I, Michael Bennett (Michael Bennett 5)

“Follow my lead, but be ready for anything,” Ginther said to his guys.

He didn’t need to tell them to lock and load, I knew. These elite commando types woke up locked and loaded. They probably couldn’t tell you where the safeties on their guns were.

My gaze shifted from the flames we’d just passed to the vehicle coming down the road. It was a black Jeep Cherokee with four hard-looking Hispanic men in it. It stopped in front of us.

“Private,” the driver said, waving his arms as he hopped out. “You need to turn around and go back. This is a private area.”

“Private? Are you out of your cotton-picking mind?” Ginther yelled, thumbing back his fire helmet as he stepped out onto the driveway. “See that hot orange stuff heading our way? That’s a forest fire, son. Winds are coming up from the south. You don’t have a minute to spare. You need to get yourself and anyone else up at that house off this mountain now.”

The Hispanic guys conferred quickly. One of them lifted a phone and started speaking rapidly into it.

Ginther lifted his own phone.

“Okay, Central. This is hook and ladder thirty-eight,” he screamed, loud enough for Perrine’s guards to hear. “We can’t get access to the fire site. You’re going to have to bring up the water chopper. I repeat. Bring in the water bird.”

Water chopper? I thought, remembering the already hovering HRT helicopters.

It’s going to rain in a minute around here, all right, I thought, glancing at Perrine’s thugs. It’s going to rain cops and lead.

The head Hispanic tough was putting away his phone when the four HRT commandos with us rolled off the top of the truck and put assault rifles in the bad guys’ faces. In a fraction of a second, the bad guys were facedown by their Jeep, hog-tied, with white plastic zip ties around their wrists.

“Oh, my God, Mike. Look at this,” Ginther said, showing me the back of the Jeep.

It was filled to the brim with military hardware. AK-47s, sniper rifles, three pairs of night-vision goggles, fragmentation grenades. They even had claymore mines.

“What did I tell you?” I said. “These jacks think it’s World War Three.”

After Ginther told his men to transfer all the weaponry onto our truck, he lifted each of Perrine’s thugs one by one and kicked them in the ass to get them moving down the driveway, toward the main road.

“Ándale, assholes,” Ginther said. “You have about five minutes before that driveway melts. Run, if you want to live.”

CHAPTER 101

GINTHER LEAPED ABOARD the rig and got on the radio to update the rest of the teams about the weapons cache. Then he hit the siren again and put the fire truck into gear. We could hear the buzz of helicopter blades as the truck stopped on the circular driveway next to the house.

“Evacuation! This is an evacuation!” Ginther bellowed over the fire truck’s loudspeaker. “A forest fire is in the area! I repeat. A forest fire is on its way!”

As we exited the fire truck, I was greeted by the glorious sight of the HRT Black Hawk hovering over the house, commandos fast-roping onto the deck. I was congratulating myself at getting this far in without resistance when the sound of gunfire erupted inside the house. Ginther told his men to watch the perimeter as we both shucked off our fire coats and raced over the driveway toward the house.

The closest entrance we found was a sliding glass door under the enormous deck. The finished basement was extremely elaborate—a pool table, a wide-screen TV, a bar with wine bottles stacked within two huge glass coolers. In a split second, the door was shattered with Ginther’s rifle butt and we were inside.

I turned to look back through the sliders when I heard a crackle. I paused, blinking. About thirty feet away, the woods below the house were completely on fire. There was so much smoke you could hardly see the sky. It was amazing how fast the forest fire had moved.

I felt like running back and grabbing some fire gear, but instead, I quickly followed Ginther through a door near the back of the room. I was in for another shock. Beyond the doorway was a huge indoor lap pool and a glass wall running along the entire width of the house.

Not only that, but there was someone in it. A pale form under the water.

The water bulged, and Marietta herself appeared with a splash at the end of the pool closest to us. She wasn’t wearing a stitch, and for a moment, Ginther and I stood arrested in place, staring at the water sluicing off her curves, at the long, black, wet wave of hair that clung to her shoulders.

Instead of being shocked, she was smiling, as though she’d been waiting there for us.

Then we heard the sound of engines. There were lights in the trees beyond the window. Then three or four ATVs blew past, roaring up behind the house, up the mountain.

“Freeze!” Ginther said.

I looked away from the window to see Marietta moving along the pool’s edge.

“No. My robe. I need to cover myself. I just want my robe,” Marietta said, reaching toward a white robe on a chaise longue beside the pool.