Wings of Gold Series

by Tappan, Tracy

  O’Dwyer’s lips slanted. “And we need to play a couple of whores to do that?”

  “Unfortunately, yes. Do you see this small pier?” Ryan pointed to it. “Only Carrera-owned ships are allowed to dock at it. No outsiders are ever permitted. Except—and here’s our ace in the hole—every Friday at 15:30 Carrera sends a couple of his goons to the town of Guapi on the mainland to pick up two prostitutes from a whorehouse there.”

  “A man and a woman,” Nicole put in. “Turns out Carrera has a voyeur fetish, and this is his weekly fix.”

  O’Dwyer’s eyebrows eased up. “He only watches them have sex? That’s it?”

  “Correct,” Nicole confirmed. “No participation.”

  Aagaard went on. “Having you and Agent Gamboa pretend to be the whores putting on Carrera’s sex show is your ticket inside the hacienda. Once inside, you two will plant a tracking device on the drug sub. When this sub deploys with the device in place, part two of the Navy’s involvement comes into play. Your team will use its Anti-Submarine Warfare capabilities to help us catch Carrera red-handed with a full load.”

  O’Dwyer’s eyes narrowed a little. “How, exactly, are Agent Gamboa and I supposed to pretend to have sex?” Again, his gaze never strayed below Nicole’s neck—the man deserved a medal—but still…something about the way his pupils widened made Nicole think that plenty of images were parading across his mind.

  A tightness fluttered up her throat.

  O’Dwyer ran a hand over his clean-shaven chin. “You don’t expect Carrera to be stupid about something like this, do you?”

  “No,” she said. “We’re going to have to be real about it, but we shouldn’t have to push our show too far.” Who, exactly, was she reassuring here? “Special Agent Aagaard and I have a distraction planned.” She sifted through the photos on the table and pulled out a satellite close-up of the hacienda. She pointed to a gate on the east side of the house. “The corner of a gas generator is visible through the bars of this gate. See that? Special Agent Aagaard will position himself at the top of this hill with a sniper rifle”—she moved her finger to indicate it—“and shoot out the generator. This will provide a nice, chaos-inspiring explosion, allowing you and me to sneak off to the drug sub and plant the tracking device.”

  Ryan braced his hands on the table. “So here’s the entire plan in summary. Step one: fly undetected onto the island. Step two: go down the mountain, intercept the two hookers, take them out, and switch places. Step three: get inside the hacienda and—”

  “Hold up,” O’Dwyer interrupted. “Take them out?” He exchanged a glance with Blond Pilot. “Look, Aagaard, I’ll drill a Hellfire Missile up the asspipe of any scuzzy drug lord out there. But these hookers, besides being guilty of making a poor occupational choice, are innocent.”

  “We’re not going to kill them,” Nicole clarified. “Just secure them: knock out, gag, tie up—that sort of thing.”

  “Once you’re inside the hacienda,” Aagaard continued, “I’ll blow the generator, you two plant the tracking device, then it’s back up the mountain to the helicopter for a rapid egress.”

  O’Dwyer frowned. “Doing the math, it doesn’t seem like we’re going to have enough time to pull this off. You say the airspace will open over the mountain at 15:00, then the hookers du jour show up at 15:30. That gives us all of thirty minutes to manage a hazardous landing, get down the mountain, and…how far down is it?”

  “About two thousand feet,” Ryan answered.

  “Thirty minutes to land,” O’Dwyer recapped, “cover two thousand feet down a winding mountain path, and intercept those whores. That’s extremely tight timing. Wouldn’t it be better to switch places with the hookers in Guapi?”

  “Can’t.” Aagaard shook his head. “Carrera keeps them under heavy guard from the mainland to the Isla Gorgona dock. So are you in?”

  O’Dwyer paused. “Just out of curiosity, why isn’t a Latino DEA agent doing this?”

  “There isn’t anyone who fits the role who is currently available,” Nicole jumped in to answer. Translation: she’d refused outright, privately to Aagaard, to do this assignment with a male coworker, all of whom she was trying to convince not to think of her as a sex object. “Since you’ll already be on the aircraft, it makes sense to have you do the job. It’s sheer good luck that you look so Latino and speak Spanish, although…” She switched to Spanish. “Imagino que habla español como gringo.”

