Pure Heat

by M. L. Buchman

  Ready for battle, the Firehawk roared east toward the fire.

  Chapter 12

  Carly plugged in her laptop and latched it onto the support arm rigged above her knees. If for some reason she ever had to grab the cyclic control, they’d have serious problems.

  First, the laptop mount sat directly above the joystick and blocked much of her view of the control panel. Second, the Firehawk was about ten times more complex than any other helicopter she’d ever ridden in before.

  A pair of display screens faced her, each surrounded by a dozen buttons that changed the screen’s function. A half-cajillion other small switches and controls ranged down the center console that separated her from Emily.

  The cyclic joystick and the head of the collective control on the left side of her seat were showered with more buttons for radio and retardant-release controls.

  She had a chopper license and kept it current to fly a 212 or the little MD500. She’d earned her ticket in case the pilot had a heart attack or something, but the Firehawk came from a whole other world. She might as well tackle a space shuttle. It wasn’t the flying she cared about anyway.

  She pulled up the terrain maps on her laptop and the latest weather information.

  If only she knew where the—

  “Forty-four-point-two-one by minus-one-fifteen-point-eight-five.” Henderson’s voice came over the radio, reading out the GPS coordinates as if he’d been reading her mind. “Officially the Scott Mountain Fire, though it’s still a couple miles from there and we’re going to keep it that way. Class D and growing. Probably Class E by the time we arrive. Zero containment. Type II now and we’re going to keep it that way. Control out.”

  “Shit.” Merks voice sounded low over the headset. “How did it get so big before they called us?” A Type II meant multiple days, base camps, and a whole mess of resources and command structure.

  “What are Class D and E?” Beale looked grumpy, though it wasn’t reflected in her voice. She struck Carly as a woman who hated not knowing everything. They’d get along just fine on that trait.

  “Your husband reads too much.” Steve spoke while Carly was keying in the longitude and latitude coordinates Henderson had just fed her. “It becomes Class E when more than three hundred acres are burned or on fire, about a half square mile. Class F starts at a thousand acres. It’s on the books that way, but what we care about is Type I, II, or III. Because of the late report, I’m guessing that it’s on steep and remote terrain, which increases the type.”

  Carly had to remember that Steve was an experienced smokie, despite the hotdogger persona he wore so comfortably.

  Beale sounded a bit less grouchy. “He does read too much. I spent a couple weeks training at Brainerd Heli and a couple more in Los Angeles County Fire Department. They both talked only about type.”

  Carly glanced over at Beale and could see she would enjoy finding the right way to rub her husband’s nose in it.

  Carly keyed the radio. “Hey, ICA Rookie!”

  “Come back.” Henderson sounded very grouchy, but his wife was smiling as she pushed the Firehawk east. The slightest nod indicated that Carly was precisely on track.

  “Type first. Class, we don’t really care; they don’t even call us unless it’s big. Or damn close like the little one we just did. We get all we need from Type II.”

  “Roger.” It was practically a growl and would have every Hoodie in the loop laughing.

  Beale was smiling, which was all Carly cared about.

  Carly tapped into the chopper’s broadband ground link with her laptop. Pulled up the mapping software. “I can confirm steep. Steep and remote. All between four and six thousand feet up. Ground support is going to be lousy. The nearest fire road is a nasty twister and ends about two miles away. Can this thing airlift a bulldozer?”

  “Let’s see.” Emily appeared to be inspecting the sky for an answer. “Your average D9 Teddy Bear—”

  “Teddy Bear?” Steve’s laugh engaged Carly’s own.

  “Yes,” Emily continued without the slightest change of tone. “Your average armored and militarized D9 Teddy Bear bulldozer made by Cat. It will knock down your typical concrete-walled home without even slowing down much. Israelis used them a lot when they didn’t like a Palestine settlement. They weigh in at about sixty tons, and I expect the armor is in the range of ten tons. So, that’s fifty tons of dozer and I can lift about five tons. And I can’t even do that at six thousand feet. Not enough air. Even a little D4 weighs in at about twice my capacity.”

