AN: Written mainly at prompting and as a gift to Karieflybabe, she made some comments that got a bunny to sit up and take notice in my head – and then it burrowed, and a fic was born. So this is all her. Thanks Karie!

Disclaimer: Not mine…

Description: Third in the Hidden Wolf series, Blair shows a few more of the tricks up his sleeve when Jim gets into a spot of trouble.

Hidden Wolf 3: Flying on Instinct
By Marns AKA Bumpkin
Rated PG

x-X-x

Blair had just finished ushering his last student out of his Anthro 101 class when he felt it. The unmistakable surge across whatever it was that made him a capital 'G' type of Guide to his Sentinel letting him know in no uncertain terms something 'bad' was happening to Jim.

The new link thingie between them was still new enough that he really had no idea how to interpret the information he was receiving from it, he didn't know what to do in order to use what it was giving him to help Jim - but he knew one thing he could do, and that was call Simon and see if the Captain knew anything. With that in mind he set off towards the storage room he had taken over as his personal office and his phone.

By the time he made it to the basement of Hargrove where his office was located Blair had gotten a better idea of what happened to Jim. The simplicity of the wrenching dislocation he had been hit with had been a rather obvious clue after all.

Jim had been snatched, grabbed, kidnapped (or should that be cop-napped?), but by who? Was it someone that had found out about his senses? Someone connected to Brackett, or Oliver, or someone else who had been in that mess debriefing him after Peru? One of the various alphabet soup agencies that littered the world that no-one wanted to lay claim to or accept responsibility for? Or was it the other end of the scale raising up to bite back? One of the criminals Jim had put away, or one of their disgruntled relatives, during his illustrious police career out for revenge perhaps?

Whichever, it didn't really matter – Blair didn't intend to leave Jim in whoever's possession for anything to happen no matter who had him.

Blair grabbed up his office phone and made a quick call. He barked out some instructions rapidly and then hung up with no thought to courtesy. Then with a slightly trembling hand he dialed the second number he needed to call, the one that was going to take a bit of time. The phone rang, it was picked up.

"Banks."

The deep rumbling voice was calm and even, with absolutely no sign of any underlying stress that would be there if he knew one of his officers was in danger. Only one answer, he didn't know. Blair was going to have to tell him.

"Simon?"

Damn, shit, hell – how was he supposed to tell a commanding officer that one of his men had been snatched off the street and the only reason Blair knew was because of some funky mind meld thing he and Jim had just started to experience? Easy, he didn't. He would adhere to the K.I.S.S. principle and only tell Simon the bare bones of what he needed to know in order to help Blair get Jim back.

"Listen man, Jim's been kidnapped. I need you, Rafe, H, Joel and Conner to meet me down in the PD Garage in twenty – we need to discuss how we are getting him back."

Whew! He was glad that was over with 'cause dictating to Simon Banks, not a pastime he was looking to take up. The man was no kind of pushover.

He focused again on the strange new link with his absent partner and was gratified to feel that the general direction and distance still felt the same. Good, very good. If it kept holding steady like this it shouldn't be too, too difficult to find Jim after all. Maybe things weren't going to be that bad this time… well, for them anyway.

x-X-x

The small airfield that Blair led them to wasn't unfamiliar territory. It was the one that all manner of state and city officials used for long term storage of the smaller crafts they needed. It also held a fair amount of private aircraft and it was towards one of these that Blair led them. An older Cessna equipped with amphibious landing gear and able to seat six passengers comfortably with two in the cockpit to fly it. Blair standing down by the tail patted the side of it with a slight smile, then turned his attention to the grounds crew man who approached from the opposite direction than they had.

"Mr. Sandburg, sir, everything is exactly as you specified earlier and you are cleared to take off as soon as you are ready. Runway four has been set aside for your use, that's the one directly ahead and to the left. Now I'll leave you to it or will there be anything else?"

Blair shook his head while he laughed inwardly at the gob smacked looks on his P.D. friend's faces. You would think with the way he kept springing things on them they would have gotten a bit more desensitized by now. And Simon, he had no excuse - he had that damn report he made Blair give him! His pilot's license was very plainly stated on there, and it listed everything he was cleared to fly. But he refrained from saying anything about any of that and just answered the airfield employee concisely.

"No, thank you. That will be all."

Dismissed, the grounds crew man walked away. Blair didn't bother to watch him go, he just walked up the few steps he needed to in order to open the door where it was located underneath the shelter of the fixed wing. He flung it wide and then looked impatiently at his unmoving friends. He snapped,

"Well, get in. Or do you need an engraved invitation or something?"

