Page 10 of Hellbent

The door of the closest SUV opened, and another man stepped into view. Compact and muscular. He threw his sculpted arms wide, as if greeting a long-lost relative.

“You’re a hard man to track down, Jack Johns,” he said.

Jack took his measure. “Jordan Thornhill. Orphan R.”

Surprise flickered across Thornhill’s face. “You know me?”

“Of you anyway,” Jack observed. “When you live as long as I have, son, you have eyes and ears in a lot of places.”

“You’re fortunate,” Thornhill said, “to have lived so long.”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “I was.”

The whoomping grew louder. A Black Hawk banked into view over the hillside and set down before them. Dirt and twigs beat at them. Jack closed his eyes against the rotor wash.

As the rotors spun down, a pair of geared-up men emerged. They wore flight suits and parachutes and looked generally overprepared. Three more men and the pilot waited inside the chopper.

Jack shouted, “A bit of overkill, don’t you think?”

Thornhill shouted, “We owe a debt of gratitude to helicopters this week!”

Jack didn’t know what to make of that.

“Well,” he said, “let’s get on with it, then.”

The two men in flight suits took Jack by either arm and conveyed him over to the helo. The others hauled him in. As they lifted off, Jack caught a bird’s-eye view of Thornhill vanishing back into the SUV as smoothly as he’d appeared. Two freelancers headed to search Jack’s truck, and the others peeled off to their respective vehicles and drove away.

The helo rose steeply and kept rising. Black Hawks have an aggressive rate of climb, and the pilot seemed intent on showing it off. This wasn’t gonna be a joyride. No, this trip had another purpose entirely.

Jack had done more jumps than he could count, so he knew how to roughly gauge altitude by the lights receding below.

They passed ten thousand feet.

Fifteen.

Somewhere north of that, they stopped and hovered.

One of the men donned a bulky headset and readied a handheld digital video camera.

Another slid open the doors on either side.

Wind ripped through the cabin, making Jack stagger. Given his cuffed wrists, he couldn’t use his arms for balance, so he took a wide stance.

The cameraman shouted, “Look into the camera!”

Jack did as told.

The cameraman listened to someone over his headset and then said, “What are your current protocols for contacting Orphan X?”

Jack shuffled closer, the wind blasting his hair, and squinted into the lens. “Van Sciver, you can’t honestly believe this will work on me.”

The cameraman listened again and then repeated his question.

Jack’s shoulders ached from his hands being cinched behind his back, but he knew he wouldn’t have to bear the pain much longer.

“There is nothing you could ever do to make me give up that boy,” Jack said. “He’s the best part of me.”

The cameraman winced, clearly catching an earful from Van Sciver over the headset, then squared to Jack with renewed focus. “I’d suggest you reconsider. We’re at sixteen thousand feet, and you’re the only one up here without a parachute on.”