“Fine.” Jeannie joined the conversation to show the painkiller was kicking in, which it wasn’t really. “Who’s on the fourth side?” When neither one answered her, she looked up at them. They were both facing back behind where Jeannie was sitting. Then she remembered. There wasn’t a “who” on the fourth side of their personal box, it was a “what.”
Wildfire.
***
They had trudged a hundred yards upslope when Connie called a hold.
Cal pulled Jeannie behind the stoutest tree he could find and wrapped his arms around her.
“What the—”
“Shh.” He clamped his hands over her ears, not knowing what to expect.
Connie spoke quietly, “In three, two…”
A roar erupted from the chopper. The C4 charges that he and Connie had planted throughout the machine blew it apart. Chunks of it fell to either side of their narrow shelter. They weren’t incendiaries, they were explosives, so they simply shredded the machine. But the blast did catch the leaking Jet A fuel on fire. With the prevailing winds, that new fire would only burn a few additional acres before it merged with the main fire. The problem was, those few acres were their safety zone unless Cal could find a safe path for them into the black.
“My chopper!” Jeannie stepped out from behind the tree and stared downslope in horror.
“We’re hoping they’ll think we were still inside and won’t look any further.”
“My chopper!”
What was it with her? It was a machine. It could be replaced. If his favorite old camera died or was lost, he’d buy another. Granted it would be roughly ten thousand times cheaper than a Firehawk, but that wouldn’t be Jeannie’s concern. She sounded as if she’d just lost a child or something.
He wasn’t used to being around people who cared so deeply about things. Most hotshots were single and cared more about their cars than people. The people on the team itself were close. They had your back when it got tight. While you were with them, they were the best people on the planet. But when you moved to another team, especially in another state as Cal had done any number of times, there wasn’t any real draw to get back together—glad to see them in a bar and catch up on old times if you ended up on the same fire someday, but that was the limit of it.
When you were in the field six months a year, year-round if you were lucky enough to be full-time, it didn’t leave a whole lot of room for family. He’d seen enough married hotshots—pumped on fire—hitting on the groupies in some out-of-area bar just as hard as any solo fire jock did. There were straight aces, but they were the rare breed.
When Jeannie cared, she did it with her whole heart. The same way she did everything. The same way she loved him… Later, he ordered himself. But that later better come soon.
“Emily’s gonna be so pissed at me,” she complained. He considered teasing her about whining, but thought better of it when he saw her eyes. She was going shocky, but there was no time to deal with that.
He got her turned around, and they began moving upslope. The fire was definitely on the move—both of them: the main one ahead and the one they’d just lit by using an exploding helicopter as a match. He wished he could call out for a report, but he didn’t see that happening anytime soon. They were now officially dead. And the evidence in his camera of just who had started these fires had to survive to get out.
He also knew that no one on the outside would be able to give them a useful report. They were inside the smoke pall, and worse, with the second fire they’d just started, they were inside the heart of the fire. No one on the outside would be able to give them useful information on what was going on in here.
It was hard to see through the gathering smoke. They all pulled on simple carbon filter masks, no way Jeannie could have worn a full breather bottle even if they had them. She was barely remaining upright as it was, though she did stagger gamely onward.
He loved this woman so much. He really did, which he still found rather startling. And he’d said it aloud, even if she hadn’t heard him. If he took the next step and connected that he only spoke truth to her, that meant it must be true. Wasn’t that a shocker?
Now he just had to get them both out of this alive so that he could tell her again.
The main fire ahead wasn’t hard to locate, despite the smoke. Like any wildfire, it ate forest and ate it cooked well-done, then roared for more. Ahead and to the left it was in full, deep-throated howl. He’d heard that pitch before, but not often. It was too hot. If they got caught in that main fire, they’d be in deep trouble. Twenty-five hundred degrees or more.
He turned them upslope and to the right. They were now paralleling the main blaze even if he couldn’t see it. He couldn’t see the one started by the chopper explosion either, but he knew it was there. Knew it was coming for them.
“Wait a sec.” Cal stopped and let himself feel the fire-torn winds, listen to the sounds of the dying forest. He knew this place. He’d stood once before in the heart of the maelstrom.
Jeannie stumbled into him and ground to a halt, blinking hard to keep her focus. Connie came up close enough to hear him over the fire’s roar.
“We’ve got two choices,” he shouted to her. “One bad, the other worse.”
Connie nodded for him to continue. He pulled Jeannie close, careful of her arm, and kissed her on the temple while he was thinking. It calmed him, holding her, made his world clearer.
“We could keep looking for a way through. Visibility is negligible. But the lower fire is coming and the main fire is too hot. Our chances of slipping out between them is pretty close to zero.”
“I’m hoping that’s the ‘worse’ choice,” Connie said. “What’s the ‘bad’ one?”
But it wasn’t. That was the bad choice. The problem was, the worse choice was probably their only option.
