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In this episode of the Stratfor podcast, a conversation about military weapons, secret missions and a life lived in a company town, where every employee was a civil servant of the US government. Piper describes a happy childhood, in a home amid the striking vistas of California's mountains, the desert nearby, playing with her sister to round up rattlesnakes and practicing her skills as a sleuth. Her father, a navy veteran from WWII, worked at Boeing in Seattle until the company laid off a large portion of its workforce. The family packed up the car when her dad got a job offer, and they moved - lock, stock, and barrel - to China Lake, the nation’s largest weapons facility, to build missiles.