Chapter 21
The debrief was more of a celebration that a formal review.
Abby watched as Bill Bruce came up, shook Derek’s hand without a word, and faded away as he so often did at briefings. Derek stared down at his hand as if he was never going to wash it again. Any of the teasing or arrogance she’d felt from him the first night was no longer relevant.
It wasn’t the awe he was displaying at the moment that shifted her view of him.
Nor the kiss. Though such a gentle kiss from a hard-fighting D-boy had made it twice as surprising, and that she hadn’t chased him away made it damned nice beyond that.
No, the biggest change had been, actually, two changes.
First, Derek and his team hadn’t treated the exercise as any more of a training op than she and hers had.
Lives were on the line, the mission was real down to everything except the Simunitions and flashbangs in place of bullets and explosives.
Though they hadn’t been gentle. The training buildings were going to take a lot of work to put back to their normal state—one was missing an entire wall because, Well, it was in our way. Damn but Derek made her laugh.
Second, he really was that good.
He—
Trisha’s hand landed on her shoulder and shook Abby back and forth until she wondered if the woman was trying to make her seasick. “That so totally rocked.”
“Worse than a lobster boat during a nor’easter,” she finally snagged Trisha’s wrist and lifted her hand aside.
Trisha had ordered in a cooler of beer, which meant there wouldn’t be any more flights for another twenty-four hours.
Unlike most pilots, who were eight hours bottle-to-throttle, the Night Stalkers were twenty-four.
A beer was an incredible luxury. She checked the bottle in her hand—Grolsch.
A good beer. More points to Trisha. The grill full of burgers and dogs set up outside the briefing room won her everyone’s vote of thanks.
“What are you looking for?” Trisha didn’t clarify.
“I, uh,” Abby looked at the range map spread out on the light table. Before Bill had come in and distracted Derek, the two of them had been reviewing the night’s work. Though at the moment she couldn’t remember why.
Each team had pushed the other to try new techniques as they hit the successive sites.
Derek had even used the DAGOR to haul aboard a ton of two-man rocks.
In a key attack, she’d stood the Chinook nose-to-the-sky.
With its tailgate on a quick release but the DAGOR still chained down and the full team strapped in, the ton of rock had fallen from the sky.
Impacting three seconds later at a hundred kmph, it had seriously flattened an armored personnel carrier—like totaled.
It had definitely distracted everyone as the attack came from the opposite side of the final camp.
“Seriously?” Trisha grabbed her shoulder again, giving her just enough of a yank to force her head up.
Derek was still standing on the opposite side of the light table and staring after Bill as he flexed his hand.
“Now you’re talking.” Trisha stopped shaking her. Instead, Abby heard the bright tink of a beer bottle tapped against hers, making her nearly lose it to the floor.
Derek turned to look at her.
“Wha—” but Trisha was gone.
Then Derek began to smile.
Abby decided she wasn’t going to ask what he was thinking.
Besides, she suspected they were the same thoughts running through her mind.