Fire at Gray Wolf Lookout (Firehawks Book 8)

by M. L. Buchman

  DC called them on close approach. Once more Akbar leaned out the door, staying low enough for Tim to lean out over him. Not too tough as Akbar was a total shrimp and Tim had earned the “Two-Tall” nickname for being two Akbars tall. He wasn’t called Akbar the Great for his height, but rather for his powerful build and unstoppable energy on the fire line.

  “Let’s get it done and…” Tim shouted in Akbar’s ear as they approached the jump point.

  “…come home to Mama!” and Akbar was gone.

  Tim actually hesitated before launching himself after Akbar and ended up a hundred yards behind him.

  Come home to Mama? Akbar had always finished the line, Go get the girls. Ever since the wedding, Akbar had gotten all weird in the head. Just because he was married and happy was no excuse to—

  The static line yanked his chute. He dropped below the tail of the DC-3—always felt as if he had to duck, but doorways on the ground did the same thing to him—and the chute caught air and jerked him hard in the groin.

  The smoke washed across the sky. High, thin cirrus clouds promised an incoming weather change, but wasn’t going to help them much today. The sun was still pounding the wilderness below with a scorching, desiccating heat that turned trees into firebrands at a single spark.

  The Cottonwood Peak Fire was chewing across some hellacious terrain. Hillsides so steep that some places you needed mountaineering gear to go chase the flames. Hundred-and-fifty foot Doug firs popping off like fireworks. Ninety-six thousand acres, seventy percent contained and a fire as angry as could be that they were beating it down.

  Tim yanked on the parachute’s control lines as the winds caught him and tried to fling him back upward into the sky. On a jump like this you spent as much time making sure that the chute didn’t tangle with itself in the chaotic winds as you did trying to land somewhere reasonable.

  Akbar had called it right though. They had to hit high on this ridge and hold it. If not, that uncontained thirty percent of the wildfire was going to light up a whole new valley to the east and the residents of Hornbrook, California were going to have a really bad day.

  His chute spun him around to face west toward the heart of the blaze. Whoever had rated this as seventy percent contained clearly needed his head examined. Whole hillsides were still alight with flame. It was only because the MHA smokies had cut so many firebreaks over the last eight days, combined with the constant pounding of the big Firehawk helicopters dumping retardant loads every which way, that the whole mountain range wasn’t on fire.

  Tim spotted Akbar. Below and to the north. Damn but that guy could fly a chute. Tim dove hard after him.

  Come home to Mama! Yeesh! But the dog had also found the perfect lady. Laura Jenson: wilderness guide, expert horsewoman—who was still trying to get Tim up on one of her beasts—and who was really good for Akbar. But it was as if Tim no longer recognized his best friend.

  They used to crawl out of a fire, sack out in the bunks for sixteen-straight, then go hit the bars. What do I do for a living? I parachute out of airplanes to fight wildfires by hand. It wowed the women every time, gained them pick of the crop.

  Now when Akbar hit the ground, Laura would be waiting in her truck and they’d disappear to her little cabin in the woods. What was up with that anyway?

  Tim looked down and cursed. He should have been paying more attention. Akbar was headed right into the center of the only decent clearing, and Tim was on the verge of overflying the ridge and landing in the next county.

  He yanked hard on the right control of his chute, swung in a wide arc, and prayed that the wind gods would be favorable just this once. They were, by inches. Instead of smacking face first into the drooping top of a hemlock that he hadn’t seen coming, he swirled around it, receiving only a breath-stealing slap to the ribs, and dropped in close beside Akbar.

  “Akbar the Great rules!”

  His friend demanded a high five for making a cleaner landing than Tim’s before he began stuffing away his chute.

  In two minutes, the chutes were in their stuff bags and they’d shifted over to firefighting mode. The next two sticks dropped into the space they’d just vacated. Krista nailed her landing more cleanly than Tim or Akbar had. Jackson ate an aspen, but it was only a little one, so he was on the ground just fine, but he had to cut down the tree to recover his chute. Didn’t matter; they had to clear the whole ridge anyway—except everyone now had an excuse to tease him.

