Pure Heat (22 page)

“Alarms, here, here, and here.” Kee's finger indicated points along the three fire roads nearest the olive slice she'd let fall on the map, at exactly the point where the attack on Steve's drone had originated.

Carly noted that Kee made no notations on the map. Nothing written, nothing where others would see it. Maybe Kee remembered the shape for fortifications the way Carly could remember the shape of a fire. She tried thinking of it that way and found it easier. Burn lines, here and here.

“Trip alarms on deer trails.” She ticked off six more places. “I expect the same pattern around the north, but I didn't waste the time checking.”

Henderson nodded.

“MRUD line starts at two hundred meters out.”

That snapped Henderson's attention from the map to Kee's face. “MRUDs?”

“Well laid, too. Not just the trip wire. They laid pressure antipersonnel mines beneath the trip wire so that you'd blow yourself up while trying to back-trace it to the main weapon.”

“Ah…” Steve held up a hand like an uncertain boy in class.

“M-R-U-D,” Henderson spelled it out, “is a directed-fragmentation mine, like our M-18 Claymore. You know, in the movie
Predator
when Schwarzenegger sets those bent green mines in a circle around their camp. Like those. They'll kill or disable thirty percent of your force at fifty meters, about a hundred and fifty feet. The fact that they also put mines beneath the trip wire means that we're probably dealing with professionals, not just some jokers with a still.”

“Oh. Ah. Thanks.” Steve lowered his hand.

Carly sat there trying to swallow and not succeeding.

“Don't worry. We're not going to send you walking in there.”

Steve made a sound between a cough and a laugh. “Good. I appreciate that.”

“Me, too.” Jeannie looked far more subdued than she had a moment before.

Henderson turned back to Kee. “Is this what I think it is?”

Kee shrugged. “I called Archie. He said hi, by the way, and he had a chat with Frank, Peter's buddy.”

Carly had figured out that when they said Peter, they were talking about the President of the United States. So, Kee had called her husband who'd had a “chat” with one of the President's advisors. What the hell had she stepped in?

“This camp isn't on his list,” Kee continued. “But it's definitely a terrorist training camp. I saw nineteen individuals in full camo. AK-47s, M-16s, handguns, lots of ammo and targets. Didn't see any SAMs, but I'm sure they're your source.”

“Terrorist camps on U.S. soil?” Carly found her voice finally. “In Oregon?”

Kee just shrugged. “Couple dozen that Frank knows about, most of them back East and in the South, couple in California. Protected by the Constitution as long as they don't hurt anybody. Of course, what they're doing is training to hurt people. Makes you kinda love and hate our country at the same time, doesn't it?”

“What I don't understand”—Emily spoke for the first time—“is why did they fire at the drone? Without that, we'd never have known they were there.”

Henderson nodded in agreement. “That's the only thing that I can't make sense of.”

Carly was still back on the white-hot fear of a camp of legally sanctioned terrorists in the depths of her forest. She'd studied the Tillamook Burn. Knew the first word and last on what had worked and failed in the four historical firefights: crown fires that blew over firebreak after firebreak, ground fires that reignited behind the crews, and embers so hot that they refired the black.

It was a wonder that only one person had died. The only thing that had beaten the first Tillamook Burn back in 1933 had been a fogbank followed by the September rains, putting it out three weeks after a logging crew started it by accident. Five hundred square miles had burned in the first fire alone.

How many times had she flown over those woods and pored over the maps, studying the terrain so that she'd be ready if this happened?

“I'm sorry to say, I can probably answer that.” Kee put down her pizza and studied her hands for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was soft.

“In the center of their compound is a single body staked out on display. He may have still been alive, but I don't think so. Something had been eating him, feral dogs perhaps. I don't think the folks running the camp were happy with him. I considered putting a round in him as a mercy, but knew you wouldn't want to risk spooking them. I expect he was your shooter, firing without orders.” She reached for her half-finished pizza, then appeared to think better of it. “It, ah, wasn't pretty.”

Wasn't pretty. Carly was going to have nightmares from even that concise description.

“They didn't appear to be on the move. High alert, yes, but no signs of packing up.”

“Steve.” Henderson didn't sound surprised, just rock steady.

Carly tried to draw strength from that and the viselike grip Steve had on her hand.

“I need a black-box flight again. This time I want thermal and radar imaging. Everything inside the circle Kee just mapped out. Anything as warm as a mouse, I want its exact location. Radar to show me every bit of metal bigger than a toothpick. Use a band they can't see. And I need to keep an eye up there. The very moment they move, I need to know.”

