Chinook

by M. L. Buchman

  You’ve completed your bachelor’s degree.

  And she’d be returning to the University of Washington the next week to start the dual masters program she'd chosen to prepare her for investigating plane crashes like the one that killed her parents.

  And then Tante Daniels had dropped her bomb.

  I’m not just your governess. I was your therapist for a decade before your parents died.

  Now that she was an adult, Tante Tanya Daniels—Tante was “Aunt” in German, even though they weren’t related—said it wasn’t ethical for her to treat Miranda without her knowledge.

  The truth had felt like a betrayal at first.

  Not family, not governess, not friend—therapist.

  Ever since she was twelve, Miranda had been only too aware of what was happening to her. She’d found all of the test results in her mother’s desk shortly before she died.

  Moderate-functioning ASD—Autism Spectrum Disorder.

  Subject requires extensive therapy if ever to be even a marginally functioning member of society.

  Severe learning and sensory disadvantages.

  The list had been long, and each one had been an overwhelming dagger in her heart.

  It was Tante Daniels who had helped her turn the blade long before Miranda knew that’s why she was nearly fulltime on her parents’ island.

  Prove them all wrong. I know we can do it together.

  And they had—Miranda had, as Tante Daniels kept insisting she say. She’d finished high school by the time most of her contemporaries were entering it.

  The pressure hadn’t eased since—ever?

  She looked over at Jeremy, who had slipped lower on the couch.

  In seventeen years of investigating crashes, starting with her own crash while en route to start at the NTSB, she’d always carried the burden alone.

  Her teams had shifted over the years, and even on this one, each member was only skilled at certain aspects.

  Holly understood the mechanical structure of aircraft and could project backward from the crash debris to estimate what forces had been applied to damage an aircraft.

  Mike best understood the one thing she herself understood least: people.

  Jon was…

  …was her lover, asleep in her bed even now.

  Major Jonathon Swift of the US Air Force Accident Investigation Board was a skilled investigator. But his skill was as much in managing a team of experts as it was in doing any aspect of the investigation himself. She’d tried to teach him, but he just didn’t see the clues even when they were spread so clearly across a debris field.

  As well as understanding rotorcraft intimately, Andi Wu had proven herself observant in ways that Jon had proved himself incapable of. She also communicated the eccentricities of the American military in ways no one else on her team could manage. A pilot’s view, but useful nonetheless.

  And then there was Jeremy.

  She’d come to rely on him like no one since Tante Daniels.

  If he said something was accurate, there was no need to question the result. She always checked everything he did. Not because she expected to find anything, but rather it was the only way she had to make his findings real in her own mental picture.

  “Jeremy?”

  He didn’t respond to her whisper. He must have fallen asleep.

  If she could clone herself, it would be him.

  If she dared to have a child—with a nine-fold increase in likelihood of an autistic parent having an autistic child, she didn’t—it would be a younger version of Jeremy.

  She and Tante Daniels had found their way from therapist, through betrayal, to friendship.

  “Will you be my friend, Jeremy?” she whispered into the darkness.

  He didn’t answer, but she could always hope.

  Miranda rose and draped Tante Daniels’ quilt over him. They’d designed and sewn it together. Lessons in planning and cooperation that, she now saw, had also included companionship.

  Then she returned to bed, to lie awake beside Jon, listening to the so-full house until the dawn came and she could start the next day.

  5

  Taz grabbed her gear and hustled off the Chinook’s rear ramp. Twenty hotshots streamed after her. They dumped their packs in a big mound on the back meadow behind the Visitor Center. The grass had been mowed for a hundred meters around the structure, making it barely boot deep. That would be helpful if the firefight came down to a last-ditch effort.

  They rushed back aboard to grab chainsaws, five-gallon cubes of saw gas and water, pumps, firehose, and a couple days of food, creating more piles of presorted gear with the ease of a long summer’s practice. The helo’s three crew chiefs leant a helping hand.

