Pure Heat (24 page)

The smokies and hotshots hit the western line of the fire's northern head at sunrise. To keep out of sight from the terrorist camp, the Firehawk and the 212s delivered all the crews by helitack rather than parachute. They began cutting off the fire's angle of attack foot by foot.

As soon as possible, Carly began bleeding teams off the south and west of the main fire. From her perch in the Firehawk, she directed whole sections of the attack. She set them to clearing a firebreak along a ridgeline two miles north of the camp. It was probably the line she'd have chosen anyway, far enough ahead of the fire to give the ground teams time to cut it deep and paint it wide with retardant.

Henderson kept all air traffic to the north of the ridge, just in case any other trigger-happy maniacs got big ideas. He didn't explain why; he just told the pilots that anyone who disobeyed him was going to get their asses kicked. He said it in that tone that ensured no one asked why they couldn't fly south of the ridgeline.

Jeannie had returned, but she was busy to the north. Henderson was coordinating that part of the battle, though Carly kept him in the loop while she concentrated on the main fire. The battle on the three contained sides was far from over, and there were still half-a-hundred different blazes in different places throughout the black.

Steve had a gray-box drone circling over the main body of the Burn. Carly gave him the 212s to order about, focusing on the south and west spot fires. The 212s hit the spot fires and anything else that his thermal imager turned up as critical.

Carly concentrated on the still-spitting east side and turning the northern head. The Canadair water scoopers kept punching long strips out of the fire's hide, and the east was holding strong.

Several fires threatened to erupt in the black, still plenty of fuel and heat there, but the drone's ability to see the buildup in infrared before it flashed over had to be one of the best new firefighting tools Carly had seen in years.

Her attention kept drifting to his tablet. It wasn't that she didn't trust him. It was that she liked watching him work. You could see his personality in his attack patterns. He didn't fix things; he attacked them. Her own methods were about precision and control—just enough, then move on.

Steve hammered spot fires called in by TJ for the ground teams or Rick. He dumped on them so hard that they never knew what hit them. Then he'd pound them one more time, partly to make sure they didn't even think of coming back and partly, Carly was sure, out of pure former smokejumper spite.

She brushed the edge of the tablet with her fingers, as close as she could come to brushing his cheek at the moment.

Beale looked over at her. She hadn't missed Carly's gesture or its meaning.

“Busted,” Carly mouthed. Steve was on the open intercom so she didn't speak aloud.

Beale just smiled at her. A long, slow smile that had nothing to do with fighting fires and everything to do with two women sitting side by side above the fire's heat.

Carly could feel that heat. But rather than rising to her cheeks, it warmed the area around her heart.

Beale looked away, out her side door window, and then, responding to a call from her husband, swung them back for another load of retardant. A hotshot team was embattled on the west side of the northern head.

Carly didn't need to see Beale's face to know that it looked as goofy as her own, thinking about their men who fought fire.

For the first time in this whole ordeal, the wind and fire cooperated. Once again the sun was setting, the sky turning blood red with smoke and ash.

The fire wouldn't live to see the sunrise. They'd have it fully contained by then. Mop-up could take weeks, but they'd have it trapped but good. There'd be plenty of dousing, monitoring, and cleanup, but when it hit the massive bulwark of their northern barrier, it should be stopped.

Carly checked the full view one last time before the final attack. The locals and Steve had held the west and south clean at yesterday's limits. The east had one bad spot-fire burn, but it only ate a couple dozen acres before they'd killed it. The whole rest of her connected line of clear-cuts had held.

The black was a long way from being fully black, but it was contained. Fires burned here and there, but nothing that could do any real damage, as long as it didn't get away from them again. Where the fire had jumped ridge to ridge, the occasional oasis of green shaded the valley floors. Steve had even shown her a live feed of a herd of elk spared by the fire, nosing out into the edge of the black around their temporary haven.

The New Tillamook Burn was at rest.

Except for the northern head.

There, the last mile-wide head was roaring ahead. She was impressed they'd managed to narrow it that much. Everything was in place for the final showdown.

