Full Blaze

by M. L. Buchman

  Henderson’s attention snapped to her face at the last. He froze for a long moment before he nodded in acknowledgment.

  Cal had to puzzle at that one a moment before he got it. Henderson, formerly Major Mark Henderson, had just been told that the only person he was allowed to talk to on the whole ship was a sergeant who used to work for him. Okay, that one had to sting.

  “You and your crew have quarters farther aft on this corridor. Meals will be provided in this room. Also—”

  “But why you?” Henderson cut her off.

  “Need to know, sir. You don’t currently need to know.”

  “Shit!” Henderson looked away toward the bank of computers.

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “Not your doing, Connie.”

  The whole room had gone dead still, as Henderson continued to inspect the hardware.

  When Emily took a step toward him, he flashed some hand signal and she stopped.

  A few seconds later he turned back to the room. “Okay. Let’s do this.” He sounded calm and in control.

  Only Cal had been positioned to see the torture on his face. How much had Henderson sacrificed when he left the Night Stalkers and went over to MHA? Things that he was only now finding out about?

  It definitely took the shine off the “perfect gig” that Henderson had offered him. How much was Cal being asked to sacrifice that he didn’t understand yet?

  Chapter 15

  Jeannie liked Sergeant Davis already. Anyone who would salute Emily Beale so seriously was all right in Jeannie’s book.

  The sergeant went to the computer Cal had poked at earlier. Was he being distant? No. They just hadn’t had a moment alone since the river. Not even a little one.

  Davis typed in a password, pressed a thumb on a reader, and the screen cleared. Then she went to open some file. A big, red warning flashed on the screen. Connie leaned in close, as if putting one eye in line with the tiny camera at the center of the screen.

  “Thumbprint on the machine and retinal scan on the file,” Cal whispered from just over her shoulder. “Hell, I use a six-digit password.”

  “Your birthday?” she whispered back.

  “Actually Calvin Hobbes Jackson’s birthday.”

  She didn’t even know his real name. Having had a tiny glimpse of his past only told her how little she knew about him. “You and I need to—”

  “If you’ll all look at the screen.”

  Jeannie spun around to see that a projector mounted on the center of the ceiling was now lighting the opposite wall. Someone dimmed the lights.

  “This is the island of Timor.” A long, thin bit of land with nothing else even close. “The west half of it belongs to Indonesia. The other half is the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste, also known as East Timor.” With a laser pointer, Connie traced the wavering line of the border as it cut oddly along rivers, doubled back on itself in a wide curve over mountains, and then found another river to follow to the other coast. It curved like a snake across the narrowest part of the island. The country was about forty miles wide and two hundred long.

  “There’s another little piece of East Timor here as an exclave about forty miles away.” She indicated a small misshapen lump along the north side of the island. “But they have no fires there at the moment. Nor are there any in the Indonesian half of the island so we have no worries there.”

  “What’s the terrain like?” Leave it to a hotshot to care about the terrain. Clearly he hadn’t switched his brain over to the idea that they could fly above it.

  “Rugged, some of it very rugged. This central mountain range tops out at near three thousand meters, over nine thousand feet.”

  “Damn! Let’s hope that the firefight doesn’t go up there.” Jeannie did some quick calculations of high-hot limitations on load capacity. Then realized she was running the numbers for her old MD500. At ten thousand feet and within ten degrees of the equator, the Firehawk—her beautiful, big Firehawk—would have twenty-five percent less power. And since half of her weight was structural and half of it was a water payload, that meant losing half of the payload. Plus a safety margin…

  “Crap! We can’t even lift five hundred gallons to the top of that mountain.”

  “I make it about four-ninety,” Connie confirmed, offering a brief smile as if Jeannie had just done something really right.

  Cal looked at her with…shock on his features. It wasn’t rocket science. It was just…helicopter science. And she’d always been able to do that. Emily nodded to herself as if thoroughly pleased with something. With the fact that her and Connie’s numbers had matched? That Jeannie had been able to do the simple calculation that had so gobsmacked Cal?

