Chinook

by M. L. Buchman

  Most people thought her size was a disadvantage. But she also weighed less and had never blown a knee, unlike so many heavier runners. Her muscle-to-mass ratio was exceptional. And she liked to think that her determination was off the charts.

  It hadn’t taken long for the hotshot crew to realize this, and she’d become the team scout. She could reach an overlook, give them a clear idea of what the burn was doing before it crested some ridge, and get back to help faster than anyone.

  Last night it had sent her wide around the flanks of the fire, in some places up above the timberline to be safe. Her extreme fitness wasn’t helping her as much as she’d like at the moment. Almost all of tonight’s scramble had been over a mile high and strained her lungs to their limit. The Rogue River hotshots were based below a thousand, so her acclimatization sucked.

  Once safely clear of the fire’s flanks, she’d had to circle back over a kilometer to reach the helicopter’s resting place.

  The first thing she found was the snapped-off length of rotor blade.

  That was all she needed to see to know the crew’s fate.

  In 2011, “Extortion 17”—also a CH-47D Chinook—had been shot down by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Five crew members (Reserve and National Guard), eight Afghanis, a war dog, and twenty-five Special Operations Forces—several of them rumored to be SEAL Team 6 veterans of the bin Laden raid—had died instantly. It wasn’t the rocket-propelled grenade or the crash that had killed them as most people thought. The RPG hadn’t hit the fuselage, it had hit the rotor. What killed them all was the abrupt slam as twenty tons of heavily loaded helo suddenly decided to spin like a child’s top.

  She wrapped some orange flagging tape around the scorched trunk of a nearby tree, then tracked down the helo to make sure. The Chinook hadn’t crashed, it had shattered. Verifying the first four bodies didn’t take long. But there’d been the standard five aboard when they’d dropped off the fire team.

  It took her half an hour to find the fifth one; she’d landed seventy-five meters away, close by one of those weird clumps of green that sometimes happened in the middle of the Black. Ten trees, a dozen bushes, and a badly scorched deer that Taz put out of its misery.

  The crew member looked as if she was just taking a break—if you ignored the strange bend in her left arm. She lay on her back in a gap between two charcoal-black tree stumps, so undamaged that Taz kept expecting her to get up and ask about the others. Wasn’t gonna happen; her impact had planted her so deep in the soil that her chest was several inches below ground level.

  “At the helo. All dead,” she called to her team’s superintendent.

  “Roger,” his voice crackled over the radio.

  He would still be prepping for the fire’s onslaught on the far side of the ridge. It was impressive that they could hear each other at all.

  “Call it in.” At least that’s how she interpreted the burst of static.

  She double-clicked an acknowledgement, much easier to hear than words, then she dialed to the primary air frequency and reported.

  “Roger, hotshot. You were the sole witness, right? We’ve got a team inbound at first light. Can you hold at the helo for any questions?”

  She checked her watch. Less than an hour to sunrise. It would take her longer than that to rejoin the others. She’d already been on the go for three hours.

  “Roger that. Tell them to bring five body bags.”

  “Jesus! Okay. Ground out.”

  She’d never understood why the dead made people squeamish. After all, they were dead; they sure as hell didn’t care.

  Not good at sitting still, Taz looked around.

  Deep in the Black, there wasn’t much going on. But there were some spot fires and flareups she could work on while she waited. Weirdly, the helo hadn’t burned, which was a testament to the crash-proofing of the fuel tanks.

  Donning goggles and a face mask, Taz pulled out her Pulaski fire axe and headed for the nearest flareup.

  9

  Holly tickled Jeremy’s feet to wake him from a very comfortable dream. He was still on the couch and it was still dark…outside. A bright side-table lamp was blinding him.

  “Hey, cut it out!” He kicked out a foot, but all it did was flap the quilt at her.

  He’d been dreaming that Miranda had asked him to be her friend. How strange was that? She was twelve years older and had, like, everything: this island, cool planes, and she was the best crash investigator on the planet. How could she possibly need a friend?

