Pure Heat (17 page)

“Why does it take twice as long to dress when someone is watching?” Carly asked him in a soft voice, barely louder than the pounding rotors of the descending Firehawk.

Steve didn't know, but it was certainly true. “Your T-shirt is on backwards.”

“So?” She shot a nasty look at him. She was still naked below the waist and maybe thought him overly picky.

He traced a line connecting the tips of her breasts, appreciating how they responded to his lightest touch.

“It makes them labeled as ‘Goonies.' Just thought you'd want to know.”

She stared down at her labeled chest for several moments and then did one of those female armhole things and got it turned around without taking it off.

He scrambled to pin down the last of the lunch fixings and one of Carly's socks, which was about to be blown away by the downblast of the helicopter's descent. He only had one foot in his shorts. Hadn't worn underwear because the only pair he'd brought had been soaked in the river this morning.

“Can't say why it takes so long, but you're a damn fine sight in any state, Ms. Thomas.” About time he used the name she'd insisted on the first time they met.

“Go to hell, Mr. Mercer.” But her grin was game and the quick kiss that followed wasn't too quick. It lingered long enough to burn down to places in him that really would be better not heating up at the moment. Definitely not until he finished pulling his shorts back on, at least.

They zipped and tucked, and stuffed laces into boot tops. They were on their feet by the time the Hawk was fully settled a hundred yards away.

As they climbed the slope to the waiting chopper, Steve couldn't help but notice the way Carly moved. Loose-hipped, but still ready to walk over the back of any fire that dared get in her way.

She was the embodiment of the perfect woman, with an amazing body that responded in ways even his fantasies had never imagined, a heart so sweet it put strawberries and fresh flowers to shame, and a determination of spirit that he'd never met in his life.

He managed to catch up with her despite how fast she was moving. As they ducked their heads to stay well below the sweep of the rotors, he leaned in close to be sure he'd be heard.

“Love you, Angel.”

He hadn't meant to say that.

Not at all.

He shocked himself to a standstill.

He'd only wanted to thank her for the best afternoon of his life. But once it was said, he knew it was true.

He really did love her. He'd never told a woman that, not since his junior prom when he'd still been young enough to think it was a lightweight word to be tossed about casually. Julie Ann had corrected that assumption damn fast, and he'd worn the hand-shaped outline on his cheek for several days to drive the lesson home.

Carly made it three more steps before stumbling to a halt and turning to face him with denial forming across her features.

The rotors spun overhead and everybody aboard watched them.

Slowly, her head began to shake back and forth.

Steve shrugged, at a bit of a loss.

“I'm afraid it's true.”

He had to shout it to be heard.

***

Steve had to bodily turn her and push her toward the chopper. Carly's brain was in full spin and she couldn't get her bearings.

He caressed her ass shamelessly as he helped her aboard.

And it felt great.

But, her mind shouted, what about the being-in-love-with-her part? That definitely wouldn't do. Shit! It was goddamn impossible!
No
way
in
hell, mister.
Great sex, sure, but she hadn't signed up for love. No way. Never again.

Carly tried to meet Steve's eyes, but failed in the hustle of getting aboard and secured.

Steve strapped in beside her among the coolers and other gear hastily stowed aboard. They perched on a half-deflated air mattress.

They pulled on headsets as Henderson, again at the controls, lifted them skyward.

“Welcome aboard, campers.”

Carly's eyes focused. Everyone was aboard. They were the last. Oh crap! Her cheeks felt as if she'd just walked through a raging fire.

“First,” Henderson announced as he pointed the chopper north and put her nose down into it, “I think we need a round of applause for a fine, fine show.”

Everyone turned and started laughing and applauding. Chutes and Betsy. Oh God, Uncle TJ and Aunt Margaret.

Carly's cheeks went from hot to flaming, but when she went to raise her hands to them, she discovered that Steve held one tightly, their fingers interlaced.

She checked his face. He might be grinning, but at least there was a blush under his tan. Wasn't there? At least a little?

