Full Blaze

by M. L. Buchman

  “We need to let the area cool down. Maybe five or ten more minutes, but we did it.”

  “And you love me.”

  A brief silence stretched out, followed by one of his wonderful low chuckles. “You’re not going to let me live that one down, are you?”

  “Never. Not even after you marry me.”

  She wished she could see his face. Jeannie could certainly picture it well enough: that stunned puppy look each time she’d surprised him with something he hadn’t had time to think through before.

  “Damn, Helitack. I, uh, hadn’t gotten that far.”

  “That’s okay. You said you wanted to follow where I’m leading.” He’d said it while they were wallowing in a cool river in the Outback above Katherine Gorge, which sounded wonderful right at the moment.

  “I did,” he admitted a little reluctantly as if he’d swum out into deeper waters than he’d intended.

  She wanted to reach out to him, touch him to comfort the nerves of the man who’d become far too good at being alone. She couldn’t. All she could do was lean her shoulder a little more tightly against his and try to ignore the pain of the bullet wound.

  “I love you, Calvin Hobbes Jackson, and whatever that poor, angry young boy was called.”

  He spoke after a long silence. “Francis Bernard, for Francis of Assisi.”

  “Thank you, Cal.” He’d told her. It didn’t matter at all, and it also meant the world. How hard had that been for him? She couldn’t see his face to tell. She took a deep breath to still her driving pulse. It was another big step for him, for both of them.

  “Let that be enough for now,” she offered him.

  “I love you, Helitack,” his voice soft.

  She wrapped the words around her tighter than the foil shelter. Last time he’d said the words moments before they were expected to die. This time he’d said them after they’d known they were going to live.

  ***

  Enough time had passed that they should be safe to crawl out, but Cal didn’t want to move from beside Jeannie. As close together as if they shared a bed.

  A sharp buzzing sound built from nearby. It Dopplered by close above them, fast. Friendly or not?

  He cracked the edge of the shelter off the ground and took a careful breath. No blast of heat in the face. He pulled back the top of the shelter and spotted Steve’s black-and-flame painted MHA drone circling back for another pass. He raised a hand and received a wing waggle in response.

  Then he looked downslope, into the black. They’d left the remains of the chopper five hundred feet below and perhaps a half mile behind. The vegetation was now sparse enough, mostly just the trunks of burned trees and spirals of lazy smoke climbing upward. He’d have easily spotted anyone moving upslope. They were safe, at least for the moment.

  “Okay to come out now.” He began to help Jeannie up.

  Connie jumped up and sprinted over to grab a charred but intact Pulaski and, after a little fishing around, dug up her rifle and ammo. She scrambled back and placed herself downslope of himself and Jeannie. Crouching, she shouldered her rifle and aimed it downslope toward the chopper.

  “Is that really necessary?”

  The drone flashed over again, then another wing waggle and it was gone.

  Connie relaxed. “Easiest way to tell Mark not to let Emily come and get us. At least not without backup.”

  That sobered Cal. He retrieved his camera case and checked inside. Everything looked okay, both the proof of arson he needed and the photo like none he’d ever taken before. Both safe.

  “Can we keep moving upslope?”

  Jeannie nodded, and Cal helped her to her feet.

  “Everyone drain a canteen; we’ve just sweated out a lot of water. Then let’s get out of here.”

  They followed the black up into the hills of East Timor.

  ***

  Cal’s radio squawked to life, startling Jeannie back to consciousness. She had descended into a fog, wholly focused on putting one foot in front of the other.

  “What was that?”

  “Emily found a landing just a hundred yards to the south.” He turned her, and even that change was enough to make her stumble badly.

  Cal stopped her, then squatted in front of her, presenting his back.

  She wrapped her good arm around his neck and hooked her legs over his hips as he locked his arms under them. Her right arm was in such pain that having it squeezed between them didn’t make it all that much worse. Maybe she’d be lucky and pass out for real this time.

