Pure Heat (19 page)

The fire was ugly.

Carly sat in the back of the Firehawk studying the overnight images of the fire and trying to stuff down an egg sandwich and plasticized hash browns someone had rustled up in town. Thankfully, they'd also brought back some wonderfully huge cups of really bad coffee. At least it was strong, which was all she really cared about.

She tried another view on the console but didn't have a real feel for the controls yet. Steve had showed her which menus she could use before going out to pack up the returned black-box drone.

He made it look so easy, a click here, a roll of the mouse there. But what she had was shit.

By the time he climbed back aboard, she almost cried out with relief.

“You make it look so damned easy.”

She started to climb out of the chair, but he leaned in and trapped her with a kiss. For half a moment, irritation rippled along her skin. She needed to see the fire. The next half of the moment, she was leaning into the kiss and reveling in its confidence and reassurance.

Then she pushed back enough to speak. “Damn it, Mercer. The fire.”

“Yeah, I can feel it.” He aimed one of his saucy grins her way but eased her out of the chair. He slid in front of the controls, his fingertips trailing deliciously over her hip as they finished trading places.

“Love you, Ms. Thomas.”

Her knees let go. She did her best to mask that as she knelt on the cargo-bay deck.

“Don't say that!” She hissed it at him even though no one else was around.

He shrugged. “New for me, too. But I'm kinda enjoying it.” Then his smile proved that she hadn't hidden her complete discomfiture from him for a single second.

Well, her body was now more awake than her brain was. Before she even had her breath back, he had set up a time lapse of the changes through the night.

She watched the fire's perimeter change and shift. Saw the center die out, then reignite to burn anew.

“It's like someone is breathing straight down on the center of it. The damn thing is spreading in like five different directions.”

“Fuel.”

He had a point. The Tillamook Forest was supposed to have undergone a controlled burn a dozen times in the last twenty years. But the environmentalists wouldn't let it out of court. At first it had been the crowd that was against the controlled burn. The ones who didn't yet understand that burning up all the crap on the forest floor let the forest live longer.

By the time they were convinced, about a decade ago, the watershed people kicked into gear, and then the endangered-species set. Finally, there was just too damned much tinder on the forest floor and no one dared light it off. You didn't do a prescribed burn in the middle of a box of kindling.

Now someone or something had, and a half-dozen square miles had become fully involved in the first day.

“The smokies who drove in last night are here, cutting this line along the northeastern flank.”

Carly leaned in close over his shoulder. Close enough that she could feel his warmth and the strong, male scent of him. The safe, warm feel of him so close. Those crazies back in the woods had scared her half to death.

Now, only the fire mattered. She could deal with that, but she didn't pull back from the comfort of being close to Steve.

“Run the time loop again and include the footage from the first drone as well.” This time she let herself watch the fire and feel what it had done. Watched it spreading along valley lines, eating fuel wherever it could be found when the winds were calm at sunset. Then legging west in the evening with the land breeze.

“Again.”

The very end of the loop showed the beginning of the southeast push that would normally be traveling down the coast this time of year. So it wasn't actually growing in all directions simultaneously, but the winds were working it that way.

“Zoom in here. More, more. Put a marker here.” She tapped the screen, and Steve clicked in an orange flag.

“Really? How in the hell do you figure that?”

“Point of origin. Bet I'm within a hundred yards.”

“No bet.”

Carly had an evil thought, one that just might distract Steve from his “being in love” nonsense. She bit his ear lightly.

“You sure you don't want in? I'll bet an hour of time as a sex slave that I'm within a hundred feet. But it will cost you double if I'm within fifty.” She wasn't that positive, but she figured it was a no-loser bet.

He groaned. “How can I pass up a chance like that?”

“Good, you lose. Tell the investigators to start right there.” It was a valley, not a ridge. Probably not a lightning strike. A couple of hiking trails crossed the wilderness right there, the end of a fire road close by. Sloppy camper or hunter most likely. “Have them check the end of this fire road for recent usage.”

Steve kicked out the message while she watched the tape loop again. “Damn, it really is growing in every direction.”

“There. That's your helispot.” Steve zoomed in to show her.

Beale climbed aboard and began preflight on the chopper. Henderson stuck his head in.

“You two gonna make me proud?”

Carly grinned at him. “If you start by moving the retardant tankers up to this pullout across from Elk Creek Campground on Highway 6. Trees are too tight for us to be dipping a snorkel in the river.”

