Wild Fire

Chapter 1-4

She glanced back and saw that Gordon had rested his head against the side wall and had closed his eyes. It was nice to see that his easy bravado had been just that. It would be far more worrisome if he had a true devil-may-care attitude. But at the moment, he looked exhausted and more than a little stressed. So, at least one of Henderson’s pilots wasn’t superhuman, which meant she had some slim chance of fitting in. She was impressed that he’d held it together at all through such a bad crash.

Ripley focused on lining up where Mark wanted her. She came in low from the west and ended up in a line behind three Firehawks. The fire had hit the leading edge of the firebreak that the smokies had slashed through the trees. Unable to move forward, the fire was piling up on itself, building a towering wall along the entire length of the clearing. It looked as if the wave of fire was about to break, falling forward to crash down upon the smokies from above.

The Firehawks slid into a nice neat line and laid down clouds of water in long, six-second spills. As soon as each bird finished its drop, it would peel away, up and east toward the water. Then the next one opened up. Military precision in a civilian outfit.

Aircranes tended to fly alone. A major fire could have an entire airshow going, and there’d be only one Aircrane.

Well, she was here to show them what one could do.

The three Firehawks had dumped three thousand gallons between them.

Ripley shifted another twenty feet upwind of their drop line to compensate for the increased fire intensity as she approached the middle of the line—bigger fires generated bigger winds, which shuffled the water drop sideways. Sixty knots speed and a hundred and fifty feet up. She flew along the fire’s leading edge, no more than a rotor width from the flame tops. There she unleashed her drop for a fifty-yard overlap with the last of the Firehawks and a setting for moderate coverage. She let it run. And run. And run.

Twenty-five hundred gallons laid down on the fire in a long, clean line.

“Damn! But that’s a lot of water. That’s one of the sexiest things I’ve ever seen.”

It wasn’t Henderson, so it must be one of the pilots. No, it wasn’t over the radio, it was over the intercom. Gordon. He was twisted around and looking out the curved bubble of Janet’s aft controller position.

“Damn straight!” Ripley didn’t get to watch her own drops, except occasionally on video, but it was an amazing feeling to make such a difference with each pass of her helicopter.

As soon as she headed back toward the water, an MD 530 zipped up close to her port side. A moment later, it had climbed over her and come up to the starboard. The little helicopters had always made her twitchy. She was a Big Iron gal herself: Seahawks for the Navy and now the Aircrane—the first weighed ten tons fully loaded and her Aircrane could pick that up without breaking a sweat. An MD 530 weighed a ton and a half all in.

“Damn it! Why do they even have one of those? They aren’t good for much more than watering the plants.”

“Well,” Gordon said. “They occasionally do a fine job of clearing the skies of little drones.”

Crap! Be rude to the guy twice in two minutes. Usually she was smoother than that with members of the opposite s*x. Maybe she was still shaky from almost cutting him in half. “Okay. Well, let me know if there are any other ways I can insult you.”

“Sure thing,” he agreed complacently. “Could you open a second radio on…” and he called out a frequency.

Pilot chatter came in loud and clear. She’d need to get the rest of the frequencies soon. Brad set it so that the ICA’s calls would automatically mute the pilot’s channel.

“Gordon?” A woman asked. “Are you really okay?” Her voice was soft and smooth with an Italian accent.

“I’m fine, Vanessa. Just wet, shook up, and damn glad to be alive.”

Between the Italian accent and sexy name, if she was beautiful, Ripley would hate her just on general principles.

“Oh, thank goodness.” Then, with a waggle of wings, the little MD 530 turned to go back to the fire.

Despite its simplicity, the brief exchange had been so intimate that it was almost embarrassing to listen to.

Ripley hadn’t been that intimate with anyone since, well, Chief Petty Officer Weasel Williams. Lieutenant Ripley Vaughan, a much younger and more naive version of herself, had left the Navy three years ago because she’d fallen in love with an enlisted man. An enlisted man who’d left her two days from the altar…for the wedding caterer. It was the last time she’d let herself be so trusting. Or trusting at all really.

But having someone to care about her the way Vanessa cared about Gordon would be…nice.

Ripley wished she wasn’t such a romantic.

