Full Blaze

Chapter 1-3

“How much can you hold?”

“A thousand gallons at this altitude. Minus a hundred for the foam tank I have rigged in the stern and minus thirty more for you.” She said it matter-of-factly, but he could hear the insult.

He didn’t feel the least bit guilty—too damn glad to be alive. This time when he looked over, he noticed more than the color of her hair. Her position, twisted to look out and down at the pool, revealed a trim waist despite the heavy jacket she wore. He took another bet with himself that in addition to warm brown eyes, she’d have a light form, making a still nicer package. And she made her living floating like magic through the air.

It reminded him of the old Bing Crosby song about the girl with the light brown hair.

“I dream of Jeannie with the bright red hair,” he sang it out with the best of the WWII-era crooners.

Jeannie jerked around to stare at the photographer chap. “How did you know my name? And it’s with the bright blue hair.” She sang the last part back to prove that his smooth baritone was not the only good voice on this flight. Though why she did that was beyond her. And he wasn’t getting a point for that nice voice.

“Because it, uh, used to be blue? No, that’s too boring for someone like you. Let’s see…” Then he laughed. “Because it never was blue. I dream of Jeannie with the electric blue hair… I can feel the crooners rolling over in their graves trying to imagine modern blue instead of light brown. Don’t know how I missed that. Didn’t know your name. Just liked how you fit the song, Floating like a vapor on the summer air. Though you’re more smoke over fire, aren’t you?”

The jet pump whined as it sucked air. Turning once more to the window, she descended to get the lower end of the snorkel submerged again and watched the fill gauge. Five more seconds to full. She shut off at 920 gallons.

And…done.

Retracting the snorkel onto the hose reel and rising back into the air, she made sure that she stayed clear of chimneys, tall trees, and power lines.

No one had ever gotten that right. Her hair had never been blue. She’d put in the red streak after her first flight against fire. The woman who’d certified her in Australia had said Jeannie was so good that she must have a fire-red streak down her back. She’d showed up with the dye job the next day and flown that way ever since.

The thing about the blue had always been her little joke, a line to keep guys at a distance. And it had always worked, when she wanted it to, to make them look foolish or confused. Sure it occasionally ticked them off, which worked equally as well.

But not Cal Jackson. First ever to get it right, and with fewer clues than most. That had to be worth another point, though she gave it up reluctantly.

She called Mark Henderson, flying air attack command in the Beech Baron up at seven thousand feet. “Air attack, this is Hawk Oh-Two with a full load of water and foam…and a passenger. Where do you want me?”

She listened to the directions and grinned at the cooing sound in the background. His one-year-old daughter would be curled up in her tiny car seat flying copilot beside him—the team’s most junior member.

The hotshot crew that Cal had been with had repositioned to cut a firebreak across a feeder of fire reaching north along an overgrown greenway. The residents hadn’t dead-limbed trees or cleared brush, despite warnings about the greenway that reached deep into the rich-people suburb. The ever-growing urban-forest interface was always risky, but an untended one was asking for what you deserved. And then they wondered why their homes burned. Jeannie was instructed to follow Emily Beale in Hawk Oh-One to give the hotshots a hand.

“I can drop you back in with your hotshot crew, if you want,” Jeannie told Cal over the intercom. “We’re headed over to give them a hand.”

“I’m fine where I am, if that’s okay with you. They’re probably tired of me anyway.”

“Great. So now I’m saddled with your deadweight?” She climbed to six hundred feet above ground level, turning to a heading of one-two-zero, and spotted Emily setting up for her attack run a half mile ahead.

“I know it’s a burden, but I’m easy.”

“Well, I’m not.” What i***t part of her brain decided to add s****l innuendo to this conversation? It wasn’t the sort of thing she ever did.

She heard a camera-shutter click sound over the headset. She looked over, straight into a big, fat camera lens barely two feet away. She heard another click.

“Cut that out!” As she opened her mouth, she heard a third click.

And then he laughed aloud. “Yeah, we gotta frame that one.”

Turning away, she lined up on her attack run, then checked in on the hotshots’ frequency for final guidance. Her best option would be to ignore the man in the copilot seat. She wished that was easier to do.

Cal had enjoyed flustering her. She was so smooth, so professional. In addition to the lovely Australian accent, like Nicole Kidman’s when she wasn’t covering it, Jeannie’s voice had all the markers of higher education. He flipped through the three photos on his viewfinder’s screen. The last one was funny: her mouth open, the anger obvious, and the camera reflected in the mirrored shades clearly illustrated the reason for her ire. He should blow it up and laminate it to the side of her helo some night.