Henderson pulled out a radio and got them moving. She could hear the diesel trucks start up and leave the airfield. They'd obviously been in position awaiting instructions.

“Rick Dobson is on-site in another twenty minutes from Crater Lake. He has two more teams of smokies en route. Missoula and Sacramento each gave him one. He says they're here in two hours.”

“Here and here.” Carly drew two lines along the fire's northwest side. “See if we can pinch off at least one direction.”

“Tankers will start flying in about half an hour. Rick is setting up Incident Command at Hillsboro Airport five miles east of here. That's where the tankers are running from as well, so they'll have a fast turnaround time.”

“Why are we here instead of there? Five miles doesn't make any difference, and they've got to have better coffee.”

Henderson simply pointed at the black case locked up on the trailer.

“Oh.” Far fewer eyes in the middle of this mowed farmer's field. “We're going to need everything we can get, and no bad winds.”

“Yeah, about that. By midday tomorrow, we've got some bad news rolling in from the southwest.”

Carly bit back a curse. That was too soon. No matter what they did, they couldn't make any real headway on a blaze of this size in just two days.

Don't think. Just fight what's in front of you. That's all you can do.

She clambered out, giving Steve's shoulder a squeeze as she did so. The simple gesture made her feel better, far better than it should if he really were just a lover. The girl in the mirror was smiling smugly at her about something.

As Carly climbed down, Kee came up and sat on the edge of the cargo deck. She didn't climb aboard, just sat there as if that's where she was going to ride, feet dangling out into the wind.

Except, it wasn't Kee. Before, she'd been a sassy civilian in shades and a shirt so tight and unbuttoned so low that Steve hadn't been able to drag his attention away from her serious chest. Carly knew she herself was lean and no competition for that kind of a build.

Then she thought of Steve's kiss and knew his eyes might travel, but it wasn't Kee that he was really watching. And he did say he loved her, which was still freaking her out.

But now Kee was in heavy camouflage. Bits of grass and rope that looked tattered like weeds were draped over most of her body. A substantial backpack was strapped to her back and a gun, almost as long as she was tall, hung slantwise across her chest.

“Holy shit.”

Kee flashed her a grin through the green-and-black makeup. Her helmet as masked as the rest of her.

“Just going for a walk in the woods.”

“Uh, sure.” Carly thought back to yesterday—was it just yesterday?—when she and Steve had worn boots, shorts, and T-shirts for their walk in the woods. The most dangerous thing in their lunch-sized backpack was a pocketknife.

All of the creeped-out nerves that had faded away as she worked to understand the fire slammed back in.

“I thought this was no big deal. Aren't there like, I don't know, cops or something to send?”

“Nearest fire roads are half a mile in any direction. Not even any hiking trails through there, at least no official ones. They chose their place very carefully. Bet they have alarms on the roads. I know I would. And they fired a Russian SAM, granted one that's a decade or two out of date, at a poor little drone. Specifically at a surveillance drone, which means they knew enough to distinguish that from Joe and Martha flying their Piper out to the coast.”

Carly swallowed. “Uh, makes sense.” Made her head hurt. “Why you?”

“Because she's the best.” Emily leaned over between the seats. “Now climb up front if you're coming.”

Carly glanced up at the rotors starting to spin overhead.

When she looked back down, Kee was staring transfixed at Emily who had turned away to finish a chat with her husband.

“Doesn't give compliments much?” Carly asked Kee softly.

The woman just shook her head slowly. “Not ever.” Her voice was barely a whisper.

As they flew to the fire, Beale started chatting with Kee Stevenson like old friends. It was one of the strangest conversations Steve had ever listened to.

Beale was flying a Firehawk toward some crazy survivalist with a surface-to-air missile. Kee was sitting idly on the edge of the cargo bay as if her feet weren't dangling three thousand feet over the ground.

“How is Dilya?” Beale could have been serving up tea with that voice.

“Sprouting. I swear she grows an inch a day. Passed me by last month some time. She could end up tall as Archie.”

“Pretty unusual for an Uzbekistani.”

“Pretty unusual for an Uzbekistani to be eating five decent meals a day. And she's still as thin as you, Major.”

Steve checked Kee's coloring again. Green-and-black camo paint. Okay. But he'd seen her clearly this morning. She was pretty much a white chick with Asian eyes and dusky skin.

