Fire Flight (2003), page 12
She’d tried to swat him, but he’d moved too fast, and what once would have elicited laughter and a rapid adjournment to the bedroom had ended in pique and rejection on both sides.
Karen did another turn in front of the mirror, simultaneously pleased and fully alarmed at the overt statement the dress was making.
This is too much. He already knows I’m a girl.
“Dammit!” she said out loud, even less sure what to do than before. She checked her watch again. A quarter till seven.
Okay, okay. A fresh blouse and jeans. That’s safe.
She carefully repacked her dress and slipped into a fresh pair of jeans, smiling at the memory of how she must have looked four years ago when she and Clark Maxwell had met for the first time.
Her squad had jumped on a remote fire in southern Oregon that September and had spent two tough days cutting line to contain it when one of the more experienced jumpers tried to break the fall of a newly cut tree with his head. The concussion was serious, but whether it was life-threatening was unclear. The incident commander had radioed for a helicopter, and a Bell 212, the civilian version of the famed Huey, had shown up in the late afternoon with enough room for all but one of them to catch a free ride out and avoid an eight-mile hike. It had been no sacrifice for Karen to volunteer to stay behind to finish the cold-trailing of a small remaining area—a process of feeling for hot spots with her bare hand and using a small bladder bag of water called a Fedco to douse them. She was, after all, an accomplished outdoorsman, and the pilot had promised to return in the morning to pick her up.
She had already pitched her tent and happily settled down to wait for sunset, anticipating a luxurious evening of solitude by the campfire cloaked in the delicious privacy of the forest, when the distinctive sound of an approaching 212 had overwhelmed the mountain ridge once again.
The big helicopter settled in for the second time with the same pilot at the controls, and she watched while he secured his cockpit and climbed out, introducing himself as Clark Maxwell and explaining that his intent had been to fly her out before sundown.
“I’m afraid it’s too late, though,” he’d said. “I guess I misjudged the time.”
He was a trim, good-looking man, just over six feet in height and in his late thirties, with established laugh lines on his face and deep green eyes that seemed to be taking particular note of her. She’d been more than a little suspicious of his motives and very aware of the remote surroundings. It was always possible, she figured, that he was a “player” zeroing in on an eligible female with the practiced self-confidence of a cougar stalking a rabbit. But Clark Maxwell proved to be a perfect gentleman and a welcome companion who’d even thought to bring dinner.
“Wait a minute,” she’d said. “Dinner? I thought you came back to fly me out before sundown.”
“Ah, well…the food was kind of a contingency,” he’d explained with a shrug. “In case it got too dark.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, I was a Boy Scout. You know, ‘Be Prepared’?”
“Right.”
He’d picked up the food, he told her, by landing the 212 in a mall parking lot in Medford. “I confused a local cop. He was going to write me a ticket, but he couldn’t figure out which law I’d broken.”
The two of them feasted on an amazing dinner of beef bourguignon. He’d even brought wine. Nothing distinguished, to hear him tell it, just a naive little white Zinfandel in a Styrofoam “ice bucket.” He’d brought paper cups to use as glasses, and a thermos of Starbucks house blend.
“It was next to the restaurant” was the explanation. “Starbucks.”
They’d polished off the food and the wine and lain back on the mountainside nursing the coffee and talking until three in the morning. The night air was balmy in a gentle breeze as they lay under a canopy of stars with the Milky Way so incredibly bright and crystalline and startling that it had literally made her cry. Meteors and satellites marched across the starscape as the lime-green aurora borealis danced on the north horizon and purple flashes marked the passage of distant thunderstorms. The accompanying songs of the night owls and the distant cry of a persistent wolf had rounded out the symphony of ponderosa pine needles in the wind, singing their praises of the successful battle that had saved them from the flames.
Jupiter and Saturn sparkled overhead, Orion and Cassiopeia and the Big Dipper undulated with the sparkle of a million distant suns, and the planet turned beneath them as if set on its course specifically for the two of them—right then, right there.
She could still remember the subjects they’d discussed, the perfume of cedar wood smoke in their hair. From childhood toys to quantum physics, puberty to philosophy, and, most of all, the aching joy of being alive in such a place. They had found a kinship of wonder that was unlike anything she’d ever experienced with anyone, male or female, friend or lover.
He hadn’t as much as touched her hand that night, and she smiled at the thought of kidding him someday that the reason had been the nightmarish image she must have cut in the starlight with her smudged face and dirty jumpsuit and hard hat–pressed hair. But it had been one of the most moving moments of her young life, and when they’d lifted off with all the chain saws, Pulaskis, and parachutes the next morning, there was a powerful, unspoken bond between them—as if they were the only two humans on the planet who knew what they knew about the cosmos and life.
She had never told Trent about that magical experience with Clark Maxwell, since he would have responded only with anger fueled by jealousy. Trent had already grown maliciously fond of maligning the other members of her smokejumping squad, and what that lone pilot-philosopher and she had shared that evening was far too beautiful to be sullied by the likes of Trent’s discontent with life.
