Ancient Shores Read Online Free

cockpit before the pilot had time to react. The little girl with the smile did not even seem to know what was happening.
    Someone in a white shirt, with his tie loosened, burst from the terminal and charged the plane. But he was too far away. The fire roared over the fuel tanks. Max had taken only a few steps before he realized it was hopeless. He stopped, waiting for the explosion, knowing it was already too late, almost wishing the blast would come and end it.
    The little girl had been watching him, and now she saw the fire. Her expression changed, and she looked back at Max.
    Max never forgot those eyes. Then the man with the tie bolted past, his shoes making clacking sounds on the concrete, and Max called after him that he would get killed. He got to the plane, fought the door open, and went inside. Still the girl stared at Max. Then hands drew her away from the window.
    And in that moment it went.
    The aircraft erupted in a fireball. The blast of heat rolled over him as he fell face down on the apron.
    Max had found out who he was.
     
    People rarely recognize the significant moments of their lives without the assistance of hindsight. A trip downtown to buy a book results in a chance meeting that ends at the altar. A late taxi leaves one stranded with a fellow traveler who becomes a friend and who, two years later, offers a career move. You never know.
    Max had experienced a turning point shortly after the incident at Fort Collins, when a weekend of planned seduction went wrong and he found himself with nothing to do on an otherwise pleasant spring Sunday. Friends persuaded him to attend a warbirds air show, and he met Tom Lasker and his Avenger torpedo bomber.
    Lasker was a flying farmer with several thousand acres up on the border. He had just purchased the Avenger at an auction and was having second thoughts when Max, looking for a lunch partner, came upon him and saw first the plane and then the big weather-beaten man seated beside it, staring at it, his wooden chair turned backward, his rough features creased with concern.
    The Avenger was battered; it sagged, and its paint was flaking off. But something about it touched Max. He was a romantic at heart, and the Avenger was pure history, lethal and lovely and in trouble. It was his first intersection with an antique warplane. And it changed his life forever.
    “It could use some work,” Max had told him.
    Lasker spoke to the plane. “I think I got carried away,” he said.
    Which is how Max got into the antique plane business. He cut a deal and spent the next few weeks restoring the Avenger. He subcontracted to replace the engine and tighten up the hydraulics. He installed state-of-the-art electronics, applied fresh gray paint to the aircraft, and gave it a new set of insignia. Battle stars gleamed on its fuselage and wings, and he drew a crowd when he flew it into Fort Moxie to turn it over to its owner.
    That had been a reluctant transfer. Lasker was pleased with the results and handed Max a generous bonus. His wife, Ginny, came with him, and she was ecstatic when she saw what he had done. That earned Ginny a permanent place in Max’s affections. She posed in front of the plane and insisted on going for a ride. Lasker had taken her up and circled the town for a half-hour, buzzing the water tower, while Max waited in the office. When they came back, they all went out to the farm, and Ginny laid out a roast-beef dinner. They drank and talked long into the night, and Max slept in the guest room, as he would do many more times.
    Max had been restoring antique warbirds ever since.
    The colonel and Molly Glory had both approved.
     
    Max cruised down through cloud decks in the early evening toward Chellis Field outside Fargo. The P—38 felt good, felt damn out of this world. But he had lost the high bid, and the company would have to begin the process of a sale all over again. It was unlikely he would do as well next time.
    Still, Max thought of himself as more of an