Fires of Midnight

by Jon Land

  Sal turned both pistols on the next enemy surge at the same time Johnny Wareagle leaped over the ledge of the roof to join McCracken on the balcony. The Indian had a gun in hand now as well, a Desert Eagle semiautomatic, one of the few he felt comfortable with. He ran in slightly staggered fashion behind Blaine, adding his bullets to the others that traced the retreat of the gunmen.

  “The kid, Johnny!” Blaine’s voice ordered as he reloaded again. “Find the kid!”

  Joshua Wolfe realized the truth of what was happening instantly, the moment the first gunshot sounded and froze him. He turned his gaze to the balcony and glimpsed a bearded man charging across it. Josh had just recognized the huge Indian as well when more gunfire split the night almost directly in front of him. Even from behind, he recognized Sal Belamo unleashing a series of deafening reports from a huge pistol.

  Blaine McCracken and friends had come to his rescue yet again, but this time Josh had no intention of hanging around and waiting to be saved. Seizing upon the chaos the gun battle had caused in the ranks of the Men, he sped toward the gleefully terrified screams coming from Splash Mountain. As he neared the dwindling line to board the ride, he swung left up a slight hill and under an overhang proclaiming the entrance to Adventureland.

  Incensed, Fuchs kept his attention pinned to the screen providing the clearest picture of McCracken and the Indian firing from the balcony. Another screen showed a third man who must have accompanied them diving behind a concession stand on the ground to avoid return fire. McCracken and Wareagle instantly turned their pistols on that fire’s source.

  “No!” Fuchs yelled to himself. “No!”

  Another half dozen of his troops had just gone down when Turk Wills’s voice blared over the speaker.

  “What the hell is going on, Mr. Washington?”

  “It’s none of your concern, Chief.”

  “The fuck it ain’t! I’m trying to clear up this damn accident and all of a sudden I’m getting reports of gunfire in Frontierland and people getting shot for real.”

  “The matter is under control.”

  “Stand your men down, mister, before somebody innocent gets shot.”

  “That sounds like an order.”

  “Fucking A right it is.”

  “Sorry, I have the authority here,” Fuchs said, switching off the speaker and returning his attention to the screens in search of Joshua Wolfe.

  Blaine and Johnny dropped to the street and joined Sal Belamo.

  “Kid went this way,” Sal said, brushing himself off and then popping a fresh speed loader into his magnum before leading them off on Joshua Wolfe’s trail.

  They charged through a covered arch of small souvenir shops at the entrance to Adventureland and caught a fleeting glimpse of a shape ducking into an attraction two hundred feet away. Guns ready, the trio gave chase, running toward the entrance for a ride labeled “Pirates of the Caribbean.” Because the parade was mere minutes from starting, the lines for all attractions, with the exception of Splash Mountain and Space Mountain, were down considerably. In fact, as they sped through the S-like passageway that led to the “Pirates” boarding point, the three of them encountered virtually no people.

  A moderately steep decline brought them to the start of the ride, comprised of individual waterborne cars each with seven bench seats. Two were still in sight ahead when Blaine, Johnny and Sal took a car all to themselves, one to each of the middle seats. Blaine could see into the car immediately ahead clearly enough to know Joshua Wolfe wasn’t in it. The car in front of that, the one the kid must therefore have taken, had already disappeared into the darkness.

  McCracken checked the logistics of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride. The cars rode between rails atop a channel of water that looked to be four or five feet deep, enough to allow for currents. On either side the water was considerably shallower, a foot or so of currents sweeping across a hard floor for effect.

  Blaine gazed up at the cavelike confines they were passing through. Fake stalactites hung from the dark gray ceiling. Machine-made fog billowed here and there as they came around to the right toward a shipwreck featuring a moving skeleton piloting the remnants of the craft.

  “Beware,” McCracken thought he heard through an unseen speaker before their car fell into a steep drop. They skidded atop the water briefly before approaching what looked to be a full-scale sea battle between a war galleon and a fort, complete with flashes and bursts of water from near misses. He knew this part of the “Pirates” ride was contained primarily underground amidst the tunnels, which gave him no reason for comfort.