Carly was asleep under a blanket, lying in the back of the Firehawk cargo bay. She'd been exhausted by orchestrating the firefight all day and the intensity of the crossover meeting. Still, she'd managed to stay up with Steve until he'd completed the first passes over the terrorist camp.

Now Henderson and Kee were sitting with Steve in the Firehawk. Beale and Jeannie were asleep somewhere, probably in the barn. They had to pilot tomorrow, at least Beale did. A crew had shown up to look at the little MD. If Steve leaned out of the Firehawk, he'd be able to see their work lights as they removed broken pieces and inspected the rear rotor's drive system for other damage. Jeannie would be going nuts if they didn't have it fixed by morning.

He had the best overlay image he'd been able to build up on the main screen.

“Here's their alarm line.” Kee traced it on the tablet and Steve captured the line as an image overlay. “Here's the line of antipersonnel mines.” An inner ring.

“My overlook was twenty meters up a tree here, probably one of these.”

Well inside the circle of mines. Steve looked at her again. You wouldn't look twice at her on the street, except to admire her. She was his age, short, built. “Pretty” is all any male would register. Not “trained sniper able to penetrate enemy camps wholly undetected.”

“There were four guards in well-camouflaged hides inside the mine perimeter.”

They'd been so well shielded that he'd had to fly the drone barely two hundred feet above them to pick them out. He'd sent the drone flying a near-silent crisscrossing pattern to map everything.

He'd had to struggle; he hadn't used this part of the software before except for that one day of training. Once he had someone located, he was able to place a follow tag on them. That was normal enough to make it easy to track the whereabouts of fire crews. But the software could also do a trace-and-follow. If someone moved between drone readings, the program would see who had moved and conjecture as to the path of each individual. Anyone in motion left a light trail behind them that faded slowly.

“Twenty-six total,” Steve announced.

“A lot of metal in this area.” Henderson pointed.

“Kitchen,” Kee answered. “Residual heat from the stove or fire.”

The area did glow hotter than the other areas.

“More metal here.”

“Weapons cache.” Kee leaned in, then back as Steve zoomed in on it. “A lot of little stuff, rifles and the like. Enough stacks of ammo boxes, if that's what those are, to shoot up a small city. Looks like they have a couple more SAMs over here along the side. But what's that big guy there? Or is it two of them?”

“If it's radioactive or biohazard, the sniffers couldn't taste it last night.” Henderson didn't sound happy.

“Chemical or explosive?”

Steve pulled the readings back up from the prior night and studied them. He looked at the help menu. Instead of an entry, there was a phone number.

He looked at Henderson.

“Call it.”

“It's three in the morning.”

“Call it.”

Steve had wondered why a phone and headset were built into his control console, and now he knew. Leaving the phone on speaker, he clicked on the number and it was answered on the first ring. Rather than a greeting, he received a recording, “Control-shift-click the reading packet. Enter your pass code and click Submit.”

He did so. Within seconds the auto-voice announced, “Packet received. Hold, please.”

How civilized that someone had programmed in a “please.” It was about the only thing that kept Steve's nerves steady enough to work the keyboard.

“Is thermal image available?” The recording again.

“Uh, yes.” That odd delay while voice recognition software waited to see if he'd finished speaking.

“Control-shift-click the image file. Enter your pass code and click Submit.” And a few moments after he sent it, “Packet received. Hold, please.”

“Hi, mate.” An Aussie voice sounded so loud that it echoed in the cargo bay of the silent Firehawk. “Aw, that's a beaut. I haven't seen a FAB-250 in just an age.”

“Who…” Henderson wagged a finger at him and Steve stopped. He tried again. “Uh, what can you tell me about it?”

He cranked the volume down, hoping not to wake Carly, but saw that it was too late. Her eyes had opened, though she didn't move from under her blanket.

“This is Russian made. Actually these. Looks like you got a stack of two-by-two here. A kiloton if used all together, figure a quarter of that is casing and such, still make a bloody big bang. Can't tell the era, but I'm guessing old. Love to get up close with this beauty. You see the wedge tail…” Steve didn't but would take the guy's word for it. “Rather than a circular one. Chances are it was dug up rather than purchased new. You see, in 194—”

“Could you”—Henderson cut him off—“give us some idea of the damage radius?”

“Nothing much, each one on its own is just a little girl. Take out your average city block. Useful on a high-rise, too. Used together, if you could get these old ladies to trigger together, pressure wave and fires could take out a small city core.”

“Right, thanks.”

“Pleasure, mate.” And the line went dead.

