Matching Military MREs & Wine?
In previous chapters, of DIE BY WIRE, Mira Longbow and Jackson Day have focused on the mission and done their best to ignore their past — the good and the bad. In this chapter, they’re on the run. And as with all battles, there come breaks in the action. And everybody has to eat.
The right food wine match always makes for an enjoyable meal! Click here for a much larger (7MB) image).The character named Qalila in this chapter is Qalila Sontag, a Pleiades colleague of Mira’s. Qalila is deadly in her own right. But in this mission, she is in charge of weapons and supplies, functioning as a combination quartermaster, gunnery sergeant and transport specialist. She also acts as a sort of Bond-like “Q” to supply some pretty neat gadgets and weaponry (all of which actually exist)
Qalila seems to have had some sort of previous history with Day. Mira is not pleased with that. And not pleased with herself that she’s not pleased with Day and Qalila’s previous history.
In this chapter, ss they eat, we find Day and Mira finally ready to pick at — and maybe pick up — the threads of a relationship they have both hoped for since Al-Kut.
The right white wine to match their MRE moves things along nicely.
CHAPTER FIFTY SIX – DIE BY WIRE
Amsterdam
The bank of LCDs lit the Achtersluisstraat operations room like sunshine dancing through leaves. Shadows shifted constantly rearranged by incoming data re-drawing the lines and multicolored squares on the displays.
Jackson Day sat in a folding chair at one end of a folding table and watched Mira ransack a large cardboard box while he finished the last bite of stuffing from a grilled chicken breast and cornbread stuffing MRE.
He washed it down with a sip of Vouvray from a plastic glass. Only Qalila would pair appropriate wines to bulletproof military-issue food.
And only Mira, he realized, could so thoroughly unhinge him with a word, a glance, a casual brush of fingertips; a laugh, a pout, a sensual combing of graceful fingers through unaccustomedly short hair.
Following his earlier inarticulate stammering they’d ripped open two pouches of his favorite MREs — menu five — and went for the bread and jalapeno cheese spread, while the water-activated chemical heaters warmed the entrees.
An awkward silence settled between them. Day searched for something, anything at all, to break the ice.
Growing up on a ranch in the sparsely populated rangeland and mountains of the eastern Sierras had never offered him an opportunity to develop smooth pick-up lines and the sort of glib gab that lubricated a conversation with the opposite sex.
Banalities served them pretty well until they washed the last of the cheese and bread down with the MRE’s iced tea.
Day finally worked up his nerve.
CONTINUED IN DIE BY WIRE
