Pure Heat (2 page)

She'd only been at the helibase for a day, but there was already a rumor mill about the woman sitting in the pilot's seat. Carly didn't care. As long as the pilot didn't bank and run away, they were good. Now Carly could see the fire, and that was all that really mattered. Ground chatter on the radio had told her that the smokejumpers were fighting a losing battle against the head of the flame. Against one head. She could see that the flanking line they were trying to clear wouldn't be ready before the fire climbed up to them.

The fire had started with a wilderness camper who'd had the good sense to call it in as soon as they lost control of it. They wouldn't be so happy when the Forest Service sent them the bill to fight the fire. The entire forest was posted with the USFS's highest warning: all burning forbidden. Every pointer on every warning sign had been swung over to the far end of the “extreme danger” red zone.

This was an easy hundred-thousand-dollar blaze. If they didn't kill it fast, it would be many times that by tomorrow. One saving grace was that there were no homesteads out here to burn. When you started burning million-dollar homes perched on scenic hillsides, then costs started adding up quickly.

The fire was still just a Type III, so she could work as Incident Commander—Air on this one. She radioed Rick that she'd be coordinating directly with the Incident Commander—Ground at base. She was trained and authorized to serve as ICA on fires right up to a monstrous Type I response, but she found it incredibly distracting to set up each little aircraft run and her bosses at MHA agreed. Her skills on the big fires were best used as a Fire Behavior Analyst. As an FBAN, her job was about predicting the shifts and changes of a fire rather than the hundreds of tiny details of fighting them minute by minute.

This fire had climbed the western face of Saddlebag Gap, splitting from a single tail at the campfire into a dozen different heads, each fire front chasing up a deep-cut valley etched into the landscape, carved by ten thousand years of trickling streams.

Most of the heads were dying against a cliff wall at the upper end of their little valleys, leaving long trails of black behind them. Smoldering black tree trunks denuded of all branches and foliage were all that remained. Their shoulders were yet wrapped in the lingering smoke of dead and dying fires. They'd need heavy mop-up crews to check it all out, but there shouldn't be any real problems.

Three separate heads were still running hot, finding more fuel as they climbed to the ridge, not less. They fired showers of shining sparks upward into the climbing smoke plume that darkened the sky ahead of them.

The pilot tipped the Firehawk helicopter and headed toward the embattled smokejumper crew on the ground.

“No, wait.” Carly hadn't finished understanding the fire from their vantage point five hundred feet above the ridge crest. Most Army hot-rodders thought you fought fires down between the branches. It was a relief that this one didn't, but would she get close enough when it mattered?

The pilot pulled back to a hover, and Carly could feel the woman inspect her. Rumor was that the pilot almost never spoke, except to her husband and her newborn girl. Carly could appreciate that. She tried to recall the silent woman's name but decided it wasn't important. Time enough to learn names if the new pilot lasted.

The flames climbing toward the fire crew were bad, but the crew had an escape. They could forge a path through that notch in the ridge and down the other side, ahead of the fire.

The number two head from the north was clawing up the ridge with no one to stop it yet. It radiated a malevolent, deep orange, as if saying, “I'm going this way, and just try and stop me. I dare you.” The next sticks of smokejumpers would be here shortly. That's where they needed to jump.

“Base, this is ICA Thomas. How many smokies in your next load?”

“Three sticks, Carly.”

“Roger, jump all six of them on the number two head. Out.”

The number three head…

“That's the one.” Carly pointed for the pilot. “That's the bitch. Hit her. Hit her hard.”

The pilot didn't move. She was just looking toward Carly again, her face unreadable behind silver shades.

They simply hovered five hundred feet above the ridge, dancing on that margin between enshrouding smoke ahead and below, and sunlight above and behind.

Had she nerved out?

“The crew's okay for now. We'll drop more smokies on number two. Number three is going to cross the ridge and burn into the southern slope. Then we're in a whole new world of hurt.”

