Wild Fire

Chapter 1-1

Chapter One

“Gordon. Hit the hotspot at your two o’clock.”

“Perfect,” Gordon Finchley mumbled to himself. The call came from Mark Henderson, the Incident Commander-Air, the moment after Gordon carved his MD 530 helicopter the other way toward a flaming hotspot at eleven o’clock and hit the release on his load of water.

Two hundred gallons spilled down out of his helo’s belly tank and punched the cluster of burning alders square in the heart. He glanced back as he continued his turn and the flames were now hidden in the cloud of steam, which meant it was a good hit.

“Die, you dog!” He yelled it at the flames like…Austin Powers…yelling at something. He really had to work on his macho. Or maybe just give it up as a lost cause.

“I have the other one, Mark,” Vanessa called up to the ICA from her own MD 530. Her touch of an Italian accent still completely slayed Gordon…and any other guy who met her. Because her “Italian” was more than just her voice.

Gordon twisted his bird enough sideways to watch her, which was always a pleasure, in the air or on the ground. Vanessa Donatella flew her tiny, four-seater helicopter the same way she looked: smooth, beautiful, and just a little bit delicate. Her water attack was also dead on. It punched down the second spot fire, which had been ignited by an ember cast far ahead of the main fire.

The two of them were fighting their aerial battle beyond the head of the wildfire—he and Vanessa were making sure that nothing sparked to life ahead of the line of defense. He could just make out the Mount Hood Aviation smokejumpers suited up in flame-resistant yellow Nomex, defending a ridgeline. The heavy hitters of the main airshow, MHA’s three Firehawks and a Twin 212 helicopter, were attacking the primary fire, ducking in and around the columns of smoke and flame to deliver their loads where the smokejumpers most needed them.

He twisted back to straight flight, popped up high enough to clear the leading edge of the flames, then ducked through the thin veil of smoke and dove down over the burning bank at the lake’s shore. He could feel the wash of radiated heat through the large windshield that gave him such a great view—a nearly unbroken sweep of acrylic starting below his feet on the rudder pedals, then sweeping above his head. It became much cooler once he punched out over the open lake.

Gordon slid to a hover with his skids just ten feet over the water—low enough to unreel his snorkel hose and let the pump head dip below the lake’s surface. It would be forty seconds until he had two hundred more gallons aboard.

Vanessa slid her helo down close beside him and dunked her own hose.

Their helos were identical except for the large identifying numbers on the side. The MD 530 was as small as a helicopter could be and still have four seats. Last season they’d switched from dipping buckets dangling on longlines to belly tanks attached between the skids. There was an art to steering the swinging buckets to their target that Gordon could get nostalgic about, but the tank was certainly more convenient.

Their helos were painted with the MHA colors: gloss black with red-and-orange flames running down the sides. The effect was a bit ruined by the big windshields that made up the whole nose of the aircraft, but Gordon would take the visibility any day.

“Nice hit,” he offered. The pilots kept a second radio tuned to a private frequency so that they could coordinate among themselves without interfering with the ICA’s commands to the airshow. It also allowed them to chat in these brief quiet moments. In the background was a third radio tuned to the ground team. Thankfully, there weren’t any fixed-wing aircraft attacking the fire or there’d be a fourth radio running. When flying solo, it could be harder to fight the radios than the fire.

“You too. It is such a pity that you hit the wrong fire.” He could feel Vanessa’s warmth in her tease.

“Even a couple seconds more warning would have worked. If I didn’t know better, I’d think Mark was doing it on purpose.”

“Whine. Whine. Whine.”

They shared a smile across the hundred feet that separated them. It was a real bummer that it hadn’t worked out between them. After months of silent but—he eventually discovered—mutual attraction, they’d gotten together. Only to have nothing come of it. Making love to someone as beautiful and gentle as Vanessa was a joy, but there’d been no spark. They’d talked about it, tried again, and still nothing. Despite his typical awkwardness around stunning women (most women really) and Vanessa’s natural shyness—or perhaps because of the combination—they’d come out of it as close friends. Friends without benefits, which was still a pity, but good friends.

His water tank gauge reached full and he lifted aloft as he reeled in his hose. Vanessa would be about ten seconds behind him.

Together they flew over the flaming bank that sloped steeply up from the lake. No point in fighting that fire, it would burn down to the shore and then there would be nowhere else for it to go. It was simply one flank of the main fire. The head itself was a long burn running south toward a community of homes at the other end of the lake—that they had to defend.

Henderson gave him enough lead time to pick his path this time. His whine to Vanessa had some basis. Messing with a pilot didn’t sound like Henderson at all, but lately there’d definitely been something going on.

Gordon shrugged to himself.

He was never big on worrying about what came next. After three years of flying for the man, Gordon knew that whatever Henderson’s game was, it would show up only when he was good and ready to reveal it. But another part of him—the one that had told his father precisely where he could ram a hot branding iron the day he’d left the family ranch for the last time—decided that if Henderson kept it up, Gordon might need to buy a branding iron of his own.

For now, only the fire mattered. It was getting even more aggressive and it took a punch from both of their birds to kill the next flare-up.

“I’m back to base for fuel,” Vanessa announced on the command frequency.