  # # #

  Forty hours later Tim had spent thirty hours non-stop on the line and ten crashed face first into his bunk. Those first thirty had been a grueling battle of clearing the ridgeline and scraping the earth down to mineral soils. The heat had been obscene as the fire climbed the face of the ridge, rising until it had towered over them in a wall of raging orange and thick, smoke-swirl black a couple dozen stories high.

  The glossy black-and-racing-flame painted dots of the MHA Firehawks had looked insignificant as they dove, dropping eight tons of bright-red retardant alongside the fire or a thousand gallons of water directly on the flames as called for. The smaller MD500s were on near-continuous call-up to douse hotspots where sparks had jumped the line. Emily, Jeannie, and Vern, their three night-drop certified pilots, had flown right through the night to help them kill it. Mickey and the others picking it back up at daybreak.

  Twice they’d been within minutes of having to run and once they were within seconds of deploying their fire shelters, but they’d managed to beat it back each time. There was a reason that smokejumpers were called on a Type I wildfire incident. They delivered. And the Mount Hood Aviation smokies had a reputation of being the best in the business; they’d delivered on that as well.

  Tim had hammered face down into his bunk, too damn exhausted to shower first. Which meant his sheets were now char-smeared and he’d have to do a load of laundry. He jumped down out of the top bunk, shifting sideways to not land on Akbar if he swung out of the lower bunk at the same moment…except he wasn’t there. His sheets were neat and clean, the blanket tucked in. Tim’s were the only set of boots on the tiny bit of floor the two of them usually jostled for. Akbar now stayed overnight in the bunkhouse only if Laura was out on a wilderness tour ride with her horses.

  Tim thought about swapping his sheets for Akbar’s clean ones, but it hardly seemed worth the effort.

  Following tradition, Tim went down the hall, kicking the doors and receiving back curses from the crashed-out smokies. The MHA base camp had been a summer camp for Boy Scouts or something way too many years ago. The halls were narrow and the doors thin.

  “Doghouse!” he hollered as he went. He raised a fist to pound on Krista’s door when a voice shouted from behind it.

  “You do that, Harada, and I’m gonna squish your tall ass down to Akbar’s runt size.”

  That was of course a challenge and he beat on her door with a quick rattle of both fists before sprinting for the safety of the men’s showers.

  Relative safety.

  He was all soaped up in the doorless plywood shower stall, when a bucket of ice-cold water blasted him back against the wall.

  He yelped! He couldn’t help himself. She must have dipped it from the glacier-fed stream that ran behind the camp it was so freaking cold.

  Her raucous laugh said that maybe she had.

  He considered that turnabout might be fair play, but with Krista you never knew. If he hooked up a one-and-a-half inch fire hose, she might get even with a three hundred-gallon helicopter drop. And then… Maybe he’d just shame her into buying the first round at the Doghouse Inn.

  Tim resoaped and scrubbed and knew he’d still missed some patches of black. The steel sheets attached to the wall as mirrors were as useless now as they’d been before decades of Boy Scouts had tried to carve their initials into them. Usually he and Akbar checked each other because you ended up with smoke or char stains in the strangest spots.

  But Akbar wasn’t here.

  Tim didn’t dare wait for any of the o
thers. If he was caught still in the shower by all the folks he’d just rousted from their sacks, it wouldn’t turn out well.

  He made it back to his room in one piece. The guys who’d showered last night were already on their way out. Good, they’d grab the table before he got down into town and hit the Doghouse Inn. The grimy ones weren’t moving very fast yet.

  Tim had slept through breakfast and after the extreme workout of a long fire his stomach was being pretty grouchy about that.

  # # #

  As Macy Tyler prepared for it, she regretted saying yes to a date with Brett Harrison. She regretted not breaking the date the second after she’d made it. And she hoped that by the time the evening with Brett Harrison was over she wouldn’t regret not dying of some exotic Peruvian parrot flu earlier in the day.