  Connie picked up her narration of facts. “In 1975, East Timor declared its independence from Portugal. A couple months later, Indonesia took over the country and claimed it as theirs for the next twenty-two years. They had—”

  “Man, that had to suck.” Cal broke the stream of information.

  Connie Davis might have been speed-reading from an encyclopedia, yet she wasn’t referring to any notes. Even while talking to Henderson, she’d been very cool, but the Majors had both been very pleased to see her. Cool or just steady? She had looked very pleased to see Emily in that half moment before snapping the textbook salute. A woman with hidden layers, Jeannie decided.

  “It gets worse. Free in 1999, they had an elected government by 2002. By 2007, presidential candidates had become shooting targets and then their military completely collapsed after half of them were fired. The UN had to occupy until the end of 2012 to maintain order. This is when it starts getting interesting.”

  Jeannie placed her palm on her heart. It really hurt for those poor people. Cal looked grim.

  “In 2011, Indonesia supported East Timor’s application to join ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. The military has been rebuilt to thirteen hundred men and women. Most of them have rifles, some of them have handguns. They have four patrol boats around the forty-meter class, but they’re grossly undermanned due to lack of trained personnel. No jets, no choppers. They barely have uniforms. That’s the political background you’re entering into.” Davis stopped as if a switch had been turned off. The exact amount of information she’d been cleared to impart had been communicated. But none of it was anything you couldn’t find on Wikipedia.

  Jeannie looked at Cal to see if he was feeling the same itch. There had to be something else going on. There were too many odd pieces, including Sergeant Davis herself.

  Cal looked around the room as if he’d just been woken from a sound sleep and was checking to see who was in the room with him.

  Jeannie tried to figure out what he was thinking. He must be wondering why they were here. Why were they here? This was Mount Hood Aviation. They were a firefighting outfit. Oh…

  “There’s a fire,” Cal said before she could.

  “Big one,” Jeannie agreed and dropped into one of the chairs at the table. “If they can justify us coming in, it’s got to be a big one.”

  Connie Davis nodded and waited for one of them to continue. It was easier to think of her as Connie. Jeannie wasn’t military enough to be comfortable with someone’s rank becoming their first name. Calling her brother Pilot Officer Clark only worked for her when she was trying to irritate him.

  Cal shrugged at her and sat in the chair beside her.

  “Where do you start?” she asked him.

  “Wait, that’s it. Jeannie said it was the wrong season for big fires in this region. Not unheard of, but not normal. That means you suspect something weird is going on, but aren’t sure. You want us to prove or disprove that.”

  Connie nodded definitively, the lesson complete. She pulled up another image. A series of four big fires were marked by distinct plumes of smoke in the satellite photograph.

  “Damn!” Cal whispered
under his breath and Jeannie couldn’t agree more. These were big fires. All in the west end of East Timor, near the border with Indonesia.

  “What’s the population like?” She could almost picture the homes going up in smoke.

  Connie pulled up another image. “There are only two real border crossings. They’re right along the coast, north and south. No real towns associated with them. All of the towns are in-country. The biggest is Suai to the south at twenty thousand people, Maliana same size to the north, and Bobonaro up in the central highlands with about six thousand. The main city of Dili is halfway across the country. About two hundred thousand, a fifth of the country’s population, lives there—well out of harm’s way.”

  Jeannie cringed. That was still a lot of people and a lot of homes, and two towns, each almost as big as Alice Springs.

  “So you want us to fight the fires and scope out what’s going on with them?”

  “Yes, you’ll be doing firefighting but you’ll also be acting as on-site observers. Unless there is serious justification, the UN can’t send even fire-support forces back in. Because they withdrew the peacekeeping forces so recently, it would send a bad message. It could destabilize what little foothold the current East Timorese government has carved out. So, MHA is presently on loan to East Timor as firefighters and to the UN Security Council as observers.”

