TOP SECRET TANGO

Decades after finding a top-secret courier pouch, 68-year-old J. Paul Kingston trains to join a clandestine mission to Peru to retrieve a spy plane in Cole’s thriller series starter.

In 1972, on his last day working at the Hughes Aircraft Company in Culver City, California, Kingston is thrilled that “the guards and their leadership trusted me enough to let me see Howard Hughes’ inner sanctum.” Kingston has been working the night shift full time at Hughes and “as an emergency cryptographer for the U.S. Air Force at the same facility on the weekends” while also attending business school. He’s just earned his MBA, so he’s leaving all these activities behind to take a job as a business analyst and spend more time with his wife and kids. To celebrate his last day, the Hughes guards bring Kingston to the company founder’s private area, which includes a racing plane. Kingston finds a pouch stamped “TOP SECRET TANGO” inside the craft and makes a decision to bring it home with him for safekeeping. Decades later, the 68-year-old Kingston, a recent widower, removes the pouch from his home safe. He reaches out to the contact listed in its materials, which leads to meetings with Washington, D.C.–area intelligence agencies. Soon, he’s on a mission to retrieve a B-17 spy plane, now in Peru and being used for “nefarious activities, such as drug trafficking,” by Russian criminals. Kingston undergoes weeks of rigorous testing and training before the team goes undercover as tourists in Peru. Kingston is tasked with drawing the “bad actors” away from the B-17 but ends up being tortured by a Russian, bit by an anaconda, and more.

Cole, a partner at a wealth-management firm who also has an intelligence background, appears to have had a lot of fun crafting this return-to-duty fantasy, which features an aging baby boomer hero and splashy appearances by a parrot and “a huge harpy eagle, with legs as thick as a person’s arms.” The novel has an intriguing beginning, linking the always-fascinating Howard Hughes to espionage activities, although the recluse tycoon then fades from the plot. The novel’s detailing of the various spy planes that could, like this book’s B-17, be overtaken by rogue players lends a sense of real-life urgency to this narrative. The book’s training section, which has the feel of insider knowledge, takes up a large part of the narrative; indeed, the team doesn’t advance from training to touchdown in Peru until more than midway through the novel. However, this mission prep, while a bit overextended, has its pleasurable elements, as when Kingston and his team stumble upon real FBI and Russian spy doings during what was supposed to be just a simple “weekend field exercise.” Some of the plot points are a bit puzzling, such as the reason why Kingston didn’t contact anyone about the pouch for so long. Overall, though, this book is an entertaining, wild ride that ably sets up a potential series recounting Kingston’s further adventures.

A colorful, if training-heavy, covert-ops tale with an appealing protagonist.