  He lifted her as easily as if she weighed no more than his camera, and they were off again. She laid her head on his shoulder despite the jouncing. A soot-stained ear showed from beneath his soft brown hair. She nipped it with her teeth.

  “Hey!” But he laughed.

  Then she heard it. The best sound ever. A Black Hawk helicopter on the descent. She looked up to MHA’s Firehawk Oh-one, her black-and-fire paint shining where the sun hit on it. Two more choppers hovered in close formation.

  Cal turned her so that their backs were toward the rotor’s downblast and the swirling ash, but he didn’t stumble, didn’t falter. The man was as solid as a rock. Just like his heart.

  In moments they were aboard.

  A medic who she didn’t know, a pretty young woman in an Army uniform with a single gold bar on her lapel and that sword-and-twined-snakes patch on the arm, helped ease Jeannie down onto the cargo deck.

  Connie saluted her. “Greetings, Lieutenant Wallace.”

  The woman saluted back just as neatly with a disarming smile. “Greetings, Sis. Damn but we’re glad to see you.”

  There was no way the two were related; they looked nothing alike. The woman must have seen her confusion.

  “Sister-in-law. She married my big brother. My name’s Noreen. Now, let’s look at that arm.”

  With a deep roar, one that had always sounded so big and powerful until she’d stood in the middle of a wildfire, the Firehawk lifted back into the sky.

  When Noreen exposed the bloody bandage, Jeannie looked away. When she felt the sharp prick of a needle, she concentrated on what was going on around her, even as the screaming nerves were drugged into sleep. Emily was at the controls. Over the noise of the helicopter, Jeannie couldn’t make out what anyone was saying, but she could see Cal do something with his computer and then hold it forward between the seats for Emily to see.

  “Where’s Mark?” Jeannie asked the medic. “If he’s stuck back with the baby, he’ll—”

  “He’s up with my brother.” She pointed out the open cargo-bay door at one of the other helicopters that had come in with Emily’s Firehawk. “We’re perfectly safe with them here. Tessa’s with Carly and Steve on the Freedom.”

  Jeannie looked out at the other two choppers. They were painted pitch black. Not glossy, like MHA’s job, but matte black, like stealth stuff. And they had the strange angular shapes that she associated with that kind of modern technology. They also had stub wings that stuck out to either side and from which hung an alarming array of missiles and guns.

  “That’s Major Beale’s old bird, the Vengeance. Lola Maloney is awesome, but I wish I’d had a chance to fly with Emily. Major Henderson is up in his old Viper. Copilot only, but there was no stopping him, and he is the best pilot SOAR ever had other than Major Beale.” Noreen spoke with such intense pride. The Night Stalkers were obviously deep in her blood. “My brother’s up on the Viper as well.”

  Cal, apparently done up forward, came back to sit with her and hold her good hand.

  “Beale has an encrypted radio and is already talking to Mark who is talking to Lola who is… Aw, hell. I don’t know. They’re fixing it all, somehow. How you doing, Helitack?”

  Now Jeannie could see his face. See the worry, the fear for her despite the heavy soot smears. She also saw the exh
austion. These last hours had been much harder on him than she could ever imagine.

  “Not sure. Let’s ask the doc.”

  “Not a doc yet,” Noreen replied cheerfully. “Just an Army medic. Army assigned me to the USS Independence when all this came up.”

  “The Independence?”

  “Sure. It’s the sister ship to the one you’ve been on. We’ve been parked just over the horizon with Lola’s unit in case things got ugly.”

  “Ugly!” Cal’s bark of laughter was thick with pain. He squeezed her good hand so hard it would have hurt at any other time. He was being so careful to avoid looking at her other arm.

  “Apparently even the most pessimistic projections never anticipated an attack against civilian aircraft, especially not by trained military units. At last, your wife’s arm is fine.”

  Jeannie looked down at the deck to hide her smile while Cal sputtered.

