Wings of Gold Series

by Tappan, Tracy

“I’m okay now.” Which was a half-truth. She wasn’t ready for anymore hardcore running, but drop-kicking a hooker was in her current repertoire. She moved in close to the bushes, crouching down and peering through the heavy sticks and leaves.

  O’Dwyer hunkered down next to her.

  She caught his scent, and her belly did a weird shimmy. Odd thing was, he should’ve smelled bad. The stink of jet fuel permeated his flight suit, along with some bilge-type odor she suspected came from living on a Navy ship. But all that seemed to be counteracted and overwhelmed by the scent radiating off his flesh, that of sun and ocean and earthy sweat. And it was everything exactly not bad.

  Through the leafy vegetation, Nicole caught a glimpse of a blue dress, and she tensed. Twenty things could go wrong and nineteen of those could get us killed. A hot and prickly sensation came over her, like breaking out in a rash. In seconds they would face deadly challenge number one: if their timing was even slightly off on this ambush, then either the male or female hooker could start screaming or run for help, and then—

  She nearly startled out of her shoes at the sound of footsteps behind her.

  She whirled on her heels.

  O’Dwyer turned at the same instant.

  Hammond appeared on the path they’d just raced down, moving at a steady jog, a sniper rifle gripped in his right hand. His face was sloppily smeared with camouflage face paint and he’d taken the colorful patches off his flight suit. O’Dwyer had done the same, removing anything that might identify him in case their escape got fast and nasty and they didn’t have time to retrieve their backpacks.

  Hammond slowed his stride and raised his eyebrows in question.

  O’Dwyer gave him a thumbs-up. Mission still a GO.

  Nodding, Hammond chopped his hand toward the hill he was supposed to man, then tore up it.

  She and O’Dwyer turned back to peer through the leaves again.

  Nicole’s adrenaline spiked. The hookers were directly in front of her now, the woman still yammering about her defective shoe. Nicole could smell BO, and one of the two was definitely a mouth-breather.

  O’Dwyer held up a fist. He extended one finger, counting down, then a second finger…

  Nicole spring-loaded her muscles, sweat accumulating along her spine.

  Third finger.

  She leapt through the thin area of bushes, took a single step onto the open path, and whirled herself into a spinning back-kick, landing a head-snapping heel to the woman’s jaw. Coming out of her turn, Nicole saw the man’s mouth open wide as a drug smuggler’s anus, and she kept moving, throwing a hard right cross. She punched the man off his feet, sending him skidding onto the dirt path in a billow of dust…dazed, but not unconscious.

  The woman was out cold.

  O’Dwyer seized the man by the shirt and delivered a quick, hard jab to the middle of the guy’s face, knocking out the rest of his lights. He towed the guy behind the bushes.

  Nicole grabbed the unconscious woman under the armpits and dragged her out of sight, too. She laid the woman beside the man, who was a mustachioed fellow with a small paunch and oily, slicked-back hair. Nicole’s nostrils pinched and her stomach crawled. What if she’d had to do the mission with a man like this?

  “That was impressive,” O’Dwyer observed quietly, already tying and gagging the greaser. “You made my side of the job boring, though.”

  She unzipped her backpack and yanked out a line of rope and a gag, setting to work on the woman. “After my late arrival, I figured my reputation could use some flash.”

  O’Dwyer cut her a wry glance. “I hope you’re kidding.”

  She finished wrangling her hooker, then stood and quickly stripped out of her clothes, cleaning the sweat off her body with the towel she’d brought for that purpose. It seemed her perspiration returned the moment she swiped it away. She gave up and wriggled into her dress, eyeing the unconscious hooker’s high heels. She tugged them off the woman’s feet. “I’ll carry these,” she told O’Dwyer, dangling one with a broken heel in front of him. “The guards have no doubt noted our tardiness. We’ll need an excuse.”

  “Good idea.” O’Dwyer was dressed and ready.

  She started to go, but he grabbed her gently by the shoulder and turned her back around, taking hold of her other shoulder as he did. “You’re still panting a little,” he told her quietly. “Take a second, draw a breath, and let’s get focused.” O’Dwyer’s muscular chest expanded as he filled his own lungs. He exhaled, his breath drafting warmly past her. “I’ve got your back, and you’ve got mine. A team, right?”