  He chuckled. “Aprendí a hablar español desde que era niño, lo hablo sin acento.”

  Nicole arched her brows. “All right, you’ve shocked me.” She’d accused him of speaking Spanish like a white boy, and he’d answered in perfect Spanish, I learned Spanish from the time I was a child. I speak it without an accent.

  O’Dwyer’s eyes warmed on her, lighting off a corresponding—and disturbing, questionable, odd—warmth in her belly.

  “Are you in?” Aagaard demanded again.

  “Yes.” O’Dwyer looked at Aagaard. “But Mikey does the shooting.” He indicated Blond Pilot. “The more people I take on board the helo, the less gas I can carry, which isn’t optimal. I’ll also want to keep light to deal with the high winds and the heat; I’ll need to be able to maximize my available power. Aagaard, you stay behind.”

  Nicole gave Blond Pilot an uncertain once-over. “That’s a difficult shot. Not much of the generator is showing.”

  “Mikey’s a certified sharpshooter,” O’Dwyer said.

  Nicole checked eyes with Ryan.

  Aagaard nodded. “We need to work on your disguise,” he told O’Dwyer. “Your haircut, for one, is too Uncle Sam.”

  O’Dwyer ran his hand over his short hair, the gesture flexing up his right biceps. Something Nicole noted with the objectivity of someone who could comment, if asked, that the Navy lieutenant would probably be a good man in a fight.

  “We want to shave your head,” Aagaard added. “And paint a tattoo on your skull.”

  O’Dwyer laughed in a burst. “Great. When do we start?”

  “First thing tomorrow morning.” Ryan scooped the photos back into the folder. “You and Agent Gamboa only have one day to train for this.”

  Chapter Four

  Monserrate Mountain, city center of Bogotá, Colombia

  It was a good thing Eric made a habit of running the treadmill for forty-five minutes a day when he was deployed. He also vigorously pumped iron, daily…all to stay in shape? Sure was his answer to anyone who asked, but mostly to jettison extra energy before it made him go nuts; not a good place for a leader of pilots to go.

  A guy could wander into strange places inside his brain when he was floating for so many long months, and every man handled it differently. For Eric, functioning at high OPTEMPO16 always jacked up his energy too much, giving him more than he knew what to do with. Release in the form of warm female companionship wasn’t an option. He didn’t sample the local color in foreign ports—terrified of dick-eating diseases? Check. Nor did he partake of fleet meat17—not interested in conduct unbecoming an officer? Double check. So with too much energy and not enough places to expend it, the extra exercise was just a preemptive strike.

  He never thought he’d be thankful he’d adopted his exercise regime for anything other than anti-insanity reasons, but he was now. Anything less than his current top physical condition would’ve had him hurling his lungs out on this, his fifth trip down the despicable Monserrate Mountain, running next to Special Agent Nicole Gamboa, who was, incidentally, looking hardly taxed. She was sweating, yes—it was a hundred fucking degrees out here—and her breathing was labored, but otherwise he had the embarrassing sense that if they did this run many more times, she would outpace him.

  They’d chosen to train on Monserrate—minus the helicopter landing—because it was a near replica of the mountain on Isla Gorgona, at least in terms of the heavy jungle vegetation and the steepness of the trail. The Isla Gorgona mountain was much smaller in total altitude than the massive Monserrate, which rose over
10,000 feet above sea level, and Eric was pretty sure Isla Gorgona didn’t have restaurants and souvenir shops like Monserrate did. The Church of Monserrate was a pilgrimage site, and every time he, Gamboa, and Mikey thundered down the path, they received more than one startled glance from religious devotees strolling the opposite direction.

  “You made it this time,” Agent Aagaard announced, staring down at a stopwatch as their group pounded up to him. “Two minutes to spare. Except for you, Hammond,” the agent called out to Mikey.

  Eric forced himself not to plant his hands on his knees while he caught his breath.

  Mikey heaved up to them. “I’m doing this in flight boots,” he complained. “And hauling this.” One-handed, he held up his sniper rifle, which had earned most of the startled glances. “She gets to wear running shoes.” He gestured rigidly at Gamboa.

  “O’Dwyer made it,” Aagaard pointed out. “In flight boots and wearing a backpack.”

