Fires of Midnight

by Jon Land

  They packed onto the raft named “Huck Finn” and were squeezed back against the far rail. Josh kept his eyes down, knowing he mustn’t invite a chance glance, even in the coming dark. The straw-hatted driver repeated the “Closing in ten minutes” warning and urged all passengers to be quick in their exploring. The raft thumped against the dock on the island and the patrons disembarked into a shack labeled “Aunt Polly’s Restaurant.”

  This really was an island, and that was what had attracted Josh to it initially on Wednesday. He had ultimately settled on it as the hiding place for his second vial of CLAIR because of the dark, cool hiding places it offered. After checking out all the possibilities, he had chosen Injun Joe’s Cave. When he discovered that finding the perfect spot within it was impossible, he had decided to create one by chipping out a large enough portion of rock with the help of his belt buckle. The resulting gap easily accommodated the vial but, even chipping away further at the shard of rock, could not stop it from protruding slightly once replaced.

  That was a blessing now, since it would greatly facilitate his task of locating the spot again in the dark. Sure enough, he found the slight ridge quickly and removed the rock fragment. Then he slid his fingers into the depression and gripped the vial firmly. He eased it into the pocket on the other side of his jeans from the one containing the smaller vial he’d taken out of Group Six. Now that he had what he’d come for he could begin to think about exiting the Magic Kingdom, something that would surely prove more difficult than entering. But if he could stick with this group of teenagers for another hour or so, exit from the park would come infinitely easier in the postfireworks rush.

  Moving swiftly, he caught up with the other kids and accompanied them to the landing where the last of the island’s patrons for the day waited to be ferried back to the Magic Kingdom mainland. His group squeezed onto the second-to-last raft, “Huck Finn” again. A few minutes later it thumped home against the mainland dock. The surge of the crowd pushed Josh forward onto the landing, then back up to the pedestrian road that sliced through the Magic Kingdom. He followed the others, who stopped when they caught a glimpse of roller-coasterlike cars careening through some nearby foliage.

  “What ride was that?” Wendy asked.

  “Big Thunder Mountain Railroad,” the boy named David answered. “Let’s check it out.”

  And they headed off to the right, the ride just below them, with Joshua Wolfe following along as if caught in the flow.

  Krill checked his watch, satisfied that it was almost time to move. The fireworks display would be starting in barely an hour’s time at the conclusion of the evening’s Spectromagic Parade.

  Normally, the Magic Kingdom’s fireworks were shot off from a custommade turret pedestal poised in a cement courtyard behind Cinderella’s Castle. But tonight’s were too elaborate and required too many mortar tubes and Roman candles for the area to accommodate them. So they had been moved to a barge moored in the Seven Seas Lagoon between the Polynesian and Grand Floridian resort hotels.

  The change of location, though, would not change the unique way the shells would be shot off. Instead of black-powder charges, Disney fired their charges by air pressure, known as the air launch pyrotechnic system. Similarly, the shells would be set off electronically as opposed to the standard timer launch. The result was a show far less dangerous and far more spectacular, since it allowed technicians to precisely time the release of every single burst of color.

  It had taken Krill several hours to disassemble the trio of shells he’d located in the storage closet, properly insert the three canisters containing the nerve gas Dr. Haslanger had provided, and then reassemble the shells. His remaining task now was to load these altered charges into the mortar tubes fastened tight atop the barge. When the fireworks exploded to life, the nerve gas inserted within would disperse over the entire area of the Magic Kingdom. That would give Krill a half hour to escape before it took effect. Fuchs wouldn’t be coming out and neither would Joshua Wolfe. With Fuchs dead and taking the blame for the debacle, both Krill and Haslanger would be safe. Group Six would survive in some form, and however reduced it might be, Haslanger would be able to retain his labs and research facilities.

  Krill reviewed the remaining logistics of his plan. Take the launch out to the barge and load his three charges into separate mortar tubes. The entire show was controlled by a computer program that would kick in automatically. No technicians would even be in the area. Krill’s plan was to work his way to the launch once the parade started and go from there.

