Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [14]
“Along with the wolves,” the copilot responded. Nature was about balance, or so the Discovery Channel said. Not enough bison, the wolves die. Not enough wolves, the bison overproduce.
Utah’s countryside started off mountainous but gradually settled down to rolling flatness. They again maneuvered east to avoid Salt Lake City, which had an international airport and, probably, a sufficiently powerful radar to get a skin-paint.
This entire exercise would have been impossible thirty years earlier. They would have had to cross the Pinetree Line, one of the predecessors to America’s DEW—Distant Early Warning—Lines, and alert the North American Air Defense Command at Cheyenne Mountain. Well, given the current tensions between the United States and Russia, maybe the DEW and Pinetree would be recommissioned.
The ride was smoother than he’d expected. Riding in daylight, in summer, over the desert, could be bumpy indeed, what with the irregular rising thermal currents. Except for a few automobile headlights, the land below might as well have been the sea, so empty and black it was.
Thirty minutes to go. They were down to 9,000 pounds of fuel. The engines burned it a lot faster down here, just over 5,000 pounds per hour instead of the usual 3,400 or so.
“Wake the passengers up?” the copilot asked.
“Good idea.” The pilot lifted the microphone. “Attention. We expect to land in thirty minutes. Let us know if you have any special needs. Thank you,” he added. Thank you indeed for the money, and the interesting flight profile, he did not add.
The pilot and copilot both wondered who the passengers were but asked no questions. Upholding customer anonymity was part of the job, and though what they were doing was technically illegal, probably, by American law, they weren’t American citizens. They were not carrying guns, drugs, or anything else illegal. In any case, they didn’t know their passenger from Adam, and his face was wrapped in bandages anyway.
“Hundred miles, according to the computer. I hope the runway really is that long.”
“Chart says it is. Two thousand six hundred meters. We’ll know soon enough.”
In fact, the airstrip had been built in 1943, and was scarcely used since, built by an engineer battalion that had been trucked to Nevada and told to build an air base—as practice, really. All the fields looked the same, built from the same manual, like a triangle with one line segment longer than the other two. They were angling for runway two-seven, indicating a due-west approach run into the prevailing winds. It even had runway lights installed, but the cabling had long since degraded, as had the airport’s diesel generator. But as there was little in the way of snow and ice here to damage the concrete runways, they were as good as the day they’d cured out, twelve inches thick of rebarred concrete.
“There.”
“I see ’em.”
They were, in fact, neon-green chemical lights being broken, shaken, and tossed onto the runway perimeter, and they blazed brightly on the low-light HUD display. Then even more as a truck’s headlights turned on. One such pair even drove down the northern border of the runway, as though to outline it for the approaching aircraft. Neither pilot nor copilot knew, but they assumed that one of the passengers had called ahead on a cell phone to wake someone up.
“Okay, let’s shoot the approach,” the pilot-in-command ordered. He eased the throttles back and lowered flaps to chop air speed. Again the altitude sensor announced their height above the ground, lower … lower … lower … then the wheels kissed the ground. At the west end of the runway, a truck flipped its headlights from high beams to low, back and forth a few times, and the pilot let the aircraft coast all the way.
“We have arrived at our destination,” the pilot said over the intercom as the aircraft came to a slow and gentle halt. He took off his headset and stood to move aft. He opened the left-side door and lowered the stairs, then turned to look at his charter party, most of