Wildfire Smokejumper Trilogy

Chapter 10-2

Laura couldn’t stand it one moment longer. Everyone had their twenty dollar t-shirts and the mood was high. Already their adventure was being shared with other guests, in the past tense.

She headed out through the same “Employee’s Door” she’d used to avoid Grayson Clyde Masterson, their calls to come join them still ringing in her ears. This time, once she was out the back door, she didn’t circle around to the parking lot to make good her escape.

Without thinking about it, she started out striding up the meadow behind the Lodge, past where the helicopter had dropped them. She was at a fast trot by they time she passed the base of the Magic Mile lift that could whisk her up to the ice and snow which still covered the upper slopes deeply. After five hundred feet of elevation gain at a run, she picked up the PCT.

When her feet hit the trail, she was moving flat out. It was a roughshod run in her riding boots, but she covered the ground fast.

In just two miles she came up behind the line of smokies and slowed her pace. Her trail group had been so close to making it back before they were cut off.

What had been a smoke-clogged canyon thirty minutes earlier, was now a towering cloud reaching far past the mountain’s peak. The wind currents that whipped the peak year round were ripping the top off the smoke plume and dragging it over the peak. It was hard to tell if the glacier was blackened by the shadow of the looming cloud or if a coating of ash now covered the usually blinding white snow.

The trail itself led through the smokies’ position and into a wall of tangled smoke and flame, both so thick it was impossible to discern one from the other in the swirling mass.

From here, it looked like the smokies were standing right up against the flame. But as she drew closer, she could see that the distances were deceptive and a roll of the landscape made the flames appear closer than they actually were.

Still, her feet stumbled to a halt well back of the smokie’s line. Smoke loomed above her. That wasn’t surprising except in its massive thickness. But she also saw black clouds billowing overhead when she looked up. Way up. It towered dozens of stories above them, and Johnny’s crew was moving along at the same relaxed pace they’d used while cleaning up her trees. Not relaxed, sustainable for hour after hour.

It was an impossible world, but they worked in it. One of them spotted her and left the line to come over and talk to her.

“Hi Laura.” It was Krista, the powerful Nordic woman. “You weren’t planning on coming any closer, were you?” She pulled out a water bottle and offered it to Laura first before taking a drink herself.

“Nearer the flame?” she shook her head. “No. Not even another step.”

“Good. Makes you a smart woman. It’s going pretty well so far.”

Laura looked at the conflagration before her. “This is well?”

“So far. Still a little early to tell. But I think we’ll be able to hold this side of the fire. Ox and Chas have already had to retreat twice. The northwest side is quite ugly at the moment for such a little fire. Glad you called it in as early as you did.”

Laura didn’t feel so bad any more about flying out of the fire zone. If this wasn’t ugly, she couldn’t imagine something like the Tillamook Burn that Johnny had fought before they met.

“Are they…?” She couldn’t form the question.

“Out? No. Not yet.”

Laura sagged. She’d actually been trying to ask if she’d killed them. Not yet was the answer there as well.

“But stay right here. You’ll see some serious s**t here real soon.” Krista, apparently done with her break, stuffed away her water bottle and picked up the axe she’d rested on the ground while they talked. “Of course if it doesn’t work, they’ll be going into the shelters, and that would be very bad.”

The shelters. Small foil tents that firefighters hid beneath if they were caught in the middle of an inescapable fire. That was a tool of absolute last resort. This had been her doing. She’d put their lives at risk by insisting he save her horses. No. Johnny wouldn’t take risks unnecessarily. Krista was being pessimistic, or maybe preparing her in case things went badly.

“But we think we’ve got it,” Krista reassured her. “The ICA approved Akbar’s plan.”

Johnny had a plan. His plans were always good, weren’t they? She wavered on the edge of being sick as the world spun. Please let his plan work. Let him come back to her and not hate her for what she’d done to him.

“Arson is such a bitch.” Krista headed away.

It took Laura a moment to process that and she had to sprint up to Krista. Laura grabbed her arm and spun her back before she reached her crew. “Arson?”

Krista nodded, “Fire Marshall still needs to investigate, but after a while you know it when you see it. Somebody wanted to burn up this canyon for some reason. Gotta go.”

For the life of her, Laura couldn’t imagine why someone would do that.