multiple figure environments spanning across page

Question

I am using the IEEEtran package and have three figures A,B,C which are propper figures (\begin{figure}...\end{figure}) containing pgfplots. I now want to display A,B,C next to each other spanning the page:

+-------+
| A B C |
|.......|
|.......|
|.......|
+-------+

I cannot remove the figure environment from either of the figures as they all need different captions and different labels

As a working example:

File test.tex

\documentclass[conference]{IEEEtran}
\pagestyle{plain}

\usepackage{multicol}
\usepackage{pgfplots}
\usepackage{tikz}


\begin{document}

\begin{figure*}[t]
\begin{minipage}{0.33\textwidth}
\centering
\input{fig-test}
\end{minipage}
\begin{minipage}{0.33\textwidth}
\centering
\input{fig-test}
\end{minipage}
\begin{minipage}{0.33\textwidth}
\centering
\input{fig-test}
\end{minipage}
\end{figure*}

\end{document}

File fig-test.tex

\begin{tikzpicture}
\begin{axis}[
xlabel={X},
ylabel={Y},
legend style={cells={align=right},at={(.5,0.975)}},
legend columns=1,
    ymin=0,
    ymax=1.1,
    legend columns=1,
    xmin=0.9,
    xmax=1,
]
\addplot[line width=1] table {./general-test.txt};
\legend{A,B,C,D,E}
\end{axis}
\end{tikzpicture}
%}
\caption{This is a caption.}
\label{fig:reduce-type}

File general-test.txt

Stable  number
0.242   0.1
0.900   0.1
0.905   0.1
0.910   0.1
0.915   0.1
0.920   0.1
0.925   0.1
0.930   0.1