“Second,” Henderson continued, his voice dropping and alerting Steve that here was the real reason they were on the move with so little notice. He glanced out the door at the sun, down in half an hour. As far as Steve could tell they were arrowing back to base, and by the sound of it and the tilt of the chopper's nose, they weren't moseying along as they had on the outbound journey.

“Who here can tell me what the Tillamook Burn is?”

He felt Carly's grip convulse in his. Her face, such a splendidly brilliant pink a moment before, was now ghost-white. A glance forward showed all of the locals in a similar state. TJ and Margaret had also clutched hands, and Chutes and Betsy looked grim. Akbar was leaning out the door as if he could see the couple hundred miles to the northwest. Steve knew Tillamook was on the coast somewhere, but that was it.

Only Steve himself and Tori appeared not to be in the know.

Carly's voice was thin when she spoke. “It was the worst disaster in Oregon fire history, 1933 to 1951. Four fires in the Tillamook State Forest, every six years like clockwork. It kept burning and reburning, and they could never control it. A third of a million acres, about five hundred square miles of old-growth forest. If you take out the overlapping burns in different years, it was over seven hundred thousand acres. Over a thousand square miles.”

The silence was deafening.

Henderson had to clear his throat, not once, but twice.

“Well, according to the first alert report, the Tillamook Burn is, ah, burning.”

The Firehawk hit Hoodie One camp right about full dark. The alert had come in too late in the day for even the smokies to get onto the fire. You didn't jump in the dark, no matter what was happening.

They cooked up a game plan while they flew, and Merks hit the ground running. With Carly's help, they had a drone up at full dark. An achievement celebrated with a high five and a kiss that curled Steve's toes.

Steve Mercer was in love. Wasn't that a news flash? About as unlikely an occurrence as batting a thousand.

They'd only known each other for a single week, but he could see the vista of what lay before them. As clearly as he'd seen the rolling hills covered in blooming fireweed. A vista of lazy mornings waking together and lively nights without enough sleep. A vista that he knew to keep to himself for the moment.

He fired up the console in the back of the truck and had the bird circling above the helibase fifteen minutes after they hit the ground. Carly sat so close beside him that he could feel her body heat in the cooling evening. He grabbed his sweatshirt that he'd left on workbench and wrapped it around her. His own body was still running plenty hot to keep him warm.

Somehow, Henderson wrangled an emergency clearance for unmanned flight. The flight plan from the FAA got Steve's drone to the Tillamook State Forest in under two hours, without traveling anywhere near Portland airport's traffic patterns.

At eleven at night, he finally flew the drone over the fire. He and Carly sat in the back of the truck and traced size, wind speed, and terrain.

Henderson hovered close enough behind them that he kept bumping Steve's elbow as he tried to control the aircraft.

Steve ran his heat trace app.

“Shit! It's already a high end of Class F in size, Class G in another hour or two. We're headed into another Type I fire, and at this rate, it will be an ugly one. The second Type I in as many weeks. This can't be happening.”

“Anything bigger in area than G?” Henderson was clearly searching the copious training he'd received.

Steve knew he wouldn't come up with anything. Because there wasn't. At least not in the books.

Steve and Carly spoke in near unison. “H is for Hell.”

***

“There.” Carly pointed and Henderson leaned in.

Steve flipped to infrared and overlaid the roads. The synchronicity between them was almost like sex. She barely had to think something and Steve was there.

“Fly the smokies to Skyport Airport in Cornelius. Get them in Jeeps, and run them in on Route 6. They should be able to get alongside the burn here on…”

Steve zoomed in on the obvious road until she could see the name.

“Cedar Butte Road.”

Henderson pulled out a walkie-talkie. “TJ. Launch the smokies, land them in Skyport, and have off-road transport ready.”

“Roger that. Out.”

As she spun to face him, the jump-plane engines roared to life.

“You didn't put TJ back on active duty?” She phrased it as a question but loaded it with enough venom to kill a lesser man than ICA Henderson.

