Asimov's SF, August 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Ellison was staring off at the western ridge. “You got one of those ICCARUS units in your truck, Ozzie?” she asked casually.

  "Yeah, I've got one,” he admitted.

  Her grin was back, but now Ozzie recognized it for what it was: a mask over an old and bitter wound. “Suppose we could call up the action on that ridge over there?” she asked, nodding to the west.

  Ozzie tried to imagine what ICCARUS might show him that would be of any use. Satellite photos on file could contribute a photo of the area, but it couldn't show what was under the trees. The fuel density, fuel types, and fuel moisture levels would all be indicated by colors and patterns, but that wouldn't help them spot a human being. The infrared ... “Mind telling me what you hope to see?” he asked.

  "I hope to get lucky,” she said cheerfully. “I'm hoping Scooter caught him crossing from his car to the rocks up there, or maybe the infrared will pick up residual heat from his flamethrower."

  "Not after eighteen hours!” Ozzie protested.

  "Naw, this would be historical footage,” she agreed. “You can call up the historicals, can't you?"

  "Of course.” Ozzie started back toward his truck, and Ellison fell in beside him. It wouldn't hurt to show her what ICCARUS had generated, but he couldn't help feeling there was more to her agenda than a wild hope to spot the perpetrator on snapshots taken at fifteen-minute intervals. After the first hour, the interval would have increased to six hours, just sufficient to monitor fire spread.

  "Don't suppose you could request a current satellite photo of that area,” she said.

  Now she was pushing it. “If I feel it's warranted,” he hedged. The Forest Service might think the DWR was made of money, but Ozzie's supervisor didn't share the opinion. Why spend money on a satellite photo when a lead plane could fly over the area and get the information they needed? Of course, to get that, they would have to convince the Incident Commander on this fire it was necessary. Ozzie knew the IC; it was going to take more than a candy wrapper.

  When they reached the truck, Ozzie lifted out the ICCARUS unit and set it up on the hood where they could both see it. The first thing that came up was the overview of the Matchless Fire; the image updated in real time, as new data was added, and Ozzie winced to see how close the fire was getting to the campground. The facilities there had been rebuilt only four years ago, having been destroyed in the terrorist fires of 2007. He touched the menu button, selected “status,” then touched the screen at the point of the campground. A blowup of the area appeared, along with figures summarizing fire activity, weather conditions, fuel conditions, the number and kinds of crews and equipment deployed in the area, and the objectives of the command team for that location.

  Ellison gave a low whistle. “You know, when I started with the Outfit,” she drawled, using an insider's term for the Forest Service, “infrared was a Type 1 resource. Now look."

  The naked envy in her voice made Ozzie self-conscious. “Now you're walking around with infrared on your head,” he observed, tapping the screen to bring back the overview.

  She put a hand to her goggles. “What, these? Had to buy these myself."

  That explained it. It also said something about Ellison, that she was willing to shell out her own money to have better tools. Seasonal firefighters had to purchase their own gear, of course, from fire-resistant clothing to fire shelters, and Agency firefighters had to take theirs out of their uniform allowance; but multi-function goggles were a tool, like a shovel or a pulaski, and no one was expected to buy his or her own. They were also expensive; it wasn't like buying one of the newer, better fire shelters...

  "Deploy!” someone shouted as they raced up the ravine, losing ground to the flames. He could see the newbie in front of him groping for the plastic case at the small of her back, stopping to rip it open and snatch out the aluminum and fiberglass shelter that was supposed to protect her from the radiant heat, supposed to trap breathable air inside with her. It was one of the new shelters, but Ozzie's was old, it hadn't been out of its case in the fifteen years he'd owned it. He reached for it, but was afraid to stop running; there was no cleared area, the ravine was full of fuels, and if he deployed here, there would be dry grass under him. It would bring the fire to his shelter, let it inside. So he kept running—

  "Ozzie? You okay?"