  That sobered up the mood of the aircraft. This Firehawk was the new powerhouse of the MHA fleet. Its arrival had made Carly feel as if they could fight anything, but the problem was not so simple.

  “Now, if you had a CH-47 Chinook,” Emily continued, as if all of the technical information had turned her downright gregarious, “you could cart around a D4 dozer just fine, even to those altitudes.”

  There was a loud click over the intercom as she keyed the radio mike. “Honey?”

  “Here, babe.” Henderson’s voice came clear, sounding as if he were mostly over his grouch.

  “Anybody local have a Chinook or a Skycrane? Carly says the roads are too remote. We need a way to get some Cat D4s on-site.”

  “Roger, babe. I’ll get to work on it. Well done. ICA, out.”

  Carly looked over at Emily. The woman had just given her all of the credit for the idea without a second thought. Any male pilot Carly had ever flown with would have taken the credit himself even for something that was completely her idea. Was that the nature of the woman beside her? Or was it the nature of decent people?

  Which would Steve do?

  He’d given her a lot to consider over the last two days.

  His unhesitating jump into the fire. The ease with which they worked together. It was as if whenever they were working, the fake, irritating Steve faded away and the decent version appeared in his place.

  Nor had she missed his change of attitude last night. Allowing her some personal space. Then changing his mind about parking her in. And it couldn’t have been to preserve his precious upholstery, he was clearly smart enough to have included that in his original planning. She sure as hell would have gone looking for a mud puddle before walking across it. Actually, she might even have gone to the corner store and bought a bottle of water to create one if none were available.

  He was clearly interested in her. She’d caught sight of the image on his screen during the drone’s first flight, a still shot of her face in the sunlight looking up at the drone. And she’d let him kiss her. Though it was hard to admit, she’d wanted him to. That had been almost as much of a shock as the kiss itself.

  Okay, honestly, his kiss had sent too many bad memories rushing to the surface, leaving her sick and dizzy between one heartbeat and the next.

  Yet he hadn’t pursued her through the bar like most other males on the scent. He’d actually been conspicuously decent, not even coming to TJ’s table except for a brief moment when she’d gone to the bathroom.

  But that wasn’t what had set her on her heels last night. Steve wasn’t what had made her reactions so befuddled that she didn’t even think to wave good night until his taillights turned out of sight.

  It was Emily’s comments to her. Carly had thought that she was facing her past. But now she wondered if she was avoiding her memories.

  There was also something different about Steve. It wasn’t that he made her laugh, even when he didn’t intend to. Nor was it the image of him dancing with hot gravel in his underwear, though even the memory still made her smile.

  It was that Steve had stirred up embers she’d thought fully doused and suppressed. The loss of Linc had left her in the black and she’d been fine that way. But her heart had been sneaky, a slow smolder that still lurked beneath the surface.

  Right up to the moment Steve had looked at her for the first time and gasped out under his breath, “An angel.”

  Chapter 13

  Th
e reports continued coming in. Slow at first, but ramping up when the smokies and then Henderson reached the site almost simultaneously. The ICA began radioing back observer reports.

  “Heavy to severe. Fully active, surface and crown fire. Solid Type II.” Steve heard the return of the carefully measured humor he’d learned to appreciate in the man. “Estimate five hundred acres. Class F by the time choppers arrive.”

  “If you,” Beale ground out over the radio of their racing Firehawk, “are flying over a fire with our daughter, you’re a dead man.”

  It was certainly a voice Steve would never want to be on the receiving end of, even if he weren’t at fault.

  Henderson was a very brave man and responded in a light voice. “We’re at ten thousand feet and circling a mile to the side, honey. No worries. Jump teams are in and moving to flank north and south. Winds steady at thirty-five knots, too chaotic over the fire. They had to jump well outside the zone. They’re just getting to the fire edge now.”

  Steve ached in empathy for these guys. They’d have parachuted down to open ground a thousand feet or more from the fire. Then, in heavy gear with pumps and tools and hoses, they’d trekked over steep terrain before they could even start the firefight.

