Mark silenced her with a finger on her lips, then gathered her into a hug to silence her fears.
It did.
Or else the three days without sleep caught up with her.
Whichever it was, Mark’s hug was the last thing she remembered.
14
Dilya turned for the ranch. She’d wanted to wait until the middle of the night. Then she could return the horse and slip away. It was a chickenshit move, but it was far and away her first choice.
Except Zackie was shivering despite her thick coat. Wind Runner had begun pawing the ground with his impatience. When the sun sank below the peaks of the Sawtooth Mountains far earlier than official sunset time, the three of them were cast into bitter shadows. Unsure if she could find her way back in the dark, she followed the three sets of tracks in the snow. Two outbound, one inbound.
Riding alone.
Emily was right. None of her instincts led her to expect help from a team of anyone other than herself and her dog. Reaching out to Emily hadn’t been enough. Or was it too much?
She didn’t know, but she’d found a way to make one of the worst weeks of her life even more horrible. She’d lost Jimmy, driven half across the country to discover that Miss Watson had been taken by force. And now, perhaps worst of all, she’d unleashed Emily’s fury.
Neither Kee nor Archie had ever unloaded on her; though she’d probably deserved it any number of times—not the least when she’d stowed away on their helicopter during a long-ago Spec Ops mission. They’d thought her a naïve little girl at the time. Instead? She’d been terrified of losing them and even more afraid that they wouldn’t follow through and kill the men who had murdered her parents. She’d stowed away to make sure they kept their word, which they had. That they had done it to stop a war was a detail she hadn’t understood until years later.
The heads of the former President and First Lady’s protection details—practically her third set of parents—would do no more than look at her sadly when the occasional fit of being a teen in the White House had swept through her.
Emily’s ire probably wouldn’t hurt so much if it hadn’t been so pointed…and accurate. She needed to go somewhere and think about this. But doing it while freezing to death at the foot of the Sawtooths was too reminiscent of when she’d nearly frozen and starved to death in the Hindu Kush—only to be rescued by Emily’s team. Well, Emily certainly wouldn’t be rescuing her this time.
Dilya crested the ridge overlooking the ranch’s main compound. She was halfway down the hill before she spotted the three figures. They stood in the failing light halfway between the big lodge and the horse barn—all three facing in her direction when she hove into view. The big man who hadn’t bothered to zip up his parka. The smaller man, his body so quiet that it would be easy to miss his presence at all. And the woman at his side. Emily’s husband Mark, Michael, the greatest Delta Force warrior in The Unit’s history, and Claudia, the Night Stalker pilot whom he’d married.
Oh God. She was in so much trouble.
15
Derek stayed stuck in his chair at the end of the briefing for tonight’s mission and wondered what prairie dog hole he’d just stumbled into. Delta prided itself on being different. And while he’d flown on literally hundreds of missions with the Night Stalkers, they’d always just been an asset to an existing mission objective. Slot helicopter A into hazardous-as-hell-landing-zone B, deliver Rangers C and Delta D, to kick serious terrorist ass T. It wasn’t that complex a formula—until now.
Here in Fort Campbell, it was all about the helos. How to reshape the plan to leverage their strengths in new ways while protecting those precious aerial assets. Until now, he’d merely laid out a place and a time, leaving the rest up to them.
Not last night. The challenges they’d faced to hit those time marks despite picking up slower helos in their aerial convoy, then being betrayed by Air Force’s autonomous drone—he still felt sick that he’d unwittingly been a part of that. Major Trisha O’Malley had been the one to tell him to offer that connection to Abby last night and probably, no, definitely gloated about it afterward. But he’d been the one to actually deliver that betrayal aboard Abby’s bird. Only her being way smarter than the average soldier had kept their lone flight clean.
He couldn’t call it a date, though by the time they’d finished dinner and headed for last night’s long-delayed debrief, he wished he could.
What makes a D-boy so arrogant? had been her first question as they sat down over Hot Brown sandwiches. It was an artery clogging experience of the first order: layers of turkey and broiled tomatoes buried in cheese sauce and topped with bacon, all served on thick-slice buttered-and-grilled bread called Texas toast. He’d almost ordered it again for breakfast, instead opting for the marginally healthier biscuits and gravy with a side mushroom omelet.
Name another outfit as good as we are.
She didn’t even try. No need, as D-boys were the best counter-terrorism squad out there. Everyone, except the British themselves, agreed that they’d even bypassed the SAS they were modeled after. That wasn’t the question.
So, how would you answer that question about the Night Stalkers? he’d countered.
Arrogance isn’t one of my failings. And it wasn’t. Abby hadn’t bragged a single word about the skills she’d shown during the night. She simply did it and done.
He’d had to chew on that one awhile. Male bonding? was the best he could come up with.
I’d have said testosterone poisoning. Same thing I suppose. Damn but she was funny, especially when she was being half serious.
Derek had never been the sort of guy to think things through. It was a God-given truth that no plan survives the first contact with the enemy—thank you General Helmuth von Moltke the Elder for that truism. Delta’s solution? Don’t think too far ahead. Go in with a goal and years of training in flexibility—act in the moment to compensate as each situation went dynamic in a new and unforeseeably ugly manner. Delta thinking was very present tense.
He'd spent much of the dinner kicking himself for hitting on Captain Abby Rose with the bar-babe line. He didn’t usually aim any higher than that. At least in that world, everyone knew what was what—high recreation, zero commitment.
She might be what his redneck father would have termed a God-forsaken Yankee, but he found her kind of charming. Kinda? He’d spent the entire meal focused on getting her to like him…and still couldn’t tell if he’d succeeded. She’d tolerated him, but dinner had shifted rapidly from the personal to the professional. She was from Maine. There’d been something about a relation with nothing but lobsters on the brain. He couldn’t tell if that was a saying, a secret Downeast code, or a harsh reality.
