Trial by Ice and Fire (26 page)

THIRTY-FOUR

T
HE OFFICE
for the Bridger-Teton National Forest is five miles off the highway and close to the shore of Jackson Lake. It's yet another log cabin, far smaller than Alana's and far bigger than my own. Out in the parking lot several uniformed rangers and volunteers are doing their best to shoo away the tourists in order to open up the parking places for the emergency vehicles. I give them a flash from the red-and-blue lights under my grill when they try to wave off my truck. Already fire-fighting crews are assembling. The young men and women wear green fire-retardant pants and yellow shirts. Some of their clothes and faces are streaked with dirt and ash, indicating they'd probably been out in the field already. A catering truck is dishing out hamburgers and sodas.

Wokowski is right behind me in his department Chevy Tahoe with his lights also spinning. Sheriff Buchanan, who had ducked back inside the log castle to say something to Alana before following us, shouldn't be far behind. The sergeant and I don't wait—we immediately head into the big cabin's central room.

It's crowded with people, and the floor is strewn with the cables of communications gear and laptop computers. I overhear people yelling into phones about tankers, helicopters, retardant, low relative humidity, unstable air, urban interface, and setting up “anchor points.” No one pays me any heed when I walk over to the big topographical map that takes up most of a wall.

A bearded young man with Coke-bottle glasses and a radio headset stands before it. He's marking the map with pushpins connected by red thread. They seem to outline the border of the area already burnt. It starts small on the west, maybe an inch or so wide on the low hills before Alana's castle, then it spreads out from there in a broad, convex angle. The largest side takes up more than five inches of red thread. Two big blue arrows show how the wind is coming out of the northwest.

“Hey,” I say to the guy with the earphones.

He nods distractedly, glancing up from my boots to my dirty nylon pants and my ragged polypro shirt, and looks away while pressing one side of the headset closer to his ear.

So I continue to study the map without his help. The lay of things is obvious enough. Within the ragged circle of thread is a toy Monopoly house where Alana Reese's castle should be. A hotel would have been more appropriate. A small “#1” is penciled in above it. There are two other houses in the rough triangle of thread, #'s 2 and 3, but there's no way to tell if these have remained untouched as Alana's had. There are more than ten others just beyond the red line.

Moving my eyes to the east, I find the broad area of high hills called Preacher Park and within it, near the pass between Jackson Hole and Lander, a circle of thick contour lines marked Elation Peak.

I look back at the advancing red thread and then at the map's legend. The fire is less than thirty miles away. And the big blue arrows are pointing right toward it.

“Hey,” I say again to the guy with the earphones.

He continues to ignore me. I tap his shoulder and put my finger on the butte. “Is the fire going to reach this?”

He turns quickly, frowning, looking affronted by my touch. “Who the hell are you?”

“I'm with the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation. This is Sergeant Wokowski from the Teton County Sheriff's Office.”

The technician glares at us both—my scarred face and filthy climbing clothes, then Wokowski's Neanderthal countenance behind the mirrored shades and the way his uniform is stretched tight over all those thick muscles. He decides to answer the question.

“Yeah, it's going to go up for sure,” he says. “That's a nasty little hollow just upwind of it. There was a blowdown there five years ago, turned the whole place into kindling, and ever since, we've been trying to figure out how to burn it off or clear it out without endangering the surrounding forests and homes. Didn't have the money to do it, though. Or the manpower. There are too many deadfalls and snags in there—no way to control it. When this fire reaches there, look out. It will go off like a bomb. The winds will swirl around down in there and probably generate a firestorm. That mountain will go up, too.”

Wokowski the former smoke jumper gives a curt nod, but I have to ask, “What's a firestorm?”

“It's a feedback loop. A phenomenon where you've got a lot of fuel—dry timber and grass—in a deep valley like that so it will burn hot enough to create its own winds. Sometimes like tornadoes, almost. With a superhigh fuel load like you've got in that deep valley, it makes for a convection cell of smoke and gas. You can get area ignition, a sort of spontaneous combustion—an entire section of the forest detonating in an instant.” He presses the earphone closer to his ear again then says, “Look, Officers, I'm kind of busy. . . .” He starts moving the pins again.

