It was late afternoon before Emily let her stop. Jeannie had logged three hours of simulator time and was ragged beyond any mere energy bar or flask of water’s ability to fix. At the same time she felt exhilarated. Emily had declared her progress as “sufficient,” which ranked as high praise from MHA’s chief helicopter pilot. Jeannie was already night-certified in the Huey and the MD500. The next step would be night-certified-in-type for the Firehawk. Then the last step, night-fire-certified for drops on a fire, was so close that Jeannie could taste it.
But all she could feel at the moment was the utter drain of the three hard hours of simulator flying in the sun-heated chopper. Emily constantly giving her small corrections, often without words, rather through the flight controls or by altering a screen view. Then repeating and repeating until Jeannie’s body did it automatically without Emily’s intervention. That then freed her up to think about the next obstacle Emily placed in her way.
She considered collapsing where she stood, but instead dug a can of soda and a sandwich out of a cooler and went searching for some shade by the river.
That was where she spotted Cal. He sat in the shade of a paperbark tree, close beside the Katherine River, his back turned toward her. He looked so good in just shorts and a tight T-shirt, but that wasn’t reason enough to go to him, not anymore. She hesitated as she struggled to understand and didn’t like that reaction much, either. She didn’t want to feel hesitant about “them.”
This morning she had walked much farther with Dale and Kalinda than she had intended on their return journey back down to Katherine Gorge. If she had been hoping for more guidance in terms of Cal, it had not been forthcoming. Kalinda had talked of her children, one in university, the other already graduated and married with a child of her own. Dale had spoken, as he sometimes did, with his silence. Today he had silently spoken of listening to the world around her until she found the correct path to walk.
She had accompanied them downstream to the head of the closest gorge where the old sneak had landed the park’s search-and-rescue plane. It was the closest place they could land a fixed-wing aircraft. No final word of advice except a hug.
On the long, hot hike back, she’d had a lot of time to think. And she’d done her best to listen for the right path, but it was no clearer than it had been. She only saw two options. One was to drop Cal Jackson stone-cold and be done with him, which she didn’t want to do on so many levels. The only other path led her inexorably back to Cal.
Following the only path she was willing to walk, she took her mid-afternoon breakfast to the shade of the paperbark tree and sat beside him.
For a long time they sat in silence and simply watched the river flow. When at last he spoke, she almost didn’t hear him. His voice was as in tune with the Outback’s sounds as Dale’s.
“The name ‘Calvin Hobbes Jackson’ was created as a joke on an Alaskan fire line when I was sixteen. I made up a name for myself from my favorite comic strip. I have no master’s in fire science like you. I have no University of Sydney bachelor’s in environmental studies. I have no pilot’s license with who knows how many dozens of certifications. I can barely drive a car, and I’ve never owned one. I never finished high school. At sixteen I ran away from my twelfth foster home in ten years, forged my birth certificate to become two years older, and went to fight fire. I’m not brilliant like you.”
Jeannie looked at him, wondering what had changed that he now spoke. Nothing. He still looked exactly the same to her.
“I’ve only ever done two things well: fought fire and taken pictures of it. It’s all I know how to do. You scare the hell out of me, Jeannie Clark. I see a woman who is constantly transforming herself into a better version of who she is. I can’t keep up with that. I’ve dug my niche, and it’s a damned comfortable one. It’s one I know I can pull off day in and day out. I have no home. I just follow fire, season to season. Other than a second backpack sitting in some hotshot barracks in California, my worldly possessions are sitting in the back of your chopper. I think that I want to follow where you’re leading, Jeannie. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it sounds right. I just don’t know how. Or if I can.”
He didn’t turn to look at her. He didn’t weep. His voice was nearly a monotone. No more emotion showed than if he was reading aloud her preflight checklist. Not a single shred of evidence that he had just bared his soul to her. Again he didn’t see his immense strength and how it could hold the world at bay, even when it was the interior world of his own emotions.
“But that’s not who you are at all.” Her voice was rough with exhaustion, even to her own ears.
“It’s what I see.”
She wanted to cry for him, but he didn’t need her tears. And the way he saw her. That too was…wrong. They sat again in a long silence as the feelings built inside her. Like the river flowing just beyond their feet, neither of them was any more than they appeared to be. Human, flawed. His perception was wrong. It wasn’t who he was or who she was that was out of sync. It was how they saw each other that was in the way. Both of them were wrong.
Jeannie had seen Cal as her shining knight. In Alice Springs he had plunged his sword, or at least his fire ax, into the heart of the beast on her behalf. She wasn’t some goddamn princess in an ivory tower. She could fight her own battles. But that he’d faced the fire on her behalf spoke of his own deep reasons, even if he couldn’t see them. And those reasons made her appreciate him so much.
“This is all wrong.”
“What?” He leaned in as if to hear her better.
“I said, this is all wrong.”
He stared at her in shock for several seconds, then jerked to his feet.
She was so tired that it took her a moment to run after and follow him down to the water’s edge.
He pulled away from her hand when she rested it on his arm.
“Wait. Listen to me.”
He pulled away again.
