Full Blaze

by M. L. Buchman

  “Firehawk Oh-two, abort water drop. Repeat, abort drop. We need an emergency evac.” Henderson read out a set of coordinates.

  “Pisser!”

  Cal stuck his head up between the seats and looked at her. She was too angry to turn around as she flew toward the coordinates, pushing her Hawk ahead hard at almost two hundred miles per hour. The fading protests of the ground commander only made her angrier.

  “What?”

  “Some damn idiot didn’t pay attention to the evac order, so I have to go do a rescue while we lose two more homes. Probably some idiot who—”

  “Got caught on a cliff edge with his tail out in wind?”

  “Crap, Cal. Sorry.”

  “That’s okay.” He knelt at the back edge of the center console and looked out the front windscreen with her.

  She heard the click over the intercom from his headset microphone as he took a photo that must be capturing something interesting, but she’d be damned if she knew what.

  “They’re just people in extraordinary circumstances doing what people do. Is it worth the energy to get pissed at them?”

  She ducked the Hawk below a particularly low-hanging pall of smoke and then climbed quickly to fly over the big power line that ran along the edge of Parma Park. Jeannie would have to dump her load before she could pick up any people. But she’d like it to be somewhere at least marginally useful.

  “I mean people just—”

  “Look,” she cut him off before he could make her feel worse. “I don’t appreciate you making me feel stupid. Just because you’re right, it doesn’t give you that right.”

  “Yes, ma’am!” She caught his smart salute in her peripheral vision. “Whatever you say, Captain, sir.”

  “Careful, or I’ll ground your pretty behind along with whatever…” She tapered off as the problem came into sight. A policeman in a cruiser, trapped a hundred feet from a wall of flames that cut across the road. Behind him was a cul-de-sac that led nowhere. His only other option was to retreat into the unknown woods on foot.

  Cal was gone from beside her, probably back to one of the doors for a clear photo.

  As she roared up to hover and observe the scene, the cop waved a rather desperate hand. Then a mother and two kids clambered out of the rear seat. The flames were reaching toward the car, and he was running out of street to back up on really fast. In another minute there wouldn’t even be room to land.

  Cal started to say something, but she saw it already. With a quick twist that elicited a yelp and a curse from Cal, Jeannie lined up the Hawk. She couldn’t douse the whole road and open an escape route, but a thousand gallons would buy them the time they needed for a rescue.

  “You okay back there?” She started her run and triggered the vent doors and the foam pump for a half-load drop.

  “Fine,” he grumbled. “Just warn me next time you’re gonna do that. I’ll put on my hard hat.”

  “Sure thing, Hotshot. Got it on now?”

  “Yes. In self-defen—”

  “Good!” She carved a hard turn, doubling back beside the initial part of her drop without wasting time to close the tank.

  “Ow! Crap!”

  She kept her smile to herself by keeping her gaze straight ahead. Then she hammered down toward the trapped cop and family.

  Cal made some loud noise as they landed, but he didn’t explain it and she was too busy watching her rotor tips and the mailboxes, fence posts, telephone poles, wires, and everything else that adorned the street as she settled into place. She actually ended up with one wheel on the road and the other over a thirty-foot drop-off.

  “Help ’em up, Cal!” She had to concentrate on keeping the Hawk level and stable without actually landing it.

  The officer herded the family over with their heads ducked down. In moments they were loading up. She could hear Cal giving calm directions and snapping them into seats.

  Jeannie also kept an eye on the flames, but they were holding to the other side of the line of her dousing. For now. No way she’d actually stopped them.

  “Okay!” Cal reached up between the seats and grabbed his two-way radio that he’d left charging on the console. She could see him slip it into the shoulder harness of his Nomex fire suit. “Climb about five feet and hold.”

  “What the hell?”

  “Just do it, Magic Girl.” His voice was practically a caress.

  Then he was gone.