I don't understand half of what he's said but it sounds bad. Very bad, judging by the look on Wokowski's face. The same image that's probably in his head comes into mine: Cali being thrown off a three-hundred-foot cliff into a “firestorm.” Sort of like what happened to her dad.

“How long until the fire reaches it?” I ask him.

He tries to ignore me once again but Wokowski grabs his arm and turns him around. “You're going to talk to us.”

I repeat my question.

“Okay, okay. Right now, it's slowing down some. Winds are dropping a little, so it's moving at about three miles an hour through heavy timber cut up and stalled by a lot of dry meadows. The winds are going to be picking up, though. Really picking up, like to thirty or forty knots. Later this afternoon or tonight. It's going to start moving a hell of a lot faster then. It'll blow about midnight, I guess. Could happen earlier, though.”

I ask Wokowski how long it would take to drive out there. About an hour, he says, almost grunting the words. Then with a very determined look, he adds, “But we can make it in forty.”

“No, you can't,” the young man chimes in with surprising backbone in the face of Wokowski's expression. “Look here—the fire has passed over parts of 287 and is still burning other parts. There'll be timber all over the road. And we're getting reports about just how thick the fuel is up there. That makes for a lot of heat. It's likely some of the road has simply melted away.”

Sheriff Buchanan comes into the room with Alana Reese in tow. Just what I don't need right now. Alana looks like a different woman—she almost looks her age. Her blonde hair is uncombed and dark flesh puffs out beneath her eyes. She no longer has an aura of complete control. I feel something like pity as I notice this. Despite the actress's diminished presence, the volume of noise in the room suddenly ebbs as people stop and stare. I wave them over to us and point at the map.

“I think I know where they are. Elation Peak.”

But the actress snarls at me anyway, showing sharp little teeth, “Then why are you still here?” She closes her eyes hard and reopens them. “I'm sorry. Did you say . . . I don't—”

Wokowski doesn't let her finish. She's looking like she might faint instead of continuing to speak anyway. He says to the sheriff, “We need to reconvene the SWAT team. Right now. And we need a helicopter to take us in—the road's out.”

“Do you know who's running this show?” she asks him.

Wokowski looks around quickly and points at a bald man with a goatee. “That's Fred Williams, Bridger-Teton's fire director.”

The director is already coming toward us. He's in his sixties, tall and fit, and despite his age, he walks with an athlete's bounce. After nodding politely at the sheriff and Alana, he slaps Wokowski on a meaty shoulder. “How's your knee, Wook? You thinking about hanging up that badge and coming back to us? We could use you, you know. This is going to be a big one.”

The rest of us are quickly introduced. Before my hand leaves his grasp, the sheriff is already explaining the situation to him. When she describes Cali as an assistant county attorney, Wokowski jumps in, adding that she also used to be on a Hot Shot crew. Williams nods, evidently remembering. “But I didn't know her,” he says apologetically to Alana.

The sheriff tells him of our urgent need for a helicopter. “We need it now. We need to get up there right away.”

But he shakes his head. “I'm very, very sorry to hear about this happening to your daughter, but I can't put more lives at risk by allowing one of my helicopters to drop anyone in there. Especially since you don't know for sure that she's on Elation. At this point in time it would be suicide for everyone—it would take too much time to get your SWAT team properly outfitted, picked up, and carried in.”

All of us begin to protest, but he holds up a hand.

“And that valley could go up within a few hours. Even if it doesn't happen until midnight, the winds pushing ahead of the fire will make any flight in there too dangerous. It's already pushing fifteen knots and rising fast. We only have the one bird up right now, dropping water, and we're going to have to set her down in another half hour.”

“She's a friend of mine, Fred. A very, very good friend,” Wokowski tells him, his meaning clear.

The director looks away from the sergeant uncomfortably. He shakes his head. “I can't, Wook, I can't. You don't know for sure she's there. Even if you were sure, I can't risk my crew. I don't have the authority, not in this world or the next, to take on that kind of liability.” Then he raises his hand again before Wokowski starts a new protest. “I can do something, though. If the winds there aren't too bad yet, we can do a fly-by to see if anybody's home.”