  She couldn’t believe the size of the lump that pushed into her throat. She’d done nothing but antagonize this man from the first moment she met him, not for anything he’d necessarily done, but for no better reason than because she was scared. Oh, the horrors of admitting that, but it was true. Of softness. Of failure. Of emotions. Of this mission…so many feelings that had somehow been magnified tenfold in the three days she’d known Lieutenant Eric O’Dwyer. But regardless of her pushing him, both verbally and physically, he was setting it aside to be a unit. She swallowed and nodded. “Absolutely.”

  His expression eased into a smile. “Let’s do this thing, then.” He turned and headed for the gap in the bush.

  “Hey.” She held him back. “Watch how you walk, all right? Your stride is too confident. Maybe try and slouch into your hips a bit.”

  “Roger that.” Appreciation warmed his eyes. “Thanks.”

  Her chest tightened, so tight she wasn’t sure she’d be able to follow his suggestion and keep drawing oxygen into her lungs.

  They tramped onto the path.

  Her pulse shuddered through her veins as they put themselves out in the open. This is it. “Hablemos sólo español desde ahora,” she said to him. We only speak Spanish from here on out.

  O’Dwyer didn’t have a chance to answer.

  A tall Colombian man dressed all in black, including a pair of mirrored sunglasses, strode around the bend in the road, appearing on the path in front of them. He had a very black AK-47 assault rifle slung across his shoulder along with a bandolier of bullets. The moment he caught sight of them, he swung up the weapon and pointed it at O’Dwyer.

  “Llegan tarde,” he hissed.

  You’re late.

  Chapter Eight

  Kyle left Eric and the chica down in a small gully as he sprinted up his designated hill, doing his best not to wheeze and clomp-clomp-clomp his presence out to all the bad guys on the island. Not so easy to do when each of his flight boots felt like cinder blocks. It didn’t help matters that he, unlike Eric, lazed around while on deployment. In home port, he played racquetball four times a week. At sea, he was in his rack catching Z’s if he wasn’t flying or eating…something the overworked SWO’s21 hated about him. “Sleep till you’re hungry, eat till you’re tired” was how the surface sailors snidely described the working day of an airdale.22

  Cresting the hill, Kyle ducked behind a tree. The top was a narrow ridge, only about six feet across, three feet in other spots, but concealing foliage—trees and shrubbery—had still managed to sprout up along it. Good thing, or else his silhouette would’ve been visible for miles. Might as well be a duckie at a carnival shoot if that was the case. He darted stealthily and quickly from tree to tree, aiming for a spot overlooking the walled front gate which led to Señor Meat Gazer’s mansion. No sense setting up shop in front of the generator until he was sure Eric and what’s-her-name had made it inside.

  He found a bush and lowered down onto his belly just to the side of it, legs jacked apart. Automatically, he started to control his breathing and heart rate, something he’d learned at sniper training school at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia.

  A childhood spent in the Young Terrace projects in Norfolk, Virginia, bored out of his mind and unsupervised by an overworked mother, had been filled with adventures using his BB rifle shooter, stirring up all kinds of trouble along with his little brother. The skills he
’d unintentionally acquired on those exploits had specially qualified him to become a sniper for the Marines when he hadn’t passed his ASTB23 entrance exam into pilot training.

  But, whaddya know, turned out he had passed his exam, with flying damned colors, fuck you very much. His scores had accidentally been switched with someone else’s. In acknowledgment of their dick-up, the military had offered him a lateral move to the Navy’s flight program, if he still wanted it.

  If. That was funny.

  The Navy had always been his number one choice, seeing as the sole reason he signed up was to prove to Sienna Kelleman, daughter of the prestigious Admiral Robert Kelleman, that the scruffy, underfed teen from Young Terrace was worthy to kiss her ring. Sienna had stuck up her nose at the thought of him joining the Marines, even though the Marines were considered to be the elite…same as her response to so many of the things he did. So, yeah, “if,” his ass. He’d been on the next flight to Pensacola, Florida, quicker than shit through a goose.

