Looking for the Fire

by M. L. Buchman

  “Storm moved out twenty minutes ago.”

  He swallowed and tasted blood. A little testing. Ow, shit! He’d bit his tongue really badly. Bit, hell. Felt like he’d round it for the whole twenty minutes with his molars.

  The bitter adrenal taste mixed with the iron of the blood almost made him sick. The only way he managed to resist it was knowing that if he puked all over the cabin floor, he was the one who’d have to clean it up. And god, she’d hear it.

  Twenty minutes.

  It had felt like twenty hours. He had been trapped in IEDs. Not one or two, but thousands: his MRAP tumbling across a field of them, each roll tossing more dead bodies, more deadly shards of steel, striking more IEDs which made him roll again, and more—

  “Talk to me, Tess. It’s bad. Just keep talking to me.”

  So she did. She told him about her first trip into the woods. Her mother taking her to see a lookout tower when she was just six.

  “Mom wanted to be a lookout so badly. Did ground-school training and everything. Then the head ranger in charge of assignments said he wasn’t going to let a single woman go out into the woods alone—couples and males only. She’d tried a dozen different regions, but they all said the same. It was that same summer she was raped in a city, because cities are so much safer than the deep woods, you know. That’s how she had me. She never married.”

  “Is that why you’re out here, She-lion?” He sat up. Every one of his muscles complained. He’d only had PTSD attacks a couple times. Figured it was going away. Yeah, until he rode through the heart of the lightning storm from hell.

  “Maybe. First year it probably was. But we hiked in the woods a lot together. She liked, likes to fish. Has a bum knee now, so she can’t get up here to see me, but we still walk into fishing spots. I fell in love with the wild on my own. Sometimes it feels like I can’t breathe until I’m up here.”

  God but he could picture her, the goddess of the peaks. The she-lion standing guard over her wilderness.

  “How about you?”

  “Me?”

  “You, Gray Wolf. Why are you out here?”

  Why was he?

  Truth?

  “I couldn’t think of anything better to do with my summer.”

  9

  Tess took his phone number at the end of the season, she didn’t have a number to give other than her mom’s and Tess never gave that out.

  “I’ll buy the first beer,” he’d offered.

  She’d been down a week and still hadn’t call to take him up on the offer.

  Knew the number by heart, had it memorized before she’d lowered and latched the shutters, locked the site down for winter, and headed down the mountain.

  Had almost dialed it from her mom’s, but didn’t know what to say. After the lightning storm, they’d gone deep. They’d told each other the important stuff, back and forth each night on their private frequency.

  She felt as if her every truth had been exposed for him to see. Hollowed out trees, cracked wide to reveal their burned out hearts.

  If she spoke to Jack Gray Wolf with no last name…if she met him, would she be able to still be herself? No one else knew what he now knew about her. She’d blow it for sure.

  Harry took her back on at the Spotted Pony; bars were a pretty good fit for flaky seasonal work. Good bartenders were little better than itinerant workers, so there was always an opening.

  Two lagers. Three tequilas with salt and lime. A pair of boilermakers. Two Thanks but no thanks. (That would turn into the Hell no! version somewhere in the next seven months as it always did.)

  Two guys came and sat at the end of the bar.

  She kind of remembered them from her last night before the fire season. Not that either had been that memorable. But they’d stayed late on her last night and tipped really well.

  Her bartender’s eye drifted over one of them, still unmemorable, but stopped on the other.

  Was it really the same person? There was a set to the eyes, a depth and certainty that couldn’t have been there before. Someone terribly alive lived in that face.

  Harry served them, but she made a point of using the taps down that end of the bar for the next beers she had to draw.

  The night was still quiet enough to overhear their conversation.

  “You sure she even exists? Sounds like the horseshit craziest story you ever laid on me.”

  “She exists. She’s real. Way more than you, asshole.”

  Tess was paralyzed with shock. The beer ran out of the glass over her fingers and began running along her forearm to dribble off her elbow. She startled and slapped the tap closed, wiped her hand and arm with a bar rag.

  She’d know that voice anywhere. All summer it had been burned into the landscape of her thoughts until she knew it as well as her own. She knew the shape of every scar on his soul just as he knew the scars on hers.

  Tess delivered the beer back down the bar.

  Before she could talk herself out of it, she grabbed a pen and a bar napkin and wrote a quick note.

  Drawing a fresh pint of the porter he was having, Tess set the napkin down with the message showing and then placed the beer right on top of it without saying a word. He’d know her voice as surely as she knew his.

  Tess turned to the next patron calling for a refill even as he called out a confused, “Who’s this from?”

  From the corner of her eye, she saw him lift the beer and read the note.

  Apply liberally in case of forest fire or lightning storm. She’d drawn a cougar’s paw print for a signature.

  He looked at her in absolute shock. She set down the beer she was pouring and turned to face him.

  A hundred emotions ran across his features, ones that she found she could read as easily as her own; she might not know the handsome face, but she knew the man behind it so well that she didn’t need to. There was no one she knew better, or who knew her better.

