woman who would become my mother."Her past was much like my father’s, though she was French. Her parents placed her with Catholic friends when the Nazi’s began arresting French Jews. She was later taken to Spain and raised by a family there. She was only eighteen when she went to Israel in hopes of finding her family. She found a job to support herself working in the government, and that is how she met my father."From my mother, I learned to speak and write Spanish. From both my father and mother, I learned to speak and write French and Hebrew."When I was eighteen, I was conscripted into the Israeli Defense Force. Because my testing showed I had an aptitude for languages, when I finished basic and combat training, I was sent to a school to learn to speak and write Arabic. After that school, I was transferred to the Combat Intelligence Collection Corps. I was made part of Sayeret Matkal, the Israeli Special Forces branch that does recon and intelligence gathering behind enemy lines. I can’t tell you what I did there."When I finished my service, a man came to see me and asked if I’d like to help Israel in a different way. What he told me sounded exciting, so I accepted and became part of the Duvdevan Unit. I spent two years dressed in civilian clothes in several Arab countries gathering intelligence on terrorist organizations. A year ago, I was identified by one of the radical Islamic organizations as an Israeli agent and had to leave the Middle East or I’d have been killed. I was assigned to Argentina to gather intelligence on the Neo-Nazi groups that are located here and to some extent, in Brazil and other South American countries."The men we just killed are part of a Neo-Nazi group who call their organization Ahner. They took their name from the Nazi Germany think-tank known as Ahnenerbe. Their ideology is the same as the German Nazi party. They advocate the elimination or enslavement or all races they consider inferior, and they finance their operations by trafficking in sex slaves of those same races. That’s what they’re doing out here; financing their operations. I was assigned to stop them."The camp you saw is a lay-over point between the ports in Chile where they land the girls and wherever they’re going next. It might be the brothels in Buenos Aires, Mexico, almost any country including the US. They will kill anyone who tries to stop them. Do you feel better about what we did now?”I’d heard of the Duvdeven Unit of the Israeli Special Forces, but the name was about all I’d heard. Nobody, not even the CIA guys I worked with, knew much about what the Duvdeven Unit did, or if they knew, they weren’t telling anybody. All that was known was they were Israelis who were fluent in Arabic and dressed in the clothing of the local population. Supposedly they infiltrated the ranks of the terrorists and sent that information back to Israel. There were rumors about assassinations of high-ranking terrorist officials, but that’s all they were, just rumors.That knowledge explained a lot of things about Ariella. I knew the Israeli Special Forces are among the most highly trained fighting forces in the world and were as good as our own US Army Rangers and Navy SEALs. To work undercover in the situations in Afghanistan and Iran would require more than training though. It would require an immense amount of self-confidence and as one of my Ranger instructors had once said, “balls big enough to need a wheelbarrow”.It also explained how much she knew about me. The CIA in the Middle East and the Israeli Special Forces have a very close working relationship. All it would take is for someone in the ISF to request information about me and they’d have it. What I didn’t understand is why they were interested in what I was doing in Argentina.“OK, I understand why you’re here, but you said you were waiting on me for a week. It’s not that I don’t appreciate you bailing my ass out of trouble, but why are you so interested in why I’m here?”Ariella stopped walking then and turned to face me.“Because Marcus Richter hired you.”I was confused again.“Richter isn’t a Neo-Nazi. He’s a dealer in international currencies.”Ariella smiled.“That’s what he told you, and he is, but his story is more detailed than that.At the end of World War Two, the Allies were looking for a German banker named Heinrich Richter because he was responsible for sending much of the gold pillaged by the German Army to Swiss banks. They wanted his records and his testimony so they could return the gold to the appropriate countries.Israel was very interested as well, because a significant amount of that gold came from Jews in the countries Germany overran. The Allies were closing in on him when he disappeared. The rumor was he was able to escape to Argentina. Through our intelligence efforts in Argentina, we learned he did indeed relocate to Argentina where he married a local woman with high status in the government. Unfortunately, we learned that information after he died."For several years, we monitored the activities of his wife and son, the same Marcus Richter who spoke with you. His mother appears to have retired to an estate in the country with a private nurse, and no one other than Richter visits or telephones her. In our observations of Richter though, it was soon evident he has close connections with several Neo-Nazi groups in Argentina. We suspected he was using his business to launder money for them, but we were never able to positively tie his financial dealings to them. Richter is smart and he uses Swiss banks for all the transfers. Getting information from a Swiss bank is something even Israel can not easily do. The reason is the amount of Nazi gold still held in those banks."We needed a way to stop him, so we laid a trap for him. We forged the hallmark on a single gold bar and arranged for another currency trader who supports our cause to contact him. We also planted the story about the submarines through another of our contacts in Argentina, a former member of the ISF who emigrated from Germany to Argentina a few years ago. The man who told Richter about the smelter was another of our contacts who casually related the story to Richter’s assistants. The story about the mine and its location has been rumored in Argentina for years so once we had located the smelter for him, Richter assumed the gold must be in the mine, just as we intended.The rest of the story you already know, except that the money you are being paid came from the treasury of Ahner. We know that information through the efforts of a man who is the son of a Jewish man and his Argentine wife. He grew up in Buenos Aires and is fluent in Spanish. He has infiltrated Ahner and relays information on their activities to my unit.”I was beginning to understand now and I didn’t feel good about the whole deal.“So, there is no gold?”Ariella smiled.“We believe there is a cache of Nazi gold somewhere in Argentina, but it is not likely to be found. All the people who knew of it are dead by now and as far as we’ve been able to determine, they didn’t pass the information on to anyone. As for any gold here in a led mine, well, there is a led mine a few kilometers from here, but it doesn’t have any gold.”“So I came down here for nothing?”“Oh no, you are going to be very useful. When you go back and tell Richter there is no gold here, he’ll have to relay that to Ahner. In the past, his contracts with Ahner have been that he is paid an advance which would be returned should his work not be successful. Since he will have failed in this attempt, Anher will demand that Richter return the advance.He won’t be able to do that because as we speak, the US is quietly in the process of freezing all his US bank accounts and arranging for a transfer from his Swiss bank would take too long"It would be my guess that when Ahner can’t get their money back, Marcus Richter will suddenly disappear and never be found. That is what happened to the last person who promised something to Ahner and then didn’t deliver. As I said, they will kill anyone without even a second thought.”“It sounds like I need to start sleeping with a pistol from now on. Thanks a lot.”Ariella shook her head.“No. You’re in no danger. We know Richter never disclosed your identity to Ahner, and the ammunition for both our rifles and your pistol are common to weapons issued to the Argentine Army and of the same manufacturer. When we leave, I’ll leave some evidence that it was the Argentine Army that attacked the camp. That does happen from time to time, usually when some company commander decides he isn’t being paid well enough to keep protecting them.”When we got back to the camp, Ariella took off her backpack.
Ariella; lethal and lovely.Based on a post by ronde, in 2 parts. Listen to the ► Podcast at Steamy Stories.Packed and Stacked.She was maybe twenty-five, and even in the battle dress she was wearing, she looked slender. I couldn’t tell much else about her except she looked a little the Arabic women I’d seen in Afghanistan. I was sure about two things though; the rifle was an Israeli M 89 SR sniper rifle, and she sounded very serious when she spoke.“What are you doing here?” she demanded.Since I was armed to the teeth and had just shot a guy, my story about being a tourist and out taking some pictures wasn’t going to work very well. The truth would work better unless she was one of the traffickers. I didn’t think she was though. If she had been, she’d have just shot me while she had the chance.“I’m an American. This guy hired me to track down some gold he thought was hidden in an old led mine. This is where the led mine is supposed to be located. I hadn’t counted on there being anybody else here.”She smiled then.“You’ll be Dale Stevenson, right?”“Yeah. How do you know that?”She was still smiling.“We can talk about that later. Right now, we need to take care of the guys who are going to come down that road in a couple of minutes.”Showdown looming.When the truck finally came into view, the men looked a little hesitant and the woman told me why.“They’re taking it slow because they don’t know who’s out here. If it was the Argentine Army, the traffickers would have known they were coming and they wouldn’t be here. That’s because they pay certain people in the Army to protect them. They would just relocate and the Army could appear to be doing their job because they discovered the camp. Once they figure out where we are, they won’t stop until we’re dead or they are so I hope you’re a good shot. During my briefing they said you are.”It was about then the truck came creeping down the road. The woman sighted through the rifle scope and with two quick shots; she shot the driver and smashed in the receiver of the M60.The men bailed out of the pickup and clustered up behind it, then talked for a while before another man pulled the dead driver out of the truck, got back in, started the engine, and started it back down the road. The other men followed behind it with their rifles ready. When they got close enough to see their faces, most of them looked scared.The woman was looking through the scope on her rifle when she whispered.“They’re still looking for where the shots came from, Oh, one of them just pointed in the direction of the man you shot. They think the shots came from those rocks over there. They’ll keep the truck between them and the rocks until they’re pretty close, and then jump out from behind it and start firing at those rocks and any other cover they see. We’ll have to take them before they spread out too much. I’ll take out the driver and the ones in the lead. You start at the rear and work your way toward the truck.”The truck continued to creep down the road, and when they were about ten meters from the main road, the men began to move up the side of the truck. She took out the driver and that was my signal. I sighted in on the man furthest from the truck and fired.The whole thing took less than a minute. I saw one man running back toward the camp, but he didn’t make it. The woman’s shot dropped him face first in the dirt of the road.Well, like I said, my original intention was to retreat if possible. Now, we’d shot a bunch of people based on what the woman had said, and I didn’t have the slightest idea who the hell she was or who they were. The only thing I was sure of was I was in deep shit and it was probably going to get deeper.I turned to look at the woman. She was in the process of changing magazines on her rifle. She slammed the full magazine into the magazine well, checked the chamber for a live round, and then looked up and smiled.“I guess you’re as good as they said. You only missed twice.”She was beginning to piss me off by telling me what to do and then criticizing me for how I did it.“Yeah, well, it’s been a while since I’ve been in a firefight. Since you seem to know everything about me and what just happened, what do we do now?”She stood up, shouldered the rifle, and frowned.“I’ve been watching that camp for a week waiting for you to get here, and I counted twelve men. That means there are five left. They’ll wait a while for these men to come back, but when they don’t they’ll send at least two to find out what happened. We need to get to that camp before they do that.”“And what do we do when we get there? I don’t really like shooting people when I don’t know which side they’re on.”She smiled again.“They’re on the side that would kill both of us without even thinking about it. Does that help?”Moving to a safer place.We kept to the rocks until we got to the trees, and then made our way to the camp by walking a few meters from the road. Two men were just walking to the second truck when we got there. The woman tapped me on the shoulder and when I looked she pointed at the shack and held up three fingers, the pointed to me.Without waiting for an answer, she sighted down the scope of her rifle. A second later, the guy starting to climb in the driver’s seat grabbed his chest and then fell down. It was maybe two seconds later and after the other guy started running back to the shack that he went down with a bullet in his back.That was about when the other three came running out of the shack with their rifles. I took them out with three shots. Then, we waited to see if any of them were going to get up or if there were any more in the shack. After five minutes, all was quiet, so the woman stood up.“That should be all of them. Let’s go see what they have in the shacks.”I noticed she didn’t shoulder the rifle this time, and she didn’t just walk out into the clearing. She ran to take cover behind the truck first. I followed her and kept watching our flanks and rear.Once we were at the truck, she peeked around it at the shack, then ran the three meters to the corner. Once she was there, she motioned for me. I knew what she wanted me to do because it was a standard method of entering a building used by US Army Rangers. I ran to the other corner. Once I was there, we started working our way to the door.Her count had been right. There was nobody in the smaller shack. It was evidently sort of a barracks and mess hall, because there were four cots on one side. On the other side was a table and a small wood-burning stove.We left the shack and repeated the same thing on the larger shack. When we pushed open the door there, I saw the reason the traffickers were there.Inside that shack and in a clump were six young girls holding on to each other because they were terrified. Two looked like the women I’d seen in Buenos Aires, but the other four were definitely Asian.The woman rattled off something in Spanish, and then something in what I guessed was French. It looked to me like the girls relaxed a little then. The two Hispanic girls smiled, and two of the Asian girls said something back to her and then started jabbering away at the other two.The woman turned to me and smiled.