Pure Heat (18 page)

“Hey there, Major. My, how the mighty have fallen.”

Steve wiped a hand across his face, trying to wake himself up. He lay facedown on a picnic table, one of the few amenities of this tiny, western Oregon airport. Skyport. Yeah, right. A rusting hanger and an office that was half garden shed. In the hangar crouched a pair of 1970s vintage Air Tractor 300 crop dusters, and in a dilapidated barn, a Cessna 150 that would never again see the skies rusted quietly away.

Now Skyport airfield sported the Firehawk, the two empty jump planes, three trucks of retardant, a fuel truck, and his trailer parked along the grass and gravel runway. A little after sunrise, the other choppers would start arriving.

On the table, the garishly red-and-white remains of last night's buckets of chicken glared at him. When he sat up and managed to focus, he saw a short woman saluting ICA Henderson. She was about as opposite of Carly as possible. Seriously built, and clearly had no problem sharing. Her tight shirt and its open buttons did a lot to fire the imagination, even if he was too exhausted for anything else to fire off.

Henderson saluted back smartly. Right, military. Steve rubbed his eyes again. Hard to forget that after the way Henderson had driven everyone last night.

Steve figured they'd had three hours of sleep, and he was betting that Henderson had even less. Yet he looked as sharp and together as the woman facing him in matching mirrored shades.

Steve tried to pull some semblance of order back into his clothes before looking around. First thing he spotted was Carly. She'd at least stretched out on the ground before passing out. Someone had tossed a blanket over her. Might have even been him, but he wasn't sure.

Light, sunrise. Well, kind of. The stars were fading into the pink horizon. Dawn in half an hour, flight in an hour. They'd had their three hours of sleep.

He just wanted to curl up under the blanket with Carly and tease her awake to make love as the sun rose. She looked so comfortable.

He kicked the sole of her boot.

She rolled to her feet without so much as a pause. How did she do that, asleep to awake between one moment and the next? Steve needed coffee, preferably intravenously, before anything else happened today.

Then he noticed that Carly hadn't actually moved yet. She stood there weaving and blinking her eyes against the predawn light. It made him feel a little better.

“Planet Earth,” he told her. “In a mythical land called Cornelius. The only Cornelius I ever heard of managed the Philly Athletics for almost fifty years. Weird to name an Oregon town after a Philadelphia ballplayer.”

“Hero of
Planet
of
the
Apes
,” Carly mumbled at him and dropped onto the opposite bench just as he managed to stand.

Henderson was bringing over the woman with the chest.

Slightly more conscious, Steve also noted black hair with a gold streak and skin the color of a really exceptional tan. Big smile, way too much energy.

Steve dropped back to the bench.

“These two live wires are the core of the fire control team. Steve Mercer, Carly Thomas, Kee Stevenson.”

Steve tried to wave. Carly simply groaned and laid her head on the table as his had been.

Beale wandered up without her kid.

The salute that this Kee Stevenson gave Beale was a whole different story than the cocky one Beale had aimed at Henderson, even though they were both majors. Even though they were both retired. Suddenly the woman went all stiff and rigid, the salute was picture perfect and held tight until Beale nodded back.

“You really landed us in bumfuck nowhere, Major.”

It was true. The Skyport was a mowed strip between two fields of shoulder-high corn. Five miles west of where the outer parts of Portland's suburbia petered out. Five more miles to the Coast Range and the Tillamook State Forest. But here at Cornelius, there was nothing.

“We're about to break out of Class G into your Class H,” Beale announced, ignoring Kee's comment. “Rick is flying in to take overall command as this is definitely a Type I incident already.”

Carly sat up like someone had injected her with adrenaline.

“How soon can we get a bird in the air?” Carly shot at Henderson. Then she turned west. Even in the faint light, Steve could discern the brown and black cloud of smoke rising from beyond the horizon.

“Gray bird is up and circling from last night.” They'd launched the drone an hour after landing at Skyport, but he'd kept it well clear of where he'd lost the first one. He and Carly headed for the Firehawk.

Henderson stopped them. “First thing, I want the black-box bird aloft.”

“Ten minutes.” Steve broke into a run.

