“We have a dozen MI6 field agents, probably highly skilled?—”
“Lethally skilled,” Miss Watson joined them with Dilya hovering at her side. “Hopefully they didn’t get a good look at Dilya. They can not be allowed to identify her.”
“Why were they hunting you?” Cutcher pushed forward. “Who the hell are you that MI6 is after you?”
“Would you like to know which of your MPs are currently being blackmailed by foreign powers—and I’m not only talking about by Russia, the EU, and the US? Or perhaps you’d be interested in the identity of the UK’s top hacker for hire? GCHQ doesn’t know his identity, but I do and, frankly, your people are far too trusting.”
“Kwan?” Dilya asked.
Miss Watson shook her head.
“Oh,” Dilya nodded. “I should have seen that. Yes, that is a very risky choice.”
That simple comment finally wiped girl out of his vocabulary for Dilya. Delta knew a lot about the forces that opposed them—pre-engagement. More than the OPFOR would like, often more about their structure and assets than they knew about themselves. Of all the hackers for hire in the world, a world he knew existed but didn’t understand beyond annoying emails and scary headlines, Dilya had just connected how many disparate threads of information to figure out who the UK would hire?
“How smart are you?” He didn’t mean to blurt it out like that.
“Smarter than the average bear.”
“I’ll be sure to protect my pic-i-nic basket.”
“It won’t save you,” she grinned at him.
He returned the grin and tapped his finger on his sidearm in its holster.
She shrugged a maybe yes / maybe no. Then she slid up her sleeve to reveal a Benchmade black-anodized foldable Mediator knife in a wrist sheath. Even the simple gesture told him she knew how to handle it like a pro. At this distance, she’d damage him, even if he shot her first. Definitely not girl. They traded smiles once more.
“So,” Abby stayed focused on the colonel. “Do we drop their bodies down a crab hole to stop them?”
“What’s a crab hole?”
She didn’t answer, but he’d apparently now made himself a target for Dilya. “It’s a depression in the seabed floor where dead stuff tends to accumulate.” A flick of her eyebrows suggested that perhaps his body belonged there. “Crabs go there to feed. It’s the best spot to drop your crab pot. Most are closely guarded secrets.”
“Give me a break, Dilya, I’m from Oklahoma. Crab pots aren’t exactly our thing.”
“Still, if you’re going after—” she cast her voice so that no one else noticed. The slightest shift of her eyes indicated Abby.
Abby, who was still refusing to look at him.
Yeah, she heard your thoughts, buddy boy. You’re now off the reservation but good.
It was a good thing. He didn’t want a woman in his life anyway.
64
Abby couldn’t stand to look at any of them other than Colonel Beale. If she looked at Group Captain Cutcher, she’d freak out. Her job was to be a pilot, not try to answer impossible questions about the proper action against an ally’s foreign intelligence service. If she looked at Dilya or Miss Watson, well, she’d barely kept the tears at bay the first time.
And Derek? He had her in such a jumble inside that she didn’t know which way was up. His touch, probably meant to soothe, had risked tipping her over the edge into hysterical weeping, which she would not do in front of her commander. No one, man or woman, had ever had that effect on her, that deep connection. He embodied new territory she was in no way equipped to navigate. So, like an LZ that was truly too hot to land in, she’d avoid the whole zone.
If she looked at the dog… It was Dilya’s dog, so who knew what its superpower might be.
Focus on Beale. “Awaiting orders, Colonel.”
“I don’t have answers, Captain. And,” she stepped back to peer around the side of the helo toward the Base Hangar, “I’d estimate we have about thirty seconds to come up with a plan.”
Abby swallowed hard to keep the churning knot in her gut down where it belonged. All she could think to do was shoot them. This was getting far too real. Unless?—
“Shoot them, ma’am.”
