Pure Heat

Chapter 1-2

“You fly much?” Major was some kind of high rank. Carly wasn’t sure how high, but definitely senior officer. The woman had probably been a desk jockey who only touched a machine once a year to keep her certification.

“First time in a year.”

Ka-ching, nailed that in one.

But the woman’s voice had been dry. Or perhaps it was droll? Was she making a joke?

“Ever flown fire?”

That practically earned Carly a laugh. “Not the way you’re talking about it. Had to have a kid to do that.” Her age was hard to tell. The woman had a sort of ageless blonde beauty. Thirty maybe. But how had she made senior officer by that age?

“What was your last flight?”

“Oil rig.” The way she said it was obviously a conversation ender so Carly let it die.

Maybe this Major had been thrown out of the Army for being hopeless. So bad that she’d been chucked off the relatively mundane task of flying oil workers back and forth to their offshore rigs. If she was a Major and any damn good, not only having passed on her good looks, what was the woman doing in a Sikorsky Firehawk over a forest fire?

Though Carly had to remember that she’d often been discounted for being too pretty to know anything. Tall, slender, and white-blonde hair, unlike the ex-Major’s wheat-blonde, always made guys assume she was an i***t, though even the densest ones soon learned she was way smarter, at least about fire, than all of them put together.

Carly had been up on a thousand flights over hundreds of fires. She’d seen them scorching across the hillsides from firebases since before her first toddling steps. She’d spent every summer of her life at fire base camps. In her late teens, she’d earned her red card and joined the mop-up teams—endless hours trudging through clouds of ash and charcoal seeking any stray heat or scent of smoke.

Her college summers were spent hiking the burning hills with hotshot crews, chasing the active fire up close enough that the heat was a continual prickling wash across her skin despite the Nomex suits. She’d worked her way up the ranks, and now she lived at the helibases during the fire season.

Lead spotter. Senior fire-reader for Mount Hood Aviation, the Oregon wildland firefighters. The Flame Witch. She rather liked the last one. Never reacted when someone called her that behind her back, but she’d considered it more than once for a bumper sticker on her old Jeep.

At the crest of the ridge, the entire vista changed. The clean green of comfortably resting Douglas firs and larch spreading across rolling hills to the horizon was replaced by the fire giants of lore and legend. The quiet legions on the western face of Saddlebag Gap had been transformed into towering infernos, shooting flames to twice their majestic height. Eighty-foot trees had been turned into two-hundred-foot-tall blowtorches.

The pilot didn’t flinch. That was a good sign. More than one rookie flyboy—or flygirl, in this case—had lost it and returned them to base before Carly could get a sense of the fire. They’d land with a full load of retardant still in the belly of the aircraft.

A complete waste.

At least something like that usually happened early enough in the season that it didn’t cause too much trouble. When the late-summer monster burns rolled across the Cascade and Coast Range, a lost minute could mean success or failure in the firefight, as well as life or death for the ground crews.

The new woman had only been at the helibase for a day, but there was already a rumor mill about her.

Carly didn’t care. As long as the pilot didn’t bank and run away, they were good. Now Carly could see the fire, and that was all that mattered. Ground chatter on the radio had told her that the smokejumpers were fighting a losing battle against the head of the flame. Against one head. She could see that the flanking line they were trying to clear wouldn’t be ready before the fire climbed up to them.

The fire had started with a wilderness camper who’d had the good sense to call it in as soon as they lost control of it. They wouldn’t be so happy when the Forest Service sent them the bill to fight the fire. The entire forest was posted with the USFS’s highest warning: all burning forbidden. Every pointer on every warning sign had been swung over to the far end of the Extreme Danger red zone.

This was an easy hundred-thousand-dollar blaze. If they didn’t kill it fast, it would be many times that by tomorrow. One saving grace was that there were no homesteads out here to burn. When million-dollar homes perched on scenic hillsides began going up in cheery puffs of smoke, then costs started adding up quickly.

The fire was still only a Type III, so she could work on this one as Incident Commander – Air. She radioed Rick that she’d be coordinating directly with the Incident Commander – Ground at base. She was trained and authorized to serve as ICA on fires right up to a monstrous Type I response, but she found it incredibly distracting to coordinate the ten thousand details of a firefight. Thankfully her bosses at MHA agreed.

Carly’s skills on the big fires were best used as a Fire Behavior Analyst. As an FBAN, her job was about predicting the shifts and changes of a fire, preferable to focusing on the hundreds of tiny details of fighting them minute-by-minute.

This fire had climbed the western face of Saddlebag Gap, splitting from a single tail at the campfire into a dozen different heads, each fire front chasing up a deep-cut valley etched into the landscape, carved by ten thousand years of trickling streams and several millennia more of glaciers.

Most of the heads were dying against a cliff wall at the upper end of their limited valleys, leaving long trails of black behind them. Smoldering black tree trunks denuded of all branches and foliage were all that remained. Their shoulders were yet wrapped in the lingering smoke of dead and dying fires. They’d need heavy mop-up crews to check it all out, but there shouldn’t be any real problems.