  Others had tried that nickname on her because of her name, and she’d quashed them but good. She wasn’t some dreamy, damned buxom blond living in a 1960s sitcom. So, why did she like it so much when Cal said it?

  Not knowing why, she climbed five feet and held. The fire was still cooperating at the moment. She felt, more than heard, the loud click. A light blinked on her console, showing the cargo hook was engaged. Jeannie spotted Cal ducking out from beneath the chopper, trailing a lifting harness.

  Over his radio, he called to her. “Hover about fifty feet over the cop car.”

  She spotted him running forward along the unpaved road with the other end of the heavy harness dragging after him. By the time she was in the air over the car, she’d recovered enough from her shock to run the calculations. The car probably only weighed a ton and a half. Add in Cal, the cop, and the family, and her Firehawk could still pick them all up clean and easy.

  She stuck her head out into the Plexiglas bubble on her door’s window and looked down. Cal was fast and efficient despite the pounding downdraft of the Firehawk’s rotor. In under thirty seconds he had attached all four cables to the corners of the car and yanked each one before checking it again visually. Competent. It reminded her of how his hands had felt while holding her. Very competent.

  He spun a single finger over his head in a motion to start hoisting.

  “Get aboard!” She moved to land near the car, but there wasn’t room because of a pair of telephone poles. He waved her off and made the hoist motion again.

  She didn’t like the idea of having someone climbing into the cop car while it was an underslung load, but it was clear that even if she did land, he wouldn’t be climbing aboard.

  Stubborn idiot!

  She continued to climb, taking the slack out of the cable.

  “Ten feet. Five,” Cal called over the radio, continuing to wind his finger in the air.

  Jeannie eased her rate of climb down to a creep and felt the cable go taut as the chopper took the load. She waited five seconds, about all she was willing to give Cal to get aboard as the flames were once again on the move.

  “You in?” she radioed.

  “Go for it,” he called, and she did. Climbing upward she could see the car spin sideways as the load came on the cable and it straightened out. When she had the load twenty feet in the air, she spotted Cal. Still on the ground.

  He’d backed up a dozen paces and had his camera out.

  “Calvin Jackson! Even your cartoon self isn’t this stupid!”

  “It’s a good shot. Keep going!”

  “You’re gonna be trapped.”

  “No. The hotshots are just over that ridge to the north. I checked the images on Steve’s fire map. I’m clear all the way up. Keep going.” And he continued to shoot the images.

  “Drongo!”

  “I’ll assume that was foul. You wanted me back with the hotshots anyway, Magic Girl. Over and out.” He signed off, waved once, and turned toward the hills that only a hotshot could climb over. That was when she noticed that he’d also slung on the pack that had been hanging in the chopper’s cargo bay. He was completely gone from her chopper, which hurt like hell.

  She climbed away, looking for a place to set down the cop car, its owner, and the people that the officer had risked his life to save.

  ***

  Cal ducked under the trees before turning back to watch Jeannie fly awa
y. The only way she’d go was if he left her no choice.

  He pulled out the telephoto and captured a couple more amazing shots. “Mount Hood Aviation chopper saves family and police car.” Hell of a headline, and he’d sell the images for the cover story. The car going up into the sky, the cop’s smoke-stained face looking down in relief and amazement. The horror written openly across the woman’s and kids’ faces as they watched the fire, now recovered from its dousing, roar over their small cabin. He snapped a shot of the cabin tucked back in the trees as it went up in flames. No power lines. Weekender place left primitive. They’d probably never even heard the evac order, so they owed the cop their lives.

  He shot another one of the chopper with the car dangling beneath, backdropped by a distant wall of flame, except it didn’t look distant because he’d used the telephoto and been far enough away to flatten the depth of field.

  He waited there under the edge of the trees, perhaps longer than he should have. But he so liked watching Jeannie fly. When she was out of sight, he turned and began climbing the ridge.

