Wings of Gold Series

by Tappan, Tracy

  Wait…did he? How was that possible? It generally took him way more than a day to set aside his immediate judgments of women and give them a chance. Was Farrin somehow already providing him with reasons to trust her?

  Maybe he wouldn’t go that far.

  You said don’t let anyone into the post-op ward. Only you. But I let Kaleem in, and now your copilot is dead.

  But then maybe he would.

  “There.” Turban adjustment complete, Farrin lowered her arms.

  As soon as she stood, Jason felt the adolescent urge to knock the headpiece out of whack again, get her back down on her knees in front of him. Back to touching his hair. She had great hands.

  “Now you look Pakistani.” She tilted her head to one side. “Well…from a distance. Your eye color is wrong.”

  “Thank you.” He picked up the clothes he’d stolen for Shane. “If you’re done packing, would you mind helping me dress Shane? I want to get on the road soon.”

  The whole process of outfitting Shane, then hoisting him into the saddle was a teeth-gritting evolution—for both Jason and Shane.

  For Shane, because he’d stiffened up considerably during the night, and every movement was pain.

  For Jason, because Shane’s stiffness was causing him to do everything too damned slowly. By the time Jason had settled the sick man on board the swaybacked nag, he was sporting the beginnings of a headache. Probably as much from caffeine withdrawal as frustration.

  “I won’t tie you in place,” he told Shane. “But if you fall out of the saddle, then I’ll have to.” He put the reins in Shane’s hand, then double-checked the security of the H&K at the side of the saddle.

  Jason had jerry-rigged a rifle scabbard on both their saddles out of hemp rope he found in the barn.

  He walked over to Farrin, who was standing uncertainly beside her mount. Both horse and human were gazing at each other with similar wary hesitancy.

  Crap, another inexperienced rider to deal with. He checked the horizon for pinkening. They were still okay.

  Farrin gave him a wan smile as she gestured at her horse. “Do you know how to operate one of these things?”

  He laughed. “Yeah. A little bit. Don’t worry, you’ll be all right. I picked a docile horse for you.” He took the stirrup and aimed it at her. “Put your left foot in here, then hop up and make a grab for the saddle horn—the knob sticking up there.” He pointed at it. “I’ll give you a boost as you go.”

  Nodding, she carefully stuck her foot in the stirrup. She hopped, and he was just moving to put a helping hand on the back of her thigh, when she lost her balance and, with a gasp, flung her arms around his neck.

  He caught her quickly, circling an arm around her waist. “I’ve got you.” His assurance came out muffled, seeing as their current position had jammed half his face into her upper chest, treating him to a full blast of her scent.

  She smelled like a woman who’d been through a couple of tough days filled with work and fear: sweaty. But the aroma was a natural, primitive female sweat, and, damn if there wasn’t something unexpectedly alluring about it. Underneath was a hint of lavender, from soap or perfume, he couldn’t tell. But a warm twisting in his belly told him the combination of smells was giving him ideas.

  He bracketed her waist, pausing an unnecessary second to enjoy the feel of her, then raised her into the saddle. She was a good, solid weight in his hands, although no strain at all to lift. He was falling more in love with her body the more he got to know it. In love? Strike that. In lust.

  Or…maybe not?

  Be nice if he had answers to all these questions he kept asking himself.

  “Here are the reins.” He gave her the leather straps, then went around to the other side of the horse and tucked her foot into the second stirrup. “Your horse will follow mine, so you don’t have to do much. Just make sure not to leave too much slack in the reins.” He offered her a reassuring smile. “We good?”

  She gazed down at him, her eyes soft and grateful. “We’re good,” she said in a breathy tone that did things to the flimsy thread strung from him to her, increasing the fibers, adding a sense of we-will-conquer-this-mess-as-one togetherness.

  “Let’s get out of here, then.” He strode to his own horse.

  The gelding flattened its ears and blasted a terse snort from its nostrils.

