Gone Read online

  “Are those new cameras that I ordered installed?”

  “They went online yesterday with a closed-circuit feed into your bedroom, as you insisted,” Arthur said. “Shall I have Hector and Junior waiting with the van at the airfield?”

  “Yes, you shall, Arthur. Please remind them and the rest of the staff that these are special guests. Guests who will be treated with the utmost respect.”

  Perrine smiled proudly as he walked with his manservant toward his glittering pool, the tiers of manicured gardens, his magnificent mansion.

  “That is, until I kill them, of course,” he said.

  CHAPTER 90

  AFTER ANOTHER HALF HOUR, it looked like we’d gotten everything we were going to get out of Tomás Neves.

  Between dunkings, he told us he had taken Perrine to a San Diego cartel house with a tunnel in its basement that went under the border. The tunnel exited in a tire shop, where a waiting car took Perrine to a plane at the Tijuana Airport.

  He claimed that the plane had taken Perrine to an estate in Mexico near Real del Monte, where a party was going to take place. A chatty Salvajes cartel underling with whom he had coordinated Perrine’s transfer had bragged to him that his older brother had been invited to a black-tie function there tonight for what was called a bonus ceremony.

  Suitcases of money would be ceremoniously handed out as hookers were brought in by the busload. Neves told us it was common knowledge that nothing made Perrine happier than drinking and carousing with his most efficient and most brutal soldiers.

  At first, I thought, What a load of bullshit, but then I thought again. Perrine was amazingly cocky and arrogant. What better way to show how ballsy he was than to start a war with the US and then throw a party for his men.

  As Neves was disseminating this information, I was in constant contact with Emily, who was outside, working her phone, firing off everything we learned to the LAPD task force so they could compare it with the flowchart we’d been building on Perrine’s cartel. The cops and agents back at the shop were, in turn, collating everything through FBI, CIA, NSA, and DEA databases.

  The first glimmer of hope came when she called into the basement.

  “San Diego SWAT just hit the address Neves gave us, Mike. There really is a tunnel. And Mexican authorities confirm that a private plane did leave from the Tijuana Airport this morning at eight a.m.”

  We were passing around a box of Pop-Tarts twenty minutes later, gearing up for some more tubby time with Neves, when there was a knock on the sliding-glass door.

  “A DEA undercover in Cancún just drove up to a hacienda outside Real del Monte,” Emily said breathlessly as I opened it. “He got a hit on one of the Salvajes cell numbers we have. Not only that, but the CIA just learned that the estate in question used to be owned by Perrine! Word is, they’re taking this as actionable intelligence. We need to get rolling. JSOC is calling a meeting back at the base.”

  I left Neves with Diaz and Bassman and raced with Emily back to the SoCal Logistics Airport. After we badged our way through the guard booth, it was obvious some fires had been lit.

  It was like someone had dropped a pinball into one of those kinetic mousetrap sculptures. Uniformed soldiers were pouring in and out of the dormitories and hangars. Dozens of bearded Navy SEALs and Delta Force operators clustered in small groups, loading guns and equipment kit bags as soldiers with clipboards did flight prep on the Black Hawk and Little Bird choppers out on the tarmac.

  As we walked into the task force’s war room, a video teleconference with Washington and one of the JSOC generals was under way. Beside it in the split screen was a satellite image of a compound with a huge house, a pool, gardens.

  Colonel D’Ambrose, sitting at the rear of the room, cracked the door and came out when he saw us.

  “They sent up a drone,” he said. “What your contact said is true. There’s an enormous amount of activity going on at the estate. Not only that, CIA is still doing some forensic work on the imaging, but they think they spotted Perrine riding a horse on one of the mountain trails. The Defense Department is in conference right now with the president. We just got word that the president wants Perrine in a body bag. We’re going in tonight under cover of darkness with everything we got.”

  “We did it, Mike? We found Perrine?” Emily said as she collapsed in an office chair, rubbing her eyes.

  “I don’t give a shit about him, Emily,” I said. “We need to find my family.”

  CHAPTER 91

  IT LOOKED LIKE THE set of a spaghetti Western, or maybe Wile E. Coyote’s stomping grounds, rolling beneath my feet by midnight that night. Below was a wilderness of windswept desert, small buttes, and mesas. All of it was tinged green through the night-vision goggles I was wearing.

