Once again they arranged themselves in a trailing three-ship formation and followed Sam across the south face of the mountain, hitting lower and lower levels of the forest until the slurry had splashed through the lowest pines on the slope and all three tankers had emptied their loads.
Three more tankers were inbound from West Yellowstone as Barrett, Maxwell, and Deason headed back for another “load and return.” The flame front of the fire was less than eight miles away, the smoke becoming too thick around the base of the mountain for another low-level run. As they departed the area, Clark could hear Sam on the radio briefing the inbound crews that once more they would be starting at the edge of the ridgeline and working back down.
“The wind is picking up far faster than we’d figured,” Sam was explaining. “You may notice the flames standing over almost horizontally in the wind down there, and that’s going to start the fire climbing the slope viciously as soon as it gets there because the flames will bake off any of the water in the retardant we’ve been putting down. We’ve slowed the fire down, but the object of what we’re doing now is to widen our line toward the top so it runs out of steam and can’t jump the ridge.”
JACKSON HOLE AIRPORT, WYOMING
Trent Jones held the Jet Ranger in a reasonably stable hover as he rechecked the traffic around the airport. The empty water bucket and fifty feet of cable were safely stowed in the backseat, and the plan was to deploy it at Bryarly when and if the spot fires started. The helitack crewman gave him the all-clear signal a second time, and he began carefully raising the collective to increase both engine speed and lift, adding more power as he nudged the cyclic forward and transitioned to forward flight. He accelerated steadily, departing Jackson Hole Airport and passing an inbound television news helicopter as he aimed his helicopter toward the North Fork area and the town of Bryarly, where Dispatch had assigned him to land and stand by.
The angry columns of smoke from the fires now threatening the small town of Kelly and the resort areas within Grand Teton National Park on the east side of the valley were becoming thicker and more energetic with the rise of the wind. There was a permeable wall of dark smoke in his path, most of it boiling out of the Sheep Mountain valley and blowing north, northwest. Trent checked his map and altered course slightly so he could come around the northwest side of Bryarly, some forty miles away.
Despite the smoke and the crisis and the frenetic activity on the ramp he’d just left, he was in something approximating a good mood because he was flying again, an infinitely more pleasurable pursuit than what he’d temporarily left behind in West Yellowstone.
It wasn’t just dealing with Jerry that was killing him, Trent decided. It was the apprehension, wondering whether the rest of the fleet was going to hold together and whether his worst fears had come true with the crash of Tanker 86.
The crash was a nightmare on several levels, including one he could talk to virtually no one about. The loneliness of that knowledge was like an acid steadily leaching away his confidence. It had already destroyed his marriage, and he suspected it was somehow destroying his health as well. He knew he was in over his head, confusing his maintenance team and making all the wrong calls about where to put the few resources Jerry gave him to work with. The mechanics were good people, good professionals, but they deserved better leadership than he’d been able to give them, and he was losing sleep over how many corners they had cut due to his inability to buffer Jerry’s constant cost pressures. Somewhere out there in the fleet there was a part that should have been replaced, something one of his people had kept in service because of the pressures he’d put on them. Eventually, that bomb was going to explode and kill someone.
If it hadn’t already.
Trent glanced at the left copilot’s seat and the wide-eyed twenty-three-year-old would-be copilot named Eric Wright, whom Jerry had insisted he bring along. He’d been all but ignoring the kid, but not pointedly. There were just too many things to think about—or avoid thinking about, he mused. Maybe he’d talk to Wright a little bit on the ground in Bryarly, but he couldn’t deny being irritated by his forced presence.
The thought of Bryarly forced him to peer closely through the windscreen again, this time spotting the tiny town in the pall of smoke and haze five miles ahead.
“Excuse me, Captain Jones?”
Trent shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Hey, Wright…I’m the chief of maintenance, not an airline captain, okay?”
“I’m sorry. How do you like to be addressed?”