Steve looked over at Carly and saw her staring back at him. He really wished she'd slept through that.

“Okay, Steve. Need you to keep sharp today.”

Henderson. He couldn't have slept any more than Steve, so how could he sound so damn cheerful? Steve hunched against the cool dawn at the picnic table. His eyes were open, but that's all he could lay claim to.

“We're into the fire Day Three. Winds are coming, and I want you to tell me the very instant anything moves up there in the north.”

“Uh.” He tried to shift into smokie mode. When jumping a fire, or before that when working hotshot, you got used to sleep deprivation. Sometimes three, even four days between breaks for any shut-eye. Get right into hallucinations and you could still work the line if you knew how. But now he'd be flying two drones and keeping close lookout on the fire and a terrorist camp. That was a different tale.

“Sure,” he managed and clambered to his feet. Henderson slapped his shoulder hard enough that Steve almost face-planted in the cold pizza he'd been considering for breakfast. But it looked like a squirrel or something had snuck up on the picnic table last night and stripped off the crusts. Apparently the local squirrel wasn't a fan of cheese or pineapple.

Steve scrubbed his face again, wishing to find some coffee by the time he stopped.

“Here.”

He opened his eyes and there it was, Carly's hand holding out a giant cup of coffee.

“Oh God.” He took a sip, scalding his mouth. “Oh God, you have to marry me now.”

“You better be joking, Mercer.”

Steve managed to focus his eyes on her face. Scowl and squint. Didn't scare him anymore, not the way it had those first couple dozen times. It meant she cared.

“Don't know.” He took another hit of coffee and almost wept with relief. “We'll just have to wait and see if I'm joking.” Actually, he didn't know himself, not for sure.

“Damn you!” But it was a soft curse, mostly under her breath. Then she clearly reset her face with a subject change, gentle smile, normal gorgeous eyes. “Did you get any sleep last night?”

He shoved a hand through his hair, then shook his head sadly.

“You got about three hours,” he informed her, and she looked as fresh and beautiful as ever. “Wish you'd had more. Sorry about that. Wind is coming today.”

She stood beside him and leaned lightly into his shoulder. They just stood there, waiting for the sun to climb into the sky.

“This one's going to be hard.”

That he knew without looking at the ash-filled skies.

Carly studied the progress as they flew toward the fire.

The ground crews had run right through the night.

The northern crews still hadn't managed to close the gap. Every time they squeezed the fire's flanks closer together, the fire shot out to the north, east, and west, squirting a half mile at a time in fantastic leaps that were both beautiful and horrifying.

The west and south crews had kicked some serious ass. They'd somehow played the fire right, firebreaks across where the night's land breezes tended to gather and drive the fire hard, and simple ground work where the winds didn't rip flame from one tree to the next faster than a man could run.

Carly got the air tankers laying beautiful long strips of red retardant on the west and south side in support of the ground work. It took dozens and dozens of runs with the air tankers to back up the magnificent ground effort. The air tankers could lay down a half mile per load a hundred feet wide. They had to cover ten miles of the west edge of the fire and four more across the south. Overlapping passes from both directions, three runs wide.

As the western and southern heads of the fire finished consuming the black, the fire ran head on into a firebreak backed up by trees soaked in retardant. And it died. It fought and struggled, spit and sparked, shot embers into the superheated air hoping for a good little spot fire, for just one spark to catch beyond the human defenses. Then it could roll unimpeded to the sea, not caring about the five thousand souls cowering in Tillamook with the sea at their backs. The Firehawk, 212s, and Jeannie, back aloft in her MD500, tackled the few fires that did flare up in unburned forest.

A pair of Canadair tankers that could scoop water on the run showed up midmorning. Carly got them dowsing the fire directly on the south and west, fifteen hundred gallons every ten minutes. They'd hit the fire, working to knock it out of the crown and back to the ground so that it couldn't jump the firebreak. A few miles' flight to Tillamook Bay, twelve seconds on the water, and they were full and on their way back with another seven tons of water.

With the south and west reasonably secure, Carly turned her attention north and east. Everything that had gone right on two sides of the fire had gone wrong on the other two.

The fire had jumped firebreaks, overrun fire roads, ignored terrain, and generated its own winds so strong that it wasn't toppling trees, it was just ripping them straight out of the ground.

Debris, like that first chunk that had hit Jeannie, flew hundreds of feet into the air.

Air tankers and choppers had to fly high enough to stay out of the chaotic microbursts. When they did spill retardant at that high an elevation, it was almost impossible to predict where it would land, and it definitely landed without the tight patterns and high effectiveness of the western runs.

