Wings of Gold Series

by Tappan, Tracy

  She blinked a couple of times. WITSEC has been trying to locate me? “What’s going on?” she asked around a sudden wad of cotton in her throat.

  Russell’s tone deepened to a more serious note. “I can’t discuss the details over a non-secure line like this, but I do need to tell you that Marshal Bowry was killed by the Jiménez crime family.”

  Nicole pressed a palm over her mouth, her pulse slowing to a near stop, her blood turning to ice. Jiménez? She knew the name…but how?

  “He was tortured to death,” Russell added. She heard papers shuffling. “There’s no way to determine how much information Marshal Bowry might’ve divulged before he died, but we have to assume all of his cases, past and present, have been compromised.”

  Around her, the walls of her apartment fell down, the roof, the floor—her entire world. Despite a life spent with this very possibility hanging over her, she’d still allowed herself to feel a modicum of safety from knowing her parents had gone into WITSEC while she was still in the womb. No bad guy had ever seen what she looked like, not even as a baby. But Lehder-Rivas’s men wouldn’t need to know what she looked like, would they, if Bowry had given up her new identity? The Jiménez family must be disciples of Lehder-Rivas, closing in on the daughter of Manolo Muñoz to even the score at last.

  Terror caved in Nicole’s belly. She tightened her grip on the phone until her hand shook, and her body shuddered so hard, she rocked off the bar stool, stumbling over her own feet. She shot out her left hand to the kitchen counter, but missed and landed hard on her knees, a breath jarring out of her.

  “Nicole?” Russell’s voice was sharp with concern. “Are you all right?”

  She willed words past her thickened tongue. Consonants, vowels, put together in a recognizable pattern. None came.

  “You need to come back into the program,” Russell insisted firmly. “Right away. Your life could be in danger.”

  She froze there on her knees. Back in the program…change her name, quit her job in the DEA, cut all ties to friends, to… Her chin quivered.

  I love you, Nicole.

  Her soul rose up and roared.

  Don’t you see? I can’t ever be with someone. My life isn’t my own, Eric.

  “Where are you?” Russell repeated.

  Please don’t do this to me. The Nicole Gamboa she’d built over the years was far from perfect, but she still didn’t want the woman to go up in a cloud of smoke. Of course, being dead would accomplish the same disappearing act.

  “Nicole…?”

  She grabbed the edge of the kitchen counter and forced herself to her feet.

  Be my girlfriend.

  She took a moment to breathe, then slammed herself closed, like a door to a vault, combination spun into lock position. No more thinking about any of it. She glanced at the clock. 7:32. The operational brief at the HSM-75 Wolf Pack squadron was at nine, and she still needed to shower, dress, check her weapons, and contend with traffic out to NAS North Island. “I have to make my breakfast,” she said in an oddly monotone voice.

  Marshal Russell took a second to process that bit of crazy. “I know you’re probably scared, Nicole…”

  “It’s important, you know, to eat before a mission.” She cut the connection.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Nicole sat on the edge of the helicopter’s open doorway, helmet and harness on, her legs dangling into open air. The spinning rotor blades thumped relentlessly against her eardrums. The wind was in her face and the sky was so blue it hurt her eyes, increasing a near-paralyzing sense of déjà vu. It felt like her heart was beating from somewhere low down in her chest, like she’d never retrieved it from where it fell a few hours ago when she found out some of the most vicious men on the planet were possibly hot on her trail.

  “We’re steady on target.” Eric’s voice came through the earpiece in her helmet. “You’re cleared to rappel.”

  With a lead weight in her throat, Nicole watched a thick nylon rope unfurl from the cabin door down to the top of her destination, the volcano look-alike rock. I don’t want to die. Had she really just thought that? She’d never thought that before prior to a dangerous mission…although this one was pretty damned dangerous, rappelling blindly into the relative unknown. So of course she must have thought it.

  Ryan was crouched behind her, stoked for battle. “You ready?”