“Just call me Trent. You had a question?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Yeah, and that’s another thing. Don’t call me sir.”
“Okay,” Eric Wright replied, carefully programming himself to avoid the word. “I know Mr. Stein wanted you to evaluate me as a pilot. Would you like me to fly it for a while and let you relax?”
A flare of resentment soured his expression, and Trent felt himself turning on the young pilot like a cop turns on an assailant, his tongue the lethal weapon and restraint all but gone.
“What?!”
Eric Wright looked startled as he tried to decide whether to repeat himself.
“I…ah…just thought I’d offer to spell you on the controls.”
I’m sick of people trying to steal away anything I might enjoy, Trent thought, his bitterness rising. His anger slipped the usual bonds of restraint and aimed itself at the copilot.
“When I want your damned help flying my helicopter, Wright, I’ll ask for it. Is that clear?”
“Ah, sure. I apologize if…if that was out of bounds.”
Trent glanced at him again and tried unsuccessfully to affect a smile.
“Look, I don’t get much stick time. Understand?”
“You bet.”
“So…your offer is kinda like trying to take a half-gnawed bone from a hungry dog.”
Eric Wright nodded, his eagerness to please irritating Trent even more as he began slowing for the landing.
Chapter 28
NORTH FORK RIDGE DROP ZONE
Here it comes, Karen thought, peering over the south rim of the meadow, and we’re not ready.
The thickening stream of smoke howling up and over the ridge and into her face was the hot breath of the beast. With fifty-to eighty-foot flames crowning and leaning over almost horizontally, it had reached the base of the mountain and was starting its climb. Just under a million pounds of slurry had been dropped in its path, but the massive heat produced by the flames was able to effectively evaporate all remaining moisture content, preparing the trees and grasses for a sudden explosion of blazing heat. The retardant was slowing the process chemically, holding the rate of assent to a more sedate pace than an untreated mountainside, but it was inching toward them, and the moment of eye-to-eye encounter was approaching.
Karen motioned to three of the squad and reached the others by radio. They gathered with her quickly as she pointed downslope.
“It’s time to test to see if we have enough pull from the main fire to get a backfire going.”
Her strategy from early morning had been to prepare enough black along the scratch line to separate the north and south ridges, but leaving enough fuel downslope to the south to ignite once the main fire was close enough to create the inevitable inflowing wind. The flame front of a major forest fire sucked air at furious rates, and regardless of which way or how hard the winds had been blowing during the day, the fire would suck air back across the ridge from north to south for a brief period as it climbed toward them, causing a backfire to burn furiously toward the advancing flame front, and severely widening the unburnable black left in its path.
“We missed those two trees,” Karen said, pointing down the south slope where two Douglas firs stood close enough to the meadow. Downslope from the two trees a stand of fir and larch and a few lodgepole gave way to a horizontal run of aspen, which were a slow-burning fire barrier. If the backfire could take out everything above the aspen, they had a good cha
nce of stopping the main flame front from even reaching the ridge.
“Which ones do you want us to drop?” Peter Zable asked. “Those?”
“Yeah,” Karen confirmed. “We have just enough time,” she said, almost yelling over the roar of the wind.
“That slurry makes it slippery as hell,” Peter replied.
“I know, I know, but if the backfire fails and those explode, the force of the wind will propel all those upper branches over the top. We didn’t see that problem earlier.”
“Okay, Dave and I’ll go,” Peter said, and Karen shook her head.
“No, we’ll all go, and tie a safety harness around whoever has the saws. Three of you, two saws, the rest of us on backup.”
They moved as a disciplined unit more characteristic of ground-bound hotshots who hiked, choppered, or drove in to handle the more volatile line work. Within three minutes, chips were flying and the trees began coming down, the sawyers having constant trouble keeping their footing on the red-stained dirt of the forest floor they were denuding. The wind was almost to forty knots again, and the force of it was helping them stay upright.
