Chapter Sixteen
Beck
The sound of the helicopter blades rumbling through the air was oddly comforting. I leaned my head back against the seat with a sigh. I was bone tired and so was our entire crew. We’d been called out to a fire that just wouldn’t f*****g die in central Alaska. Our crew had finished a two week rotation before we’d been relieved by one of the crews from the Fairbanks area. We were in the midst of another dry summer, which was keeping hotshot crews all over the state busy. The spruce bark beetle had ravaged Alaska’s massive swaths of evergreen forest. The beetle had found its way here via lumber shipments from Asia. Since its arrival, it had stayed busy surviving off of Alaska’s bountiful spruce trees and leaving nothing but acre upon acre of dead trees in its wake. Hot,