“She and Archie are hanging out with Peter and Calledbetty this week,” Kee continued, ignoring the spiraling descent of the chopper.

“Spending a lot of time at it. You okay with still being in?”

“Sure. This is what I do.”

Steve saw her pat her rifle like an old friend.

“But I like Archie being in DC more than if he's in the field. Better for Dilya.”

“Drop zone in ten.”

“Roger, Major. You keeping your kid in the air?”

“She stays up with Mark in a spotter fixed-wing plane most of the time. He knows I will murder him if he actually flies her over the fire, so she's as safe there as anywhere. Carly's dad did the same and it seemed to work out pretty well for her. We'll have to see.”

Steve could feel Carly's silence on the intercom. Emily Beale was using Carly as an example for how to raise her own child.

Beale had been easing down closer and closer to the treetops as they approached where they were dropping Kee.

Steve had become so intrigued with trying to unravel the conversation that he'd forgotten to watch out the door. When he did, he'd have reeled back in shock if he weren't strapped in.

They were slowing and sinking the last few feet.

Kee lifted her feet to clear a treetop that slapped the Firehawk's wheel.

Beale held the chopper with the wheels between the trees.

“See ya later.” Kee handed the headset to Steve, winked at him, and tossed the descending rope out the door.

Steve had expected low profile as soon as he saw Kee's rig, but this was freaky. He could reach out and touch the treetops right outside the door.

Kee didn't even use a rappelling rig, just heavy gloves, the length of rope trapped between her boots, and she was gone. The rope went slack impossibly fast.

He heard a simple squawk over the radio, “Clear.” And then nothing.

He retrieved the line as Beale scooted several hundred meters south before rising out of the trees.

“Who the hell is she?” he asked over the intercom.

“She's married,” Beale answered.

“I got that and it isn't what I was asking.”

To that he got no response.

“Peter,” Carly said over the intercom as if everything now made sense.

And suddenly it did. Beale and Henderson had told the story of a young orphan they'd rescued who now was friends with the President. And Kee's kid was in DC. Peter must be President Peter Matthews.

Steve looked down at the trees to see if he could catch another glimpse of the woman who was both a sniper and an adoptive mother to a friend of the President. They'd already started to climb and head for the fire, which left Kee somewhere lost behind them. Something about her made him feel almost sorry for the crazies with the Russian SAM. They had no idea what was coming for them.

Over the next hour, the full force of the Goonies were pulled in and focused on this latest version of the Tillamook Burn.

Carly kept Steve hopping, trying to have his drone be everywhere at once. All other craft, each at their designated altitude, circled above the fire in a clockwise pattern. Air Attack, the actual runs of retardant or foam, was the lowest layer. Above them in a stack were helicopters, then the air tankers, and finally the Incident Commander—Air in his spotter plane.

Occasionally Rick, as Incident Commander, flew up at Henderson's level. But he spent most of his time on the ground in Hillsboro where a crisis center had been driven in and set up. Dozens of screens fed him everything from Steve's imagery to satellite feeds and weather channels. He'd also have a massive screen showing a terrain map. A half-dozen techs would keep updates on the fire's perimeter and every engine and ground member.

Above them all, Steve had been given a flight space to manipulate his drone as he wished. With the zoom on the cameras, the elevation was of little consequence. At a thousand feet, he was closer than he'd been when he took the image of Carly's face gazing up into the sky in wonder.

Beale starting making trips to the pullout near Elk Creek. Two trucks of retardant were on-site by the time they arrived. To speed loading, they set up a pair of pumpkins. The five-thousand-gallon flex tanks, like oversized pop-up kiddie swimming pools, allowed them to avoid landing the helicopter. They simply flew up, dipped in their snorkel, and forty seconds later they were gone again, a thousand gallons heavier. While they were gone, the tankers refilled the pumpkins.

The smaller choppers had joined in. The 212s dipping their Bambi Buckets to capacity and the MD500 also snorkeling full its belly tank. In a matter of seconds, the fleet had a full load and was turned back toward the fire.

Henderson, in the Beech Baron with his daughter flying copilot, led the two fixed-wing air tankers on tracks called out by Carly. Steve noticed that he flew higher than most guide planes typically would and studiously went nowhere near the flames.

Steve's coffee had long gone cold, and he still couldn't find a moment to get a swallow.

