Pure Heat (9 page)

“Other than that.” Emily's smile indicated that somehow she knew there was a whole tanker-load of reasons other than short acquaintance. Carly wasn't going near any relationship. She fooled around with some onion rings she didn't want. Took a bite of one, even though it had long gone cold.

She knew what her reasons were for avoiding a relationship with Steve Mercer or anyone else. She wasn't ready to face that pain. Not by a long shot.

“So what was SOAR like?”

Emily nodded politely at the subject change, but Carly knew she hadn't dodged the bullet for long.

Carly looked down at the baby in her arms. The blue eyes were open and looking right at her as if to say, “I've got my shit together. What's your problem?”

The alarm came in while Steve lay on his back beneath the Firehawk. He anchored the last clip for the mobile rig's antenna into place. He'd already done a drone flight from the console he'd set up in the Firehawk's cargo bay. He'd wanted to verify all systems were functional before he finished anchoring all the wires and consoles in place. It had worked just fine, and now the install was done.

He walked one last time around the Firehawk to make sure it was a clean install. The new antenna was clamped to the underside of the tail boom. The wire led around the edge of the retardant tank until it reached the tank control lines. He'd ducked it through the same fuselage penetration and up into the twin-screen console.

The keyboard and trackball controls were embedded on a shelf mounted to the back of the copilot's seat. If this were a military bird, he'd be in the port-side gunner's spot, on the left side of the chopper's cargo bay directly behind Carly's high-backed seat. From there he could look out the side opening, a hole about three feet tall and half that wide. He could see most of what was below even with his hands still on the controls. He also took up only the smallest corner of the cargo bay, which meant if they ever had to switch over to helitack, he wouldn't be in the way.

The console itself was a hardened rig, so it could be exposed to ash and smoke without damage. They could keep the cargo bay doors open as long as they didn't get directly in the heavy smoke. Hell, the rig was tough enough, he could probably drop a bucket of retardant on it and the thing would still work.

Steve gave everything a sharp tug to make sure it was well anchored before heading to where the crews were gathering around the foot of the helibase's two-story radio tower.

Last night at the Doghouse, Henderson had made it clear this was Steve's first priority, to get the drone's mobile control up and running on his wife's Firehawk. The ICA himself had helped him carry the console and tool cases over from the truck right after breakfast.

No sign of Carly this morning.

Last night he'd changed his mind and made sure he'd left before Carly and TJ did. He'd backed his car out carefully to make sure he didn't scrape up against the Jeep. No question whose paint job would lose if he did so. His gloss-black Trans Am Firebird versus her rusted blue Jeep? No contest. He decided it wasn't his best idea, teasing her right now.

Once he was clear, he'd looked up. There she was. A shining beacon in his headlights, softened by the backlight of a solitary streetlight. Just standing there. Hands tucked in pockets. Hair loose about her face, spilling down over her shoulders. The thin leather vest open at the front. At first he'd thought it was a shield, but rather it invited you to admire the body within all the more.

No, that wasn't right either. She'd dressed specifically to make him crazy, and it had totally worked. He hadn't been able to look away from her all evening, no matter how many times she'd caught him staring. He'd known her for one day, and if he didn't get his hands on her, he just might break down and cry.

Her expression was quiet. Clearly she'd seen that he'd parked her in tight and had watched him pull clear. But that wasn't it.

She was thinking really deep thoughts. He wondered if they were good or bad. He couldn't tell last night.

Now, in the late-morning light of the Hoodie One camp, he wondered why he hadn't asked. Why hadn't he at least been civil enough to wish her a good evening? Instead, he'd merely raised a hand through the sunroof to wave. A wave that hadn't been returned, though he'd seen her eyes track the gesture. She'd seen it, but not responded.

He supposed there was his answer. So, he'd simply driven away. In the rearview mirror, it looked as if she was still standing there under the streetlight when the road turned out of sight.

As the final few stragglers arrived around the radio tower, he saw her Jeep come screaming into the parking lot. Clearly she'd gotten the page while already on her way here. Carly wiped the wheel like a pro and cranked the Jeep into a space, the gravel protesting as she slammed on the brakes. Even before the engine had fully stopped, she was running across the parking lot and between the buildings.

She arrived beside him just as Henderson climbed to the stair landing from which Steve had first surveyed the base two days ago.

“Morning.” Steve tested the waters.

“Morning.” Her nod bright and sharp. Her smile radiant.

Awash in the power of it, Steve rather hoped it was meant for him.