“I just told them we were here to rescue them. The girls who talked to me are Vietnamese girls and they understood French. They said they’ve been here for two weeks. The other two Asian girls are from Taiwan and they speak Chinese. The two Vietnamese girls are telling them what I said. Now we have to get them somewhere safe. I can take care of that.”The woman pulled what looked like a cell phone from her vest and tapped the screen, then held it to her ear. A few seconds later, she said, “Secure. Six kittens”. She got an answer, said, “Ready in fifteen”, then tapped the screen again. As she put the cell phone back in her vest, she smiled.“You’re wondering how I got a cell phone to work out here aren’t you? It is a cell phone so if I were to be captured, it won’t raise any suspicions. It works just like any other cell phone except it will only communicate with our own cell towers. My group has a mobile tower about six kilometers from here. They’ll meet us at the road in about fifteen minutes.”Like she said, about fifteen minutes later, a bus drove up and stopped where the road to the camp met the main road. Once the six girls were on board, the bus drove off and left the woman and me standing there in the road. I asked her why she didn’t get on the bus too. She smiled.“I’ll tell you on the way back to their camp. We have a few things left to do.”Her story explained a lot about her and how she knew so much about me.“My name, my real name, is Ariella. You don’t need to know my last name."Ariella is Hebrew for "Lioness of God”. My father named me that because he said I was so much like my grandfather. My grandfather was killed during the rebellion in the Warsaw ghetto. My other grandparents were sent to Treblinka where they were killed.“My father was ten years old then, and during the fighting, some people in the Polish resistance smuggled him out of the ghetto and into the forest. From there, he was taken to a Catholic monastery where he was baptized as a Catholic so the Germans wouldn’t arrest and take him to a concentration camp. He had to learn how to act like a Catholic boy in a very short time, but he was a smart boy and survived the war that way."When the war ended, my father was taken to France and placed with Catholic foster parents. He grew up on a vineyard near Langon and learned to speak French, but he never forgot he was Jewish. As soon as he reached the age of nineteen, he left France for Israel and began searching for any relatives who survived the camps. He found no one with the same last name who remembered his father or mother. Instead, he found Miriam, the woman he would marry and the woman who would become my mother."Her past was much like my father’s, though she was French. Her parents placed her with Catholic friends when the Nazi’s began arresting French Jews. She was later taken to Spain and raised by a family there. She was only eighteen when she went to Israel in hopes of finding her family. She found a job to support herself working in the government, and that is how she met my father."From my mother, I learned to speak and write Spanish. From both my father and mother, I learned to speak and write French and Hebrew."When I was eighteen, I was conscripted into the Israeli Defense Force. Because my testing showed I had an aptitude for languages, when I finished basic and combat training, I was sent to a school to learn to speak and write Arabic. After that school, I was transferred to the Combat Intelligence Collection Corps. I was made part of Sayeret Matkal, the Israeli Special Forces branch that does recon and intelligence gathering behind enemy lines. I can’t tell you what I did there."When I finished my service, a man came to see me and asked if I’d like to help Israel in a different way. What he told me sounded exciting, so I accepted and became part of the Duvdevan Unit. I spent two years dressed in civilian clothes in several Arab countries gathering intelligence on terrorist organizations. A year ago, I was identified by one of the radical Islamic organizations as an Israeli agent and had to leave the Middle East or I’d have been killed. I was assigned to Argentina to gather intelligence on the Neo-Nazi groups that are located here and to some extent, in Brazil and other South American countries."The men we just killed are part of a Neo-Nazi group who call their organization Ahner. They took their name from the Nazi Germany think-tank known as Ahnenerbe. Their ideology is the same as the German Nazi party. They advocate the elimination or enslavement or all races they consider inferior, and they finance their operations by trafficking in sex slaves of those same races. That’s what they’re doing out here; financing their operations. I was assigned to stop them."The camp you saw is a lay-over point between the ports in Chile where they land the girls and wherever they’re going next. It might be the brothels in Buenos Aires, Mexico, almost any country including the US. They will kill anyone who tries to stop them. Do you feel better about what we did now?”I’d heard of the Duvdeven Unit of the Israeli Special Forces, but the name was about all I’d heard. Nobody, not even the CIA guys I worked with, knew much about what the Duvdeven Unit did, or if they knew, they weren’t telling anybody. All that was known was they were Israelis who were fluent in Arabic and dressed in the clothing of the local population. Supposedly they infiltrated the ranks of the terrorists and sent that information back to Israel. There were rumors about assassinations of high-ranking terrorist officials, but that’s all they were, just rumors.That knowledge explained a lot of things about Ariella. I knew the Israeli Special Forces are among the most highly trained fighting forces in the world and were as good as our own US Army Rangers and Navy SEALs. To work undercover in the situations in Afghanistan and Iran would require more than training though. It would require an immense amount of self-confidence and as one of my Ranger instructors had once said, “balls big enough to need a wheelbarrow”.It also explained how much she knew about me. The CIA in the Middle East and the Israeli Special Forces have a very close working relationship. All it would take is for someone in the ISF to request information about me and they’d have it. What I didn’t understand is why they were interested in what I was doing in Argentina.“OK, I understand why you’re here, but you said you were waiting on me for a week. It’s not that I don’t appreciate you bailing my ass out of trouble, but why are you so interested in why I’m here?”Ariella stopped walking then and turned to face me.“Because Marcus Richter hired you.”I was confused again.“Richter isn’t a Neo-Nazi. He’s a dealer in international currencies.”Ariella smiled.“That’s what he told you, and he is, but his story is more detailed than that.At the end of World War Two, the Allies were looking for a German banker named Heinrich Richter because he was responsible for sending much of the gold pillaged by the German Army to Swiss banks. They wanted his records and his testimony so they could return the gold to the appropriate countries.Israel was very interested as well, because a significant amount of that gold came from Jews in the countries Germany overran. The Allies were closing in on him when he disappeared. The rumor was he was able to escape to Argentina. Through our intelligence efforts in Argentina, we learned he did indeed relocate to Argentina where he married a local woman with high status in the government. Unfortunately, we learned that information after he died."For several years, we monitored the activities of his wife and son, the same Marcus Richter who spoke with you. His mother appears to have retired to an estate in the country with a private nurse, and no one other than Richter visits or telephones her. In our observations of Richter though, it was soon evident he has close connections with several Neo-Nazi groups in Argentina. We suspected he was using his business to launder money for them, but we were never able to positively tie his financial dealings to them. Richter is smart and he uses Swiss banks for all the transfers. Getting information from a Swiss bank is something even Israel can not easily do. The reason is the amount of Nazi gold still held in those banks."We needed a way to stop him, so we laid a trap for him. We forged the hallmark on a single gold bar and arranged for another currency trader who supports our cause to contact him. We also planted the story about the submarines through another of our contacts in Argentina, a former member of the ISF who emigrated from Germany to Argentina a few years ago. The man who told Richter about the smelter was another of our contacts who casually related the story to Richter’s assistants. The story about the mine and its location has been rumored in Argentina for years so once we had located the smelter for him, Richter assumed the gold must be in the mine, just as we intended.The rest of the story you already know, except that the money you are being paid came from the treasury of Ahner. We know that information through the efforts of a man who is the son of a Jewish man and his Argentine wife. He grew up in Buenos Aires and is fluent in Spanish. He has infiltrated Ahner and relays information on their activities to my unit.”I was beginning to understand now and I didn’t feel good about the whole deal.“So, there is no gold?”Ariella smiled.“We believe there is a cache of Nazi gold somewhere in Argentina, but it is not likely to be found. All the people who knew of it are dead by now and as far as we’ve been able to determine, they didn’t pass the information on to anyone. As for any gold here in a led mine, well, there is a led mine a few kilometers from here, but it doesn’t have any gold.”“So I came down here for nothing?”“Oh no, you are going to be very useful. When you go back and tell Richter there is no gold here, he’ll have to relay that to Ahner. In the past, his contracts with Ahner have been that he is paid an advance which would be returned should his work not be successful. Since he will have failed in this attempt, Anher will demand that Richter return the advance.He won’t be able to do that because as we speak, the US is quietly in the process of freezing all his US bank accounts and arranging for a transfer from his Swiss bank would take too long"It would be my guess that when Ahner can’t get their money back, Marcus Richter will suddenly disappear and never be found. That is what happened to the last person who promised something to Ahner and then didn’t deliver. As I said, they will kill anyone without even a second thought.”“It sounds like I need to start sleeping with a pistol from now on. Thanks a lot.”Ariella shook her head.“No. You’re in no danger. We know Richter never disclosed your identity to Ahner, and the ammunition for both our rifles and your pistol are common to weapons issued to the Argentine Army and of the same manufacturer. When we leave, I’ll leave some evidence that it was the Argentine Army that attacked the camp. That does happen from time to time, usually when some company commander decides he isn’t being paid well enough to keep protecting them.”When we got back to the camp, Ariella took off her backpack.
I was hired to find lost Nazi gold. I found Ariella instead.Based on a post by ronde, in 2 parts. Listen to the ► Podcast at Steamy Stories.The shiny, black, Mercedes X-Class pickup slowly worked its way down the road about a hundred meters from where I was crouched behind a rock. The fact the pickup was alone and had an M 60 machine gun on a pintle mount in the bed told me this wasn’t some unit of the Argentine Army. The Argentine Army might have been driving a Mercedes pickup, but it would have been OD green and the machine gun would have been an FN Mag.The woman nudged me then.“They’ll be on top of us in a few minutes. I’ll take out the truck driver and the M 60. That’ll slow them down while they’re trying to figure out where the shots came from. They might run then, but if they don’t it’ll take both of us to take out the rest. Are you ready for that?”I was ready, because I knew if we didn’t take out all of them, we’d be running for our lives. I’d experienced that before. I was a former US Army Ranger with two tours of Afghanistan under my belt before I decided civilian life would be a whole lot healthier.I had no reservations about what we had to do, though it was going to be tough. With it’s short barrel, iron sights, and a tendency to overheat if fired quickly, the HK G 36 C carbine I carried lost accuracy fast after about two hundred meters, so they’d have to be closer than that. I could use the old “spray and pray” technique used by some US Army soldiers before the M4 came out with a selector switch for a three round burst instead of just full-auto fire. The problem with that was I only had a hundred and twenty rounds and they wouldn’t last long if I did that. After that, all I had was a 9 millimeter Browning pistol. They’d have to be a lot closer before I had any chance of putting even one down with that.The woman was in better shape for long range shooting. The Israeli M 89 SR rifle she was crouched behind was accurate out to about a thousand meters if she knew what she was doing, and if she did, the thirty rounds in her magazine would be more than sufficient.She let the truck get to about seventy-five meters from our position and then put one 7.62 millimeter round through the windshield. The driver slumped down in the seat at the same time her second shot hit the M60 just behind the operating handle and effectively froze the action. The truck turned sharply into a rock and then the engine died. The whole thing couldn’t have taken more than about five seconds. The woman definitely knew her way around a rifle.The three guys in the truck bed and the one left in the cab bailed out, got behind the truck, and started looking for the shooter. They were going to have a difficult time finding us. The suppressor on the M89SR effectively hid any muzzle flash and any dust caused by the gasses exiting the barrel. It also reduced the sound enough that it would be difficult for the guys to pinpoint it since the echo from the mountains made the sound seem to come from all directions.The woman and I watched them for the next five minutes, and it became obvious they weren’t battle-trained troops. They were probably considered a serious threat by the local population, but to me they were just amateurs; well-equipped amateurs, but still amateurs.They were well equipped because they had money, and money was the reason I was in Argentina in the first place. Meeting the woman was just a lucky accident. Well, that’s what I thought at the time. I later found out it was no accident.How it all started.The whole thing started six weeks before I found myself with the woman crouched behind a rock and waiting to see what the guys behind the truck were going to do next.After separating myself from the US Army, I needed some way to keep myself indoors and fed. When I looked at what I knew how to do, planning for close combat and then executing that plan was all I could come up with.Given the domestic and political climate at the time, a lot of former military men were running self defense schools. After reading about a few of the schools, I decided I could make some money that way too.I’d been deployed for much of my Army career so most of my Army pay was sitting in my bank. I used half of what I had as a down payment on fifty acres in Eastern Tennessee with a house and barn on it, and built a pistol and rifle range.I was doing OK, teaching a class a couple times a week in basic gun safety and giving the Tennessee concealed-carry class and test. The other days, I taught advanced courses in long-range rifle shooting and rapid-fire pistol shooting. I also sold targets and ammunition. I wasn’t getting rich, but I was able to make the mortgage payments, put food on the table, and keep my fridge stocked with beer.One afternoon after I’d finished up my class on accurate rapid pistol fire, I was policing brass from the range when a guy in a suit and tie walked up and stuck out his hand. He introduced himself as Marcus Richter.