So she took him out at the back of his knees with a sweep kick that big brother Randall had taught her. Cal actually fell into the river. When he tried to scramble away, she shoved hard against his hip, knocking him farther in.
With a scream of rage, he charged her, grabbed her around the waist, and heaved her up and out over the river. He was so damn strong that she actually had time to experience free fall before she belly flopped into the river.
She surfaced in waist-deep water, her shorts soaked and her blouse clinging once again. She didn’t feel like some goddess rising from the river’s water. She felt pissed.
In a similar mood, he glared at her from knee-deep in, his fists on his hips.
“You’re going to listen to me, Calvin Hobbes Jackson, if I have to beat the shit out of you. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll get Mark, or worse, Emily, to pin you down until I’m done. So, I’d advise that you just goddamn well listen to me.”
“You already said, ‘We’re all wrong.’ That’s all I need to know.” He practically spit the words at her.
“That’s not what I said. You’re an idiot, Hotshot! But you’re not stupid, so use your goddamn amazing brain.”
He might be glaring, but at least he also appeared to hesitate.
“I was saying, no, I’m not some goddess. I love that you see me that way, but it’s not who I am. I’m just as lost, confused, and fucked up as the next person. I’m about half as smart as you are. I worked hard, so damn hard to get what I have. Somehow you just reach out and there it is in your hand. I wish I had a tenth of your creativity. I want to someday earn the reputation of integrity that you swept up off that table in the Alice Springs hangar along with the morning coffee. God, Cal, I want so much. I want to fly like Emily. I want to command one tenth of the respect she has in her little finger. And the one I can’t get around, Cal, is how much I want you. I love you.”
His eyes flashed wide.
Shit! She’d gone one
too far. She hadn’t meant to say it out loud. “I barely know what it means, but that doesn’t make it any less true.”
He dropped to sit in the water that now lapped around his chest, his kneecaps just breaking the surface.
She trudged through the water until she stood in front of him. “Look, I know it’s too much. I know I shouldn’t have said it. I know that it makes absolutely not one iota of sense, but it’s truth. The best I know how to speak it. It is bald truth. That’s all I have to offer you, Cal. Truth, every time I speak. I’ll never lie to you. Not about how I’m feeling, not about what I want, or what I’ve done. Because I think that’s what love is. At least partly. The part I can see anyway.”
He looked up at her. Not at her body. Not at her chest wrapped once again in a blouse gone sheer with another soaking. No, he looked her right in the eyes.
She loved his eyes. It was the one place his mood was always revealed. There was a glint of humor lurking around the edges.
“You done, Helitack?”
Done. Done in. Done for. “Way done,” she told him.
“Good.” He snagged one of her legs and leveraged it to land her in the water beside him.
She emerged spluttering and had to wipe her dripping hair off her face before she could see him.
“Because there’s one thing I have to tell you.”
Jeannie braced herself on the river bottom. This was going to be bad. He was married or had a child or a criminal record or—
“You’re the first person in my entire life to tell me that they loved me. I’m not sure I heard anything else you said after that. Maybe there’s some water in my ear.” He tipped his head one way and then the other as if draining them, then shrugged indifferently. “I don’t know what to do with it yet. I don’t know if I will ever say it back to you. Because if I do, it will be just as you said, absolute truth. But I can tell you this much. I’ve never wanted to be with someone even a tiny percentage as much as I want to be with you. And if you don’t think that’s scaring the crap out of me, you need to turn in those college degrees and ask for a refund.”
“I’m the first?”
“If you discount a couple of stray comments at the height of, well, you know, by women who wouldn’t know love if it were named Fido and bit them on the ass, then yes.”
“That really sucks, Cal.” How many hundreds or even thousands of times had she been told that growing up? Even her dad, who wasn’t the most communicative guy, had told her that. Even her turd head of a brother now said it almost every time they talked.
“Hadn’t really missed it until just now.”
Jeannie looked at this wonderful, troublesome, talented man. She sloshed around until she was straddling his lap and her arms rested on his shoulders. Their faces were just inches apart. She brushed aside stray water drops, enjoying the intimacy of the gesture. Leaning in she kissed him long and slow.
“That was a damn nice kiss, Helitack.”
She sighed as she felt so much of the burden she’d been carrying these last days sloughing off her to drift downriver. “It was.” She sounded all female and fluttery even to her own ears. Ridiculous, but she couldn’t stop feeling it.
“So, what are you thinking, smart lady?” His smile grew. “Truth now.”
“Truth?” She wanted to laugh. “I think that we’re both such messes that we’d make a pretty good sideshow at a carnival. Also, I think that if we decide to work at this together, maybe between your smart brain and my overeducated one we have at least a snowball’s chance of figuring this out. What do you say, want to give it a try, mate?”
“Together?” His smile was blooming.
“Together.” She could feel her own smile following suit.
“Worth a shot, I guess. It’s a beginning, at least. And, hey, with two brains like ours, nothing much can go wrong, can it?”
“Not a thing.” She leaned and kissed him, pulling them together until her lips hurt. His hands cupped her behind so hard and her head so gently that she’d gladly never move again.
“Hey, you two.”
Jeannie looked up to see Mark standing on the bank looking down at them.