Jeannie just lay against him, completely past her limits. It would have to be the worse one. He swore he’d never again do this. Not after losing Jacob in that Montana fire four years ago. He would never let himself be so trapped that he had to hide and hope under a flimsy foil shelter.
“They say it’s last resort.” He closed his eyes, trying not to see anything as he said it, but his friend’s face shone before him: clean and laughing in a bar, exhausted, sooty, and sacked out in the black…and crisp beneath a burned-through shelter while Cal had stood back and taken the picture. A picture that shamed him to this day because he’d never directly looked one last time upon his friend’s face.
“Where?” Connie was a hundred percent business. Something they did to SOAR people? Somehow removed their emotions? She was as straight ahead as Beale. No, it was training. Henderson was a hundred percent squared away on a fire, even if he was unhappy with his chosen role in the quiet times.
Cal looked around, and from what he could see, they were roughly in the center of a small clearing. It was thick with grasses but—“We need to scrape the grass down to dirt. As big a circle as we can.”
He sat Jeannie down and piled the gear around her. She was past protesting. He forced a water bottle into her hand and tipped it for her to drink so her dazed mind would get the idea.
“We have ten minutes, fifteen at most,” he told Connie. He grabbed a Pulaski and didn’t have to say anything more. Fire ax on one side, the cutting hoe of an adze on the other. He swung it into the sod and gave a pull. Thankfully, the grass pulled up in fairly easy clumps. Soil beneath, not rock. Maybe their luck was turning.
He began cutting a line in the low, fast, repeated motion that he’d perfected as a hotshot. No one could rid the ground of burnable material to make a firebreak faster than a trained hotshot. In moments he’d cut a swath a yard wide and four long across the slope. Connie had covered about half that.
“I’m faster. I’ll cut, you swamp.”
Connie didn’t waste time on words. She just looked at him lik
e he was speaking a foreign language.
“Swamper clears the material that the lead cuts. Drag the grass upslope into those trees. When the fire climbs from below us, we want it to have as little fuel to work with as possible until after it’s past us.”
Without a word, she tossed aside her Pulaski and gathered up an armful of the long, dry grass and trotted upslope. A woman of action, just what he needed at the moment.
So he cut. He put his head down and cut and pulled. He didn’t have enough oxygen through the breather mask and tore it off and chucked it aside. The smoke was thick, but nothing he hadn’t eaten before. When he had a four-yard square, he focused on cutting the swath longer toward his best guess on the direction of the oncoming blaze. If it had less to burn before it reached them, it might be a few crucial degrees cooler when it hit them.
Sweat was streaming down his face when Connie yelled.
He couldn’t make out her words, but he didn’t need to. Despite the thick smoke, he could see the orange glow coming toward them from downslope, could feel the heat, could hear it gathering its angry breath.
After a quick glance around to judge the final angle of attack, he moved toward the upper edge of the cleared area he’d created and hacked out three small holes, each about a foot deep.
Connie looked at him strangely.
“Face holes. We lie face down and put our faces in the hole. The air will be cooler down there.” Then he spotted the rifle slung across her back. “Bury that.”
“Why? Rounds don’t cook off until well over two hundred degrees.”
“Bury that. And your sidearm and the rounds. Don’t miss any. It will probably be way over two hundred inside the shelter; more like fifteen hundred to two thousand outside.”
Her look of horror only lasted a second before she sprinted for her Pulaski and began chopping a hole well to the side of the clearing.
Cal cut a hole for his camera bag that would be right under his belly. He had to protect those images of the invading and arsonist Indonesian Army. If the good guys found his body, alive or not, they’d find the images. Then he went to fetch Jeannie and the pack with the fire shelters in them. She was having trouble standing, so he simply swept her up into his arms, though they were shaking with the unaccustomed strain of wielding the Pulaski as fast and long as he had.
“Carrying me over the threshold?”
“Sure, Helitack. Whatever you say.” He checked her eyes to see if they were shocky, but they looked coherent. He was just setting her down when she continued.
“I seem to recall you saying something about loving me just before we crashed. It took some considering, but I don’t think I imagined it.”
He managed not to drop her. “Might have.”
“Bit of a surprise?” she teased him.
“Everything about you is a surprise to me, Helitack. Now, lie down and put your face in that hole. Then don’t move.”
“Yes sir, Mr. Hotshot, sir.”
He couldn’t help himself. He kissed her. He was afraid it would feel as if he was saying good-bye. But it didn’t. It felt as if he was saying hello to a whole new world.
***
Jeannie did everything Cal said. He hooked her feet into the lower end of the shelter.
“Feet toward the fire. If I shout for you to turn, you find a way to do it, but do not, do not come up out of that shelter.”
Then he tucked it under her hips. Slid a handle up her good arm to the elbow. He tugged a heavy glove on her good hand.
“That arm goes up over your head to pin down the shelter. The fire will create updrafts trying to tear the shelter off. You keep it pinned in place.”
“What about my other side?” She had to shout to be heard above the climbing roar of flame. Already it was as loud as her Firehawk right before takeoff.
“I’ll pin that down with my shelter.”
