Chinook

Chapter 3

3

This was the way to travel.

Taz sat on the tail ramp of the CH-47D Chinook helicopter and watched the night-black forest go by. She’d never thought to fly in a military aircraft again, even if it was just Army National Guard.

The Chinook was the military’s primary heavy lifter rotorcraft. Sure, the Navy’s CH-53E Super Sea Stallion could lift more, but they also had a nasty habit of falling out the sky and killing another platoon of Marines.

She’d take the twin-rotor Chinook any day. They almost never went down, unless they were shot. Even then, they were incredibly tough.

Her hotshot wildfire crew had been called up from southern Oregon to a nasty burn on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. The firefight was in the rugged mountains above Port Angeles along the northernmost shore of the state. The achingly dry summer had turned the entire place into a giant tinderbox.

It was late in the season, they’d been on the verge of cutting her and the other seasonal firefighters loose, but the Washington wilderness had decided it still had one good burn to go.

They’d crammed into the team’s pair of ten-seat hotshot buggies and driven through the afternoon and evening to get to the town of Port Angeles at midnight. The ARNG had been waiting to immediately airlift her team of twenty to defend the Hurricane Ridge Visitor Center. The lone access road was on fire at either end. Airlift was the only way in or out.

She rubbed at the calluses on her hands. Physical work was something she’d left behind for nineteen years after Basic Training. Even after five months with the hotshots, her hands ached. But it felt good to be doing something physical after all these years. No power plays. No national crises. Simply good, hard work.

As the flight humped over the first ridge, the landscape glowed—lit from within by firelight. Bright smears of red and gold peeking through wind-torn rents in the obscuring smoke. Where the smoke hid the terrain, it was luminous with the raging fires it masked.

The Chinook was so powerful that it didn’t have to claw to make the mile-high climb. It was as smooth a ride as a C-130 Hercules transport plane. I’m going this way.

She liked its muscley attitude.

So much of her life she’d been just that—the unstoppable force. At least in the halls and offices of the American defense system.

Her life was so different now that she barely recognized it. For over a month after the Ghostrider crash had “killed” her, she’d just drifted north from Phoenix. Sleeping wild and seeing places she’d only ever heard of. The Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, Mesa Verde…she’d just played tourist.

Taz had spent so much of her life on the move that sitting still didn’t work for more than a few hours behind the wheel. Picking up some decent hiking gear at a pawn shop in Flagstaff, she took to the hills and trails wherever she went. The farther she got out in nature, the better she felt.

Chance had placed her in Southern Oregon at Pearsony Falls Park on the first day of the testing for the Rogue River Hotshots. One of the crew bosses laughed when she asked if she could join the test. Hard to begrudge him, she stood eight inches shorter and forty pounds lighter than either of the other women among the thirty hopefuls. Half the team were regulars, which meant there were only ten open spots. Didn’t matter to her, she was just looking for something new to do for a few days.

She’d waited him out.

The superintendent had shrugged as if it was no skin off his back if she wanted to join them for a bit of a workout.

Tasia Vicki Flores had lasted about an hour into those tryouts. After she came in well ahead of the pack on the first hike, her old nickname of Taz resurfaced. But she was no longer the general’s Taser. It was a hundred percent her now.

As for the physical testing, what had started out as an amusing diversion had turned into a brutal ten-day trial that had fit her down to her boots. Hiking a forty-pound pack across three miles in ninety minutes was about physical toughness, the kind she’d spent a month building up during her own explorations of the Sierra Nevada. Digging organic debris off a fireline in hour thirty-six was about mental toughness. Spending nights “coyote”—sleeping wild—was what she’d already been doing anyway.

She earned her place, did the work to earn a Red Card, and became a seasonal wildland firefighter on a crew of twenty other hard-headed hotshots. One other woman made it through. The crew boss who’d laughed at her asked specifically to have her on his crew.

You’re tenacious. Facing a fire, I like tenacious.

For five months they chased burns up and down the hills until she was in the best shape of her life.

And she belonged.

Taz glanced around the Chinook helicopter’s cargo bay. Every one of the crew was more familiar than anyone had ever been in her life other than General JJ Martinez.

She knew that Jeff had a husband in Sacramento who didn’t understand his need to fight fires half the year, but made it work. Jeff felt guilty all the time, calling fire his “evil mistress”, but this was his eighth season.

Clare had been married twice, both times to firefighters, and had been well on her way to a third firefighter before deciding it would be better to go hotshot herself. First thing I’ve gotten right in years.

Taz had slowly fabricated a past.

A San Diego childhood.

Living with a Lockheed Martin engineer in El Segundo, California, then DC, to explain how she knew so much about aircraft and the nation’s capital.

Catching his cheating ass with a Congressional aide, resulting in her wandering road trip in her beater Corolla.

It hadn’t held together all that well until she let slip a few words about a barely avoided court-martial. Of course, implying her fictitious lover’s trial—not the one she’d avoided herself by conveniently “dying” in the Ghostrider’s crash without ending up dead.

She became a woman with a shadowy past, which actually made her story more acceptable to the rest of the crew. No one here to recognize Colonel Vicki Cortez. Outside the Pentagon, that wasn’t much of a worry.

Yes, she’d take the present any day.