She rubbed her hands together. “We've got us a fire. Know anything?”

Since Henderson was probably seconds from speaking, the question hardly made sense unless you were really that psyched about fighting the next fire. And if that's what was driving her, then all that slap of power from a happy angel, well, it wasn't meant for him.

Steve just waved a hand upward, not really trusting himself to speak.

“We've got a hot one.” Henderson placed both hands on the railing and looked down at them. “Any of you fight the Springs Fire in central Idaho?”

A couple of hands went up, just some smokies.

“We're headed about thirty miles west of the Springs Fire, and you know what the terrain is like. You Goonies here at Hoodie One are the closest outfit that isn't already involved with some other mess. For smokies in the DC-3, Garden Valley, Idaho, is about an hour-and-a-half flight. Choppers, you're in the two- and three-hour range. Garden Valley has a grass-strip airport with a helipad—make that a handy patch of dirt—at the east end.

“There's no retardant on site, tanks but they're dry. The restock order was somehow missed. The nearest trucks are five hours out. Limited fuel is on-site, though more fuel is”—Henderson glanced at his watch—“already en route from Boise. So, we'll be running foam mix and dipping water out of the Payette River. You have fifteen minutes until I want everyone airborne. Updates in the air. Merks, hang back for a sec. Rest of you, get gone.”

Henderson had rattled the whole thing off in practically a single breath that carried easily over the crowd. No wasted time. Exactly what they needed to know, no more, no less. They didn't know if they would be on flatlands or pitched terrain, though the groans of the few who'd fought the Springs Fire said it wasn't good. That they were bringing in more aviation fuel meant they'd be there for a while, which told them both that the fire wasn't small and that you'd need your personal gear. Perfectly efficient.

Except for Steve, left standing still while everyone else sprinted away. Chutes had already fired off the forklift and headed for the preloaded pallets of gear to move them into the jump planes. Others sprinted for their quarters to grab their gear. The smokies went straight to the loft for their jumpsuits and parachutes. That was all the personal gear that they'd be needing.

Carly rested her hand on Steve's shoulder a second, gave it a squeeze, and then bolted off.

Right. It was a three-hour chopper flight. Six hours by drone. A drone could only spend twenty hours in the air. That meant he'd spend more time in transit than flying. And he didn't have the satellite rig, never mind the FAA clearance, for long-distance control anyway. Grounded.

She'd seen that immediately, offered a moment of sympathy, then run. Smart, beautiful, thoughtful.

Crap!

He appreciated the thought even as his anger built. His first big fire, and he was being left out because he was just the drone guy. If he hadn't gone and busted himself up… He should be gearing up with the smok—

Henderson grabbed his arm and started leading him across the base.

“How fast can you prep the trailer?”

“For what?” Steve blinked.

“Airlift.” Henderson was no longer the mellow but efficient guy Steve had shared burgers with last night. He'd turned into a no-nonsense ICA, a fastball pitcher, and would clearly mow down anything or anyone in his way.

Steve did the math as they hustled around the last of the buildings. “Ten minutes.”

“You have five.”

“I'll need help. Good help.”

“Carly,” Henderson shouted and waved.

Carly came running over, a small backpack across her shoulders. A leather case of charts and probably her computer in one hand.

“Help Merks. You've already worked with his gear. You have four and a half minutes.” Henderson was gone before Carly came to a full stop.

Neither of them hesitated. That had been trained out of both of them early on. Whatever had been in last night's look and this morning's greeting didn't matter at the moment.

Steve keyed open the truck as Carly freed the lower end of the drone landing rope. They collapsed the tower and strapped it to the side of the trailer in perfect synchronicity. He'd reach out a hand only to have the wrench slap into it. When Carly tipped the last section into place, he'd already cleared the straps so they weren't trapped between sections.

A rotor downdraft from above almost buffeted him to his knees. He'd been too focused to hear it coming.

A large hook and lifting harness landed in the grass beside them. He didn't need to glance up to know Emily Beale hovered the massive Firehawk a hundred feet over his head. He took the right side and Carly the left, clipping the harness onto the trailer's four lifting rings.

The chopper battered them as Beale landed close alongside.

In moments he and Carly had the two gray-case drones loaded into the Firehawk's cargo bay. He had to strap them to the top of four pallets of white five-gallon buckets. Six hundred or so gallons of foam mix. Chutes had been busy with his forklift. Add the mix at a ratio of one to a hundred with water, and it was the best thing for firefighting short of retardant. It looked like an impossible amount, but Steve knew it would disappear far too fast if the fire was a big one.