“Then I want you to show Kee last night's recording,” Henderson called after him.

“Then get her ass over here.” Steve didn't look back to see if she followed.

***

Steve had the black-box drone on the rail in three minutes.

“This looks way different.” Carly stroked a hand down the fuselage, all angles and strange curves that felt slick rather than hard like the metal of the other drones. And the gray-box ones had been black with MHA's fire red. This was odd, dark gray above and painted a pale blue below.

He handed the checklist to Carly. She tried to read it but couldn't quite get her eyes to focus yet.

“You didn't see this bird,” Steve said. “I'm not even supposed to launch it in daylight if I can help it.”

“You aren't, yet. Sun is still fifteen minutes off. I think.” But his comment only made it all the more intriguing.

“The paint job is designed to be very hard to see against the land from above or against the sky from below. The surfaces are all curved for stealth, antiradar. If someone out there is still watching, they really shouldn't see this one as it flies over. It's also much faster, carries more payload, but it can only stay up for four hours instead of twenty.”

She read off the details of the wing-attachment section of the checklist, but Steve had them on even before she finished. She started on payload mounts.

“Shit! Where's Henderson? Find him. What gear does he want rigged?”

Steve didn't even look up to see the ICA standing behind him.

“Radiometer and biohazard sensors,” Henderson answered before she could ask. “And put on a target-lock tracker. I'd like to know more about who's shooting at you.”

Carly saw Steve shiver for a moment before reaching back into the case and pulling out three objects, two the size of a calculator, the third as big as her two fists.

Kee breezed right up. “Sweet. Even we don't have these yet.”

“That's because they don't exist, Sergeant. Clear?”

Carly watched Kee slant a look at the Major, but her reply had none of the bravado of a moment earlier. “Crystal, sir.”

Carly looked back down at her checklist and did her best to read off the instructions for Steve, but she couldn't.

“Radiometric,” the list informed her, was for detecting trace radioactivity. A small table listed distance, reading strength variations along flight path, and cross-referenced possible relevant bomb types and yields.

She swallowed hard against a dry throat and skipped that section to start reading out the electrical hookups, taking comfort from Steve's steady and precise hands as he inserted the detectors behind the cameras.

After the black-box bird launched, Steve let the shakes run through him. It took him three tries just to get the screwdriver back into the goddamn toolbox.

He'd read and signed all of the crazy paperwork MHA insisted on but not really thought about it until he'd seen Carly's face go sheet white while reading the instructions.

Nuclear bomb detection. She hadn't read the table aloud, but he could tell the instant she reached it. Her eyes were normally wide and welcoming—except when she was pissed at him, which was often enough. But now they had shot huge. The thought that there might be a nuclear bomb twenty miles to the west was freaking him out.

Were they inside or outside the blast radius? How about fallout?

How the hell was he supposed to know? He sure wasn't going to ask. Better not to know.

He reached for the console controls but couldn't make his fingers work. So he sat on his hands in the back of the parked Firehawk, hoping that would steady them down.

Now all of those clearances and background checks made sense. There'd been rumors about Mount Hood Aviation, the kind you laughed off as being silly. The rumors had been around as long as MHA. Sure they'd always been firefighters, flying choppers since the sixties.

But rumor said they'd purchased the old Air America fleet from CIA operations in Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War. Other rumors said they still flew on-call CIA black ops.

Stupid. It was all stupid.

He felt the Firehawk shift and glanced over his shoulder. Carly climbed aboard and rested her hands on his good right thigh as she sat on the cargo-bay deck. Kee moved up close and squatted so that her eyes were level with his. Henderson and Emily climbed in and sat in the seats in the middle of the bay.

Two retired Army majors. No, two retired SOAR majors, a much more serious proposition. And this new lady, Kee of the crisp salute.

One thing was damn sure. He should have read those papers a lot more carefully when he was signing them.

***

Steve shut down the replay of last night's loss of his drone. The five occupants of the Firehawk remained silent. The two console screens now just dark eyes staring at him.

He looked down and brushed his hand over Carly's hair where she sat cross-legged on the deck beside him. He did it as much to reassure himself as her.