  He really had to cut it out. He glanced at his watch. Twenty-four hours. Twenty-four lousy, stinking hours, and he’d spent far too much of it thinking about the woman whose kiss was more powerful than her punch.

  This wasn’t any Cal Jackson that he knew. It was part of the reason he’d left the cockpit for the cargo bay and ultimately the chopper for the woods—he’d needed the distance. Sitting so close that he could touch her had become almost unbearable without doing so. He actually was a morning person, no matter how nasty he woke up when kicked. Despite the bump on the head, he’d been very, very wide awake by the time she’d laid that kiss on him.

  He circled an outcropping, took a slug from his water bottle, and kept clambering up through the young alder and black cottonwood.

  The woman tasted of warm winter fires and moonlit nights. Jeannie of the dark-red hair streak, of the magic touch and the amazing body—he’d had a chance to confirm that before she geared up this morning—was horribly distracting. Women weren’t supposed to be distracting. They were supposed to be fun. Splendid, shared, mutual fun. Love-’em-and-leave-’em types. Jeannie was the kind of woman who was all about being dedicated and forthright. Commitment would be high on the list of qualities she’d look for in a man. She was precisely the kind of woman that Cal avoided like a Type I fire…except he’d made a career of rushing into Type I fires.

  So why was he trudging up this hillside back to his hotshot team to get away from her?

  Well, it had been a hell of a set of photographs. It also would make good advertising for MHA in the newspapers. Henderson would be okay with that. Actually, if Cal played it right, he could probably get the shots and his article to go national. That could be fun and pay for a couple more months of his present lifestyle at a single go.

  Run it with one of the photos he’d taken of Jeannie yesterday. Not the quiet one of her profile. He wasn’t willing to share that one with anyone else. But the frank, no-nonsense expression as she stared at the photographer, anonymous behind his camera in her reflected image. He started composing the story as he crested the ridge and looked at the vista of what was going on around him. He enjoyed writing the story himself in addition to providing the images. He’d learned to tell fire stories like a good ghost story around a campfire, and they sold well that way. The personal story behind each picture, bringing the whole experience alive for the reader comfortable in their armchair.

  He could see that the Grindstone Canyon Fire was indeed living up to its name, gearing up to grind the hill-dwellers down into powdery ash. From here atop the ridge he had a fairly good view of what was going on. The heart of the fire was still up in the rugged hills to the north and east, the plume still massive. In the daylight it showed more black than gray or red. So thick, it was obscuring the heart of the fire itself.

  With a smaller fire, you could always see some way into it. You could fly in from the backside, hike in through the black where it had already burned. Or in a savannah fire, it would be a thin, though hot, boundary line. The Black Saturday bushfire had rarely been more than a few hundred meters from leading edge to trailing edge. The problem was that the leading edge had been so hot—with a constant supply of fresh fuel—despite moving so fast, that by the time the trailing edge arrived, everything in its path had been destroyed. With the variable winds, the Grindstone Fire was expanding in every direction at once, finding thick reserves of forest and the occasional home as it burned.

  To the northwest of his current position, Cal could see a couple of trees swaying in ways that had nothing to do with the winds. Sure enough, in a few moments, one of them tipped slowly to the side and quickly disappeared from sight. A minute later, another followed. That would be his hotshot crew cutting a firebreak in hopes of protecting western Cielito. They were about a half mile away over some rough ground, but no sign of the fire itself. The towering smoke plume beyond the ridge said that it was definitely coming though.

  In all the other directions, far below, he could see the streets and highways of Santa Barbara. With the shifting wind, the city was darkly shadowed at eleven in the morning. Most cars on the roads had their headlights on.

  “Welcome to the dark side,” he told them. There was a whole “glamour” aspect to firefighting that had never really made sense to him, not that he was complaining. Sure you had cool machines and you had to be fit to be a firefighter. The glamour aspect made for firefighter calendars and women who actually cooed at you in bars like pigeons flocking to bread crumbs.

