Wildfire Smokejumper Trilogy

Chapter 5-1

Chapter 5

Tim felt strangely quiet through the rest of the meal, as if the chaos of his emotions had been burned away by Macy’s touch.

The problem was that he now stood in the “black.” It was the area that a forest fire had already been through, stripped of color by heat and flame until there was only the black of char, the gray of ash, and the blue of sky shining between leafless black branches. Flare-ups of spot fires might occur, and there were often surreal patches of green that the fire had swept all around but not burned. It was a quiet, almost serene space.

It was also a place where you stood after a fire, wrung out and half wondering what you were supposed to do next. Smokejumpers stayed ahead of the fire to cut it off. They only crossed into the black when they had to escape, or when the job was done.

Tim oddly felt as if he’d only just managed to escape, but he didn’t know from what.

When Macy announced that she had a flight to make, he’d asked if he could ride along. It would be a good chance to see the surrounding area.

She’d looked surprised, and even wary, but finally said he could come.

“No jumping out of my helicopter though. I don’t carry parachutes.”

Baxter had looked chagrined when he’d been relegated to the truck bed for the trip down to the hangars. They were tucked among the trees close beside the one straight stretch of the main road north of town. Power lines had been rerouted upslope and the shoulders to either side were all Heinrich’s barley, so no trees stuck up to clip wings or rotor blades.

He helped Macy roll the Bell 206 LongRanger out of the hangar and onto the small paved space between the hangars and the road. MHA only flew the converted Black Hawks and the tiny MD500s. The LongRanger fell halfway between the two in size.

“Pretty,” Tim couldn’t help but whistle. The 206 was a long and sleek helicopter. A single, two-bladed rotor. The cockpit up front offered a great side-by-side view for pilot and copilot. Room for five in the back in facing seats. Luggage compartment. Cargo hook. It was easy to see why this craft was the first choice of news and police agencies.

“She’s my baby. Mom and Dad gave me the loan to buy her and I expect to have it paid off before the end of the century,” Macy patted the helo’s nose and dropped the tow cradle down so that she was resting on her skids. “Glass avionics, high-altitude rotor, the whole bit.”

“How high?” Tim hesitated.

Macy simply pointed at the mountain looming beyond the south end of the valley. It looked as if she was pointing at the top.

“You don’t!” Part of his Type I Incident training had included a week-long mountain rescue course that had put the fear of god in him. That was fine when you had to rappel down a cliff face or fetch someone off the side of Mount Hood. But Denali was a whole different matter. He was the monster, the tallest peak in North America. The death toll on his flanks was three to five a year, except when he was in a bad mood which was most years.

Macy stood up from where she’d been inspecting the underside of the tail rotor as part of her pre-flight.

“I don’t what?”

“You don’t take tourists up—” He couldn’t even choke out the words as he pictured her dead on the ice fields of Denali wrapped up in a snarl of sheet metal that had once been a helicopter.

She walked right up to him, fisted her hands on her hips, and stared up at him, “What if I do?”

“Are you an i***t?” It exploded out of him. Tim never lost his temper, but imagining Macy doing something stupid— “Do you know how many people die trying to fly up—” Then he saw that smile of hers. She’d never been able to quite lock it down when teasing him, which had saved him from looking the fool not a single time in their entire history together. He still fell for it. “Crap!”

She burst out laughing, finally laying a hand on his shoulder and shaking him a bit.

“Oh,” she gasped out. “You should see your face.”

“Double crap!”

“You never could swear worth a damn, Harada.”

“Triple crap!” he grinned down at her.

“Shee-it!” she said in a way that would have made Akbar proud. “Tourists pay plenty for the scenic tour, but even I’m not crazy enough to fly them to the top. I have the high altitude rig for when mountain rescue places a call-out. I only go that high to save lives, not for dumb-a*s joy rides.”

“Still…” Tim could feel the nerves creep back up his spine.

Macy cursed, grabbed his arm, and dragged him around to the right hand pilot’s door. She swung it open and fished out something from an inside pocket on the door and shoved it into his hands.