“Active
radio
duty.”

“Oh.” Carly swallowed her anger as hard as she could. “Okay.”

“I was thinking with his experience and at the rate we're growing, it might be a good permanent spot for him. Mike's been training him and signed him off yesterday.”

Carly closed her eyes and rocked back in her seat as the wave of relief hit her.

“Really?” She barely dared voice the hope. After the last accident, she couldn't stand the thought of her uncle getting in harm's way again.

“I think he'll take a little convincing, but he knows it's the right choice. Akbar is more than ready to step up to Ground One.”

She couldn't help herself. Carly threw her arms around Henderson's neck and kissed him quickly. He patted her back in a fatherly gesture that had her sitting back and feeling awkward.

TJ out of the fire was worth far more than a bit of embarrassment.

She could hear the planes taking off. How did they get airborne so fast?

Henderson must have seen the question on her face. “The crews loaded an hour ago and have been napping on the planes. Everyone except the heli-crews are already on the road in support vehicles. The choppers are prepped and waiting for first light.”

“Oh.” He'd reassigned TJ and did his job well despite her doubts. And he'd done a nice job cleaning her fish. Maybe she could unbend a little.

“Uh… Well done, I guess.”

He grinned down at her. “Coming from you, that's a high compliment indeed. I need a tape recorder. Steve, you got one handy that I—”

“What the hell?” Steve's curse had them both spinning back to the console.

The screens were blank.

“I had a good signal. I was flying her high up so that I could keep a good signal, since we're out near my range limits. I had it good, five-by-five, and then suddenly it's gone.” He tapped some keys. “Not responding on the backup frequency either.”

“Is it the bird or…”

Steve was scrolling back through the recording on the right-hand screen to when he'd lost the feed. All he had was a black screen, even though Carly could see the time counter scrolling backwards. Suddenly the screen was filled with data and the bright infrared image of the fire.

He found the last few seconds of image and rolled it back and forth across the loss of the feed from the drone.

“Where are you?” His voice was harsh, angry.

Carly read the coordinates. “You're way ahead of the blaze.”

Steve nodded. “I was circling out. Figured if it was lightning strikes, there might be other fires. I wanted to make sure that we only had the one blaze that we were fighting.”

“Good idea.” She rubbed his shoulder, knew he'd be stressed about losing the signal on the bird.

“The real problem is if it's still flying.” Steve brought up the last high overview of the fire. “I started on the edge here, then I set the autopilot into an expanding circle.” He traced a growing spiral around the fire. “With eighteen more hours of fuel, it could cause all sorts of trouble. Shit, it's got to be here somewhere.”

He returned to the last few seconds of video and rolled it back and forth again and again. One moment there was the fire image with an overlay of airspeed, humidity, altitude, position, and who knew what all. Carly didn't recognize half of the numbers. The only ones changing were the clock and its position in the air. Then nothing. All of the data ended at once.

“Shit!” Steve pounded a fist down against his thigh, then gasped in pain.

She reached for him, but he pulled away.

“Sorry,” he muttered before she even had time to get really hurt. “I'm going to be in a foul mood until I find that bird.”

He scrolled back further and let the feed run again in real time.

Once.

Twice.

A third time.

“There!” Henderson pointed at the screen, but Carly didn't see anything.

“Scroll back.”

They watched the recording again.

“Right there.”

Steve slapped Stop.

“Roll back a couple of frames.”

“There. Can you enhance that?”

Carly looked at the tiny slash of red on the screen. How had he even noticed that? And why would he care?

Steve fussed with it for a bit, bigger, blurrier, orange then green, then back to red. His movements on the console were as concise as they'd been on her flesh. Carly shoved the thought aside. They had bigger issues, not even counting the fire.

“Uh, that's about the best I can do.”

“Okay, keep those settings, just that segment of the field of view and roll forward slowly.”

“Two seconds to signal loss.” The infrared showed the streak for about half a second and then a slow fade. The rolling greenery of the unburned forest just a ghost in the background. Then nothing.

