The altimeter dropped to twelve hundred meters. From what Skater had learned, the Border Patrol had standing orders to shoot anything that went below the thousand-meter mark. He glanced at the compass, a swirling ball suspended in a silicon mixture. The latitude and longitude, fed into the Fiat-Fokker’s computer by a GPS satellite overhead, printed on the sides of the vibrating ball. The numbers shifted erratically as the amphibian tumbled.