Page 39 of Shadow Blind

Aiden raised his eyebrows and scoffed. What the hell was the bastard yapping about?

Aiden followed Cosky up the steps. He stopped at the foot of the cabin to stare. His normal flights weren’t nearly as luxurious as this. Eight plush, cream-colored seats, arranged in sets of two, faced each other. Four ran along the right side of the plane and four along the left. The rows were separated by a narrow aisle. Behind the chairs was a couch on one side of the cabin and a couch with a worktable against the other wall. Small, oval windows, with the shades drawn, accompanied each chair. The air smelled fresh and slightly floral.

Nothing about the jet indicated a military bird. Hell, even the carpet looked airbrushed and fluffy.

“Ah, hell,” Cosky’s voice turned sour. “What’s he doing here?”

Aiden followed his brother-in-law’s gaze to the last of the eight chairs. It took him a few seconds to recognize the unlikable and mouthy bastard from Wolf’s exfil team. What had Rawls called him? O’Neill? The dude was slouched down in his chair, eyes closed, apparently napping. At least the asshole had taken a seat far enough away to ignore him. Aiden dropped into a chair across the aisle from Zane and scowled down at his phone.

What the hell was going on? Tag and Tram should have dispatched their targets and contacted him by now.

Forcing his frustration back, he turned to Cosky, who’d taken the seat across from him. “How long will it take the ground crew to haul us to the airstrip?”

Cosky chuckled. Leaning forward, he pulled on the bottom of the window shade next to Aiden’s chair. The curtain rolled up, leaving the window bare. “Buckle up and prepare to be amazed.”

“Right.” Aiden rolled his eyes before turning his attention back to his phone.

“You ever hear that old adage about a watched pot never boiling? Pretty sure it applies to cell phones, too,” Cosky said dryly, although his gray eyes were almost sympathetic.

Aiden clipped his seatbelt together and glanced out the window. Impatience steamed through him. He saw no ground crew arriving to move the jet to the airstrip. Talk about a staging clusterfuck. Why the hell would the Shadow Mountain ground crew park their aircraft like this? It would take hours to maneuver the planes and choppers out of the Citation’s way.

He frowned as a low whine started up beneath his feet. The buzzing wasn’t engine noise or vibration. Maybe the ground crew was finally clearing a path. But when he glanced out the window, the aircraft surrounding the Citation were gone.

What the hell?

He leaned into the window and peered down. The aircraft below were getting smaller with each second.

“What. The….?” There was a sense of ascension now, although it was coming from the disappearing ground, not from the plane itself. “We’re on a lift?”

He craned his neck and looked up, trying to see the ceiling.

“Relax.” A shit-eating grin spread across Rawls’s face, who was sitting next to Zane. “We ain’t gonna hit the roof. A magical portal will open and deposit us directly onto the runway.”

“No shit?” Aiden pulled back, realizing for the first time that everyone in the cabin was watching him with various degrees of amusement. Except for O’Neill, who was still slumped in the back with his eyes closed.

A grating whine sounded, this time from above. He leaned against the window to look up and watched a good chunk of the ceiling split and slide to the sides. Watery streams of light brightened the dark chasm. Within seconds, they were outside; the sun beaming down on them. Blue sky and fluffy clouds were everywhere. No grass, no trees. No buildings. No rolling hills or roads. No people. Just an endless stretch of blue sky.

He leaned against the window again, looking down. Cement. Fuck, they were on the runway. A runway up in the clouds.

Still gawking, he shook his head. “Where the hell is this runway?”

“Now that,” Cosky scoffed, his smirk vanishing, “is an excellent question.”

Aiden absently glanced down at his cell. His fingers had loosened their desperate grip, but still no call. It was too dangerous to call Tag. A distraction at an inopportune moment could prove disastrous. Which meant he had to wait for Tag or Tram to call him.

He battened down his impatience and turned to Cosky. “You don’t know where we are?”

They’d worked for Shadow Mountain for three years now. How could they not know?

“We know we’re somewhere up on Denali.” There was a shrug in Zane’s voice, like he didn’t really care. Zane projected impenetrable calm, which made him hard to read.

“The real question is how the hell they’re hiding this, not just from the climbers, but from the locals.…” Cosky trailed off with a perplexed shake of his head. “This is Mount Denali, for Christ’s sake.”

Cos was right. At least a thousand people climbed Denali every year. Some of those climbers should have noticed planes and helicopters taking off from the mountainside. Hadn’t they questioned where the aircraft had come from? Plus, there were a good dozen towns surrounding the mountain. Denali wasn’t hidden within a remote region of Alaska. Civilization encircled the sleeping giant.

“That’s not the only…irregularity,” Rawls said in that slow drawl of his. “There’s also the weather up here. There’s never any wind.”

“Or snow, or rain,” Zane broke in.

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