The wind never truly dies in the Urals.It prowls the valleys and ridgelines like a restless spirit, rattling bare birches, hissing across the frozen stone. At night it screams—long, feral cries that curl around the peaks like warning songs. The Mansi hunters had long ago given one of those mountains a name: Kholat Syakhl, the Mountain of the Dead.In the dim light of February 1959, the mountain waited. Snow drifted across its slopes, erasing tracks, swallowing sound, hiding the small traces...

The summer of 1916 had come on like a furnace. June had been blistering, the kind of month that drove city dwellers out of their brick apartments in Philadelphia and New York, down toward the promise of breezes off the Atlantic Ocean, in Jersey shore towns like Beach Haven, Spring Lake, Asbury Park, and Matawan... But beneath the glittering surface, the sea held its own dark relentless man-eating secret.

"The wind was a living thing. It tore at his clothes, roared in his ears, clawed at the edges of his resolve. The aluminum skin of the Boeing 727 thrummed beneath his feet, the open airstair rattling in the cold November night..." What began as one man's audacious airline hijacking, extortion and theft of 200,000 in ransom money, and subsequent escape and disappearance, transformed over the years and decades from a simple criminal act into a tale of myth and folklore--making the name, D.B....