  Krill had just stepped out from the storage room, the three shells held in a small tote bag, when he saw the huge shadow approaching an elbow turn in the tunnels ahead. He ducked back inside but left the door open a crack, just enough to catch a glimpse of the Indian gliding up the hallway. Krill tensed. He recognized the Indian from a picture in McCracken’s file, knew he had been party to the debacle at Group Six a few nights earlier.

  He had accordingly expected the Indian to be in the park, yet not down here stalking him as Krill felt certain was the case. To confront the Indian now, though, he knew, would be to threaten the success of his mission. So Krill remained still and waited until the Indian was out of sight before moving back into the corridor and heading in the opposite direction, remembering too late that he’d left the door to the storage room open.

  “Hey! Hey! Up here!”

  Josh turned his eyes upward along with the rest of the kids in the group as they reached the start of Big Thunder Mountain Railroad.

  “Here!”

  A boy was straddling the tracks above them, waving. A camera dangled from around his throat and Josh realized it was Andy.

  “Get the fuck down!” David yelled up at him.

  He showed his camera. “I just want to take one—”

  The rest of Andy’s words were drowned out when a chain of roller coaster cars swept round the bend. The smile vanished from his face. He froze briefly as the cars bore down on him. The whomp of a collision followed and Andy was airborne, tumbling toward the ground.

  The girl named Wendy screamed.

  “Oh, God,” someone else moaned.

  Andy hit the bank with a thud and rolled. Above him the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad cars wavered but somehow clung to the tracks.

  “Help!” a voice yelled. “Someone get help!”

  Josh was close to the fallen boy and moved instinctively, pushing forward through some brush to reach his moaning, semiconscious form.

  “Help me,” Andy muttered fearfully. “Help me, please … .”

  Josh settled down next to him.

  FORTY-ONE

  Response to the accident within the Magic Kingdom was swift and immediate. One of the costumed young men working the controls for Big Thunder Mountain Railroad hit the hidden emergency button that triggered a silent alarm, silent everywhere but inside the security office, where a harmonic buzz sounded to the accompaniment of a red light over the bank of monitors.

  Turk Wills looked up. “What the hell …”

  The monitor, crowded a bit by the presence of Mr. Washington, spun away from the screens toward Wills. “Thunder Mountain Railroad, sir.” He twisted back and punched his keyboard to bring pictures of the area into view. “Books like a fall.”

  “Send medical,” Wills ordered. Then, to another worker, “Alert Orlando County MC. Tell them to expect one possible incoming casualty, major trauma possible. Get me a MedVac chopper here in case we’ve got a critical.”

  Even as Wills spoke, a fully equipped rescue wagon appeared from a garage hidden in the park. It flashed its lights, hit its sirens occasionally, and headed for Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, slowed by the massive crowds clogging the streets. At the same time, emergency medical response teams rushed on foot to the area via the tunnels, toting black bags. By this time the security monitor had managed to fill six screens with various angles of the accident’s aftermath.

  “I’m heading down there,” Wills announced,
halfway to the stairway that would take him down into the tunnels. His eyes fell briefly on Colonel Fuchs. “Sorry for the distraction, Mr. Washington.”

  But Fuchs was more concerned with the action unfolding on one of the screens, telling the monitor to zoom in closer.

  Andy wailed in pain when Josh touched his shoulder.

  “My leg!” Josh discerned through the shrieks. “My leg!”

  Josh inspected Andy’s right leg, which was bent inward at an odd angle. His fingers reached down and felt the steady pulse of blood flowing out of a tear in the femoral artery. Andy could be dead in less than a minute without immediate treatment.

  Josh let instinct take over, knowledge from his two years’ worth of medical school charging through his brain like information across a computer screen. Knowing seconds were precious, he stripped off the belt from his jeans, worked it around the thick, fleshy part of Andy’s thigh, and tied it tight, double-looping the knot.

