Fires of Midnight Read Online Free Page A

down the back roads, hoping he could outrun the reinforcements certain to be summoned by the soldiers he had left stranded at the hotel. The ride passed uneventfully, and he had actually begun to relax by the time the thin, poorly paved road spilled out onto another primary route that would take him the last stretch to the airfield.
    Then he froze, brakes jammed hard and jeep screeching to a sideways halt.
    Directly before him, up a slight rise, an armored personnel carrier was parked sideways across the road. He glimpsed men scampering into better positions of cover behind it, weapons readied. Blaine swung the jeep around only to find a pair of troop-carrying trucks steaming toward him from a half-mile away.
    He had resigned himself to fighting it out with the jeep’s fifty-caliber machine gun when a distant whirring sound grabbed his ears. It was
familiar and yet forgotten, as impossible as the sight that followed it out of the west.
    An old Helio Courier, something he hadn’t seen since the Nam days, banked free of the mountains and dropped for the road. It wasn’t the craft Blaine had arranged for his extraction and this certainly wasn’t the pilot. Helio Couriers had been used by Air America pilots to ferry Operation Phoenix personnel in and out of impossible situations. Utilized for their ability to fly low and to land with virtually no airfield, they had saved many a life, their pilots—like the famous Harry Lime—as crazy as the men they transported.
    The Courier seemed to stop dead in the air and drop out of the sky, whining as it split the wind. Its wing-mounted machine guns began clacking, carving up chunks of the roadbed in the direct path of the troop carriers heading Blaine’s way. The lead one swerved to avoid the fire and the trailing truck slammed into it. McCracken watched both spin onto the shoulder, while behind him soldiers hurried back into their armored personnel carrier to give chase.
    But the Helio Courier was already into its rapid descent, kissing the road like an old friend and coming to a hunkering halt just two yards from Blaine’s jeep. The cockpit hatch popped up, revealing a man dressed in a polyester Hawaiian shirt complete with lei.
    It couldn’t be!
    But it was.
    “At your service, Captain!” Harry Lime yelled down to McCracken, flashing a mock salute. “Better get yourself on board.”
     
    B laine squeezed into the cockpit and took the copilot’s seat as a spectator. The strands of Harry’s lei bobbed a bit in the air. The wind caught his baggy Hawaiian shirt and ballooned it outward until Blaine sealed the hatch behind him. Then he watched Harry deftly maneuver the old plane back into takeoff mode, whizzing by the disabled trucks even as the closing armored personnel carrier’s machine gun opened fire. If the bullets bothered Harry Lime, he didn’t show it. He expertly skimmed the tree line low enough to leave branch scratches on the Helio Courier’s underside and flew in zigzag fashion until he reached the Atlantic. Once there he gave the plane full throttle and let her hum over the water so low the ocean spray dropletted the windshield.
    “You’re better than ever, Harry.”
    Lime tried to smile, almost blushing, working an unlit cigarette from one side of his mouth to the other. “Good to see a guy like you still needs a guy like me, Captain.”
    “Castro’d be smoking me like one of Havana’s best if you hadn’t shown up when you did.”
    “Got my own reasons this time.”

    Only then did Blaine notice the quivery expression that had crossed Crazy Harry Lime’s face. “Keep talking.”
    “You gotta help me. You’re the only one who can. That’s why I took this run. That’s why I had to come get you. Leave you down there in Castro’s shithouse and I’m fucked as bad as you.”
    “Hard to believe, Harry.”
    “It ain’t, trust me. See, Captain, something happened … .”

TWO
    S usan Lyle had practiced laboratory work in full isolation gear many