No nod. No acknowledgment. Frozen for half a moment longer. No waver in the hover, a good trick in the jumpy gusts that heat-blasted first one way and then another above a fire. Carly now felt as if she were the target of study. As if she were the one being assessed, analyzed, and mapped instead of the fire.

“Drop in twenty seconds, chief.” The pilot spoke over the intercom with absolute surety, warning the crew chief in the back to be ready on his fire-dump controls. “Fifty percent drop in three hundred feet of flow, so give me a dial setting of two for two and a half seconds. Eight-second hold and then the second half of load.”

Evans Fitch, who'd been silent so far, acknowledged with a simple “Ready.” That was weird because normally Evans was one of those guys who couldn't shut up.

He had flown a training run with the woman and had simply described the flight as “Serious, man. Real serious.”—whatever that meant—in his atypically abbreviated speech, as if the pilot had stripped him of his voluble word supply.

Not counting Carly as spotter, there would normally only be one person flying in the Sikorsky Firehawk, but with a newbie pilot, even one who came with helitack certification, they were overstaffing. Evans was manning the duplicate set of drop controls, which connected back to a console in the helicopter's cargo area where everyone except the pilot and copilot rode. Carly would have to decide how long they needed to have Evans at the backup controls.

The woman's numbers were wrong. The drop length was okay, but the turn couldn't happen that fast. Before Carly could protest, the helicopter dipped and turned so sharply that Carly found herself hanging on to the edges of her seat so she wouldn't be thrown against the harness. The rotors beat harder through Carly's headset as they dug into the air, thrusting the Firehawk toward the third head of the blaze.

“Winds?” the pilot asked.

Carly blinked as they dove into the smoke. Visibility alternated from a hundred yards to a hundred inches and back as they plunged toward the maelstrom. The heat in the cabin jumped ten, then twenty, degrees as they flew into the hot smoke over the fire.

“Pretty mellow, steady at fifteen from the west-northwest.” She could tell by the shape of the smoke plume and the slight movement in the droopy-topped hemlocks still outside of the fire.

The pilot simply left a long enough silence to remind Carly that she wasn't stupid and had known that. Of course, any decent pilot knew how to read the winds at altitude. The woman was asking about the real-world winds, a hundred feet over the treetops. That was a whole different question. As a pretest for planning a parachute jump, the smokejumpers would spill out weighted crepe-paper streamers that would twist and curl in the thousand conflicting air currents that battered above a raging fire.

“Chaotic. Winds can microburst from forty knots to zero and back in a couple seconds, and the worst of that occurs vertically. Horizontally, the winds will carry more or less up the slope, probably about thirty knots and chaotic at the moment. The winds are better at two hundred feet, much more stable.” She offered the woman an out.

“But the retardant is best at a hundred feet.”

Carly considered. “In these tight canyons, yes, if you can get it in the right place.” The accuracy would be better, and the tighter spread would provide heavier coverage per acre. That would be an advantage right now.

Through the next visibility break, Carly could see they were already at the hundred-foot mark and moving fast. She glanced down at the unfamiliar console, needing a moment to spot their airspeed. Damn, but they were moving fast.

The pilot returned to her silent mode, and Carly worked the numbers in her head while she held on. Dial setting of two would be about right at this speed, if the flame retardant landed in the right place.

A loud bang could be heard even over the heavy beat of the Firehawk's rotors. A tree had just gone off like a bomb. Superheated until the pitch didn't ignite, it exploded. A thousand shards of tree in every direction. But the pilot had them moving fast enough that they were in the clear on this one. Not even the bright patter of wood chips against the fuselage.

“Drop in five, four, three, two, one. Drop now. Now. Now.”

Carly more felt than heard the mechanical door opening on the thousand-gallon tank of flame retardant mounted under the belly of the helicopter. Most pilots drifted higher as the load lightened. This pilot was good enough that their altitude remained steady. Even better, the pilot held the same height above the treetops as they dipped into the valley, then climbed up the other side. She'd seen pilots who tried to hold stable to elevation above sea level. They either learned fast or were thrown out of the service. It was fine in a chaparral fire, but up here in the mountains, firefighting altitudes always had to be referenced from the terrain or you could fly straight into a mountain.