  “Get your ass in gear, Little One. Miranda got a launch call. A downed Army Chinook at a wildfire. Breakfast is already up. Departure in five. Nice quilt by the way.”

  He looked down. The last he’d seen of it, it had been a shadow spread across Miranda’s lap. It was a wild piecework pattern of ocean blues, from white-blue of a hazy sky close by his chin, down to the blue-black of a storm-tossed nighttime sea at his feet. Adrift in the middle, a pale-green, two-masted sailboat seemed to be struggling toward the light.

  He certainly knew how that felt. He folded it carefully.

  On reaching the kitchen, he discovered that he was the last awake. Holly must have delayed waking him, just to screw up his morning even more. It definitely put him at the tail end of the pack and breakfast rush. He managed most of a bowl of granola and honey over Greek yogurt, only because Mike had it prepped for him by the time he got there.

  He finished it, without quite wearing it, while riding in the golf cart from the house to the hangar.

  Holly then used the cart to chase the deer off the grass runway while Mike and Miranda prepared the plane. That took longer than the flight from Spieden Island to Port Angeles, which had lasted just six minutes in Miranda’s Citation jet.

  Jeremy wished he was a pilot so that he could fly up front with her instead of Mike. In just the first month she’d whisked them to two incidents in Colorado and another in California. At least they got to arrive together, which was a major improvement on lagging hours behind in the much slower Mooney as had often happened in the past.

  As the predawn light revealed the array of firefighting aircraft being prepped at Fairchild Airport in Port Angeles, they shifted from the sleek jet to an old Bell LongRanger. With the retired USAF pilot, who usually went aloft for tourist flights, the six of them and their gear were right up at the load limit. Especially for a mile-high crash site.

  But the pilot placed them on site just as the sun cracked over the Cascade Mountains to the east and illuminated the Black in long, stark shadows. The ash coating on the burnt landscape made everything look the same. So much so that the pilot came dangerously close to putting them down in a patch of some unrecognizable tree stumps that would have eaten his helo.

  Once clear, just turning their backs on his takeoff wasn’t enough. They were blasted with cinders and ash until they all looked as if their backsides had been dipped in ink.

  Holly took off her hardhat, which revealed a clean halo at the top. She fluffed her blonde hair to little effect except for smearing some of the ash over the previously clean area.

  “Just think of it as temporary dye,” Andi offered. Her hair was dyed like fire, red at the tips, gold, and then yellow-to-blue before fading into her natural black hair color.

  “Girl who flies like she’s on fire is now all smoky,” Holly shot back.

  Indeed, the colors across the back of her shoulder-length hair were dimmed by the ash bath.

  “Just the way I like it. ’Cause I’m smoky hot.”

  Jeremy could never think of quick comebacks to Holly’s verbal attacks. He still hadn’t come up with one for her tickling his feet this morning.

  At Miranda’s request, the LongRanger had dropped them a hundred meters from the downed helo so as not to disturb the site.

  As they clambered over the rough ground, Jeremy spotted a wrap of bright orange tape on a tree off to the left. No way would plastic tape have survived the fire.

  He called out that he was going to chec
k it out, not that anyone seemed to care.

  Nearing the tree—which rose barely over a hundred feet without a single remaining bit of green and only the stubs of branches—he saw why it had been marked.

  A body lay spread out on the soil.

  Or rather in the soil.

  He stopped to kick at the detritus lying on the forest floor. Scorched pine needles, bits of tiny branches, possibly meters of organic matter. He’d have to dig a test trench alongside the body. Once he had the thickness and makeup of the various layers, he could estimate the body’s velocity on impact.

  Because of its prone position, it had most likely struck at a hundred and twenty miles per hour—assuming it had fallen far enough to reach terminal velocity. Reaching terminal velocity typically took five seconds and some five hundred feet. If the calculated velocity at impact was lower, it would let him estimate the body’s height of departure from the aircraft.

