EYES FROM ABOVE HELP IN FLIGHT

Helicopters, Planes Track Smugglers On Ground, In Air

The eerie green glow of the cockpit lights and the long, tubular eyes
jutting from their helmets made Brian Cook and Ted Labbe look like extras
from a Star Wars set.

The two men twisted a U.S. Customs Black Hawk helicopter low over the hills
and canyons near Nogales as Randy Crone and Jay Sayrahder leaned out the
gunner's doors and scoured the terrain.

It was 4 a.m., and the crew of Chopper 320 was looking for a three-horse
pack train threading its way back to Mexico after dropping a load of dope.
So far, they'd found zilch.

Then, just when the crew had given up and headed back to base, a voice
crackled over the intercom: "BP has some fresh sign." Agents on the ground
had found new tracks. The Hawk turned around.

Soon, the helicopter's spotlight, the Night Sun, illuminated tracks along a
ridge and down a grassy flank.

"They have some dope!" Cook yelled.

But they didn't have the smugglers. The chopper touched down and six lumpy
burlap bundles tumbled aboard.

"Boy, smell that dope - it smells like a fresh cut lawn!" someone piped up
on the intercom.

Later, Labbe did the math. They'd found 137 pounds. It amounted to only 30
to 50 pounds per horse. There should have been more.

Mainstay of drug war

The Customs Service's air interdiction unit has been a mainstay of
America's drug war since 1969, throwing an array of aircraft, 118 at last
count, into the daily fight against drug trafficking across the southern
United States.

Cessna Citations, small chase jets, patrol the border looking for
low-flying air smugglers. In their noses are fighter-jet radar. From their
bellies, infrared cameras home in on suspicious planes miles away in the
dead of night.

Five P-3s, civilian versions of the military AWACS radar plane, fly the
border and along the coasts, hunting covert drug flights from Central and
South America. The newest P-3 radar covers 200,000 square miles in one sweep.

Overseas, Customs craft cruise the skies from Aruba to Colombia, helping
foreign police and troops on interdiction missions.

Closer to home, Black Hawk helicopters are the drug fighter's utility
craft. Solid steel war machines with computerized flight systems and
infrared cameras, they can track smugglers on ground or in the air, day or
night. They ferry agents into and out of remote areas. They swoop down to
pick up narcotics left at rendezvous points.

Smaller Customs choppers and planes also buzz the border like mosquitoes,
spying on drug deals, chasing get-away cars and scanning for new smuggling
trails.

In Riverside, Calif., the Air and Marine Interdiction Coordination Center
monitors an 11-year-old radar network covering the southern United States
and parts of Central America and the Caribbean. Information pours in from
65 radar sources, including the Federal Aviation Administration, the
Department of Defense, 11 radar blimps and the airborne P-3s. A $35 million
computer sorts it all out, discerning which of 20,000 aircraft in the air
at a given moment might be suspect.

Jeff Houlihan, a senior detection systems specialist at the domestic air
center, said radar watchers look for quick flights in and out of small
strips at regular intervals, aircraft flying by visual flight rules at
night, heavy cross-border traffic at certain times of day.

Fliers who can't be identified or who take suspicious action are followed
by intercept planes.

In one case in 1995, a P-3 watched a flight off the coast of Colombia veer
to San Rafael, Sonora, where it landed. With Mexico's permission, Customs
Citations spied on the landing site until ground police arrived. They found
a French-built commercial cargo jet stuck in the mud with more than 6,000
pounds of cocaine aboard.

Pilots evade detection

The air power has slowed the smugglers across America's southern flank, but
skillful night fliers in low-running planes still routinely evade detection.

Mostly, they do it by hugging mountains or finding seams between radar posts.

Professional drug runners sometimes use an Arizona corridor known as
"Smuggler's Alley" or "Gringo Pass" that hugs the western edge of the
Baboquivari Mountains. They follow the radar blind spot to an area
northwest of Tucson, where they drop their loads from the air. If they're
fast, they can be in and out of the United States in a half-hour.

Though Customs pays close attention to the pass, pilots know that some
flights make it through.

"It's greater than I would've said last year," said Michael Pitts,
operations officer for the Customs air branch at Tucson's Davis-Monthan Air
Force Base.

The Tucson unit is one of only two 24-hour Customs air operations in the
country. From a windowless room wallpapered in air maps and light boards,
fliers take turns monitoring radio traffic and a hotline on which police
agencies all over the state request air support. It's a firehouse
existence, pilots waiting for the alarm to sound. When it does, they can be
in the air in less than eight minutes.

Air war costs a lot

Keeping the air net aloft is expensive. Radar blimps cost $25 million
apiece. The government estimated in 1998 that a P-3 cost $3,687 per flight
hour to operate; a Black Hawk $3,859 an hour. Citation chase jets were
relative bargains at $1,885 an hour.

Cost has been an even bigger issue since President Clinton expanded air
operations into Latin America in 1993. Though responsibilities grew,
funding from 1992 and 1997 fell by about a third.

Funding has recently begun to climb, and the Tucson branch keeps several
Black Hawks and Citations, an Astar helicopter and a host of smaller planes
on standby at all times. But Customs is more selective about the missions
it flies. The pilots catch a lot of dope, but they say a lot is getting away.

Earlier this year, Citation pilot Pete Hermes was patrolling the skies over
western Arizona when he was alerted that a "target aircraft" had taken off
from a desert strip southwest of Phoenix. Hermes banked north, directly
toward what Customs suspected was a southbound treetop flier that had
dropped off a load.

Hermes went "lights out," shutting off lights inside and outside the plane.
Radar operator Larry Forcum fiddled with his radar console under the red
glow of the only light left.

"He should be coming out of the notch -- top right to bottom left," the
radio squawked.

"OK, so he's headed south?" Hermes replied.

"That's a roger."

Forcum found a promising target on his radar screen. But as he zeroed in,
its speed seemed too slow to be a plane. It was probably a car on the ground.

"We're going to race to the border and turn around," Hermes said.

Twenty-five minutes later, they locked onto a target.

"I like it, baby, I like it!" Hermes shouted.

They tried to get a look with the infrared camera, but it was still too
far. Forcum loaded a videotape to record the chase as evidence.

Then, without warning, the target disappeared off radar. Hermes maneuvered
the plane in several directions to try to pick it up again. No luck.

A few minutes later, the Citation headed back to Tucson.

If it was a smuggler, Hermes said, "he's probably back in Mexico counting
his money by now."