With the Firehawk they'd made a couple of strategic hits of retardant at the center of the fire's head directly in line with the camp, about a mile out. They'd flown down in the treetops, only after Steve had validated that the area was clear. Not the best dispersal at that altitude, but it had worked.

The fire had slowed in the center. Not stopped, but slowed. It would come up the sides first, scaring the camp's residents and funneling them straight into the waiting arms of the military's elite helicopter forces. On the run, they hopefully wouldn't have their wits about them enough to bear firearms. Then they could be easily—and relatively safely—scooped up.

Kee and several of her teammates were on the ground to the north of the fire, about halfway to the firebreak to watch for strays and direct the military's actions.

The daytime sea breeze had helped turn the fire toward the camp. Tonight's land breeze would drag the remains of the fire against the western line they'd been cutting and dousing all day. No weather was predicted, so the fire would die against the north and west firebreaks.

After it had overrun the camp.

MHA's only job now was to fly the outer line and wait. The Firehawk and Jeannie's MD500 would pick up Kee's team if something went wrong. Otherwise they'd mount the choppers they'd brought down from Fort Lewis, along with the captives.

Steve watched as the fire approached.

He needed to remember never to piss off ICA Mark Henderson. The terrorists must be crapping in their pants right about now.

A mile-wide wall of fire was marching down three sides of the ridgeline to sweep right into the camp's valley. Flames rolled a hundred or more feet into the darkening sky.

Sap exploded, shattering trees like a cheap bat whacked on the trademark. He'd stood in the face of a big fire on a rampage any number of times. It was a moment that defined a smokie. Did you face the devil and beat it back? Did you turn tail and run? Or were you so damned sure of yourself that you stood fast until the beast was upon you?

He'd been trained in how to read the fire, and every single thing he could see about this one sent a single message.

Run!

But they didn't.

He had to keep repositioning the black-box bird to see what was happening in the camp, rather than the fire. There was no way they'd be firing at his drone. They had far more important things to think about, even if they could spot him. So he made a couple of high-resolution runs and then sent the drone climbing steeply to get well clear of the abrupt wind shears and fire-driven whirlwinds.

The fire didn't know it was dead. It still burned with a fierce, tree-eating heat. It wasn't being driven ahead by the wind, but rather by the availability of fuel and fresh, oxygen-laden air. It moved slowly enough that it had the chance to thoroughly burn everything it touched. This was a strip of the black that would be a long time recovering.

“They should be moving now.” Henderson on the radio. He'd said they'd be using some encrypted signal, so it was okay to talk.

“Nothing.” Steve looked at his traces that should show the snarl of people moving about the camp and then turn into long streaks sprinting to the north. They weren't.

The fire was close enough that he couldn't retain consistent tracking of the figures on the ground, especially from his increased altitude.

“They're clustering in the center of the camp.” But the software couldn't count them, they were overshadowed by the approaching fire's heat.

“Leaving it to the last minute, don't you think?” Kee from the ground. “Am I supposed to go in and give those gun-happy idiots a red carpet before they singe their asses?”

Steve kept watching. They were too close together to distinguish now, bodies massed in the center of the camp. A cluster of them started for the area where the weapons were stored.

At that same moment, one of the leading tongues of flame reached the perimeter line. Whether the mine burned and fired or a flaming branch dropped on a trip wire made no difference. There was a bright flash as first one mine fired off, then another, then two more.

“Mines are going off along the east edges. They're still milling in the central area. Three, maybe four are going for the weapons store.”

“Idiots!” Kee again. She kept swearing for several seconds before regaining control. “Team Three, pull back. I repeat, Team Three, pull back. Re-form in the open clearing a hundred meters from the Chinook chopper. Remain in the clear. Do not stand behind a tree.”

Steve couldn't look away as the fire hit the western perimeter, and finally the temporarily slowed central portion of the fire stormed in from the south.

The flashes of the exploding antipersonnel mines was quickly overshadowed by the driving fire.

