New Novel Progress: Into Chapter 18. Target remains 20.

Nothing more to say on that. Grinding. Hope you had a Merry Christmas or other Winter holiday.

However, here's a little belated present for you. An excerpt from Chapter 8:

The view out the airliner’s window was a tunnel’s mouth, looking across the taxiways at Sal as the TAP Air Portugal flight rolled toward one last takeoff on the way to Bissau. The other Cape Verde islands were more mountainous and occasionally greener; Sal was a flat spot, seven miles wide by eighteen north to south, with a couple of respectable bumps of high ground in the north. The rest of it was arid flatlands and the salt pans that gave the island its modern name. That, and a geographic location near halfway between Iberia and Brazil, made it an ideal place to build a sprawling airport from the earliest days of transoceanic air service. This wasn’t a destination, really; it was a stopover. Get fuel, maybe transfer between flights, that sort of place. But everyone and their brother headed for a destination along the routes radiating outwards seemed to stop here. South African Airlines hopped through going on to London; Cubana connected Havana to Luanda through here. Everyone coming or going between Europe and Brazil came through, even if they were flying the Aluminum Cloud, that wonder of civil aviation called the Boeing 747. Too bad TAP’s service to Bissau was still in 1960’s era ‘07s, or Drake and Oliveira might actually have been comfortable on this flight.

Into the final lap of First Draft. Will post more soon.