One young larch fell at once, and Joey Sampson turned his attention to a fifty-foot Douglas fir, using his chain saw as he struggled with his footing. He stepped back just as the remaining few uncut inches of the trunk snapped and the tree began to fall. Karen saw him step out of the path of the tree as it gathered momentum, but she was unprepared to see the sudden launch of his chain saw into the air as his feet slipped from under him and his body slid toward the path of the oncoming tree. Joey flipped his body around to face the ridge and clawed his fingers into the dirt. His squad mate on the other end of the tether reacted too slowly, stopping him with his lower legs in the crosshairs of the accelerating trunk. There was a simultaneous scramble to yank Joey upslope as he fought to pull up, raising his right leg to his chest and digging his knee in for support as he tried to pull his left leg out of the way, but the tree thundered to earth at the same moment, catching the side of his heavy boot and driving it into the mountainside, the sound of delicate bones snapping within the partially crushed boot lost to the cacophony of the impact.
“Joey! Jesus!” Karen shouted as the saws went silent and the entire squad converged on their fallen comrade.
“Goddammit!” he was saying, over and over again. “Almost!”
Three more of the squad joined them, and all six struggled to roll the thousand-pound tree downslope and off Joey’s boot as the others starting digging the damaged foot out of the dirt. They carried him back up to the meadow and laid him out; Dave, the one trained paramedic among them, removed the boot and did a quick examination.
“Well…you need some immediate attention, old boy,” Dave said to Joey, looking toward Karen at the very moment she was pressing the transmit button on her handheld to call for a rescue helicopter.
Okay, she said to herself, shaken by the injury and their new situation, which wouldn’t permit the escape she’d planned before the fire’s arrival. We’ll get Joey airlifted out of here and then get off this meadow.
She turned to Dave and Pete.
“Where’s our emergency shelter area?”
“Around the north side of the ridge to the east, Karen,” Pete replied.
“Get up there and verify it’s ready if we need it.”
They nodded and moved off immediately.
She motioned to Scott.
“Did you test the winds for the backfire?”
He was nodding. “Yes! It’s good enough. We’re ready.”
“Light it up,” she yelled, motioning to the line of grasses and fuels on the southern downslope below the blackened area they’d prepared.
“Jones, Lead Four-Two,” came across her radio as the first flames of their backfire were taking hold.
“Jones, go,” Karen responded, feeling her heart racing.
“Jackson Hole Ops says to tell you they’re sending the closest thing with a rescue basket. I think it’s a CH-47 Chinook. The winds are too high up there for anyone to land.”
“Okay.”
“Remember to ground the basket first.”
“Roger that. What’s his ETA?”
He hesitated. “Ah, ten minutes, I think. He’s coming up from Bryarly.”
“Where are you, Four-Two?” Karen asked. “I’ve lost you in all the smoke.”
“Just to the south monitoring the flame front. It’s started up the slope, but it’s been slowed down by the slurry.”
Karen could feel her heart pounding, but the question had to be asked.
“How…how long would you estimate before it reaches us?”
Again a pause as she imagined him doing the math.
“Ah…this is just a guess, okay?”
“All right.”
“It’s hauling ass, Jones. I calculate it’s moving about three chains per minute, and it has a bit over three thousand linear feet of terrain to traverse.”
He let that sink in as she forced herself to do the same calculation.
“That’s fifteen minutes!” Karen replied, feeling a chill up her back.
“Roger. At the earliest.”
“How far is the Chinook?”
“Coming up the valley now. I’m talking to him on the air-to-air.”
“We’ll have only moments. He’ll have one shot at it.”
Karen turned and ran to the northern side of the meadow, searching the murky depths of what had been a crystal-clear valley when they’d arrived. She could hear the heavy thumping of rotor blades and finally caught the outline of the twin-rotor helicopter several thousand feet below and climbing. She squinted hard and was relieved to see the big helicopter rising out of the haze.
