Chapter 10
Emily made it back to the ranch even more slowly than usual—sixteen hours to cross half the country.
With no military flights headed in the right direction, she’d fought through inconvenient airport locations, a broken plane, and a drunk who should have been ejected at altitude instead of merely cornered—the not-so-gentle application of her hand-to-hand combat training had definitely garnered his attention and cooperation—and ended with him zip-tied to an attendant’s seat in the aft galley.
The flight attendants had appreciated the help, but it had led to interviews and paperwork once they’d landed which made her miss the connector flight of an already bad layover—winter-time flights to western Montana simply weren’t very common.
The flights themselves were consumed by paperwork she’d fallen behind on and planning she hadn’t had time to do in Fort Campbell.
Trisha’s after-action report had made her laugh.
She’d never considered planting a key friendly aboard each helo to unwittingly sabotage their systems. How Trisha managed to get a CCA from the Air Force testing and qualification teams was an addition to her never-ending mystical collection of skills.
The results had her frowning until she read the detailed accounts by the various pilots. Trisha had slammed them up against a helo pilot’s greatest fears.
During her own time in Afghanistan, their greatest fears were RPGs and surface-to-air missiles.
Drones back then had been strictly US hardware, large birds flying high on surveillance or kill missions.
Now they constituted a whole new level of ugly.
Small, incredibly maneuverable, and—with the innovations of the Ukraine War—lethal.
No one had missed the recent downing of a twenty-million-dollar Colombian military Black Hawk by a three-thousand-dollar Russian drone used by the extremist guerilla drug- and kidnap-runners still operating in the deep jungle.
Only one Chinook had made it through last night’s test, captained by Abigail Rose and Ethan Merced. Digging deeper into the debrief, Emily spotted Trisha’s note.
Capt. Abby Rose and D-boy Capt. Derek Kylie showed strong connection and cooperation.
Leave it to Trisha to bury it in an after-action report.
She knew they represented the sort of people Emily was looking for.
Her husband Mark and Colonel Michael Gibson, then Trisha and her husband Billy, Emily knew the power of that deep integration offered by the inclusion of a permanently embedded Delta Force liaison within a Night Stalker operation.
Surely, Trisha hoped that Emily would miss it so that she could lay a massive tease trap for later.
Emily sent a simple text: Push them hard in tonight’s exercise. Trisha would definitely know who she meant, and her own nonreaction would be a tease back.
The jolt of the landing in Great Falls, Montana, came as a complete shock. She’d been so deep in the report, she’d completely missed the passenger jet’s descent and final approach. She rubbed her eyes. Were her piloting instincts failing her?
The more likely answer, of severe sleep deprivation, came home to roost the instant after climbing into the ranch’s helicopter that Mark had flown down. She didn’t even stay conscious long enough to kiss him before sleeping through the twenty-minute flight out to Henderson’s Ranch.
He had half lifted her out of the helo before the slap of cold air woke her. “No, wait. Put me down before you hurt yourself.”
Mark laughed and held her closer. If anything, ranch work had made him even more powerful than the first time he’d held her thirteen years ago.
Retired and mid-forties, he’d mellowed from that long-ago company commander…
but not changed all that much. Nothing she’d like to do more than curl up in his arms and be carried to their bed—as long as he let her sleep.
“The girls?”
“It’s a school day.” One p.m. her time had become noon local. Which meant—
“Dilya.”
“What about her?”
“Where is she?”
Mark looked down at her. “Dilya?”
Emily sighed. The girl could be bloody invisible when she wanted to.
“Hi, Emily.”
Mark banged his nose on the back of Emily’s head as they both twisted to look down at her.
Except Dilya wasn’t down anymore. She’d been a little slip of a girl when their unit had rescued the war orphan from the middle of a battle in northern Afghanistan.
She’d been starved for too many years to ever be more than slender.
Her dark brown hair still ruffled long down her back, and her green eyes still seemed too large for her narrow features, especially highlighted by her mid-tone skin.
Mark set Emily down rather abruptly as he grabbed for his nose. Thankfully he first let go of her feet rather than her head. Still, a hand on Mark’s shoulder was all that kept her from dropping to the snow-dusted dirt.
“You’re in Montana.” Emily didn’t know quite what comfort she’d found in stating the obvious.
“So are you.” Dilya smiled at her, and her dog, a too-smart Sheltie named Zackie, wagged her tail in agreement. “We need to talk.”
“So you said.”
Mark looked from one to the other of them as he held his nose before cursing, “Dabbit!” And he stalked off without even giving her a kiss.
Mark knew about the Tac Room, probably knew its purpose, but he wasn’t one of the four authorized to enter there.
Usually he liked it that way. Not at the moment.
Of course Dilya wasn’t authorized either, but that hadn’t stopped her.