  I shifted my weight to wake my numb butt, perched on the cold, hard vibrating metal floor of the Black Hawk chopper. It’d taken some favor calling and even more finagling by Emily, but in the end, we were able to go on the raid on one of the supporting Black Hawks with the FBI’s hostage rescue team and some CIA personnel. Emily had emphasized my past personal contact with Perrine and my ability to ID him. I could ID him, all right, and was really looking forward to some more personal contact.

  The dozen nap-of-the-earth airborne helicopters in our armada included Black Hawks and Little Birds, two Cobra attack helicopters, and even a twin-bladed Chinook filled with a contingent of first-recon marines. Far above, somewhere among the glittering stars, there was even an AC-130 Spectre gunship bristling with machine guns and mortars and Hellfire missiles to back us up.

  Not knowing what to expect, the Pentagon had broken out the entire toolbox. Which couldn’t have made me happier. Perrine and his cartel were for all intents and purposes no different from an enemy army. It was finally time to deal with them as such.

  It had been mostly flat desert, but as we flew, the terrain suddenly started to change. From the flat desert floor, low, corrugated hills with more vegetation began to rise. Soon the hills turned into majestic, rugged cliffs and sheer mountain-stream-filled valleys.

  “We are coming in, in five,” a voice called over the radio. A minute later, we went past a ridge, and Perrine’s house was there. The Unabomber’s cabin this was not. The satellite images hadn’t done it justice. The dramatically lit, breathtaking French Second Empire mansion looked like a block someone had airlifted from the Champs-Élyssés and plunked down in the middle of the Mexican mountains. Every one of its lights was blazing on its marble steps and columns like it was an opera house on opening night.

  There were soccer fields, several barns, something that looked like a racetrack. At the rear of the house were illuminated gardens that tiered down and down to a massive, magnificent, softly lit tiled pool. Beyond the pool was a runway with three corporate jets parked at its end.

  No wonder the US government hadn’t told the Mexicans about the raid. How could this opulent palace so boldly exist out here in the middle of nowhere without their knowledge or consent?

  The answer was, it couldn’t. Staring down at the compound, I knew the rumor that Perrine was more powerful than the Mexican president was a hundred percent true.

  CHAPTER 92

  AS WE CAME CLOSER, I tightened my helmet’s chin strap and checked the safety on my M4. I winked at Emily, across from me, to hide my mounting anxiety. Like me and the rest of the HR team, she was loaded for bear, dressed in black combat fatigues and strapped down with guns and gear. She winked back, then crossed herself and started praying.

  As I was about to join her, an alarm suddenly went off in the forward cabin’s glowing console. It sounded like a police whistle followed by a fire alarm.

  There was a lot of excited chatter over the tactical line. Before you could say surface-to-air missile, a white streak whooshed up off the slope to left. As I watched in stark, helpless, gaping horror, the corkscrewing streak connected with the forward rotor of the Chinook, at the end of our column of aircraft. There was an air-cracking boom and a b
right flash of light, and the Chinook was spinning and dropping, spiraling downward like a spinning leaf in October.

  “Chalk three is hit!” came a voice over the mike. “Hard landing! Hard landing!”

  Another sizzling corkscrewing missile flew up, just missing the Black Hawk across from us. Down through its wafting contrail, I could see men on the roof of a small cinder-block house perched on the edge of a ridge.

  “Roof left! Roof left!” someone shouted over the line as one of the Cobra attack helicopters broke rank and dove toward the house.

  I almost wet myself when its electric machine gun went off. It sounded like something caught in a shredder, or a massive industrial accident at a power plant. With an extended, sizzling, spine-tingling zap, a blinding white rope of bullets and tracers the size of Coke bottles beamed down out of the attack chopper, into the structure.

  As the helicopter continued to rain lead, the second Cobra swiveled up and around on its axis like a record, and not one but two rockets sledded off from beneath its underbelly and downward in an exhilarating shower of sparks. A split second later, the guardhouse, or whatever it had been, disappeared in a blinding, three-story pa-powing blossom of white light. The concussion of the explosion that came a sliver of a second later whapped warm against my skin where I sat on the wobbling deck of the Black Hawk.

  “We have small-arms fire!” someone said redundantly as from all around the well-lit house and compound, small flashes of light began to sprout. I clapped my hands over my ears when the gunner in the door of our chopper suddenly opened up with his .50 caliber. The sound of its empty brass shells pinging off the metal wall beside my head sounded like a hyped-up jazz drummer hitting the high hats.

  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&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 thought, with his head trauma and blood loss, that he might be going into shock.