  He came back with a start. “Yeah, fine,” he lied. He tapped the ICCARUS screen where the image of the western ridge appeared; but before the enlarged picture resolved, it occurred to him that he had never introduced himself to Carol Ellison, and yet she had called him by name just now. She knew who he was. That meant she knew what had happened to him. The gaze he turned on her was cold. “I don't remember telling you my name."

  "Didn't have to.” She grinned, a smug grin this time. “I asked for you."

  "By name?” Why would she do that?

  Her eyes measured him a moment before she answered, “I figured you know more about fire than most."

  Most DWR agents, she meant. The DWR had a reputation for being administrative in nature, for shunning field work. So she had asked for the one guy she knew had worked the firelines. After the Drover Fire, it was a name every firefighter in the area knew.

  "You know, that chip on your shoulder doesn't interest me in the least, so you might as well stick it in your pocket,” she advised him. “That's where I keep mine. Carol Ellison,” she introduced, pulling off a glove and offering her hand. “Call me Ellie."

  The sight of that hand jarred Ozzie, even as her nickname rang a bell. Her palm and fingers were gnarled by old, white scar tissue—burn scars, scars incurred before medical technology could grow replacement skin from a person's own cells, when grafts had to be taken from other parts of her body—Of course: the Flintlock Fire, in 2010. The crew that got burned over on Kingfisher Ridge. The only survivor.

  The man in front of Ozzie was deploying his shelter; feet and hands in the corner straps, he stretched it like a sail in the howling wind, then fell to the ground, pulling the flaps in under him. Ozzie detoured around him, but he knew it was now or never. He had to deploy. There were still patches of grass here, but not as much. Maybe it wouldn't be too bad. Maybe he wouldn't take any fire in his shelter—

  Ozzie withdrew his own glove and clasped Ellie's hand firmly, but gently. The scar tissue was an odd texture, lumpy but almost slick, and it made his stomach churn. “Oswaldo Mendoza,” he said, refusing to shy away from the sensation. “But I guess you knew that.” There was suddenly a kinship between them that could not be denied. Sole survivors. Was that why she had asked for him, by name?

  When he drew his hand back, Ellie Ellison lifted hers and regarded the deep scars as though they were a soot smudge or a berry stain she had just noticed. “I was cold trailing,” she said absently, referring to the mop-up technique of running a bare hand through the ashes of a fire to make sure there were no hotspots. “Had my right glove off. Then I looked up at the sky, and something wet hit my cheek. I was afraid a bird got me, so I pulled off my left glove, too, and wiped at my face with my clean hand.” She pulled off her left glove now, to display the same kind of scars. “It was rain,” she said simply. “That's when I knew."

  What Ellie had known was that the smoke plume from the fire was about to collapse. It had risen thousands of feet into the atmosphere until it ran into a cold layer of air that caused the moisture in it to condense and fall back to earth as scattered raindrops. Only a few made it through the superheated air over the fire to fall on the hands and faces of firefighters, but Ellie had recognized them as harbingers of disaster.

  She had shouted to her crew boss, who radioed Dispatch, then told his crew to pull back to their van, just in case. He didn't think there was any rush. They were climbing an unburned hillside, a shortcut back to the van, when they saw the fire coming. Pushed by the microburst winds of the collapsing plume, it jumped from treetop to treetop through a canopy left untouched by the earlier surface fire. Some tried to outrun it; others opened
their tent-like shelters and fell to the ground where they were on the slope. Ellie, who had been more alarmed than her crew boss and had trotted ahead of the others, made it over the crest of the hill before she deployed hers. When flames invaded her sanctuary, she had beaten them out with her ungloved hands. There on the lee side of the hill, where the convective heat of the fire's leading edge had rolled over her and toxic gases had not forced their way into her shelter, she had survived.

  Now she pulled her gloves back on over the grisly reminders of her ordeal. “Stupid,” she said with a trace of smile that belied the pain in her eyes. “To this day I can't remember what I did with those gloves. Must have dropped them. So, can we see historicals of that ridge now?"