  All the while the boy was moaning, almost wailing.

  “This will slow the bleeding,” Josh told him.

  Andy’s shirt was ripped and Josh tore a ragged strip from it and balled it tight. He eased his hand back toward the wound and felt between the knee and thigh for it. He located it blindly and found the point where the blood, not quite stanched but slowed considerably, originated. Probing his fingers through the ragged strip of flesh brought him to the point where the artery had been partially torn. He pressed the balled-up fabric in tight and applied as much pressure as he could.

  Josh heard activity behind him and then an unfamiliar voice saying, “Move aside, please. Move aside.”

  He turned and looked up to see a pair of emergency medical personnel starting to learn toward him, huffing for breath. “Sublateral laceration of the femoral artery,” Josh reported, before either could speak. “I have tied the flow off eighteen centimeters above the knee.”

  “Christ,” one of them muttered.

  “We’ll take over now,” the other said firmly.

  He squeezed in close and replaced Josh’s hand with his own upon Andy’s leg. Josh rose and backed away, realizing that blood had splattered onto his shirt and was dripping from his hand.

  Standing in front of the monitor board, Colonel Fuchs gasped. Joshua Wolfe’s image was clearly visible in the center of one of the screens. His first thought was that the boy had been injured. Then he saw him wipe his hand against his already stained shirt and slip away, eyes darting nervously about. Fuchs locked his stare on his quarry and spoke into the transistorized headset fixed over his ears.

  “Target located! Thunder Mountain Railroad, northwest corner of park, bottom of Frontierland. Wearing a dark blue shirt and baseball cap.”

  The location was perfect, Fuchs realized. The man-made river separating Tom Sawyer’s Island from the rest of the park and negotiated hourly by a cruising riverboat would keep the boy from fleeing north or east. The park’s steep boundary line lay to the west and was blocked by fencing, leaving Joshua Wolfe only the southern area around Frontierland.

  “Form a perimeter along the southwestern stretch of river across to Splash Mountain. I want men on the Frontierland rooftops to get me a spot, but exercise caution.” Fuchs took a deep breath. “There’s no reason to be rash. We’ve got him.”

  “An accident,” Susan Lyle said softly, when the rescue wagon came into view near Cinderella’s Castle.

  McCracken, though, was more concerned with the flood of men in suits surging into the area, holding fast to their ear units, pushing their way through the milling, gathering crowds that wondered what had transpired. He recognized enough of them to know they were Fuchs’s men descending on an area somewhere inside Frontierland.

  Blaine grasped the handles of Susan’s wheelchair and began to push, speaking into his jawbone mike. “Johnny!”

  “Here, Blainey,” Wareagle responded from the storage closet along the tunnels where he’d been for the last several minutes.

  “Sal!”

  “Read you, boss.”

  “Show time, boys. Meet me at the head of Frontierland pronto.” He swung the wheelchair to the right.

  “Wait a minute,” Susan said, swinging her shoulders about. “We’re going the wrong way! You’re pushing me the wrong way!”

  “Depends on your perspective.” McCracken brought the chair to a halt against a railing that overlooked Cinderella’s Castle and the beginning of the parade route. “This is where it gets messy. You don’t want to be around when we go to work.”

  “The boy!” she screamed after him, propping herself out of the wheelchair to the amazement of those gathered close by.

  “I’ll get him,” Blaine said to her before he disappeared.

  Joshua Wolfe melted away from the scene, into the crowds that thickened along the perimeter of the accident. They thinned slightly as he reached the main avenue of Frontierland where it wound its way past dark wooden buildings lifted from the Old West. Music from a player piano rose out of a brilliantly re-created combination saloon and restaurant called the Mile Long Bar. The flow of human traffic was clearly headed against Josh and bucking it meant standing out. But he had no choice. Losing himself in the mounting crowd headed north for the accident scene meant the risk of trapping himself. So he approached the stretch where passage through Frontierland narrowed in front of the Country Bear Jamboree and Shootin’ Arcade.

