Pure Heat

Chapter 1-3

Through the next visibility break, Carly could see they were already at the hundred-foot mark and moving fast. She glanced down at the unfamiliar console, needing a moment to spot their airspeed. Damn, but they were moving fast.

The pilot returned to her silent mode, and Carly worked the numbers in her head while she held on. Dial setting of two would be about right at this speed, if the flame retardant landed in the right place.

A loud bang could be heard over the heavy beat of the Firehawk’s rotors. A tree had gone off like a bomb. Superheated until the pitch didn’t ignite, it exploded. A thousand shards of tree in every direction. But the pilot had them moving fast enough that they were in the clear on this one. No bright patter of wood chips against the fuselage.

“Drop in five, four, three, two, one. Drop now. Now. Now.”

Carly more felt than heard the mechanical door opening on the thousand-gallon tank of flame retardant mounted under the belly of the helicopter. Most pilots drifted higher as the load lightened. This pilot was good enough that their altitude remained steady.

Better yet, the pilot held the same height above the treetops as they dipped into the valley, then climbed up the other side. She’d seen pilots who tried to hold stable to elevation above sea level. They either learned fast or were thrown out of the service. It was fine in a chaparral fire, but up here in the mountains, firefighting altitudes always had to be referenced from the terrain or the pilot could fly straight into a mountain.

Leaning into the curved side window and twisting to see what she could, Carly pictured the pattern of the red mud. With a slight arc, half of the mud landed at the leading edge of the fire, and half on the trees immediately ahead of the flames. Textbook perfect. Normally, they’d attack the flank, narrowing the fire to extinction. But here they didn’t have that luxury. By the time they flanked it, the fire would be over the ridge. It was still localized enough now that maybe they could cut its throat.

She’d counted to two and half, then again felt the slight vibration through her seat as the dump hatch’s hydraulics slammed shut. The Firehawk helicopter somehow went from a hundred and twenty knots in one direction to a hundred and twenty in the other.

Carly couldn’t quite tell how they’d done it so abruptly, though her eyes did momentarily cross from the g-force that knocked the air out of her lungs like a punch to the solar plexus.

Part of her mind had continued to count seconds. At eight seconds, Evans popped the retardant hatch again as the pilot repeated her call of “Now. Now. Now.”

Somehow, impossibly, they were lined up on the fire once more. It had taken a hard-climbing turn to avoid slamming into the wall of the valley that they had been crossing laterally. But again, they were above the top edge of the flames, bouncing through the rough edge of superheated air currents bolting for the skies.

Carly sat on the uphill side, making it so that she couldn’t see exactly where the pilot placed the drop. That was a good sign. Beginners thought that dumping the retardant directly on a fire did something. It truly didn’t. Retardant had to be dropped ahead of the fire. It was a sticky, nasty slurry that clung to branches and bark like heavy glue, tinted bright red so that you could see where it lay. It cooled the unburned fuel that the fire sought and trapped the oxygen-laden air away from the wood so that it couldn’t burn. No oxygen, no fire.

So this second pass, if the pilot did it right, should be laid upslope from the first pass, overlapping to allow for the different direction of flight to coat the back side of the unburned trees and branches that had been coated in the first pass. But mostly the second pass would be targeted on the untouched and yet unburned trees. All to create a wider swath of protected fuel.

This one drop of retardant wouldn’t be enough. Carly could tell that by the rough ride of the Firehawk helicopter through the air pockets as they hammered down into the valley and back up the opposite slope.

They’d need another load right away, and probably two or three after that, to cut this head. The fire-heated wind roared up the valley too hard, too fast. The wide barrier laid down by the near-perfect drop still couldn’t stop this beast.

But they’d sure slowed it down.

The ex-Army pilot hovered once again over the point of the ridge, turned so Carly had the best view of the fire below.

Carly keyed the radio.

“Tanker base. This is Firehawk Oh-one. Come back.”

“Tanker base. Go ahead.”

“Three heads. We hit north hard. You’ll need two flanking loads to trap it. But first load we need water and foam on top of the crew on the south head. They’re jumping the next couple sticks of smokies into middle head. Over.”

“Roger that. Out.”

“Out.”

As she took her hand off the mike switch, she saw the jump plane, MHA’s beautiful old DC-3 twin-engine, with the next round of smokejumpers. The plane was swinging above a high meadow not far from the middle head of fire. Two brightly colored paper streamers spilled out into the wind. They fluttered and twisted, showing a strong draft up the valley but no chaotic crosswinds. She’d seen the winds tie smokie streamers in knots while they still turned in the air. The smokies would be watching them intently to decide their best approach.

The plane turned again, and on the next pass, four jumpers spilled out, two sticks. The smokies’ rectangular parachutes popping open in a bright array of Crayola red, black, and gold of MHA. That was new. Until now they’d always been a soot-stained white. In contrast, the jumpers’ heavily padded and pocketed jumpsuits were a dusky, dirty, and very soot-stained yellow.

As the plane circled to drop the next stick of jumpers, the pilot spoke, breaking Carly’s reverie as she watched the choreographed ballet of a coordinated fire attack.

“Seen enough?”

“Roger that. Let’s get another load.”

The nose of the helo pulled up sharply. In a crazy compound maneuver that Carly had never experienced before, the body of the helicopter spun on its axis. Now they were equally abruptly nose down and moving fast back toward the firebase. Not one wasted moment of motion.

“Where did you learn to fly like that?”

Again that long, silent moment of assessment from the pilot.

“Army.”

“I’ve flown with plenty of Army jocks. They don’t fly like you. I’ve been up with enough of them to know that the Army doesn’t teach this.”

“I flew for the 160th SOAR, Airborne. Major Emily Beale.” Then a note of deep chagrin entered her voice. “Retired, I guess.”

It was now Carly’s turn to remain silent as they roared back toward the helibase for the next load of retardant. SOAR. The Army’s secret Special Operations Aviation Regiment. The best and scariest helicopter pilots on the planet. Well, they certainly wouldn’t need Evans as a backup on any future flights.

“Why are you flying fire?”

“As I said, had a kid. Didn’t seem fair to her if I kept flying military.”

“Like flying fire is so much safer.”

Emily Beale again answered with silence.