  As he circled around the tree for a closer look, he spotted a woman sitting against the trunk eating breakfast.

  Below her smudged hard hat, her brown-black hair was in a ponytail down to the middle of her back. Her yellow Nomex shirt was mostly ash-gray, but the Pulaski axe lying at her side—half-axe and half the sharpened hoe shape of an adze—said she was a hotshot crew member.

  “Hi.”

  “Hello,” she answered around a mouthful of the energy bar she’d been eating without looking up from the pack she’d been digging around in. Her voice was little better than a croak with fire smoke.

  “Keeping her company?” For the corpse was a woman’s.

  “Figured you people wouldn’t just stumble on her, so I waited to make sure you found her.”

  “Okay, thanks.” Jeremy was never sure how to talk to women. “That’s interesting.”

  “What?”

  “The failed safety strap lying beside her. That’s one-and-seven-eighths webbing. It has a breaking strength of thirty-six hundred foot-pounds.”

  “Is that a lot?”

  “To a human body? Yes, it’s a lot.” Jeremy pulled out his camera and moved in to record it.

  10

  Taz had trouble turning to the left. A branch had fallen, bounced off her helmet, and clipped her shoulder during an incautious moment. Nothing broken, but she couldn’t find the damn Tylenol anywhere in her pack.

  Then she stopped looking.

  That voice…

  She knew that voice.

  Then he stepped into her field of view and unshouldered his big pack.

  An NTSB logo was bright across the back of his vest as he squatted to inspect the corpse.

  She recognized Jeremy even by how he moved. None of the uncertainty of when they’d made love in the Baja desert on the final day of her former life. No. This was the man in his element, one who had understood the complexities of a Ghostrider’s weapon system simply by looking at it—yet had been utterly baffled by how to touch her when they’d made love.

  She’d forgotten Jeremy worked for the NTSB. But he was supposed to be stationed in Washington, DC, not Washington State.

  Taz stopped caring about the Tylenol, the half-chewed protein bar for breakfast, or her damned shoulder.

  It was unfair.

  The United States of America had almost four hundred million people. It had three-point-eight million square miles. Fifty states. God alone knew how many territories.

  And Jeremy Trahn was somehow the guy who had arrived to inspect the corpse out in the middle of fucking nowhere?

  It was a given that she’d never see him again.

  That she’d never see anyone who’d known her before, ever again.

  Firefighting for the Rogue River Hotshots on the opposite side of the country. How much farther from the Pentagon did she have to get to be safely dead?

  Apparently a lot farther.

  He reached into his pack without turning to face her.

  She didn’t think that ignoring her was something he’d do. Unless maybe he hadn’t recognized her?

  Pulling out a set of shears, he trimmed the last foot off the webbing and tucked it in a plastic evidence bag.

  “If she weighed one-forty,” he spoke as he wrote a note across the front of the bag before shifting to inspect something else, “she had to hit the end of the webbing with the equivalent of a twenty-six-foot fall to exceed thirty-six hundred foot-pounds—almost five thousand Newton-meters. The standard Monkey Tail restraint harness is only three meters long. This,” he flapped the bag before tucking it into his pack, “also would have a safety factor beyond that. It means that within a maximum of ten feet, she was thrown as violently from the helo as hitting the sidewalk after falling off the top of a three-story building.”

  Jeremy had always liked his words and his details.

  Taz held on to her pack and pushed silently to her feet.

  Knowing it was a total chickenshit maneuver—but unable to stop herself—she sprinted into the clump of preserved greenery and dove behind the deer carcass.

  11

  When Jeremy finally turned to pull out his foldable shovel to dig the test trench into the surface detritus and soil, he risked a glance at the woman.

  Except she wasn’t there.

  He looked around, but there was no sign of where she’d gone.

