Full Blaze

by M. L. Buchman

  No one got to call him stupid and get away with it. But he was playing in a different arena here than as a foster kid in a crappy high school or even in a hotshot crew. He bit his tongue hard before finding a reply he could live with.

  “No dumber than average.”

  “Then why didn’t you try to kiss her?”

  What the hell?

  “You mean other than I’ve only known Jeannie for a couple of hours? And while I’m as much of a hound dog as the next man, I do happen to respect the women I chase.”

  “Right. Aside from that.” Mark’s deep voice was dismissive of such trivia.

  Cal thought about how much he’d been impressed by Jeannie’s flying, by her beauty, and most of all by that quiet expression he’d captured with his camera.

  That was when he clued into what Mark was really asking him. Not why hadn’t he tried to kiss her, but why wasn’t he acting as if she was the most attractive woman he’d ever met.

  When she actually was.

  There was a thought to shock the shit out of him. But it was true, and he must be showing it.

  Was he that obvious, even if he hadn’t seen it himself? Well, he’d certainly engaged her emotions, though his sore jaw said they were the wrong ones.

  Jeannie, of the bright blue hair that was actually dark red, wasn’t some firefighter-bar groupie only marginally contained in a tight tank top. Lord knows there were enough of those around to keep almost any man happy. No, Jeannie was a seriously skilled professional, flying one of the newest, best, and most expensive pieces of firefighting equipment in existence. Only the biggest air tankers and a few other choppers could do more or cost more per hour to operate. She was not a girl in a bar, and for one of the first times in his life, he wasn’t sure just what the attraction to that had been.

  “I’ll…have to get back to you on that.”

  “Good lad.” He’d apparently just passed some test. Mark clapped him on the shoulder as if he was trying to use Cal for a pile driver. “Let’s go meet some people.”

  ***

  “I let Denise know to work on your bird.”

  “Thanks, Emily.” Jeannie turned from the chow-truck line to face her boss. She went to tickle Tessa’s cheek, but her left hand still stung badly when she moved it. She reached out with her right and earned a giggle for her efforts.

  “Did you break anything?”

  Jeannie flexed her hand carefully, but was able to show full range of motion. “No, it just stings. The guy has a jaw like a brick.” She selected the meat loaf and mashies option, and Betsy dished it up for her.

  “I’ll have the same. Smells great,” Emily told MHA’s main cook. “Could Jeannie get a bag of ice on the side?”

  Betsy produced one in moments and handed it over. “Trouble on landing?”

  “She was massaging somebody’s jaw for them,” Emily offered before Jeannie could make up some excuse.

  “You go, girl!” Betsy shot her a thumbs-up. “Anybody we know? Wait… The new guy. Handsome as could be. Sat by himself out at the farthest table for much of the afternoon, real quiet. Punched him, did you? You must like him.”

  “What? No! Not even close. I—”

  Emily took her own tray, which came complete with a couple jars of baby food for Tessa, and guided Jeannie away to a picnic table.

  “Seriously, I—” Jeannie set her tray down awkwardly with only one hand.

  “Ice on hand,” Emily ordered her. “Food in mouth. You need the calories after today.”

  Jeannie did as she was told. But there was no way she liked this Calvin guy. Even if, she did a little mental math, he had somehow slipped past ten points. Fighting the Black Saturday bushfires, he may have even snuck up close to twenty without her noticing.

  Damn him!

  ***

  Cal landed at a picnic table lit with a battery-powered lantern and the orange glow of the tail end of sunset. To the west, the suburbs and trees hid the horizon, though there was still a hint of pink. The last thing the sunlight hit was the massive smoke cloud rising to the east above the Santa Barbara hills. It glowed red at the top from the sun and red at the bottom from the thirty-percent contained fire. In between was dark and turbulent.