“Mr. Dale Stevenson; did I get your name right? Ah, good. Mr. Stevenson, I understand you have somewhat of a unique background, a background I would find useful if you agree to my proposal.”I figured he’d gotten that information from my web site. I thought “US Army Ranger” sounded better than “former military” like some of the school web sites used.I shrugged.“I can teach you how to fire a weapon and how to defend yourself in an emergency if that’s what you mean.”He shook his head.“No, though the thought has crossed my mind. Fortunately, I have people who take care of those duties for me."No, I’m a successful business man in a rather unique business. I trade in world currencies. It is that business that resulted in my visit to your establishment today. I fear the explanation of that business will be quite lengthy, so would it be possible to find a place where we might sit down and out of the sun?”I’d converted part of the barn into a classroom for my classes, so I led the man there. Once we were seated, he cleared his throat.“As I said, I am a trader in world currencies and that includes gold and silver in its many forms, from coinage to bullion. My business is of necessity rather secretive, for were some in the precious metal market to have advanced knowledge of my activities, it would have an impact upon the world pricing of said precious metals. It is such advanced knowledge I hope to exploit to my advantage if you agree to perform a service for me, a service for which you will be very well compensated.”I wasn’t entirely convinced this guy was on the level, but I had no reason to stop listening to him.I smiled.“It sounds like you have some sort of secret mission you want me to do for you.”He smiled.“Yes, secrecy is of the utmost importance. When you hear the details, you will understand why."As you probably know, in the last stages of World War Two, many high-ranking members of the Nazi party and German military realized any favorable outcome to the war was an impossibility. Germany would be defeated and given the atrocities committed, those same people would be prosecuted for war crimes, found guilty, and imprisoned or executed."They began making plans to escape before they were captured by the Allies. Argentina was neutral during the war and indeed declared war on the Axis powers a month before the war in Europe ended, but many in Argentina were still sympathetic toward Germany. As a result, Argentina was viewed as a possible haven by those attempting to escape what would surely be their ultimate fate."Argentina, in fact, encouraged those high-ranking people to come there. It is well known that many were able to successfully leave Germany and take up residence in Argentina. The efforts of some Israeli organizations that were able to locate some of them and transport them back to Israel for trial is a testimony to that fact."What is not well known is how those same people funded their escape and managed to live in Argentina until they were able to find employment. There are suspicions of the transfer of gold either before or after their escape, but no proof. What is known is there were large caches of gold the Nazi’s looted from the countries and people they overran in the early stages of the war."While much of that gold was gold bars plundered from the repositories in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, a significant amount was in the gold taken from individuals. To date, some of that gold has been recovered, but a sizeable portion has not and there are only rumors as to its location, until about a month ago."Ah, shall we say, a friend of a friend mentioned he had been offered a small bar of gold bullion bearing the imprint of the Heraeus Corporation of Germany. I do not know if you know of this German company, but Heraeus has been in the business of refining and producing precious metals since the late 1800’s when they discovered a method of melting platinum."During World War Two, one small gold smelting facility of the Heraeus corporation located on the outskirts of Hanau, Germany was taken over by the Nazi party, managed by Nazi party members, and slave labor was used for the smelting process. They began melting the gold looted from the countries occupied by the German Army into bullion. The bullion was stamped with the hallmark of the Heraeus corporation in order to make it appear to be legitimate, though the Heraeus company per se had nothing to do with the operation."This knowledge has been common since the war ended, but what happened to the gold bullion produced by the Nazi controlled factory has been unknown until this single bar of bullion was offered to this friend of my friend. The offer was made in somewhat secretive circumstances and the design of the hallmark dated to the period of the Second World War. These two things intrigued this friend of my friend and also intrigued me."My interest was passing until I spoke to a man who wished to buy gold as an investment. He related a tale told by his grandfather of watching U-boats berthed at Helgoland, Germany when he was twelve years old. His grandfather had watched the U-boats before as they were fueled, armed, and then sent back out to sea. On a few occasions, this was not the case."According to his story, over the course of a week, several men in prison uniforms loaded six submarines with wooden cases that appeared much too heavy to be supplies and not large enough to hold munitions. He thought it unusual that they did not load any torpedoes as they always had before, but assumed the submarines were supply submarines used to re-supply U-boats at sea."Once the submarines were loaded, the men in prison uniforms were taken away and a few men in the uniform of the German navy went on board, but not in the same numbers this man had seen before. Instead of a full crew, a number of men in business dress also boarded the submarines. The submarines then left port. Three months later, those same six submarines were again docked in Helgoland and were being once again loaded as before. This cycle was repeated two more times before he witnessed the same submarines being loaded with torpedoes and manned by full crews of the German Navy."Another very interesting event happened in Argentina at the end of the war. Juan Peron was elected president and set about nationalizing industries and services while at the same time raising the wages of workers. Most importantly, he paid off the entire amount of externally held Argentine debt."Because Argentina does mine native gold and silver ore, I have people there to keep me informed about the latest developments. When I heard the stories about the bar of gold bullion and the German submarines and put that story into the context of what I know about the country, I asked my people there to do some research into the matter. The report I received a few weeks ago offered some tantalizing conclusions."At the end of the war, Argentina had external debt amounting to about two hundred million US Dollars. When Peron was elected President, he settled the national debt with payments in gold bullion, which is understandable because gold is the currency of the world. What is not understandable is where Peron was able to find enough gold to do that without bankrupting the country. The entire gold reserves of Argentina at the time were about two hundred and fifty million US dollars. He would have had to drain most of those reserves, but apparently did not. He continued to implement his policies by using that same gold reserve."My people were not able to identify how that situation changed so rapidly once Peron was in office nor the source of the gold with which he paid the Argentine debt. They were able to report that prior to settling that debt, the Argentine government ceased operations of a small, older smelter in the foothills of the Andes near Mendoza to bring that facility up to the level of current technology. They learned this from an old man who had been employed at the smelter in his youth. He said he was sent home and told to not report for work for two months."The man was interested in what changes were going to be made so over the course of seven weeks, he watched the activities at the smelter. He related to my people that the first week, he saw many trucks drive into the smelter and each truck had armed guards who were all tall men who looked European. He could not see what they did in the smelter, but he did notice the smokestack continued to emit smoke just as it had when the smelter was operating."A week before his two month furlough was to end, he witnessed those same trucks with the same armed guards drive out of the smelter and take the road that led to Buenos Aires. He also said when he returned to work, there was little difference from how the smelter had operated before.”I wasn’t sure what all this had to do with me. When I asked, his face became grim.“What I and my people believe is that a very large amount of gold was shipped to Argentina by the Nazis on submarines and used to pay the Argentine government for allowing them to stay there. That is the only explanation for how Peron was able to find the gold to pay off the national debt. It is also an explanation for the unusual loading of the submarine and for the bar of gold bullion offered to, as I said, a friend of a friend. The smelter was shut down in order to melt the Nazi gold and then recast it into bullion that bore the Argentine hallmark.”I was still confused.“OK, that’s all well and good, but again, what does that have to do with me?”He placed his hands on the table between us and smiled.“I want to pay you to find the rest of the Nazi gold.”Now, I was confused again.“The rest? I thought you said they melted it all down and recast it.”He shook his head and chuckled.“I said they melted and recast enough to pay off the Argentine debt, not that they melted and recast all the gold. The total amount of gold plundered by the Nazis is not accurately known, but it has been estimated at nearly two billion US dollars in the currency of the day. About a fourth of that can be reasonably accounted for as it was transferred to various banks in neutral countries, though some of those transfers are disputed. The rest has never been found."It is my estimate that the Nazis shipped at least four hundred tons of gold to Argentina on those submarines. In the currency of the day, that would be about half a billion US dollars. In 1945, the Argentine debt was about two hundred million US dollars. That leaves us with a difference of about three hundred million which would be a little over one and a half billion US dollars at today’s market price.”I said I didn’t think that was feasible because of the weight of gold. It wouldn’t fit on a submarine. He smiled.“Yes, gold is heavy but also very dense and does not require much space. The normal armament for a U-boat of the type loaded at Helgoland was fourteen torpedoes that weighed a little over a ton and a half each. Each submarine could have carried over twenty tons of gold if the torpedoes were not on board. The six submarines making four trips could have carried that much gold and many passengers. With a range of about nine thousand nautical miles, they could easily have made the trip from Germany to Argentina and back in about three months at sea.It sounded like another Nazi conspiracy theory to me, but it was interesting so I decided to play along for a while."So, you want me to find this gold and then what? Hire a bunch of trucks to bring it back to the US?”He smiled and shook his head.“No. I only want you to confirm its location from the information my people have developed after almost a year of research. Near Mendoza in Mendoza province, my people located the ruins of what they described as a replica of The Berghof, Hitler’s residence in Bavaria. The surrounding area is mostly unpopulated now, but was once the site of a now closed led mine. We believe the building was built to house German Army and SS officers who fled Germany and surmise the gold must have been secreted in the led mine. Once you have confirmed the gold is indeed at that location, others will orchestrate its removal and transport.That little bell in your head that tells you something’s not right started to ring."Mr. Richter, if your people know where it is, why don’t those others you talked about confirm the gold is there and then remove it?”He pursed his lips.“My people in Argentina are carefully watched by the Argentine government to detect any financial dealings they might attempt. It is highly likely some in the Argentine government are also aware of their findings. Were my people to investigate that mine, well, the current government of Argentina would consider the gold to be the property of Argentina. It is not, but Argentina would be very upset were they to find it has been discovered and removed from the country.”The little bell in my head was now clanging.“So what you’re asking me to do is illegal? I don’t much like the idea of spending time in an Argentine prison.”He shook his head.“Your involvement will only be to locate and enter an abandoned and unguarded mine, confirm with photographs that the gold is there, and then bring those photographs and an accurate location back to me. It will be as if you were a tourist seeing the countryside and just happened upon the mine during your travels. There is nothing illegal about that."You will be well compensated for your efforts. I am prepared to offer you transportation to and from Argentina, a vehicle and other equipment for your use while there, and the sum of one hundred thousand dollars. I have arranged for twenty thousand dollars to be transferred to your bank account immediately upon your arrival in Argentina and commencement of your search. You will, of course, be provided with a small sum for travel expenses. The balance will be transferred upon your return, assuming you are successful. If not, the transfer will be for an additional twenty thous