  The Chinook was a sweet bonus, being able to bring all of their gear with them. Usually it was limited to what they could carry on the long hike to a fire, backed up with occasional airdrops.

  She couldn’t wait to get started.

  Max had promised her that he’d teach her to really run the saw. She could hack down a tree but Max was a sawyer-artist with Gertrude, his twenty-four-inch, six-horse Stihl. He’d also made it clear that he absolutely wanted some serious sex with her. Not as a price of teaching her, he just wanted her.

  Jeremy, wherever he was—probably back in DC where she’d originally kidnapped him—was little more than a memory as far as her body was concerned. But he remained an uncomfortable memory because he’d changed her in some way that she still didn’t understand.

  Taz had never been one to dwell on the past, but he wouldn’t fade away.

  Maybe Max would clear him out of her system. Even if he didn’t, she had no doubt it would be fun. Another new concept in her life.

  She dropped the last thirty-pound cube of fuel next to his saw. Max was five-ten of muscled hotshot, wearing sweat- and smoke-stained Nomex. It was a good smell. A real one. Not fresh showered and over-cologned like the men in the halls of the Pentagon.

  “The answer’s yes, Max.” She kept her voice low.

  “That’s damn fine news, Taz!” He always had an easy smile, but now a bright grin lit his face as he looked down at her. “That gives me some serious motivation to kill this burn fast.”

  He held up a palm and she high-fived it hard, their leather gloves slapping together loudly.

  Others in the crew looked over. A few laughed knowingly.

  Taz hustled to get her own gear sorted and in order.

  Yeah, not a lot of secrets on a hotshot crew. But after a lifetime of secrets and security clearances, that was a nice change too.

  As the helo lifted clear, the moonlight revealed an amazing sight.

  The Hurricane Ridge Visitor Center was perched on the edge of a four-thousand-foot drop down to a shimmering river valley far below. It should be shimmering with moonlight, not blood-red with reflected firelight, but still, it looked amazing.

  Beyond the deep river valley, six- and seven-thousand-foot peaks shone in the moonlight. Vast swaths of wild forest, traversed by only the occasional hiking trail or logging road, swept up to rocky pinnacles.

  “Normally be some snow up there, even now,” Max told her as he stuffed a trio of aluminum liter flasks of fuel into his pack.

  She did the same. Everyone on a hotshot team always carried a liter of saw fuel even though the team only had two sawyers. Better to run out of drinking water than saw fuel.

  “Really bad drought this year, looking at Mount Olympus. Barely has a glacier left at all.”

  “Right, I forgot you were a local kid.”

  “Grew up just that way about thirty miles.”

  Even as he gestured to the east, the moonlight broke clear of the smoky haze and the top thousand feet of the entire ridgeline shone fairy-tale white.

  It wasn’t the sort of view she’d seen from San Diego or DC.

  “Not planning on introducing me to your family, are you?” Max didn’t seem like one of those crazed, over-committing types, but it was always good to know.
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br />   “Shit, woman! All I’m talking about here is sawing and sex.”

  “My kinda burn.”

  And his smile was back.

  As they cached some gear and prepared what they could carry to the line of attack, she couldn’t stop looking over at those magnificent peaks.

  It also meant that she was the only one who saw the departing Washington Army National Guard CH-47D Chinook helicopter fall from the sky.

  6

  Captain Jack “the Pirate” Spahr loved being a weekend warrior. Army National Guard was typically about doing your monthly weekend and helping out with the occasional flood relief. In exchange he got to fly a twenty-million-dollar helo for the fun of it.

  Being called up to fly bucket brigade on a forest fire for a few weeks just made it all the sweeter. And it sure beat the hell out of the unexpected six-month tour of Afghanistan they’d pulled in his first year. That had been a brutal shock but he’d been one of the lucky ones. Made it home little worse for wear.

  Still, those had been hard days.

