With the infrared headlights and the night-vision goggles, he actually spotted a deer staring at them in stark terror before bolting into the woods. When Compass made no corrections, Hot Rod dropped down a gear—because automatic trannies never behaved quite the way he needed—yanked down on the console-mounted hand brake to get a four-wheel slide to make the ninety-degree turn, and gunned it into the scrub that grew along the verge. They blasted through and, sure enough, a path opened beneath the trees, straight, then curving abruptly left to avoid a massive oak Compass had failed to mention.
The plan gave him five minutes to cover three kilometers to the vehicle drop-off site. His DAGOR wasn’t about running quiet, it was about getting there around, through, or over anything. They’d do the last kilometer to the target building in the required silence by hoofing it.
Compass fed him the turns he needed just as he needed them. Once they picked up a disused logging road, he eased off the gas long enough to slap from four-wheel-low to four-wheel-high and punched it again.
They made the distance with a full minute to spare. He quietly idled sixty seconds closer at a double-time jog before shutting it down. FILO, first-in/last-out, the rest of the team was on the ground and moving before the final throb of the engine. His job this time? Sit his ass in place until they needed that ride. Often times being a top driver put him at the front of the action, but sitting here alone was the ass-end of suckitude.
The others would cover the last eight hundred meters afoot in four minutes—five if they ran into any particularly unusual booby traps. Add two minutes for recon and last-minute adjustments.
He counted three-sixty and checked his watch—within two seconds.
The Number Two team would be ready on the other side of the target building on their silent electric bikes. No need for radio calls, they’d be there and all launch at the same moment.
He started the engine.
Team Three’s Chinook sounded in the distance off to the South.
Into gear.
A flash lit up the trees.
He punched the gas and the DAGOR leapt forward. He covered the last kilometer in under ninety seconds.
By the time he arrived, they’d already taken the building. His team had punched in the ground-floor windows of the two-story structure on two sides. The e-bikes’ crew gave the other two sides similar treatment. And the roof team had roped down from the Chinook, set grappled hooks above the windows, then leapt out and swung back to slam into the upper story in a cloud of fragmented glass.
The last flashes of simulated battle lit the windows from within as he skidded to a stop. Snipers that had landed on the roof scanned him and he waved the pre-agreed hand sign to verify his identity in addition to the infrared reflecting tabs on his shoulders.
Ninety seconds after they called the site Secure, Charlene One landed square in front of him. He rolled aboard. Derek and Bill Bruce the referee sat at the front of the bay, each intent on their tablets. Once chained in, Hot Rod shut down, got out, and eased himself back to stand with the crew chief Sam at the rear ramp.
Charlie Four was called in to take away the prisoners.
“Hey, they grabbed the referees too.” Sam pointed at the prisoners with white armbands. Their hands were zip-tied behind their backs and The Unit operators escorted them in the same pack as the OPFOR prisoners.
Hot Rod couldn’t help smiling. “No such thing as Trust but verify in The Unit’s world. You are: Unit, captive, or killed. We don’t want to mess with a hostage who coulda been turned or a terrorist embedded with the hostages. We disarm and bind ’em all and sort it out later. Apologies only when necessary.”
They both glanced at Lt. Colonel Bruce, but he gave no sign as to his thoughts about his observation team’s fate.
Once freed of the prisoners, the rest of Derek’s team hustled aboard and dumped two loaded knapsacks on the tailgate.
“Sort it,” he ordered.
Hot Rod and Compass were automatically handed any maps. Grease, who handled a submachine gun better than anyone, and Misty, their top sniper, received building and force plans. X-ray had his laptop up and running; he got all the SIGINT, signals intelligence. Derek took anything that looked like action plans. The others sorted through the leftover chaff. They’d practiced this for untold hours with everything from carefully prepped training kits to bags of civilian household garbage. Amazing what you could learn about people from their trash.
In minutes, the team had hypothesized, verified, and mapped information about a second site—underground. Direct satellite images pulled down by X-ray didn’t show squat until he ran a time lapse of the last twenty-four hours of observations. Busy spot inbound and nothing outbound all afternoon up until darkness.
Derek and the seriously cute pilot cooked up an attack plan so fast that Hot Rod would have been the one left standing in the dirt if he hadn’t already been aboard.
21
The debrief was more of a celebration that a formal review.
Abby watched as Bill Bruce came up, shook Derek’s hand without a word, and faded away as he so often did at briefings. Derek stared down at his hand as if he was never going to wash it again. Any of the teasing or arrogance she’d felt from him the first night was no longer relevant.
It wasn’t the awe he was displaying at the moment that shifted her view of him.
Nor the kiss. Though such a gentle kiss from a hard-fighting D-boy had made it twice as surprising, and that she hadn’t chased him away made it damned nice beyond that.
No, the biggest change had been, actually, two changes.
