James Patterson: Gone

“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.

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.

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.

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.