I was hired to find lost Nazi gold. I found Ariella instead.Based on a post by ronde, in 2 parts. Listen to the ► Podcast at Steamy Stories.The shiny, black, Mercedes X-Class pickup slowly worked its way down the road about a hundred meters from where I was crouched behind a rock. The fact the pickup was alone and had an M 60 machine gun on a pintle mount in the bed told me this wasn’t some unit of the Argentine Army. The Argentine Army might have been driving a Mercedes pickup, but it would have been OD green and the machine gun would have been an FN Mag.The woman nudged me then.“They’ll be on top of us in a few minutes. I’ll take out the truck driver and the M 60. That’ll slow them down while they’re trying to figure out where the shots came from. They might run then, but if they don’t it’ll take both of us to take out the rest. Are you ready for that?”I was ready, because I knew if we didn’t take out all of them, we’d be running for our lives. I’d experienced that before. I was a former US Army Ranger with two tours of Afghanistan under my belt before I decided civilian life would be a whole lot healthier.I had no reservations about what we had to do, though it was going to be tough. With it’s short barrel, iron sights, and a tendency to overheat if fired quickly, the HK G 36 C carbine I carried lost accuracy fast after about two hundred meters, so they’d have to be closer than that. I could use the old “spray and pray” technique used by some US Army soldiers before the M4 came out with a selector switch for a three round burst instead of just full-auto fire. The problem with that was I only had a hundred and twenty rounds and they wouldn’t last long if I did that. After that, all I had was a 9 millimeter Browning pistol. They’d have to be a lot closer before I had any chance of putting even one down with that.The woman was in better shape for long range shooting. The Israeli M 89 SR rifle she was crouched behind was accurate out to about a thousand meters if she knew what she was doing, and if she did, the thirty rounds in her magazine would be more than sufficient.She let the truck get to about seventy-five meters from our position and then put one 7.62 millimeter round through the windshield. The driver slumped down in the seat at the same time her second shot hit the M60 just behind the operating handle and effectively froze the action. The truck turned sharply into a rock and then the engine died. The whole thing couldn’t have taken more than about five seconds. The woman definitely knew her way around a rifle.The three guys in the truck bed and the one left in the cab bailed out, got behind the truck, and started looking for the shooter. They were going to have a difficult time finding us. The suppressor on the M89SR effectively hid any muzzle flash and any dust caused by the gasses exiting the barrel. It also reduced the sound enough that it would be difficult for the guys to pinpoint it since the echo from the mountains made the sound seem to come from all directions.The woman and I watched them for the next five minutes, and it became obvious they weren’t battle-trained troops. They were probably considered a serious threat by the local population, but to me they were just amateurs; well-equipped amateurs, but still amateurs.They were well equipped because they had money, and money was the reason I was in Argentina in the first place. Meeting the woman was just a lucky accident. Well, that’s what I thought at the time. I later found out it was no accident.How it all started.The whole thing started six weeks before I found myself with the woman crouched behind a rock and waiting to see what the guys behind the truck were going to do next.After separating myself from the US Army, I needed some way to keep myself indoors and fed. When I looked at what I knew how to do, planning for close combat and then executing that plan was all I could come up with.Given the domestic and political climate at the time, a lot of former military men were running self defense schools. After reading about a few of the schools, I decided I could make some money that way too.I’d been deployed for much of my Army career so most of my Army pay was sitting in my bank. I used half of what I had as a down payment on fifty acres in Eastern Tennessee with a house and barn on it, and built a pistol and rifle range.I was doing OK, teaching a class a couple times a week in basic gun safety and giving the Tennessee concealed-carry class and test. The other days, I taught advanced courses in long-range rifle shooting and rapid-fire pistol shooting. I also sold targets and ammunition. I wasn’t getting rich, but I was able to make the mortgage payments, put food on the table, and keep my fridge stocked with beer.One afternoon after I’d finished up my class on accurate rapid pistol fire, I was policing brass from the range when a guy in a suit and tie walked up and stuck out his hand. He introduced himself as Marcus Richter.“Mr. Dale Stevenson; did I get your name right? Ah, good. Mr. Stevenson, I understand you have somewhat of a unique background, a background I would find useful if you agree to my proposal.”I figured he’d gotten that information from my web site. I thought “US Army Ranger” sounded better than “former military” like some of the school web sites used.I shrugged.“I can teach you how to fire a weapon and how to defend yourself in an emergency if that’s what you mean.”He shook his head.“No, though the thought has crossed my mind. Fortunately, I have people who take care of those duties for me."No, I’m a successful business man in a rather unique business. I trade in world currencies. It is that business that resulted in my visit to your establishment today. I fear the explanation of that business will be quite lengthy, so would it be possible to find a place where we might sit down and out of the sun?”I’d converted part of the barn into a classroom for my classes, so I led the man there. Once we were seated, he cleared his throat.“As I said, I am a trader in world currencies and that includes gold and silver in its many forms, from coinage to bullion. My business is of necessity rather secretive, for were some in the precious metal market to have advanced knowledge of my activities, it would have an impact upon the world pricing of said precious metals. It is such advanced knowledge I hope to exploit to my advantage if you agree to perform a service for me, a service for which you will be very well compensated.”I wasn’t entirely convinced this guy was on the level, but I had no reason to stop listening to him.I smiled.“It sounds like you have some sort of secret mission you want me to do for you.”He smiled.“Yes, secrecy is of the utmost importance. When you hear the details, you will understand why."As you probably know, in the last stages of World War Two, many high-ranking members of the Nazi party and German military realized any favorable outcome to the war was an impossibility. Germany would be defeated and given the atrocities committed, those same people would be prosecuted for war crimes, found guilty, and imprisoned or executed."They began making plans to escape before they were captured by the Allies. Argentina was neutral during the war and indeed declared war on the Axis powers a month before the war in Europe ended, but many in Argentina were still sympathetic toward Germany. As a result, Argentina was viewed as a possible haven by those attempting to escape what would surely be their ultimate fate."Argentina, in fact, encouraged those high-ranking people to come there. It is well known that many were able to successfully leave Germany and take up residence in Argentina. The efforts of some Israeli organizations that were able to locate some of them and transport them back to Israel for trial is a testimony to that fact."What is not well known is how those same people funded their escape and managed to live in Argentina until they were able to find employment. There are suspicions of the transfer of gold either before or after their escape, but no proof. What is known is there were large caches of gold the Nazi’s looted from the countries and people they overran in the early stages of the war."While much of that gold was gold bars plundered from the repositories in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, a significant amount was in the gold taken from individuals. To date, some of that gold has been recovered, but a sizeable portion has not and there are only rumors as to its location, until about a month ago."Ah, shall we say, a friend of a friend mentioned he had been offered a small bar of gold bullion bearing the imprint of the Heraeus Corporation of Germany. I do not know if you know of this German company, but Heraeus has been in the business of refining and producing precious metals since the late 1800’s when they discovered a method of melting platinum."During World War Two, one small gold smelting facility of the Heraeus corporation located on the outskirts of Hanau, Germany was taken over by the Nazi party, managed by Nazi party members, and slave labor was used for the smelting process. They began melting the gold looted from the countries occupied by the German Army into bullion. The bullion was stamped with the hallmark of the Heraeus corporation in order to make it appear to be legitimate, though the Heraeus company per se had nothing to do with the operation."This knowledge has been common since the war ended, but what happened to the gold bullion produced by the Nazi controlled factory has been unknown until this single bar of bullion was offered to this friend of my friend. The offer was made in somewhat secretive circumstances and the design of the hallmark dated to the period of the Second World War. These two things intrigued this friend of my friend and also intrigued me."My interest was passing until I spoke to a man who wished to buy gold as an investment. He related a tale told by his grandfather of watching U-boats berthed at Helgoland, Germany when he was twelve years old. His grandfather had watched the U-boats before as they were fueled, armed, and then sent back out to sea. On a few occasions, this was not the case."According to his story, over the course of a week, several men in prison uniforms loaded six submarines with wooden cases that appeared much too heavy to be supplies and not large enough to hold munitions. He thought it unusual that they did not load any torpedoes as they always had before, but assumed the submarines were supply submarines used to re-supply U-boats at sea."Once the submarines were loaded, the men in prison uniforms were taken away and a few men in the uniform of the German navy went on board, but not in the same numbers this man had seen before. Instead of a full crew, a number of men in business dress also boarded the submarines. The submarines then left port. Three months later, those same six submarines were again docked in Helgoland and were being once again loaded as before. This cycle was repeated two more times before he witnessed the same submarines being loaded with torpedoes and manned by full crews of the German Navy."Another very interesting event happened in Argentina at the end of the war. Juan Peron was elected president and set about nationalizing industries and services while at the same time raising the wages of workers. Most importantly, he paid off the entire amount of externally held Argentine debt."Because Argentina does mine native gold and silver ore, I have people there to keep me informed about the latest developments. When I heard the stories about the bar of gold bullion and the German submarines and put that story into the context of what I know about the country, I asked my people there to do some research into the matter. The report I received a few weeks ago offered some tantalizing conclusions."At the end of the war, Argentina had external debt amounting to about two hundred million US Dollars. When Peron was elected President, he settled the national debt with payments in gold bullion, which is understandable because gold is the currency of the world. What is not understandable is where Peron was able to find enough gold to do that without bankrupting the country. The entire gold reserves of Argentina at the time were about two hundred and fifty million US dollars. He would have had to drain most of those reserves, but apparently did not. He continued to implement his policies by using that same gold reserve."My people were not able to identify how that situation changed so rapidly once Peron was in office nor the source of the gold with which he paid the Argentine debt. They were able to report that prior to settling that debt, the Argentine government ceased operations of a small, older smelter in the foothills of the Andes near Mendoza to bring that facility up to the level of current technology. They learned this from an old man who had been employed at the smelter in his youth. He said he was sent home and told to not report for work for two months."The man was interested in what changes were going to be made so over the course of seven weeks, he watched the activities at the smelter. He related to my people that the first week, he saw many trucks drive into the smelter and each truck had armed guards who were all tall men who looked European. He could not see what they did in the smelter, but he did notice the smokestack continued to emit smoke just as it had when the smelter was operating."A week before his two month furlough was to end, he witnessed those same trucks with the same armed guards drive out of the smelter and take the road that led to Buenos Aires. He also said when he returned to work, there was little difference from how the smelter had operated before.”I wasn’t sure what all this had to do with me. When I asked, his face became grim.“What I and my people believe is that a very large amount of gold was shipped to Argentina by the Nazis on submarines and used to pay the Argentine government for allowing them to stay there. That is the only explanation for how Peron was able to find the gold to pay off the national debt. It is also an explanation for the unusual loading of the submarine and for the bar of gold bullion offered to, as I said, a friend of a friend. The smelter was shut down in order to melt the Nazi gold and then recast it into bullion that bore the Argentine hallmark.”I was still confused.“OK, that’s all well and good, but again, what does that have to do with me?”He placed his hands on the table between us and smiled.“I want to pay you to find the rest of the Nazi gold.”Now, I was confused again.“The rest? I thought you said they melted it all down and recast it.”He shook his head and chuckled.“I said they melted and recast enough to pay off the Argentine debt, not that they melted and recast all the gold. The total amount of gold plundered by the Nazis is not accurately known, but it has been estimated at nearly two billion US dollars in the currency of the day. About a fourth of that can be reasonably accounted for as it was transferred to various banks in neutral countries, though some of those transfers are disputed. The rest has never been found."It is my estimate that the Nazis shipped at least four hundred tons of gold to Argentina on those submarines. In the currency of the day, that would be about half a billion US dollars. In 1945, the Argentine debt was about two hundred million US dollars. That leaves us with a difference of about three hundred million which would be a little over one and a half billion US dollars at today’s market price.”I said I didn’t think that was feasible because of the weight of gold. It wouldn’t fit on a submarine. He smiled.“Yes, gold is heavy but also very dense and does not require much space. The normal armament for a U-boat of the type loaded at Helgoland was fourteen torpedoes that weighed a little over a ton and a half each. Each submarine could have carried over twenty tons of gold if the torpedoes were not on board. The six submarines making four trips could have carried that much gold and many passengers. With a range of about nine thousand nautical miles, they could easily have made the trip from Germany to Argentina and back in about three months at sea.It sounded like another Nazi conspiracy theory to me, but it was interesting so I decided to play along for a while."So, you want me to find this gold and then what? Hire a bunch of trucks to bring it back to the US?”He smiled and shook his head.“No. I only want you to confirm its location from the information my people have developed after almost a year of research. Near Mendoza in Mendoza province, my people located the ruins of what they described as a replica of The Berghof, Hitler’s residence in Bavaria. The surrounding area is mostly unpopulated now, but was once the site of a now closed led mine. We believe the building was built to house German Army and SS officers who fled Germany and surmise the gold must have been secreted in the led mine. Once you have confirmed the gold is indeed at that location, others will orchestrate its removal and transport.That little bell in your head that tells you something’s not right started to ring."Mr. Richter, if your people know where it is, why don’t those others you talked about confirm the gold is there and then remove it?”He pursed his lips.“My people in Argentina are carefully watched by the Argentine government to detect any financial dealings they might attempt. It is highly likely some in the Argentine government are also aware of their findings. Were my people to investigate that mine, well, the current government of Argentina would consider the gold to be the property of Argentina. It is not, but Argentina would be very upset were they to find it has been discovered and removed from the country.”The little bell in my head was now clanging.“So what you’re asking me to do is illegal? I don’t much like the idea of spending time in an Argentine prison.”He shook his head.“Your involvement will only be to locate and enter an abandoned and unguarded mine, confirm with photographs that the gold is there, and then bring those photographs and an accurate location back to me. It will be as if you were a tourist seeing the countryside and just happened upon the mine during your travels. There is nothing illegal about that."You will be well compensated for your efforts. I am prepared to offer you transportation to and from Argentina, a vehicle and other equipment for your use while there, and the sum of one hundred thousand dollars. I have arranged for twenty thousand dollars to be transferred to your bank account immediately upon your arrival in Argentina and commencement of your search. You will, of course, be provided with a small sum for travel expenses. The balance will be transferred upon your return, assuming you are successful. If not, the transfer will be for an additional twenty thous
