James Patterson - I, Michael Bennett

To the seventies, maybe, I thought, since on the way up, I’d actually passed a faded old billboard bearing a picture of Smokey Bear in his Park Service hat with the words ONLY YOU CAN PREVENT FOREST FIRES.

We were three miles due south of Perrine’s rented wooded estate on West Kill Mountain, along a section of the Catskills called Devil’s Path, which made a lot of sense, considering we were here to find the devil himself. In the five hours since we had gotten the location of Perrine’s hideout from the Puentes brothers, earth and sky had most definitely been moved. In the space of the afternoon, a sixty-member contingent of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team and all their equipment had been mobilized up from their headquarters in Quantico, Virginia, to Stewart Air National Guard Base, just outside of Newburgh, on two C-130 military cargo planes.

I met with HRT briefly at the base when they arrived, and they were formidable indeed. Think of an armored, and armed to the teeth, professional football team. Only they brought their own helicopters and were dressed like ninjas. The feds didn’t just want to capture Perrine after they got egg on their faces down in Foley Square. They needed to.

In the bucket beside me, HRT leader Kyle Ginther handed me a Canon SLR camera with a huge high-power zoom lens. Thirtyish, dark-haired, and boyish, Ginther looked friendly, like the young dad next door. Only when this dad wasn’t leaf-blowing his lawn, he was emptying sniper rifles and automatic weapons into range targets.

I glassed the terrain to the north with the camera. After a moment, I spotted the roof of Perrine’s hideout halfway up the south slope of West Kill and super-zoomed it in. Through hanging motes of pollen, a shingle-and-beam chalet-style lodge house came into view. It had river-stone chimneys and a massive deck out in front to soak in the view. I’d already seen the photographs, taken an hour earlier, of Perrine and Marietta on that same deck sharing a drink.

“We’ve received the building plans from the architect and have a shoot house mocked up,” Ginther said. “We know that there are two other guesthouses on the property, along with a barn. We also just learned that Perrine’s quarters are on the lower level of the main house.”

I blinked at him in shock.

“How did you find that out?”

“Intel from the Puentes brothers,” Ginther said. “Getting the phone numbers of the people up there with Perrine was gold, Mike. With the help of the phone company, we sent software into the targets’ cell phones that turned them into microphones. Their phones don’t even have to be on. Ain’t technology grand?”

“How many people do you think are up there?” I said.

“Twenty-five to forty, as far as we can tell,” Ginther said. “They’re armed mostly with shotguns, but we have seen a few assault rifles. The men we’ve observed patrolling the perimeter seem professional, definitely trained. We’re going to have to watch our step.”

“How are you going to do the raid?” I asked.

“Wait till it’s dark, put our snipers in a tight perimeter around the facility, then cut the power and fast-rope in onto that deck from our Black Hawk and Little Bird helicopters. With snipers covering the outside with suppression fire, the airborne assault unit will split into two teams, one securing the main and upper levels, the other the basement, where Perrine is at. We’ll be ready to go by tonight.”

I wiped sweat out of my eyes as I thought about things for a minute. On the way up to Greene County, I’d stopped at a country store to answer a text message and spotted a crow moving at the parking lot’s edge. It took me a second to realize with horror that it was plucking the feathers out of a smaller dead bird. For some reason, I couldn’t shake that sickening image-the large dark bird holding down the smaller one with his talon, fastidiously plucking out its feathers one by one-as I stood there sweating on the cherry picker.

“Something bothering you, Mike?” Ginther said.

“Despite your confidence and HRT’s obviously incredible abilities,” I said, “Perrine has the high ground. He brought heavy weapons to the midtown Manhattan shoot-out we had at the beginning of the summer, so he’s bound to have some more up here. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if he had RPGs. And he knows special operations tactics. The bad guys actually used flashbangs on us when my partner was killed. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they had night vision, too, so a full-frontal assault, even in the dark, sounds dangerous to me. This bastard has sent me to enough cop funerals, thank you very much.”

“Okay, I’m listening. You have any ideas?”

That’s when it hit me. I did have an idea. At least the germ of one. I let it settle in for a beat, and then I grabbed the camera and looked back up at the house peeking out between the treetops.

“That driveway is the only way in or out?” I asked.

“By car, at least,” Ginther said.

“Smokey Bear,” I mumbled.

“What was that?”

I handed the commando back his camera.

“Take us down,” I said. “I think I have an idea.”

Two hours later, just after the sun went down, Ginther and I sat in the cab of a truck, looking out at the silent mountain twilight as we waited by the radio. We sat up when we heard the radio scratch.

“Okay, this is Rabbit. We’re in position,” came the word from the first HRT infil team.

I glanced over at Ginther as he checked his watch. We waited some more.

It took another three minutes before the second team crackled the mike.

“Okay, this is Merlin. We’re here.”

“Okay,” Ginther said back. “Pop ’em all, fellas. Everything you got.”

“Roger that, Cap,” Merlin said. “Affirmative. Fire in the hole.”

We waited, our eyes glued north, toward Perrine’s house. After a minute, we smiled in unison as an enormous column of black smoke rose into the pale, twilit sky.

But having two HRTs pop dozens of smoke grenades into the woods below Perrine’s hideout was only phase one. As the smoke billowed, Ginther made another call to the fire station at the base of West Kill Mountain’s north slope. A moment later, a blaring air horn sounded in the distance.

My last-ditch plan was under way. Perrine might suspect something fishy was up once he heard the siren and saw the smoke, but how could he be sure if it was a real forest fire or not? The answer was that he couldn’t. Because deception is basic to the art of war, we needed to cause as much confusion and chaos as possible as we went in. In fact, we needed to bamboozle the living shit out of Perrine if we were going to capture him without heavy resistance.

“Okay, buckle up. This is it,” Ginther yelled as he started one of the two fire trucks we’d borrowed from the nearby towns of Hunter and Roxbury. I slipped on a yellow fire helmet. I and the dozen other HRT members riding in the two trucks were already wearing firemen’s gear over our automatic weapons. I crossed my fingers.

Please let this work.

A second later, our blue and red lights started flashing and we were rolling along the country blacktop, sirens blaring. I held onto an overhead strap with my right hand and the strap of a borrowed M4 assault rifle with my left as the roaring, rumbling truck swung off the mountain road and onto the driveway of Perrine’s hideout.

We saw it almost immediately. After we had gone up the steep driveway for about a minute, we didn’t see just smoke anymore. Not good, I thought, staring open-mouthed out the front passenger-side window.

Tall orange flames were now engulfing the woods on both sides of the driveway. I stared out at the growing fire. On each side of the driveway, there had to be half an acre of forest already in flames as the fire climbed up the slope toward Perrine’s mountain retreat. Bits of burning black-and-orange embers were falling everywhere. Like confetti in a Halloween parade.