It was all her parents’ fault, especially her Senegalese mother. There was no way that a girl who had been raised by a theater drama professor, who wrote romance novels on the side, could be anything but a romantic. Her mixed-race Oklahoman father had taken his one-eighth Cherokee heritage as a calling to become a cultural archaeologist for the local tribes—Ripley had inherited her straight dark hair from him. He too was always bringing home legends of true love, lasting from the time of the creation myths.

Ripley ran another drag of the sea snorkel alongside the burning lake shore—glad to see nobody floating out in the middle of the lake this time. The Firehawks had left her a clear path, settling in a line as they dunked their hoses and ran their pumps.

“Damn, that’s bloody awesome!” A female pilot on the helicopter frequency, but without any hint of an Italian accent. Australian this time. How many women were in this outfit? Usually, when Ripley showed up, it increased the total to one.

“How much water, how fast?” A man asked.

“Twenty-six hundred and fifty gallons. Forty seconds,” Ripley answered as she finished the run and pulled back aloft. Though even in the S-64F she could only carry over twenty-five hundred if she was at a low altitude and had burned most of her fuel, decreasing her total load. Didn’t mean that she had to tell anyone that.

“Mommy, I want one,” the Aussie called out. The Firehawks would still have fifteen more seconds to pump aboard their measly thousand gallons while she was already flying back to the fire.

Gordon just sat back and listened to the on-going firefight. It was strange to be sitting here with nothing to do as the flight volleyed back and forth between water and fire. They finally got a retardant tanker truck and a dip tank set up. The Firehawks switched over to dumping retardant by snorkeling their loads out of a “pumpkin,” which looked like a kiddie pool on steroids kept full of the red goo by the tanker.

The retardant was laid down in broad sweeps where the fire wasn’t—over the smokies’ s***h pile, along the flanks, and finally the tail. Each swath coated an area of unburned trees and grass with a sticky red solution of phosphates and sulfates that made it so that no oxygen could reach the wood—no oxygen, no fire. The red let the pilots and ICA see where they’d already dropped.

The problem was that the fire had flared up so hot and fast that it constantly threatened to jump the narrow lines of defense. Twice the flank outran how fast they could lay down the retardant. Then it skipped over and started a fresh fire with new flanks and a new head. More retardant was laid down around that.

Vanessa stayed on water and hit spot fires.

That left the lake wide open for Ripley and her Aircrane to gather massive loads of water and hit the fire directly wherever the ground team needed it to be cooled down. The smokies’ line was now being tested by the main head, and the wildfire was definitely in no mood to stop.

Ripley battered away at it, slapping it down out of the crown in one section, only to have it flare up in the next. Several times she had to jump over to killing spot fires when Vanessa’s MD and Mickey’s 212 were overwhelmed by the number of embers falling and sparking downwind, closer to the community. The hundred homes at the southeast corner were nestled right into the trees. If the fire got loose, they didn’t stand a chance. When she flew over it, she could see the rural fire engines wetting down some of the closer houses while the police with their flashing lights were fighting the challenges of a reluctant evacuation.

The battle became a blur. Heat, noise, flame, and the intense chatter on the radios. Everyone wanted attention. Everyone wanted all the resources put to their section of the blaze.

Gordon could see the real advantage of a copilot. It wasn’t that they were needed to fly the aircraft. Even a monster aircraft like the Aircrane could probably be handled by a single pilot, but a copilot sure helped handle the radios.

“You take the Vs,” Ripley had called out to Brad. He muted her from the two VHF radios that were for talking to the ICA and the air-to-air comm for the helicopters. It let her focus on the FM radios in her coordination with the ground team. Much more rational than trying to pick your instructions out of four or five lines of simultaneous chatter.

They were definitely in it now. The battle was deeply engaged and everyone was doing something…except him.

He hadn’t merely watched a firefight since he’d been a kid growing up in Red Butte, Wyoming. A scrub fire had swept over the prairie and a helicopter had flown over to dump water on it before it overran the highway. He’d rushed out on his pony to watch. It had been a simple task for the UH-1 Huey, flying with a bucket on a longline, dipping water out of the lazy waters of the North Platte River…and he’d been hooked. Such a simple thing had shaped his whole life.

And now what was he supposed to do? No helo. MHA didn’t have a spare million-dollar aircraft sitting around. His own would be a complete write-off: shattered engine, bent frame, and all.

Yet he felt as if he was sitting once more on his pony watching the helicopter work up and down the distant fireline. His world had just changed…but he had no idea how. He could only hope it was for the better. Crashing once in a flying career was definitely once too many.