Gone

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.