  “There he is, Blainey,” Wareagle signaled, focusing on the car two ahead of them now passing through the center of the battle.

  But McCracken’s eyes had already been drawn to movement upon the battlements of the fort, brilliantly re-created beneath a fake night sky awash with gun smoke.

  “Fuchs’s fucks,” Sal elaborated as he glimpsed figures taking cover behind the fort’s facade. He shifted position in the car and steadied his pistol. “How the fuck they beat us in here?”

  “Colonel’s got Disney’s cooperation. His people got access to underground doors we don’t even know exist.”

  The fort stretched across the entire length of an imaginary shoreline, its highest points rising toward the illusion of sky. While the fort might not have been real, the cover it provided behind circular gray-brick parapets and atop the raised battlements was just what the gunmen needed. Directly across from it, the warship Davy Jones exchanged imaginary fire through cannon that recoiled behind a thundering crescendo of fire on the command of a robotic captain.

  Joshua Wolfe’s car was passing directly in front of the gunmen poised behind the fort’s facade.

  “Take ’em!” Blaine ordered.

  “Fire!” the puppet captain of the Davy Jones screamed from the ship’s foredeck at the same time.

  The trio’s gunfire was all but drowned out by the fierce sounds of cannon fire reverberating through unseen speakers.

  “Take cover, Blainey!” Johnny Wareagle called, lunging out of the car into the thin stream of water running on the left side of the track’s runner and heading for the Davy Jones.

  All three had abandoned the car by the time the enemy gunmen in the fort took aim and fired at it. McCracken and Belamo ducked behind the galleon’s far side, finding it to be an open, unfinished shell in striking contrast to the elegant replica on the side the customers viewed. The foredeck and cannon ports were real enough, though, and Blaine rushed to the former while Johnny and Sal took up position behind the latter.

  The real fire joined the cacophony of the simulated battle. The only difference was the chips and shards of wood spewing on their side and the concrete pieces of the fort sent flying on the other. The cars passing by after theirs might not have noticed anything was amiss otherwise, or perhaps they thought even that was part of the show.

  Belamo made his way to McCracken’s side on the foredeck. “Figured it was a good time to break these out, boss,” he said, producing a full nine-millimeter magazine wrapped in molded plastic to keep out moisture.

  “Splats,” Blaine winked.

  “Fucking A.” Belamo winked.

  Sal had the Splat bullets specially made by a friend. Inside each was a capsule loaded with ground glass and picric acid. The glass was there to stabilize any premature reaction. Once fired, the bullet distorted, breaking the capsule and allowing the picric acid to mix with lead. The resulting compound of lead picric gave an ordinary bullet force comparable to a forty-millimeter grenade.

  “Give me a minute or so to work my way around behind them ’fore you start firing,” Sal proposed.

  “Reinforcements will have joined them by then.”

  Belamo smiled. “More the merrier.”

  For Joshua Wolfe, the ride passed in terror and second-guessing. He had noticed the gunmen in the fort an instant before the real battle erupted. He ducked low and didn’t look back, because he knew it was Mc
Cracken returning their fire behind him. It had to be McCracken. He lowered himself to the floor of the car and covered his head, unable to tell the real blasts from the fake ones by sound alone.

  As he ducked, his hands went instinctively to the pockets of his baggy jeans, sagging now for want of a belt, and made sure the two vials were still intact inside. He wondered what would happen if he mixed them here, then held the deadly compound out for Fuchs to see from wherever he was watching. Could this be his ticket out? Was there a way to turn the colonel’s strategy against himself? Probably not. Fuchs would have him shot and take his chances.

