Station Breaker

36 Deep Six

Looking at the charts and tracing my route to my presumed destination of Los Angeles, I have a very scary realization and inspiration. Whether or not those twinkling lights in the distance are Russian MiGs flying out of Bolivia, I know for sure I'm going to get a real Ruskie escort when I pass over international water by Bolivia and Venezuela. I'll be well within range of anything flying out of Caracas and Cuba.

They're probably not going to bring me down over land — even the Amazonian jungle, but open water is a different matter.

The Russians haven't been shy about doing that kind of thing in the past. I'll never make it to Mexican airspace if I keep this course.

I need to get them off my back and hopefully out of range. And out of range may not even be a possibility if they have a Tupolev Tu-160 long-range bomber anywhere near Central America. That can go further than I can and carries cruise missiles that adds another 1,500 miles to its striking distance.

To get them off my back, I have to do something really, really stupid.

The upside is that if it works, they'll think I'm dead, as will the American and Mexican authorities.

I don't know how long the ruse will work, but it might be enough to get me onto a different path and confuse the situation enough that I get past their air defenses.

I check the autopilot and set a timer so I can steal a nap. Thankfully, this bird has enough alarms and alerts that I'm able to sleep reasonably confident that I'm not about to smash into a mountain.

I wake up two hours later as the plane begins to jostle from some turbulence. Nothing major, but probably a good time to get up.

Once I'm through it, I let myself use the bathroom, although I leave the door open in the event I have to run to the controls.

We're heading towards the Colombian border and I'm sure they're going to want to send their own planes to greet me.

The Brazilian Gripen left a while ago — as did the twinkling lights. My radar doesn't show anything close, but a military jet flying at a high altitude could shadow me without my knowledge. This thing is more useful for collision avoidance and weather.

It'll take me less than an hour to fly over Colombia. After that, I'm over the ocean and fair game to anyone that wants to shoot me down.

I run through my hare-brained scheme one more time. Yep, it's a dumb plan. Yep, I'm going to go through with it.

Two minutes before I reach the coast I turn the plane almost due north.

To everyone tracking me this has to have come as some kind of surprise. For some random reason I'm now heading away from my stated course.

For the Russians who are on an intercept path, this complicates things.

They'll be able to reroute, but this buys me a few extra minutes to get over international waters and do my really stupid thing…

I cut almost all my thrust and push the nose towards the sea.

I'm at 33,000 feet…

Now 32,000…

30,000…

25,000…

20,000…

15,000…

This is where it gets tricky.

Full throttle…

5,000…

I can see waves in the moonlight.

I'm probably going to die.

Pull out of the dive… wait for it… bank port!

I'm flying less than a hundred feet above the ocean and the plane is shaking like crazy.

This is not an optimum altitude but I keep going and keep turning.

I'm now heading south over Colombia, down an inlet.

If they're tracking me, I just dropped out of their radar right over the ocean. If this was any other commercial flight, the assumption would be that I just had some kind of disaster and the plane is now sinking into the waves.

However, that only buys me some confusion. While they're frantically trying to figure out where I went, I need to get out of their target zone.

This means flying ridiculously low over the Rio Atrata and then banking back north once I'm on the other side of the continent — which will be very shortly.

I check my radar to see if anything is following me; everything looks clear. If I have any Russian escorts, their onboard radar would have lost me by now.

Satellite tracking would have been lost the moment I changed altitude and course. They can find me again if they have some idea where to look — that's why I plan to complicate things a bit for them.

After I cross Colombia at a ridiculously low altitude, sticking to the jungle, I take the plane north once I'm near the coast and go back to a slightly more respectable height.

Right now there are hundreds of passenger jets in the skies between here and the United States. To avoid crashing into them or having a bunch of panicked pilots report my position, I have to keep my jet out of their airspace.

While I can only stay low for so long on land before I start tripping all sorts of radar, if I do it over the ocean I'm less likely to raise any warning flags — but also equally likely to lose the plane in bad weather.

There's a very good reason pilots like to keep these things as high up as they can. Besides better fuel efficiency, the closer you are to ground the more difficult a plane is to control when the weather is less than perfect.

That means lots of turbulence for me and no more cereal breaks for a while.

I check the weather radar and spot a mildly nasty storm and steer right for it.

Controlling the plane is a bit of a bitch, but after an hour of stormy weather and wanting to throw up, I come out into some nice conditions near El Salvador.

Assuming everything worked — big assumption — I'm a thousand miles away from where they thought I was going to be at this point.

I should be able to cross Mexican airspace without too much trouble if I stay clear of the airports and the cities; basically acting like a drug smuggler.

Which is what I'm going to have to do if I want to enter the United States.