  With a shout of pure joy, the same shout she heard in her heart each time she entered the wilderness, he vaulted the bar and rushed to stop a single step from her.

  “She-lion?” his voice hesitated just as it did on that first fire call, right before he’d whispered that “Thank you” that had melted her heart.

  “Hey there, Gray Wolf.”

  He reached for her, thought better of it, then brushed a finger as lightly down her cheek as the last breeze of a storm clearing off the horizon.

  “You’re real,” he was as breathless as he’d been spotting his first fire.

  “Last I checked.”

  This time when he went to reach for her, she stopped him with a hand against the center of his chest. The shock was as super-charged as a lightning strike and heated her insides to full burn.

  “One question.”

  “Anything.”

  “What’s your last name? Jack, Big Bad Gray Wolf, what?”

  “Parker. Jack Parker.”

  She slid the hand up his chest, cupped his neck with her hand and pulled him down into a kiss. He didn’t hesitate a second.

  As she melted against him to the cheers of the bar crowd, she had just the least little glimpse of the future, like the first smoke puff that showed early to tell of the fire that would rage through the forest.

  No longer the lone princess in her tower. Next year she’d be sharing lookout duties on Cougar Peak, and the year after, and the one after that, and…

  Pure Heat a Firehawks romance

  Steve “Merks” Mercer hammered down the last half mile into the Goonies’ Hoodie One camp. The Oregon-based Mount Hood Aviation always named its operation bases that way. Hood River, Oregon—hell and gone from everything except a whole lot of wildfires.

  Foo Fighters roared out of the speakers, a piece from his niece’s latest mix to try and get him out of his standard eighties “too retro” r
ock and roll. With the convertible top open, his hair whipped in the wind a bit. Hell today it could be pouring rain until his hair was even darker than its normal black and he wouldn’t care. It felt so damn good to be roaring into a helibase for the first time in a year.

  Instead of rain, the sun shone down from a sky so crystalline blue that it was hard to credit. High up, he spotted several choppers swooping down toward the camp. A pair of Bell 212 Twin Hueys and a little MD500, all painted the lurid black with red flames of Mount Hood Aviation, just like his car. He’d take that as a good omen.

  He let the tail of his classic Firebird Trans Am break loose on the twisting dirt road that climbed through the dense pine woods from the town of Hood River, perched on the banks of the mighty Columbia and staring up at Mount Hood.

  This was gonna be a damn fine summer.

  Helibase in the Oregon woods. Nice little town at the foot of the mountain. Hood River was big enough to boast several bars and a pair of breweries. It was also a big windsurfing spot down in the Gorge, which meant the tourists would be young, fit, and primed for some fun. The promise of some serious sport for a footloose and fancy-free guy.

  And fire.

  He’d missed the bulk of last summer.

  He hammered in the clutch and downshifted to regain control of his fishtail, did his best to ignore the twinge in his new left knee.

  Steve had spent last summer on the surgeon’s table. And hated every goddamn second he’d been away from the fight. It sure hadn’t helped him score much, either. “I used to be a smokejumper until I blew out my knee.” Blew up his knee would more accurate since they’d barely saved the leg. Either way, the pickup line just didn’t sweep ’em off their feet the way you’d like. Compare that with, “I parachute into forest fires for the fun of it.” Way, way better.

  And never again.

  He fouled that thought into the bleachers with all the force he could muster and punched the accelerator hard.

  Folks would be milling around at the camp if those choppers meant there was an active fire today. As any entrance made was worth making properly, Steve cranked the wheel and jerked up on the emergency brake as he flew into the gravel parking lot.

  A dozen heads turned.

  He planted a full, four-wheel drift across the lot and fired a broad spray of gravel at a battered old blue-and-rust Jeep as he slid in beside it. Ground to a perfect parallel-parked stop. Bummer that whatever sucker owned the Jeep had taken off the cloth covers and doors. Steve had managed to spray the gravel high enough to land some on the seats. Excellent.

  He settled his wrap-around Porsche Design sunglasses solidly on the bridge of his nose and pulled on his autographed San Francisco Giants cap. The four winning pitchers of the 2012 World Series had signed it. He only wore it when appearances really mattered. Wouldn’t do at all to sweat it up.

  He hopped out of the car.

  Okay, his brain imagined that he hopped out of the car.

  His body opened the door, and he managed to swing his left leg out without having to cup a hand behind the knee. Pretty good when you considered he wasn’t even supposed to be driving a manual transmission yet. And he’d “accidentally” left his cane at the roadside motel room back in Grants Pass where he’d crashed into bed last night.

  So done with that.

  Now he stood, that itself the better part of a miracle, on a helibase and felt ready to go.

  He debated between tracking down a cup of coffee or finding the base commander to check in. Then he opted for the third choice, the radio shack. The heartbeat of any firebase was its radio tower, and this one actually had a tower. It looked like a very short fire watchtower. Crisscrossed braces and a set of stairs led up to a second-story radio shack with windows and a narrow walkway all around the outside. All of the action would funnel through there for both air and ground crews.

  An exterior wooden staircase led in switchbacks up to the shack. The staircase had a broad landing midway that gave him an excuse to stop and survey the scene. And rest his knee.