  He felt bad about not still being out with the hotshot crew. As if he was letting the team down by not being there, even though he only wielded a camera. He didn’t swing a Pulaski or wield a chain saw much anymore, not unless things got really tight, so he tried to help out by running for drinking water, breaking down the cases of supplies that were airdropped in each night, and generally trying to help the team stay upbeat despite the grinding slog that was hotshot firefighting.

  He also often served as scout. It let him range off to either side of wherever the hotshots were digging in and trying to stop the beast. He could swing up to a mile left or right along the line and search out problems, find possible advantages for the next attack, and pin down the ever-important escape routes.

  That was what the lone survivor of the Granite Mountain hotshots on the Yarnell Fire had been doing, looking ahead over the next ridge just as he was supposed to be doing. It was impossible to imagine the survivor guilt he must still be feeling years later, one man of twenty.

  Cal also liked the photographic possibilities that working as scout offered. Shoulder to shoulder with the crew boss, long view of the beast eating another ridge, air drops of retardant, foam, and water. Even shots of the temporary camps as the hotshots crashed for four hours of sleep in a cluster around a pallet of food and water that had been parachuted in. They often slept sprawled on the ground, removing only their packs and hard hats before passing out.

  It was so very human. That was what he liked about doing the photography. The walls of fire sold the best: a couple million dollars of mansion wrapped in a cloak of flame, a humble garden shed surviving due to the fire’s vagaries. But the people fighting the battle past all reasonable limits were what so intrigued him.

  Cal didn’t feel as bad about not being still in the fire when he looked at the meal spread before him on the picnic table. It was hard to feel sad while facing the massive double burger, including all the trimmings, and the giant bag of chips open in the middle of the table. It was the first meal he’d had in days that didn’t come out of an MRE pouch. Meals-Ready-to-Eat didn’t have much going for them other than calories, though those certainly counted.

  Jeannie, he noted, was sitting several tables away with the other pilots. Two blond women, one of them the scary ex-major, three guys, and Jeannie. The tables between them were filled with smokies and a couple engine crews who had been rotated out for sleep and food before being shoved back into the fray. He shifted a little to the left so that he had a clear sight line to her.

  “Got your ass caught out in the wind?” TJ aimed a pickle wedge at Cal’s chest like a sword. He was an old guy in his fifties or sixties who had obviously done his time in the smoke before moving behind a radio.

  “Had better days,” Cal admitted. He’d also never been punched by a beautiful woman before. Slapped? Yes. Flattened? Hell no.

  “TJ knows all about better days,” Chutes, another old-timer, told him.

  “Aw, don’t dig out that story.” But the smile was easygoing.

  “How far back do you two go?” Cal asked, then bit into his burger. Oh God, that was so good. The smoke and char finally where they belonged, rather than in the air he breathed. Whoever cooked these was damn good.

  “The Bronze Age, if you let them get started,” said Henderson, coming over with his own mounded plate of fried chicken.

  “That’s why they put TJ behind a radio.” Chutes nodded toward his pal. “Couldn’t trust him to jump anymore. He’d shatter like a china doll.”

  “Spent a decade more in the smoke than you,” TJ fired back.

  “Which is two decades after you should have gotte
n out.”

  Their back-and-forth was easygoing and had a familiar rhythm that Cal had no problem falling into. They’d said “jump.” So Chutes and TJ had both been smokejumpers. Chutes now oversaw all of the parachute loads that were dropped to the action crews in the field, as well as commanding the smokejumpers’ parachute loft. Apparently he didn’t have any other name.

  The fifth guy at the table was Steve Mercer, who Cal had met after Jeannie dropped him off…and before she’d hit him. A glance revealed her laughing with the other pilots. Once he saw her, he could pick out her laugh from the others. It was a great laugh, sparkly but from the gut. Man, he was in trouble on this one. Think about something else, anything else.

  “I got a great shot of your drone,” he told Steve. “Right up against the nastiest wall of fire you can imagine.”

  “Cool. I have one or two inside my truck.” Steve jerked a thumb over toward the service van and drone launcher. “But only in free flight above the fire. Don’t have much excuse to fly in low and hot like that. And when I do, there’s rarely time for a picture.”