“I’ll be right beside you on this side,” Connie told her as she was clambering into hers on Jeannie’s other side.
“Both of you,” Cal said. “Do not come out of the shelter no matter what you feel, no matter what you hear. Not until I tell you. You’ll think you’re burning alive, but if you come out too soon, you will be.”
Jeannie couldn’t stop looking at Cal. He snapped out his own shelter with the ease of too much experience. He didn’t even lie down first, he stepped into it, pulling it up and over his fire gear and deftly hooking it over his hard hat, reminding her of a weird kind of silver caterpillar with a firefighter underbelly. He inspected them both carefully.
“Connie, make sure you keep your boots and knees on the ground, that’s what’s holding the shelter in place.”
She saw him make a quick scan downslope.
“Our orientation is good.” Then he looked upslope and swore quietly, his hands scrambling for his camera even as he stood there in his silvery caterpillar cocoon.
Jeannie looked upslope. The smoke had blown clear for a moment, exposing the main fire to view. It was closer than she’d thought, closer than she’d ever been. Though she lay hundreds of yards away, she could feel the heat of the wall of brilliant orange flame on her face. The heart of the inferno towered far above them. It flung aside trees as if they were weightless. And in the heart of the flame was something she’d heard about but never seen.
Cal was wielding his camera with the same skill he’d used minutes before with his Pulaski. In her half-dream state, she’d enjoyed watching the man work, imagining his flowing muscles beneath the heavy protective gear. Comforted, knowing that if anyone could save them, it would be Cal Jackson.
He was photographing the heart of the fire. And in its midst, the winds were so strong, that they’d created a flaming tornado of blood-red flame. She’d always wondered if the streak in her hair was too dark, too red, but she could see that it wasn’t. That she’d nailed it perfectly. The fire whirl was beautiful and simultaneously terrifying as it spun and climbed into the darkness of the smoke-shrouded sky. It wasn’t some distant phenomenon, safely placed on a National Geographic cover. This was a monster that howled to the heavens right above their heads.
Cal stood a few steps downslope of them and, for just a moment, Jeannie could see the image as he must see it. Both her and Connie’s shelters would show the firefighters peeking out to see the towering fire whirl that could destroy them with the merest flick of its tornado-strength winds. That was the award-winning photograph he was always talking about, and she saw why. It was magnificent, horrible, and with her and Connie’s shelters visible, it would be very human as well.
She also remembered him on a Santa Barbara cliff edge, so lost in his photographs that he’d almost been caught by the flames.
“Cal. Cal!” At her second shout, he looked down at her.
Then he came back from wherever he’d gone behind his camera. “All the way under now, Helitack.” He stuffed the camera into the bag.
Jeannie pulled the foil over her head and felt his hands, sure and strong, making sure she was in the best position.
“Face in the hole. It’s almost here,” he shouted. She tried to peek over at him, but he already had the edge of her shelter pinned under his. He moved tight against her, his left arm against her broken one. It hurt like mad, and she was so glad for the pain that she wanted to weep with relief.
“Hang on!”
Then it was upon them.
The roar was deafening. Well past anything she’d ever experienced in her Firehawk. On top of the fire’s roar, the shelter snapped back and forth in the powerful winds, like a thousand champagne corks popping.
Then the heat hit and all she could do was scream down into her hole in the ground. It was so painful that there was nothing else she could do.
Cal was shouting something on one side. She didn’t understand, but it sounded encouraging. The only thing she could feel other than the searing heat
was his shoulder against hers where he’d pinned down her own shelter.
To the other side, Connie was also yelling. At first it sounded like repeats of “I’m okay.” But finally, like her own cry, it just became a constant yell, as if they could beat back the wildfire with the release of their own pain and fear.
Finally the roar was so loud that she could hear no one. She was alone and her body was on fire. A thousand nightmares were visited down on her. Her helicopter exploding and burning, except this time it felt as if she still lay inside it. She imagined emerging from the shelter to find Cal hadn’t survived. Or the pain on Cal’s face when he emerged and found she was the one who’d died.
That, oddly, was the image that sustained her as she lay in the darkness under the foil and screamed out her pain, down into her hole in the dirt. Cal loved her. And even though he might not know it yet, his kiss had said it all—he loved her so much that it might destroy him if she died. So she would have to live. All it took was holding on and riding it out.
She could do that.
Chapter 18
“Hey, Helitack. You still with us?”
The voice came out of a dream and slid around Jeannie’s thoughts like a caress. She tried to turn toward it.
“Not yet, Helitack. Just lie still.”
And she did. Lying there in the dark cocoon of…her fire shelter. The roar was gone. The searing heat had passed as well. The occasional gust snapped her shelter loudly, but it wasn’t the constant tearing and tugging that had made her fear its loss at the height of the fire.
Connie said something from the far side.
“We made it,” Jeannie repeated for her.
“We did, Helitack.” Cal’s voice sounded just inches away through the two thin shelters.
She let herself wallow in the sound as his deep voice soothed her.
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