  She had a Glock 40 on each hip and was dressed all in black, including her bulletproof vest, and over that, a short-sleeved D-E-A T-shirt plus a harness which looped over her shoulders, across her chest, and under her thighs, the shoulder straps coming together in back into a single lanyard with a metal clasp on the end for later extraction. She probably looked ready enough. And, yet, resoundingly, unequivocally, no, she wasn’t ready.

  We have to assume all of his cases, past and present, have been compromised.

  What the hell are you so afraid of… Is it because of who you really are?

  You chew through men.

  You need to come back into the program right away.

  I bet you’ve never been in a long-term relationship, have you?

  Being controlled is about pleasing your dad.

  I’ve got your back, and you’ve got mine. A team.

  Sweat skated down the length of her spine as thoughts tumbled like greased Lotto balls inside her head, not a single one wanted, needed, or useful. She had the sneaking sense her efforts to shut down her emotions after Marshal Russell’s phone call had failed miserably. Too much…she was overflowing with just too much bullshit.

  She gripped the rope. The trip down would be more or less a free fall, no harness, no metal clasps, just her and a pair of padded, steel-reinforced gloves sliding down the rope. The opening at the top of the rock serving as the drug sub’s hiding place was only about ten feet in diameter, so Eric would have to be right on the money when he hovered over it, if she was going to thread herself through the eye of that needle. She didn’t know a lot about flying a helicopter, but she’d guess it wasn’t the easiest maneuver to manage.

  Eric was at the top of his game today, though—he must’ve slept like a baby last night, and how nice for him—because the helo didn’t waver. A true professional, that man, as he’d also proved at the morning brief when he acted strictly the Navy lieutenant to her DEA agent. No secret longing looks—or pissed off ones—only concentrated attention on the mission.

  If that was another ploy to get her to be his girlfriend, it was a damned clever one.

  “You squared away, Gamboa?” Eric asked.

  Nicole didn’t answer.

  She stared at the finely spun clouds on the horizon and thought about her mom. When Nicole was stationed in San Diego, she watched DVD episodes of Grey’s Anatomy with Kalani once a month. All visits with her parents were supposed to be organized through WITSEC, since Kalani and Manolo were still in the program, but Nicole snuck over monthly on her own, anyway. In one episode, cardiologist Dr. Christina Yang operated on a man with situs inversus totalis—doctor-speak for a syndrome where all of the man’s organs were reversed. That was Nicole, sitting here on the edge of infinity, rope in hand. Everything was on the wrong side internally. Nothing at all right. Please don’t do this to me.

  Eric’s voice lowered. “You planning on blazing inside like the toughest thing God ever made?”

  Her chest pinched and her eyes burned.

  I love you, Nicole.

  “Signing offline with you now, Lieutenant.” She yanked her helmet off. When it came time for extraction and/or to call in the bomb unit lent to the mission by the local police, she and Aagaard would use a AN/PRC-112G CSAR radio40 to contact the helicopter.

  Taking better hold of the rope, Nicole wrapped her boots around the swaying end, then threw herself off the edge of the helicopter. Her breath caught as she zinged straight down, fast. Her heart woke up and pounded hard. She pinned her focus on her target of the rock opening, rushing wind flinging her ponytail up, then—swoosh! She was inside. She grou
nd her teeth as the sudden change from bright sunlight to cave darkness blinded her. Not good to descend into the enemy badlands unable to see…

  Her boots hit the cave floor, and she dropped instantly. Belly flat to the ground, she paused a second to let her eyesight adjust. Spotting a stack of crates, she moved lithely behind one for cover, then threw off her thick gloves and drew both Glocks. She scanned the area, keeping her breathing quiet.

  The cave was only about twenty-five feet tall, which was about the height of a cathedral ceiling in a house—if the house was built of slimy wet rock—but a good two hundred feet across, plenty wide enough to house a hundred-foot mini submarine. It was pure luck Nicole had landed on this small island area, only wide enough for the stack of five crates and two barrels of diesel fuel, and not in the water.

  Three seconds later, Aagaard hit the deck, lowering instantly into a crouch. He blinked rapidly.

  “Clear,” she murmured from her hiding place.

  He glanced over at her, nodded, then gestured toward the submarine.

