“Not tonight.” Definitely not his usual response, but it was a guaranteed way to lose his bet.
“And the part about the mirror I seem to be looking at wrong?”
“That’s the reason I kissed the lady without asking permission first.”
“Do you usually ask permission?”
He had to think about that one too. “Must say no.” She shifted farther back. “Because usually the answer is pretty damn obvious.”
“But I’m not?”
He laughed. “You got armor thicker than your Hook’s.” He made a point of looking around at the deep-blue sky. “The only thing obvious about you is that you are seriously wrongheaded about yourself.” He went Okie again. “I gon’ out and buy this here fine lady a mere right soon.”
He’d been right about her eyes; that curly walnut-brown hair and strong eyebrows that emphasized their light honey-amber color. All through dinner he hadn’t been able to look away any more than he could now. She stared at him until he wondered if maybe he needed a mere to check himself in.
“Goodnight, Captain Kylie.” Then she kissed him as lightly as he’d kissed her and turned on her heel. This time she didn’t look back.
16
Abby had been exhausted after the long training flight and her constant conversational screwups over dinner. Which should have meant only one thing, she wasn’t going to sleep a wink. Past history taught her that she’d replay every step of the former and every misstep of the latter throughout the day when she was supposed to be sleeping.
What in her past had ever taught her to deal with an attractive man? Mum had died when she was a toddler and Gran’mum soon after. The two funerals were her first two identifiable memories. She’d been raised in a house of men: brothers, cousins, even neighbors. She was the only female of her generation for a fair way round the family tree. Which taught her all the rough-and-tumble lessons as a child and prepared for nothing that happened when she hit her teens.
Deal with them in banter, barter, or a brawl? No problem. Ones she was attracted to… Yeah, still no ideas.
How many times had she proven that with Captain Kylie last night? Out of his fearsome D-boy mode, he was funny, polite, and interesting. His brown hair tended to curl, which made him look more disheveled than scary, even though he kept it short. It goes nuts if I let it grow another inch. I swear, it’s trying to stage a rebellion. That, or Mama and Papa were lying and I’m part sheep. He laughed easily…and he listened. Yet she kept tumbling out of the conversation with all the grace of a busted helo.
And after that kiss and promise to buy her a mere, she should have had ten times the trouble sleeping. Instead? She’d crashed into her bed for the best eight hours she’d had in a long while.
For her late-afternoon breakfast, she’d hit the mini fridge for fruit, yogurt, and granola, with a splash of honey. She stuck with hot cocoa because coffee shifted her up, then down, and she didn’t like the variability when flying.
Not that she was avoiding Captain Derek Kylie, who would have eaten in the DFAC. And she hadn’t sat between Ethan and Sam in the front row of this morning’s debriefing or this evening’s briefing to shut Derek out; it’s where she always sat.
Trisha had other ideas.
“Due to last night’s success by your team,” as if she and Derek were linked by their survival, “you’re taking the lead on tonight’s training op.”
And it was a doozy.
17
“Your mission, Derek Kylie, is to run the lead of a roll-up, but do it Night Stalkers’ style,” Trisha announced.
It was one of the techniques developed by Delta during the Afghanistan War. Oh, there was the full military acronym, but not even briefing officers used it. A roll-up op started with an initial piece of intel. That was used to stage a raid—typically of Unit operators delivered by the Night Stalkers. Immediately, new information was gathered from aggressive prisoner interviews, laptops, diagrams, caches of documents under floorboards, and anything else that came to hand. Sent back to operational HQ, a new target was identified, and an insta-warrant was issued by US-friendly twenty-four-hour-a-day courts that they’d built in every relevant jurisdiction.
With a fresh warrant, the raiding team would transit directly to the next site—gathering up any more terrorists and intel that came to hand there—then punch on to the next site after that. It was a race against word-of-mouth networks that would scatter the possible downstream targets. They’d built that method to three or four raids in a single night, vastly increasing their effectiveness. They often cut off whole branches of the tree rather than a single Taliban or ISIL cell.
For the teams, it was a brutal mission that stretched abilities and stamina to the limits. On bad nights the word-of-mouth network outstripped even their best efforts. Then they might drop into a heavily armed death trap. The roll-up’s toll on manpower and equipment could be brutal, but the payoffs often ranked as exceptional.
Tonight, they’d be staging the same thing out in the Fort Campbell training range, but each was required to use a different helo technique. In typical usage, the quick Little Birds would deliver four operators per bird. Then the Black Hawks would come in to deliver the support layer, typically 75th Rangers. Depending on if there was room or not, if the battle zone wasn’t some too-tightly-packed urban environment, the big Chinooks would come in to clear up the mess. Chinooks—with a rotor sweep of sixty by a hundred feet—didn’t thrive in the typical Afghan or Third World street designed for a couple donkey carts.
But the big cities had the space.
The next war was far more likely to be in an urban center like Kyiv or Taipei, perhaps even Moscow, Beijing, or Warsaw. Oddly, wider streets opened up more opportunities for the Night Stalkers’ MH-47G Chinook helos and their serious carrying capacity. In a pinch a Black Hawk could carry eleven troops and their gear; a Chinook could handle fifty with room left over.
Trisha had left the briefing room, leaving a full portfolio of their first target on the briefing room table for the team to plan with. Derek let out a harsh laugh.
“What?”