They scrambled. Blair was again showing evidence of the other person he could turn into when needed, and that version of the man wasn't someone who had a whole lot of patience. He stepped into the plane, obviously expecting them to follow, and began the pre-flight routines. Hurrying forward the displaced Major Crime Detectives were soon boarding the plane in an efficient and orderly enough fashion to suit the worried Guide, but their organized manner didn't mean they were silent.

When he broke the stasis holding them in place, it seemed he'd also broken the hold on their tongues and they weren't holding back. He was being peppered with questions from all quarters the entire time as they seated themselves and then as he started to take off.

"Jeez Sandy, nice plane… is it yours?" Megan asked as she moved to sit in the co-pilot's position. Knowing she was as able as he was to fly the plane, Blair didn't quibble about her seating choice. In fact, he'd been going to ask her to sit there so her choosing it saved him the effort.

"I thought you were afraid of heights Blair?" Joel was mystified and it showed in his voice. "Isn't being a pilot a bit contraindicative of that?"

Blair smiled tightly at the older man and 'hmmed' ambiguously . He knew he didn't have to tell Joel that fear precluded ability in any skill or endeavor – it just made things a bit less comfortable to accomplish.

Henri just crowed, "Hairboy! You've been holding out on us!"

"Yeah, this is one sweet little ride." Rafe agreed. "You have her the entire time you've known us?"

Simon didn't say anything until they were in the air and on their way, a heading already set.

"Sandburg, nevermind anything else that these yahoos are saying… are you ever going to tell us where we're going? Fill us in on what you know and any plan you might have made - or are we stuck guessing?"

Blair threw the big man a dirty look. Simon knew there was more to him than met the eye, on more than one level, so his sarcasm was not welcome. But he just said calmly,

"While we were on our way here I managed to get a few calls in to some of my contacts and none of them had heard anything, so I know what Jim's being taken wasn't, but they did tell me about three places out this way where you could hide a good sized group of people and not be noticed for a really long time. I have a very strong feeling that one of them is where we're going to find the group that grabbed Jim. We just have to figure out which one, and get him out without getting ourselves captured or killed."

Rafe and H didn't seem to pay attention to the latter part of what
Blair said, or at least they didn't appear to have as they began to alternately ask rapid fire,

"Your contacts?"

"You have contacts?"

"Wait-a-minute… what kind of contacts are we talking about here?"

"You have been holding out on us Hairboy! Plane, contacts… what else is there that you've not been sharing?"

"Captain did you know about these 'contacts'?"

Megan giggled and rolled her eyes. She happily snarked at her fellow detectives,

"Of course he knew about the contacts you daft drongos – remember he made his demand for chapter and verse on Blair Sandburg, his life and skills, after that great hullabaloo at that warehouse where we almost all got blown to bits and Blair was the one who saved our collective arses yet again."

"Oh yeah…" and "Right…" overlapped as they both verbally acknowledged their recollection of the incident. Joel chuckled as Simon's pained face showed that he too was recalling the time in question.

Thankfully, the rest of the flight passed in silence as the group of friends subsided into reflection of times and adventures of the past. Allowing Blair to fly over the three sites in the foothills of the Cascade mountains and easily determine which was the one in use. It didn't even take the use of his newfound and freaky guide-skill, from the air it was obvious which ones were still deserted and which was inhabited.

He was very happy to find that it was the one he had thought, and didn't waste any time in landing the plane in the narrow lake a mile or so downhill from the old survivalist health camp. Anchoring the plane in place and disembarking took no time at all and they were all standing on solid ground again in short order. It was now time to talk strategy. Blair opened the floor.

"Alright people, we are only about a mile away as the crow flies from the old Naturalist Camp. We need to do our best to get close to see what is going on," his gaze slid over them, then glanced down at himself, and he stifled a sigh as he continued, "Well, with any luck we can do it without being seen. I guess that is the best we can hope for with the way we are dressed, we aren't exactly equipped for being unobtrusive here."

The others took in each other's regular city day finery and had to agree with Blair's assessment with some consternation, they weren't sporting anything remotely like camouflage. Ah well, it couldn't be helped. They would just have to muddle along as best they could.

Blair and Simon took the lead, using woodcraft learned in vastly different circumstances to navigate back to where they knew the camp was located. Megan, Rafe and Henri followed behind easily enough. They were just there as extra fighters, and knew it. Joel had a bit more difficulty, but he stayed in the tail position and was able to catch up each time they paused for reconnoitering.

