First, Derek and his team hadn’t treated the exercise as any more of a training op than she and hers had. Lives were on the line, the mission was real down to everything except the Simunitions and flashbangs in place of bullets and explosives. Though they hadn’t been gentle. The training buildings were going to take a lot of work to put back to their normal state—one was missing an entire wall because, Well, it was in our way. Damn but Derek made her laugh.
Second, he really was that good.
He—
Trisha’s hand landed on her shoulder and shook Abby back and forth until she wondered if the woman was trying to make her seasick. “That so totally rocked.”
“Worse than a lobster boat during a nor’easter,” she finally snagged Trisha’s wrist and lifted her hand aside. Trisha had ordered in a cooler of beer, which meant there wouldn’t be any more flights for another twenty-four hours. Unlike most pilots, who were eight hours bottle-to-throttle, the Night Stalkers were twenty-four. A beer was an incredible luxury. She checked the bottle in her hand—Grolsch. A good beer. More points to Trisha. The grill full of burgers and dogs set up outside the briefing room won her everyone’s vote of thanks.
“What are you looking for?” Trisha didn’t clarify.
“I, uh,” Abby looked at the range map spread out on the light table. Before Bill had come in and distracted Derek, the two of them had been reviewing the night’s work. Though at the moment she couldn’t remember why.
Each team had pushed the other to try new techniques as they hit the successive sites. Derek had even used the DAGOR to haul aboard a ton of two-man rocks. In a key attack, she’d stood the Chinook nose-to-the-sky. With its tailgate on a quick release but the DAGOR still chained down and the full team strapped in, the ton of rock had fallen from the sky. Impacting three seconds later at a hundred kmph, it had seriously flattened an armored personnel carrier—like totaled. It had definitely distracted everyone as the attack came from the opposite side of the final camp.
“Seriously?” Trisha grabbed her shoulder again, giving her just enough of a yank to force her head up.
Derek was still standing on the opposite side of the light table and staring after Bill as he flexed his hand.
“Now you’re talking.” Trisha stopped shaking her. Instead, Abby heard the bright tink of a beer bottle tapped against hers, making her nearly lose it to the floor.
Derek turned to look at her.
“Wha—” but Trisha was gone.
Then Derek began to smile.
Abby decided she wasn’t going to ask what he was thinking.
Besides, she suspected they were the same thoughts running through her mind.
22
“Where the hell are you, Emily?”
As if she knew. It was an alien room, which she didn’t recognize in the dark shadows. It was…her bathroom. Her bathroom…at home…lit by a pale blue nightlight and a slender crescent of golden moon through the skylight. Oh, right.
To preserve Mark from the worst annoyances of her command, her instincts had learned to retreat from the bedroom to the bathroom to take late night calls when she was home. Home at Henderson’s Ranch. Unsure of how she came to be here, she could only picture the quiet pleasure of riding Chesapeake through the golden afternoon sunlight. Had she ridden her horse here from Fort Campbell? No effort recalled quite why she’d felt smothered by her own personal cloud of gloom while doing so.
“Emily? Earth to Emily.”
“Trisha?”
“How hard did you push the limits this time? Have you been asleep for the whole twenty-four hours since you ghosted my hard-working ass?”
She knew better than to comment on that because Trisha would then start telling her all the far more fun things her fine ass could have been doing in the meantime. Emily had fallen for that trap often enough to avoid it even half awake.
“What time is it?”
“Where are you?”
“Uh,” she looked at the bathroom again, “Montana.”
“Bitch! Is it utterly gorgeous?”
It was a bathroom. A nice one. Done in dark woods and cool tile. Hers and Mark’s. Then she remembered riding across the snow-dusted foothills and breathing great lungfuls of the sharp air, which made more sense than riding thousands of kilometers across the Great Plains. “Yes.”
“That makes it five a.m. My time, that is. Four a.m. yours.”