  She sped to Ryan’s side. Acoustics were amazing in this place. She and Ryan sounded like they were running with cookie sheets strapped to their shoes as they hustled across the small open space. A muscle flinched in Aagaard’s jaw.

  They vaulted stealthily onto the submarine, and Nicole hunkered down over the open hatch. Sweat streamed through her eyelashes, memories assaulting her. Eric, dressed only in canvas pants, his pecs slick with perspiration, holding…holding that silly dildo in his hand as he retrieved their pen guns. In that moment, he looked like he could’ve won a war all on his own…in so many moments she was with him. She swallowed convulsively.

  I think I’m capable of defining what I am and am not willing to do in my life.

  She wasn’t in lingerie this time, but still felt as raw and exposed, her heart sitting outside her chest. Ectopia cordis she believed Grey’s Anatomy called that.

  Ryan surveyed her closely, an expression of concern slowly spreading across his face. She saw a question form on his lips, and, no, gracias. She would rather eat an old shoe than answer it. Holstering both Glocks, she thrust feet-first into the submarine’s opening and slid down the ladder. Down the hatch! Hahaha. Like…literally. The back of her throat fizzled strangely.

  Aagaard landed beside her.

  Without a word, she drew her Glocks again and advanced in the same direction as last time, leaving Ryan to go aft. Within a few paces, she was in the control room where she’d planted the tracking device before. The lights were on this time, banishing the abandoned, ghostly feel of the place. Instead it seemed strangely like she was on the set of an old submarine movie, maybe Das Boot, the screens, indicators, and knobs fake staging, her guns a prop, her overwrought emotions an accident of over-acting.

  I’m trying to protect you.

  Because I love you.

  She swallowed heavily as a wave of dizziness slanted the deck beneath her feet, her stomach plunging like she was falling and falling and falling…toward nowhere but an abyss of lost space. Swiping a forearm across her brow, she moved on shaky legs into the next room: berthing space. No one. There wasn’t another door. End of the line. She holstered one Glock, then pulled a small radio off a holster on her hip and pressed trembling fingers to the speak button.

  Take a second, draw a breath, and let’s get focused.

  “I’m clear here, Aagaard. What’s your status?”

  No response.

  She tried again.

  Nothing.

  Mierda. With a Glock two-fisted straight out in front of her, she returned to the ladder. Her belly collided repeatedly with her ribs. No Aagaard. Padding silently on the balls of her feet, she headed aft until she came to the last portal. She silently crept through—it was the kitchen galley—and spotted Ryan around the edge of a metal cabinet bolted to the wall.

  He was standing statue-still.

  In the tense silence small sounds were made large. Water dripping. Something mechanical humming—a refrigerator, maybe. Steam hissing through a pipe.

  Her blood raced around the tracks of her veins. She didn’t move, didn’t speak.

  Aagaard finally did. “It appears Carrera was one step ahead of us again,” he said in a tone of exaggerated evenness. “This gentleman was left here to greet us.”

  Sweat dripped from the end of her nose. Still holding the Glock, she took another step into the room, bringing a man—probably Colombian, maybe Venezuelan—into view. He was sitting in a chair in front of Aagaard.

  A muscle in her neck knotted.

  The man was wearing a vest made out of about thirty sticks of dynamite and had a detonator clutched in his quaking fist, his thumb hovering precariously over the button that would bring this all to an end.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “Any ideas?” Aagaard inquired of her. “The fellow doesn’t understand English, so feel free to speak candidly.”

  “¡Nada de armas!” Dynamite Man squeaked at her.

  No guns!

  “Tranquilo, no queremos problemas.” Nicole carefully set both Glocks on the floor, kicked them away from her, then said in Spanish, “Be calm, okay? None of us wants to die.”

  The dynamite guy stared at her.

  “We need to ambush the target,” Ryan commented pleasantly.

  Nicole’s answer was controlled. “The man is weighted down with enough explosives to kill two generations of our children, Aagaard.” Dread wound around her chest like steel tentacles. You ever feel nervous, mija, don’t ever show it to an opponent.

  Dynamite Man wouldn’t stop staring at her.

  “He’s preoccupied with you,” Ryan murmured. “This could be good, Nicole. Keep talking.”