  “Well, there wasn’t really time, but I got it anyway.”

  “Is it true that you threw your camera bag aboard Jeannie’s chopper before jumping in yourself?”

  “She-it!” Chutes drawled out. “You do crap like that, you’re gonna fit right in with this motley crew.”

  There was a new thought. Maybe Cal could talk his way into embedding with MHA for a while. Their heli-aviation team had a reputation for being one of the best. He glanced over at Jeannie’s table. As he turned back to face the crowd at his table, he caught ICA Henderson watching him with a small smile on his face.

  Okay, you caught me. Cal acknowledged Henderson’s knowing smile with a nod.

  He turned to the other guys at the table.

  “So, what would make you MHA guys of any interest to me as a wildfire photojournalist?” This was ground he was comfortable on. And it was always good to turn the question around like that rather than asking if he could come aboard. Everyone wanted to think they were interesting. On a fire crew it was easy, since most of them were. And the woman he couldn’t stop glancing toward definitely ranked as very interesting.

  Henderson’s smile grew and Cal decided that he agreed. “Camera in the Fiery Sky” could be the new series title. Cal definitely liked the idea of doing more flying with MHA.

  ***

  Jeannie waited until dinner was breaking up. She tried to anticipate in which direction Cal would leave and moved to place herself in the shadows. It was well after dark and the temperature was dropping from the earlier southern California scorch to merely intolerable. Maybe they’d make some headway on the fire tonight. It wasn’t a monster yet, but it was big and showing definite attitude.

  With MHA’s actions, they were holding it to a Type II fire. Barely. They really didn’t want to call out a Type I Incident Management Team unless they had to. That would mean they were in a whole new world of hurt in terms of the fire’s complexity and threat.

  All through dinner, Emily Beale hadn’t said a single word about Jeannie flexing her sore hand or having punched Cal Jackson with no apparent provocation. Well, Jeannie had to admit that even her own justification was looking pretty lame in retrospect.

  She couldn’t help noticing that Cal sat with ICA Henderson and the old guard. Of course his hotshot background would buy him an easy seat with the two former smokejumpers, so that shouldn’t surprise her.

  What did surprise her was how aware of him she was.

  At first she’d caught him watching her tentatively. She’d pulled off her LA Dodgers baseball cap, letting her ponytail slip out of the back hole, and resettled the hat. With her hair down, she could safely keep an eye on Cal without appearing to. She wasn’t fooling Emily, but she’d never expected to do that.

  Something had changed with him, shifted somehow during the meal. She’d missed when he went from being the outsider to being one of the crew, but he now huddled forward more confidently, laughing more easily. She’d seen his nerves so bad that he’d totally snarled himself in the headset cord, so he couldn’t fool her. But Jeannie suspected that this was more his natural state. His recovery from a near-fatal experience had been surprisingly rapid, as would only happen with a man who’d learned to trust himself in dangerous situations.

  But she didn’t trust him. And why not? That was what she’d spent all of dinner trying to puzzle out. He’d fought the Black Saturday bushfire. He’d made light of it, but maybe he’d done that because the thing had been so grim.

  With a cloud of dust and a burst of blaring rock-and-roll on their radio, a smoke-smeared wildfire engine crew arrived at the well-lit food truck, driving their heavy-duty, ash-colored vehicle right up beside a picnic table. They flocked about with a frenetic energy that couldn’t last long before exhaustion took over. Hopefully it would hold out long enough for them to consume some calories before their imminent collapse like zapped bugs. Cal and the others vacated their table to make way.

  She’d guessed Cal’s trajectory almost correctly and only had to shift a little until she was sitting on the front bumper of Steve’s black drone-control van directly in Cal’s path.

  “Cal.”

  He stumbled to a halt not five feet away. She could see him as a fairly clear silhouette against the mess area’s yellow camp lights, but that was all.