I was hired to find lost Nazi gold. I found Ariella instead.Based on a post by ronde, in 2 parts. Listen to the ► Podcast at Steamy Stories.The shiny, black, Mercedes X-Class pickup slowly worked its way down the road about a hundred meters from where I was crouched behind a rock. The fact the pickup was alone and had an M 60 machine gun on a pintle mount in the bed told me this wasn’t some unit of the Argentine Army. The Argentine Army might have been driving a Mercedes pickup, but it would have been OD green and the machine gun would have been an FN Mag.The woman nudged me then.“They’ll be on top of us in a few minutes. I’ll take out the truck driver and the M 60. That’ll slow them down while they’re trying to figure out where the shots came from. They might run then, but if they don’t it’ll take both of us to take out the rest. Are you ready for that?”I was ready, because I knew if we didn’t take out all of them, we’d be running for our lives. I’d experienced that before. I was a former US Army Ranger with two tours of Afghanistan under my belt before I decided civilian life would be a whole lot healthier.I had no reservations about what we had to do, though it was going to be tough. With it’s short barrel, iron sights, and a tendency to overheat if fired quickly, the HK G 36 C carbine I carried lost accuracy fast after about two hundred meters, so they’d have to be closer than that. I could use the old “spray and pray” technique used by some US Army soldiers before the M4 came out with a selector switch for a three round burst instead of just full-auto fire. The problem with that was I only had a hundred and twenty rounds and they wouldn’t last long if I did that. After that, all I had was a 9 millimeter Browning pistol. They’d have to be a lot closer before I had any chance of putting even one down with that.The woman was in better shape for long range shooting. The Israeli M 89 SR rifle she was crouched behind was accurate out to about a thousand meters if she knew what she was doing, and if she did, the thirty rounds in her magazine would be more than sufficient.She let the truck get to about seventy-five meters from our position and then put one 7.62 millimeter round through the windshield. The driver slumped down in the seat at the same time her second shot hit the M60 just behind the operating handle and effectively froze the action. The truck turned sharply into a rock and then the engine died. The whole thing couldn’t have taken more than about five seconds. The woman definitely knew her way around a rifle.The three guys in the truck bed and the one left in the cab bailed out, got behind the truck, and started looking for the shooter. They were going to have a difficult time finding us. The suppressor on the M89SR effectively hid any muzzle flash and any dust caused by the gasses exiting the barrel. It also reduced the sound enough that it would be difficult for the guys to pinpoint it since the echo from the mountains made the sound seem to come from all directions.The woman and I watched them for the next five minutes, and it became obvious they weren’t battle-trained troops. They were probably considered a serious threat by the local population, but to me they were just amateurs; well-equipped amateurs, but still amateurs.They were well equipped because they had money, and money was the reason I was in Argentina in the first place. Meeting the woman was just a lucky accident. Well, that’s what I thought at the time. I later found out it was no accident.How it all started.The whole thing started six weeks before I found myself with the woman crouched behind a rock and waiting to see what the guys behind the truck were going to do next.After separating myself from the US Army, I needed some way to keep myself indoors and fed. When I looked at what I knew how to do, planning for close combat and then executing that plan was all I could come up with.Given the domestic and political climate at the time, a lot of former military men were running self defense schools. After reading about a few of the schools, I decided I could make some money that way too.I’d been deployed for much of my Army career so most of my Army pay was sitting in my bank. I used half of what I had as a down payment on fifty acres in Eastern Tennessee with a house and barn on it, and built a pistol and rifle range.I was doing OK, teaching a class a couple times a week in basic gun safety and giving the Tennessee concealed-carry class and test. The other days, I taught advanced courses in long-range rifle shooting and rapid-fire pistol shooting. I also sold targets and ammunition. I wasn’t getting rich, but I was able to make the mortgage payments, put food on the table, and keep my fridge stocked with beer.One afternoon after I’d finished up my class on accurate rapid pistol fire, I was policing brass from the range when a guy in a suit and tie walked up and stuck out his hand. He introduced himself as Marcus Richter.“Mr. Dale Stevenson; did I get your name right? Ah, good. Mr. Stevenson, I understand you have somewhat of a unique background, a background I would find useful if you agree to my proposal.”I figured he’d gotten that information from my web site. I thought “US Army Ranger” sounded better than “former military” like some of the school web sites used.I shrugged.“I can teach you how to fire a weapon and how to defend yourself in an emergency if that’s what you mean.”He shook his head.“No, though the thought has crossed my mind. Fortunately, I have people who take care of those duties for me."No, I’m a successful business man in a rather unique business. I trade in world currencies. It is that business that resulted in my visit to your establishment today. I fear the explanation of that business will be quite lengthy, so would it be possible to find a place where we might sit down and out of the sun?”I’d converted part of the barn into a classroom for my classes, so I led the man there. Once we were seated, he cleared his throat.“As I said, I am a trader in world currencies and that includes gold and silver in its many forms, from coinage to bullion. My business is of necessity rather secretive, for were some in the precious metal market to have advanced knowledge of my activities, it would have an impact upon the world pricing of said precious metals. It is such advanced knowledge I hope to exploit to my advantage if you agree to perform a service for me, a service for which you will be very well compensated.”I wasn’t entirely convinced this guy was on the level, but I had no reason to stop listening to him.I smiled.“It sounds like you have some sort of secret mission you want me to do for you.”He smiled.“Yes, secrecy is of the utmost importance. When you hear the details, you will understand why."As you probably know, in the last stages of World War Two, many high-ranking members of the Nazi party and German military realized any favorable outcome to the war was an impossibility. Germany would be defeated and given the atrocities committed, those same people would be prosecuted for war crimes, found guilty, and imprisoned or executed."They began making plans to escape before they were captured by the Allies. Argentina was neutral during the war and indeed declared war on the Axis powers a month before the war in Europe ended, but many in Argentina were still sympathetic toward Germany. As a result, Argentina was viewed as a possible haven by those attempting to escape what would surely be their ultimate fate."Argentina, in fact, encouraged those high-ranking people to come there. It is well known that many were able to successfully leave Germany and take up residence in Argentina. The efforts of some Israeli organizations that were able to locate some of them and transport them back to Israel for trial is a testimony to that fact."What is not well known is how those same people funded their escape and managed to live in Argentina until they were able to find employment. There are suspicions of the transfer of gold either before or after their escape, but no proof. What is known is there were large caches of gold the Nazi’s looted from the countries and people they overran in the early stages of the war."While much of that gold was gold bars plundered from the repositories in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, a significant amount was in the gold taken from individuals. To date, some of that gold has been recovered, but a sizeable portion has not and there are only rumors as to its location, until about a month ago."Ah, shall we say, a friend of a friend mentioned he had been offered a small bar of gold bullion bearing the imprint of the Heraeus Corporation of Germany. I do not know if you know of this German company, but Heraeus has been in the business of refining and producing precious metals since the late 1800’s when they discovered a method of melting platinum."During World War Two, one small gold smelting facility of the Heraeus corporation located on the outskirts of Hanau, Germany was taken over by the Nazi party, managed by Nazi party members, and slave labor was used for the smelting process. They began melting the gold looted from the countries occupied by the German Army into bullion. The bullion was stamped with the hallmark of the Heraeus corporation in order to make it appear to be legitimate, though the Heraeus company per se had nothing to do with the operation."This knowledge has been common since the war ended, but what happened to the gold bullion produced by the Nazi controlled factory has been unknown until this single bar of bullion was offered to this friend of my friend. The offer was made in somewhat secretive circumstances and the design of the hallmark dated to the period of the Second World War. These two things intrigued this friend of my friend and also intrigued me."My interest was passing until I spoke to a man who wished to buy gold as an investment. He related a tale told by his grandfather of watching U-boats berthed at Helgoland, Germany when he was twelve years old. His grandfather had watched the U-boats before as they were fueled, armed, and then sent back out to sea. On a few occasions, this was not the case."According to his story, over the course of a week, several men in prison uniforms loaded six submarines with wooden cases that appeared much too heavy to be supplies and not large enough to hold munitions. He thought it unusual that they did not load any torpedoes as they always had before, but assumed the submarines were supply submarines used to re-supply U-boats at sea."Once the submarines were loaded, the men in prison uniforms were taken away and a few men in the uniform of the German navy went on board, but not in the same numbers this man had seen before. Instead of a full crew, a number of men in business dress also boarded the submarines. The submarines then left port. Three months later, those same six submarines were again docked in Helgoland and were being once again loaded as before. This cycle was repeated two more times before he witnessed the same submarines being loaded with torpedoes and manned by full crews of the German Navy."Another very interesting event happened in Argentina at the end of the war. Juan Peron was elected president and set about nationalizing industries and services while at the same time raising the wages of workers. Most importantly, he paid off the entire amount of externally held Argentine debt."Because Argentina does mine native gold and silver ore, I have people there to keep me informed about the latest developments. When I heard the stories about the bar of gold bullion and the German submarines and put that story into the context of what I know about the country, I asked my people there to do some research into the matter. The report I received a few weeks ago offered some tantalizing conclusions."At the end of the war, Argentina had external debt amounting to about two hundred million US Dollars. When Peron was elected President, he settled the national debt with payments in gold bullion, which is understandable because gold is the currency of the world. What is not understandable is where Peron was able to find enough gold to do that without bankrupting the country. The entire gold reserves of Argentina at the time were about two hundred and fifty million US dollars. He would have had to drain most of those reserves, but apparently did not. He continued to implement his policies by using that same gold reserve."My people were not able to identify how that situation changed so rapidly once Peron was in office nor the source of the gold with which he paid the Argentine debt. They were able to report that prior to settling that debt, the Argentine government ceased operations of a small, older smelter in the foothills of the Andes near Mendoza to bring that facility up to the level of current technology. They learned this from an old man who had been employed at the smelter in his youth. He said he was sent home and told to not report for work for two months."The man was interested in what changes were going to be made so over the course of seven weeks, he watched the activities at the smelter. He related to my people that the first week, he saw many trucks drive into the smelter and each truck had armed guards who were all tall men who looked European. He could not see what they did in the smelter, but he did notice the smokestack continued to emit smoke just as it had when the smelter was operating."A week before his two month furlough was to end, he witnessed those same trucks with the same armed guards drive out of the smelter and take the road that led to Buenos Aires. He also said when he returned to work, there was little difference from how the smelter had operated before.”I wasn’t sure what all this had to do with me. When I asked, his face became grim.“What I and my people believe is that a very large amount of gold was shipped to Argentina by the Nazis on submarines and used to pay the Argentine government for allowing them to stay there. That is the only explanation for how Peron was able to find the gold to pay off the national debt. It is also an explanation for the unusual loading of the submarine and for the bar of gold bullion offered to, as I said, a friend of a friend. The smelter was shut down in order to melt the Nazi gold and then recast it into bullion that bore the Argentine hallmark.”I was still confused.“OK, that’s all well and good, but again, what does that have to do with me?”He placed his hands on the table between us and smiled.“I want to pay you to find the rest of the Nazi gold.”Now, I was confused again.“The rest? I thought you said they melted it all down and recast it.”He shook his head and chuckled.“I said they melted and recast enough to pay off the Argentine debt, not that they melted and recast all the gold. The total amount of gold plundered by the Nazis is not accurately known, but it has been estimated at nearly two billion US dollars in the currency of the day. About a fourth of that can be reasonably accounted for as it was transferred to various banks in neutral countries, though some of those transfers are disputed. The rest has never been found."It is my estimate that the Nazis shipped at least four hundred tons of gold to Argentina on those submarines. In the currency of the day, that would be about half a billion US dollars. In 1945, the Argentine debt was about two hundred million US dollars. That leaves us with a difference of about three hundred million which would be a little over one and a half billion US dollars at today’s market price.”I said I didn’t think that was feasible because of the weight of gold. It wouldn’t fit on a submarine. He smiled.