  He could have done worse. Much worse.

  Hoodie One helibase was nestled deep in the Cascade Mountains just north of Mount Hood. From here, he could see the icy cap of the eleven-thousand-foot-high dormant volcano towering above everything else in the neighborhood. A long, lenticular cloud shadowed the peak, a jaunty blemish in the otherwise perfect blue sky.

  The air smelled both odd and right at the same time. The dry oak and sage smell of his native California had been replaced with wet and pine. You could smell the wet despite the hot summer sun. At least he supposed it was hot. Even in early summer, Oregon was fifteen to twenty degrees cooler than Sacramento in the spring. Sometimes the California air was so parched that it hurt to breathe, but here the air was a balm as he inhaled again.

  Ah, there.

  He inhaled again deeply.

  Every wildfire airbase had it, the sting of aviation fuel and the tang of retardant overridden with a sheen that might be hard work and sweat. It let him know he’d come home.

  The firebase had been carved into a high meadow bordered by towering conifers. Only the one dirt road climbing up the hills from the town a half dozen miles below. A line of scrungy metal huts, a rough wooden barracks, and a mess hall that might have been left over from a summer camp for kids a couple decades back. You certainly didn’t visit firefighting bases for the luxury of it all.

  You came here for the fire. And for what lay between the radio tower on which he perched and the grass-strip runway.

  A couple of small fixed-wing Cessnas and a twin-prop Beech Baron were parked along the edge. They’d be used for spotter and lead planes. These planes would fly lead for each run of the big fixed-wing air tankers parked down at the Hood River airport or flying in from other states for the truly big fires.

  Then there was the line of helicopters.

  The 212s and the MD500 he’d spotted coming in were clearly new arrivals. Crews were pulling the big, orange Bambi Buckets from the cargo bays and running out the lines for the 212s. The MD500 had a built-in tank. Someone crawled under the belly of each of the 212s and hooked up the head of the long lead line used to carry the bucket two hundred feet below the bird and the controls to release the valve from inside the helicopter.

  There must be a fire in action. Sure enough. He could see the refueling truck headed their way, and it was not moving at some leisurely pace. Not just action, but somewhere nearby.

  With a start, he realized that he wouldn’t have to go trolling off base for company. He’d always been careful not to fraternize with the jump crews, because that made for a mess when it went south. But if he wasn’t jumping anymore… Some very fit women would be coming into this camp as well.

  He breathed the air deeply again, trying to taste just a bit of smoke, and found it. Damn, but this was gonna be a fine summer.

  ***

  “Climb and left twenty degrees.”

  As the pilot turned, Carly Thomas leaned until the restraint harness dug into her shoulders so that she could see as much as possible. The front windscreen of the helicopter was sectioned off by instrument panels. She could look over them, under them, or out the side windows of her door, but she still felt like she couldn’t see.

  She really needed to get her head outside in the air to follow what the fire was doing. Taste it, feel the heat on her face as it climbed the ridge. Could they stop the burn, or would the conflagration jump the craggy barrier and begin its destruction of the next valley?

  She needed the air. But the doors on this thing didn’t open in flight, so she couldn’t get her face out in the wind. In the little MD500s she could do that; they flew without the doors all the time.

  This was her first flight in Mount Hood Aviation’s brand-new Firehawk. It might rank as a critical addition to MHA’s firefighting fleet, but she was far from liking it yet. The fire-rigge
d Sikorsky Black Hawk felt heavy. The MD500 could carry four people at its limit, and this bird could carry a dozen without noticing. The heavy beat of the rotors was well muffled by the radio headset, but she could feel the pulse against her body.

  And she couldn’t smell anything except new plastic and paint job.

  Available at fine retailers every Sept, 2014

  More information at: www.mlbuchman.com

  About the Author

  M. L. Buchman has over 25 novels in print. His military romantic suspense books have been named Barnes & Noble and NPR “Top 5 of the year” and Booklist “Top 10 of the Year.” In addition to romance, he also writes thrillers, fantasy, and science fiction. In among his career as a corporate project manager he has: rebuilt and single-handed a fifty-foot sailboat, both flown and jumped out of airplanes, designed and built two houses, and bicycled solo around the world. He is now making his living full-time as a writer, living on the Oregon Coast with his beloved wife. He is constantly amazed at what you can do with a degree in Geophysics. You may keep up with his writing at www.mlbuchman.com.

  Copyright 2014 Matthew Lieber Buchman

  Published by Buchman Bookworks

  All rights reserved.

  This book, or parts thereof,

  may not be reproduced in any form

  without permission from the author.

  Discover more by this author at: www.mlbuchman.com

  Cover images:

  Watch tower on sunset sky

  © Pklimenko | Dreamstime.com

  Beach Romantic Young Couple

  Walking Edge of Sea at Sunset

  © Travelling-light | Dreamstime.com

  Other works by M.L. Buchman

  The Night Stalkers

  The Night Is Mine

  I Own the Dawn

  Daniel’s Christmas

  Wait Until Dark

  Frank’s Independence Day

  Peter’s Christmas