The Complete Hotshots

Chapter 3

3

Day Five and Candace was halfway through the selection process. She’d been right on four out of the five who’d been gone on Day One; one had made it to Day Two. She’d lost five more since then. She was down from forty to thirty on her way to the final twenty to be accepted into the crew.

She knew crew bosses who did it solely with physical testing: massive hikes, hard calisthenics, and so on. She preferred to incorporate as much training as possible. Here’s what the real world will be like, kids. You up for it?

Yesterday she had them clearing a line. When a fire was working its way through the forest duff and detritus, it was up to a hotshot team to scrape and clear a wide swath down to mineral soil, and to do it in lines often a mile or more long. Upslope and down.

Hotshots might be the elite ground crew, barely a step down from the smokejumpers, but they spent a lot of time grubbing dirt lines. Sixteen hours she’d kept them at it, sunup to well past sundown, finishing by headlamp, then sacking out right where they were. On a big fire, they’d be going twenty-four to thirty-six hours at a time and she wanted to give them a taste of that. They all wore field packs now and either a Pulaski axe or a McLeod rake. Unlike most field duty during the season, her dad’s townie crew did roll in with a wildfire engine loaded up for each meal; so at least they ate well.

Today, she pulled Jess and Patsy out of the crowd and introduced them around the deep woods camp as her two foremen. She’d left them in the team long enough that their exceptional skills and experience had become standout obvious, so there were no hard feelings about having spies in their midst. At least none that she could spot.

Luke Rawlings had offered her one of his enigmatic smiles that seemed to say, About time. As if he’d known about them since the first day.

She was half tempted to boot the man, just because the puzzle of him was so damned distracting. Candace needed the team to stay focused and this man was a complete aberration. But the part of her that he was sidetracking had nothing to do with forest fires, so she did her best to ignore that and left him in place.

He clearly had no experience with wildfire or hotshot techniques, but show him something once and he had it solid. Not just what to do, but like he’d always had it. Luke had clearly never run a chainsaw, didn’t even know how to start one. Yet after a single day that the team had spent clearing some new land for a farmer downslope near the town of Monitor, he moved like a three-year sawyer.

And he never spoke much. Strong and silent type. “Just takin’ care of business, ma’am” attitude. When he did speak, his voice had a soft southern to it, Tennessee or Kentucky—that he clearly knew was a total charmer. Of the six women among the recruits, four had already taken a run at him. As far as Candace could tell, not a one of them had gotten past that polite shield.

What are you hiding, Rawlings?

He wasn’t saying. Well, today should separate out more of the recruits. Question was, did she want him separated out or not?

She moved them downslope from where they’d camped—an uncomfortable site on the slopes of Dragontail Peak. Anyone who thought fires didn’t burn on this kind of terrain, so hotshots never walked it, would be disabused of that notion over the fast-approaching fire season.

When they reached a small clearing, her Dad had already arrived with a wildfire engine. These trucks were wide, heavy, and smaller than the standard in-town engines. More the size of a utility service truck, they could cross surprisingly rough terrain with a great deal of gear and five hundred gallons of water.

Once they were gathered, Candace pulled out a fire shelter pouch and held it up for all to see.

“This is a five-hundred dollar device of last resort. You will always have one on your hip and you will protect it more carefully than your own face. If everything else goes wrong and you find yourself in a burnover situation, this foil shelter is your only chance of survival.”

That sobered a number of their faces.

“Today, we’ll practice with plastic shelters worth about ten dollars. I don’t want to see even the smallest tear or nick in these, because if it’s a real fire, fifteen hundred degree flame will find its way right through that gap and toast your ass. I can’t begin to tell you how much paperwork that will cause me.”

That got her some good laughs. Even the old hands appreciated the dark humor of it. She knew that at least three of them besides herself had ridden out a burnover under a shelter. And several of them had friends among the Yarnell 19 who died in 2013; the manzanita-fed flames too hot for even the foil shelters’ protection.

Luke Rawlings, however, looked at her as if she’d just committed a crime against humanity. His expression had gone dark enough that she suddenly feared for her safety.

No. It wasn’t her he was looking at.

He was looking at something that wasn’t in the grass clearing, but rather in his past. Well, she pitied whoever had put that look on his face, because she’d wager they hadn’t survived long after whatever they’d done to piss him off.

She made it a policy to not pull a recruit’s application file during the ten-day trial, but she’d broken down last night. U.S. Navy Chief Petty Officer Luke Rawlings, retired. That explained some things, but not others. She’d fought fire beside plenty of ex-soldiers before, though none as quietly competent as Rawlings. Many hadn’t been able to face the fire itself when it came down to reality: some froze, some ran, and one got the shakes so bad they had to medevac him out.

Luke was steady. Always helping the rawest rookies get their feet under them with a gentle word and a clear demonstration. Infinitely patient, he kept working with them until they really had it. He’d be a good man to have around.

Erase that, Cantrell. Mr. Ex-Navy Luke Altman would be a good firefighter to have around. She just wished she could stop thinking about the man who watched her as much as she was watching him.

Usually about half of the former soldiers would be weeded out by the fire shelter deployment exercise.

It was something of a surprise when she realized that she really hoped Luke wasn’t one of those.