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  I looked forward, behind the mansion, when I heard a tremendous thumping.

  “It’s the AC-One-Thirty,” one of the FBI commandos said as the runway was chewed up by massive explosions.

  “Hoo-rah!” someone yelled as one of the corporate jets was blown to smithereens.

  It was quite satisfying for me to witness the awesome might of our military finally brought to bear and unleashed on Perrine and his inhumanly abhorrent organization. For a moment, listening to our guns, I forgot about everything. How mad I was. How afraid I was for my family.

  Then the joy was gone as quickly as it had come as the Black Hawk descended toward the yard behind the compound’s wall. I closed my eyes and prayed to God that we weren’t too late.

  CHAPTER 93

  The Black Hawk stayed in a hover as the HRT guys started fast-roping down into a dusty yard alongside the compound’s largest barn. The original plan was to land here with the marines in the Chinook, but obviously we were on to plan B.

  With the advance team on the ground, the Black Hawk lowered and landed. I’d just noticed that barn’s roof was on fire when someone came out of it. It was an old man with a blanket over his shoulders.

  “Look out!” I yelled as the blanket exploded. Buckshot rattled off the side of the chopper and into the roof of the cabin beside me. One of the hostage rescue guys went down, clutching his thigh. There was a barrage of return M4 fire, and the old guy stiffened and dropped forward like the tailgate of a pickup truck.

  Just as the old man hit the ground, the barn door burst open, and out came a bunch of horses. It happened so suddenly, I almost fell out of the helicopter. Two of the horses were actually on fire! Then I saw a lump on one of the horses on the far side of the galloping herd.

  I looked through the sight of my rifle.

  You’ve got to be kidding me.

  The lump was a handsome, light-skinned black man in a tuxedo shirt and black pants.

  I was just about to pull the trigger when Perrine disappeared on the horse, around the other side of the barn. I leaned to the side and slapped the pilot chopper on his back.

  “Up! Up!” I screamed as I clicked the rifle’s selector to full auto.

  Up we went. Straight up like an express elevator. Perrine had broken away from the rest of the herd and was kicking his horse like a madman as he raced it toward the huge main house. He was just alongside the Olympic-sized pool when I braced myself against the wall of the heli and zeroed my sights. The M4 softly tapped my shoulder as I pulled the trigger and held it.

  Through the Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight, I watched the horse go down and sideways onto the apron of the pool at full speed, sliding on the tile. There was a tremendous splash. Perrine and the horse were in the pool!

  I backslapped the pilot again, but he was already ahead of me, swinging the bird over. He was still about twenty feet above the pool when I leaped from the chopper’s side and dropped in a pencil dive.

  It was a direct hit. From two stories up, my two hundred and ten pounds, plus the fifty pounds of gun and vest and tactical gear I was carrying, landed flush on Perrine’s back like a bomb. The hard sole of my right combat boot connected with the back of his head as the left one crunched between his shoulder blades.

  He was pulling himself out of the pool at the time, and the impact bashed the holy living shit out of his face against the metal railing. I found out later that I’d not only broken Perrine’s nose again, I’d cracked open the orbital bone around his eye and fractured his cheekbone and knocked out half his teeth. He wasn’t done, though. Of course he wasn’t. This was Manuel “The Sun King” Perrine.

  My gun went flying as the water rushed up.

  CHAPTER 94

  AS I PLUNGED INTO the pool, I clawed out my right hand and managed to hook Perrine’s belt.

  We went under the warm water. I remember thinking vaguely that I would have to get the heavy Kevlar vest off me. But that was for later. As we sank like a stone, the image off to my right was like something out of a Salvador Dalí painting. The horse was thrashing on the floor of the brightly lit pool’s deep end, bubbles exploding from its flared nostrils, blood geysering from its bullet wounds like puffs of red smoke.

  Perrine was thrashing, too, scratching back at my face, trying to kick me. But from where I was positioned, behind and beneath him, pulling him down like an anchor, he couldn’t land anything solid. I grabbed his belt with my other hand and pulled with everything I had.

