Flash of Fire

Chapter 1-2

They’d gone on for weeks. Hopefuls—all guys—showing up, sometimes several a day, trooping into the Oregon wilderness and driving up to the high Mount Hood Aviation base camp. To substitute for Emily, someone was going to have to be seriously good. She was the best heli-pilot Mickey had seen in a decade of flying and eight years on fires.

In between refresher flights up and down the slopes of Mount Hood, Mickey and the others had taken to hanging out at the wooden picnic tables in front of the mess hall, sipping cold sodas, and watching the slaughter.

Mickey could see the failures as fast as Beale had them back out of the sky.

Military-quality control but no feel for a fire—including the flaming steel drums set up midfield.

Weekend aviation jocks who thought that flying fire was only about taking the certification course—MHA wasn’t a place heli-aviation firefighters started, it was where they strove to end up.

Top fliers from other outfits slipped into camp quietly so their current bosses wouldn’t know, then slipped out as quietly when Emily booted their butts for not being up to MHA standards.

And then she’d hired a female pilot. If it was anyone else than Emily Beale, gender bias would be a safe bet, but not her. Emily only cared about finding the true best. She set an amazing standard.

“So…” Mickey turned back to the other guys as Betsy the cook worked her way through the crowd with a stack of Styrofoam cups and a pitcher of coffee.

Everything stopped while they all loaded up, then reconvened gripping cups of Betsy’s best brew.

“So, what’s the new recruit like other than hot?”

Robin stood at the back door of the MHA barracks and stared up at the trees. She’d arrived four days ago at this funky camp lost in the foothills of Mount Hood, Oregon, for an interview and still couldn’t believe it every time she saw the forest.

It had been six months since she’d flown, and that had been her last day in the Arizona Army National Guard. The army heliport in Marana just north of Tucson, where she’d spent most of her six years in the AANG, was three hundred acres of baking tarmac covered with long, neatly parked rows of Blackhawks and Apaches, surrounded by tens of thousands of acres of baking desert.

Mount Hood Aviation was a tiny grass strip perched at five thousand feet on the side of an eleven-thousand-foot-tall presently snoozing volcano. The runway had been stuck in the middle of trees that soared a hundred feet or more high. Spruce, Douglas fir, maples, and alder. Beneath them lay a thick mat of blackberry, salal, and a hundred other scrub varieties that she didn’t recognize. And moss frickin’ everywhere: dripping from tree branches, mixed into the grass, clinging to the north sides of buildings and roofs. The lush biomass was so dense that it was impossible to take in, but she could taste it in the air, thick enough with oxygen that it felt like she was in an emergency ward and they were pumping it directly into this Arizona gal.

Robin had grown up in Tucson, served twenty miles away in Marana and ten kajillion away in Afghanistan—all places where oxygen was served in reasonable helpings instead of Oregonian truck stop–sized portions. She’d never been much of a traveler, so Oregon was about as familiar as the moon.

The MHA base camp was the run-down remains of a Boy Scout camp along one side of the grass runway. Plywood barracks, dining hall, and a rec hall turned parachute-and-supplies loft, all of the wood gone gray with age—at least all that wasn’t covered by the frickin’ moss.

She decided that going back through the dim maze of the barracks would be ill-advised. Like Alice, she might slide down the rabbit hole and never be seen again. She began walking around the building.

On the far side of the runway that cut this place in two stood a line of the finest Firehawks she’d ever seen, which more than made up for the disaster of the camp. MHA was one of the only civilian outfits to run the converted Black Hawk helicopters that she’d spent six years flying for the military. That was a huge draw, practically as big as getting out of her waitress outfit.

Robin imagined taking that pretty Firehawk helicopter—painted with the Mount Hood Aviation trademark gloss black and brilliant red-and-orange flames like a hi-fuel dragster running out at the strip in Tucson on a hot summer night—and lifting it smoothly into the Oregon sky. The controls had been silky in Robin’s hands during the interview and subsequent training flights. Though it ticked her off a bit that the MHA firefighters had better-equipped Black Hawks than the ones she’d flown for the Arizona Army National Guard.

The AANG birds were always three steps behind. The Night Stalkers of Special Operations got the best, of course, then the Army and Navy got the good gear. The National Guard didn’t always get the castoffs, but it felt like they did. The Army and Navy made sure NGs knew they were second-class citizens—they were dumb enough to think they were both first when actually neither was. But as a Guarder, she’d never met a Spec Ops dude anyway, so they didn’t affect her reality.

Now she was discovering that she’d been four steps behind. This measly civilian outfit fielded three Firehawks with fully electronic glass-screen cockpits. A lot of the Army and Navy birds were still mechanical dial and gauge, like all of the AANG craft. The high tech had taken some getting used to during her training flights, though all in a good way. Of course she’d now been totally spoiled.

Mount Hood Aviation also had two tiny MD 500s and a pair of midsized Bell 212 Hueys—called Twin 212s for their dual engines—all of which were immaculate and also sported the latest gear. All the aircraft looked unusually sleek and powerful in that black-and-flame paint job.

