Station Breaker

37 Escorts

We protect our nation's border through a variety of methods. There's our early warning systems — long range radar designed to see if there are enemy bombers heading their way. Some of these radar installations are ground-based, but our modern air defense relies heavily on airborne radar carried aloft by jets like the AWACS.

Airborne systems offer you the advantage of letting you know if some sneaky bastard is trying to fly low enough to the terrain to avoid any ground based line-of-sight installations.

Our biggest concentration of these planes is in Alaska, because it neighbors Russia. But we keep all our borders under surveillance.

The simple truth is you can't sneak an airplane of this size in undetected. The upside is that thousands of airplanes cross our borders everyday and get ignored because they're routine flight traffic.

My goal is to behave like one of those airplanes, following a flight path out of Mexico City, and only change my path at the last minute.

The Pentagon has prepared for every possible trick our enemies could try. I'm not about to fool them. However, the one thing I have going for me is that I don't have the same objective as a hypothetical Russian strategic bomber trying to penetrate American airspace.

I don't want to go near a heavily-populated city — and protecting those and military bases is the primary purpose of our defense.

While there are hundreds of places I can land that are far enough away from civilization, I don't want to land somewhere too off the beaten path only to die of dehydration or get quickly spotted from the air.

I considered a few decommissioned Air Force bases, but they're too far away from any kind of town. A small municipal airport is an option, but they'll undoubtedly have police — or will have by the time I hop to the ground.

I need a third way; a place to land close enough to a city where I can hide, but not so populated that there's a squadron of fighter jets ready to take me down before I even lower my landing gear.

In iCosmos astronaut training we spend weeks in seminars where they try to teach us unconventional problem solving. You never want to be in an Apollo 13 scenario where you have to improvise an air filtration system using spare parts found in a tiny capsule, but you need to be prepared for any contingency.

My first thought was a water landing, but there aren't a whole lot of options near the US-Mexico border. The major bodies of water are right on the coast and have Border Patrol agents in boats waiting for someone to cross.

Landing a 777 in the middle of one of those lakes might attract a little attention — unless it's spring break.

I started by looking on the map for dry lake beds. The best ones are a little further inside the States. The Mojave would be awesome. That was even a backup landing site for the Space Shuttle and one of the places we're taught to bring down our spaceships in case of a mechanical problem and need a wide area to avoid crashing into people on the ground.

The problem with the Mojave and the other good locations, besides being a little too far from civilization, is that they're all near Air Force bases. And those are the people I want to avoid.

Landing on a highway is an option, but there's a very high chance I'll hit a car. Which would be really bad for us both.

Scanning the charts inch by inch I came across a solution that's probably a horrible idea and made my stomach hurt thinking about how the airline would salvage the plane, but is way better than parking it in a lake.

I'm going to try to land this in the Rio Grande river — which at this time of year near El Paso is a dried up riverbed.

On the map I spotted a long straight path in a suburb just north of the city. The really good news is that it's less than two miles from a shopping mall.

If I don't turn into a fireball on landing, I can pop the hatch, take a fun ride down the slide and be off and running before the cops are called to the scene.

By the time they make it to the plane, I can be eating orange chicken in the mall food court and figuring out what the hell I'm going to do next.

And there's probably free wifi in the mall, which means I can use my stolen Brazilian phone to see if CapricornZero has any helpful advice for me on Twitter. Maybe he can help me figure out how I'm going to pay for my orange chicken too? Ugh. Landing is just one of many problems I have to deal with.

Focus, David. Don't start cracking open that fortune cookie just yet.

It's time to try our last bit of deception. I put the plane on a course that roughly lines up with El Paso, Texas but doesn't look like I'm heading there.

My plan is to go there way faster than I should and do a maneuver to kill my speed at the last moment and spiral down into a landing. It's something you'd never try with passengers, but should keep everyone guessing.

The sun is just coming up over the horizon. Man, it's been that long already?

BOOM!!! Suddenly the entire plane rattles and I almost jump out of my seat.

At first I think I've been hit then I see two F-35 jets blow past my window on either side.

That explosion was the sound of them breaking the sound barrier — meant to get my attention.

Christ. I wasn't expecting to be intercepted this soon.

The F-35s slow down and take a position on port and starboard less than a hundred feet away.

One of them starts blinking a light at me.

It's Morse code.

My brain translates it automatically for me:

Yeah, yeah. They're bluffing. I pretend to not be able to read what they said and make sure my balaclava is firmly around my head.

Damnit.