He grabbed the spare tool kit from under the bench and hit the lock button on the truck. Per regulation, he waited while it rolled down, then reinserted the padlock. “Locks keep honest people honest.” Even though it served no real purpose, the padlock would keep ninety percent of people from even trying to open the door. The truck's real security system was far more robust.

He reached the chopper just as Carly finished loading her gear. His own gear was all the way over in the barracks. Did he have time to run for it?

Henderson showed up at his elbow and practically shoved him aboard.

Guess not.

Then Henderson tossed a duffel at him that he caught easily enough. It was Steve's.

The ICA leaned in and shouted to his wife loud enough to be heard over the rotor noise.

“Betsy has Tessa. The three of us will be in the Beech Baron. We'll be on-site before you get there. Fly safe.”

A bit of sign language flickered between them. ASL, American Sign Language. Steve could tell that much. But not a simple “I love you” sign. Which was about his limit. And “shoes.” He'd had a girlfriend who'd taught him that sign so she could tell him when it was time for a present without having to say so. It had been cute at first, then irritating, then… She hadn't actually lasted all that long. He only added about a half-dozen pair to her collection. Considering her closet, he wondered just how many previous men had been suckered into thinking it was cute and for just how long.

Steve tossed his duffel behind the rearmost pallet; it would be fine there. He belted into the chair in front of his console, just behind Carly. He left enough give in the harness to let him lean out the window as they took off. He watched the lifting wire attached to his trailer slowly unwinding as they lifted it upward.

“Twenty feet more slack,” he called over the intercom.

“Ten feet. Lines all clear.”

The chopper eased upward more slowly.

“Taut. Lines look good.” The harness wires hadn't caught or snagged anything on the trailer. That was about a fifty-fifty proposition that SkyHi still had to address with some factory redesign. Henderson had waited long enough to make sure they had the load clean, and then he'd gone off with a ground-eating stride that didn't look fast but was.

“Load off the ground. Ten feet. Still good.”

Then the chopper tipped its nose down and bolted like a hound to the hunt as it continued climbing. The trailer weighed about five hundred pounds, a twentieth of this bird's lifting capacity. The foam mix took it to sixty percent of the Firehawk's maximum load, which still left her plenty of power for raw speed.

Ready for battle, the Firehawk roared east toward the fire.

Carly plugged in her laptop and latched it onto the support arm rigged above her knees. If for some reason she ever had to grab the cyclic control, they'd have serious problems.

First, the laptop mount sat directly above the joystick and blocked much of her view of the control panel. Second, the Firehawk was about ten times more complex than any other helicopter she'd ever ridden in before.

A pair of display screens faced her, each surrounded by a dozen buttons that changed the screen's function. A half-cajillion other small switches and controls ranged down the center console that separated her from Emily.

The cyclic joystick and the head of the collective control on the left side of her seat were showered with more buttons for radio and retardant-release controls.

She had a chopper license and kept it current to fly a 212 or the little MD500. She'd earned her ticket in case the pilot had a heart attack or something, but the Firehawk came from a whole other world. She might as well tackle a space shuttle. It wasn't the flying she cared about anyway.

She pulled up the terrain maps on her laptop and the latest weather information.

If only she knew where the—

“Forty-four-point-two-one by minus-one-fifteen-point-eight-five.” Henderson's voice came over the radio, reading out the GPS coordinates as if he'd been reading her mind. “Officially the Scott Mountain Fire, though it's still a couple miles from there and we're going to keep it that way. Class D and growing. Probably Class E by the time we arrive. Zero containment. Type II now and we're going to keep it that way. Control out.”

“Shit.” Merks voice sounded low over the headset. “How did it get so big before they called us?” A Type II meant multiple days, base camps, and a whole mess of resources and command structure.

“What are Class D and E?” Beale looked grumpy, though it wasn't reflected in her voice. She struck Carly as a woman who hated not knowing everything. They'd get along just fine on that trait.

“Your husband reads too much.” Steve spoke while Carly was keying in the longitude and latitude coordinates Henderson had just fed her. “It becomes Class E when more than three hundred acres are burned or on fire, about a half square mile. Class F starts at a thousand acres. It's on the books that way, but what we care about is Type I, II, or III. Because of the late report, I'm guessing that it's on steep and remote terrain, which increases the type.”

Carly had to remember that Steve was an experienced smokie, despite the hotdogger persona he wore so comfortably.