She’d had years of practice, first at the secret forward military base they’d rescued her to, then later as the First Child’s nanny and the First Lady’s dog handler in the White House.
Emily still hadn’t heard the story of how Dilya ended up owning the First Lady’s dog when she left the White House.
“Sorry,” Dilya looked more sad than sorry.
“Your timing has been better.” Then she recognized the new pained look on Dilya’s face as clearly as Mark had recognized that nothing important would happen as long as he remained within earshot.
“New Hampshire?” Last she’d heard, Dilya had been living with a boy near Mount Washington, the tallest point north of Tennessee and east of the Black Hills.
“All he cared about was his trains.”
“Trains?”
“He works on the tourist cog-rail line that goes up to the top of Mount Washington. I thought he’d be…”
“…interested in the same things you were?”
Dilya sighed so heavily that even the irrepressible Zackie looked sad.
“He was, still is, into tactical online war games. But that’s as far as he wants to take it.
Ultimately, we just annoyed the crap out of each other.
” She stroked Zackie’s head. “Our Shelties grew as grouchy with each other as we did.”
“I’m sorry.” Emily was never brilliant at moments like this.
She knew what to do when she was someone’s commander and superior officer.
But Dilya was the adopted daughter of the man she’d met at West Point, then flown with for years, and the woman who’d been Emily’s top gunner back in the day.
Emily and Dilya were more friends than anything else.
Out of other ideas, Emily rested a hand on Dilya’s arm in sympathy.
Dilya nodded hard, brushed once at her eyes, and retreated without moving a muscle. “We need to talk.”
Emily dropped her hand. “Is it okay if I get some sleep first?”
Dilya’s look said no.
Now it was Emily’s turn to sigh sadly. Well, she wasn’t going to leave the high-pressure world of Fort Campbell only to crawl into the high-pressure world of the Tac Room, no matter how anxious Dilya was.
Emily looked about the Montana ranch compound; she might be barely conscious but at least she was home and that was a blessing in any form.
But the two-story log-built lodge would be busy with ranch operations; there might also be a chef’s masterclass based on the number of vehicles parked in front of the lodge.
Their master chef often ran those over the winter—for income off the tourist season.
The big horse barn rarely had a quiet corner.
Mark had gone to the multi-bay garage; he and Doug, the ranch manager, maintained most of the tractors and such themselves.
Zackie’s attention was riveted in the opposite direction where Stan and Jodi would be running a new class of war dogs through training.
The soft, chilly breeze from that direction must be suggesting a whole pack of potential playmates.
She looked up at the achingly blue sky that stretched on forever.
After growing up in DC and spending the bulk of her adult life in helicopters and military bases, she’d fallen in love with the ranch’s Big Sky.
The snow shone beneath the midday sun, but it wasn’t much more than a filling around the winter grasses.
The air was crisper than a fresh-picked apple and alive like nowhere else she’d ever been.
“Do you ride?”
Dilya’s eye roll said she was being dense.
“Give me a break, kid. I’ve been awake for three days.” And she wasn’t as young as she used to be. Twenty years back when she’d been a freshly minted SOAR pilot, her current state of sleep deprivation was nothing out of the norm. Now in her mid-forties? Not so much.
“I spent how many years working for First Lady Melanie Anne Darlington Thomas?” Dilya didn’t make it a passive-aggressive sneer. It was more of a jog-your-elbow reminder. Dilya had never developed any nasty streak past the eye roll she’d had down cold long before she spoke English.
The First Lady, Zackie’s putative owner, was a masterful horsewoman from a grand Tennessee farm. Emily had seen the wall of awards to prove it. She’d even managed to convert her husband to the sport, though President Zachary Thomas never excelled any better than Mark, or herself. “Oh, right.”
What had Dilya been up to that had made Emily drop everything when Dilya insisted they talk? She was only… “How old are you now, anyway?”
“Twenty-five.” Again, no duh! Just a fact.
At that age she’d become Captain Emily Beale and been commanding combat flights for the 101st Screaming Eagles. Dilya’s specialty wasn’t flying helos. But it was—
Emily felt her first true chill since arriving in Montana’s winter.
Dilya had been trained by having parents who were the top military sniper and a military strategy consultant to multiple Presidents, and had lived a dozen years within the White House.
There she’d been gathered under the wing of one of the nation’s top spies.
Who knew what the hell the girl delved into now, with that as a background.
But it explained why she’d dropped everything and come on the run when Dilya called.
She hadn’t even thought of telling Dilya to come to her in Kentucky until she was halfway home.
It was a good decision on two counts. First, Emily didn’t want to risk mixing whatever worried Dilya with her own day job as commander of the 160th SOAR.
Second, hadn’t she been wishing to get home just minutes before Dilya’s call?
“Let’s go steal a couple horses.”
Dilya brightened. “Yes, let’s.”