  “Uh, hi. Jeannie?” He had identified her only by her voice and on a single word. Why was she enjoying that? She didn’t want to be liking that, not from him. Then she heard that humor of his come to the fore as he answered his own question. “She of the stout left punch?”

  “You calling me stout, jackaroo?” She liked bantering with him. He was quick.

  “Just your punch. The rest of you, not a bit. And I’ve never worked a cattle station, Australian or otherwise.”

  But he didn’t move in for “the kill.” For the sweep-the-girl-off-her-feet kiss that so many guys thought was charming. Of course, she had punched him, so maybe it was just survival instinct, something he’d already proved he possessed.

  “I admit”—his voice was droll, all she had to judge him by at the moment—“that I found that particular, narrow aspect of stoutness to be, well…”

  “Flattening?” she offered.

  “I was going with ‘daunting,’” he corrected, “but ‘flattening’ works. May I?” His silhouette waved an arm toward the other end of the bumper.

  At her nod, he didn’t move at all. Right. She would be near enough invisible in the dark. “Sure. Just keep your chin to yourself, mate.”

  “Good advice.” Cal sat on the other side of the cable winch mounted at the center of the bumper.

  “So, I’m guessing you’ve somehow talked Henderson into letting you fly with me.”

  “Damn, Jeannie. Where’s your bottle? You magic too? How did you figure that out? And all he gave me—at least I think, he plays his cards pretty close—was permission to ask you.”

  Jeannie considered what that would mean. Much of wildfire flying was tense and incredibly busy. A fixed-wing air-tanker pilot only spoke with three people during a flight: the air commander circling high above, the guide plane that led them into the fire, releasing a puff of smoke to mark where to begin the drop, and the tower at the retanking base. And on a smaller fire, the first two were the same person.

  The helitankers talked to the air commander, the other helitankers—because it was rare for there to be only one whirlybird on a fire—ground commanders, ground teams… The list of frequencies she had to maintain was almost as crazy as the ICA’s. The Firehawk had several extra radios, and she was always switching between them. Thankfully, they were all on tap using the four-way switch under her left thumb and the microphone push-to-talk switch under her right index finger. About the only people she didn’t talk to were the air tankers, their guides, and any airpo
rt tower… She just stayed out of the fixed-wingers’ way.

  But much of flying helitanker was the constant shuttling from supply point to flame and back, hopefully on a short-circuit loop, depending on where the water or retardant was. It could get hard to hold focus flying alone for a fourteen-hour day.

  She remembered how much she’d enjoyed flying with Emily during the training and checkout rides as she moved up from the MD500 to the Firehawk. She had already been carded in the Twin Huey 212s, so she was used to dual turbine engines and belly tanks. The added complexity in the Firehawk had been mostly related to how much faster you could get into trouble. It boasted twice the load capacity and half again the speed of the Huey, and blew her poor little MD500 out of the water. But she’d also enjoyed Emily’s company while she gathered the required flight hours.

  Mark Henderson could offer Cal Jackson permission all he wanted, but Jeannie could simply say no and she knew Emily would back her up to the hilt. And even Mark knew to stay out of his wife’s way.

  Jeannie could feel herself growing more confident every day she flew with Emily, as if the woman were an elixir of self-assuredness.

  “We’ll see,” she finally told the figure waiting in the dark. “And thanks.”

  “Thanks? For what, putting my chin in the way of your fist?”

  She hadn’t really noticed it over the headset, but in the growing silence of the settling camp, his voice was unique. There was a depth, a strength that was terribly attractive. She really liked his voice. It was the kind you wanted close beside you in the dark.

  “No, I want to apologize for that. What I wanted to say was thanks for fighting the Black Saturday bushfires.”

  She could feel him shift on the truck bumper. Lit from below, the ash cloud of the Grindstone Canyon Fire above the Santa Barbara hills was just enough light behind him that she could make out his movement as he leaned against the truck’s radiator grill to look up and out at the sky.