  But not before Sienna had sent him off for his one-and-a-half year stint in flight training with the surprising gift of her virginity. That’d been a real breath-releaser, considering he’d dated the blonde beauty for six long years—since they were both juniors in high school and throughout college—without ever once being allowed the esteemed privilege of having sex with her. Sienna’s sweet farewell had been the best night of his life, although not, apparently, a photo album moment for her…at least after she’d had a couple of weeks to think about it. He’d received an angry Dear John letter a month into aviation ground school.

  Heartbroken, he’d contemplated striding into his CO’s office, squatting on the man’s desk, and taking a dump right on the training schedule to earn himself a one-way ticket to the USS Backyard.24 Luckily, he’d had the foresight to go away for a weekend of introspection before he threw his career away. He’d spent it sitting in a hotel room with a bottle of Jack Daniels and evaluating his relationship with Sienna, coming to the long overdue conclusion that his ex-girlfriend had always treated him like no more than her foot-bather for the sum total of their relationship. So, fuck her.

  Turned out he had an aptitude for being a pilot, anyway.

  Tossing the bottle of Jack into a corner of his hotel room, he’d run to the closest bar, practically with his arms spread wide and the word freedom pouring from his lips, and found himself a cute brunette to ride his flagpole. And so it’d gone… From the second he was no longer held back by Miss Ice Thighs, who’d forced him to live the years of his sexual prime as a monk, he’d been Oscar Mike25 on any and all babes who struck his fancy.

  Worked out he had an aptitude for screwing, too.

  A fly buzzed across his cheek, and he swatted at it, then swiped his sleeve across his brow. Setting the stock of his weapon against his shoulder, he raised the sight to his eye. He was carrying a sound-suppressed CAR-15 sniper rifle with a Leupold 10-power scope, and through the crosshairs he saw…nothing. Crap, LZ and la muchacha should’ve been at the gate by now. He swept down the path, and found them talking to a baddie with an AK-47. Kyle sighted on the man’s ear and eased his finger around the trigger. Go ahead and flinch, mudderfocker. I’ll put one in your farging icehole.

  But the dude lowered his assault rifle and gestured toward the gate. The threesome continued down the path.

  Kyle tracked their progress.

  More baddies at the entrance, and lots more tense conversation. Some kind of racket about the bag of smut toys, by the look of it. What’s-her-face withdrew something from the sack, but Kyle couldn’t see what it was or what she was doing with it. Maybe she was going to throw a latex vagina at one of the guards. Kyle smirked. He could almost wish for it, if such a maneuver wouldn’t have gotten LZ up to his neck in grumpy Colombians with weaponry.

  Kyle cut the smirking. Who was he kidding? His friend was already in neck-deep…or soon would be with this Fed chick, who was—her ball-busting propensities aside—some serious tail. And Kyle, of all people, knew how much high-end trim could tangle up a guy. As soon as LZ got within sniffing distance of that piece of ass, he’d come to full salute. Kyle himself had almost thrown wood at the Marriott, and he didn’t even like Maria Guadalupe Lucia Teresa, or whatever the hell she was called. And since Eric couldn’t bust his nuts inside hot mamma jamma, LZ was heading for some mammoth-sized blue balls. Pure agony.

  Kyle squinted harder through his scope. Everyone was still conversing in front of the gate. He zeroed in his sights on LZ. The line of Eric’s shoulders looked rigid. It was subtle, only noticeable to someone who knew him well, but something was definitely up. With Fed Chick? Seemed like it. Whatever she was doing, she had everyone’s focused attention. Including Eric’s. Mostly Eric’s. Kyle slowly eased his crosshairs from one guard to the next. He’d been authorized to meet any act of aggression with an equal measure of aggression. No problem with that at all. If anyone—

  The guard holding the AK strode forward and pushed open the gate, leading Eric and Whatsa Whosit inside.

  Kyle released a breath. Time to rock. Lifting his head, he checked the perimeter, then hopped to his feet, slung his rifle over his shoulder, and repeated his tree to tree maneuvering as he made his way to a spot across from the generator. Canvassing ahead, he saw that the area in front of his target was on a narrow strip of the ridge, which would, unfortunately, force him to angle his body off-center during the shoot to keep—

  He grunted as earth gave way beneath his left boot on the lip of the ridge. His leg slipped, and the rest of him started to follow in a downhill skid. He grappled for the edge, alarm spearing through him. More ground crumbled away beneath his fingers. Gaining speed and momentum, he jackknifed into a tumble down the hill, cartwheeling ass over boots, his heartbeat surging into a wild rhythm as his rifle flew off his body into nowhere.