“Are you going to be done anytime soon?”
“Not for a really long time,” Cal mumbled into her neck. It tickled.
Jeannie threw her head back and laughed. “The answer is no. We’d like you to go away, Mr. Henderson.”
“Tough.” He sounded calm and jovial, and as if he didn’t give a damn what they thought or said. “We’re going to fly a mission, and absence isn’t an option. Briefing is in five minutes, airborne in thirty.”
“A mission? Like we’re supposed to care.”
Henderson just smiled at her, then turned a fraction of an inch to indicate to her that he was now talking to Cal, even though Cal was still occupied ever so nicely with her collar.
“A fire. Big one.”
All of Cal’s hotshot instincts were called to action, his body hardening abruptly, just not in the way she’d been looking forward to.
Chapter 14
“From this moment, we don’t exist. Am I clear?”
They all squatted in the shade of some kind of scrub palm. Jeannie could probably tell Cal what it was and which parts you could eat and which parts you could use to build an emergency satellite radio with full GPS tracking. Damn, but that woman never stopped astonishing him. She was last to arrive, having pulled on a dry T-shirt and jeans. He figured he’d air-dry fast enough and hadn’t bothered. But he was glad she had. The woman was too damned distracting when wet. Hell, she was pretty distracting when dry too.
Focus, Jackson. The three couples sat in a misshapen circle dictated by the available shade. The mid-afternoon temperature was easily a hundred degrees.
Henderson took the time to study each face around the circle of six. When he looked at Cal, Cal could feel his blood run cold. Despite the sunlight still scorching across their little camp, Henderson had removed his mirrored sunglasses for perhaps the first time since they’d met. His steel-gray eyes bored into Cal.
Well, to hell with him. Cal could match that right back. Before the whole thing could decay into some alpha-male titanic struggle, Henderson merely nodded slightly and moved on to Jeannie. He must have seen what he was looking for, though Cal had no clue what that was. He had to keep reminding himself that this guy wasn’t a firefighter first, he was military first. Henderson had no need to prove he was in charge; he already knew he was. It was a slick solution to the problem of command on a team.
When Henderson completed his inspection and decided he was satisfied, he slid his glasses back on. Cal was a bit pissed, but the rest of them had gone unexpectedly somber. Beale was as unreadable as ever behind her own mirrored shades, and the baby was asleep. He’d missed something. Something way bigger than a fire. And if he was looking for clues from a sleeping baby, he really was losing his mind.
“East Timor has a fire, and we’ve been asked to assist. Any questions?”
No one else spoke.
Well, Cal wasn’t about to be cowed by Henderson or any other man.
“Yeah, about a hundred of them.”
“Good. Ask those once we get there.” As if he knew exactly what Cal would ask.
Cal looked around the circle. Not finding any assistance, not even from Jeannie, he shut his mouth, but he was becoming less happy by the second. Maybe he should have flown south with the other pilots… Oh! He finally understood what was happening. There was a fire, but there was something else going on. Something big. Fire and East Timor weren’t a whole lot of clues. And since Henderson wasn’t ready to be handing out any more at the moment, Cal would just have to wait.
He hated waiting.
Henderson nodded ever so pleasantly when he saw Cal’s change of attitude.
Cal snarled at him as pleasantly as he could.
/> Now assured of his audience, Henderson continued, “We’re flying to an offshore base with both Firehawks. We should have additional information by the time we arrive. Other questions?”
Jeannie looked up at the sun.
Cal checked his watch before realizing that was exactly what she was doing. He gazed up at the sun as well, but all it told him was to look away quickly, and that he was still disoriented about which direction was north and which south due to crossing the equator.
“Refuel in Darwin.” Jeannie was calculating payloads, distances, and fuel burn in her head as easily as he adjusted exposures. “We can just make the crossing over the Timor Sea without auxiliary tanks. But it will be at night. I’m neither night-certified in this craft nor long-water-crossing certified.”
“Emily will fly with you as instructor. Cal in back. I’ll fly Em’s chopper with Carly and Steve. Have to impose on you two as babysitters for the duration of the flight.”
As Carly was already holding Tessa and looking damn cute about it, that didn’t appear to be a problem.
“At the far end, I’ll be running fire command from a ground station, so Steve’s drone and you people will be my eyes but I’ll still coordinate. Jeannie, you’ll be hauling our spares kit and gear. We’ll be hauling Steve’s drones and launcher. Anyone else?”
Damn, but the man had it wired. Cal glanced at the others. Nothing. He shrugged. He was still a crappy fifth wheel in this outfit, but it was far more interesting than anything he’d planned to be doing. Far deeper into…
“Yeah, I’ve got a question.” Hopefully Henderson would answer this one. If not, Cal might see just what it took to hike out of the Outback here and now.
Henderson didn’t even wait to let him ask it first before answering. Like he had mind-reading radar installed in those mirrored sunglasses.
“I took the liberty of requesting a full background check on you, and MHA’s security division has already signed off on you. All I need from you is to sign a nondisclosure agreement. We’ll work out getting you on the MHA payroll at a later time.”
Full Blaze Page 19