  Yeah, yeah, yeah… Jason checked the girth strap, the security of the packs at the back of the saddle, and his CAR15 in the rifle scabbard. All was well with his tack. He himself wasn’t entirely. He gave his head a solid shake to get thoughts of Farrin’s body out of his mind—her eyes, her touch, her secrets. Having luck with that, are you, Jace?

  Not so much.

  Preparing to mount, he grabbed the saddle horn and gained one stirrup. The gelding plunged sideways, turning the saddle into a moving target. Straightening his stirruped leg, he smoothly rode the merry-go-round as he swung his other leg over. The ill-tempered animal tried to slip the bit.

  Jason took a firm hold of the reins and squeezed his knees.

  The gelding sidled, its hooves striking the hard ground, and Jason felt the beast tense in readiness to buck. He dissuaded the annoying animal by squeezing his legs until he’d caught the barrel of the gelding’s body in a vise grip. The message was clear—me, boss, you, little shit. The beast abandoned its bucking bronco idea.

  Jason guided his horse into a tight circle, sending another I’m-the-one-in-charge-here message to its peach-pit-sized brain. He hadn’t been on a horse since he was sixteen years old, but the skills of riding a horse—like riding a bike, he supposed—never left a person. Especially when a rider had been as expert as he had. In fact, at sixteen, he won the Silver Oak Jumper Tournament in Halifax, Massachusetts, an Olympic-level tourney. He’d always loved jumping for the same reason he came to love Special Operations Warfare—the fast pace and the danger.

  But when his mother glowed at him with such beaming pride the day he accepted his championship medal, his love mutated into vitriol. He’d stalked over to Georgette, thrust the medal into her ivory-white hands, and never mounted a horse again. That night, he stole a car. So, hmmm, he might have committed that crime for more reasons than smearing his father’s good name.

  Putting such thoughts at his back, Jason set his heels to Little Shit and led his misfit band west into uncertainty.

  Chapter Twenty

  They traveled along an uneven dirt road for a good two hours, the sky melting from rose to gold to blue, before trouble found them around a curve in the path.

  The view of the road ahead was blocked by high rock on the right, or north side, so it wasn’t until the three of them were riding around the bend that Jason saw a checkpoint set up about five hundred yards in front of them, with four armed guards milling about. There were two jeeps parked across the main road, their grills pointing at each other with approximately four feet of space between.

  It was a perfect spot to set up a roadblock. To the left of the parked jeeps was another tall stretch of rock, a huge, impassable boulder. To the right—after the high rock dropped away into a stretch of sparse forestland—was a village, made up of about fifty structures built of chipped, mud-colored clay, and laid out in a haphazard design. Also impassable? Jason would say yes, because there was no way those guards would let the three of them veer into the town unmolested.

  The guards wore Cheetah sneakers.

  “Shit,” Shane spat out from several paces behind Jason. “Taliban.”

  Jason’s hair prickled with perspiration. The day had bloomed into the high eighties, and his turban already felt like a gelatinous species of slime mold on top of his head. Shane—unquestionably in constant pain—was drenched from scalp to boots. Them clearly not being able to handle Pakistan’s heat didn’t exactly lend itself to them passing as locals. And now this new development was adding exponentially to Jason’s sweat quotient.

  He pulled back from the lead position, putting himself directly beside Shane and Farrin,
Shane on his right, Farrin just beyond, on Shane’s right. “Slow down,” he told them, “and let those people pass first.”

  A donkey-drawn wagon with a family of four walking beside it was on a branch of another road coming up from the southeast. This other road converged with theirs—coming from the northeast—to make one main road bearing west, where the checkpoint was.

  “What’s the plan, Vanderby?”

  “Working on one.”

  Shane jerked his chin at the path where the donkey-drawn wagon was. “You want to turn east down that road? We’ll have to go the wrong direction for a way, but it’s better than what’s ahead.”

  “We’ve already been spotted,” Jason pointed out. “Suddenly changing directions would look suspicious.”

  “What, then? Negotiate our way through the barricade? If that’s your working plan, it isn’t giving me a stiffy.”

  Jason leaned forward on his horse to look past Shane to Farrin. “Can you speak Pashto or Urdu?”