It takes ten minutes for the director to set up the fly-by. Ten minutes where all any of us can do is think about Cali burning.

Finally we're waved over to a table with a radio on it the size of a large briefcase. The bearded technician from the map is plugged into it and he's talking into his microphone. Seeing us gathered around him, the technician turns a knob and the air fills with a hiss of static until a voice comes over.

“This is Ranger 204. Give me the coordinates again. Over.”

The techie spins in his chair and studies the map on the wall, reading out grid coordinates to the pilot on the other end of the radio.

“Okay, got it. Give me a few. I'm lifting off Six Lakes, coming over Crystal Peak. Probably about twenty kilometers from the target.” In a minute his voice grows more excited. “Jesus, I hope you guys are calling in reinforcements. This one's going to keep us in overtime for at least a month. A real monster! It's all over the whole western horizon. When I got a look at it up close earlier, I swear the flames out front were three hundred feet high. It looks like it's somewhere around twenty miles away now. Over.”

The four of us stand in total silence around the techie, ignoring the whirl of activity all around us. Alana turns to the wall and begins crying quietly.

“It's coming into view. Looks kind of like a mesa, pretty flat on top and steep on all sides but the west. You guys can say good-bye to your lookout on top—that sucker's right in the monster's path. Don't see any people, but those big windows on the lookout are propped open. Hang on . . . I'm going in closer.”

Wokowski soundlessly sags against the map. All the color bleeds from his skin. His eyes are shut. I take it to mean that if the windows are open, someone's there.

“Have him come pick us up right now. We need—” I start to say but a sound from the radio cuts me off.

“Holy shit! What was that?” A sharp crack carries into the room over the static. “Jesus, there's a hole in the windscreen! I think somebody's shooting at us! Hey! There's a guy with a rifle in the lookout!”

“Get them out of there!” Williams tells the radio operator, who is already doing exactly that. The pilot probably doesn't need to be told.

There are maybe twenty seconds of silence from the radio—it seems like twenty minutes—until the pilot comes back on, his voice calmer but not completely hiding his anxiety, and reports that he's heading for Jackson to have the helicopter checked out and the windscreen repaired.

“I would tell you to call the cops,” the pilot adds, “but whoever was shooting at us is going to be toast soon enough. Sleep tight, asshole.”

“Do you have another helicopter?” Wokowski asks the ranger.

He shakes his head. “We have two on the way from Missoula, but they won't be here until later tonight. Maybe the morning.”

The techie with the headset interrupts. “Excuse me, Dr. Williams. But in another half hour it's going to be blowing more than thirty knots. I'm hearing that it's already more than forty-five at Teton Pass. No helicopter's going up in a wind like that.”

“How about a plane?” Wokowski asks.

All of us but Alana look at him. How will he land a plane where there's no runway?

“I can jump in,” he explains.

“I've got a plane and a pilot,” I say automatically, thinking of Jim.

No one says anything for a long moment. I think we're all trying to stretch our minds around the details of the sergeant's proposal.

“Call him,” Wokowski says. “Tell him I'll be at the airport in an hour.”

“That's ludicrous, Wook,” Williams says. “I know you're a tough guy, but do you really think you can jump in without getting shot out of the air, come down on your bad knee, manage to land on the butte despite the high winds, take on a man with a rifle by yourself, and save the hostage? This isn't a movie. Excuse me,” he adds with a glance to Alana. “Besides, how would you get out?”

“Fire shelter,” Wokowski says, then explains to the sheriff and me. “They're like pup tents made of aluminum and fiberglass. They reflect heat and don't melt, even when it's more than a thousand degrees. Smoke Jumpers and Hot Shot crews all carry them for emergencies.”

The ranger scoffs again but gently. “Wook, you know they're unreliable at best. We both know people who have died in those shelters. And with the fuel in there, this fire will be burning at far more than one thousand degrees. That's much hotter than the conditions the shelters are designed for.”

“Not on top of the butte. It's mostly grass and rock up there. I've seen it. A shelter will work.”

The ranger is still shaking his head. “Not in my district. I can't accept that kind of liability, either legally or morally,” he repeats.