Robin stumbled to a halt halfway around the back of the parachute loft—she’d clearly chosen the long way around. A service truck sat there with a seriously massive lock, and attached to the hitch was a trailer. The trailer was an odd one and so out of context that it took her a moment to recognize. It belonged to a ScanEagle drone. She’d seen them in Afghanistan. A small, five-foot-long quarter-million-dollar surveillance bird with a ten-foot wingspan… that no civilian outfit should have.

Who the hell were these people and what had she gotten herself into?

It’s not that she didn’t appreciate the high-end gear. Didn’t matter. Whatever the past, she had the best at her command now. So what if her new contract was only for a single fire season. She’d stop complaining…soon.

Mount Hood Aviation had a one-season slot because their lead pilot was in her final trimester—for her second kid, like she was doing it on purpose—and would be grounded for the fire season itself. She probably shouldn’t have been flying the interview flights either, but Robin guessed no one had dared to stop her. Emily Beale had been a total b***h in stretch-waist camos and a belly-hugging black t-shirt for Robin’s interview flight, though she was the size of an RV.

Robin dragged herself away from considering the launch trailer and continued around the service garage. Maybe she should have braved the barracks corridors. She hurried up her pace.

It wasn’t that Emily Beale had been nasty, but rather that she’d been so damn good and corrected every tiny thing Robin did that wasn’t up to her standards. Worse, she’d delivered every tidbit as a simple correction. That left it to Robin to feel shitty for failing to meet the standards of a woman who could barely fit between the pilot’s seat and the cyclic control joystick.

“You’re starting your drop three seconds too early.” They soared over a mind-boggling wilderness of trees so thick that the terrain was invisible beneath it.

Robin hated personal failure; she was a specialist in self-recrimination. Had thought about putting it on her résumé.

“If you hover two feet lower, you’ll pick up another six percent efficiency on the belly tank loading pumps mounted on the snorkel.” Over a mountain lake that must be twenty miles from the nearest road and begged for her to go swimming in it.

She should have known that about the snorkel; it made perfect sense after Beale had dropped the fact quietly over the intercom. A quiet, sure voice in the roaring cockpit of the converted Black Hawk helicopter.

Unlike her AANG birds with a big, orange bucket dangling unpredictably on a hundred feet of longline, the MHA Black Hawks had been converted to Firehawks with big belly tanks that were bolted right onto the bottom of the helicopter’s frame. It let her carry a thousand gallons of water, instead of the eight hundred that the bucket held, which was sweet.

The belly tank also meant she could get more up close and personal with the fire. Aiming a bucket on a longline was like spreading your feet and trying to pee straight down into a shot glass—a good party trick in the girls’ barracks during those boring and occasionally drunken AANG weekends when the reservists were in house. The belly tank let her decide, dump starts here, ends there, and hit it every time.

Despite the black t-shirt and stretch camos, Ms. Queen Beale had that feel of ex-military that certain air jocks never got over when they hit the civilian world. You’re out, lady. Deal with it. Robin had taken enough officer s**t on the inside and didn’t need it out here.

Beale wasn’t the only one who was reeked of ex-military in this outfit. The lay of the MHA land was odd.

Mark, the boss man, was also ex-officer material. Handsome as hell but married to the pregnant queen b***h. Not Robin’s type anyway; she liked her men still a tad rough around the edges. The boss was totally AJ Squared Away. He also was always toting around their two-year-old daughter. Which was pretty damn cute—if you lived in a women’s magazine world. Besides, he spent his workday circling at high elevations in his command plane as if that was genuinely flying.

A guy who wasn’t rotorcraft? Robin was definitely not interested.

Robin hadn’t sorted out the helicopter pilots yet, but she would. There had to be a bit of extracurricular recreation to this job or she’d go stir-crazy for sure simply chasing after the occasional fire.

Finally, she cleared the last corner of the last building and stopped in surprise at the size of the crowd gathered around the base of the control tower. She’d seriously underestimated the size of this outfit. Forty people were gathered together, with Mark and Queen b***h Beale perched up on the platform as if ready to deliver her military lecture.

Robin’s two Afghan tours had been in her rookie and her third year of service in the Guard…then three more years of sitting on her butt before she bailed on them.

The stand-down of forces in Iraq and Afghanistan had turned the National Guard into a whole lot of training weekends with the Tuition Turkeys—in it for the free school and praying they never deployed—and the occasional call up for a fire, flood, or other natural mess. And she honestly wasn’t a regular Army sort of gal.

If she spent the next six to nine months sitting around on her butt, alone, between infrequent fire calls, she was going to die of boredom.

There was hope though. She’d take this morning’s alert—a fire on her first day—as a good sign.

She’d been lying there in the crappy base accommodations—no complaints from her; they were free, but they were still crappy—bored to s**t in the dark. And then that sweet alarm that could have awakened Jesus it was so damn strident had rung through the base.