  “A little of each,” she answered, her knuckles white around her reins. “But stilted and with an accent. I couldn’t pass as a local. And what plausible excuse could I give for why neither of you speak?”

  Jason sat back in the saddle and ran his tongue along the back of his teeth. He didn’t have a stiffy, either. How the hell were they going to get past those tangoes?

  “I’m also assuming,” she added, “that you and Shane will be scrutinized quite closely. Because those men are searching for two military-aged males—specifically, you two—from the helicopter crash. Aren’t they?”

  Jason would say that was a most definite affirmative. The Taliban knew Shane and Jason were out here somewhere, not far from the crash site, and on the run. And maybe the bad guys didn’t realize Shane and Jason were a bonus deal of a SEAL and a naval aviator, but the terrorists damn well knew they were American military. No way these tangoes would stop aggressively hunting them until they were found.

  Which made them a double-whammy of poison pills for Farrin to be hanging out with. But if she was thinking it, she was nice enough not to show it in her tone or expression.

  He studied the checkpoint again: guards…jeeps… There was some space between the two jeeps. Not a lot, but probably enough to pass through. “About four feet lies between those two vehicles. See? We should be able to ride through single file.”

  Shane grunted. “If the guards just let us go by. Which they fucking won’t.”

  “No, they won’t,” he agreed. “We need a distraction to clear them out.”

  “Okay. What?”

  That was the question of the hour. Jason scanned the town again. His tautly-strung nerves were pushing him to get thinking. Because even as slowly as their group was plodding along, they were drawing inescapably closer to the checkpoint.

  “Maybe you could work at warp speed figuring this out, Vanderby. In a couple more minutes”—Shane nodded in a sharp movement at the diminishing road ahead—“we’re going to be in a hurt locker.”

  “I’m reasonably clear on that.” Little Shit’s flanks quivered, and the gelding took an agitated step sideways, no doubt picking up on its rider’s tension. Steadying his mount, Jason kept scanning: guards…jeeps… He swept past the checkpoint to the village. Next to one of the homes at the edge of town was a third parked jeep, its hood up and the engine left to idle. At the rear of the vehicle, canisters of various sizes were tied to the back: gasoline, water, oil. Hmmm.

  “Okay, I think I have an idea for a diversion. I’ll have to sneak over to that idling jeep, so I need you two to ride closer to the concealing trees to help hide me while I dismount.” Yes, there were trees in Pakistan. Way to the north, the country was actually lush. The path they’d been traveling all morning had alternated between flat, ugly desert, and wooded areas with patchy grass, the moody landscape probably reflecting the temperament of the people who populated this remote part of the country.

  With the trees as their goal, both Shane and Farrin engaged in a bunch of rein-jerking that failed to guide either lazy mare from its apathetic forward plod. After a moment of watching them, Jason steered his gelding into the mares, using his horse to shove Shane and Farrin toward the boundary of the road.

  After the two mares ambled over a bit, Jason reined back behind Shane and Farrin, shifted over, then rode up on Farrin’s side, almost off the path and into the woods. “Once the diversion gets those guards to clear out”—and here’s hoping they would clear out—“get cracking through the barrier.”

  Up ahead, the donkey wagon stopped at the checkpoint.

  Unintelligible conversation floated back. The Taliban guards were focused on the family of four. Now’s the time.

  “Here—” Jason handed Farrin Little Shit’s reins, then sprang from the saddle next to a tree. He slipped into the forest and stole rapidly from trunk to trunk, flinging the hanging length of turban across the lower part of his face. Whoever wore this head covering before had also sweated in it. A lot.

  He neared the idling jeep.

  Pausing at the edge of the forest, he checked the guards. One of them had hopped into the jeep closest to the village and was backing it up to create an eight- to ten-foot space for the donkey wagon to pass through.

  Jason slouched to make himself less tall—he’d yet to meet a Pakistani male of his height—and exited the woods with mincing steps that, with any luck, looked very un-American. His dog tags shifted back and forth against his chest. What a bummer if his tags would be needed to do their job shortly: identify his dead body.

