Full Blaze

Chapter 1-1

1

Cal Jackson stared up at the wall of flame eating its way toward him through the forest. He was always tempting fate one step too far. Now he was way past the second step, as well as the third. He was standing in the foreign land of Totally Screwed. In his seven years of fighting wildfires and five more photographing them, he’d never been this far over the line. Not even close.

He’d ridden the edge a lot since he was a testosterone-laden teen. It had earned him his fair share of cold slaps from ticked-off women, but maybe more than his share of warm and friendly nights. It had also led to numerous interesting opportunities to travel for both work and play, so he’d learned to take that risk without actively thinking about it.

He tried not to take that second step often; it was his warning that he was pushing the limits. But dancing along the edge of that step was what had won him so many of his awards. Though the Pulitzer for photography and Best Of for World Press Photo still remained out of reach, he’d bagged a lot of awards including the cover on National Geographic. And Time, twice.

Out here, way past the second step, the Grindstone Canyon Fire was in full-throated roar. The sound throbbed against his body with bass notes that shook his inner organs. He had stood close beside the tracks when two-hundred-car freight trains had flown past at full speed.

This was louder.

Nor did it conveniently pass by and Doppler into the distance; this train of fire had him clear in its sights.

The air was growing so hot that it hurt to breathe. His acute sense of smell for smoke, burning pitch, and carbon had long since been overwhelmed by the saturation of them in the air.

He’d embedded tight with a crew of hotshot firefighters who were fast losing ground against the wildfire despite their best efforts. It happened that way. Fighting fire was a delicate back-and-forth dance between flame and attacker, in effect a hip-hop advance and retreat, attack and counterattack by both sides of the…hoedown.

Hoedown? Where had he come up with that? Third foster father. Yuck!

Yet in one way the comparison was appropriate, as it was with the rakes, Pulaskis, and also the hoes that a hotshot crew used to battle the flames. Not hoedown, but rather… His brain trying to work out what hip-hop dancers called that battle of dance, power, and sensuality had to be about the damn stupidest thought to have as his last on earth.

The Grindstone in southern California was probably the last big fire of the year in the United States. The Pacific Northwest was already getting rain, and Colorado had snow, though that hadn’t slowed down the Fern Lake Fire back in 2012. He’d won two awards and filled national headlines on that one for his piece on fighting wildfires when the supply tanks and rivers froze and the helicopters couldn’t get at the water to fight the flames.

The Southeast had recently been soaked by a serious trio of hurricanes. So this year California was last in the hot seat, and the fires above Santa Barbara were doing their best to take back the hills for Mother Nature. It had started in the same area of Rattlesnake Canyon Park as the lethal Rattlesnake Fire of 1953 that killed fifteen firefighters. Though this time it was started by lightning rather than a psycho arsonist.

He should have grabbed a clue from the historical setting, though he’d been no better with history than most of the subjects in school, except fighting and photography. With maturity, he’d added fire as an adjective to both of them. He now knew fire history as well as any hotshot walking the hills, except for this time when it should have warned him. There hadn’t been a bad burn here in more than sixty years, so it was due.

The hotshot crew he’d been with had been in the heat for a week, driving ahead and then retreating—dancing that careful strategic dance against the flames. Less than two minutes ago the crew had taken off down a narrow track leading across a cliff face and onto a rolling slope that led down into the distant valley. Their escape route was clean. He’d hesitated an extra fifteen seconds to get a shot of a massive fig tree, over eighty feet tall, being ripped up by fire-generated winds and tossed aside like a matchstick. Fifteen lousy seconds.

The problem was that the fire had cast the flaming tree down clear across his escape route. The tree not only lay across the path, but it was catching all of the surrounding material on fire as well. The crew looked at him helplessly across the gap.

The notch canyon that separated them was too far for a rope cast, and the vertical walls that plunged down to either side of his position required a level of mountaineering skill that included hammers and pitons, neither of which he was carrying. He carefully eyed a ledge about ten feet below, but could think of no way to get down to it. Far too narrow a landing to risk a jump. Yet.

He could see the crew boss on the radio, but with the fire’s roar, Cal couldn’t hear him though his own radio handset was in its pouch against his shoulder and the volume was turned up to full.

The smoke blotted out the boss as he was about to make a hand sign. A glance upward into the smoke canopy told him that no helicopters would be able to save his sorry behind. The mushroom cloud of smoke—looking like a nuclear blast, it was so intense—rose ten thousand feet above the California landscape. It declared that line of approach as closed for the duration.

The ravine to the south was clogged with fire, and the one to the north was now fully lit by the thrown tree, its branches ablaze like a thousand-armed candelabra. The two ravines met to the west.

The only way out was east—and there raged the beast.

The narrow ledge of his final demise was covered in a few dogwood and valley oak trees, tall grasses, and dense manzanita brush. When the fire rolled over this site, it would burn hot. Hot in the same way it had burned over the nineteen-man crew at Yarnell, the air so superheated it had burned through their foil emergency shelters. It had done that despite the circular clearing they’d cut around themselves. And he didn’t carry a chain saw either, to try to make a clearing.