  But the front of Frontierland just beyond that passage was blocked. Josh could see some of the Men making a neat, inconspicuous row across it. And if he could see them …

  Josh swung round and joined the flow of traffic back past the Shootin’ Arcade, skirting the lines winding their way toward the Diamond Horseshoe and Country Bear Jamboree that filled up the larger buildings on his left.

  The Men were there as well, more spread out and yet slightly more conspicuous. Watching for him. He realized he must have been spotted on a security monitor while at the site of the accident. There were buildings that he could dodge his way into, a number of restaurants that might offer a back door out to another section of the park. Maybe the Men hadn’t had time to cover everything yet, at least not those doors.

  Josh slowed his pace, intending to duck into the first likely-looking storefront.

  Fuchs flicked his eyes back and forth over three different screens, following the deployment of his men through Frontierland. Suddenly a tall, familiar shape flashed briefly across the center one.

  “Go back!” he ordered the man working the keyboard.

  “Which screen?”

  “This one!” Fuchs blared, pointing. “Slow! Go back slow! … There, hold it there!”

  He never would have recognized Blaine McCracken beneath the paunch and baggy straw hat, but his giant Indian friend was unmistakable.

  “McCracken is entering Frontierland. The Indian is with him,” he announced to his troops. “Exercise extreme caution.”

  Blaine and Johnny Wareagle met up with Sal Belamo just inside Frontierland.

  “We got activity up there, boss,” Sal Belamo reported, his eyes fixed on the balconies and flat rooftops that adorned the buildings along the main drag.

  “Snipers?”

  “Spotters, from what I can tell. Boy gets found, it’ll be them that does it.”

  “You handle the ones on the ground?”

  Belamo scowled. “You need to ask?”

  Blaine and Johnny bolted into a nearby building and charged up the stairs that led to the facade of a second floor. Earlier inspection of the building had shown it had access to the balcony and rooftop for the stunt players who performed regular shows during the afternoon and evening hours. The two men traced the footsteps of the players, Blaine taking a narrow door onto a balcony that ran along much of the street’s length while Wareagle continued on to the roof level.

  A man standing on the roof and peering downward at the street was speaking into a miniature microphone. Turning, he spotted Johnny and tried to draw his gun. But Wareagle covered the remaining dist
ance in a single lunge and flung the man into the night before his fingers had grazed steel.

  The man plummeted to the ground, much to the delight of the nearby crowd, who thought they were watching another installment of the advertised stunt show. The plunge also drew the attention of two more men posted on the roof, each holding binoculars to their eyes. They barely had a chance to drop them to their chests before Johnny was upon them; he trapped a head in either hand and slammed them violently together.

  Having shed the cumbersome bulk of his disguise, McCracken dashed across the balcony. As expected, the attention—and guns—of a half-dozen men positioned there turned upward toward the Indian long enough to allow Blaine to begin his surge. By the time they spotted him and steadied their weapons, McCracken had already sighted in and opened fire in a nonstop barrage, empty clip exchanged for a fresh one while barely breaking stride. Bullets flew from the SIG, spent shells flying everywhere to be snatched up by patrons below, eager for a souvenir and avidly watching the spectacle.

  By the time a few spectators noted the performers weren’t dressed in the expected cowboy garb, Sal Belamo had leveled his .44 Magnum at a grouping of gunmen on the ground ready to open fire on McCracken, exposed on the balcony. Not hitting a bystander was Sal’s biggest concern, but the gunmen had helped him here by viciously clearing a path for themselves as they’d advanced. Speedloader held between his front teeth, Sal opened up on the five of them with the Magnum in his right hand, even as he was drawing his backup snub-nosed with his left. He didn’t start firing it until the magnum was out, and then only as he ejected the bigger gun’s spent shells and drew it to his mouth to pop in a fresh supply.