  Just because they’d both lived in Larch Creek, Alaska their entire lives was not reason enough for her to totally come apart. Was it?

  Actually it was nothing against Brett particularly. But she knew she was still borderline psychotic about men. It was her first date since punching out her fiancé on the altar, and the intervening six months had not been sufficient for her to be completely rational on the subject.

  After fussing for fifteen minutes, she gave herself up as a lost cause. Macy hanked her dark, dead straight, can’t-do-crap-with-it hair back in a long ponytail, put on a bra just because—it was mostly optional with her build, and pulled on a t-shirt. Headed for the door, she caught sight of herself in the hall mirror and saw which t-shirt she’d grabbed: Helicopter Pilots Get It Up Faster.

  She raced back to her bedroom and switched it out for: People Fly Airplanes, Pilots Fly Helicopters. And knocked apart her ponytail in the process. Hearing Brett’s pickup on the gravel street, she left her hair down, grabbed a denim jacket, and headed for the door.

  Macy hurried out and didn’t give Brett time to climb down and open the door of his rattletrap Ford truck for her, if he’d even thought of it.

  “Look nice, Macy,” was all the greeting he managed which made her feel a little better about the state of her own nerves.

  He drove into town, which was actually a bit ridiculous, but he’d insisted he would pick her up. Town was four blocks long and she only lived six blocks from the center of it. They rolled down Buck Street, up Spitz Lane, and down Dave Court to Jack London Avenue—which had the grandest name but was only two blocks long because of a washout at one end and the back of the pharmacy-gas station at the other.

  This north side of town was simply “The Call” because all of the streets were named for characters from The Call of the Wild. French Pete and Jack London had sailed the Alaskan seaways together. So, as streets were added, the founders had made sure they were named after various of London’s books. Those who lived in “The Fang” to the south were stuck with characters from White Fang for their addresses including: Grey Beaver Boulevard, Weedon Way, and Lip-lip Lane.

  Macy wished that she and French Pete’s mate Hilma—he went on to marry an Englishwoman long after he’d left and probably forgotten Larch Creek—hadn’t been separated by a century of time; the woman must have really been something.

  Macy tried to start a conversation with Brett, but rapidly discovered that she’d forgotten to bring her brain along on this date and couldn’t think of a thing to say.

  They hit the main street at the foot of Hal’s Folly—the street was only the length of the gas station, named for the idiot who drove a dogsled over thin ice and died for it in London’s book. It was pure irony that the street was short and steep. When it was icy, the Folly could send you shooting across the town’s main street and off into Larch Creek—which was much more of a river than a creek. The street froze in early October, but the river was active enough that you didn’t want to go skidding out onto the ice before mid-November.

  Brett drove them up past the contradictory storefronts which were all on the “high side” of the road—the “low side” and occasionally the road itself disappeared for a time during the spring floods. The problem was that almost all of the buildings were from the turn of the century, but half were from the turn of this century and half were from the turn before. The town had languished during the 1900s and only experienced a rebirth over the last four decades.

  Old log cabins and modern stick-framed buildings with generous windows stood side by side. Mason’s Galleria was an ultramodern building of oddly-shaded glass and no right angles. One of the town mysteries was how Mason kept the art gallery in business when Larch Creek attracted so few tourists. Macy’s favorite suggestion was that the woman—who was always dressed in the sharpest New York clothes and spoke so fast that no one could understand her—was actually a front for the Alaskan mafia come to rule Larch Creek.

  This newest, most modern building in town was tight beside the oldest and darkest structure.

  French Pete’s, where Brett parked his truck, was the anchor at the center of town and glowered out at all of the other structures. The heavy-log, two-story building dominated Parisian Way—as the main street of Larch Creek was named by the crazy French prospector who founded the town in the late-1800s. He’d named the trading post after himself and the town after the distinctive trees that painted the surrounding hills yellow every fall. French Pete had moved on, but a Tlingit woman he’d brought with him stayed and bore him a son after his departure. It was Hilma who had made sure the town thrived.

