“Now just a moment, young lady,” Captain Cutcher reached for her sidearm and suddenly Misty’s long rifle was poking against her back.
“Two nights of practice…” Abby let it hang in the air.
“Ha!” Derek selected a frequency and clicked his radio’s mike. “Double-check your weapons. Sims only. I repeat, Sims only. Take the Brits down Delta style in sixty.”
Abby called her own team and began issuing orders. No need to confer; they were in such synchronicity. As soon as they finished, she had a horrid thought. “But they’ll have live weapons. When they fire back at your men?—”
“If we give them a chance!” Then Derek laughed as he grabbed her hand. “C’mon! You wanta see the fun up close, don’t you?”
Hot Rod was just rolling up in the DAGOR with Compass beside him.
“You,” Derek beeped Dilya on the nose and got his hand swatted. Oddly, she caught him with her wrist rather than her hand and he reacted as if it truly stung.
Abby wanted to give her a cheer.
“Stay the hell out of sight. You too.” He pointed at the dog, then shifted to point into the Chinook’s cargo bay. The dog went and, after a confused scowl at Derek, Dilya followed.
“Misty. Up.” Derek called out as he dragged Abby toward the DAGOR.
Misty slung her sniper rifle over her back and vaulted up to the .50 cal Browning machine gun that had been mounted on the turret. “Only got live rounds here, boss.”
“Then don’t hit anyone.”
“That’s against my nature.” She grinned as she faced forward. She stood on the middle seat of the row behind the driver and navigator. That raised her upper torso above the roll bars, but placed her hands on the handles of the big machine gun mounted on a turret. It could swivel three hundred and sixty degrees around her.
Derek boosted Abby onto the tailgate. “Hang on!”
The extra heartbeat that he spent with his hands around her waist as if relishing the memory—which she did as well—and almost left him behind.
Hot Rod did his usual bolting toward the action before everyone was fully aboard.
65
Crap! The hand that Dilya had slapped with her knife’s wrist sheath was all Derek could use to leverage himself aboard the racing DAGOR. And it hurt! He’d have to find a way to pay the twerp back—like teach her dog a new trick since Zackie listened to him now. It would fluster Dilya even more.
“Straight at them, Hot Rod. Misty, do not destroy their helos—at least not unless absolutely necessary.”
He flipped up one of the rear side-seats in the DAGOR’s truck bed. From the storage beneath, he extracted a blue-painted sidearm. “Don’t say I never gave you anything.” He dropped it, along with a single blue magazine, in Abby’s lap. “Don’t shoot them in the face. They won’t necessarily have goggles on to protect their eyes. Even if they do, it’s just plain nasty.”
“Only one mag?”
“I like your style, but this won’t take long enough to do any reloading.” He took a pair of altered Glocks himself and then passed more up to the others. Simunitions rounds fired like the real thing, flew about a hundred feet, and stung if they caught you. No paintball, but still nonlethal. Live rounds couldn’t fire in blue guns; they had smaller barrel sizes by a few crucial caliber. The blues, however, could fire in a standard weapon, which could be severely embarrassing—or worse, as they gummed up the works or caused jams without doing more than annoying the enemy.
Before every mission, a Delta operator scrounged through their entire kit to purge the blues. Carrying both at once was against all the rules. Of course, D-boys and girls weren’t exactly big on rules.
“Rev it loud!”
Hot Rod yanked the shifter down a gear and punched the accelerator. The engine roared.
Derek popped his head up to check the MI6 team’s reactions.
As he’d hoped, every head was facing their way but he could see beyond them that his guys had gotten into it. Sixty seconds warning had been plenty.
Charlie Two and Four had initially climbed high. An MH-47G was a hella powerful bird with a ten-meter-per-second climb rate. In thirty seconds, they’d popped up to a thousand feet and kicked out their cargo.
It began raining D-boys. The pair of four-man MRZRs and two bikes fluttered down to either side of the DAGOR’s central path with a driver parachuting down so close behind that they were mounted in seconds. One of the guys tried to land directly into the MRZR’s driver’s seat but missed and ended up on the passenger side with his weapon at the ready. Though no one else seemed to notice, Derek would tease him about it later. Maybe change his tag to Wrong Side or Passenger. Not Shotgun—the dude would enjoy that too much.
Hot Rod slammed the DAGOR into a four-wheel spinning slide that finished with Abby’s and Derek’s toes a bare meter from the leader’s knees.