  Yeah, but Eric could shut down the city with the stink of his flight suit by now. “Everybody unbunch,” he said. “It’s not mission critical for Mikey to arrive at the same time we do. He doesn’t have to change clothes.”

  Aagaard nodded grudgingly. “All right. Get changing, then. Let me time you on that.” Aagaard thumbed the button on the stopwatch. “You only have those spare two minutes.”

  Eric whipped his backpack off at the same time Gamboa threw off hers. He yanked out a pair of leather sandals, cream-colored canvas pants, and a dark-brown-and-cream stripped pullover of the same material: all very Colombian clothes to—

  “Ho-ly shit.” Mikey whistled.

  Eric glanced up. And somehow kept undressing, even though all the blood in his head instantly vacated his brain for southern regions of his body.

  Agent Gamboa had stripped off her running shorts and tank top, and was now working at getting a skimpy red dress dragged down over a lacy purple thong and bra set. Holy shit was right. In fact, quadruple holy shit.

  “Lieutenant Hammond,” Aagaard snarled. “Conduct yourself as a professional.”

  Eric plugged his legs into the pants, and silently gritted down, boy, down, boy to his cock. Gamboa’s body was better than he’d originally predicted, or dreamed. Leggy, curvy, sleek muscles all over the place, tons of soft-looking cappuccino skin set off to drooling perfection by that sexy purple number she was wearing. And how the hell did she still manage to smell like caramel in this heat?

  “I’ll be reporting this to your superior officer,” Aagaard was still haranguing.

  “’K.”

  Eric tried to tug on the pullover, but one of the sleeves was inside-out and he got tangled up in it. He stumbled sideways and bumped into Gamboa. “Dammit.” He jerked off the shirt…and saw her, all decked out in her hooker dress. It was short enough to barely cover her crotch, and low enough that her stacked-up boobs overflowed the neckline. A pair of treacherously spiked heels emphasized the long, tapered length of her legs. His mouth went dry, and the buildup of frustrations pulled the pin on his ability to deal rationally with this hosed-up mission anymore.

  “Fuck it!” Eric threw the shirt down. “It’s too hot to wear that thing! I’m going bare-chested. I can do that, right? I’m a whore, so why not, because, you know, I’m a fucking whore!” He was yelling. Well, this op was stupid.

  They hadn’t even started, and he was already handling it like a monkey fucking a football—not well. But, dammit, he’d been all nice and neatly tucked away into his I’m-on-deployment-no-woman zone, and then Special Agent Nicole Gamboa had entered his life mid-float. And now, tomorrow, he was supposed to put his hands on a woman whose looks knocked him completely cockeyed, but not in the act of heart-pumping, fingernail-scraping, ball-exploding sex. Not during some roll around on the bedsheets, playful, laugh-your-ass-off-while-having-sex sex. Certainly not in any kind of situation where getting the high happy hard one would be cause for, “Hey look at that! Wahoo, let’s use it!” But rather for the type of blushing embarrassment the likes of which he hadn’t experienced since he was thirteen and ejaculated a full payload into his pants when his sixteen-year-old neighbor, Sandy Burbank, stuck her fingers into a jar of Smucker’s apple jelly during lunchtime. No. This was a job, where touching DEA Agent Nicole Gamboa couldn’t be actual fun, but something easily misconstrued as a breach of ethics, or abuse, or as breaking the rules of a man-woman-coworker doctrine he hadn’t even received the memo about.

  Happy thoughts.

  Happier ones to come…

  “Whose screwed-up idea was it to do an op in Colombia in the middle of June, anyway!” Irrational anger was so much better than having to convince his cock that all of this was just pretend, like Ren and Stimpy or…or puppets.

  Aagaard slowly stuffed his stopwatch into his pocket.

  Yeah, that’s right, move carefully around the Navy pilot in the middle of some kind of bizarre check-out, kiddies.

  Mikey had a strange expression on his face, like Eric was holding out his cruise spunk sock18 to everyone and gushing, “Guys, look how full it is!”

  Well, it was rare indeed to see Lieutenant Eric O’Dwyer come off his spool. There was a reason for it. He hated this. You cannot perform at peak capacity, Eric, when you let emotion rule you.

  Yeah. No shit.