  There had been a recent upstart movement to rename the town because having the town of Larch Creek on Larch Creek kept confusing things. “Rive Gauche” was the current favorite during heavy drinking at French Pete’s because the town was on the “left bank” of Larch Creek. If you were driving in on the only road, the whole town was on the left bank; like the heart of Paris. The change had never made it past the drinking stage, so most folk just ignored the whole topic, but it persisted on late Saturday nights.

  Macy took strength from the town. She had loved it since her first memories. And just because she’d been dumb enough to agree to a date with Brett, she wasn’t going to blame Larch Creek for that.

  Well, not much. Perhaps, if there were more than five hundred folk this side of Liga Pass, there would be a single man that she could date who didn’t know every detail of her life. She still clung onto the idea that she’d find a decent man somewhere among the chaff.

  Dreamer!

  That wasn’t entirely fair. After all, some of them, like Brett, were decent enough.

  The problem was that she, in turn, knew every detail of their lives. Macy had gone to school with each of them for too many years and knew them all too well. A lot of her classmates left at a dead run after graduation and were now up in Fairbanks, though very few went further afield. The thirty-mile trip back to Larch Creek from “the city” might as well be three hundred for how often they visited. The first half of the trip was on Interstate 4 which was kept open year round. But once you left the main highway, the road narrowed and twisted ten miles over Liga Pass with harsh hairpins and little forgiveness. It didn’t help that it was closed as often as it was open in the winter months. The last five miles were through the valley’s broad bottom land.

  The town was four blocks long from the Unitarian church, which was still a movie theater on Friday and Saturday nights, at the north end of town to the grange at the south end. The houses crawled up the hills to the east. And the west side of the fast-running, glacier-fed river, where the forested hills rose in an abrupt escarpment, belonged to bear, elk, and wolf. Only Old Man Parker had a place on that side, unable to cross during fall freeze-up or spring melt-out. But he and his girlfriend didn’t come into town much even when the way was open across running water or thick ice.

  The main road ran north to meet the highway to Fairbanks, and in the other direction ended five miles south at Tena. Tena simply meant “trail” in the Tanana dialect and added another couple dozen families to the area. The foot trail out of Tena lead straight toward the massif of Denali’s twenty-thousand foo
t peak which made the valley into a picture postcard.

  Macy did her best to draw strength from the valley and mountain during the short drive to French Pete’s. Once they hit Parisian Way, a bit of her brain returned. She even managed a polite inquiry about Brett’s construction business and was pretty pleased at having done so. Thankfully they were close, so his answer was kept brief.

  “Mostly it’s about shoring up people’s homes before winter hits. There are only a couple new homes a year and Danny gets most of those.” He sounded bitter, it was a rivalry that went back to the senior prom and Cheryl Dahl, the prettiest Tanana girl in town.

  The fact that Brett and Danny drank together most Saturdays and Cheryl had married Mike Nichol—the one she’d accompanied to the prom—and had three equally beautiful children in Anchorage had done nothing to ease their epic rivalry.

  Or perhaps it was because Brett’s blue pickup had a bumper sticker that said America Is Under Construction and Danny’s blue truck had a drawing of his blue bulldozer that read Vogon Constructor Fleet—specialist in BIG jobs.

  “Small towns,” Macy said in the best sympathetic tone she could muster. It was difficult to not laugh in his face, because it was so small-town of them.

  “This place looks wackier every time,” they’d stopped in front of French Pete’s. “Carl has definitely changed something, just can’t pick it out.”

  Macy looked up in surprise. The combined bar and restaurant appeared no different to her. Big dark logs made a structure two-stories high with a steep roof to shed the snow. A half dozen broad steps led up to a deep porch that had no room for humans; it was jammed with Carl Deville’s collection of “stuff.”

  “Your junk. My stuff,” Carl would always say when teased about it by some unwary tourist. After such an unthinking comment, they were then as likely to find horseradish in their turkey sandwich as not.