Gone (Michael Bennett 6)

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.

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?