The Complete Firebirds

Chapter 5

5

“Something bothering you?” Jana asked as the three of them were settling into their bunks after another impossibly long firefight—their fourth major fire in five weeks. It felt good to be back at Illinois Valley Airport even if they’d been on the road more than they’d been here.

The bunkroom wasn’t generous; it was best if they didn’t all try to get dressed at the same time. Jana had the single bed on one wall. Maggie—their ace mechanic—had the top bunk above Stacy’s lower. After the long drive back from the Idaho Trickle Creek Fire, which hadn’t been trickling at all, she was too tired to even think.

“Sure,” Stacy mumbled. “I’m desperate to know how long we actually get to stretch out on a crappy bunk before the next fire.”

“Hey,” Maggie stuck out her head and look down at her, temporarily blocking the too bright overhead light that no one had the energy to switch off. The shadows completely hid her expression. “I tightened the springs and put in a new board and everything.”

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to trigger the perfectionist in the room.”

“Look who’s talking,” Maggie’s silhouette rolled back out of sight.

Stacy considered rolling over to get out of the light, but just threw an arm over her face instead.

“We got us a trio of perfectionists in this bunkroom. Now if someone could explain the trash in those other two bunkhouses, that might help some.”

“They’re men. I guess we need to cut them some slack.” Not that they’d been working one minute less than the women on the team.

When they had all first practiced together, it soon became apparent that Jana and Curt had assembled a very skilled group of pilots. But that wasn’t enough for them as they’d conceived something grander.

In her experience most outfits debriefed the fire’s behavior after each flight. Instead, the Firebirds debriefed aerial tactics. And it was paying off.

On the first fire, a controlled burn over in Corvallis that had run out of control, they’d beaten and battered at the fire. Each MD 520N could deliver a half-ton of water—two hundred gallons—out of the belly tanks rigged between their skids. Curt had even spent the extra for deployable snorkels, so that they didn’t have to land to retank, but could just hover over a stream or lake and refill in thirty seconds. If a retardant truck was handy, they could also land and refill in not many seconds more. But they’d made six separate attacks, fighting the fire in too many places at once.

Now, five hard weeks later, they attacked the fire in a tight line bunched like hydroplanes at the start of a race on Devil’s Lake in Lincoln City. They focused on one house at a time. There was no way for their six little helos to stop the main front of a raging wildfire. But first they’d learned how to hold it back around a single house.

Then they’d advanced.

Rather than stopping the fire, they punched holes in it—holes that expanded to gaps. More than once, they’d saved a whole row of houses with the fencelines scorched out between them, but the structures still standing. Ka-ching! That’s what they got paid for.

Doing it on their first big fire this week over in Idaho had confused the crap out of the air bosses. They’d had to fight tooth-and-nail to prove that their tactics were saving more homes, even at the cost of more forest. They’d finally convinced that one guy, but the next fire was probably going to be the same battle all over again. It was too exhausting to even think about.

Stacy’s body was buzzing with that exhaustion so there was no way she was going to get to sleep.

“I need a beer,” not that it would help, but it was better than lying here and not sleeping while her body buzzed.

“Something other than camp food,” Jana sighed. “Like…pizza!”

“Men,” Maggie groaned from the upper bunk. “We definitely need men.”

“We’ve already got a supply of those,” Stacy could feel them in the small huts next door.

“No. Those are our men. We need real ones. The kind we can be stupid about and not regret it in the morning.”

There was a sudden silence as Stacy glanced over at Jana.

“Beer,” she whispered.

“Pizza,” Jana sat up enough to look at her.

“Men,” Maggie again leaned out enough to block the light with her head.

“Road trip!” They all said it in unison.

“Shh!” Maggie made the sound far more loudly than they’d been speaking. “Let’s sneak. Otherwise our men will follow us and spoil the fun.”

Jana dressed in nice slacks and a pretty blouse, a bright scrunchy hanked her long blonde hair into a ponytail.

“You’re not going to wear your cosmetic hand?” Stacy had seen it in the drawer, because there was no privacy in a room this small. Come to think of it, she’d never seen Jana wearing anything but the hooks.

“I can drink beer and eat pizza with this one,” she flexed a shoulder and clicked the opposing hooks together to emphasize her point. “If a guy can’t deal with it, to hell with him.”

“To hell with him,” Maggie agreed cheerfully and Stacy echoed the sentiment.

Yes, to hell with him, whoever him was. Keeping that in mind, Stacy rehung her one fine change of clothes in the tiny closet. Instead she went with her standard Oregon attire: jeans with no char spots, a red t-shirt that said “Fire pilots are like fire, too hot to touch!”, and a fleece REI shirt that covered most of the words. She tossed her hair over her shoulder and she was done.

Maggie changed into lacy red underwear—“In case I actually get lucky”—and then a low cut, clingy dress of flirty gold that offset her dark skin so that it looked like she was both glowing and perhaps a little evil. The hem landed well above her knees and pretty much guaranteed her luck if there was a single man anywhere in a dozen miles. She was also pixie high and by far the cutest of the three of them, so she and Jana wouldn’t stand a chance until Maggie had her pick. Which was fine, Stacy wanted a beer. She might be tempted by a pizza, but men were nowhere on her list. Not until she found one with an ego smaller than a gray whale migrating up the coast. Not gonna happen on a fire line.

They slipped out the back, climbed into Stacy’s little Toyota because they were all sick of riding back from Idaho in the big GMC Denali pickups. Maggie slipped into one of the small backseats that had her sitting sideways and they were off.

Jana turned to the only radio station that reached this far into the hills. They were playing Boondocks by Little Big Town. Definitely where they were. They sang along all the way into town.