  “Okay, not your wife.” Noreen said it like an insult, questioning Cal’s intelligence. Then she switched instantly back to her former cheerful manner. “We’ll get X-rays when we’re back aboard ship, but I think it’s only a fracture. I pulled the bullet out, and there were no bone fragments with it. The round appears to be intact. Right up against a nerve cluster; bet it hurt like hell to move, but not much damage because I see you moving all your fingers and joints. The round must have been mostly spent.”

  “It went through the chopper’s door first.”

  “That explains it. That’s why it did so little damage.”

  Jeannie shivered. “You mean a real gunshot would…”

  “Be way messier and would hurt about ten times as much.”

  “I’ll pass.”

  “Me too.”

  Jeannie looked up at Cal as Noreen finished her bandaging. Despite the grime, he’d gone sheet white.

  “Hey, Hotshot?”

  “Huh?”

  “What say we don’t do this again? Okay?”

  That woke up his slow smile and some of the color returned to his face.

  “That, Helitack, is a deal.”

  Chapter 19

  The Daly Waters Pub in the middle of Australia’s Northern Territory was one of Jeannie’s favorites anywhere on the planet. If they were going to make her convalesce for a month, she’d be damned but she was going to do it in style. And that Cal had the same idea of what defined style just made it all the better.

  They’d rented a small caravan in Darwin and a car stout enough to tow the little camper. It boasted a tiny kitchen and table, and a shower and dunny that was definitely too small to share, though they’d tried on the shower. Which didn’t really matter because most of the rest of the camper was a very comfy bed.

  She’d taken him swimming in the Wangi Falls of Litchfield National Park. It was a twenty-meter waterfall that seemed to appear out of nowhere atop a cliff and disappear to nowhere after languishing for a while in a wide pool a few hundred meters across. After a couple days soaking there, she’d been able to lose the sling, which had opened up several more options.

  They’d stayed for most of a week with Dale and Kalinda. They’d gone on several walks together, but not back up the gorges. The Wet had come to Arnhem Land and the river levels were on the rise, along with the salties working their way upriver.

  Cal had grown a little shy on her, reluctant to talk about what was happening between them. She could see that “processing internally” sign flashing behind his eyes whenever she brought up the things they’d said to each other during the fire.

  She bit her tongue for patience and focused on being thankful for the pieces he did show her. He talked about his childhood enough for her to agree with him that it was indeed best left in the past. Let Calvin Hobbes be born at sixteen on an Alaskan fire line. That worked for both of them.

  The long hours rolling down the Alice towing their little caravan and watching the Outback had been filled equally with tales of fires past and present, and comfortable silences. They’d crest a low rise, just meters tall, and the two tar-and-gravel-sealed lanes of the Stuart Highway would stretch straight ahead to the next rise a half-dozen kilometers off.

  “What are those?” At the midway point between two rises, Cal had pointed to a man-high white post with the numbers “1” at waist height and “2” near the top.

  She’d teased him for a while, but no outsider was likely to unravel the code, so she finally gave in. “That’s how many meters deep the water is during a flash flood in the Wet season. They don’t happen much, but it happens.”

  He’d refused to believe her, that two meters of water could cover the vast area between the two rises. So, she stopped them at a stout bridge stretching over a deep dry gully a hundred meters across. Out of the car, she pointed to the markings along the side of the bridge’s very stout pilings. They counted up to eighteen meters, the depth of the gorge. “Water’s been over this bridge’s deck twice in the last century. Gully will be dry within a day after.”

  On their trip, they’d also thrashed over the results of the East Timor mission. SOAR had reported to the UN Security Council, and the council had landed hard on Indonesia’s doorstep. The Grup 2 Para Commandos’ entire command structure had been arrested. The orders probably went higher up the ranks, but that was denied. The Grup 2 commanders were labeled as “rogue,” and international face was saved.