  “About what?”

  Ryan threw her a steely sideways glance. “Anything.”

  Ask a stupid question… “Hey, friend, listen.” She inched forward. “I can get you immunity in America,” she lied. “You don’t need this trash-fuck suicide mission.”

  Dynamite Man shifted in his chair, and she almost flinched. Hey, stupid, it’s not like that detonator has a safety switch. Be careful!

  The target’s eyes tracked over the full length of her.

  “Try flirting with him.” Ryan’s voice was low and sibilant.

  A sick feeling crowded into her throat. If only she hadn’t gotten out of bed this morning. If only the floor would open up and swallow her.

  Dynamite Man’s hand jerked around the detonator.

  Ryan hissed.

  “Look, friend,” she tried again. “I’m going to take off my vest.” She unhooked her harness, stepped out of it, then yanked off her T-shirt and unstrapped her bulletproof vest, undressing down to her tank top. “Now I’m as vulnerable as you are. See?”

  Dynamite Man did see. His eyes opened wide as he gaped at her boobs, their shape and size displayed perfectly beneath her tight tank. His hand slackened around the detonator.

  She sensed Ryan coiling up. “Flash him,” he said. “Quickly.”

  She smiled at Dynamite Man. “I’d prefer not to do that, thank you.”

  “We need a distraction,” Ryan said, still slow and even, “so I can jump him.”

  “Why don’t you try getting to your backpack, Aagaard.” Inside of which was the AN/PRC-112 G CSAR Radio.

  Ryan growled almost imperceptibly. “You think this jagoff is going to sit idly by while I talk on a radio?”

  She kept smiling. If she used her breasts to forward one more mission, she might have to jump off a bridge afterward.

  “This guy is wrapped up with enough dynamite to blow the top of this rock off,” Ryan argued in his I’m-so-much-smarter-than-you voice. “When debris goes flying into the sky, what do you think will happen to lover boy’s helicopter?”

  The tendons in Nicole’s throat rippled and stretched. Eric wasn’t still in a hover above them. He’d flown to a nearby airfield to pick up the bomb unit, but he would’ve returned by now and be circling close by. Después de todo l
o que pasó entre nosotros, ¿no dirás adiós? She squeezed her eyes closed, held her lids together for a moment, then peeled them apart. Eric had said that in English, not Spanish. After everything that’s happened between us, you’re not even going to say goodbye? Why was she remembering it in Spanish?

  The image came…the shadowy figure of Marshal Bowry between her naked thighs. “You’re cracking up, Nicole,” he said, then his mouth and nose melted off his face like hot glue.

  Aagaard kept at her. “I know you don’t want anything bad to happen to those unsuspecting Navy boys.”

  Bile cooked the end of her esophagus. Mechanically, she untucked her shirt from the waistband of her pants. Her fingernails scraped the material. “Hey, treasure, if you release us, this is what you’ll get.” She reached beneath her top and popped the front hook of her bra. Her brain felt like it was in chunks. “I’ll screw you good.” She whipped her top up, baring her naked breasts.

  Dynamite Man’s jaw went slack, and Aagaard moved with lightning speed, hammering a punch into the man’s face while simultaneously plucking the detonator out of his hand. Aagaard swung toward her, his mouth open to speak—

  And his cheeks bloomed bright red.

  Nicole hauled her shirt back down. She stood in place, stunned. Her own face heated and her breath clawed at the inside of her lungs.

  Aagaard turned back around and secured the bad guy’s wrists behind his back, whatever he’d been about to say remaining unsaid. Flinging his backpack off, Ryan pulled the radio out.

  Dynamite Man groaned.

  Nicole watched her partner in shrinking silence.

  “We’re clear,” Aagaard said into the radio. “Send in the bomb unit to sweep for the RDD, and…to deal with another situation we have here.” He lowered the radio to his side. “You did a good job,” he told her neutrally. But his Adam’s apple bobbed and there was something in his eyes…

  Black rage swept through her. “You motherfucker,” she ground out. She snatched up her harness and yanked it back on.

  “Nicole…” Ryan tried, but his face turned red again.