  Chapter Nine

  Eric hooded his eyes, trying to make himself look like a bored man-whore who was also probably stoned off his gourd, when he was actually miles from bored—not with the barrel of an AK-47 aimed at his chest—and the only thing he was high on was adrenaline.

  “I broke my fuckin’ shoe!” Gamboa flapped her high heels around in the air. “See, man, these piece of shit things!”

  Through the slit of his lids, Eric double-checked that the woman who’d just spoken the guttural street Spanish was Gamboa. He hardly recognized her voice.

  “See my feet?!” Gamboa went on, verging on hysteria. “Torn up from this ass-sucking ground.”

  “Shut up.” AK-47 commanded her. “And lift your skirt.”

  Gamboa flung her shoes to the ground and tugged up her dress, exposing the purple thong which, even though Gamboa had scuffed it up, was rapidly becoming the stuff of torturous dreams.

  Eric scratched the back of his ear. That’s what a bored, totally unconcerned about a low-life staring at his partner’s crotch did, right? Scratched his ear?

  “Higher, slut. Now turn around.” Scuzzwad stared at Gamboa’s ass.

  Eric fought the urge to take AK-47’s face and grind it into the dirt. Huh. Unexpected. Moving on to lazily scratch his belly, Eric sighed. “If you’re looking for a cock, man, I’m the one who has that.” Probably a good thing that AK-47 was wearing sunglasses. Eric was about ninety percent certain he didn’t want to see the expression in the man’s eyes when he rounded on Eric.

  “Raise your shirt, something.” Insert blank space here: whatever AK had called Eric, he didn’t know the Spanish word for it. Good guess it wasn’t a derivative of friend, though.

  Eric pulled up his shirt and turned around without being asked. “See, no weapons,” he said, facing front again. “Unless you count my cock.” He lifted one side of his mouth. “Look, man, bitch here is just moving slow because she’s got an ass full of spunk.” He chuckled, like he found himself so funny. “She had a busy morning, understand?”

  Gamboa gave her lashes an exaggerated flutter. “Expect to feel my teeth when I suck your cock today, son of a poxed wh
ore.”

  “Shut your fucking holes,” AK-47 barked. “Follow me.”

  Gamboa scooped up her shoes, and picked her way carefully over the pebble-strewn dirt road.

  Eric made sure to shuffle his feet and slouch as he trailed AK-47 to the front gate, where there were two more rifle-toting guards, one sitting behind a table. Beyond, the hacienda rose two stories high, the façade painted a flawless white while each of a half a dozen windows were bordered in dark brown wood. The roof was shingled in rounded red clay tiles, and a balcony surrounding the entire second floor was painted the same muted red color.

  “Leave the bag,” the standing guard with a mustache ordered them.

  Eric showed him the contents. “These are our props, friend.”

  “Mister Carrera doesn’t need you to use props.” Mustache grabbed the bag and tossed it onto the table.

  It landed with a clunk loud enough for Eric to wonder if their tracking device had shit the bed. “It’s part of our show.”

  “Leave it.” Mustache gestured curtly at AK-47. “Pablo, take them inside.”

  Well, crap. They hadn’t planned on this happening.

  “Handsome,” Gamboa purred to Mustache, once again really not sounding like herself. “Mister Carrera is for sure going to want to see what I can do with this.” Gamboa looped a finger through one of the bag’s straps and lifted slightly, letting the mouth of it gape open. She pulled out a large rubber flesh-colored cock covered in bulging veins. Ballsy of her to pick that particular dildo, seeing as it was the hiding place for their two .25-caliber pen guns. She offered Mustache a sultry look as her fingers danced up the length of the fake cock and toyed with the ridge. Parting her lips, she rubbed the length of the cock against her cheek, right beside her open mouth, so close it was, like, God, please, jam it in there.

  The spectacle caused a level of havoc inside Eric as unexpected as it was startling. For two quick jackhammers of his heart he forgot to breathe as heat flooded his groin so fast he would’ve fallen over if he’d been standing in his normal posture.