Dead or Alive Read Free Page B

Zulu -4:00, keeping homage to Greenwich Mean/Universal time, four hours to the east.
    “There it is,” the copilot announced. The approach lights for Moose Jaw showed up on the black countryside. “Altitude twelve thousand, descending one thousand per minute.”
    “Stand by the transponder,” the pilot ordered.
    “Roger,” the copilot replied. The transponder was a custom installation, done by the flight crew themselves.
    “Six thousand feet. Flaps?”
    “Leave ’em,” the pilot commanded.
    “Roger. Runway in view.” The sky was clear, and the Moose Jaw approach lights strobed in the cloudless air.
    “Moose Jaw, this is Mike Foxtrot, over.”
    “Mike Foxtrot, Moose Jaw, over.”
    “Moose Jaw, our gear doesn’t want to come down. Please stand by. Over.” That notification woke people up.
    “Roger. Are you declaring an emergency, over?” the approach radio inquired at once.
    “Negative, Moose Jaw. We’re checking the electrics. Stand by.”
    “Roger, standing by.” Just a hint of concern in the voice.
    “Okay,” the pilot said to his copilot, “we’ll drop off their scope at one thousand feet.” They’d been through all this, of course. “Altitude three thousand and descending.”
    The pilot eased right. This was to show a course change on the Moose Jaw approach radar, nothing serious but a change nonetheless. With altitude dropping it might look interesting on the radar tapes if anyone cared to look, which was doubtful. Another blip lost in the airspace.
     
     
     
    T wo thousand,” the copilot said. The air was a little bumpier at the lower altitude but not as bumpy as it was going to get. “Fifteen hundred. Might want to adjust the descent rate.”
    “Fair enough.” The pilot inched back on the yoke to flatten out the down-angle so that he could level out at nine hundred feet AGL. That was low enough to enter Moose Jaw’s ground clutter. Though the Dassault was anything but stealthy, most civilian traffic-control radars primarily saw transponder signals, not “skin-paints.” In commercial aviation, a plane on radar was nothing more than a notional signal in the sky.
    “Mike Foxtrot, Moose Jaw, say altitude, over.”
    They’d be doing this for a while. The local tower team was unusually awake. Maybe they’d flown into a training exercise, the pilot thought. Too bad, but not a major problem.
    “Autopilot off. Hand-flying the airplane.”
    “Pilot’s airplane,” the copilot replied.
    “Okay, looping right. Transponder off,” the pilot commanded.
    The copilot killed power to transponder one. “Powered off. We’re invisible.” That got Moose Jaw’s attention.
    “Mike Foxtrot, Moose Jaw. Say altitude, over,” the voice commanded more crisply. Then a second call.
    The Falcon completed its northern loop and settled down on a course of two-two-five. The ground below was flat, and the pilot was tempted to reduce altitude to five hundred feet but decided against it. No need. As planned, the aircraft had just evaporated off the Moose Jaw radar.
    “Mike Foxtrot, Moose Jaw. Say altitude, over!”
    “Sounds excited,” the copilot observed.
    “I don’t blame him.”
    The transponder they’d just shut down was for another plane entirely, probably parked in its hangar outside Söderhamn, Sweden. This flight was costing their charter party seventy thousand extra euros, but the Swiss flight crew understood about making money, and they weren’t flying drugs or anything like that. Money or not, that sort of cargo was not worth the trouble.
    Moose Jaw was forty miles behind them now, and dwindling at seven miles per minute, according to the plane’s Doppler radar. The pilot adjusted his yoke to compensate for the cross-wind. The computer by his right knee would compute for drift, and the computer knew exactly where they were going.
    Part of the way, anyway.

3

    I T LOOKED DIFFERENT than it had in the imagery—they always did—but they were in the right place, that was for sure. He