The time it took to travel the distance from where they had left the plane to when they were first able to start making out voices from the camp they were headed for seemed to pass very quickly. Tension was mounting in the skulking police detectives, the two captains, and one very worried police observer. Doing their best to stay hidden the whole lot of them moved closer in order to figure out what they were up against. A snippet of conversation captured their attention.

"You get the 'All Father' settled into the suites we set aside for him? Is he resting comfortably or has the manner in which he was recruited distressed him?"

The capitals were clearly heard and the hidden Major Crime group looked at each other puzzled. They were sure the two they were eavesdropping on were talking about Jim and made sure to listen hard for the reply.

"Yes sir, the doctor has been in to check him over and said that there will be no ill effects from the drug when he wakes up. Nothing that will pass on onto the future generations of pure Aryan soldiers he will be sire to anyway."

Their eyes bugged out. Jim as father to an army? An Aryan army even… the thought was ludicrous. More than one pair of eyes began to water as controlling the laughter that wanted to erupt became difficult. They regained control as Simon whispered harshly,

"Mock later, rescue now!"

That directive settled them down quick and they were soon back to business. With some quick hand signs, Blair, Joel, and Simon divided their forces and organized their place and time to meet up again in order to share the information they gathered. Plan set, they wished each other luck and moved out. Simon with Joel, Megan with Henri, and Rafe with Blair.

Simon and Joel would take one half of the camp's circumference, and the other half would be covered by Henri and Megan. As Simon and Megan were the two who were more woods-wise, outside of Blair and Jim, this made sense. Then Joel and Henri being with them would mean they had someone trusted watching their backs. Blair and Rafe, on the other hand, would be sneaking through the camp itself to reach the other side. A bit more dangerous. They would have to really watch each other's backs, and steps too.

x-X-x

Blair sighed with relief as he made his way to the room that his friend and Sentinel was locked into. The fight to take the camp had been short and sweet and he was looking forward to retrieving Jim from the indignity of incarceration, even if it was a gilded cage he was trapped in.

He was still shaking his head over the fight as he did so though. For a person who studied people and why and how they interacted, some things were still a complete mystery to him. This was a case in point.

Their little foray around and in the camp had shown they were dealing with a new group of white-supremacists. But this group was nothing like Kincaid's, they were rather pathetic really. The six of them hadn't had too much opposition to take out when they raided the camp – the reason for this being so easy was that the leader of the so-called 'New Aryan Nation' had wanted to raise his hand-bred and perfect soldiers from infancy rather than recruiting from the polluted masses. His followers because of this were, for the most part, female and not fighters by any stretch.

The few actual 'soldiers' he had recruited over time were men who shared his vision of what the future should be and weren't really fighters either. They had been enough to subdue Jim with the aid of drugs and snatch him, but that had been pushing things. They never would have succeeded if they hadn't taken Jim so totally by surprise.

Blair opened the door he knew he would find Jim behind and had to snort back a laugh. Jim was still sleeping. He had slept right through his entire kidnapping and rescue. Figured. Blair shook his head incredulously, so much for those vaunted 'Black Ops' instincts and reflexes.

He heard the other's trailing up the hallway, understood that it meant the fruitloops were on their way with the proper authorities, and so he entered the room. He thought Jim would like to be awake to thank the people who had risked their lives to rescue him. Blair walked over and prodded the larger man till he woke up. Then to the muzzy face looking questionably up at him he said dryly,

"C'mon 'Stud', time to wake up…" a burst of laughter from the doorway made Jim look over to see his co-workers and frown. Blair bopped him in the leg, to get his attention again, "Now, now, now… None of that, those folks over there risked their butts to save yours. It's not their fault that your very fine self was wanted by a bunch of loonies to put to stud as the father for their 'Future Army of Ultimate Aryan Soldiers'."

"Their what?" Jim croaked out, eyes wide.

That did it, not even Blair could hold back the laughter any longer. The sheer ridiculous nature of the reason they had grabbed Jim combined with the release of tension now that he was safe again had them all howling till tears ran down their faces and breathing was becoming an issue. Blair managed to get enough control of himself to say mock coyly,

"Oh you stud you – playing dumb isn't a valid defense."

Then as Jim spluttered, Blair dissolved again into incoherency. The rest of their friends never even having paused only laughed harder as they weakly hit each other.

-end-