The head-on shot of her still and quiet a moment earlier was far better, though. It captured the serious pilot, the frank gaze of a professional, a pretty professional doing her job. Though that shot had the mood spoiled by the dual reflections of his camera.

It was the first shot that stopped him. That was an amazing photo. The same intentness, now in profile—she had an exceptionally pleasant profile—high forehead, nice nose, and womanly lips above a well-defined chin and a splendid length of neck. But the wide-angle lens had captured her hands on the controls of a vastly complex machine. Beyond the window, the wall of smoke and flame hung so close he could feel his nerves starting to return.

He’d never been afraid of fire. Respected it? Immensely. But afraid? Not until he’d practically been burned to death for the second time in his life.

He lowered the camera and inspected where he had come to rest.

As a hotshot for seven years, he’d often been delivered by helitack but he’d only gotten to ride up front a few times. Those trips had been in a much smaller and simpler helo.

The Firehawk was a monster. Ten smoke eaters could cram in the cargo bay along with their gear. The controls up here in the front were arranged in a giant T. A long console between the seats offered a bewildering array of electronics. It was set up with three columns of electronic gear, which included radios, but a lot more that he didn’t recognize at all.

Then the broad top of the T spread sideways below the main windshield. It presented each seat with two large glass squares like laptop screens, with a handful of control buttons on each of the four sides. A quick glance showed that his two screens and Jeannie’s two were all showing different information. Terrain map, radar with tiny blips that must be other aircraft, and the other two completely cluttered with images of dials and gauges that he couldn’t begin to interpret.

Overhead, above the windscreen, was another bank of controls mounted in the ceiling with levers for the two engines and a bunch of switches and circuit breakers. As far as he could tell, it would require a serious college course to understand what half of the labels meant, never mind how to use them.

Taken all together, it meant only one thing to him: Way out of your league, Cal. He was good at two things: fighting fire and photographing the fight. Those were the only skills he’d ever found, and the only real pleasures.

Jeannie was from a whole other level of the world that he didn’t get to play in. He rarely had the opportunity to watch it from so close.

Between his knees, the cyclic control wiggled back and forth, mirroring Jeannie’s smooth control movements with her right hand on her own stick. A lever between the left side of his seat and the door rose and fell slightly. A quick glance revealed that it too was matching her left hand’s actions.

What he especially liked was the view. In addition to his bubble window in the door and the broad windscreen above the console, the helo also offered a wide view through a window. The numerous windows offered an unprecedented view of the fire, including lower front corners of the helicopter’s nose down around his feet.

He stayed with the wide-angle lens, wanting to capture the feeling of the view from the safe bubble of the helo. They bounced and twisted through the air currents, rising heat creating updrafts and microbursts that were keeping Jeannie busy.

Then with the long lens, he snapped the hotshots, tiny blots of yellow before a wall of smoke and fire that appeared to stretch on forever. When he was in it, tasting the fire, hawking and spitting to clear the ash from his tongue and cursing the loss of that drop of moisture, all he saw was his part of the battle—twenty yards, sometimes only twenty feet.

Here, above it but still in it, the fire took on a different character. The battle looked hopeless, the tiny twenty-man hotshot team and the massive forest ablaze around them.

Yet that was how wildfire battles were fought, up close and personal. And other than the smokejumpers, the hotshots were the ones closest to the front.

Engine companies, dozer teams, and locals worked where their equipment could go.

Where they couldn’t go, the hotshots hiked in.

And where the hotshots couldn’t go, the smokies jumped out of their airplanes and parachuted in.

Above the ground teams flew helitankers and fixed-wing air tankers, raining water, water with foam, or retardant down from the heavens, depending on what the ground team needed and what was available.

Past the hotshot crew he could see the lead helo start its dump. Retardant. The dark red cascaded down like a heaven-born waterfall. Jeannie had said a thousand gallons, a couple of hot tubs worth all at once. Didn’t sound like much when he thought of it that way. Though he knew from working previous fires that a thousand gallons had a huge impact on holding a line.

With his telephoto he watched the trees the lead pilot was hitting mere feet outside the fire’s flank, trapping the flames into a narrow band that could then be cut off with a firebreak. They’d steer the fire to its own destruction when it ran out of places to escape to and re-ignite.

The retardant coated the unburned timber and blocked oxygen from the surface. No oxygen, no fire. They left a red stripe across the forest for hundreds of yards, clearly marking what had and hadn’t been hit.

Jeannie swung to the east of the first retardant drop over the burning flank of the trees. He felt the motorized vents open, could feel the helicopter lighten, become more jittery in the heat-wracked winds.

“Hey, you can’t see it.” He tried looking out the side window, but the water and foam was, of course, pouring out directly behind them as they flew forward. The bulge in the window wasn’t enough to see anything either.