Free Project Reunion by Ginger Booth Page B

applause. After that, he said, “I don’t think there’s any need for a Q&A. Let’s break for dinner. Breakfast will be served back here at 8 a.m. Thank you all.”
-o-
Emmett leaned into the door jamb leading to the bedroom of our little housekeeping hotel suite. He’d stashed our bags in there, while I transferred beer into the kitchenette fridge.
“You want to get that fight out of the way now?” he offered softly.
“No need. I think I get it,” I replied. I stepped up to lean on a wall next to him, where I could reach his front shirt button to toy with. “You gave me credit as your co-author. Thank you. As your girlfriend, I didn’t belong in there.”
“Yeah. Not even socially. Dee, we’ve only been together a couple months. You’re not an Army wife. You’re here as a presenter in your own right. You’d never be here as my date.”
“Understood.” I looked up at him and smiled. “I meant it, you know. Impressed as hell with your presentation.”
“Thank you. And thank you for all you put into it.” He narrowed one eye. “I’m not sure we’re done with the fight yet, though.”
My heart sank. “Look, I’ll tell Adam no more touching in public.”
“Not that easy,” he said, shaking his head a bit. “He still cares about you. You still care about him. You broke off with him because he was going to sea. But, darlin’, Adam’s not at sea. He left the ark. Hell, he could commute back to Totoket, now.”
“I chose Emmett,” I said firmly, meeting his eyes.
“You sure about that? Why?” he demanded softly.
“Emmett, I – Gah,” I said, as someone knocked on our door. “I’ll get rid of them.”
“Not what I’m here for, darlin’,” Emmett murmured, and reached the hall door before I did. “Captain, Commander, come on in.”
Niedermeyer and Adam walked in to our housekeeping suite’s miniature living room, and froze at seeing me. “Ah, didn’t mean to intrude, if you’re busy. Emmett, Ms. Baker,” Niedermeyer said. Adam just raised an eyebrow.
“Not a problem, sir,” Emmett assured him, and waved them to the little couch. “Care for a beer? They brew some good stuff in Totoket. Only a little warm from the car.”
Once we were all settled with glasses of beer – and on a first-name basis, at John Niedermeyer’s insistence – Adam got down to business.
“Emmett, I didn’t want to bring this up during the Q&A,” Adam said. “But we had an alternate suggestion for your exits from New York.” He pulled out a convertible tablet computer, and brought up the map from Emmett’s presentation. He set it on the coffee table where we could all see.
“You point out – rightly – that the refugees are in rough shape. But these exits are at the periphery. Your most awkward logistics are creating corridors to move them out. But here at the periphery, the population is lower, maybe even sustainable. I mean, suburban lawns aren’t much smaller in Westchester than they are Fairfield County across the border. So your plan expends a lot of troops and effort just to move people out of the center, New York City proper, by land. While traveling past people who want to get out, but who are your lowest priority. Lot of conflict there.”
Adam’s finger tracked to New York harbor. “But we’ve got excellent water access straight to all five boroughs. There are islands we could secure and invest for staging areas and quarantines. Meanwhile, it looks like your land troops might be, um, not steady enough to handle civilians inside the border.”
“I’m an idiot,” Emmett replied. “I’m sorry. In the Army, we usually think of D-Day and the impossible landing problem.”
“There’s not much parallel here with D-Day,” Adam said politely. “You’re not trying to land an overwhelming force in the face of an entrenched defense. You want to extract controlled batches of civilians. There are small weapons inside the city. But not much that would trouble a ship. I spoke to the XO who