The figures headed for the weapons store were driven back by the heat.

One, then another, figure broke and ran.

Then, as a mass, they began moving north.

“Hang on, everybody.” Steve had been told to warn everyone the moment the fire hit the weapons store.

It took ten long seconds.

Enough time for most of the people to get clear the camp, but even the first runner had barely a hundred yards' lead when the bombs went off.

For days Carly tried to remember what the fireball had looked like, but she couldn't. The flash had been too bright, the sight too shocking. One moment fire and runners on Steve's tablet and a wall of fire marching across the landscape. The next? Nothing but white.

In that instant, the sky outside the Firehawk's windshield had lit like daylight. The evening dark was blasted away for a moment by an impossible brightness.

Beale had them hovering well north of the ridge, placing them two miles from the blast center, and they'd pulled back all of the ground crews as well. For a long moment, the clouds of ash and smoke above the ridge had been brilliantly lit from within, shining like an evil beacon in the falling night.

Then the darkness had returned.

The shock wave arrived seconds later and battered them, despite their distance.

Once it too had passed, Beale had flown the Firehawk to just above the ridge. The SOAR choppers were already sweeping forward. By the time the fire ground crews would arrive, nothing of the camp would remain except for a strange area where all the trees would be blown outward from an unlikely crater over a dozen meters across and a half dozen deep.

The Army's Special Forces teams cleared the few remaining perimeter mines. What little remained of the camp was gathered up, and a long line of body bags was loaded into the big Chinook helicopter Kee had brought down from Fort Lewis.

Oddly, the blast had blown out a whole section of the fire. The thin remaining finger of the New Tillamook Burn had died with little more than a whimper against the northern firebreak.

***

It had taken eight more long days of mop-up to finally kill the Burn enough to hand it off to the Type II crew. Spot fires, hot spots, and new flare-ups had left the sleep-deprived crew on the run, or rather on the stagger, for a full week before they had it killed. The size of the fire and the roughness of the terrain had made it a back-breaking task to mop up.

The blast had been explained away as an abandoned propane tank, which at least satisfied the newsies who'd seen the light as far away as Portland and Salem.

Carly found Steve where he'd been most of the last two days, when he wasn't asleep in her bed or lying in her arms.

She'd placed two wooden Adirondack chairs on the back deck of her cabin. From here, there was nothing to see except green forest. Doug fir. Hemlock. Larch. They towered above the cabin, sprawling uncut for a hundred years over all of her twenty acres except where the cabin and garden sat.

Squirrels played here. Deer wandered up to the verge to stare at the humans before returning silently into the woods.

Steve pulled her into his lap with that easy strength of his that made her feel so safe. Carly slid willing into his arms and let herself melt into one of his luscious kisses before resting her head in her favorite spot on his shoulder.

She stroked a hand over the T-shirt that matched hers. The word “Tillamook” flamed diagonally across his chest. “I fought the Burn!” crossed over his heart in blue letters. Water dripped off them and had extinguished the
M
and
O
, leaving them black. It was one of the cooler fire shirts she'd seen. This one she'd keep for a long time.

“Back to it tomorrow.” Carly could feel his voice vibrating through his chest. She nuzzled against it as if she could burrow right in like a hibernating bear, all warm and cozy.

He was searching the towering trees. She could tell that he was once again seeking for words to express all of the wonderful things inside him.

“Go ahead,” she whispered, leaving a kiss on his neck. “Go ahead and say it.”

He huffed out a sad sigh as if sorry that he couldn't offer more.

“I love you, Carly.”

The words just melted her every time. She'd never tire of hearing them. And she finally knew what she wanted to say in response.

“I love you, Steve.”

There. That was it. Those were the words she hadn't been able to say. Perhaps the problem had been that they weren't her words.

The words were theirs together.

They loved each other. What more could she possibly need?

She lay against his shoulder and let her eyes drift closed. She allowed herself to become lost in the smell of the pine forest, near enough crushed by the strong arms of the man who belonged there with her.