Kee had changed while watching the video. The wry humor she'd aimed at Henderson was simply gone. Now her focus was complete and she was actually as scary as Beale. She'd had Steve run it a half-dozen times in normal light and then in infrared. She'd asked about wind speeds and air pressures. He gave her what he could.

“Definitely a Strela-3. A little too slow to be the 2M and way too slow to be any of ours. Even the old Redeye was faster than that. They've got the Igla now, don't know why they even make these damn things anymore.” She still squatted close beside Carly as if she could stay that way for hours without moving.

“Russians wouldn't waste time with those, but they still sell them to a couple of dozen other countries. These things are a real pain, especially because any damn fool can buy and operate one. They practically give them out like candy.”

“But”—Carly's voice was impressively steady—“what are they doing in our Oregon forest?”

Kee looked out the door for half a minute, and neither of the Majors interrupted. This was the woman they'd called within minutes of determining his drone had been shot down. Steve kept his mouth shut as well.

“Do you have a current image?”

Steve flipped over to the surviving gray-box drone that he'd launched last night after arriving here.

“I've been keeping this one circling over the fire all night, but every time I get to the north end, I take an IR capture of the same coordinates. Keeping my damn distance.”

“Strela-3 is only good to four kilometers, so two and a half miles should keep you clean.”

“I'm closer to five miles out, but the resolution is pretty good.” He ran the series of images.

“No infrared movement. No people or vehicles moving about.”

“Not that show through the trees.”

“They're either under cover or dug in.”

“How far is the fire?” Carly was keeping tabs on it all.

“Nine miles, almost ten. Right now at least. The way it's moving, if we can't stop it, the fire will pass well west of that site.”

Henderson glanced out the door, and Steve followed his gaze across the empty airstrip. Predawn dusk.

“These are the worst visual conditions. How soon can you do an overflight with the black-box drone?”

Steve turned back to the console and flipped over to the second bird's control frequency. “How high?”

“Five hundred meters, but don't slow down to admire the scenery.”

Steve set up the run and programmed it in.

“Two minutes out.” He'd brought it in close while they were looking at the other images. Creepy to think that whoever had shot him down was close enough that he could fly the drone there in under fifteen minutes.

He slipped his fingers into Carly's where they still rested on his thigh. It was kind of cool to do that. He'd never been much of a hand holder, but being with Carly was making him a convert.

Except Carly's hand was freezing. He cupped it between his hand and his thigh to warm it. Maybe this wasn't so cool. Maybe this was also scary as all hell. What kind of crazy back in the hills didn't like drones and shot one down with an old Russian surface-to-air missile?

“This doesn't sound like a moonshiner.” At first, Steve hoped that it wasn't a moonshiner. He'd had enough of them. Of course, what if it were something worse?

“Nor a survivalist,” Carly added.

And she was right, it didn't.

The actual overflight happened so fast that he could barely see it.

Once it was done, Steve rolled back and scrolled through the data more slowly. “Negative on radioactive and negative on biohazard. At least that's what this stuff says. There's some reading here I'm not sure of, but not biological.” He felt the relief sigh through his body, a tension he hadn't realized that he was holding.

“K-band,” Kee said, sounding disgusted as she read the data on the screen. “They've got a damned cop's radar speed trap aimed at the sky.”

“Okay, Steve, bring that bird home, long way round. Then you and Carly get focused on the fire.”

Henderson made it sound like an order, and Steve wasn't about to complain. No real chance of K-band radar spotting a black-box drone, even if he came back the same way. The gray-box one would have stood out just fine, though.

“So,” Carly said, looking up at him and squeezing his thigh. “Maybe it is just some crazy survivalist.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” He glanced up at the other three over Carly's head. But they were looking at each other in some kind of silent conversation.

Kee casually turned back to the monitor.

“Think I'll go for a walk.” She tapped a short fingernail about four miles south of where the drone had been shot down. “You can drop me right here on your first pass at the fire.”

Steve looked back at the Majors and decided he didn't like the sudden itch between his shoulder blades. It felt as if a target were painted there.

He stroked Carly's hair again to keep her distracted from seeing their grim expressions.