Predator by Richard Whittle Read Free Book Online

was a pure-blooded—and often enough in later years a cold-blooded—capitalist, a shrewd deal maker with a nose for opportunity and a knack for planning and finance. “He always had a plan,” his high school friend Norman Augustine would remember decades later. “To make some money or win an election or write an article or give a speech or what have you.” Moreover, as the audacious expedition he put together before his twenty-first birthday proved, and as he would demonstrate repeatedly later in life, Neal Blue knew not only how to make big plans, but also how to execute them, a crucial step that eludes most big thinkers. In time, his abilities would make him uncommonly wealthy. They would also make him a founding father of the drone revolution.
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    A photo taken on June 3, 1955, shows Blue with three Yale classmates who had decided to join him and spend the summer between their sophomore and junior years on a ten-week, seventeen-country, two-continent odyssey—an undertaking more daring than it might sound in these days of cell phones and the Internet. The four young Americans were going to cross merciless deserts and rugged mountains in lands where the roads were poor and the inhabitants could be hostile—lonely places where the bad luck of a breakdown or an encounter with armed brigands could mean serious trouble, even death.
    The well-scrubbed young faces of Blue and his upper-crust Class of ’57 partners, Henry G. von Maur, Charles W. Trippe, and G. Morgan Browne Jr., betrayed no trepidation as they posed for a news photographer at New York Harbor on the eve of their departure. Standing dockside next to the red-and-white Dodge Sierra that would carry them on their trek, wearing suits and ties and short haircuts, they were clearly trying hard to look serious while seeming to scrutinize an invisible spot on the station wagon’s hood. Berthed in the background was the luxurious and historic SS Ile de France. The grand ocean liner—which had crossed the Atlantic regularly a few years earlier to convoy GIs to Europe to fight World War II—would now convey the Dodge Sierra to the continent for an exploit the Yale men would document in dispatches to the New York Times .
    â€œThey will sail tomorrow for France,” the photo caption inaccurately reported. Trippe’s father was Pan American World Airways founder Juan Trippe, so while the car would sail, the young men would fly to Europe via Pan Am. Several weeks earlier, Trippe Sr. had also secured them a meeting with the publisher of the Times , Arthur Hays Sulzberger, during which the four classmates would pitch their proposal that the paper pay them for regular reports on their expedition as it unfolded. Blue figured they needed to prove that they were serious about their undertaking, so before going to see Sulzberger at the newspaper’s Times Square headquarters, he and his friends put together a slick brochure describing their “Global Goodwill Tour.” The publisher agreed to buy a weekly article with photos, so their next stop was the Chrysler Building, a few blocks east, on Forty-Second Street. There, the promise of coverage in the Times got the students not only free use of the Dodge Sierra but also modifications to toughen it for the rigors of Third World roads. “Dodge engineers have equipped the car with heavy duty springs, a heavy duty cooling system, battery and generator as well as tinted glass to cut down on heat,” the dockside photo’s caption noted. “The car is also equipped with a special engine that will operate on low octane gas.”
    Their itinerary would take the four young men from France to Germany to Austria; then south through Communist but independent Yugoslavia and on to Greece; then east through Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and finally to India. From Calcutta, they would fly home. “U.S. Students Find