  When the Firehawk reached the airstrip east of Garden Valley, they were in the bottom of a steep-sided valley. Henderson’s Baron landed on the grass strip even as Beale hovered and landed the trailer well clear of the helibase on a flat spot just above the banks of a lazy bend in the Payette River.

  She hovered low enough for Steve to jump out. He looked at the gap to ground and tried not to think about his knee.

  Carly spoke over the headset, “Can you set us fully down? Make it easier to unload as well.”

  Bless the woman.

  After Beale set it down, Steve stepped down and slid the drone cases and the tool kit free.

  Carly climbed out, ducked under the chopper, and unclipped the harness from the lifting hook. A quick gesture and Beale was back in the sky, moving upslope to the helibase before resettling.

  Together he and Carly cleared the harness and prepped the trailer. Getting the drone-catcher rig aloft only took a few minutes. And this time he didn’t take his time assembling the bird. As fast as Carly read off the checklist, Steve attached the pieces of the first bird. He locked the two drones’ cases to the wheels of the trailer, so at least they couldn’t be stolen without taking the whole thing back aloft.

  The radio on Carly’s belt squawked.

  “This is Henderson. Is the drone up?”

  “How soon until the Firehawk is ready?” Steve asked without looking up from fueling the bird.

  Carly relayed the question over her radio.

  “Now.”

  Steve capped the tank, set the auto-flight, and fired the engine, which whined to life, caught, and steadied. He fired the catapult and launched the drone into the sky. He watched it long enough to make sure it had stabilized in a lazy circle a thousand feet overhead, waiting for his next command.

  Together he and Carly ran toward the chopper. He felt like a foolish teenager playing a game of tag for two. Chasing Carly, just two steps ahead, alive with the energy, the joy, the passion for what she did radiating from the very core of her being. He wanted to grab her and throw her to the soft summer grass along the slow, winding river and fall down beside her. Instead he limp-raced toward the chopper, not able to gain on her head start.

  Henderson met them there. “Okay, you two are my eyes in the sky. Carly, do that magic that Rick tells me you do. Merks, make me proud.”

  Then he pulled Carly aside.

  Under the pretense of double-checking his cabling installation, Steve shuffled close enough to overhear.

  “Rick and the Hoodie Two crew are tied up on a massive chaparral fire in Nevada. You’re our only Type I Incident Commander qualified. I’m Type I for air and TJ is Type I for ground. So we’ll be taking the load off you as much as we can, but this is your fire. I know you prefer to focus on air tactics and strategy, but the nearest wildfire Type I Incident Commander who isn’t in another mess at the moment is at least six hours away. Can you run it?”

  Carly shrugged. “Sure.”

  Henderson stuck out a hand. “Rick said I could count on you. It’s good to know.”

  They shook hard on it once. Then, with a shared nod, they turned toward their next tasks, Carly mounting up and Henderson striding off toward the 212s that were just arriving.

  Steve’s respect for the man just kept growing. It wasn’t your average guy who would admit to a younger woman that she was more qualified than he was to do the job. Steve began booting up the console to take control of his drone.

  A fuel truck was winding up its hose from where it had been filling the Firehawk’s tanks. The squeaky whine of the rusted take-up reel overlapping the idling diesel engine. The old truck at this normally quiet strip was an equal mix of rust and red.

  While Steve and Carly had been setting up the trailer, someone had unloaded the three tons of foam mix. Steve looked to the side and saw it stacked. No forklift in sight at Garden Valley airstrip. Someone had moved it all by hand. He was glad it wasn’t him.

  A dozen buckets remained aboard.

  “You know how to set these?” Carly glanced into the cargo bay.