“Yes, gold is heavy but also very dense and does not require much space. The normal armament for a U-boat of the type loaded at Helgoland was fourteen torpedoes that weighed a little over a ton and a half each. Each submarine could have carried over twenty tons of gold if the torpedoes were not on board. The six submarines making four trips could have carried that much gold and many passengers. With a range of about nine thousand nautical miles, they could easily have made the trip from Germany to Argentina and back in about three months at sea.It sounded like another Nazi conspiracy theory to me, but it was interesting so I decided to play along for a while."So, you want me to find this gold and then what? Hire a bunch of trucks to bring it back to the US?”He smiled and shook his head.“No. I only want you to confirm its location from the information my people have developed after almost a year of research. Near Mendoza in Mendoza province, my people located the ruins of what they described as a replica of The Berghof, Hitler’s residence in Bavaria. The surrounding area is mostly unpopulated now, but was once the site of a now closed led mine. We believe the building was built to house German Army and SS officers who fled Germany and surmise the gold must have been secreted in the led mine. Once you have confirmed the gold is indeed at that location, others will orchestrate its removal and transport.That little bell in your head that tells you something’s not right started to ring."Mr. Richter, if your people know where it is, why don’t those others you talked about confirm the gold is there and then remove it?”He pursed his lips.“My people in Argentina are carefully watched by the Argentine government to detect any financial dealings they might attempt. It is highly likely some in the Argentine government are also aware of their findings. Were my people to investigate that mine, well, the current government of Argentina would consider the gold to be the property of Argentina. It is not, but Argentina would be very upset were they to find it has been discovered and removed from the country.”The little bell in my head was now clanging.“So what you’re asking me to do is illegal? I don’t much like the idea of spending time in an Argentine prison.”He shook his head.“Your involvement will only be to locate and enter an abandoned and unguarded mine, confirm with photographs that the gold is there, and then bring those photographs and an accurate location back to me. It will be as if you were a tourist seeing the countryside and just happened upon the mine during your travels. There is nothing illegal about that."You will be well compensated for your efforts. I am prepared to offer you transportation to and from Argentina, a vehicle and other equipment for your use while there, and the sum of one hundred thousand dollars. I have arranged for twenty thousand dollars to be transferred to your bank account immediately upon your arrival in Argentina and commencement of your search. You will, of course, be provided with a small sum for travel expenses. The balance will be transferred upon your return, assuming you are successful. If not, the transfer will be for an additional twenty thous
Living the Dream, Facing the Nightmare: An Interview with Alan C. Mack This week's Team Never Quit guest is a decorated war hero and an extraordinary pilot whose military career spanned nearly 36 years, including 17 years in Army Special Operations. Alan C. Mack, a retired Chief Warrant Officer 5 (CW5), shares his incredible journey from a young man with a passion for flying to a highly respected leader in some of the most elite units of the U.S. military. Alan's expertise and leadership saw him involved in numerous high-stakes operations, many still classified. One of the most notable missions he discusses is the Battle of Takur Ghar, also known as the Battle of Roberts Ridge, during Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan. Alan's bravery and skill under fire, including crash-landing a helicopter and attempting multiple rescue missions under heavy enemy fire, highlight his exceptional courage. Alan's distinguished service has earned him numerous awards, including the Legion of Merit, two Distinguished Flying Crosses, three Bronze Stars, ten Air Medals (one with a Valor device), and many more. His impressive flight record includes over 6,700 flight hours, with more than 3,200 hours under Night Vision Goggles. After retiring from the military, Alan continued to serve his community. He now works as the Deputy Commissioner of Emergency Services for Orange County, New York, a role that he appreciates for its peaceful nature compared to his military experiences. Alan's story is one of resilience, dedication, and the pursuit of one's dreams. Despite the adversities and challenges faced in combat, his journey is a testament to the human spirit's ability to overcome and find meaning in serving others. His life is an inspiration, showing that with determination and courage, it's possible to live out your dreams while also facing and conquering the nightmares. This episode will leave you both inspired and reflective. In This Episode You Will Hear: • The biggest cause of an air refueling incident is the grohe – it's a big hose – you are actually only 19' from rotors to tanker. (26:26) • [During air refueling] You're doing 110-120mph over the water. (27:00) • I've done air refueling as low as 100' off the coast of Iraq. (27:08) • I get a missile fired at me so now I drop down between buildings. I'm down on the rooftops and you know what's in front of me? Kites. Hundreds and hundreds of kites. (34:10) • The older [Chinook helicopter] Delta models just had handheld maps. (43:34) • [During Operation Red Wings] I sat down with the A10's and the AC130's with my map and the imagery and said “I need you to either suppress or creative a diversion that's so big no one could help but look. (50:15) • Crew Chiefs sometimes see things that aren't there (and I hate to say it that way) but sometimes they'll see lights of a car and think they're seeing signal light signals. (53:28) • Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. (55:00) • My youngest son was a Night Stalker Flight Engineer, and my oldest son is a Navy F18 wizzo (back seater) He's a Goose. (58:05) • I did 17 years with the Night Stalkers, plus about 10 years of deployment. (59:03) • Every aircraft munition has a probable kill ratio. A surface to air missile has a “PK” of 75%, meaning that if they fired at you, you have a 75% chance of killing you. The ground has a 100% PK. (64:23) • I've got about 3,500, maybe 4,000 hours of night vision time, which is a lot. (67:51) • Anaconda was a conventional operation, such as Red Wings. There's no soft component to it. (68:57) • We had 4 or 5 people on the aircraft tail, and we are diving at about 150, [one of our men that fell out but is tethered] while they're shooting at us and his toes are tickling the trees. The crew chief is returning fire with an M60 machine gun. He looks over and pulls our guy up, and I learned we had lost Neil [another guy] and decided we've gotta go back. So I turned inbound and climbed back up and the controls stopped moving. Imagine you pulled the keys out of your car. That's what it's like with no hydraulics. So I'm like “Guys… we're done,” as in “We're going to die.” (79:03) • In the spirit of never quit, there's a saying: ”Never quit flying the aircraft.” (83:22) • Everything I do in life, I associate with movies I've seen. (88:12) Socials: - IG: alancmack2015 - https://alancmack.com/ - https://www.facebook.com/ BUY HIS BOOK HERE-> Razor 03: A Night Stalker's Wars https://www.amazon.com/Razor-03-Night-Stalkers-Wars/dp/1399018698 - IG: team_neverquit , marcusluttrell , melanieluttrell , huntero13 - https://www.patreon.com/teamneverquit Sponsors: - Navyfederal.org - Tonal.com [TNQ] - qualialife.com/TNQ [TNQ] - greenlight.com/TNQ - PDSDebt.com/TNQ - drinkAG1.com/TNQ - GoodRX.com/TNQ - ghostbed.com/TNQ [TNQ] - Shadyrays.com [TNQ] - Hims.com/TNQ - Shopify.com/TNQ - PXG.com/TNQ - Aura.com/TNQ - Moink.com/TNQ - Policygenius.com - TAKELEAN.com [TNQ] - usejoymode.com [TNQ] - Shhtape.com [TNQ] - mackweldon.com/utm_source=streaming&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcastlaunch&utm_content=TNQutm_term=TNQ
Dine værter i denne uge er Anders Richter, Nils Petter Bro, Christian Grau og Anders Breinholt, som i denne uge alle er samlet i studiet.Breinholt er tilbage i studiet, og vi får en tiltrængt opdatering på hans liv og MC-midtvejsk.... øhhh eventyr!NP har testet VW ID. Buzz i den lange og opdaterede udgave, samt BMW i5 M60 og Porsche 992 Targa 4S.Grau har kørt Toyota GR Yaris på bane samt den elektriske Rolls-Royce Spectre på landevejen.I nyhederne vender vi VW's "Operation Tiny Car", Hyundai Inster og BMW M5.Vi samler op på den efterlyste Mitsubishi Lancer EVO 8.Vi ringer til vores medlem i Rom, Gustav Isaksen, og hører mere om hans interessante bilvalg.I Graukassen svarer vi på alle jeres bilspørgsmål og vender gode tips til en bilrelateret sommerferie.NP styrer quizzen som i denne omgang handler om motorcykler.For annoncering i programmet kontakt Bauer Media. Afsnit 146 er publiceret d. 8. Juli, 2024.
Hoje batemos um papo sobre como uma plataforma de inteligência artificial está ajudando pessoas a estudarem fora do Brasil.A M60 já conseguiu mapear mais de 850 mil bolsas de estudos internacionais, muitas delas, 100% gratuitas! Para explicar como essa IA funciona, eu recebo hoje aqui no Teletransporta o Mateus Tomoto, CEO da Universidade do Intercâmbio. O TeletransPorta é apresentado por Gustavo Minari e focados em inovação. É o programa que vai levar você para o futuro, mas com um olhar do presente. HT Solutions: 17 anos impulsionando a tecnologia no Brasil!Com soluções tecnológicas completas para empresas, desde a instalação e configuração até o suporte técnico especializado. E instituições de ensino com Google for Education, lousas digitais, laboratórios de informática e muito mais. A HT conta com o apoio de marcas como Dell, HP, Lenovo e Samsung.Para conhecer todas as soluções, é só clicar no link: https://canalte.ch/htsolutions Entre em contato por: podcast@canaltech.com.brConheça o Podcast Canaltech Deixe também uma avaliação no seu dispositivo que isso ajuda bastante. Este programa é um produto do Canaltech, com produção, roteiro e apresentação por Gustavo Minari, edição por Yuri Souza. Capa por Rafael Damini e trilha sonora de Guilherme Zomer.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Robbie is back from Japan and driving the BMW i5 M60. Nicole jumps from last week’s Suburban into the Nissan Altima and Sam had the Cadillac Lyriq with new better door handles and fully functional software. In the news, will Rivian partner with Apple on something? Infotainment, ADAS? Will the US impose 100% tarrifs on… Read More »A Little Digital Kiss
David og Håkon er ute og ratter nye BMW i5 med bakhjulsdrift og 340 hestekrefter. Kan det tenkes at dette faktisk er en vel så god kombinasjon mellom pris og kjøreegenskaper som den dyre og kraftige BMW i5 M60 med firehjulsdrift? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Starting things off this week is the 2024 BMW i5 M60, a near-600 horsepower all-electric sedan that Benjamin seems impressed with, especially in comparison to the Mercedes-AMG EQE from last week. But every BMW comes with its hiccups and gimmicks, and Benjamin is more than eager to share his experience with this high-end German, and how the new executive sport sedan feels. Then Sami gets his three-row on by talking about not just one, but two family oriented crossovers. The discussion starts with the 2024 Toyota Highlander Hybrid, which seems to be the default three-row for families looking to grow from their RAV4. Then the guys go on to talk about Sami's recently tested 2024 Subaru Ascent, and how the brand has recieved a lot of credit for its steady approach to the market. Thanks for listening!!
Čakali sme i5, ale že to bude M60? Brutál. A spracovanie famózne! #bmw #i5m60 #i5 #automobilovypodcast
This week on the BMWBLOG Podcast, Nate reunites with Horatiu for a new episode. Our focus today revolves around the recent Test Fest organized by BMW of North America, showcasing a fleet of over 100 cars for testing. We had the opportunity to experience six of them, ranging from diverse SUVs to electric cars and sports cars. Additionally, we delve into the ongoing journey with our long-term BMW iX M60, exploring the nuances of living with an electric car. To wrap it up, we share insights on trading our BMW i3 for the new i4. capping off with a discussion on the latest buzz in the BMW world — a potential all-electric BMW M3 - iM3. Let's dive into the details! Intro 0:00 BMW i5 M60 on track 02:20 i5 vs 530i 10:20 BMW X5 50e 17:40 BMW X5 M60i 22:30 BMW XM Label 25:30 New BMW M5 38:50 MINI Countryman JCW 39:10 BMW iX M60 41:10 Charging electric cars 48:15 Traded a BMW i3 55:20 Crazy BMW i4 Spec 59:15 BMW i3 - The perfect car? 1:11:00 BMW iM3 1:13:00
Join Francie and Kyle today as they dive into the nerdy details of the BMW i5 eDrive40 and i5 M60. Kyle tells us why he ventured all the way to Lisbon, Portugal to give these cars a drive, which aspects of the i5 that really shine through, where BMW could focus a bit more, and his overall experience on the roads of Lisbon in these EVs. Find us on all of these places:YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/outofspecpodcastApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/out-of-spec-podcast/id1576636119Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0tKIQfKL9oaHc1DLOTWvbdAmazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/473692b9-05b9-41f9-9b38-9f86fbdabee7/OUT-OF-SPEC-PODCASTFor further inquiries please email podcast@outofspecstudios.com#bmw #i5 #review Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Greg Athayde is a 62 year old runner who was born in Uganda and immigrated to Winnipeg, MB with his family in 1972. He discovered track and cross country in junior high and took part all the way through his years at the University of Manitoba. In his 30s & 40s Greg dabbled in road running and even raced several marathons, but more recently he's gone all-in again on the track. 800m is his favourite event and it turns out he's just as good at it (if not better!) as a 62 year old than he was in his prime…relatively speaking, of course. Greg explains what age-grading is and how it can work to keep masters athletes striving for their goals. Greg runs with Tough Track, the same club that Carolyn's kids and husband (Johnny) belong to, so we had some fun discussions around what it's like to train with and race against teenagers. In August 2023 at the Canadian Masters Athletics Outdoor Championships in Langley, BC, Greg was part of a world record setting 4 x 800m relay team for his M60-64 age category! This episode really opened our eyes to the many different ways one can enjoy running beyond marathons and ultramarathons. Greg is on several boards and committees aimed at growing our masters track and road running communities at the local, provincial and national levels. Connect with Greg or learn more about Masters Athletics:Greg's Instagram: @athayg1Athletics Manitoba Instagram: @athleticsmbLearn More: http://athleticsmanitoba.com/masters-athletics-2/Connect with Carolyn & Kim:Email us with guest ideas: inspiredsolescast@gmail.comInspired Soles InstagramKim's InstagramKim's FacebookCarolyn's InstagramCarolyn's FacebookCarolyn's websiteWe love hearing from you! Connect with us on Instagram @inspiredsolescast or email guest ideas to inspiredsolescast@gmail.com. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend, subscribe or leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.