  He’d been married less than a year then, kid on the way. His brother’d had to take over both their jobs in building their first major apartment complex. And Chinooks had been getting shot out of the skies right and left over there in the early days of the dustbowl.

  This was a piece of cake by comparison.

  “Thanks for the ride,” the hotshot crew’s superintendent called over the headset.

  “The pirate crew of the Black Pearl was glad to have you,” Captain Jack called back.

  There was a snort of laughter, then the man was gone. The Black Pearl might be painted blah-tan, but that didn’t matter to devoted fans of Pirates of the Caribbean. And his daughter’s first big crush had been Johnny Depp.

  Jack waited for his crew chief to confirm that the fire crew hadn’t left anything behind. Wendy always made the weekend a pleasure. She was seriously funny and definitely enhanced the scenery. He might be married but he wasn’t blind.

  “They’re out, Cap’n Jack. But they scuffed up my pretty deck something awful.” Wendy’s “pretty deck” couldn’t look more battered even if the hotshots went after it with their fire axes. The old CH-47D had been built in 1984 and stood strong through a lot of hard service since.

  Easing up on the left-hand thrust lever, he lifted the big Chinook back into the sky.

  They’d come in over the wide meadow to the northeast of the Visitor center, but the fire was digging through the trees to the west. After ranging over many rugged miles, the forest stopped at the western edge of the Visitor Center’s parking lot.

  “We promised them a report of what’s coming their way.”

  Jack and his crew were the only ones still able to fly. All of the other flight teams on the fire had already flown their full duty day and were on mandatory crew rest. Wasn’t a fire boss on any burn who didn’t wish for a way around Army Regulation 95-1. His was the only crew flipped to evenings and nights in case of emergencies. Fire bosses did their best to avoid emergencies, so they’d spent a lot of time just shuttling around supplies and personnel. Didn’t bother him. Night flying was the best. If the hotshots needed easy access to the fire, Cap’n Jack and his merry band were glad to give it.

  Doing some extra scouting for them was just another great reason to stay aloft.

  Turned west, once they were high enough to see, the answer of what was coming their way was pure hell.

  And there wasn’t a thing he could do to help them until dawn. He might be nighttime qualified over a fire, but actually fighting a fire at night was a clearance he didn’t have yet.

  His copilot began calling the details back to the hotshots’ crew boss.

  “A heavy head roughly three hundred meters wide is two kilometers out and moving slow.”

  Which was going to accelerate fast if the winds picked up in the morning as predicted.

  “The flanks appear to be spreading more south than north.”

  Meaning it was going to plow straight on into the Visitor Center rather than passing safely north. Jack would make sure the crew slept in their gear tonight in case the hotshots needed an emergency extraction. Barely ten miles away in Port Angeles, they could be aloft in three minutes and reach here in five more, despite the mile-high climb.

  He was low enough over the head of the fire that he could feel the heat coming through the clear window that ran from his knee down to his feet.

  7

  What Captain Jack Spahr didn’t know was that there was a hundred-and-fifty-foot hump in the terrain masked by the heat of the fire’s core. Also, he was originally from Massachusetts and simply didn’t think about the fact that Douglas fir trees could grow to three hundred feet, over thirty stories. Back home, a tall tree topped out at five stories.

  Climbing the rocky knob, the fire had slowed and intensified. The wildfire’s typical core temperature of fourteen hundred degrees rose. The inferno concentrated as it climbed up the knob and began cooking a “King of the Forest” Douglas fir that had first fought for this perch before Columbus was born.

  At over two thousand degrees, a tree doesn’t burn.

  The interior superheated faster than the bark and outer layers of pitchy wood could carbonize and turn into ash. The sap vaporized, creating an overpressure deep inside the wood so intense that the tree simply shattered.

  The upper forty-seven feet of the Doug fir launched skyward like a roman candle.

  The CH-47D Chinook had survived two tours in Afghanistan—one flown by Captain Jack Spahr and his crew—another tour in Iraq, and another during Operation Desert Storm back in 1991.