Beale sounded a bit less grouchy. “He does read too much. I spent a couple weeks training at Brainerd Heli and a couple more in Los Angeles County Fire Department. They both talked only about type.”

Carly glanced over at Beale and could see she would enjoy finding the right way to rub her husband's nose in it.

Carly keyed the radio. “Hey, ICA Rookie!”

“Come back.” Henderson sounded very grouchy, but his wife was smiling as she pushed the Firehawk east. The slightest nod indicated that Carly was precisely on track.

“Type first. Class, we don't really care; they don't even call us unless it's big. Or damn close like the little one we just did. We get all we need from Type II.”

“Roger.” It was practically a growl and would have every Hoodie in the loop laughing.

Beale was smiling, which was all Carly cared about.

Carly tapped into the chopper's broadband ground link with her laptop. Pulled up the mapping software. “I can confirm steep. Steep and remote. All between four and six thousand feet up. Ground support is going to be lousy. The nearest fire road is a nasty twister and ends about two miles away. Can this thing airlift a bulldozer?”

“Let's see.” Emily appeared to be inspecting the sky for an answer. “Your average D9 Teddy Bear—”

“Teddy Bear?” Steve's laugh engaged Carly's own.

“Yes,” Emily continued without the slightest change of tone. “Your average armored and militarized D9 Teddy Bear bulldozer made by Cat. It will knock down your typical concrete-walled home without even slowing down much. Israelis used them a lot when they didn't like a Palestine settlement. They weigh in at about sixty tons, and I expect the armor is in the range of ten tons. So, that's fifty tons of dozer and I can lift about five tons. And I can't even do that at six thousand feet. Not enough air. Even a little D4 weighs in at about twice my capacity.”

That sobered up the mood of the aircraft. This Firehawk was the new powerhouse of the MHA fleet. Its arrival had made Carly feel as if they could fight anything, but the problem was not so simple.

“Now, if you had a CH-47 Chinook,” Emily continued, as if all of the technical information had turned her downright gregarious, “you could cart around a D4 dozer just fine, even to those altitudes.”

There was a loud click over the intercom as she keyed the radio mike. “Honey?”

“Here, babe.” Henderson's voice came clear, sounding as if he were mostly over his grouch.

“Anybody local have a Chinook or a Skycrane? Carly says the roads are too remote. We need a way to get some Cat D4s on-site.”

“Roger, babe. I'll get to work on it. Well done. ICA, out.”

Carly looked over at Emily. The woman had just given her all of the credit for the idea without a second thought. Any male pilot Carly had ever flown with would have taken the credit himself even for something that was completely her idea. Was that the nature of the woman beside her? Or was it the nature of decent people?

Which would Steve do?

He'd given her a lot to consider over the last two days.

His unhesitating jump into the fire. The ease with which they worked together. It was as if whenever they were working, the fake, irritating Steve faded away and the decent version appeared in his place.

Nor had she missed his change of attitude last night. Allowing her some personal space. Then changing his mind about parking her in. And it couldn't have been to preserve his precious upholstery, he was clearly smart enough to have included that in his original planning. She sure as hell would have gone looking for a mud puddle before walking across it. Actually, she might even have gone to the corner store and bought a bottle of water to create one if none were available.

He was clearly interested in her. She'd caught sight of the image on his screen during the drone's first flight, a still shot of her face in the sunlight looking up at the drone. And she'd let him kiss her. Though it was hard to admit, she'd wanted him to. That had been almost as much of a shock as the kiss itself.

Okay, honestly, his kiss had sent too many bad memories rushing to the surface, leaving her sick and dizzy between one heartbeat and the next.

Yet he hadn't pursued her through the bar like most other males on the scent. He'd actually been conspicuously decent, not even coming to TJ's table except for a brief moment when she'd gone to the bathroom.

But that wasn't what had set her on her heels last night. Steve wasn't what had made her reactions so befuddled that she didn't even think to wave good night until his taillights turned out of sight.

It was Emily's comments to her. Carly had thought that she was facing her past. But now she wondered if she was avoiding her memories.

There was also something different about Steve. It wasn't that he made her laugh, even when he didn't intend to. Nor was it the image of him dancing with hot gravel in his underwear, though even the memory still made her smile.

It was that Steve had stirred up embers she'd thought fully doused and suppressed. The loss of Linc had left her in the black and she'd been fine that way. But her heart had been sneaky, a slow smolder that still lurked beneath the surface.

Right up to the moment Steve had looked at her for the first time and gasped out under his breath, “An angel.”