“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!”

Jed took three long strides and threw himself out into the night, noting the altitude of one thousand feet on the altimeter strapped to his wrist as he did. He had ten seconds until contact with the ground, roughly. So eight seconds to deploy his chute.

A wicked crosswind hit him the instant he left the plane and sent him corkscrewing.

Panic flared in his chest.

This wasn’t a HALO where he had twenty thousand feet to get himself sorted. He had five seconds to orient, stabilize, and deploy his shoot. That was it. The SEAL inside instantly took control—vaporizing all fear, all uncertainty, all doubt. Two hundred and fifty kids were counting on him. Sarah Beth was counting on him. Tonight would not be the night he would meet his Maker.

Calling upon the muscle memory of countless jumps, he harnessed gravity and frictional aerodynamics to get into the proper form. Legs bent at the knees, arms out, he found the horizon. Like a bowlegged Superman, he leaned left and steered himself toward the dark campus below, which was getting closer and bigger at a ridiculous rate.

Seven seconds . . .

His right hand found the rip cord.

Lightning flashed.

Eight seconds . . .

He pulled it.