On this week's podcast we speak with RAF Chinook Aircrewman Liz McConaghy. Liz grew up in a small country town and at 17 joined the RAF, to follow her dream of becoming a chinook Aircrewman serving for 17 years a job she loved. At 21 Liz was the youngest aircrew member to deploy to Iraq and was the only female ‘crewman' on the Chinook wing for four years. Liz completed another deployment to Iraq and would deploy 10 times to Helmand province in Afghanistan in support of the enduring Operation Herrick Campaign. Liz's inspiringly honest story reveals the highs and lows that she witnessed at war, and the cost that came with both, physically and mentally for those involved. During her deployments, she survived not only a near fatal wire strike onboard her CH47, but numerous emery fire ‘Contacts' defending her crew by returning fire from both the M134 ‘Minigun' and M60 weapons entrusted to her to operate. Liz'sgreatest honour of all her duties was serving on the Medical Emergency Response Team or “MERT”, flying ambulance as it was commonly known. This involved recovering wounded soldiers from the battlefield, often under fire, and witnessing them both die and come back to life at her feet in the cabin of her Chinook. Liz saw Camp bastion grow from a barbed wire fence surrounding an area of tents in the sand to a huge Operating Base it became. Very few Chinook crew members if any spanned the length of time as Liz did. After all these years of seeing trauma and tragedy Liz battled her own war within and took her to the point of suicide once she had left the service, her survival from both the battles in foreign lands and in her own head led her to tell her story publishing her book Chinook Crew “Chick” published in 2022 in the hope she can help others win their wars. Presenter: Adam Blum Guest: Liz McConaghy Editor: Kyle Watkins Investigative Consultant: Adam Holloway
We had the privilege of interviewing Don Cochrane about Vertex and the Dirty Dozen watches. Don is the great-grandson of Claude Lyons, who started Vertex Watches all the way back in 1912. Don wanted to restart the family business and continue the watchmaking legacy left by his great-grandfather. 0:00 The history of Vertex 5:16 The Only British Dirty Dozen Watchmaker 9:45 Vertex watches and World War 2 12:30 What happened after the war? 16:13 Designing the M100 and re-starting the brand 21:13 The coolest Peli case 23:24 MP45 - mono-pusher chronograph 24:16 M60 - diving watch 27:31 Two lug pin positions 28:17 Brand identity
Whenever people are placed in front of a burning wall of adversity, the one thing they have control over that can be used as a weapon of mass destruction to tear down that wall is their own physical bodies. The ability to become a barrel chested, 5 mile-running, weight crushing machine is a skill Cam and Israel have honed in their own military experiences, as well as watched heroes in some of their favorite pieces of pop culture cultivate. Ask yourself, would Rambo have been as successful hip firing a M60 if he wasn't that jacked? Exactly. So today, Izzy and Cam are going to talk about some workouts featured in pop culture as well as their very own experience with fitness!An educational game of "Do You Even Lift, Bro?" ties off what some critics are calling "the best episode of PCFM ever made this week." Support the show
In this week's No Lowballers podcast by GoWild presented by GunBroker.com, we're talking all about machine guns including their history and how we got to modern machine guns. Logan gets right into it and dispels a big myth: The Gatling gun is not a machine gun! This helps us define what a machine gun is and what it isn't. When did the world's first fully automatic machine gun come out and who invented it? It came out at a pivotal time and completely changed modern warfare. Find out where you can go view some of the earliest machine guns. In World War I we saw several of these early machine guns enter the playing field, including the Maxim MG0 used by the German army, the Lewis Gun used by American and British troops, and the Browning M1917 used by the United States. These early models were big and heavy and we're definitely a crew-served weapon. By World War II we started to see some advancements in technology and a few more machine guns hitting the battlefield, including the Browning M2 used by many nations and the MG42 introduced by Germany and feared by the Allies. We outline the differences between belt-fed, box-fed, and pan-fed guns and which ones were meant for anti-personnel and anti-material purposes. We then move into the Vietnam War era talking about the M60. Over time, machine guns have become smaller, lighter, and more portable, but many of the attributes from the early foundational firearms are still utilized in today's modern armaments. Allen jumps in to talk about the design of these different machine guns and how they would dissipate heat, either through water or air cooling, or swapping barrels. Logan mentions that many of these guns were adapted in the field over the years as servicemen figured out how to best use their weapons in innovative ways, like using them in aircraft. When aircraft went from being an observation tool to an offensive weapon, the machine guns went with them. Jacob asks an important set of questions we all want to know: Can we own a machine gun, where do we find one, and what's the expected purchase price to buy one? Logan outlines the legalities and what the process looks like. Allen then speaks to the popular machine guns selling on GunBroker.com along with their price ranges. The process is not as intimidating as you think, and while owning a machine gun is not cheap, it's otherwise just a pile of paperwork and playing the waiting game on the federal government. Another way to get the machine gun look and feel is by picking up a belt-fed semi-automatic firearm, like the FN M249s. Allen jokes about the hardest part of owning a machine gun … tune in to find out what that is! As usual, we close the episode by hearing from Allen on whatever weird, interesting, and obscure guns have sold on GunBroker this past week! If you like what you're hearing, please leave us a rating and review!! The No Lowballers podcast is a brand new joint venture between GoWild and GunBroker.com to explore the history and heritage of firearms. We hope to expose you to the vintage guns of the golden age along with newer, modern guns, specialty items, and a few other odd balls along the way. Jump in and come along for the ride! The show launches every Thursday morning. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Check out the Sportsmen's Empire Podcast Network for more relevant, outdoor content! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this week's No Lowballers podcast by GoWild presented by GunBroker.com, we're talking all about machine guns including their history and how we got to modern machine guns. Logan gets right into it and dispels a big myth: The Gatling gun is not a machine gun! This helps us define what a machine gun is and what it isn't. When did the world's first fully automatic machine gun come out and who invented it? It came out at a pivotal time and completely changed modern warfare. Find out where you can go view some of the earliest machine guns. In World War I we saw several of these early machine guns enter the playing field, including the Maxim MG0 used by the German army, the Lewis Gun used by American and British troops, and the Browning M1917 used by the United States. These early models were big and heavy and we're definitely a crew-served weapon. By World War II we started to see some advancements in technology and a few more machine guns hitting the battlefield, including the Browning M2 used by many nations and the MG42 introduced by Germany and feared by the Allies. We outline the differences between belt-fed, box-fed, and pan-fed guns and which ones were meant for anti-personnel and anti-material purposes. We then move into the Vietnam War era talking about the M60. Over time, machine guns have become smaller, lighter, and more portable, but many of the attributes from the early foundational firearms are still utilized in today's modern armaments. Allen jumps in to talk about the design of these different machine guns and how they would dissipate heat, either through water or air cooling, or swapping barrels. Logan mentions that many of these guns were adapted in the field over the years as servicemen figured out how to best use their weapons in innovative ways, like using them in aircraft. When aircraft went from being an observation tool to an offensive weapon, the machine guns went with them.Jacob asks an important set of questions we all want to know: Can we own a machine gun, where do we find one, and what's the expected purchase price to buy one? Logan outlines the legalities and what the process looks like. Allen then speaks to the popular machine guns selling on GunBroker.com along with their price ranges. The process is not as intimidating as you think, and while owning a machine gun is not cheap, it's otherwise just a pile of paperwork and playing the waiting game on the federal government. Another way to get the machine gun look and feel is by picking up a belt-fed semi-automatic firearm, like the FN M249s. Allen jokes about the hardest part of owning a machine gun … tune in to find out what that is!As usual, we close the episode by hearing from Allen on whatever weird, interesting, and obscure guns have sold on GunBroker this past week!If you like what you're hearing, please leave us a rating and review!!The No Lowballers podcast is a brand new joint venture between GoWild and GunBroker.com to explore the history and heritage of firearms. We hope to expose you to the vintage guns of the golden age along with newer, modern guns, specialty items, and a few other odd balls along the way. Jump in and come along for the ride! The show launches every Thursday morning. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.Check out the Sportsmen's Empire Podcast Network for more relevant, outdoor content!
To celebrate three years of Video High, the class infiltrates the airspace of another jungle shoot-em-up Rambo II ripoff with DELTA FORCE COMMANDO (1987). Brett Baxter Clark packs the guns and the pecs for just the right amount of M60 muscle jiggle, and Fred Williamson backs him up with cool quips and just the right amount of romantic subtext. The plot has something to do with avenging a murdered wife and a stolen nuclear weapon. But that's not important. We just need to know if it's ok to think a reactionary film villainizing a democratic people's revolution is this rad. Happy Commandoversary, class! INSTAGRAM | TIKTOK | FACEBOOK | TWITTER
To celebrate three years of Video High, the class infiltrates the airspace of another jungle shoot-em-up Rambo II ripoff with DELTA FORCE COMMANDO (1987). Brett Baxter Clark packs the guns and the pecs for just the right amount of M60 muscle jiggle, and Fred Williamson backs him up with cool quips and just the right amount of romantic subtext. The plot has something to do with avenging a murdered wife and a stolen nuclear weapon. But that's not important. We just need to know if it's ok to think a reactionary film villainizing a democratic people's revolution is this rad. Happy Commandoversary, class!
I talk about a recent session of REAVER and field more calls on suppressive fire amongst other topics. Calls from Spencer aka Free Thrall (Keep off the Borderlands), Safer (Safer Fantasy Crafting), Joe (Hindsightless), Chgowiz (The Dungeon Master's Handbook), Joe (Raven God Games), MW Lewis (The Worlds of MW Lewis), Dekahedron Joe (Dekahedron RPG Podcast), Goblin's Henchman, The Pink Phantom (Phantom Thoughts), Karl (The GMologist Presents), and Sam. REAVER: Sword & Sorcery RPG Quickstart https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/419427/Reaver-Sword--Sorcery-RPG-Quickstart Smoulding Dung Games https://www.smolderingdunggames.com/product/the-mystifying-marvel-of-nicomeiden-s-tower-printed-module/30?cs=true&cst=custom Phantom Thoughts https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/the-pink-phantom/episodes/039-Enter-the-Dragon-e23s4rj Dekahedron RPG Podcast http://www.dekahedron.com/ Goblin's Henchmen https://goblinshenchman.wordpress.com/ Sandbox Generator https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/430675/Sandbox-Generator When Sea Is Calling https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/397826/When-Sea-Is-Calling Goblin Henchmen's In the Heart of the Sea https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/274573/In-the-Heart-of-the-Sea--A-Procedural-High-Seas-Hex-Crawl Karl and Joe discuss Twilight 2000 4th edition suppressive fire https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/karl-rodriguez/episodes/Twilight-Tuesday-Mini-review-of-Twilight-2000-4th-edition-Urban-Operations-Boxed-Set-e245t3f Newhall Shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newhall_incident FBI Miami Shootout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_FBI_Miami_shootout Ways to contact me: Google Voice Number for US callers: (540) 445-1145 Speakpipe for international callers: https://www.speakpipe.com/NerdsRPGVarietyCast The podcast's email at nerdsrpgvarietycast 'at' gmail 'dot' com Find me on a variety of discords including the Audio Dungeon Discord. Invite for the Audio Dungeon Discord https://discord.gg/j5H8hGr Home page for this show https://nerdsrpgvarietycast.carrd.co/ Home page for Cerebrevore, the TTRPG panel discussion podcast https://cerebrevore.carrd.co/ Come to: GrogCon in Orlando, FL on 29 Sep to 1 Oct, 2023 https://www.grogcon.com/grogcon4/ Proud member of the Grog-talk Empire having been bestowed the title of The Governor Most Radiant Grandeur Baron The Belligerent Hero of The Valley. https://www.grogcon.com/podcast/ Today's episode image is taken near the Cu Chi tunnels in Vietnam, this U.S. Army soldier fires the M60 machine gun from a crouch. Image: Tom Laemlein Ray Otus did the coffee cup art for this show, you can find his blog at https://rayotus.carrd.co/ TJ Drennon provides music for my show. Colin Green at Spikepit https://anchor.fm/spikepit provided the "Have no fear" sound clip. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/jason376/message
