Wildfire Smokejumper Trilogy

Chapter 2-6

DC dropped two loads of palletized gear before heading over to the Illinois Valley airport. That way he’d be close to hand if they needed anything else dropped in. One pallet landed in the rapidly expanding clearing. The other pallet overshot and hit in the woods, but the chute was in the clearing when it collapsed so they were able to retrieve and pack it without any damage. Then they started unloading and getting organized.

Krista led the second team into the same clearing. Baker snagged himself in a tall larch and had to use a let-down line to get himself out of it. So that gave the first-flight team bragging rights over the second. It didn’t last long because Maribel, the second plane’s cargo master, nailed both of her pallets of gear into the clearing. Good trick with how damn small the area was.

Once everyone was geared up, he rolled out a map and traced a wavering line in red marker. He checked his watch and wrote “7:45a.m.” at one end of the line. It was going to be a long day. Based on his one look at the fire, it was accurate enough. Then he put a red “X” on the bluff’s location.

“This is our anchor point. We’ll have Henderson and his air crew narrow the fire as much as they can. I figure we have about fourteen hours, unless things go wrong—”

“And they never go wrong,” Tim commented.

“Never,” Krista agreed. “Not when Akbar the Great is in charge. Mama Nature wouldn’t dare.”

He ignored them both and finished his sentence, “—to beat the fire. Krista. Your team starts right here by making this anchor point clean, open it up to a full helispot big enough for the Firehawk in case we need it. Then send your team southeast along the ridge and make a fire trail. I’ll be making a line northwest.” He drew the two lines along the very top of the ridge’s topographic line.

“Deep or long?”

Akbar considered the map for a moment, looked at the shape of the terrain. Right at that moment, Henderson flew by low overhead and waggled the wings of his twin-Beech command plane in greeting. If he was here, the choppers wouldn’t be far behind.

“Make the cleared fire trail deep. The choppers will hopefully make it so that we don’t have to go too far along the ridgeline to trap this one. It’s only a baby, but we are not letting it get away from us. We all clear on that?” He shouted the last as a challenge to the team.

Twenty-three smokies shouted back, “Clear!”

“What do MHA smokies do for a living?”

“We eat fire!”

“Let’s do it!” And with a slap of his hands they were off. The first chainsaw was fired off before he even had the map folded and tucked away.

The first of the thin alders fell to expand the clearing before he’d picked up his radio. By the time he’d explained the plan to Henderson, the bluff had been leveled and was in the process of being cleared.

Akbar picked up his own saw. He’d burn through the first tank of gas, leaving the swamping to Tim. Swamping was tough work, dragging all the cut-off branches as far from the approaching fire as possible, but they’d be trading off on the next tank of gas.

He dropped the first tree—the eight-inch diameter, sixty-foot tall larch that had snagged Baker—making sure it fell with the chute on top.

Baker moved in to unsnag the chute he’d left in the upper branches.

Then Akbar began lopping off branches and Tim moved right in behind him with the rhythm of long practice to shift the detritus to the downslope side.