All he had were his cameras.

He backed to the edge of the precipice and then turned once more to look at the flame. He wasn’t conscious of his actions as he lifted his new Canon Mark III camera, found the frame, shot the photo. Zoomed back. Found the next, shot it.

The beast was close.

He’d only once been so close to the heart of the firestorm. During his days as a member of a hotshot crew, they’d have been long gone before the heart of the fire rolled this close.

The camera was heating in his hands, prickly hot to hold.

Too close! That was it. He dropped the camera into his bag and pulled out his old workhorse 6D body with the 28 mm wide-angle lens. No way he’d risk a lens change with all of the dust and ash in the air.

There! He could see the image coming together that would make a cover photo. Another prizewinner was virtually here.

A few more seconds…

If he could just…

A metal shape zipped by the lens, fast. He didn’t see what it was, but instinct had him pressing the shutter. He flicked back to the image.

On his viewfinder a winged drone six feet in length, painted black with gold-and-orange flames, had flown between him and the fire. It had a bold MHA emblazoned on its side.

Slight comfort that was. All it meant was that someone from Mount Hood Aviation was going to have the award-winning photo of the journalist who burned alive while clutching his camera like a damned i***t. All because he’d had to take that third step past the edge and now couldn’t wrench back from it.

But Cal was sure going to end up as a cinder. He was going to make a lousy Cinderella, no pretty gown rising from the ashes for him. Another thirty seconds and he’d have to take his chances inside the foil shelter, though he’d sworn he’d never do that again.

Maybe his life was supposed to pass before his eyes right about now, but he hoped not. He’d beaten the first sixteen years of his life down with every ounce of a firefighter’s willpower until they didn’t exist. The time since had been mostly good, but with the way his luck was running today, he’d get to see those early days from before he’d renamed himself Calvin Jackson.

The i***t part of him started to raise the camera again, but then he stopped. His cameras were going to cook right along with him, regardless if he threw himself over them like a Marine covering a grenade to save his buddies.

For once he focused exclusively on the wall of flame. Its heart so hot it glowed gold as the fire swarmed up tree trunks six stories tall with a single breath, sheathing each tree in a cloak of flame six inches and fifteen hundred degrees thick. The roar deepened as if gathering its breath. So loud that—

The sharp blast of a voice over a loudspeaker not ten feet behind him so startled Cal that he nearly stumbled off his shrinking perch. Completely masked by the roar of the fire and with hundred-foot flames less than thirty yards away, a helicopter had come to hover behind him. It wore the same paint job as the drone. A giant “02” was painted over its black-and-flame paint job.

A glance up showed the rotor blades shimmering in a lethal arc only a few feet above him and no break in the smoke-cloud cover. The hotshot crew was still invisible across the ravine. But far down below, just off the narrow spit of cliff he was perched upon, he could see the terrain. The pilot had flown up through a hole underneath the smoke and ash cloud.

“Get aboard, you bloody git!” the speaker screamed at him. He wouldn’t have heard it if it weren’t less than ten feet away and aimed right at him.

The helo hung maddingly out of reach, hovering with its open side door toward him. Over his shoulder he could see that the spinning rotor disk was within a foot or so of a stout oak tree. They couldn’t fly any closer to him. The helo didn’t have skids to grab on to like they always did in the movies, it only had wheels.

The cargo bay door was an open four-by-four-foot square of salvation, hanging six feet away over a hundred-yard drop. He stuffed both cameras into the padded bag, snapped it shut, and chucked the bag through the door toward the rear so it wouldn’t go out the other side that was also open. Then, squatting to make the leap while the helo bounced in the roiling air currents, he jumped into space.

He landed mostly inside the door. Far enough to drag himself the rest of the way. He spotted a rope line, made sure it was secured to something, then snapped the D ring on the front of his safety harness onto it so that he was now secure.

“Good to go,” he shouted to the pilot. There was no way he could be heard. The freight train was screaming toward them, barely ten yards from the rotor tips.

The pilot, flying alone, risked a quick glance back, but was skilled enough for the helo to remain rock stable despite the turbulent environment.

Cal only had long enough to get the impression of a narrow face and mirrored shades wrapped in a large, earmuff pilot’s headset. Seeing he was aboard, the pilot rolled the helo hard left and dove down through the dwindling smoke hole. He caught the camera bag as it skidded across the deck plating.

A glance up at the cliff showed a tongue of flame now reaching out to grab where the helo had hovered only moments before.

Now that he was safe, the adrenaline rush kicked out hard. He’d fought fires from California to Alaska, and he’d photographed them in Brazil, Russia, Greece, and many other places. He’d never before had his hands shake so badly that he couldn’t open the bag to make sure the cameras were okay. All he could do was clench it to his chest and let the shakes run through him.