Leaning into the curved side window and twisting to see what she could, Carly pictured the pattern of the red mud. With a slight arc, half of the mud landed just at the very leading edge of the fire, and half on the trees just ahead of the flames. Textbook perfect. Normally, you'd attack the flank, narrowing the fire to extinction. But here they didn't have that luxury. By the time they flanked it, the fire would be over the ridge. It was still small enough now that maybe they could just cut its throat.

She'd counted to two and half, then again felt the slight vibration through her seat as the dump hatch's hydraulics slammed shut. The Firehawk helicopter somehow went from a hundred and twenty knots in one direction to a hundred and twenty in the other.

Carly couldn't quite tell how they'd done it so abruptly, though her eyes did momentarily cross from the g-force that knocked the air out of her lungs like a punch.

Some part of her mind had continued to count seconds. At eight seconds, Evans popped the retardant hatch again even as the pilot repeated her call of “Now. Now. Now.” Somehow, impossibly, they were lined back up on the fire. It had taken a hard-climbing turn to avoid slamming into the wall of the valley that they had been crossing laterally. But again, they were just above the top edge of the flames, bouncing through the rough edge of superheated air currents bolting for the skies.

Carly sat on the uphill side, making it so that she couldn't see exactly where the pilot placed the drop. That was a good sign. Beginners thought that dumping the retardant directly on a fire did something. It really didn't. Retardant had to be dropped ahead of the fire. It was a sticky, nasty goo that clung to branches and bark like heavy glue, tinted bright red so that you could see where it lay. It cooled the unburned fuel that the fire sought and trapped the oxygen-laden air away from the wood so that it couldn't burn. No oxygen, no fire.

So this second pass, if the pilot did it right, should be laid just upslope from the first pass, overlapping to allow for the different direction of flight to coat the back side of some of the unburned trees and branches that had been coated in the first pass. But mostly the second pass would be targeted on the untouched and yet unburned trees. All to create a wider swath of protected fuel.

This one drop of retardant wouldn't be enough. Carly could tell that by the rough ride of the Firehawk helicopter through the air pockets as they hammered down into the valley and back up the opposite slope. They'd need another load right away, and probably two or three after that, to cut this head. The fire-heated wind roared up the valley too hard, too fast. Even the wide barrier laid down by the near-perfect drop wouldn't stop this beast.

But they'd sure slowed it down.

The ex-Army pilot hovered once again over the point of the ridge, turned so Carly had the best view of the fire below.

Carly keyed the radio.

“Tanker base. This is Firehawk Zero-one. Come back.”

“Tanker base. Go ahead.”

“Three heads. We hit north hard. You'll need two flanking loads to trap it. But first load we need water and foam on top of the crew on the south head. They're jumping the next couple sticks of smokies into middle head. Over.”

“Roger that. Out.”

“Out.”

Even as she took her hand off the mike switch, she saw the jump plane, MHA's beautiful old DC-3 twin-engine, with the next round of smokejumpers. The plane was swinging above a high meadow not far from the middle head of fire. Two brightly colored paper streamers spilled out into the wind. They fluttered and twisted, showing a strong draft up the valley but no chaotic crosswinds. She'd seen the winds tie smokie streamers in knots while they still turned in the air. The smokies would be watching them intently to decide their best approach.

The plane turned again, and on the next pass, four jumpers spilled out, two sticks. The smokies' rectangular parachutes popping open in a bright array of Crayola red, white, and blues. In contrast, their heavily padded and pocketed jumpsuits were a dusky, dirty, soot-stained yellow.

As the plane circled to drop the next stick of jumpers, the pilot spoke, breaking Carly's reverie as she watched the choreographed ballet of a coordinated fire attack.

“Seen enough?”

“Roger that. Let's get another load.”

The nose of the chopper pulled up sharply. In some kind of crazy compound maneuver that Carly had never experienced before, the body of the helicopter spun on its axis. Now they were equally abruptly nose down and moving fast back toward the firebase. Not one wasted moment of motion.