“Captain Abigail Rose?”
“Uh-huh.” Then the voice clicked into her brain. “PITA O’Malley.” Oh, shit. Not the thing to call your commanding officer, even if everyone did behind her back. She wasn’t strict, Abby might even like her. But that didn’t begin to mitigate what a pain in the ass the lieutenant colonel could be when she set her mind to it.
Trisha laughed. “Proud to be. And don’t you forget it!”
“Not a chance, ma’am.” Abby rubbed at her eyes.
“Sorry for the midday call-up.”
Abby had failed to lower the blackout curtains last night and the noontime sun lit her bedroom with a painful brightness. “How long do I have?”
“You’re about an hour late.”
“How can I be an hour late when you only just called me?”
“There’s a FRED on the way to load your helo as fast as you can break it down. Need two more hooks of your choice.” A FRED. A C-5M Super Galaxy—aka a Fucking Ridiculous Economic Disaster. Or Environmental Disaster, take your pick. The C-5Ms, the largest transports in the US military, were finally hitting their stride. However, the name had stuck as the original C-5As built in the 1960s had created a budgetary overrun unequaled for decades to come, had miserable reliability, and chewed fuel like it was free. A dozen generations later, it was a halfway decent aircraft.
“Roust Charlie Two and Four. They both kicked ass last night.”
“Done. So…” Trisha managed to draw out the two-letter word enough to make it sound positively salacious, “…do you happen to know the whereabouts of Captain Derek Kylie?”
Abby blinked. She did!
Sitting up, she spotted the empty pillow beside her. The empty, undented pillow with the sheet and blanket neatly arranged as if that side of the bed had been unused. That wasn’t right. She recalled it being very well used.
Then she remembered the male curse and spotted Derek standing still in the bedroom doorway as if trapped there—a fully clothed Derek. With his back to her, but looking at her over his shoulder. His expression was very careful.
“E-yup, I’ve got eyes on him,” her tone even sharper than she intended.
“Uh-oh,” Trisha sounded sympathetic. “Well, he and his team are on call-up too. Do you want to tell him or shall I call him separately?”
“I’ve got this.” She hung up. Setting her phone calmly on the nightstand to avoid heaving it in his face. She resisted picking up the firearm she’d left beside it. Instead, Abby folded her arms below her bare breasts. No way would she be the embarrassed one here. “Well?”
“Uh, this looks kinda bad.”
“At least he got something right.”
“I—”
She decided she didn’t want to hear it. Pushing out of bed, she snapped the covers into place. She walked past him to the bathroom. “You’d better hurry. We have an immediate call-up. You and your teams—three birds’ worth. Full loadout, no details.”
He tried to speak again.
She rerouted to her bedroom door. He started to turn but, half through his turn, she straight-armed his shoulder hard enough to send him tumbling sideways into the back of the couch. “You’d better be gone by the time I’m showered. FYI, that’ll be under two minutes.” She closed the bedroom door and headed for the bathroom.
Another one-night stand. She sighed. Even with her lousy metrics, that was still going to drop her success-with-men average.
31
Trisha was right, they were an hour behind before they even started; even with the improvements since the Chinook F variant, it still took a great deal of work to prep one for transport. Abby shadowed her crew chief Sam as they worked on Charlene One, handing him tools or lending a hand as needed to speed him along.
Pulling the Chinook’s six thirty-foot-long rotor blades required care and a skilled forklift operator as each weighed three hundred and fifty pounds. Removing the two rotor heads that raised the blades well above the fuselage was a much bigger task. Even the monster FRED couldn’t swallow a Chinook with the rotor heads still mounted—seventeen feet of helicopter height didn’t come close to slipping into a thirteen-and-a-half-foot-high cargo bay.
Helping out kept her mechanical skills at least somewhat current. Most crew chiefs wouldn’t trust a pilot to hold a flashlight on their birds, but Abby had fixed plenty of lobster pot hoists, bilge pumps, and boat engines over the years. Under Sam’s watchful eye, she at least felt useful. Charlie Two and Four were going through the same dance, but without their pilots pitching in beyond the simplest steps.
It also gave her a good excuse for avoiding Derek. Once he and his teams showed up at the loading site, he’d tried to approach her several times. Sam, reading the situation easily, brushed him away twice, then almost dropped a rotor blade on his head (purely accidentally, of course). Derek finally got the message.
The dodge and avoidance routine wasn’t going to work if they were flying on a mission together, but it sufficed for the moment.