Whoa! Gotta get going! It was five past seven, and she’d been lost in her memories.
She opened the door, then closed it quickly to recheck her appearance in the mirror; then she rushed into the hallway and pulled the door closed behind her. Surely Clark wasn’t going to turn and leave if she was stylishly late by ten minutes, she told herself. But nonetheless, being too late was also a statement, and one she did not want to make.
IN FLIGHT, EAST OF JACKSON HOLE
Sam Littlefox, the pilot known as Lead Four-Two, pulled his Beech Baron back up to a safe altitude some fifteen hundred feet above the ridgeline and leveled off heading south. His eyes searched through the purple haze and heavy smoke-filled valley to the east for the P-3 Orion retardant tanker just finishing its last drop.
“Tanker Seventeen is clear and climbing,” the pilot of the four-engine Orion reported, still unseen.
“Roger, Seventeen,” Sam replied. “I just got your marks from the judges. Eight-one, eight-three, eight-five, and a six-two from the East German judge.”
The Orion pilot keyed his transmitter, chuckling. “Must’ve been the dismount,” he said. “I think you’ve been up here too long today, Sammy.”
“You got that right.”
There were two clicks of the other microphone, a universal signal of acknowledgment, eliminating the necessity for words as the tanker pilots climbed and headed back to West Yellowstone for the night.
But Lead Four-Two had one more mission to accomplish before he, too, could head for West Yellowstone. The dispatch center in Bozeman, Montana, needed more than satellite data—they needed a short detection flight.
“Sorry, Sam, but our only call-when-needed detection ship is timed out,” Dispatch had told him by radio. “You’re all we’ve got for eyes.”
“No problem,” Sam replied, the ever-ready load-me-up response that had become his trademark—and a fatigue-inducing bad habit.
There was no so-called air attack platform—usually a larger aircraft orbiting at ten thousand feet and coordinating the battle on the growing fire. Supposedly, one would be in place by midday tomorrow, but the entire confusing, whirling mass of tankers and helicopters and the strategy to deploy them had been the responsibility of the lead-plane pilots all day long, and he was exhausted.
The thirty-six-year-old Native American banked the Model 58P Forest Service–owned Beech Baron back to a northeasterly heading, his eyes tracking the flames that an hour ago had jumped the lines along the middle of the Y-shaped cirque and crossed to the northeastern side, crowning at times and throwing firebrands downrange to light new spot fires. The ground crews had fallen back three times in one day, and were now moving like a routed army toward the same pass the tankers had used as an escape route all afternoon. Much hard work had been too easily overrun by the fire, and it was a major defeat, plain and simple.
The valley’s toast, Sam thought to himself as he passed over the middle of the expanse and lurched through the superheated updrafts rising from the blaze on the eastern flank. The plan had been to contain the main fire in the cirque while attacking the spot fires that had broken out to the north and northeast, but the south wind had been relentless, and the broad expanse of partially forested valley beyond was already aflame. The fast-moving fire threatened to combine by the next day with a growing blaze in the high terrain six miles north. From there, mature forests that had gone untouched by fire for over three hundred years stood ready to explode, and if the wind shifted even slightly to the west, all of Grand Teton National Park was going to be in the crosshairs—not to mention the unburned portions of Yellowstone. Even the burned areas now full of dry, light fuels—the so-called “pioneer species” that had started growing rapidly to replace the heavy timber destroyed in 1988—were primed and ready to ignite.
He put the Baron in a gentle right bank, his eyes falling on the folder he’d left on the empty right seat and the piece of paper that had worked its way out. It was a pen-and-ink rendering of a mythical dragon, fire and fury snorting from its nostrils as its claws raked the air, the personification of forest fire he’d drawn for his five-year-old daughter, Kelly. Somewhere between the technically correct and scientifically sound details and the shorthand version normally fed to kids, his tribe’s heritage of storytelling had shamed him into creativity. He’d given the beast name and form in a continuous story that Kelly seemed to love. The scientific details were there, too, and it had amazed him how fast she’d absorbed it all. There were insights there, he knew, about communicating with the open mind of a child, or with anyone, using pictures. But as a father, he was simply enjoying the profound connection. His lead plane was the dragon slayer, he the knight, and the beast was a respected part of the land. But sometimes, he’d told her, the beast had to be disciplined about taking more than its share.
Sam chuckled at his long-standing worry that a true elder of his tribe might sue for telling such wild variations from traditional versions. One day he’d have to research how the Oglala Sioux really explained forest fires. He had always been too distant from his heritage.
There was a muscle group in his shoulder that seemed to kink up and start hurting late in any flight, and he felt it now as it threatened to expand into a headache. Sam reached into one of the many pockets of the fishing vest he always wore in flight and closed his fingers around a small bottle of aspirin, working the cap open to pop two in his mouth. He fished a small bottle of water out of another pocket and drained nearly half of it, chuckling at the explanation he usually gave the uninitiated for why he wore the many-pocketed garment.