  Steve looked at the two plastic hoses, each already plugged into two separate five-gallon buckets, ripe with the sweet, soapy smell of foam mix. You pulled the center plug on a fresh bucket, rammed in the two hoses, and engaged the clips. You’d have ten gallons of mix that would foam up the thousand gallons of water in the Firehawk’s belly tank. It would cover way more territory than the water alone. Move the hoses to fresh buckets every time you refilled. Six drops, then they’d have to circle back for more foam. They’d probably need fuel every dozen drops, so the numbers worked well.

  “Yeah, I got it.” It would take him about thirty seconds for each changeover, and the drone would just cruise along on autopilot. In FAA airspace, it wasn’t yet legal to leave a drone in unattended flight except in very tightly controlled situations. Level flight at a predesignated altitude set by an ICA was one of those.

  “Good.” Carly nodded her thanks for his taking the extra duty. “It saves me having to put an extra body aboard and losing another thirty or forty gallons of capacity in load offset.”

  The little MD500, the slowest but most agile of MHA’s helicopters, showed up and began its descent as Steve and Carly climbed aboard the Firehawk. The MD500’s rotors made a high, whippy sound in comparison to the heavier 212s idling their turbines while getting their Bambi Buckets attached.

  Beale began cranking the Firehawk’s engines, adding their high-pitched whine to the racket that rolled over to a heavy beat.

  The fuel truck roared to life and raced over to service the new arrival.

  A deep, diesel-engine groan rose in the background, and Steve could see a couple of flatbed trailers arrive pulling bulldozers with heavy-duty cages around the driver’s seat. That meant Henderson had found a really big chopper somewhere. It should be arriving soon.

  Beale called the “tower,” a fancy word for Mike and TJ with a pair of walkie-talkies and a couple of folding lawn chairs set midfield. She had the Firehawk aloft before Steve even had his headset fully on. Rather than belting into his seat, he slipped on a harness and clipped the couple-meter-long lead line to a ceiling D ring. Now he could move around the cargo bay to service the foam buckets if needed without being able to fall out of the helicopter, or not fall very far.

  Steve got the console powered up, and as soon as he had a radio link with the drone, he sent it winging toward the fire.

  Beale struck out over the Payette River and descended slowly over a lazy curve of blue water. Not much room. Trees towered on both banks, and the Payette was barely a hundred feet wide here. The rotor disc was over fifty feet wide. It was a tight squeeze, and he held his breath until Beale had the chopper slid into place.

  The other choppers w
ould have an easier time with the tight fit. They dangled buckets eight feet in diameter at the end of two-hundred-foot lines. The Firehawk dangled a twenty-foot-long suction hose to fill its belly tank.

  Steve leaned out to watch. The big, fat, five-inch hose lowered from the Firehawk’s tank.

  “Snorkel wet,” he called as it entered the water.

  The onboard pump kicked to life, sending heavy vibrations buzzing through the deck plates and up his legs. Twenty seconds later and a thousand gallons heavier, they clawed aloft, Beale retracting the snorkel as she went.

  As soon as they climbed out of the valley, there was no question of where to go. The gray-brown plume blossomed in the northern sky like a fist.

  “The wind,” he said over the headset without even realizing it.

  “The wind,” Carly agreed. That’s why it had spread so fast.

  The tower of smoke was leaning well to the east. A westerly was pushing the fire—and pushing it hard. He leaned as far forward between the seats as he could until he was almost beside Carly. He looked up through the front windshield. At about twenty thousand feet, the plume was sheared off.

  “Jet stream.” The upper air currents were ripping off the top of the smoke and carrying it east in a long cloud.

  Steve shifted back to his console.

  “Damn.” The drone was arriving at the fire, affording Steve his first good view of it. The beginning of the black was still smoldering and the leading edge was a mile beyond it. This sucker was still spreading fast.

  “What? Can I see?” Carly was trying to do the impossible and turn far enough in her harness to somehow see the display mounted on the back of her seat.

  Steve pulled out a tablet display, tapped it on, initiated the link, and handed it forward. Now it would emulate what he was seeing.

  “Turn left and zoom out.”

  She’d assessed the view and the nature of the fire before she even had a solid grasp on the display.

  He re-aimed the drone’s camera.