Carly kept the tankers beating against the north edge of the fire. And he couldn't blame her. The Oregon Department of Transportation had already closed Highway 6 due to smoke. If the fire crossed the road, it could be closed for a long time due to melted asphalt and burned-out signs and guardrails.

Steve had pulled up the winds' forecast. They were coming—and coming hard. Tomorrow noon at the latest, they'd be hitting the coast.

“Carly?”

She completed a call to Henderson on the next line to attack, flipped frequencies to the bucket brigade of little choppers, and sent both Huey 212s after some spot fires that Akbar reported through TJ as taking too much time away from the smokies on the ground. Rick shifted one of the ground teams and let her know.

“Go, Steve.”

“Uh, there's a pinch here. I can't figure it out, but there is one.”

Carly didn't ask him what kind of pinch. Didn't need to. It was something to do with the attack plan; he just couldn't find it.

“God damn it!” Steve punched the side of the chopper for lack of anything better to hit. “Shit! Ow!”

“Hard pinch?” was Beale's wry comment on his punching her helicopter.

“Yeah.” He shoved the mike on his headset aside to suck on his bloody knuckles. Tried to keep the hiss of pain to himself. Whatever he was feeling, he knew it was bad and it made him crazy that he couldn't pin it down.

The bucket brigade called in for new instructions.

“Uh.” Carly hesitated barely a heartbeat. “Keep hitting the spot stuff for the ground team at the moment.”

Carly brushed off Henderson as well. “Keep following the same line and give me a minute.”

“Roger.”

“Emily, could you get me some height on this monster, but not up in the smoke?”

As per usual, Beale didn't ask why, but the chopper climbed on long, ground-eating clockwise spirals. Steve could hear her on the radio with her husband getting clearance as she crossed upward through air-tanker space, lead-plane altitude, and finally up past his own drone space above the level of Incident Command—Air, six thousand feet above the fire. With the number of the people now on the fire, Henderson had climbed up and mostly directed the other lead airplanes rather than flying the routes himself to guide the big tankers.

Steve leaned out the side door of the cargo bay, the side he knew Carly would also be looking out because it gave her the best view from her seat. He stuck his head right into the wind to feel the heat and smoke, to taste the burn of conifer so different from the oak he knew so well.

It looked horrible. As bad as the 2009 Station fire in the California hills above Los Angeles or the 2012 Waldo Canyon in Colorado.

Fast little surface fires had swept the browned grasses from all of the clearings. But the deeper, duller orange of ground fire had caught in the dead branches and fallen trees. Those fires were lingering, traveling slowly behind the forefront of the racing surface fires. Settling in for a deep, tree-killing burn. They'd be back to fireweed if they couldn't kill off those fires—and kill them quickly—but they were everywhere. They were so hot that they ignited anything nearby. The burn was even crawling back down from ridges against the slope.

And they were getting some broad sections of crown fire developing now—the fire racing from treetop to treetop, casting embers in the wind. Any remaining crown fires were going to become a disaster when the winds hit tomorrow.

***

Carly looked down and felt numb.

Steve was right. Something was wrong with her attack plan. She'd tried shrugging it off as nerves because of the survivalists. Then she'd tried attributing it to the chills that followed the warmth of Steve's words. She'd only ever loved two men, and she'd lost both to the fire. She wasn't going to risk that again.

But that wasn't it.

The problem lay somewhere below. Something she could see, if she only knew how to look.

The Tillamook Burn hadn't been the biggest in Oregon's history, but it had certainly ranked as the most devastating. Only the Biscuit Fire in the Siskiyou Mountains in 2002 even came close. But during the Tillamook Burns, six hundred thousand acres burned in the two fires that happened during the Great Depression. Money the state lost in lumber sales. It was cash they didn't have but spent on the firefight. Money they wouldn't raise until the late 1940s to start the reforestation. Those two blazes had almost bankrupted Oregon out of existence, and the two that followed hadn't helped much either.

She'd trained her whole life for such a fire, and nothing had prepared her for this. A couple years back she'd flown the Long Draw Fire, a sprawling monster of three-quarters of a million acres. But she hadn't been lead commander. She'd made some of her reputation on that fire, but old Charlie Schmitz had led that one for MHA. Then he'd retired right after. He'd told her he was leaving the fight in good hands.

Yeah, right.