  My boots hit the bottom of the pool when he finally caught me good with the heel of his shoe. Its sharp edge opened my face down the left side of my nose to my chin, adding my own spurting blood to the pool. By twisting around, he broke my grip somehow. As he swung toward me, I suddenly remembered from Perrine’s bio that he had been some sort of French frogman commando.

  Instead of trying to get to the surface, Perrine reached down and grabbed my head in his enormous hands and tried to snap my neck. Luckily, it didn’t work. Was he too tired? The water pressure too strong? I don’t know. It hurt like hell. He’d definitely pulled some muscles, but my neck stayed intact.

  Still, he wasn’t done. Perrine thumbed one of my eyes, and then his hands were wrapped around my throat. The half of his face that wasn’t smashed up grinned at me as he throttled me. I kicked off the pool floor and lurched forward, head-butting him, but still he held on.

  Struggling to break his grip, I finally spotted the tactical survival knife strapped to my leg. I ripped it out and stabbed upward at Perrine for all I was worth.

  The knife was ripped from my hand as I hit something good. The pressure on my neck disappeared as Perrine let go of me and went up. Watching him go, I could see the handle of the knife buried to its hilt above his left knee.

  There were cries of “Freeze! Freeze! Freeze!” when I exploded onto the surface. It was the FBI hostage rescue team I’d flown in with. Half of them were crouched in a defensive perimeter ten feet away from the pool’s edge. The other half were facing the pool itself, the laser sights of their H amp;K MP7s dancing on the drenched chest of Perrine, who had somehow yanked himself out of the drink and now was lying on his back beside an overturned tray of hors d’oeuvres.

  My strained neck started killing me as I doggy-paddled to the pool’s edge and grabbed the ladder. In the distance by the house, there was still gunfire, but it was becoming sporadic.

  I looked to my right as I heard a bomblike splash of water. It was the horse. It had somehow made its way to the surface. I watched as it splashed to the shallow end and leaped out, clicking over the tiles before it disappeared into the darkness.

  CHAPTER 95

  The Special Forces medic assigned to our team patched me up as best as he could. He taped a ridiculously large bandage to my face and put me in a neck brace.

  The entire fight had taken twenty minutes. We’d killed or captured forty-three cartel members, most of the drug-dealing assholes in attendance. We listened to the radio as the Special Forces secured the mansion and the rest of the compound. I waited breathlessly to be told that my family had been found, but it didn’t happen.

  Where the hell were they?

  After a few minutes, Emily heard from Command that the local federales were now coming to join the party. It was to make up for the fact that we had flagrantly invaded Mexican airspace and conducted a covert raid without even so much as a phone call to the new Mexican president’s office.

  It pissed me off that the story would be that the Mexican government had helped. Forget the fact that Perrine had been hiding right out in the open, that very high-up people in the Mexican government were quite obviously on Perrine’s payroll. Back to political-bullshit business as usual, I thought. The same old lies, the same old situation.

  With the scene mostly secured, the hostage rescue team decided to move Perrine up to the main house. A few minutes after being pulled from the pool, he had fallen unconscious. He was still breathing, but his blood pressure was becoming a concern, and they thoug
ht, with his head trauma and blood loss, that he might be going into shock.

  I insisted on helping with his stretcher. I desperately needed him to regain enough consciousness to tell me where my family was. We took Perrine up through his Hanging Gardens of Babylon, through the back of the mansion, and pigeonholed him in a ground-floor office.

  As the medics worked on trying to get him awake, I decided to scour the house for any sign of my family. The inside was as opulent as the outside, if that were possible. Twenty-foot coffered ceilings, wedding-cake moldings. In the jaw-dropping, ballroomlike kitchen was an island slabbed with some kind of blue gemstone.

  Some Delta Force guys were sitting on it, passing around a bottle of Dom Pérignon. Beside them was a long-faced guy handcuffed to a chair.

