She was on her own. Except she wasn’t. Derek was right there beside her, even if they couldn’t speak at the moment. His proximity was a comfort.
Not something to expect from men in her experience. Yet here he—not some movie hero—rode beside her, Captain Abigail Rose. That image sustained her through the next ninety seconds until they reached a remote building along the north side of the base.
55
No one had cleaned up the scene in the interrogation room. Derek read the blood spatter patterns easily from experience.
Too much to do. Too little of him. Derek shards: that’s what he needed. But he’d left Hot Rod and Compass outside with the vehicles, bringing only Misty with him as backup.
If there were multiples of himself, one could confer with Abby about the best way to de-escalate what they’d escalated in the first place. Or did it need to be taken up another level?
Another could be at point, keeping everyone safe. A third running a deep site assessment. A fourth…
But since there was only one of him, he stayed close behind Cutcher. If Cutcher had to be put down, he didn’t want it to be one of his team. A senior officer of one of the country’s closest allies… There were certain tasks you didn’t delegate.
“What’s he still doing here, Raymond?” Cutcher asked a man wearing the three stripes of a wing commander. No question who she was talking about. The room’s only other bloodied occupant—still on his bare feet—paced intently about the room, adjusting a stethoscope on a shelf, then carried a box of bandages across the room and back before placing it exactly where it had started. Then he turned it around three-sixty and that satisfied him before he moved to the next object.
Two med techs were hard pressed to keep him from treading on the swathes of blood on the floor or tripping over the two RMP investigators photographing the corpses.
Raymond held up an injector. “LSD. Carl thinks it was a massive dose.” One of the med techs nodded, then blocked the man’s effort to get by him. Raymond continued, “He says we probably won’t get anything rational from him for at least ten hours, possibly longer. This keeps him calm. Any attempt to get him out of the room—” The wing commander shuddered.
The drugged man crossed close by him, circled back, straightened the collar of Derek’s jacket, then moved on. His pupils were fully dilated. While he was close, Derek could hear him mumbling to himself. He appeared to be caught up in a disjointed recitation of…Hamlet. With the dead around him, that wasn’t much of a surprise.
He’d been in the grisly aftermath of battles. Walked through homes where his team had to gun down fathers, mothers, and even underage sons when they grabbed for weapons. Dinner still steaming on the table. But under the bright fluorescent lights, this was one of the worst.
“Uh, Commander Raymond, could you turn on the small lamp by the nurse’s station?”
When he did, Derek switched off the overhead. It was like he flipped the switch on the drugged man as well. He let the med techs guide him to a chair, where they quickly strapped him in.
Abby squinted her question at him.
“Dilated pupils, bright lights, witness to three ugly deaths, and drugged out of his mind on acid. I figured he might be just a touch overstimulated.”
The smile she shot him ranked even better than the carry-on nod he’d received from Colonel Gibson back in the hangar. She turned to Dilya. “You and Zackie are up.”
He noticed that Dilya reacted to the blood or corpses even less than Abby or any of the Brits. Whatever the girl had been through inured her to such sights.
All she did was say, “Miss Watson, faigh.”
“Fog?”
“More like f-a-gh, where you swallow the gh sound. Scots Gaelic for seek.”
“Zackie speaks Gaelic?”
“Of course she does. She’s a Shetland sheepdog.” Dilya’s smile would befit a merry imp as she waved a hand to prove her point. The dog tracked from the hospital bed, trotted twice about the room, lingered by the corpse wearing only his underwear, then headed out the door.
After a similar close inspection of a shattered laptop, she turned left, then doubled back and took the right-hand hallway at a brisk trot. That meant the scent trail was still strong, at least to Zackie’s nose.
Misty gave him a small nod indicating she could take the guard position on Cutcher, but Derek waved her to run point beside Dilya. He kept behind Cutcher and Abby, watching their six to make sure the others didn’t follow.
Then he let out a bark of laughter.
Abby had fallen back to trot beside him, “What’s so damn funny this time?”
“Nothing much, I admit. But no one is coming hot from behind. I realized that we gave no indication we—” he nodded at Cutcher’s back.
“—had taken the base commander by force.” Cutcher could obviously hear him better than he’d intended. “Let’s keep it that way and get this resolved.”