He opened the thin leather book as she returned to inspecting the helo. It was a logbook, but on the first page were her certifications from the Mountain Rescue Association—she had a lot of them, her Denali Park Service on-call information, and the contact numbers for the National Incident Management System—the same one that called out MHA on fires. She was even drop-certified on forest fires.

Tim flipped through the pages of the log as she continued her way around the helicopter. Mail run, mail run, tourist flight, tourist flight, rescue at Denali camp at seventeen thousand feet (wind forty knots / temp minus thirty), mail run, mail run, hunting party to Lake…

Again, when she came back around the nose of the aircraft, it was as if he was seeing her for the first time. She kept changing on him so fast he was having trouble keeping up. Last night she’d been the little girl he’d missed. This morning a grown-up he could make no sense of. And now…

For a moment, he saw the tall, slim woman with light skin and dark hair that floated off her shoulders. She wore dark sunglasses, but he knew her honey-brown eyes would be watching him even now because Macy never missed anything.

He wasn’t comfortable seeing Macy Tyler as a beautiful woman, but now that he had, it was hard to stop. A flash of dragging her off into Heinrich’s barley field left him supremely uncomfortable.

She finished her inspection and once more stood in front of him. She pulled the logbook from his nerveless fingers and tucked it back into the door pocket. He noticed that right next to it was a fire shelter in its pouch. All helicopter pilots who flew to wildfire kept one there in case they were downed too close to a blaze.

The thought of Macy Tyler in a deployed fire shelter was enough to give him nightmares.

“Crap, Mace. How did I get so far behind?”

“Been away a while, Flame Boy.”

“Flame Boy?”

“C’mon, Harada. Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, Fantastic Four? Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten all your comic books while you were away. Are you a total dweeb now?” Her greatest insult.

“Flame Boy?” he knew he sounded dense, but Macy as a woman still had his brain stupefied beyond functioning.

He barely saw her launch the punch in time to clench his gut. Still, much of the air whooshed out of his lungs for a moment. He’d forgotten how strong she was.

“Wow! Major gut muscles there, Mr. Storm. Bet you work out for a living.”

He blinked down at her and tried to find a response. He really did.

“Now’s your chance.”

His chance for what?

She waited a moment before shaking her head and climbing aboard. Just before she shut the door she said, “Your door is on the other side, oh Dense One.”

He opened his mouth and then shut it again and moved around to the passenger door on the left side of the cockpit. His chance? To what? Stop gasping like a beached salmon?

Baxter was sitting by the copilot’s door waiting for him. He cracked it to ask Macy if the dog was coming or staying, and was almost butted aside onto the pavement, which answered that question.

Tim opened the rear side door to the five seats of the passenger cabin behind the cockpit.

Baxter gave him a second look as if to make sure that wasn’t Tim’s spot. The dog was also clearly used to riding next to his mistress. Tim gave him a nudge and he clambered aboard.

Tim shut the door on his “I’m a sad puppy” face and climbed in the left-side copilot’s door.

There was a high-whine as Macy hit the starter that sliced right into his skull. He slammed the door which cut the noise by two-thirds.

“Wow! That was harsh.”

Macy didn’t respond. That’s when he noticed she was wearing a double-earmuff headset with a boom mic. He scrabbled around looking for one.

“Under the seat,” Macy yelled at him over the climbing noise. “Baxter doesn’t wear them much. Chewed on them a bit as a puppy, but he’s over that now. The noise doesn’t seem to bother him.”

He dug them out and clamped them on before the turboshaft engine rode up too loud. He also found a pair of sunglasses that weren’t too scuffed up and pulled those on as well.

Once the rotor was pounding away, Macy switched on the headsets and he could hear her.

“You fly?”

“Only a little. Returning from a fire, if we got a lift from helitack, I try to get front seat. Nothing official.”

“Let’s see you do your stuff.”

He looked at her as if she had lost her mind and almost got trapped in that dazzling smile.

Macy Tyler, very female, deftly handling heavy machinery, and with a smile brighter than the heart of a wildfire.

Yeah, now at least he knew what chance he’d passed up a moment ago…his last chance to turn and run.