Full Blaze

Chapter 1-4

“You got it in one, mate,” Jeannie answered him. “We dump blind.” But she was making minor course corrections constantly as she flew.

“Then how?” He flapped a hand like a snake to indicate her course changes.

“Following inside the Major’s line. Best pilot I’ve ever met, unbelievably good, so whatever the Major does, I do. Always works out.”

“The Major?”

“Ex-major, former Army. But when you meet her, there’s no question. She’s in total control.” Jeannie flicked a switch on the handle of her cyclic control and he heard the drop doors shut beneath their feet, closing with a solid thunk.

She. He’d fallen in with the helitanker girls of Mount Hood Aviation. Cal had heard about them and dismissed the stories as exaggerated because they were told by men about firefighting women. Women were a rare breed in wildfire, so the grunts either gunned for them, placed them on impossible pedestals, or, more typically, did both.

This particular female pilot had done a damn neat bit of flying to save his behind. And she said that her teammate was unbelievably better. So maybe the pedestal was deserved in this case.

“Can’t see when I drop, but I’m not above peeking.” Having said that, Jeannie spun them around in a move so slick it left his head spinning. She continued to fly in the direction she’d been going, but now they faced backward so that they could see where she’d flown.

As Cal reoriented himself to flying backward, he could see the results. The water, mixed with foaming agent, had expanded in volume by more than ten times to cover a broad area. Jeannie’s load had dropped over a swath of crown fire, flames jumping from the top of one tree to the next.

How many times had he stood beneath a crown and raged as the fire passed him by, high overhead, totally out of his reach to fight it? He could see the line where the foam had cooled the upper fires, knocking them back to earth, down to where the hotshots and other fire teams could fight them on the ground. He’d often appreciated it from the ground, but he’d never seen it from above.

“Sweet!”

“Thanks.”

They shared a smile. Then she shifted the controls. In one smooth motion they went from flying backward to flying forward again, headed once more for the swimming pool.

“Where did you learn to fly like this?” Cal had seen a lot of pilots, but Jeannie had a smoothness he hadn’t seen before. “It’s like you’re wired into the helo. And the way you stayed stable in the currents off the ridge when you saved my sorry ass… You must have a mystical communion with the world’s winds.”

Jeannie was grinning. “I’m a cyborg, plugged straight into my sweet machine. Do you always run your mouth like a ’roo gone mad?”

“A ’roo?”

“A kangaroo.”

“So you’re from Australia?” Cal did his best to appear clueless.

“What, didn’t my accent give me away?”

“Might have if I hadn’t thought you were a Kiwi.” Of course he’d recognized the Strine in her speech. It was like Scottish, always sounding so sexy to his American-trained ear. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t tease her about it a bit.

“A Kiwi?” Her voice rose enough to hurt his ears over the headset that blocked most of the rotor noise. “A Kiwi? I sound like a goddamn islander? Wherever you got your ear, you should demand a goddamn refund.”

“I asked for one, but when I was on the Black Saturday bushfire, they weren’t issuing Strine hearing aids to bloody Yank hotshots.”

The helo actually jinked sideways as Jeannie twisted to look at him. She recovered instantly, he was glad to see, and continued her descent toward the same swimming pool they’d used before. But it was the first error in flight he’d seen her make.

She lowered and started the snorkel before speaking again. This time her voice was whisper soft.

“You fought the Black Saturday fire in Oz?”

“Sure, didn’t you?” He tried to make it funny.

She nodded, but didn’t say anything.

And suddenly he was sorry he’d teased her. More than a million acres, four thousand homes and businesses, and 173 lives. The flames had moved at over sixty kilometers per hour across the land. Cars weren’t fast enough to escape the flames on the rutted back roads that the Australians called tracks.

Jeannie sucked another nine hundred gallons into the belly tank, while the furniture that hadn’t been blown aside before was slammed up against the fence. After that, they fell into a quiet routine as she flew.

On one of the trips, he had her call the hotshot ground crew. “They’ll want to know about that tongue of fire to the west. They can’t see it from the ground yet, but if they move fast, they can cut it off.”

And by the time they returned with the next load, the hotshots had done exactly that. It was a new perspective up here, one that they mostly enjoyed in silence.

They made three more trips before she needed to get more foaming agent and fuel. He kept taking photos, but nothing matched that first portrait of her. The image was burned into his brain. He’d take a picture of Beale’s helicopter, for that was the ex-major’s name, spilling retardant…and think about Jeannie’s profile. He’d hear the tank doors opening for their own drop…and think about her smooth accent.

Cal Jackson never went soft on any woman, yet somehow she’d slipped past his guard in their first hour of meeting. Hell, in the first ten minutes, if he was willing to admit the truth. Which he wasn’t.

When they returned to the helispot to fuel up, he hopped off and left her to fly the next round alone. First, he’d been running with the hotshots for more than forty straight hours before he’d been trapped, and he was falling asleep in the seat now that the last of the adrenaline was gone.

Second, he needed a touch more distance from Jeannie of the never-blue hair.