  Unnerved, Ozzie turned back to ICCARUS and tapped the screen several times to bring up the latest satellite view of the western ridge, as opposed to the composite now showing. The ridge was thick with trees on the east, but only sparsely vegetated on the west with a two-track road leading up toward the crest from that direction. At the top, a rock outcrop protruded, angled toward the east and broken by numerous fissures that could easily conceal a human being. The resolution was better on ICCARUS than on his sleeve interface, but it was still grainy. Even with maximum magnification, Ozzie couldn't see anything noteworthy.

  Patiently, he began to go back through the historicals. They were sketchy; there had been no reason to photograph this ridge, so there was only what was incidental to capturing the fire. But just before sundown last night, the lead plane doing size-up had snapped one photo, and there was a dot on the two-track road.

  Ozzie put full magnification on the dot; it was still just a dot. Someone or something had been on that road at 1823 last night, but it was impossible to say if it was a man or a bear, a vehicle or an elk. He looked at Ellie.

  Her face was blank, devoid of even her masking smile. What was she thinking? What was she feeling?

  "Want to take a drive?” she asked.

  A candy wrapper, and a dot on an aerial photo. He could get law enforcement out here on his authority, but how long would it take? And if he was wrong ... “Is it always the same kind of candy wrapper?” he asked.

  "Yeah. Always the same.” She waited patiently as he deliberated.

  "And it was just two other fires?"

  "That I know of. One other I strongly suspect. But you can bet he's set others; just somebody else did the investigation and missed the clues.” She shifted her weight, and Ozzie sensed the tension she worked so carefully to conceal. “We can take my green rig,” she offered, indicating the Forest Service pickup.

  She wanted this guy. He had taunted her, cost her three years on someone's shit list, and it was personal. She wanted him to be on that ridge now. But was he? “Wouldn't hurt to get up a little closer,” Ozzie admitted. He closed up ICCARUS and tucked it under his arm.

  As they left the point of origin, the smell of smoke faded but did not vanish. It was on his clothes now, in his hair, and like a ghost it continued to haunt his senses.

  "You still have nightmares?” Ellie asked as they bounced over the forest road to the western side of the ridge.

  "Yeah. You?"

  "Not in a couple years. Doesn't mean I won't have one tonight."

  They started up the zigzag track toward the crest of the ridge. Ozzie tried to phrase his question. “Do you—Do you ever—feel like yourself again?"

  "It's a new you.” She took the truck expertly around a four-foot pine sapling growing up in the middle of the track. “The first time you were born of water, the second time of fire. You start right there, start over."

  Learning to walk again, learning to control newly-grown muscles commanded by newly-grown nerves—

  "There."

  They were about a hundred yards from the crest of the ridge; Ellie brought the truck to a stop and pointed off through the trees to the left. “There it is."

  On the far side of a thick-trunked juniper, with its nose pointed downhill, was a late-model off-road vehicle, black and coated with dust. Ozzie's stomach did a quick pirouette. “That was a hell of a lucky guess,” he breathed.

  "Now, don't you make light of my detective work,” Ellie chided as she deftly maneuvered her pickup to sit sideways across the dirt track, blocking the road. “I told you, I know how this guy thinks. So, shall we go have a look in that ORV?” Without waiting for an answer, she opened her door and climbed out.

  Ozzie hesitated. They didn't have a search warrant, but that didn't mean they couldn't peer inside the vehicle. If they saw anything suspicious, he could request law enforcement and a tele-warrant. He really didn't have the authority for this kind of action, and neither did Ellie. Unlike park rangers, who were all law enforcement officers, Forest Service employees had no powers of arrest and were forbidden to carry fire-arms.

  But Ellie was hiking determinedly toward the ORV, and Ozzie figured he'd better go with her.

  The trees were thin here, but the grass was thick, nurtured by spring rains and dried by summer's heat to the finest tinder Mother Nature could provide. He could feel the bunch grass through the floor of his fire shelter, knew he was lying on dry fuels, with more dry fuels around him. The tiny tent of aluminum and fiberglass construction would deflect 95 percent of radiant heat, but it would burn if exposed to direct flame. Still, it was the only hope Ozzie had, for the temperature outside would be well over a thousand degrees; a single breath could kill him—

  Ozzie labored to catch up with Ellie, his knees and ankles working stiffly, the new skin and muscle around them still not as flexible as he wished. “What do you expect to find?” he asked, only a little winded.