“Roll back.” Carly had seen something. Her eye had recorded it, but she couldn't quite pin it down. “Just a couple frames before the signal loss.”

Steve finally pinned down the final four frames. He spread them across the screen.

It wasn't what she was seeing; it's what she wasn't.

“There. What's missing?”

Neither Steve nor Henderson answered.

She arced a finger across the lower quadrant of the screen. “No forest, no rolling hills. Something is blocking the image.”

“Shit!” Henderson pulled out his radio but didn't key it. “How high were you?”

“Three thousand feet above ground.”

“That would make it just under a thousand meters in two seconds.” He keyed the radio. “Hey, Em?”

“Here,” Emily's voice came back.

“Check my memory on the speed of a nine-kay- thirty-four.”

Carly looked at Steve, but he just shrugged.

“About four hundred and seventy meters per second sustained. As high as four ninety if the air's thinner.”

They both turned to watch Henderson's response to his wife's information, but he was staring blank-eyed straight ahead at the wall of the truck. His posture held frozen for several seconds.

Carly noted that Emily didn't ask why. Simply waited while her husband pieced that information together with whatever else he had. Was that how they flew? Nothing extra. Just precisely what was needed with a perfect trust that the other would do the same. Was that why they spoke so rarely but were inseparably close? Maybe they could think each other's thoughts or some such.

Henderson rekeyed the radio, his voice perfectly calm and cool. “Could you call around? See if maybe Kee or Connie wants a little R and R.”

“Why,” Carly asked, “are you talking about rest and relaxation when there's a fire to fight?”

Henderson ignored her.

“How soon?” Emily's only response to a situation that must make no sense to her. A seriously action-oriented couple.

“Daylight would be good. Tomorrow sunset at the latest. We'll be leaving for Skyport Airport in thirty.”

“Roger out.”

“Out.”

“And that's it?” Carly asked on Emily's behalf. “Not even going to tell her why you're asking?” He didn't strike her as a dictatorial jerk, but maybe her initial assessment had actually been the right one.

“That's it.” He clipped the radio back on his belt as if nothing were out of the ordinary. “I'm not going to transmit sensitive information on an unencrypted circuit and she knows that.”

Then his eyes refocused. He'd taken off his ever-present shades to see the screens better, his gray-blue eyes reminded Carly of hard steel.

“And neither will either of you. This information is classified. You are not to discuss it with anyone without my prior authorization. Absolutely no radio traffic on this.”

“I'm not.” Carly stood up in the truck so that she didn't have to crick her neck back so far to look up at him. “I'm not taking orders from you. We're firefighters, not your precious SOAR.”

“Carly.” Steve rested a hand on her arm but she shook him off.

“Well, Mr. Mercer.” Henderson's voice was easy, belying his hard-eyed gaze still fixed on her. “You'll be moving your trailer again, so get it wrapped up tight.” He reached out a hand and tapped the two black cases on top of the racks beside him.

Steve flinched.

Carly hadn't seen Steve touch those cases before so she hadn't noticed them herself, but there was clearly something going on here.

Henderson stepped off the tail of the truck and slid his glasses into place, despite it being the dead of night. The effect was surreal. His eyes hidden behind mirrors, he looked almost mechanical, as dangerous-looking as the fluid guy in
The
Terminator
movies.

He aimed the twinned reflection of her and Steve into the back of the dimly lit truck.

“You may want to recall the agreements you signed with Mount Hood Aviation when you officially joined.” They'd given her a bunch of paperwork, and she hadn't paid much attention to why they wanted to know so much. They promised her the Fire Behavior Analyst's slot, and that was all that mattered.

Henderson turned to leave.

“Wait!” Steve stopped him. “What happened to my bird?”

Now Steve was pinioned in Henderson's gaze.

“Your bird, Mr. Mercer, was just shot down by a Russian-made Strela-3 surface-to-air missile. Now get your ass moving.”

Then he was gone into the night.