Firestorm: A Prosecution Force Thriller (The Prosecution Force Thrillers Book 5) by Logan Ryles

Author:Logan Ryles [Ryles, Logan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severn River Publishing
Published: 2024-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

44

Port-au-Prince, Haiti

Corbyn parked the King Air on a cracked concrete pad alongside the mountaintop airport, and Reed and Turk hit the tarmac. The moment his boots struck Haitian soil, two things hit Reed in the face like boxing gloves.

The first was the heat—brutal heat, infinitely worse than Tennessee. It was tropical, thick like a cloud. Humidity so dense it suffocated him. The broiling sun hung almost directly overhead, working to turn this place into a griddle.

The second was the chaos. He could feel the tone of desperation and disorder even from just outside the airplane. Across the airstrip Reed saw a pair of U.S. Air Force C-130 Hercules cargo planes baking in the glare, soldiers of a half dozen different nationalities clad in United Nations uniforms working to offload crates of dry goods and emergency stores. Reed could tell by the markings on the pallets that they were military supplies—probably MREs and medical kits for the United Nations peacekeepers stationed here, but none of the order and precision Reed was accustomed to expecting from a U.S. Air Force supply drop was present. What he saw instead was anarchy. A spilled pallet here, a forklift buried in the mud at the edge of the tarmac there. A woman shouting into a bullhorn while the soldiers blatantly ignored her. Air Force pilots seated on crates beneath one of the Hercules’s sprawling wings. Other aircraft gathered in jumbles wherever parking space could be found.

It was mania. And they weren’t even close to downtown Port-au-Prince.

“Bloody hell, it’s hot out here!” Corbyn dropped out of the King Air with a pair of aviator sunglasses pressed over her face, already panting and scrubbing sweat away. Reed looked past her, scanning the airfield for something other than an aircraft. He located a small motor pool near a collection of mobile offices—Toyota SUVs, deuce-and-a-half military trucks that appeared two or three decades outdated, and a small number of Humvees painted in dingy white with un inscribed on their doors.

Reed jabbed his chin toward the Humvees, and Turk nodded. “I’ll get the gear.”

“What now?” Corbyn asked.

“Find fuel,” Reed said. “Then stand by.”

Corbyn grunted. “For how long?”

Reed accepted a rifle case and a backpack from Turk. “For as long as it takes.”

“That’s not reassuring,” Corbyn said.

“You having second thoughts, Top Gun?”

Corbyn shot Reed the finger. He tossed her a radio handset from the backpack.

“We’ll keep you posted. Be ready to go wheels up, quickly.”

Reed shouldered the backpack and scooped up the rifle case. Turk fell in beside him, and the two of them set off across the tarmac, boots squishing over the boiling hot asphalt. None of the UN soldiers who gathered around the fuel depot or the C-130s paid them any attention. Reed thought that the bulletproof vests and sidearms probably helped with that. There was no order in this place. No central command. No detachment of Marine MPs to regulate access or secure the area.

This wasn’t a military base. It didn’t even feel like a civilian airport. It had more in common with a war zone—and Reed knew all about war zones.

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