  “Who’s this?” I asked them.

  “He says he’s the butler,” said one of the commandos, with a southern drawl. “He also claims he no habla inglés, but look at him. Look at those tombstone chompers on him. This guy’s a Brit if I ever saw one.”

  “The butler, huh?” I said, immediately drawing my Glock. A round was already chambered in the pipe. I’d dealt with the fabulously rich before, back in Manhattan, and knew that butlers, like doormen, know everything.

  “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Chill out!” the southern Delta Force guy said as I pressed the barrel under the guy’s chin.

  I ignored him as I stared into the butler’s eyes.

  “One question,” I said. “One chance to get it right. A plane arrived after Perrine. There were prisoners in it. Where are they?”

  “Up at the lake house,” he said with an upper-crust British accent. “There’s a road behind the runway.”

  CHAPTER 96

  Minutes later, I was roaring up the mountain road behind the runway on the back of one of the four-wheelers the Delta Force guys had wisely thought to bring with them.

  As we were pulling into the front yard, AK-47 fire raked the dirt in front of us.

  “Guess we didn’t get all of them!” I screamed as I dove off the vehicle and rolled behind a low stone wall.

  The Delta Force guys seemed much less fazed by the turn of events. Instead of retreating, they sped even faster forward on the four-wheelers, pouring deadly-accurate fire into the window as they went. Some big Delta Force psycho, who I learned later had played right tackle for Georgia Tech, actually drove his four-wheeler up onto the porch and put his size-fourteen boot to the door’s lock.

  Half of the door’s frame was actually ripped off as he caved it in. Then one of his buddies threw in something I’d never heard of before. Not just one flash-bang grenade, but a whole firecracker pack of them suddenly went off.

  They poured into the house behind the deafening banging. I rushed in behind them, eyes scanning the corners of the rooms I ran past. There was a bar, red couches, rococo mirrors. My family couldn’t be here. This wasn’t happening. I almost got sick. It looked like a brothel of some sort.

  “Bennett! Back here! Back here!” one of the Delta Force guys cried.

  I burst into a room.

  How can men be so evil? I thought, looking around. Just how?

  There were children.

  Crouching fearfully on stained mattresses were about a dozen twelve- or thirteen-year-old girls. Relief flowed through me as I put my light on their tragic faces and realized that they weren’t my kids.

  Then the relief disappeared as my dread flooded back. If my guys weren’t here, then where the hell were they?

  CHAPTER 97

  A five-truck contingent of Mexican federales and military had arrived by the time we raced back to the main house. Inside, six or seven Mexican soldiers were standing out in front of the door to the office where Perrine had been secured.

  “What the hell is going on?” I said to Emily, who had her phone to her ear.

  “The Mexicans are claiming they need to interrogate Perrine. Washington told us to back off. We had to let them.”

  “Is Perrine conscious?” I asked.

  “I think so. Just barely,” Emily said.

  “I need to talk to him, Emily,” I said as I walked toward the office. “My family wasn’t up at that house. They didn’t come in on that second plane. I need to know where they are.”

  “Calm down, Mike. You’ll get your chance,” Emily whispered. “Sit tight and let the honchos hash it out first. This is a delicate situation.”

  “Not gonna happen,” I said, turning and marching past her, toward the guards. “No more hashing.”

  A crackerjack-looking, silver-haired Mexican soldier in a beret stepped in front of the door with his hands behind his back as I approached.

  “May I help you?” he said with a smile.

  “I’m United States law enforcement,” I said, showing him my federal badge. “That man has been placed under arrest by me, and I need to speak with my prisoner.”

  His smile didn’t waver.

  “Impossible,” he said as his men stepped up beside him menacingly. “This is Mexican soil and a Mexican matter. If you persist in annoying me, I shall be forced to place you under arrest.”

  I stared at him, trying to figure his angle. Will they try to take Perrine? I thought. Is that it?

  I turned at a sound behind me to find my new Delta Force pals filling the hallway.