  “The who-what?” most of them stumbled out simultaneously.

  All except Mark and Emily. If they were surprised, he and Emily were the only ones in the room not to show it.

  “Which”—Mark planted his fists on the head of the table and leaned toward them, scanning the group—“none of you can mention to anyone, ever. Inside SOAR, we called this a black-in-black operation. I don’t care if the goddamn UN Security Council itself comes calling, outside of this room all any of you ever saw was fire. Is that absolutely understood?”

  ***

  And it was all they did see.

  Whether man-made or from natural causes, this fire didn’t care. Cal had rarely seen its like. Three of the four fires had merged. Anywhere in the United States, other than perhaps Alaska, this would have been termed a Type I. A thousand or more trained professionals would have been on-site along with air tankers, heli-tack, smokejumpers…

  They had two helicopters. The Aussies had their own bushfires to deal with, so they’d sent just a pair of Bombardier water-scooping planes. At least they were the bigger CL-415s that could hold half again what the choppers could carry. On lake, river, or ocean, they could refill fifteen hundred gallons in twelve seconds as they skimmed over the surface of the water. Even the high-speed pumps on the choppers took forty seconds to fill a thousand gallons. Which felt like forever when you were just hovering there while the fire was eating the hills.

  Their first day had been all about trying to avert disaster rather than fighting fire. The hills climbed steeply from river valley to ridge and back down. The terrain was chopped up by a thousand tributaries that would have made groundwork nearly impossible even if they had the crews.

  Like in Australia, most of the rivers were dry at the moment, though not as bad as in the Red Centre. At the tail end of the Dry and with the monsoon running late, the forest and grasslands were parched. They burned so fast that they were practically wicking up the flame in their urgent need to burn.

  Citizens, with little to no warning in the outlying areas where neither phone nor electricity reached, didn’t know to evacuate until smoke crested the ridge announcing fire was not far behind. Often, the only access road was toward the fire and they were sent racing onto the forest trails to escape the blaze. The devastation was horrific. Whole villages of thatch housing disappeared in a single flash of fire. There wasn’t even time to try and save the villages; the crews were just trying to slow the fire enough to give people time to escape.

  After the long nighttime flight and this even longer day of fighting fire, they’d all just crashed into their racks, too spent to move, breathe, or discuss anything.

  Cal knew it was making Jeannie twitchy as he lay there on the single-wide military bunk with her asleep on his arm. Once the sunset had chased them from the sky, he’d made sure that she ate and hydrated before her body collapsed into sleep. They hadn’t even had sex.

  It wouldn’t hurt anything if they didn’t talk until after this fire was beat. Really, it wouldn’t change anything. Some part of him, some smart little voice deep inside, told him that he was being stupid, that Jeannie was already fuming. Tomorrow. Maybe they’d find a chance to talk tomorrow.

  But tomorrow arrived too early with a harsh alarm clock, a hasty briefing, and a major crisis.

  Steve and Henderson had set up a command center aboard the USS Freedom. It wasn’t much to look at, but Connie had made sure they got what they needed. Steve’s drone was serving about four purposes at once. Watching the existing fire and working with the few East Timorese resources in the western part of the country to evacuate the villages in a timely manner. Watching for new flare-ups. Circling wherever Carly needed a view to analyze the fire’s behavior to modify her attack plan. It was a long list that gave Cal a headache over his waffles just thinking about it.

  “The Suai Airport is a key element in our plan.” Henderson tapped a map that Connie had projected on the wall for him.

  “We have a plan?” Cal tried to keep it light, perking up in pleased surprise. It was needed because the energy in the room was fast sliding toward doom and gloom.

  “A plan, such as it is,” Henderson acknowledged and offered him a nod of thanks. “It’s the only airport in this whole end of the country big enough to accommodate the Bombardier scooper planes for refueling.”