One local engine company had gotten cut off, their beautiful new quad fire engine on the wrong end of the fire road when the fire crossed it. With Steve providing guidance from the drone's eye view, they managed to find a safe line to hike out. Steve had showed her the footage of the engine going up in flames and finally exploding in a ball of flame when the fuel tanks were breached. Add another seven hundred thousand to the cost of the fire, pretty trivial as they were on the verge of crossing over the hundred million mark on this firefight, not counting lost lumber revenue.

Hotshot crews had held and lost, held and lost along the east. They'd spent more time in retreat last night than in actually fighting the fire. It had played with them, first slicing south, then cutting back north. They'd make a stand and the fire would skip that ridge entirely only to climb and meet on the back side of the next one.

Even the smokies were hitting their limits. Four of them got trapped, with no helicopters or tankers nearby. They had to pull out their foil shelters and hide in a balloon of silvered material the size of their bodies with their faces planted in the dirt as a thunderclap of flame rolled over them.

Carly had to ride out a burnover once in a much smaller fire. Her boots hooked in one end of the elastic, her gloved hands and helmeted head in the other, arms and knees pinning down the sides, trying to make the best seal possible with the ground. The air in the tiny shelter had gone from summer dry to superheated between one heartbeat and the next. She'd dug a hole a foot deep in the dirt and planted her face in it, the only thing that kept the air cool enough not to scorch her lungs.

The hardest part had been staying there. Every instinct was screaming at her to run. The two other firefighters trapped with her had joined in her yelled encouragement from their own shelters until the air became too hot and the fire's roar so loud she'd wondered if she'd ever hear again. Then it was gone. They'd answered her shouts. Then they'd all lain still, giving the land time to cool back to safety before emerging unscathed.

Now, the Firehawk raced toward the scene in silence for three impossibly long minutes before they had a radio contact from the team.

Her chest hurt as if she had just remembered how to breathe again herself when TJ called in the “all okay.”

Jeannie ducked her MD500 into some impossibly small clearing and heli-evaced one of them to the hospital for smoke inhalation, but he was okay. He was breathing oxygen from a tank, between telling Jeannie he was just fine, and that he could go back to the fire right now. She knew better than to give in to his pleas. She knew enough not to even let him appeal to the ICs.

The winds slammed in while they were refueling at Cornelius, both the chopper and themselves with sandwiches and soda someone had scared up. The tone of the reports on the radio altered abruptly. They'd scrambled back aloft, half-eaten meals tossed aside and scattered in the rotor wash.

The winds were here.

***

The squall line hit out of the southwest. It had everything a squall always did—roaring winds, chaotic direction changes, violent microbursts, and wind shears forcing all aircraft out of the zone until it had passed.

It had everything except what they needed most. It didn't have any moisture.

The front had passed south as predicted, but farther south than anticipated. It then curled north up the Willamette Valley. They'd hoped it would gather moisture from the summer ocean, moisture that it could dump on the fire as rain or even fog. Instead, it left its rain in the Rogue River watershed. Then the dynamic low had sent strong winds to gather the achingly dry air of the prairie and high deserts of eastern Oregon, only to swing them over the Tillamook. The relative humidity plummeted, and a dry fire was now struck by a parched wind.

The squall swept upon them like a blowtorch.

Carly closed her eyes so as not to watch for a moment, just one moment while they hovered clear of yet another snarl of wind-driven fire vortices. They'd spent the last two hours doing nothing but helping get crews to safety. The Firehawk spent a half-dozen retardant runs just to open a path for a hotshot crew to a clearing that then let Beale descend and fly them to safety.

The locals were practically drag-racing their fire engines down narrow logging roads to escape. One rolled his command vehicle when a section of the old fire road slid into a creek right in the middle of a curve. At least it hadn't been an engine. One of the 212s did medevac this time, the injured firemen climbing right into the Bambi Bucket dangling a hundred feet below the chopper to be dumped unceremoniously at an ER ambulance apron while the chopper hovered above.

It was a mess and Carly just need a moment's break.

A hundred and twenty thousand acres were already lost. Two hundred square miles of timber burned despite the amassed air and man power. Even if her eastern line held, the minimum loss would be another fifty thousand acres. And there was no question that this wind was about to test her “connect the dots” plan to its limit.

“Carly?” Steve's voice was soft, so soft she almost didn't hear it over the intercom.

“Yeah?” Her voice sounded beaten, even to herself.

“I think you need to see this.”

She forced her eyes open and looked down at Steve's tablet now mounted beside her laptop.

“The fire just jumped Highway 6 to the north.”