“You guys all set?” he asked, his gaze shifting to Johnny and Bex.

“Check,” they answered in unison.

“The radio chatter at the front gate has gone quiet,” Ben said after putting on a set of headphones tuned to the same channel Jed’s team was on. “And we have eyes on what looks like two vehicles caravanning on Route 70. There’s nobody on the roads, so this could be a Dark One QRF en route, not sure, but either way it’s not looking good down there.”

“Any contact from St. George’s at all?” Jed asked, desperately needing a ray of hope in what seemed to be a dismally deteriorating situation. He’d tried several more times to reach Sarah Beth and had gotten absolutely nothing back from her. As an experienced operator, he knew better than to play the what-if game, but his mind kept going there anyway.

What if she’s unconscious?

What if Victor has her?

What if she’s . . . ?

“I’m sorry, Jed, but the campus is dark and it’s still radio silence.” Ben clasped a hand on Jed’s shoulder. “Are you sure about this jump?”

“We don’t have a choice,” Jed said, meeting the Shepherd commander’s tortured eyes. “But don’t worry. We’ll make it.”

“I wish I could come with you.”

“I know, boss,” he said. “But we’ve both got our jobs to do.”

“Good luck and go with God.”

“You too.”

“Thirty seconds,” the Air Force crew chief, now jumpmaster, said in his Peltor headphones.

Jed turned to David but found his friend on his knees—arms raised in fervent prayer—the wind from the open cargo ramp of the Hercules C-130 whipping his shirt and the legs of his pants. Jed felt a compulsion to interrupt, to ask David to try Rachel’s mobile phone and find out if she too had lost her connection to Sarah Beth, but the time for that was over. Assuming he survived the jump, he’d learn the girl’s fate himself just minutes from now.

“Twenty seconds . . . ,” the jumpmaster said.

He chased the futile thoughts away, forcing himself into combat mode. This LALO was going to be the most dangerous jump of his life. The pilots were threading the needle between two massive storm cells. Under normal circumstances, they’d never take the risk—neither would Jed—but these weren’t normal circumstances.

“Ten seconds . . .”

The plane hit a patch of turbulence and pitched hard right, knocking everyone off-balance. The pilots immediately corrected, bringing them violently back to level. Out the gaping hole in the back of the plane, lightning flashed in the near distance, illuminating an ominous, anvil-shaped thunderhead.

“Hooah! Light ’em up, baby,” Johnny shouted, his voice the high-pitched, manic battle cry of a man staring down death and reveling in it.

Jed shook his head and shifted his gaze to the red light above the jumpmaster’s head.

It switched to green.

“Go . . . go . . . go!”