  The reality that he struggled to capture with his camera was hard work, blazing heat, and itchy protective gear that always seemed to rub you raw in some spot or other. The air parched dry by the heat, choking you with ash. It all wore you down, along with the brutal amount of physical effort. The number one cause of firefighter deaths wasn’t burns, it was heart attack. Even in younger men, at some point the load was simply too much for the heart to bear. Firefighting was about working mere feet from excruciating death until you were so tired that you began hallucinating.

  And he loved it. In and around fire was the first and only place he’d ever belonged.

  Cal sat down on the ridge and pulled out his water bottle and an energy bar. He found a comfortable boulder to lean against so that he could watch the whole show.

  A roar from behind him had Cal ducking. A red-and-white air tanker, its four jet engines spinning just above idle, swooped over his head like the Star Destroyer at the opening of the original Star Wars—barely five hundred feet above the ridge. It followed a small black-and-flame-painted twin Beech airplane for approximately a mile. That would be Henderson and his daughter.

  No, it wouldn’t. Unless the man didn’t match Cal’s first impression of him, he’d never put his daughter at risk. Lead planes had been known to go down when they went too low and got caught in a bad microburst downdraft. Only three or four that he knew of over many years, but that didn’t sound like Henderson. It also sounded like something his wife would skin him alive for.

  Cal changed frequencies on his radio and scanned the sky. Henderson’s voice directed the lead plane to alter course a hundred feet west. Who was he kidding, tweaking a jet-borne flight of retardant a hundred feet? Cal spotted Henderson’s plane far above at the Incident Air Commander altitude, well clear of the fire.

  The small lead plane jinked a little west, forcing the big tanker to bank left, then right to pick up the new line. The lead released a puff of smoke. Three seconds later, the big jet-engine air tanker reached the tiny white puff and released its load. Retardant spilled out in a long billowing cascade of brilliant red for more than a quarter mile. It was so beautiful that Cal could never tire of watching it.

  Damn! He hadn’t pulled out his camera at all. Hadn’t even thought to. He already had a hundred shots just like this, but it bothered him that he hadn’t taken one picture since he’d
begun climbing the ridge.

  Odd to just be the observer. It wasn’t how he watched the world. He watched it through a lens, and he actually felt a little naked without the added distance. Playing with the sensation, he snapped the clasps on his camera case shut. A bit of a chill went up his spine, and he didn’t know why.

  Another roar as the next big air tanker came by low overhead. He didn’t jump this time, had already spotted the little lead plane circling back from the first tanker’s run to a new alignment.

  He fished his tablet computer out of his camera bag, transferred over the block of photos from the last hour, and began tapping out the article between glances up at the occasional air tanker and to make sure he still had several escape routes if the fire changed its mind and headed this way.

  He had a good start on the article and had picked out the photos that he’d most likely use when he heard something that didn’t fit. Beyond a long ridge, the fire was still clawing across the land toward the firebreak being cut by the hotshots. On the other side of the ridge lay only the black where there had so recently been a house and a cop car. A high whine, only a little louder than a kid’s radio-controlled plane, abruptly Dopplered by him across the back of the ridge.

  Steve’s drone. The little black bullet with its red-and-orange flames painted down the side zipped by not a hundred feet away. Last night at dinner, Steve had promised to show it to him, but they hadn’t had a chance. Something Cal would definitely have to make time for.

  At just ninety miles per hour, it was slower than the big air tankers riding close to stall speed to make their drops, but it looked sleek and bullet fast. The drone circled overhead once more. This time, as it passed by, it waggled its wings at him.

  Cal raised a hand to wave back at Steve. Apparently the resolution on the cameras was pretty good and there was a chance he’d see the gesture. Working with MHA would be something pretty cool. Between the drones and the Firehawk and…and Jeannie. Damn the woman. Didn’t she have the decency to stay out of his thoughts for even five minutes in a row?