“Okay, I have him. We’re three hundred feet to his twelve o’clock right now. Tell him how time critical we are.”
“Ah, Jones, do you have an escape route?”
“Yes, but it takes a few minutes to use it. They can’t pick us all up, can they?”
“Not enough time, and they wouldn’t have enough room anyway. But I’ll check.”
“Karen!” She turned around to see that Pete had returned and was pointing behind him. “The rest of the squad is fortifying the place back there about two hundred yards. We already fired it, and Dave’s back there clearing it farther.”
“Good.” She called to the others and pointed to the Chinook, which was now audible and visible and still climbing from the northwest valley. “Get Joey ready. Ground the basket, strap him tighter than hell, and wave them out of here. Then we drop all but the essentials and follow Pete.”
IN FLIGHT, LEAD PLANE FOUR-TWO
Sam banked the King Air tighter this time over the ridge, watching the progress of the big Chinook as it approached. He wasn’t qualified to fly helicopters, but he wondered if his assumption was wrong about its not being able to land in the high wind and whether they should have left the basket behind and just plopped the chopper onto the meadow, essentially flying it into the wind while the whole squad jumped aboard.
The fire was climbing like a determined panther, tree by tree, egged on by the wind whirling to fill the partial vacuum of the low-pressure ridge now west of the Tetons. He flew over the ridge to the north, spotting the small fire they’d started in a promontory of rocks on the eastern flank of the ridgeline; he knew what the leader was planning. Their backfire was just taking hold, and, as they’d obviously planned, beginning to burn downward in the suction of the massive advancing flame front. Whether it would be enough was unclear from his vantage point. The backfire looked puny and insufficient against the wall of flames roaring upward toward them.
“Lead Four-Two, Tankers Forty-four, Eighty-eight, and Ten are on your doorstep again,” Barrett’s pleasant voice reported in his headset. Sam had planned to start working the north side of the ridge, but the situation had changed.
“Okay, fellows, Lead Four-Two. We have a situation here.” He briefly outlined the progress of the fire upslope, the ex
treme turbulence now filling the same airspace they’d soared through so many times during the previous hours, and the urgency of slowing the flames.
“We can’t do this the same way we did before,” Sam added. “We’ve got to buy them enough time to get their injured jumper aboard that Chinook. Forty-four, enter a hold at ten thousand. Tanker Eighty-eight, make it ten thousand five, and Tanker Ten, hold at eleven thousand. Tanker Forty-four, I’m coming up to get you and guide you in. No dry runs. Full salvo. We’re going to nail the flame front.”
All three tankers acknowledged, their voices dead serious. This time they would be attacking the beast personally, flying through the flames and the smoke and the horrid updrafts of superheated air, which would be throwing burning firebrands in their path.
Sam could see the Chinook moving into position over the ridge meadow, the basket swinging in the heavy wind as the crew tried to drop it gently in the middle of the clearing. The big chopper was undulating, the pilot struggling to keep a hover that, in fact, was like flying with a forty-knot forward airspeed. He saw the basket touch the ground, bounce, lift in the air and twist, then do it again.
And he could see the fire below climbing another rung. It was now less than a thousand feet below the summit.
Sam had Tanker 44 in his right windscreen as he shoved the King Air’s throttles to maximum torque and came by his left side.
“Forty-four, Lead, don’t turn…extend your run until I’m ahead of you. We’ll roll off on this pass.”
“Roger.”
He shot past the DC-6 at a sixty-knot advantage and continued east for thirty seconds before throttling back and rolling into a left turn, knowing that Dave Barrett would be right on his tail. He steadied out westbound and adjusted the altitude, aiming right over the flame front.
The fire was moving with almost perfect horizontal symmetry, and laying down the retardant in an equally straight line would be simple. Getting through the smoke and the turbulence would be anything but.
Sam tightened his seat belt and boresighted the exploding tree line.
Fire Flight Page 32
