When Martha Witherspoon visits the Dragon Lady's home and asks for her special brand of tea, she discovers an unexpected ruse to smuggle emeralds into Hong Kong. She conceals the gems in the tea container when D.L. finds out that she intends to take an Air Cathay flight out of Tanzan. Because of his insatiable curiosity, Chopstick Joe finds the jewels; sadly, a jewel thief witnesses his discovery and takes the emeralds away from Joe. It is now up to Terry and Hotshot to locate the gems before D.L. takes revenge on their employer since the Dragon Lady is in a homicidal temper.

Terry and Hotshot are hired by a dishonest businessman to fly him to a hidden gold mine in the middle of the jungle. The businessman has hidden a stash of diamonds that were taken from a dozen neighboring temples and intends to transport them out of China—after killing his pilot and co-pilot—so the gold mine is merely a hoax.

In order to claim a rich inheritance, Terry and Hotshot fly a Chinese-American soldier to Tanzan. They quickly find out that the young man has been kidnapped by a group who intend to use Burma's naive assistance to get an impostor, and they start working to save the soldier before he is hurt.

Hotshot loses all of his money in Wang Wang's shady gambling establishment. He consents to assist the Dragon Lady in smuggling a pair of gamecocks with six huge diamonds in their gizzards from the airport to her home without having to go through the formality of bills of lading or Chopstick Joe's savage fingers because he needs $600 quickly. Hotshot is put in danger by the Dragon Lady as well as the dishonest gambler when one of Chopstick's cousins stows away on the flight with the roosters and throws them overboard.

Terry and Hotshot are quickly imprisoned after they unintentionally give cases of stolen plastic explosives disguised as sausage to a bandit gang that is lurking in the jungle. Since Terry's co-pilot thinks Hotshot ate the Compound C-3, making him a walking bomb ready to detonate, Terry chooses to utilize Hotshot as a human shield.

When Burma discovers one of the Dragon Lady's plots while trying to get a job as a reporter, she stows away on Terry's plane and escapes her goons. Terry and Hotshot attempt to assist their friend, who is blonde, by alerting the authorities to the plot to kill a visiting maharajah, but they are apprehended before they can do so. In order to protect the potentate, they now have to get out of the Dragon Lady's opulent jail.

Hotshot and Terry are hesitant to accept Chopstick Joe's next task, which is to transport venomous snakes. They depart for Singapore with a Serpent Lady in tow, and to their amazement, they arrive bearing a dead person.

Terry and Hotshot fly to a far-off Chinese village to deliver much-needed typhus vaccine, but their cargo is stolen and the attractive nurse who is supposed to meet them at the airport is kidnapped. The pilots accuse the Dragon Lady of stealing the medicine to sell on the black market after they stumble into her lair while looking for the nurse and the serum. The stunning criminal leader vehemently disputes the accusation. D.L., who keeps the Americans confined to her home, does her own investigations and is apprehended by the actual criminals who broke into the clinic to take syringes and other medical supplies.

Chopsticks Joe consents to transport a shady passenger and a small bundle right away to a far-off airfield in exchange for a large sum of money. If he pays Terry and Hotshot their past earnings, he doesn't expect them to refuse to fly that night any more. Much more convincing is the desperate passenger's pistol, and before long, the pilots, the passenger, and the priceless bundle are flying far into the jungle before being forced to the ground by the Dragon Lady's fighter planes. The small kid they are carrying turns out to be the titular monarch of a troubled Chinese region, and three groups of men are willing to pay to have the infant, dead or alive.