  She laughed, scarcely seeming to breathe hard. “A flamethrower!"

  "You think he's that stupid, to leave a flamethrower out where we can see it?"

  "No, I think he's that brazen.” She stopped to face Ozzie, and her mask slipped, exposing the naked anger beneath. “He's taunting us, Ozzie. He's daring us to catch him. He's been making fools of us for seventeen years, and he gets bolder with every fire. I got within yards of him last time: he laughed at me. He thinks this is funny."

  Seventeen years ... A chill ran through Ozzie as he made the connection. “He set the Flintlock Fire?” The one Ellie had survived—

  "I can't prove it,” she admitted. “But I saw the evidence bag, stuff they picked up at the point of origin. A box of matches. A half-burned newspaper.” She drew a measured breath. “A mint patty wrapper."

  Now she started toward the ORV again, and Ozzie fell into step beside her. “I remembered that wrapper eight years later,” she told him, “when I was investigating the Ponchito Fire. When I saw the same kind of wrapper at the point of origin, and in the trash from his nest. I tried to point out a connection and got my butt busted for it, reassigned to a desk up at Happy Jack. Some big-shot Dee-Dub wanted to write it up as a terror attack, hoping to get more money for his zone. That's why I got so close to this guy the second time. If I caught him, there wouldn't be any question."

  They had reached the vehicle, but Ozzie caught her arm. “We're not going to catch this guy,” he said bluntly. “If we see anything suspicious, we're calling for law enforcement."

  Ellie grinned disarmingly. “Sure. That's why I brought you along, so you could request law enforcement. They'll listen to you."

  Something about that didn't ring right, but Ozzie couldn't tell what. He let go of her. “All right, let's have a look."

  The first thing he checked was the tires on the ORV; they were Michelin QXs, no surprise, with fairly new tread. The side and rear windows of the vehicle were lightly tinted, a token shield against the Arizona sun. Ozzie looked in through the tailgate. A gasoline can was clearly visible.

  But it wasn't illegal to carry a gas can. If you traveled long distances in the back country, or if you pulled a boat with your rig—

  "Over here,” Ellie called.

  A flamethrower lay on the ground by the front wheel.

  "Looks like he w
as planning to leave it behind,” she said, her nonchalant drawl back in place. “Kind of hard to get past the roadblocks with it, I suppose."

  Ozzie's mind rebelled. It was too convenient, too pat. Criminals didn't leave huge clues like this. Or did they? What Ozzie knew of criminals was more from movies and television than from personal experience. Maybe they were just that stupid. Or maybe, as Ellie suggested, this guy was thumbing his nose at them.

  Here near the top of the ridge, treetops rustled in the gentle southwesterly breeze. Wind in the trees, and the roar of the fire on the ridge— “I'll run the license plate,” Ozzie said, reaching to activate his sleeve interface.

  But Ellie caught his wrist with her gloved hand. “Before you do that,” she said quietly.

  His nerves quaking, he looked into her pale blue eyes; they were so clear and level and cold they transfixed him.

  "You know what'll happen,” she said. “By the time they get out here, he'll have spotted us. He may be watching us right now.” She nodded toward the crest of the ridge above them, where the rock outcropping kept the trees at bay. “He'll high-tail it down the other side of this ridge, or maybe run past us right here. Which of us is going to catch him? You?"

  Ozzie knew he would be doing well to manage a painful trot. He looked toward the rocky crest. “You think he's up there?"

  "I know he is."

  "Know?” His eyes narrowed with suspicion. “You know?" Then it dawned on him. The goggles. “You saw him up here, didn't you? Before I even arrived."

  One corner of her mouth twitched upward. “He stood up to take a leak.” Her hand touched the goggles, resting now above the rim of her helmet. “I had full magnification on, hoping to spot him."