Flash of Fire

Chapter 1-4

Only the best of them flew to fire. And only the truly exceptional flew for MHA.

Which had Mickey looking toward the new blonde again, as Vern riposted the next smokejumper tease.

Being a ballerina or workout instructor didn’t get a pilot into the cockpit of an MHA Firehawk. And especially not the lead ship. To do that, she had to be fantastic. So what did she bring?

At that moment, she turned to look at him.

Robin concentrated on not shifting foot-to-foot while she waited. Would the new commander hold her first-day tardiness against her? For getting lost in the goddamn rabbit warren of barracks? And then gawking like a schoolgirl at the trees and the drone launcher and the line of Firehawks and…

The men.

Enough time had passed that everyone should have stopped staring at her by now and she could turn to scan the crowd. Time to assess who she’d signed up with.

And the first place she looked, there was a guy staring at her from the far side of the crowd. No one else, just him.

And then another, who she vaguely remembered meeting yesterday, looked over the man’s shoulder. No comparison.

Blue eyes, short—a single inch past crew-cut short—brown hair, and one of those friendly faces that looked like it smiled too easily and too often.

At the truck stop, they were the one kind of guy she could never figure out. The ham-handed ones were easy to spot and all of the waitresses knew to look for the extra pair of straws that were always dropped along the outside edge of such tables, a clear sign that This table sucks.

Most of the truckers were fine, decent guys, and there were a lot of couples rolling down the roads, way more than in Mom’s youth. She’d been able to pick out any of those types easily by the time she was ten and wiping down tables after school.

But then there were the ones like this guy on the far side of the crowd. Flying solo, looking nice…very nice, and wholly unreadable. Mr. Nice Guy or Mr. Jerk? It was hard to tell, because at the moment, he had a rather bug-zapped expression.

Mickey tried to look away, but that wasn’t working at all. Her eyes were a brilliant blue, the color of the morning sky now shining above them. High cheekbones and a chin that made him wonder what it would feel like to run his fingers along its lines.

“Told ya,” Gordon whispered behind him.

Mickey offered her a friendly nod. She returned it. Not cautious or calculating like he’d expect from a newcomer, but a short, assessing greeting. Then she turned her attention back to Mark as if Mickey had suddenly ceased to exist.

A soft “Damn” was all he could manage. Hot didn’t begin to cover this lady.

“Told ya,” Gordon repeated himself beneath the last of the back-and-forth banter. The crew was feeling good, ready for the start of the season.

“Mount Hood Aviation sightseeing tours will be next. I’ve been telling Mark that’s all you air jockeys are good for anyway,” Akbar teased them.

Mickey had been feeling good too. A final glance to the blonde and he felt better now.

“We have”—Mark raised his voice to quash the last of it—“a limited lightning-strike fire east of nowhere in Alaska. It’s in an area classified for limited-to-no intervention. Normally they’d let it burn, as there are no nearby towns. However, it has grown up in the last twenty-four hours and thinks that it has a passport and entry stamp to cross into Canada.”

“That’s our kind of export problem,” Mickey shot back at Akbar. First fire call of the year always felt great. It wouldn’t be until they’d had a month or two of impossible hours and crappy camps that the feeling would wear off. With all that, it still beat the crap out of any day job he could imagine.

“I thought Canada wouldn’t mind,” Jeannie asked. “They’re into sustainable forest burn now.” Jeannie was getting good. Of course she’d keep track of all of that, what with her fire management degree. She also worked with Carly the Fire Witch—as the fire behavior analyst was known all up and down the coast because she was that amazingly accurate.

Let her be the next Carly; he didn’t care.

Mickey was a flyer first, last, and all the way in between. Which left him to wonder again what the blonde was.

“Not when it’s threatening Dawson City,” Mark answered Jeannie’s question. Mickey needed to focus. The new woman was already distracting him. Women didn’t distract him; he enjoyed them and fully appreciated how easy it was to gather them up at bars or his sister’s wedding with I fly a helicopter to fight wildfires. But this one was making him—

“Isn’t that like twenty miles into Canada?” Gordon called out.

“More like forty,” Mickey answered, but Gordon’s question made good sense. That was a lot of territory for a fire to cover.

“The fire burned forty thousand acres last night and is rated at zero percent contained. They want us to stop it before the strong westerlies help the fire chew up another hundred thousand acres and the only city for three hundred miles around.”

Mickey had flown enough fires in the Alaskan and Canadian wilderness to be familiar with Dawson City. It had thirteen hundred people, making it the second largest municipality in the Yukon Territory—an area bigger than California. It had fallen below city size with the collapse of the gold rush at the turn of the prior century, so it was technically the Town of the City of Dawson. And if the fire analysts were worried about a US fire reaching all the way there from Alaska, it was an early-season monster in the making.

“Canadian firefighters are heavily engaged in the Banff fire at the moment and the regular crews are chasing a mess outside of Anchorage. The Alaska Fire Service put out a call for our full team. So, smokies: get outta here! Helicopters will be hot on your tails.”