But three separate heads were still running hot, finding more fuel as they climbed to the ridge, not less. They fired showers of shining sparks upward into the climbing smoke plume that darkened the sky ahead of them.

The pilot tipped the Firehawk helicopter and headed toward the embattled smokejumper crew on the ground.

“No, wait.” Carly hadn’t finished understanding the fire from their vantage point five hundred feet above the ridge crest. Most Army hotrodders thought fires were fought down between the branches. It was a relief that this one didn’t, but would she get close enough when it mattered?

The pilot pulled back to a hover, and Carly could feel the woman inspect her. Rumor was that the pilot rarely spoke, except to her husband and her newborn girl. Carly could appreciate that. She tried to recall the silent woman’s name but decided it wasn’t important. Time enough to learn names if she lasted.

The flames climbing toward the fire crew were bad, but the crew had an escape. They could forge a path through a notch in the ridge and down the other side, ahead of the fire.

The Number Two head from the north was clawing up the ridge with no one to stop it yet. It radiated a malevolent, deep orange, as if saying, I’m going this way, and try and stop me. I dare you. The next sticks of smokejumpers would be here shortly. That’s where they needed to jump.

“Base, this is ICA Thomas. How many smokies in your next load?”

“Three sticks, Carly.”

“Roger, jump all six of them on the Number Two head. Out.”

The Number Three head…

“That’s the one.” Carly pointed for the pilot. “That’s the b***h. Hit her. Hit her hard.”

The pilot didn’t move. She was looking toward Carly again, her face unreadable behind silver shades.

They hovered five hundred feet above the ridge, dancing on that margin between enshrouding smoke ahead and below, and sunlight above and behind.

Had she nerved out?

“The crew’s okay for now. We’ll drop more smokies on Number Two. But Number Three is going to cross the ridge and burn into the southern slope. Then we’re in a whole new world of hurt.”

No nod. No acknowledgment. Frozen for half a moment longer. No waver in the hover, a good trick in the jumpy gusts that heat-blasted first one way and then another above a fire. Carly now felt as if she were the target of study. As if she were the one being assessed, analyzed, and mapped instead of the fire.

“Drop in twenty seconds, Chief.” The pilot spoke over the intercom with absolute surety, warning the crew chief in the back to be ready on his fire-dump controls. “Fifty percent drop in three hundred feet of flow, so give me a dial setting of two for two-and-a-half seconds. Eight-second hold and then the second half of load.”

Evans Fitch, who’d been silent so far, acknowledged with a simple “Ready.” That was weird because normally Evans was one of those guys who couldn’t shut up.

He had flown a training run with the woman and had simply described the flight as Serious, man. Real serious.—whatever that meant—in his atypically abbreviated speech. As if the pilot had stripped him of his voluble word supply.

Not counting Carly as spotter, there would normally only be one person flying in the Sikorsky Firehawk, but with a newbie pilot, including one who came with helitack certification, they were overstaffing. Evans was manning the duplicate set of drop controls that connected back to a console in the helicopter’s cargo area where everyone except the pilot and copilot rode. Carly would have to decide how long they needed to have Evans at the backup controls.

The woman’s numbers were wrong. The drop length was okay, but the turn couldn’t happen that fast. Before Carly could protest, the helicopter dipped and turned so sharply that Carly had to hang onto the edges of her seat so she wouldn’t be thrown against the harness. The rotors beat harder through Carly’s headset as they dug into the air, thrusting the Firehawk toward the third head of the blaze.

“Winds?” the pilot asked.

Carly blinked as they dove into the smoke. Visibility alternated from a hundred yards to a hundred inches and back as they plunged toward the maelstrom. The heat in the cabin jumped ten, then twenty degrees as they flew into the hot smoke over the fire.

“Pretty mellow, steady at fifteen from the west-northwest.” She could tell by the shape of the smoke plume and the slight movement in the droopy-topped hemlocks still outside of the fire.

The pilot left a long enough silence to remind Carly that she wasn’t stupid and had known that. Of course, any decent pilot knew how to read the winds at altitude. The woman was asking about the real-world winds, a hundred feet over the treetops. That was a whole different question. As a pretest for planning a parachute jump, the smokejumpers would spill out weighted crepe-paper streamers that would twist and curl in the thousand conflicting air currents that battered above a raging fire.

“Chaotic. Winds can microburst from forty knots to zero and back in a couple seconds, and the worst of that occurs vertically. Horizontally, the winds will carry more or less up the slope, probably about thirty knots and chaotic at the moment. The winds are better at two hundred feet, much more stable.” She offered the woman an out.

“But the retardant is best at a hundred feet.”

Carly considered. “In these tight canyons, yes, if you can get it in the right place.” The accuracy would be better, and the tighter spread would provide heavier coverage per acre. That would be an advantage right now.