That had been a fast surface fire over rolling grasslands. This was hundred-foot fir trees, tight massed together on steep-walled valleys between thousand-foot ridges. The fuel, heat, and oxygen metrics of the Fire Triangle for this fire were completely different and a hundred times more complex than the Long Draw.

There weren't open spans like Long Draw where you could lay down a wet line, do a backburn in front of it, and hope to God the fire couldn't jump the gap this time.

Even the Coast Range rivers weren't much more than glorified creeks in the heart of the Tillamook State Forest, the branches often touching from each side. A crown fire strode across them as if they weren't even there, though at least it broke the surface fires for a while. Stopped them until the crown fire collapsed onto the forest floor and the whole cycle started over.

Beale circled them around to the south, miles and miles of timber stretched almost to the horizon before the fire would reach anything other than more fuel. The occasional homestead could be defended individually. If the fire burned all the way down to Highway 18, they'd have truly lost the battle. She couldn't think about that right now.

The fire wasn't moving west, so the coast towns were probably safe, but she had to watch that. They couldn't exactly retreat out to sea if an evacuation was needed. They'd only have the winding two lanes of Highway 101 as an evacuation route if it came down to that.

She'd been fighting the north, trying to hold Highway 6 as a line for no particular reason other than it was there. A line in the sand, where she could say “this far and no further.” If the fire jumped the road, which wouldn't even make this monster blink, it would find another five hundred square miles of the same open forest. Except for a few nutsoid survivalists and hermits, nobody lived out there either.

The crews attacking the northeast and northwest flanks, as much as there were flanks, had narrowed the area of attack from five miles wide to about three on the north edge, but they were a long way from closing that gap.

She could glance over at Steve's tablet if she wanted and see the crews, but they were clear in her mind's eye. Three crews of twelve smokies each, almost a tenth of the nation's total smokejumpers, split across the flanks.

Three hotshot crews, totaling sixty guys and a few women, had marched in from as close as their Box could get them. She'd ridden in the MHA Box for only one season but could feel sympathy for them. It looked like a long ambulance with side windows and was used for just that far too often. All the gear you needed to fight a fire for weeks at a time, except for somewhere soft to sleep or a shower to clean up in.

Then continuing her clockwise rotation around the site, Emily showed the east of the fire.

From their altitude, Carly could see from the edge of the fire over the steep hills and abrupt valleys slowly rippling out to eventually flatten out into the sprawling Willamette Valley. The population pretty much ended after Cornelius and Forest Grove, turning into a spatter of farms snuggled up against the foothills.

They had to stop the fire above that, on this side of Henry Hagg Lake at the very worst.

From here, Carly could see what she hadn't when they'd overflown it in the post-dawn light this morning.

“Clear-cuts,” she whispered over the headset.

“Clear-cuts,” Steve agreed. He'd felt the same pinch and seen the problem and solution almost as fast as she had. Damn, but she could really learn to appreciate him in ways other than wrapped together in a blanket beneath the stars.

“Henderson,” she practically shouted into the mike. “Where are you?”

“Ouch! Right here. A thousand feet below and a half mile back.”

“Look west. That's where the wind is going to drive us.”

“Okay, so what am I looking at?”

“Clear-cuts.” Carly couldn't help but feel smug.

“I see them, but what good do they do us? They're so far east that it can't matter.”

“Trust me. If that front comes in as predicted tomorrow, we could have our backs against it by afternoon.”

“No way…” She had to give him credit. He wasn't arguing; he just didn't believe her.

“On the Long Draw, we lost a hundred thousand acres in one night of high winds.”

“That was grasslands.”

“This is cracking-dry conifer,” Carly shot back. “It's a repeat of the first Tillamook Burn. That's what I was missing. Oh damn. That's what this is. It's a bloody replay.”

Carly tried not to be ill right on top of the Firehawk's console. She knew that Beale wouldn't appreciate it, for one thing.

“In 1933, they lost three hundred thousand acres in twenty hours.”

“That's, what, almost five hundred square miles? You have got to be kidding me. Please tell me you are.”

Carly let silence be her answer.

“Shit!”

It was the first time she'd ever heard Henderson curse. She glanced at Emily at the controls. The eyebrows raised above the line of her mirrored shades confirmed how unusual an event that might be.

She could hear Henderson take a deep breath.

“Look, we need more aviation fuel and a new plan. Let's meet back at Cornelius. I'll have some food waiting.”