The lead smokejumper let out a Whoop! that was picked up by the other smokies.

Robin froze, because the slightest movement seemed likely to get her trampled as they raced for the parachute shed and their full jump gear.

That thinned the crowd at the base of the radio tower by two-thirds and she could see more clearly the guy who’d kept watching her. He looked solid in the way of someone who’d always been fit, even as a kid. On a soldier, it was easy to see the guys who’d been bulked up by weights and war versus the ones to whom it was second nature. This guy had always looked this good.

He grabbed a second energy bar, which was a good idea, so she did the same. Once they were aloft, she’d need both hands for flying.

Adding to the general mayhem, Chutes—the head of MHA’s paracargo operation who she’d met yesterday—fired up his forklift to run pallets of supplies across the runway to the waiting DC-3 and Short C-23 Sherpa jumper planes. The first load was a whole pallet of pumps, chain saws, and gas cans followed by another one of food and Pulaski fire axes. Each had a big parachute strapped on top of the tightly bound gear.

For two or three minutes, the field was alive with smokejumpers rushing to their ready racks, grabbing jump gear, and racing across the field to their two planes.

Robin estimated that for the planes, flying from Hood River, Oregon, to Nowhere-and-Gone, Alaska, would be six hours plus a fuel stop. They’d be jumping the fire by lunchtime.

It was the one thing Robin hated about helos, the long hauls. At a good solid cruise, they were over ten hours from the fire, not counting two refueling stops which would stretch it closer to twelve. And by then, they’d be too wiped out to do much more than sleep. They wouldn’t be on the fire until tomorrow morning. It seemed like a crazy system to be sending them so far, but these guys seemed to know what they were doing.

“Helos,” Mark called from where he still stood with Emily and the others.

Mickey forced his attention away from the newcomer. She was taller than he’d first thought—close to his own five ten—and he’d always been partial to tall women. Her expression was intent. Despite being last to reach the line this morning, he’d guess there wasn’t a lazy bone in that fine body. She looked as ready to spring into action as Akbar had.

“This is too far away for the MD 500s,” Mark continued. “But fear not. Gordon and Vanessa, they have a mess up in Washington at Leavenworth that needs your services. The fire chief is in desperate need of someone able to tackle spot fires in severe terrain and the MDs are perfect for that. Gordon has the lead.”

“Vanessa and me,” Gordon whispered to Mickey in a tone of bewilderment, completely missing that he was in charge.

Oddly, Mickey could almost see that working, the dusky Italian beauty and the tall, Wyoming rancher boy. He gave Gordon an encouraging slap on the arm.

“I’m also sending one of the Twin 212s because the fire map looks ugly. Carly thinks they’re underestimating the trouble they’re in.” Which meant they were wrong, because the Fire Witch never was.

Mickey held his breath, wondering which he’d prefer: Washington or Alaska, a chance to rub shoulders with Vanessa or the new pilot? He was on the verge deciding the latter on the basis of no more than that shock of shining hair and her brilliant blue eyes, when Mark called for the other pilot.

“Bruce, you’re for Leavenworth. I need Mickey’s deep experience in Alaska.”

“No argument from me,” Bruce called out. Bruce was only a two-year man. Good enough but needed close watching on the big fires. A small but messy fire would be good for him.

“Mickey, you’re with the Firehawks.” Mark raised his voice. “Your refuel stops are in Vancouver, BC; Juneau, Alaska; and final destination, Dawson City, Yukon Territory. There’s an airstrip eight miles due east of town along the highway that will be our base of operations. You’re aloft in ten. Firehawk Oh-One?”

“Yo,” the new pilot called back. Nice voice. He’d expected rough and salty, or deep and throaty, but it wasn’t either. It was surprisingly normal. A nice contrast to her tough demeanor—because she radiated the tough attitude that the guys had been warning him about.

“You’ll have a standard config for that bird, which is Carly as your copilot and Steve with his drones in back. Denise?”

“Here.” The mechanic raised her hand though there was no need. Despite being short enough for the top of her head to reach no one’s shoulder in this group, her long mane of blonde hair would stand out anywhere.

“Kick your assistant Brenna and crucial supplies over to Bruce’s bird. You and your main shop are with Vern up to Alaska. That does it. Get a move on, people; the forest is burning.”

Denise and Brenna bolted off toward the service trailer. Mickey nearly left Gordon to his own devices, but he’d be bound to screw it up. Just like he was duty bound to try to cut his friend off from any attractive woman, he also had to help him if he could.

“Gordon?”

“What?” His friend still looked rather overwhelmed.

“With Vanessa, be yourself. Don’t gum it up with trying to be charming; it doesn’t work for you.”

“Sure it does,” he protested. “I’m a charming kind of guy.” He shot Mickey a grin.

Then he looked more carefully at Mickey’s expression and sighed. Mickey didn’t have to say a word.