“Roger,” Henderson called down from his spotter plane three thousand feet above the fire. “Gordon, fly twice as fast.”

Typical. “Sure thing, boss man.” He flipped a finger aloft, then wiggled his cyclic control side to side to wave at Vanessa by rocking his helicopter. She returned the gesture and peeled off to the northwest. By pure chance, this fire was less than a ten-minute flight from MHA’s base on the eastern foothills of Mt. Hood. The eleven-thousand-foot volcanic mountain was a shining beacon of glaringly bright glaciers, even in late September. The midmorning sun was blinding off the high slopes. In moments, Vanessa was a black dot against that white background. She’d be back in under half an hour and then it would be his turn.

Below him was a land of brown and green, heavy on the brown. Eastern Oregon had none of the green lushness that everyone associated with the Oregon Coast and the Willamette Valley. Out here, Ponderosa pine grew far enough apart for grass to grow tall between them. And now, late in the season, the grass was all dried to a dark gold and carried fire fast and hard. The pine and western juniper weren’t in much better shape. Several seasons of drought had taken their toll. The hundred-foot grand firs and the fifty-foot alder were all as dry as bone and lit off like Roman candles.

Gordon climbed an extra fifty feet, crossing the worst of it. He remembered back in his rookie year with MHA when Jeannie had a tree blow up directly under her. The superheated sap had cooked off and sent a big chunk of treetop an extra hundred feet aloft. It had knocked out her rear rotor over the New Tillamook Burn Fire. She’d managed to find a clearing the same size as her helo’s rotor blades and somehow set down safely in it. Gordon had seen it and still wasn’t sure how she’d stuck that landing.

He kept up the hustle: lake, climb over fire, hit the latest flare-up, climb back over, and dive down for more water. Occasionally one of the big helos would be tanking at the same moment he was. He’d always liked his little MD. The Firehawks—the firefighting version of the Black Hawk helicopters—could carry a thousand gallons to his two hundred, and they were damn fast in flight, but they had none of the finesse of his MD. They didn’t get up close and personal with the fire. They flew higher and could knock crown fires out of trees. He flew lower and could put out your campfire without messing up the rest of the campsite…well, not too much.

He harassed his best friend Mickey at one point in his Twin 212 as they tankered together. Two-twelves were midsized helos, halfway between his own MD and the big Firehawks—the modern version of the Vietnam-era UH-1 Hueys. It made for a good spread of capabilities on the team, but it didn’t mean he had to let Mickey fly easy just because of that.

“Hey buddy, you actually getting any work done?”

“More than you, Finchley.”

“Believe that when I see it. Honeymoon over yet?”

“Not even close!” Mickey sounded pretty damned pleased.

“You better be saying that, hubbie” Robin cut in as she hovered her big Firehawk Oh-one down over the water.

Gordon was glad for Mickey. His easygoing friend had fallen for Robin, the brash, hard-edged blonde, the moment she’d hit camp at the beginning of the year. They were an unlikely couple from the outside, but it looked like it was working for them. They’d hooked up on day one, married last month, and showed no signs of the heat easing—of course, anything involving Robin Harrow would be fiery hot. Gordon wasn’t jealous, he really wasn’t. MHA’s lead pilot was a primal force and would have run right over any lesser man than Mickey. Way too out there for Gordon. The quiet Vanessa had seemed about perfect for him, except instead of fire between them, there hadn’t even been ignition.

Not being jealous was one thing. But when they were in camp during those rare quiet moments of the busy fire season, Mickey paid much more attention to Robin than to his old still-single pal. Gordon supposed it only made sense, but he was all the happier about finding a friend in Vanessa to fill that unexpected void.

Up over the fire, they headed for their respective targets.

The real battle, the make-or-break on the fire, was going to happen in the next thirty minutes. Gordon checked his fuel. Yes, he’d be good for that long and Vanessa would be back in another ten.

The wildfire would soon be slamming up against the fire break that the smokies had punched through the trees. Flames were climbing two hundred feet into the air in a thick pall of smoke gone dark gray with all of the ash that the heat was carrying aloft.

With a single load, Gordon managed to hit three separate flare-ups behind the smokies’ line. He could see the soot-stained smokie team below, clearing brush and scraping soil by hand even though the main flames were less than a hundred feet away. They had inch-and-a-half hoses charged up and were spraying down their own line.

Gordon swung for the lake, climbed through the smoke, and dove—

Something slammed into his windshield straight in front of his face.

He flinched and jerked.

Wrong shape and color for a bird.

Mechanical!

A hobby drone. A big one. Four rotors and a camera.

It star-cracked his acrylic windshield, then slid upward.

He didn’t have a moment to plead with the fates before he felt his MD jolt.

Perfect—the drone slid straight into his engine’s air intake.

Not a chance that his Allison 250 turboshaft engine would just chew up the plastic and spit it out the exhaust. Even if it did, the battery was like throwing a brick into the turbine.

The primary compressor, spinning at fifty thousand RPM, choked on the three-pound drone.

A horrendous grinding noise sounded close above his head.

Red lights flared, starting with “Engine Out” at the upper left of his console and a high warning tone in his headset.