  A Spanish couple chose that moment to hike around the curve in the road just below their group. The man’s jaw dropped. The woman’s face went red, and she started screeching at her man in Spanish, batting at him repeatedly as she hustled him up past Gamboa.

  Eric snatched up his backpack and stuffed his flight suit and boots in. “I need a break.” Water, food, more water, an ice pick to gouge out his sex-crazed eyeballs, a memory erase stick with superpower abilities to eradicate the color purple from his brain forever, and some KY jelly for the obvious.

  “All right.” Aagaard pointed to the E-Z Up canopy they’d erected slightly off the main path for shade. “Why don’t you go there and check your gear. I’ll be back in a bit with lunch.”

  Chapter Five

  Eric stalked over and thumped his backpack on the card table underneath the canopy.

  Mikey followed, shrugging out of the top half of his flight suit and tying the empty sleeves around his waist.

  From the side of Eric’s vision he watched the nubile muscles in Gamboa’s legs flex as she approached in her high heels. “Sorry,” he told her through a tight jaw. “I’m usually not like that.” He was never like that. “I despise the heat.”

  “San Diego’s weather is hot.” She slipped her high heels off and stuffed her bare feet into her running shoes.

  “San Diego’s weather is perfect,” he countered, then shot her a narrow look. “How do you know I’m stationed in San Diego?”

  “From one of the patches on your flight suit. I’m a DEA agent, remember?” She tapped a finger under her right eye. “Observant.”

  He snorted. He was starting to feel less cranked up, a state of being that would be helped tremendously if she’d change out of her boner-maker dress. Taking responsibility for his own part, he forced himself to quit staring at her boobs…but as his attention drifted up and to the side what he found instead was also interesting. Directly underneath her left collarbone she had a neat, round scar: the obvious remnant of a bullet wound. Special Agent Nicole Gamboa had once been shot, and why that should make him want to tear someone’s throat out, he didn’t know. His mood-for-the-day must just be pissed off.

  “Anyway, it’s the humidity here that’s the real killer.” Gamboa placed a gym bag on the table. “Okay, here’s the gear we’ll be dealing with.” She unzipped it, exposing a smorgasbord of sex toys.

  He peered in and, although he wouldn’t have deemed it possible, sweated more. Gear…but he thought…

  She reached in and extracted a large prosthetic fist.

  He felt his eyebrows soar, up, up, up, high on his forehead. “Um…” No, don’t ask. Just don’t. He dragged a hand across the back of his neck. How could he not as
k? “What’s that for?”

  “It’s a rubber fist. You know, like a dildo, but for fist-fucking.”

  See, O’Dwyer, should’ve kept your mouth shut. “Didn’t know…there was…such a thing.” And he’d had a port call in Thailand. He checked over Gamboa’s shoulder to see if anyone else was wandering up the path.

  She glanced at him. “We’re not going to use it.”

  He felt some air leave his lungs. Jesus, he’d been holding his breath? Yeah, monkey fucking a football mission, one hundred percent.

  Mikey dropped down onto a camp chair. “Top ten conversations I never thought I’d overhear in my life, this ranks as number one.”

  “And, no,” Gamboa continued to Eric, “to answer your question, there isn’t exactly such a thing as an imitation fist-fucking…apparatus. We invented it to hide the tracking device in. See?” She unscrewed the cap off the wrist end and showed him the interior. “We could’ve made an extra-wide dildo, but that would’ve looked unusual.”

  Mikey propped his booted feet on the card table. “Admit it, chica, you just don’t want anyone thinking your vajizzle is big enough to take an extra-wide dildo, right?” He flung an arm behind him and flipped open the lid of a cooler. “And speaking of the almighty vajayjay—mainly yours—shouldn’t you and LZ practice your act so you’ll be comfortable with each other when it comes time for the Main Show?” He yanked out a water bottle, letting the cooler lid flop closed. “I’ll make the sacrifice, play Carrera and watch you guys. Hey, grade you, too, if you want.”

  A tic pulsed in Gamboa’s cheek. “You know what, cowboy—”

  “Extra points if you show your V, you know, since that’s the theme of—”

  “Here.” She thrust her hand into the bag and pulled out a rubber vagina. Cranking back her arm, she threw it at Mikey.