“That’s why they call it a fishing vest. When you’re always fishing for small items, it’s the best solution.”
He descended the Baron for a closer look at the new flame front marching across the second valley northeast of the cirque, riding through the violent turbulence to fly behind a small ridge. Vast areas of charred and smoking timber already marked its path, and he wondered if the fire would, in the language of forest fire fighting, “lay down” overnight, as most of them did, or whether it would keep on roaring.
The ultimate arbiter would be the wind. If the fire didn’t lay down, they would be helpless to intervene until morning. The technology was far too expensive to outfit airtankers for safely picking their way through smoke-shrouded mountains in darkness.
He glanced back to the west, struck by the magnificent multihued, ruddy colors of the horizon as the sun dipped behind the Tetons, its rays diffused by the smoke.
The firefighters would attack again in the morning with a squadron of airtankers and helicopters carrying water buckets, as well as with several huge Skycrane helicopters capable of carrying up to two thousand gallons of water with each refill at a nearby lake. The air attack would be assisting the growing force on the ground. There would be smokejumpers and helirapellers as well, or so he hoped. They were sorely needed to reach the fourteen smaller fires now growing to the north where the mountains became all but inaccessible by road.
The engine of every one of the blazes was still the stationary low pressure gradient in upper Montana, which was sucking the wind and the flames northward and infusing the tinder box of brittle forests with the oxygen the fires needed to crown, join, and explode.
And if that happened…
He banked left, mentally calculating the route back to West Yellowstone as he punched an interphone button and pulled a small cell phone from its cradle. He mated a small connector to his headset cord before punching in the correct phone number for the Dispatch Center in Bozeman and pressing “send,” his mind already turning over what phraseology would appropriately convey how bad it was. They needed bombers and jumpers and choppers and time, and they had far too little of any.
Keeping the fires from joining, he thought, was going to be the rough equivalent of a miracle.
Chapter 9
STEIN AVIATION, WEST YELLOWSTONE AIRPORT, MONTANA
Trent Jones could feel his pulse pounding in his ears.
It was happening a lot lately, and he was afraid of what it might mean to his FAA medical qualification and his continued ability to pilot the machines he patched together as a mechanic.
The hangar was quiet, other than an occasional metallic clank from all the activity around the damaged DC-6B, but the whooshing in his ears seemed loud enough for everyone else to hear. He thought about his upcoming flight physical, and whether he should risk mentioning the phenomenon to his doctor.
“It’s stress, Trent,” Karen had told him the year before in her absolutely-sure-of-herself mode. “You haven’t figured that out yet?”
“Well, duh!” he’d fired back, irritated that she had to find an explanation or a solution for everything—and aware how screwy that complaint would sound if he voiced it. Men were always getting accused of trying to solve problems when a female just wanted sympathy, but the truth was, women like Karen could be just as irritating.
Of course, it wasn’t sympathy he’d been looking for, just a receptive ear, and his solution had been to stop talking with her about work or anything related to Jerry Stein’s business—especially during the fire season.
Trent glanced around in irritation, feeling exasperated that he couldn’t get a complete sentence out between Jerry’s incoming phone calls.
Stein was still pacing around in a far corner of the hangar, holding his tiny cell phone like a weapon and using a headset to chew royally on the caller with a liberal dose of profanity, his free hand gesturing for emphasis.
The cup of coffee Trent had retrieved like a glorified gopher for Jerry sat untouched on a workstand next to one of the mechanic’s battered FM radios, which had just been turned on. It was adding to his irritation by blaring hip-hop garbage into the night.
Trent cautioned himself to keep his temper in check.
Like all the other calls over the past half hour, Jerry had answered this one instantly, cutting his maintenance director off in midsentence with an upheld index finger, as if he were merely hitting a “pause” button.
Trent glanced over at his team of mechanics working on the twisted and torn engine mount for the right outboard engine nacelle. They were looking grim. He tried to recall exactly where he’d been in his explanation to Jerry. There was an intricate nature to the battles they faced in repairing and reflying Tanker 84, and he needed at least a little of the owner’s attention to explain it.
Jerry had apparently finished his call and was walking briskly back toward the DC-6B. “Sorry, Trent. Go ahead.”
“I was saying, I think, that getting an engine mount located and shipped here is going to be impossible inside a week, and that’s if we’re lucky.”
“Bullshit. This airplane’s going to be flying tomorrow.”
“How, Jerry?”
“Hell if I know. You’re the maintenance director. Direct some maintenance. Make one if you need one. The frickin’ feds aren’t around at midnight.”
Trent sighed again and rubbed his eyes before looking up. “Jerry, for God’s sake, we’ve been having a version of this conversation for years now. You tell me, ‘Fifteen minutes or die,’ and I tell you it will take at least a day, and you…you order me to work a miracle, and I try my heart out, and it ends up taking a full day just like I said it would. In other words, all your pressure can’t change the realities I have to work with, except to kill me with ulcers or a coronary.”
