In the Hour Before Midnight Read Online Free PDF

interesting,” I said. “But tell me something, Sean. Where would I have been sitting right this minute if this Sicilian business hadn’t come up? If you hadn’t needed me?”
    He stared at me, caught at one fixed point in time like a butterfly pinned to a collector’s board, tried to speak and failed.
    â€œYou bastard,” I said. “You can stick your hundred thousand dollars where grandma had the pain.”
    His hands came apart, fists clenched, the skin of his face turned milk-white with the speed of a chemical reaction and something stirred in the depths of those grey eyes.
    â€œWe’ve come a long way since the ‘Lights of Lisbon,’ haven’t we, colonel?” I got up without waiting for a reply and left him there.
    In the cool shadows of my bedroom, anger possessed me like a living thing and my hands were shaking. There was sweat on my face and I opened the top drawer in the dressing table to search for a handkerchief. Instead I found something else. A pistol—the kind of side-arm I had always carried, a replica of the one the Egyptians had relieved me of on that dark night a thousand years ago—a Smith and Wesson .38 Special with a two inch barrel in an open-sided spring holster.
    I fastened the holster to my belt slightly forward of the right hip, pulled on a cream-coloured linen jacket I found behind the door and slipped a box of cartridges into one of the pockets.
    I found a pack of cards on a table in the living room as I knew I would where Legrande and Piet were around, and went out, taking a path down the hillside to the white beach below. One way of releasing tension is as good as another, and in any event it was obviously time to see if I’d forgotten anything.

FOUR

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    I N FACE - TO - FACE COMBAT , any soldier in his right mind would rather have a good rifle in his hands than a pistol any day of the week. In spite of what they say in the Westerns, a normal handgun isn’t much use beyond fifty yards and most people would miss a barn door at ten paces.
    Having said that, there’s no doubt that with someone who knows what he’s about, there’s nothing to equal a good handgun for close quarters work.
    I used to favour a Browning P35 automatic which is standard issue in the British Army these days, mainly because it gave me thirteen shots without having to reload, but automatics have certain snags to them. Lots of bits and pieces that cango wrong and no professional gunman I’ve ever met would use one from choice.
    In an ambush at Kimpala, I had a Simba bearing down on me like an express train, a three-foot panga ready in his right hand. I shot him once then the pin fell on a dud round. It doesn’t happen all that often and in a revolver, the cylinder would have kept on turning, but this was an automatic. The Browning jammed tight and my friend, doped up to the eyeballs, kept right on coming.
    We spent an interesting couple of minutes on the ground and the memory stayed with me for some time afterwards. From then on I was strictly a revolver man. Only five rounds if you leave one chamber empty for safety, but completely dependable.
    When I got down to the beach, it was calm and still, the sea like a blue-green mirror, the sun so strong that the rocks were too hot to touch and light bounced back from the white sand, dazzling the eye and objects blurred, became indistinct.
    I took off my jacket and loaded the Smith and Wesson carefully with five rounds then hefted it first in my left hand, then in my right. Already the old alchemy was beginning to work. Heat burned its way through the thin soles of my shoes, scoured my back, became a part of me as this gun was apart, the butt fitting easily to my hand. Nothing special about it, no custom-built grip or shaved trigger. A first-rate, factory-made deadly weapon, just like Stacey Wyatt.
    I took out the pack of cards, lined five of them up in a thin crack on the edge of a lump of