  “Well, if you continue annoying my buddy,” said the monster soldier who’d smashed in the lake house door, “me and my friends will be forced to place you fellas underground, comprende? Now open that door!”

  That was when it happened.

  From the other side of the door came a crisp, sudden POP!

  I bulled my way in past the Mexican colonel and through the door.

  Perrine was still sitting on the stretcher we’d brought him in on, with his hands cuffed behind his back. He was shot through the head, and his brains were blown out against the marble lintel of the fireplace.

  Another colonel inside the office shrugged as he holstered his pistol.

  “I had no choice. He was trying to escape.”

  I realized it then. They were cleaning up. Perrine knew too much. About the government, how far the corruption went. And still my family was missing. They’d killed the only man who knew where they were. Would this nightmare never end?

  I lunged for the bastard who’d killed Perrine, but I didn’t get a foot before someone grabbed me from behind. There was a lot of shoving, a lot of cursing in two languages, but it finally died down. I started shaking as I broke free and headed for the mansion’s back door to the backyard, where they had just brought some of the Salvajes cartel guys they’d captured.

  Someone is going to tell me where my family is, I thought as I reached for the handle of the French door.

  I hadn’t gotten it halfway open when Emily slammed into me. She was grinning as she shoved a phone into my hand. I put it to my ear.

  “Mike? Mike? Is that you?” said a voice. It was an Irish voice, an Irish woman’s voice.

  I took the phone off my ear and stared at it. For a moment, I thought I was hallucinating. I slid to the floor. I put the phone back to my ear.

  “Mary Catherine?” I said. “Mary Catherine?”

  “Mike!” Mary Catherine said. “Oh, thank God, Mike.”

  “But how-? Where-?” I sputtered. “Are you OK? Are the kids OK?”

  “We’re all fine, Mike. The children, Seamus, me, and Mr. Cody are fine.”

  CHAPTER 98

  “What? How? Where?” came Mike’s voice from the old CB receiver in front of Mary Catherine. She pressed the red key with her thumb.

  “Don’t worry, Mike. We’re hiding out in a place not too far from Mr. Cody’s, a safe place,” she said, and let the button off.

  “But the cartel sent a video of them kicking in the front door in the middle of the night,” Mike said from the boxy unit’s speaker. “I thought you were kidnapped. I don’t understand.”

  “For the last day, we’ve been hiding out at Mr. McMurphy’s house, up in the hills n
orth of Mr. Cody’s,” Mary Catherine said. “We would have called you sooner, but there’s no phone service up here. I’m actually talking to you over Mr. McMurphy’s CB that he uses when he needs to contact someone.”

  “A CB?”

  “Yes. Mr. McMurphy contacts his friend a few miles away on the radio band, and then his friend patches him through to a phone. But the friend was away for a few days and just got back. That’s why we haven’t been able to contact you.”

  “Wait. McMurphy?” I said. “Who the hell is he?”

  “A nice man from town. He said he met you at church a few weeks ago when Seamus filled in to say Mass.”

  I shook my head in disbelief as I remembered the Nick Nolte-ish hippie with the gun.

  “Him?” I said. “How did he get involved?”

  “Up here in the hills, he’s got a, um, unique farm, Mike. He keeps a low profile because of the business he’s in. He also keeps his eyes and ears open. He heard through the grapevine in town about the cartel looking around for us. He was coming by to tell us that we were in danger right as the cartel was heading for the house.

  “He came in the back door and woke us up and walked us down in the dark through one of the neighboring farms, to his truck. He drove us up to his place in the hills, and we’re still here.”

  “So I’m not dreaming?” Mike said. “You’re all alive and well?”

  “You’ll not get rid of us that easy,” Mary Catherine said. “I’d put the kids on the phone, but they’re exhausted, and I’d just as soon let them sleep. Now that the coast seems clear, Mr. McMurphy is going to drive us down to the Susanville PD in the morning. How does that sound?”

  CHAPTER 99