  The ride narrowed substantially after the sea battle, the car settling as it snaked its way toward the outskirts of a town besieged by pirates. Any of the mechanical marionettes could be Fuchs’s troops made up for cover with guns concealed beneath their costumes:

  A man being dunked in a well for torture …

  Prisoners trying to coax a dog to bring them the keys tucked in its mouth …

  A man selling garishly made-up women as wives to drunken bidders …

  Characters spun madly on turntables, swallowing the imaginary contents of rum bottles while pigs wagged their tails, dogs barked and pistols fired. Directly ahead were the orangy hues from a special-effects fire in a multistory building that rose above the rest of the props. The burning building disappeared briefly from view when Josh’s car approached a bridge. A drunken “man” was hanging a filthy leg over it and Josh stiffened, certain he was real and would shoot him when he passed under.

  Reaching the other side safely, he could barely recover his breath. His car closed on the burning building, its empty windows full of shadows that could belong to those real instead of fashioned. The amber light shone flickeringly over the scene. Josh shut his eyes to wait until the nightmarish ride was over.

  “Hey,” a voice said. “Hey!”

  Josh opened his eyes. Someone was holding the car against a makeshift pier.

  “You wanna step out, please.”

  Josh climbed out of his seat and bolted up the ramp.

  McCracken gave Sal Belamo a full minute before firing the Splats from his SIG-Sauer. As a trio of cars passed between the fake and real battle, the Splats blasted into the facade of the fort and carved huge fissures in its frame, decimating it. Shards of rock were blown backwards in avalanche fashion, even as fake cannon fire coughed up plumes of water not nearly as big as the splashes that resulted when the larger fragments of the fort landed.

  Blaine used six of the twelve Splats, aiming them toward the areas where the largest concentrations of enemy fire had originated. When he was finished, the central portion of the fort had been obliterated from the trio of parapet watchtowers all the way to the waterline. The remnants of wood framing were revealed beneath the pile of rubble that continued to mount as more of the fort crumbled.

  No more fire, real or fake, emanated from within it. Yet in twisted counterpoint the captain of the Davy Jones continued to put up a stand that had turned superfluous.

  “Boss,” Sal Belamo called over the communicator.

  “They finished off, Sal?”

  “You better get over here.”

  “Yes or no?”

  “You better get over here.”

  “Good work,” Blaine said, standing near the results of Sal Belamo’s handiwork.

  The entrance to the rear of the fort where it met the Magic Kingdom’s tunnels was littered with ten bodies, reinforcements who had not reached their positions because Sal had obviously stopped them.

  Sal wasn’t smiling. “Love to take the credit, boss, but I found them like this when I got here.”

  Blaine glanced at Johnny Wareagle, then back at Belamo. “But if you didn’t kill them, who did?”

  FORTY-TWO

  “What do you mean you can’t reach them?” Fuchs demanded of one of his field commanders.

  “Contact lost, sir.”

  “Ten more men were on their way over there.”

  “They must not have made it. I have dispatched another group to find out what happened.”

  “Is the street outside blocked off?”

  “Targets come out of that ride from any exit and we’ll have them. Tunnels covered, too.”

  “Tell your men to stop being selective with their fire. This has gone far enough. Keep me informed.”

  Fuchs had barely signed off when Turk Wills stormed back into the security center, nearly tearing the door from its hinges.

  “What the fuck is going on?” He grabbed Lester Fuchs by the lapels and slammed him against the wall.

  “Let me go, Chief.”

  “The fuck I will!”

  “Those are my men who are dying, not yours,” Fuchs said, trying to sound like he cared. “And the person responsible is one of those we’re after.”

  “Bearded guy?”

  “Yes.”

  Wills released his hold but stayed just as close. “What’s the kid got to do with all this?”

  “They’re together; that’s all you need to know.”

  “I need to know what the fuck is going on, Mr. Washington!”

  “Washington is exactly what’s going on, Chief, and right now that’s me. And I’m telling you that as bad as things are, they’re sure to get worse unless you put every man and woman you’ve got in the park on this while you still have a park to save.”

  Wills moved to the security center’s single window and gazed through the slats keeping anyone on the outside from noticing it was there. Below, Main Street U.S.A. was jammed with people awaiting the momentary start of tonight’s Spectromagic Parade. All his years on this beat and he had never once seen the Magic Kingdom more crowded.

  “Okay, Mr. Washington, what do you want my people to do?”