Another Monday of New Year, New Zealand is upon us here on Slashers Podcast! Today's episode is yet another film by Peter Jackson, Meet the Feebles from 1989. This is another film from what Doug likes to call Peter Jackson's "Trilogy of Trash," or his second feature length film (the first being Bad Taste and the last being Dead Alive). The film follows a cast entirely made of puppets who experience the sleazier side of show business while working on a variety show. This is basically parodying The Muppet Show, except there is blood, guts, bodily fluids, flashbacks of Nam and an M60 massacre to tie it altogether. As absurd and raunchy as this flick is, find out why it's one of Doug's favorites! Let us know your thoughts on this one (currently streaming on Tubi). If you want to show Austin and his co host Corey some love, be sure to follow them on Instagram @frightmarespodcast, Facebook and Twitter, and listen to them by following this link: linktr.ee/frightmarespodcast . You can also follow Austin on Letterboxd @doctorproctor. If you ever have feedback or recommendations on future episodes, please let us know at slasherspod@gmail.com. You can always find us on our social media: Instagram, Twitter, Slasher App: @slasherspod Facebook: /slasherspod Reddit: u/slasherspod https://www.youtube.com/c/slasherspodcast You can find our merch, and links to all our online presence here: linktr.ee/slasherspod Theme song is I wanna Die by Mini Meltdowns. https://open.spotify.com/artist/5ZAk6lUDsaJj8EAhrhzZnh ; https://minimeltdowns.bandcamp.com/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/slasherspod/support
"Vietnam veteran and drifter John J. Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) wanders into a small Washington town in search of an old friend, but is met with intolerance and brutality by the local sheriff, Will Teasle (Brian Dennehy). When Teasle and his deputies restrain and shave Rambo, he flashes back to his time as a prisoner of war and unleashes his fury on the officers. He narrowly escapes the manhunt, but it will take his former commander (Richard Crenna) to save the hunters from the hunted." Fun Fact: Al Pacino was tapped to be John Rambo, but due to the crew feeling his request to make the character "crazier" was CRAZY, they ripped the script out of his hands and BOOM, you got 1982's "First Blood" starring Sylvester Stallone instead! Is it fair for local police to just assume that you MIGHT be homeless based on your hair and escort you out of town? If you're able to take a WHOLE small town hostage with just an M60 and guerilla warfare tactics, shouldn't they just make you the mayor?? HOW IS IT POLICE PROTOCOL TO POWER WASH A MAN'S NUTS EVER??? A literal One Many Army capable of killing a WHOLE small town AND all of it's police force still wasn't enough to make a fat egotistical "king-sh*t" cop stand down AND MORE on "First Blood (Rambo)" - Episode 58 of "¿Who Diss Been Watching?" - UP NOW!! LIKE | RATE | COMMENT | FOLLOW | SUBSCRIBE 2 AhhFuGGiT!!! https://www.youtube.com/whodissis1 https://www.instagram.com/whodissis1 https://www.instagram.com/whodissbeenwatching https://www.instagram.com/ahhfuggit https://www.twitch.tv/whodissis1 DONT FORGET: Join me SATS at 1 PM EST while I record my movie review podcast "¿Who Diss Been Watching?" LIVE on Instagram!!! IG LIVE: https://www.instagram.com/whodissis1 MORE AUDIO VERSIONS OF AhhFuGGiT: https://linktr.ee/whodissis https://soundcloud.com/whodissis1 https://open.spotify.com/show/6hyS2l2KdQDkX5rfNH5AIp https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ahhf…it/id1084220877
At 21, Sergeant Liz McConaghy was the youngest Chinook crew person to see action, serving in Iraq. She was also the longest-serving female Chinook aircrew member on 18(B) Squadron. Liz completed two tours of Iraq and a further ten deployments to Afghanistan. During her deployments, she survived not only a near fatal strike onboard her CH47, but numerous enemy fire contacts, by returning fire from both the M134 Minigun and M60 weapons. Her biggest honour of all her duties, was serving on the Medical Emergency Response Team. (MERT) This involved recovering wounded soldiers from the battlefield, often under fire. She was also on the last 1310 Flight deployment in Afghanistan, as the British forces withdrew. Her top-selling book, 'Chinook Crew Chick' is out now and available from the link below. Read 'Eating Smoke: One Man's Descent into Crystal Meth Psychosis in Hong Kong's Triad Heartland.' Paperback UK: https://amzn.to/2YoeaPx Paperback US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0993543944 Support the podcast at: https://www.patreon.com/christhrall (£2 per month plus perks) https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-our-veterans-to-tell-their-story https://paypal.me/TeamThrall Sign up for my NON-SPAM newsletter and FREE books: https://christhrall.com/mailing-list/ Social media Links: https://facebook.com/christhrall https://twitter.com/christhrall https://instagram.com/chris.thrall https://linkedin.com/in/christhrall https://youtube.com/christhrall https://discord.gg/yqvHRUN https://christhrall.com
Adem Yavuz Arslan | Hablemitoğlu cinayeti; M60 tankı ve sırlı makale | 18.08.2022 by Tr724
Action Hero: John Rambo Leaving behind the glittery pop punk stylings of modern Gotham, The Last Action Heroes go on the run in this months episode, heading into the rain soaked forests of North America with action hero royalty: Rambo: First Blood (1982). Action heroes don't come more recognisable than this! But is this the Rambo we all know and love? Who actually did draw first blood? (Spoiler: Not Rambo…he forgot his crayons!) Why did this escalate so badly? Could this have all been avoided if they'd just bought him a burger?? We get into all this and more as Sly Stallone's soulful soldier takes a strike at The Last Action Hero leaderboard. Join us as we find out where the Italian stallions (silverback) guerrilla fighting, red bandana wearing, M60 toting 80s beefcake makes his mark.
This week on the Unnamed Automotive Podcast, the duo jump into action to discuss the 2023 BMW iX M60, a combination of BMW's M, i and X brands that looks... frumpy. Besides the exterior design, the M60 sports a ton of power and performance, especially in a straight line. But everyone knows that a BMW M product has to sound cool too, so be sure to hear Sami explain how the iX M60 achieves its signature soundtrack. Then Benjamin dives in to talk about the 2022 Acura MDX Type S, which leverages Acura's once sexy sport trim for a new (nefarious?) purpose. With a turbocharged 3.0-litre six-cylinder engine, is the MDX Type S hot enough to be worthy of that name? Where else does its performance shine? Will Benjamin end up begging listeners to help him understand where Acura is going with this Type S branding? Finally, Benjamin shares an update on his Datsun woes, and how he hopes to resolve his issues to get back on the track again. Thanks for listening! Be sure to subscribe and review!
Agradece a este podcast tantas horas de entretenimiento y disfruta de episodios exclusivos como éste. ¡Apóyale en iVoox! Después de los experimentos coreanos, los estrategas norteamericanos pensaron que ya estaba bien de apaños, y que necesitaban un diseño totalmente nuevo de MBT. Además, los diseños soviéticos de mediados de los 50 eran descorazonadores para los tanques de los que disponían en ese momento. Así nació el M48, con el cañón T-54 de 90 mm y una tripulación de solo 4 tripulantes, que se convertiría en el tanque insignia de los EE.UU. a partir de los años 50. El padre del M60 sería profusamente utilizado en el conflicto del Vietnam, donde daría apoyo 'duro' a la infantería, y un montón de experiencias para los próximos modelos. Bienvenido a la serie para CB FANS La Leyenda del M-60 Patton. El M-60 fue el pilar de los MBT de los Estados Unidos y un gran número de sus aliados occidentales. Delante tuvo adversarios temibles de tecnología soviética como los T-55 o T-62, y convivió con los primeros T-64 y T-72 hasta su reemplazo por el M1 Abrahams. Te lo cuenta nuestro Dúo Acorazado: 📐 Félix Lancho y 🦕 Antonio Gómez. Esta serie es en exclusiva para suscriptores del Programa de Fans de Ivoox. 💥 Si quieres acceder a programas como estos, 👉 a + de 500 programas exclusivos de Historia Bélica, 👉 a un nuevo programas CB FANS cada viernes, 👉 a escuchar todos los programas de Casus Belli sin publicidad, 👉 a acceso a la Zona de Fans de https://podcastcasusbelli.pod 👉 y contribuir a que el proyecto continúe, puedes apoyarnos por menos de lo que cuestan dos cafés ☕+☕. Solo has de pulsar el botón de ▶️APOYAR. 👨💻Casus Belli Podcast y Factoría Casus Belli está dirigido por Dani CarAn. Recuerda que estamos en: ⚡ Twitter, como @casusbellipod @CasusBelliPod ⚡ Facebook, nuestra página es @casusbellipodcast https://www.facebook.com/CasusBelliPodcast ⚡ Telegram, nuestro canal es @casusbellipodcast https://t.me/casusbellipodcast ⚡ Y nuestro chat es @aviones10 ⚡ ¿Queréis contarnos algo? También puedes escribirnos a casus.belli.pod@gmail.com o a info@podcastcasusbelli.com Si te ha gustado, y crees que nos lo merecemos, nos sirve mucho que nos des un 👍 like, si nos escuchas desde la app de Ivoox. 🎵 La música incluida en el programa es Freedom Soldiers de Gregory Lourme bajo licencia CC. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ El resto de música es bajo licencia privada de Epidemic Music, Jamendo Music o SGAE. de Ivoox. 🎭Las opiniones expresadas en este programa de pódcast, son de exclusiva responsabilidad de los podcasters que las trasmiten. Que cada palo aguante su vela. Muchas gracias por escucharnos, y hasta la próxima. Escucha el episodio completo en la app de iVoox, o descubre todo el catálogo de iVoox Originals
PRÓXIMAMENTE - Después de los experimentos coreanos, los estrategas norteamericanos pensaron que ya estaba bien de apaños, y que necesitaban un diseño totalmente nuevo de MBT. Además, los diseños soviéticos de mediados de los 50 eran descorazonadores para los tanques de los que disponían en ese momento. Así nació el M48, con el cañón T-54 de 90 mm y una tripulación de solo 4 tripulantes, que se convertiría en el tanque insignia de los EE.UU. a partir de los años 50. El padre del M60 sería profusamente utilizado en el conflicto del Vietnam, donde daría apoyo 'duro' a la infantería, y un montón de experiencias para los próximos modelos. Fecha de publicación: Viernes 22/04/22 🛑 Este es un audio de promoción, NO es el episodio completo. Este programa forma parte de la 🏭 Factoría Casus Belli. Casus Belli Podcast forma parte de 📀 Ivoox Originals. 👉https://podcastcasusbelli.com 👉En Facebook, nuestra página es @casusbellipodcast https://www.facebook.com/CasusBelliPodcast 👉En Instagram estamos como @casusbellipodcast https://www.instagram.com/casusbellipodcast 👉En Twitter estamos como @casusbellipod y @podcastvictoria 👉Telegram, nuestro canal es @casusbellipodcast https://t.me/casusbellipodcast 👨💻Nuestro chat del canal es https://t.me/aviones10 ⚛️ Los logotipos aparecidos en la 🏭 Factoría Casus Belli están diseñados por Publicidad Fabián publicidadfabian@yahoo.es 🎵 La música incluida en el programa es toda bajo licencia CC. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/, o licencias privadas de Epidemic Music, Jamendo Music o SGAE de Ivoox. 📧¿Queréis contarnos algo? También puedes escribirnos a casus.belli.pod@gmail.com Escucha el episodio completo en la app de iVoox, o descubre todo el catálogo de iVoox Originals
Drs. Kate DeSear (@IDPharmD_Kate) and Frank Tverdek (@FTverdek) join Dr. Julie Ann Justo (@julie_justo) to discuss the practice of empiric escalation in this episode of our gram-negative resistance series. Listen in for encouragement on following your intuition and tips on how, when, and why to practice this other side of antimicrobial stewardship. Learn more about the Society of Infectious Diseases Pharmacists: https://sidp.org/About Twitter: @SIDPharm (https://twitter.com/SIDPharm) Instagram: @SIDPharm (https://www.instagram.com/sidpharm/) Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sidprx LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sidp/ References Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute. Access Our Free Resources: M100 and M60. Accessed at https://clsi.org/standards/products/free-resources/access-our-free-resources/ Gallagher JC, et al. Open Forum Infect Dis. 2018 Oct 31;5(11):ofy280. doi: 10.1093/ofid/ofy280. PMID: 30488041. Castan B, et al. Infect Dis Now. 2021 Sep;51(6):532-539. doi: 10.1016/j.idnow.2021.05.003. Epub 2021 May 17. PMID: 34015539. Cultrera R, et al. Antibiotics (Basel). 2020 Sep 24;9(10):640. doi: 10.3390/antibiotics9100640. PMID: 32987821. Strich JR, et al. Clin Infect Dis. 2021 Feb 16;72(4):611-621. doi: 10.1093/cid/ciaa061. PMID: 32107536. Montravers P, Bassetti M. Curr Opin Infect Dis. 2018 Dec;31(6):587-593. doi: 10.1097/QCO.0000000000000490. PMID: 30299359. Strich JR, Heil EL, Masur H. J Infect Dis. 2020 Jul 21;222(Suppl 2):S119-S131. doi: 10.1093/infdis/jiaa221. PMID: 32691833. Kumar A, et al. Crit Care Med. 2006 Jun;34(6):1589-96. doi: 10.1097/01.CCM.0000217961.75225.E9. PMID: 16625125. Hibbard ML, et al. Surg Infect (Larchmt). 2010 Oct;11(5):427-32. doi: 10.1089/sur.2009.046. PMID: 20818984. Rosa RG, Goldani LZ, dos Santos RP. BMC Infect Dis. 2014 May 23;14:286. doi: 10.1186/1471-2334-14-286. PMID: 24884397. Benanti GE, et al. Antimicrob Agents Chemother. 2019 Jan 29;63(2):e01813-18. doi: 10.1128/AAC.01813-18. PMID: 30509935.
Dr. Brian Regal is a history professor at Kean University in New Jersey. He has become the go-to guy for cryptid topics by the media. Before he started tucking into things with big feet, Dr. Regal was a Cold War warrior. I have him on to talk about his days on the front lines as a tank commander and his experiences as an 18-year old in West Germany staring down the barrel of an M60 tank at T72s.
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