Wildfire Smokejumper Trilogy

Chapter 7-2

Tim had tried several times to take a background role, but Hank wasn’t having anything to do with it.

“I was always a Number Two man, you know that.”

He did, but he hadn’t realized that Hank did. He had good fire instincts, knew how to read a burn, and wasn’t afraid of it. Give him even a hint of a plan and he could implement it with style.

But the lead smokie had to be so much more than that. The Number One slot was the leader of a Type I Incident Response Team like smokejumpers. Tim and Akbar had even gone through the additional training together to make it to Type III Incident Commanders—not just team leaders. Earthquake, flood, hurricane…it didn’t matter; they had specific training on how to find a solution and make it happen.

So, Tim had kept Hank in the loop, but stepped up into the lead slot. He didn’t know the burn rate of the sparse trees and grassland this far north, but Hank did. Was he looking at deep bog or a thin layer of growth over a hard layer of permafrost? The latter. Thin enough to clear easily down to mineral soils that wouldn’t burn? Not a chance.

Between them, they knocked together a plan of attack and to the letter of Tim’s instructions, the Sherpa pilot dropped them and their gear right on target.

As soon as he was down and had his parachute stowed, he walked up to a forty-foot pine, one of the larger ones, and tried to snap a one-inch branch. It should crackle, complain, bend and recover.

With a sharp c***k, it folded in half and only a small stringer of bark held it in place at all. Dry as a bone.

He showed it to Hank who swore. “No way it should be that dry in mid-July.”

Tim surveyed the terrain. This wasn’t a wildfire rolling through sparse woods. This was a blaze in a tinder box.

The rest of the crew was jumping in while he was formulating a final plan of attack. He wished Akbar was here to run it by. He wished Henderson was circling his Incident Commander Air plane overhead with his daughter giggling in the passenger seat.

Alaska Fire Service ran a smaller crew than most jump outfits—when it got bad, the Missoula smokies would fly up to lend a hand. Twenty-one of twenty-two jumpers had made it to the planes…still no word on Tony. MHA had that many, and another twenty-man Hot Shot team. Local fire service was almost always around to help if there was a logging road even close. The nearest road to Arctic Village was a couple of parallel creases in the permafrost that they’d overflown a hundred miles ago.

Instead of the MHA complement of two Firehawks and three MD500s in addition to any fixed wing planes the US Forest Service might be sending in, he only had two SEATs which would be here in an hour to scoop river water and dump it on the fire. Each Single-Engine Air Tanker could carry about three-quarters as much as a Firehawk could deliver.

It was all he had and he’d have to make do.

All he had.

The fire was his!

He’d never commanded a whole fire before. Even on the small ones, it had been his and Akbar’s. He could hardly wait for a chance to rub this fire in Akbar’s face. While his friend was all down and snuggly with his amazing new wife, Tim would be leading his first fire.

Leading his first fire, he acknowledged, and wondering what the heck to do with the woman who was waiting for him.

Would it be with another kiss like one he’d never had in his life…or would it be a busted snout like the one she’d given to Billy Wilkins?

He’d have to worry about that later.

The Sherpa C-23s made a final pass dropping a pallet of pumps, hose, spare fuel, and food. They were in it now.

He gave Hank a five-man team and the impossible task of getting the pumps into nearby streams and pools, and soaking the underbrush; there weren’t the resources to clear it.

Tim took the rest of the team and began dropping trees, chopping them up, and dragging them downwind. Swamping all those branches was hard work, especially shoving through thick underbrush, but he couldn’t leave them where they’d let the fire catch and burn.

They needed a firebreak a hundred feet wide, a mile-and-a-half long, and, at the fire’s current rate of approach, they needed it before midnight.