The Debris of Flight 33(Martha Huett) Only months before the end of World War II, a highly-classified flight climbed into a cloudy, blackened sky with a manifest of four passengers - three armed American servicemen and a Romani woman. The soldiers were executing the final leg of a mission that was straightforward, if not perplexing. Locate the woman in a tiny mountain village near Lake Bakal in the eastern Soviet Union and bring her directly to the president in the White House. They were sternly ordered to treat the elderly woman with respect and deference. No limits were allowed her in bringing along any clothing or personal items she wished. However, the old woman was carrying only a small, hand-woven bag made of yak hair when she boarded a disguised military plane designated as commercial Flight 33.

The flight pattern had been as covert as the selection of the three Special Forces conducting the mission. At the last minute, it was delivered in Navajo Code to the pilot who had been specifically trained in night flying and navigation. In spite of his expert preparedness, the pilot felt a frisson of fear sting his nerves and slide up his spine when he read the most dangerous segment of the flight instructions: cross the Arctic Circle.

The plane with its passengers had been in flight over the Arctic Circle for only three minutes when the engines stalled. The aircraft plunged from the blizzard-bathed sky into an even more frigid fate of the glacier below. Within minutes, what was left of the plane had nestled into the slow-moving ice river, was blanketed in snow and disappeared from sight. There was no one there to see it anyway.

Opportunities like this come, well, never, thought Gerta Hemmer, as she entered the excavation's perimeter near the Arctic Circle and approached the team leader for her assigned tasks. Eighty years and a warming climate had exposed an unprecedented find in aviation history that, in spite of the fieldwork's harshness and the winter's near end, was a siren's song to Gerta.

Gerta's passion was avionics, and she was consulted on every airline disaster that had saddened her and the world for the past thirty years. A specialist in aviation disaster analysis, Gerta had the ability to hypothesize and analyze objectively, yet feel empathically, the pain and terror of the victims.

The team leader was anxious for Gerta to examine the aft of the plane where, through the deformation caused by the crash and the movement of the glacier, an air-tight compartment had been formed. She informed Gerta that technicians were in the process of cutting it open.

Gerta studied the inside of the compartment before she lowered herself into it. It was small, barely room enough for one. And, it was much warmer in there than it should be, she noted to herself, extracting scientific instruments from her backpack. Suddenly, a blizzard claxon blared in her ears and into her brain. Gerta was never one to buck safety protocols and immediately set to gathering her tools when she saw a small, hairy bag wedged into a paneled corner of the compartment. She grabbed it up, stuffed it in bottom pocket of her pack and scrambled out.

The snowstorm lasted for three days but, in a controlled frenzy, Gerta and the rest of the excavation team escaped it by minutes. Later, discussions were had and the group departed for their respective countries with an agreement to resume work in the spring. Gerta was on a plane back to Germany that afternoon. Upon landing, she was called for her expert disaster analysis of an unfortunate airliner crash in Peru. She hurried directly to the international departures terminal and was last to board the non-stop flight to Lima.

An especially difficult three weeks followed an exhausted Gerta in Lima where the plane's wreckage was as fresh as the human lives snuffed out for a faulty wing bolt. It was one of those situations where the messenger of bad news - in this case, Gerta - got the brunt of the blame. She had worked 20 hours a day, been interrogated half that time and suffered the bullying and insults of airline bigwigs. Gerta Hemmer needed a vacation.

Montanita is a small, quiet town on the Pacific Coast of Ecuador with a lot of surf and surfers. Gerta was no surfer but she loved to stretch out on an uncrowded beach and watch from afar. She found it exciting, yet relaxing. But when a young local boy wiped out on his surfboard and was flung onto the sand by a mighty wave, all her relaxation vanished.

Gerta had seen enough motionless, broken bodies to last forever. She ran screaming, "Ayuda, ayuda" to the child's aid, but the surfing crowd was much further down the beach where the Pacific chose not to be so rough. Gerta gathered the boy in her arms, heedless of his hemorraging scalp, and ran to her rented beach hut.

There the bleeding stopped, but the tears started. Unaccustomed in tending to a child's emotions, Gerta reached for her backpack thinking maybe the shiny gadgets of her work instruments might distract the young boy. Nothing worked. She dug deeper and pulled a small, hairy bag out of the bottom container of her backpack.

Gerta blinked, then remembered grabbing this very bag in the seconds before an evacuation from an Arctic blizzard. She cringed at her lapse of professionalism in aviation disaster debris collection. In her haste and exhaustion, Gerta had forgotten all about it. The boy stopped his crying mid-wail when Gerta emptied the bag into the palm of her hand. The young surfer child stared at it. He then smiled and declared how much his grandmother would like the clear round orb with snow inside it.

Gerta examined the snowglobe with relief. Obviously, it was just some kind of souvenir that one of the soldiers was carrying back to the States on Flight 33, she reasoned. There was certainly no harm in letting the boy have it. After all, a snow globe with only snow in it wasn't much use. Strange, though. Not even a miniature Eiffel Tower.

The surfer child's grandmother was over the moon. She had never seen snow, but she had seen such a crystal object when she was very young. The old Ecuadorian had seen her own grandmother of Romani descent use it to tell fortunes of others. Or misfortunes, as was told from this crystal ball.

Every crystal ball archives the fortunes told by it, the old woman knew. She looked into the orb and asked it to call up the first and last fortunes told. The most recent was over eighty years old. It was an image of aerial bombings on a naval base in the Pacific followed by one of a nuclear blast. The earliest was an image of the birth of Hitler. The old lady finally understood why it was that her ancestors fled that part of the world long before World War II. They had seen it coming.

Well, enough of the past, the old grandmother decided. She would look to the future and tell fortunes for her fishing village. The first up would be where and when her three sons could pull the best catch. She was in a particular mood for a thick conch stew tonight.

The grandmother lifted her crystal ball and turned it over. The snow drifted around inside. As it settled, the crystal ball, one that could tell the fortunes of the world, showed its next image to an old lady sitting alone in a beach hut on a South American coast. It was the image of a huge underwater cluster of conch shells. Above it, her laughing sons were pulling in an enormous bounty - a catch so large that it would be enough to feed her entire village and all its dogs, a thick and hearty stew.

---