SHORT LANDERS

After midnight, an aircraft runs low and dark across the desert - no lights, no flight plan, no radio. A hundred miles away, a faint track flickers onto a radar screen and is gone. By the time anyone understands what it was, the plane is already on the ground in the brush, unloaded, and climbing back into the black sky.

For decades, the war over America's southwest border was fought not only on the ground, but in the air. Short Landers is the chronicle of the narco flights that turned the U.S.-Mexico frontier into contested sky - clandestine aircraft skimming the terrain, improvised desert airstrips, and the relentless cat-and-mouse between smugglers and the people trying to see them coming.

Drawing on more than 100 sources, Carlos Delossantos traces how a single tactic - the short landing - reshaped binational security, forced two governments into uneasy cooperation, and rewrote the rules of interdiction. It is a story of how control of a few hundred miles of airspace became a test of trust between two nations - and how neither could win it alone.

Written by a retired defense intelligence professional with twenty-five years in counter-narcotics and Latin American analysis, Short Landers brings rare authority to a story most people never see.

For readers of Killing Pablo and El Narco, and anyone trying to understand the drug war beyond the headlines - this is the air war that was fought above the border, and why the sky was never the same.