  Crossing behind the idling jeep, he plucked the oil can off the back. A metal pour spout was already conveniently jammed into the top of the can; apparently Pakistanis didn’t use plastic jugs for oil. He circled the vehicle, walking along the driver’s side, his left shoulder nearly brushing the wall of the building the jeep was parked next to, and came to the upraised hood. He darted a quick glance around. No bad guys. Only a few villagers several buildings away. The general clamor of a town occupied with its daily business reached his ears: overlapping voices, footsteps, clopping hooves, creaky wheels. A sudden draft of wind strengthened the manure stink permeating everything, and gusted the length of fabric off his face. He caught it, flipped it back in place, then upended the can of oil on the idling engine block. All the while he kept an eye on the checkpoint, watching the wagon lumber through.

  Dropping the empty oil can in the dirt, he did another quick-search of the perimeter, then loped back into the forest.

  A moment later the reek of smoldering oil rolled out and huge billows of black smoke mushroomed up from the jeep’s engine.

  A collective shout rose from the checkpoint guards, and—hallelujah—three of them dashed over to the smoking jeep. The fourth one left behind was young, short, skinny, and held his rifle with his hands bunched together in the middle: a total amateur. He’d be no trouble for Shane to take out. So here was good luck at the checkpoint…

  Good luck, unfortunately, did not prevail with Farrin and Shane.

  Jason’s gelding—clearly unhappy about trailing behind a lowly mare—was living up to its name and being a little shit. The beast stubbornly sat back on its hocks, pulling the reins taut in Farrin’s hand and nearly tugging her from the saddle.

  Jason powered into a full-out run.

  Little Shit let out a shrill whinny, and Jason cursed again as the tangos by the smoking jeep jerked their attention over to the horse.

  Half-rearing, Little Shit sent Farrin bobbling in the saddle. She kept her seat, although barely, and only at the expense of letting Little Shit’s reins shoot from her hand.

  Jason vaulted from the trees in time to make a grab for the reins. The unruly gelding tossed its head, sending its mane lashing and the hanging leather straps whipping into a couple of writhing snakes. Jason growled. He didn’t have time to chase down his horse, because…

  The bad guys were rushing back to the checkpoint! The situation had just become a race between who could get to the
roadblock first: the bad guys or them.

  “GO!” Jason bellowed.

  Shane managed to spur his nag into a respectable canter, but Farrin, kick as she might, couldn’t get her mare to go any faster than a kidney-jolting trot.

  Not. Good. Jason leapt at his gelding again.

  Little Shit wheeled away, preparing to bolt down the road back the way they’d come and leave Jason horseless. He punched the gelding in its shoulder. Hard. The horse crabbed sideways, thrown off-balance, then swung its head to give Jason a baleful stare and bare huge, yellow teeth at him. It was enough of a pause for him to dart beneath the horse’s chin, snatching the dangling reins along the way, and pop out on the beast’s left side. He launched himself into the saddle. “You fuck,” he snarled, yanking the animal back around. “I should nickname you Big Shit.”

  Up ahead, Shane mowed over the skinny guard—who was still fumbling to get his rifle up—and charged through the blockade.

  A second later, one of the bad guys who was racing away from the smoking jeep flew into the jeep he’d backed up for the donkey wagon. The engine fired.

  Crap! Jason hammered his heels into Little Shit and shook up the reins.

  The gelding hurtled into a faster gallop…

  The jeep began to move, closing the eight-foot gap…

  He bent low over the gelding’s neck, his focus zeroed in on the space shutting down on Farrin, and—

  She made it!

  Yes! “Hee-yah!” he yelled, bringing the long, loose ends of his reins down on Little Shit’s rump in a stinging slap. Come on, boy!

  With a neigh, the gelding missiled forward.

  Another gust of wind blasted through the village, shifting the boil of oily smoke from the idling jeep over to the checkpoint, engulfing the barrier in a blinding smog.

  But not before Jason saw the nose of the driving jeep bump into the stationary one, completely closing off the opening and trapping him on the wrong side.

  Chapter Twenty-One