  “Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the Magic Kingdom, and happy Fourth of July!”

  The voice of Jiminy Cricket emanating from the park’s speakers greeted McCracken, Wareagle and Belamo as they emerged from the building housing the “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

  “Before tonight’s Spectromagic Parade begins, we are proud to have with us a pair of high school marching bands. The first hails from …”

  The trio joined the flow of pedestrian traffic hurrying to get a view of the parade via a narrow street that cut past a series of Adventureland snack shops.

  The enemy gunmen appeared first from within the dwindling line for the Swiss Family Treehouse. Their automatic fire sprayed outward randomly, searching for a bead on the trio in its spill.

  “Jesus Christ,” Blaine rasped, hitting the ground for safety as bodies collapsed around him. A wave of panic surged through the crowd, which splintered in all directions. Bullets began to pour forth from both major avenues accessing Adventureland as well.

  From the ground, McCracken fixed his eyes on a fence surrounding Adventureland’s most popular ride, the Jungle Cruise. The thick bushes lining it provided the shelter they needed right now.

  “Cover us, Indian,” he said to Johnny. “Meet up again on Main Street in time for the parade. Sal?”

  “Ready, boss.”

  Crouching, McCracken and Belamo scrambled off behind Johnny Wareagle’s fierce covering fire. They lurched upright the last stretch of the way to the fence and catapulted over it, landing in a thicket of brush that looked like it belonged in the Amazon.

  The Jungle Cruise featured the wildlife, vegetation and local color of a number of rivers, including the Amazon, the Nile and the Congo. Blaine could hear a tour guide going through a humorous litany of some of the attractions as he pulled himself along through the foliage, Belamo just behind him.

  They heard a series of thumps to their rear, evidence of pursuit coming through the dense thickets. For Blaine suddenly the all-too-clean smell of the junglelike greenery was gone, replaced by the sticky, dank stench of other jungles in Vietnam. He was back in his element, feeling at home. Those jungles had made him into what he was. He signaled Sal on. Belamo resisted briefly, then obeyed, forgi
ng ahead of him. McCracken camouflaged himself in the undergrowth and waited.

  He took down the first man who passed by slamming an arm in low at his ankles. The man thudded to the ground and Blaine smashed a rock into the back of his skull.

  Regaining his feet, he pressed onward, passing a jungle hut besieged by a family of robotic gorillas. When he heard the sound of brush crackling nearby, he took cover behind the hut. He reached up and grabbed a stringy vine, pulling it toward him so it draped across the thin path on a diagonal. Then he sank down amidst the overgrowth.

  The second attacker loomed closer, automatic rifle in hand. The vine Blaine was holding came up level with his chest. He had started to duck beneath it when McCracken sprang, yanking the vine taut around his throat, twisting and tightening. The man’s face purpled. Blaine kicked his legs out and pushed him low into the brush as he kept the pressure up until the man stopped struggling.

  He moved on again, past the voices of the cruise leaders in each of the jam-packed boats, which became the only thing disturbing the illusion of the real jungle for him. The distraction did not stop Blaine from sensing the approach of two—no, three—more men. He couldn’t risk taking them out with gunshots. The noise would draw untold reinforcements upon him.

  Sliding forward, he came to a clearing where an explorer had been captured by spear- and knife-wielding headhunters going through their programmed gestures and movements. The enemy footsteps shuffled louder behind him as McCracken entered the headhunters’ den. This might all have been an elaborately staged set, but the props were real enough, the knives and spears both sharpened at the tips.

  Ready for use.

  Seconds later, the enemy trio converged on the headhunters’ camp and made their way to the river’s shoreline to see if their quarry had chosen the water for an escape route. Blaine waited until all had passed his prone position beneath a pair of headhunters wielding spears before he sprang. He rose with a spear in each hand and hurled them outward. One found the throat of a short attacker, while the second lodged in the face of a taller one. The third swung about in a panic before the knife thumped into his chest, and he rolled down a slope toward the shoreline. McCracken dragged his corpse behind cover just before one of the cruise boats slid by.