  Even though the Suai Airport was nearby, it had three major disadvantages as a staging area for the big planes. The untended runway was barely long enough for a takeoff in normal weather, and it was bloody hot, which decreased lift. The second problem was that it would take two days to get a fuel truck there overland with the needed capacity. They only had enough fuel on-site for one more day.

  Apparently now there was a third problem.

  “A new fire, born out of nowhere, is sweeping downwind toward the Suai Airport.”

  Steve put up the latest images from his drone. They didn’t show much because the sun hadn’t risen yet. Then he flipped to infrared. A raging area of intense light was already sprawling over the squared-off areas of farmers’ fields and headed toward the airport and town.

  Cal’s whispered oath elicited nods from several of the people around him. He could feel a deep-rooted need to beat the crap out of the fire. It was a feeling that didn’t diminish, no matter how long it had been since he’d actually fought fire for a living.

  “If it’s destroyed,” Henderson continued, “it would be devastating for the Bombardiers. Without the Suai Airport, every three hours the planes would have to make an hour round-trip flight to the airport in the capital city of Dili. It’s sixty miles farther from the fire, which equals an additional round-trip time of forty minutes. Their fuel pumps are just as old and slow at that airport as the ones at Suai. The choppers, too, would have to waste about half an hour of every three getting back to the Freedom because we’re stationed well offshore in international waters.”

  Henderson scowled in Connie’s direction before continuing. “For reasons I don’t know—sorry, Sergeant, you didn’t deserve that”—he took a deep breath before continuing—“the Navy has deemed that there are valid reasons for not entering Timorese waters at this time. Let that be enough said on that topic.”

  They clambered up on deck, where the Navy had seen to their birds so that they practically shone. Full tanks, both water and fuel. They’d even restocked the pilots’ water and energy bars. They launched into the morning sky to see what they could do about saving the airport and the town of Suai. The airport was east, which meant the only route of escape for the locals was wes
t toward the bigger fires near the border, or up into the hills where the fire would be headed if they failed to stop it.

  “Nothing in this country seems to be working.” Cal scowled down at the fire and tried not to notice that it looked even worse than it had on Steve’s images. Jeannie lined up her tenth, or maybe it was her fifteenth, load of the day to attack it.

  “We’re working,” Jeannie reminded him. And she was working hard. Everyone was. Carly was trying to create the best attack plan, while keeping an eye on the existing fires so that they’d know when they had to break off to go help a village. Steve had his drone spinning in mad circles. Henderson seemed to be everywhere at once, though he sat aboard the LCS ship with Steve and Tessa, coordinating helicopters and fixed-wing tankers as well as whatever limited ground forces could be gathered. Beale and Jeannie were flying their asses off. If there was a wasted second in their motions, Cal sure couldn’t see it.

  “You’re working,” Cal bit back against the sharp taste of impatience yet again. “I’m just a goddamn fifth wheel.”

  “So, stop whining and do your job.” Jeannie sounded pretty exasperated.

  “Hunh.” He’d thought her patience was boundless, but apparently he’d crossed over some line. He reconsidered. Had he been whining? Cal grimaced. It sure sounded like he had. Even to him. Yeah, irritating.

  “I remember a first-year rook who did that to me on the Basin and Indians Fires. Just wouldn’t stop going on about how nothing was ever the way it should be.”

  “What did you do to him?”

  “Well, he sure didn’t stick around to see if we’d hire him back for the second year. Not sure he even finished the first.”

  “Lesson learned?” Jeannie asked, suddenly all sweetness and light, and obviously talking about him.

  “Yep, always abuse the rookie. For a bonus, it’s fun too.”

  That got him a laugh. A tired one. Right, he checked his watch, barely two hours aloft and already the strain was taking its toll. That was the second part of the message he hadn’t been hearing. She’d been working her pretty butt off. He, on the other hand, hadn’t been doing squat, so why was he the one complaining?