They then began to plot and examine great circle routes from Islamabad to various New England and Northwest destinations. Jones was fascinated by the differences between these. The route from Islamabad to Boston, for example, passed over the western Russian heartland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, threaded between Iceland and Greenland, then passed over the Canadian maritime provinces and Maine. Each of these places seemed to give rise to its own set of misgivings in Jones’s mind. The route to Seattle, on the other hand, cut across the least populated swath of Siberia, traversed the Arctic Ocean, made landfall again in Canada’s extreme northwest, and followed the mountainous wilderness of the Yukon and western British Columbia before crossing the U.S. border only a few miles from its destination. The trajectory was an unbroken swath of the most desolate and unpopulated places on the globe. A small diversion to one side or the other would bring the jet down in the wilderness of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, or the mountains or deserts of eastern Washington State.