  Indonesia had instantly supplied massive firefighting aid and rebuilding grants to East Timor. Apparently they’d initially tried to make the grants be loans, but with the supporting evidence of Cal’s photos, the Security Council had quashed that and the grants became outright gifts to the struggling country. MHA had also received forty million dollars for a pair of factory-new Firehawks, one as a replacement and one brand-new. Mark had been given a free hand with the specifications, and Jeannie had already been booked for simulator time to get up to speed on the new equipment.

  Cal told her about getting Mark aside and actually getting the man good and drunk—a state even Emily had never witnessed. Mark had confessed to finally accepting just how critical an operation he was running for MHA. He hadn’t minded not flying the attack choppers anymore; he’d missed the feeling of doing good deeds against bad intentions. This latest mission had proven that Mount Hood Aviation was doing exactly the kind of work he believed in so deeply. Of course both of their hangovers the next morning had put paid on them ever doing something quite that stupid again.

  So now she and Cal sat in Jeannie’s favorite pub. Daly Waters traced its origin back to 1862, named after the first white man to cross the continent from south to north. It had headquartered the Australian Pony Express, become a telegraph station, been the first international airport in the country, and was now a near-forgotten wayside in the center of the Northern Territory.

  The pub sported a wall covered layers deep with banknotes from different currencies signed and tacked up by different travelers. For reasons that still amazed her, her bra now dangled with hundreds of others from the rafters in the main room. She’d been here dozens of times and had avoided paying that particular tribute, but Cal was a bad influence.

  Now they sat out in the beer garden that was shaded in equal portions by a trellis of lush bougainvillea and a colorful tree dangling with thousands of travelers’ thongs. Cal kept making lame jokes about them, but no self-respected Ozzie would call them flip-flops no matter what some women wore under their clothes.

  Evening had settled while they sat at one of the long picnic tables under the bougainvillea and the thong tree. She’d been nursing a stubby, but Cal had a full schooner of Four-X. This was definitely going to be a fun night; he obviously didn’t have a clue about the mule kick delivered by Aussie beer. Or he did and didn’t care. It wasn’t as if they had to be anywhere in the morning. Or even the next day. They’d been told to get lost for a month and heal on full pay, and that was exactly what they were doing.

>   They finished their “beef and barra” dinner with hot damper, a bread she’d sorely been missing, and the evening sing that was tradition at the Daly Waters kicked into gear. The leader had opened with a “classic from the last century,” which was at least partly true. After all, Men at Work’s “Down Under” had been released before she was born.

  “I liked our barramundi over the campfire better.” Cal leaned in close so that she could hear him as a fifty or so people all swung into slightly different versions of “Waltzing Matilda.”

  She nodded her agreement.

  “Jeannie of the dark red hair that was never bright blue,” he whispered so close it tickled.

  She really wanted to stay for the singing and drinking; it was always a fun night here. But when he spoke to her like that, she wanted to take him somewhere private, wrap herself around him for the rest of the night, and hold on as hard as she could.

  “I’ve been trying to get up the nerve to ask this for two weeks now. I was wondering if you’d do something for me?” He followed his whisper with a kiss and a light tug on her ear.

  “Anything, as long as you don’t stop that.” She had to raise her voice to be heard over the chorus about the itinerant ranch hand stealing and cooking a sheep. Sufficient beer had been consumed that the chorus was loud and merry, even if it was nowhere near on key.

  “Would you consider wearing this? You know I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t mean it.”

  He held up a beautiful ring. A large garnet caught the last of the sunset and glittered like the dark red of a fire’s heart.

  “Cal, it’s beautiful. I’d love to wear it.”

  She held up her hand.

  “No. The other one, Helitack.” His smile was laughing at her even as his eyes remained wary.

  Unsure of what he was about, she raised her left hand.

  He clambered off the bench and knelt on the red dirt of her homeland.

  Then her slow brain caught up with what was happening, and all the sounds of the pub fell away. She could see people singing. Could see the blue, gold, and green lorikeets calling aloud as they ducked and swooped, hoping for a morsel from an unguarded plate. But she could only hear two things: the pounding of her own heart and Cal’s words.