  It wasn’t likely that he’d imagined her. Granted, he hadn’t had more than a few hours of sleep, but…

  He circled the tree she’d been leaning against—marked with the orange tape, which was still there—looking for some evidence that she’d been real and he wasn’t hallucinating.

  He found his proof.

  A worn Pulaski fire axe, its wooden handle almost black with months of ground-in soot.

  He looked again.

  No detectable footprints across the blackened soil, but then his own weren’t showing either in the soft organics.

  She hadn’t climbed the tree. It still towered a hundred feet above, but only a few frail branches of green remained at the very top. Nowhere to hide up there.

  He hefted the axe.

  “She was here. She was real.”

  But she was gone.

  “Do they have firefighting fairies who can magically hide from mere mortals?”

  He raised his voice and called out, “You forgot your axe!”

  There was no response.

  12

  Taz didn’t miss the axe until after, when Jeremy’s back was turned, she’d hotfooted it out of there.

  Jeremy shouted something in the distance, but she couldn’t tell what.

  Only stubborn self-control, overlaid with some depressing common sense, stopped her from running all the way back to the team.

  The loss of a Pulaski wasn’t that big a deal, so there was no problem there. She could blame it on a moment’s inattention during a flareup. Sometimes they just broke, though you tried to salvage the head.

  But if she returned to the hotshot crew, she’d have to admit that she hadn’t briefed the NTSB team on the crash. And since that was the whole reason she’d stayed out here…

  Why in the hell had she been gawking at Hurricane Ridge like a schoolgirl? If she hadn’t, she’d never have seen the crash. Then she’d have done her scouting and returned to the team with no one the wiser.

  Conclusion, she had to talk to them.

  Well, it was time to woman-up, and hope to hell that Jeremy could keep the secret about her not being dead.

  Halfway back to where the corpse lay in the ground, she heard voices off to the right.

  The helo.

  Slipping through the blackened forest, Taz got close enough that she could see them.

  She didn’t recognize any of the three women, but she knew both men.

  One, it took her a moment to place. She’d made it her business as General Martinez’s aide to know everything she could about the people he came in contact with. Under normal circumstances, she wouldn’t have recognized Major Jon Swift, but he was the nephew of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of St
aff Drake Nason.

  His Air Force fatigues, and that he was inspecting a crash, fit what she knew about his position on the Accident Investigation Board, confirming his identity. And that she didn’t want to go anywhere near him.

  He was probably as rule-bound and integrity-worshipping as his powerful uncle. Contact with him was a ticket straight to incarceration at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth.

  The other was Mike Munroe, who she’d kidnapped along with Jeremy while on her final mission to destroy the Mexican drug cartels. She was glad to see that he and Jeremy had both survived after she’d put them in parachutes and shoved them off the crashing C-130J Ghostrider gunship. But she wouldn’t place any bets on the warmth of his reception—she’d pistol-whipped him into submission before she’d saved his ass.

  That all felt like a crazy lifetime ago. The things she’d done for the general… It was a struggle to suppress the shudder.

  One of the three women broke off from the group.

  Not toward Jeremy.

  Instead, toward the rotor blade fragment Taz had orange-tagged off in the trees.

  That gave her an idea.

  She sprinted back into the woods, circled wide around the helo in the opposite direction from where Jeremy would still be, and arrived at the broken-off blade section just steps behind the NTSB woman.

  One steadying breath and she came around a clump of burned brush.

  “Hi. You with the NTSB? Like your hair.” It seemed like a good line. And the fire motif was pretty. She’d never have considered coloring her own when she was in the military but she could do that now.

  “Thanks. Andi Wu. You must be the hotshot we were told to expect.” Andi wasn’t all that much taller than Taz herself was. Asian to her own Mexican. Her accent was West Coast. Taz had studied carefully to shed any hints of Spanish from her own speech and recognized the tones of California. North. Probably around San Francisco.

  “That’s me. Ta—Vicki Flores.” Taz was far too unusual a nickname. Mike would definitely recognize it when Andi mentioned this meeting.