The proof of danger to her protégé raced over the perimeter fence. A pair of Dauphin helicopters caught the eastern sunrise until they glowed like a pair of shivs right before someone slid them between your ribs. If they’d been Army Air Corps blue-and-white or UK Ministry of Defence white-with-red-stripe livery, she’d have been less worried. At the worst, those would deliver a half dozen SAS warriors each. There were straightforward ways of dealing with the British equivalent of Delta Force.
Instead, these birds wore plain white along with their tail number. She pulled the IDs out of her pocket; the ones she hadn’t had time to look at since she’d taken them off the dead bodies. Face, name, scannable code, and the coat of arms. No need of a flashy title like MI6 or Secret Intelligence Service splashed across the front. The coat of arms with an English lion and Scottish unicorn rampant said more than enough.
They were the ones after her and they were going to be very upset that she’d killed one of their agents in the US and three more less than an hour ago. Those weren’t the sort of reports that the PM wanted during her daily briefings. Which, she glanced at the low sun, would be happening within another hour.
MI6 had sent in a double flight of black ops agents to get this, her existence, “resolved” before they had to report it.
She too wanted to resolve this quickly—before Dilya landed in their sights.
But how?
58
“Well, that’s interesting.” Abby hung by her fingertips clamped around cold metal with her toes perched on the low rail. She peered over the edge and looked down at what Zackie had found. In a demolition dumpster big enough to toss a couple of jet engines, lay a man with his hands and feet bound and duct tape over his mouth.
“He’s breathing.” Derek took a step back.
Without needing to be told, Misty dropped to one knee, planting the other firmly in front of her close to the dustbin. Derek used it as a launch point and cleared the edge like he was hurdling over a foot-tall tree stump, not the lip of a giant steel box that she had to cling onto to see inside. Yet for all the height of his vault, he landed quietly, absorbing the shock easily. He extended a finger to the man’s neck. “Good pulse. No signs of blood.”
At Derek’s last word, the bound man’s eyes cracked open, and he struggled to focus. His scream was sufficiently muted by the gag that all it did was rattle around the inside the dustbin. Very little of it managed to spill over the edges.
“Thoughts?” Abby didn’t have time for this. She’d seen the unmarked helos come in for a landing down at the Base Hangar. Not a good sign. The nearest US military force lay just fifteen kilometers away at RAF Fairford. Being Air Force, they might know about the C-5 Galaxy transport’s arrival but not about Abby’s Army team. Getting any useful form of support from them would probably require hours and bucking much farther up the command chain than she had time for.
Fine! The Three Colonels could delay them as long as possible to keep them from noticing what Abby was doing under their very noses. But the tide had turned and was beginning to run hard in the wrong direction.
Misty moved out of the way and Derek swung out of the dumpster as lightly as he’d swung in.
“You’ll have to teach me how to do that. Who knows when it might come in handy,” Abby told him.
“Do what?” The man didn’t have a straight face to save his life.
“Also, how you did that without stinking of garbage at the end.” She sniffed the air near his shoulder and got a snootful of a reminder of having him in her bed. “Oh, you didn’t.”
He opened his mouth to?—
“What do we do about him?” She nodded toward the man grunting ineffectually against his bonds. Miss Watson had hogtied him so he couldn’t even kick the side of the bin to draw attention.
“I think we should leave him because?—”
He agreed with her assessment and that’s all she needed to know. Abby twisted on her heel to face Dilya. “Keep Zackie going.”
They’d come up on the far side of the building from her team’s vehicles and she hadn’t bothered to call them in. They were afoot for now.
Dilya was watching Zackie and chewing on her lower lip. The Sheltie kept ranging back and forth around the dumpster, but the scent trail obviously ended in the middle of the pavement.
“She drove that man’s car away.” Dilya hauled herself up on tiptoes to peer down into the dustbin. “Did you have a vehicle?” Abby joined her.
He nodded, then winced. Miss Watson had probably left him with a severe headache and Derek’s intrusion hadn’t let him sleep off the worst of it.
“What was it?”
He grunted against the gag then rolled his eyes. The latter action made him wince again.
Derek was scanning the base, turning a slow circle. Misty raised her rifle and did the same thing through her scope in the opposite direction. Being Delta, they undoubtedly noticed and processed a thousand details she would miss. But Dilya had the skill.
Abby nudged Dilya, then nodded toward Derek. It only took her seconds before she too was doing the slow turn.
“If she’s watching us, she’s well hidden,” Dilya concluded.