  Over the last thirty-five years it had rescued flood victims, delivered post-hurricane humanitarian aid to six states and four countries in Latin America plus Mexico, and spent thousands of hours on training flights.

  Tonight, the Chinook was flying in relative safety six hundred feet over the treetops of the burning forest. If the exploding Douglas fir had been at the height of the rest of the forest, the flaming spear of treetop would have fallen harmlessly back to the ground before it could climb that high.

  But the extra height of the humped-up knob of basalt elevated the tree fifteen stories higher.

  If it had been only ten, the helicopter might have survived.

  It wasn’t.

  If the section of tree trunk had launched a tenth of a second sooner, the only damage would have been a hole punched through the still-lowered cargo ramp. Crew Chief Wendy Dravitz, sitting on the ramp to watch the burning forest but thinking about splitting some nachos and a margarita at the bar with her new guy—they’d met during the eighty-mile “Idiot” loop of the Passport to Pain bicycle ride on Vashon Island—would have died instantly, pierced by the burning trunk. But she would have been the only one. There would be a funeral and a new cargo ramp.

  Instead, the six hundred and ninety-seven pounds of flaming tree trunk speared aloft less than an arm’s length beyond the end of the ramp.

  Wendy’s night vision was blotted out by the still-flaming trunk as it struck the rear rotor.

  The Number Two blade was sheared off cleanly nine feet from the tip.

  The sudden loss of two hundred and twenty-five pounds from the end of one of the three thirty-foot-long blades severely unbalanced the rotor head. The stress of the imbalance bent the rotor head and sheared the aft synchronizing driveshaft, allowing the rear rotor to spin freely.

  Several things happened so close to simultaneously that their order didn’t matter.

  When the rear drive shaft sheared, the pair of powerful Lycoming T55 turboshaft engines fed the entirety of their ten thousand horsepower into the forward rotor.

  Without the balance of the counter-rotating rear rotor, the engine’s full power was instantly translated into a massive lateral torque on the frame. The rotational force slammed in hard enough to snap the necks of both pilots and two members of the flight crew. They didn’t live long enough to even feel the pain.

  Crew Chief Wend
y Dravitz’s position, sitting cross-legged on the lowered cargo ramp, saved her life from the initial disaster.

  When the tail of the dying Chinook whipsawed sideways, she was actually left behind—suddenly airborne.

  Her vest’s three-meter Monkey Tail safety line, which would keep her attached to the helo against any normal fall, snapped along with three ribs and her left arm.

  What happened next was of no consequence to Chief Dravitz or the crew.

  The area swept by a Chinook helicopter’s front and rear rotors overlapped in fixed synchronization so that the blades would intermesh without colliding. Without the aft synchronizing driveshaft, the massive sixty-foot-diameter free-wheeling rear rotor—spinning at nearly four rotations per second—utterly destroyed first itself, then the main rotor.

  With both rotors shattered, the fifteen tons of the CH-47D plummeted toward the ground.

  In freefall, Chief Dravitz fell alongside the dying helo for a five-second eternity, fully aware of what was happening to her.

  The ground was close enough that she stopped caring before the end of the sixth second after the impact by the tree.

  8

  Every inch of Taz’s body ached.

  Because the only other “rested” aircraft presently on the fire had been a spotter plane, it was left to the hotshots to scout for survivors. The spotter had pinpointed the GPS coordinates of the wreckage. The helo had passed over the fire and crashed in the Black—the burned-over area behind any forest fire.

  In her typical role as team scout, Taz had been sent looking.

  No one else could cover rough terrain as fast as she could. Twice now, her life had depended upon her ability to cross hard desert. In DC, her one solace had been to run. In the Pentagon’s gym, in marathons, even ultramarathons. She rarely won—her career just hadn’t allowed her to train at the very top level—but she was rarely out of the top ten.