Fire Flight

by John J. Nance

  “YO! ANYONE OUT THERE? YELL BACK AT ME, MATE, OR BANG SOMETHING AROUND IF YOU HEAR THIS, RIGHT?”

  A small meadow opened up ahead, and he stopped at the edge of it, killed the engine, and listened. He could almost imagine he was hearing a voice against the background of the low, rumbling roar in the distance. He started again and bounced across the meadow, moving into the trees at the same moment a rock bounced off his hood and caused him to brake.

  “Hey! Wot the ’ell was that?” he said to no one in particular, a flash of anger crossing his mind that a rock would dare hit his expensive toy.

  Hold on!

  He killed the engine once again and jumped out. “Anyone there?” he yelled.

  “Right in front of you,” a strained male voice replied from somewhere in front of the Humvee. Jimmy hurried around the front to find two men, one of them unconscious, the other struggling to stand. “Jesus, man. You almost ran over us!”

  “Sorry, mate. Could you hear me on the PA, then?”

  “They could hear you in Canberra, for God’s sake! Do you have a first-aid kit? My copilot needs immediate help.”

  “Bloody hell! Are you from the Jet Ranger?”

  “Yes.” Trent was leaning over, trying to lift the copilot by himself. “I’m the pilot, and my copilot’s in bad shape.”

  “That’s why I’m here, mate. Leave him there and let me have a look.”

  “Are you a doctor?”

  “No…but I know a few things. There’s a first-aid med kit in the back.”

  Trent was severely bruised but otherwise unhurt. He stood painfully and went to the Humvee’s back hatch, finding the kit. There was an emergency defibrillator kit as well, and after a moment’s hesitation he unclipped that, too.

  Jimmy bandaged the worst cut on Eric’s right arm and then checked his breathing and airway.

  “One more item. There’s a green emergency oxygen bottle in the right rear utility bin.”

  They retrieved it, and Jimmy slipped an oxygen mask on Eric’s face and turned it on before directing Trent to open the rear doors and lay out a blanket. Together, they lifted the copilot as gently as possible and carried him to the Humvee, loading him in the back.

  “You able to stay back here with him?”

  Trent nodded.

  “Good. It’ll take us thirty minutes to get back and get a chopper in, if we can. The smoke’s getting very heavy.”

  “What if we can’t?” Trent asked, his defenses all but gone.

  Jimmy grinned. “Nobody says no to Jimmy Wolf, mate!” He closed them in the rear hatch and moved to the driver’s seat to get started, as Trent tried to ignore the dull pain in his back and mull over the bizarre reality of their rescuer’s identity.

  WEST YELLOWSTONE AIRPORT, MONTANA

  Clark Maxwell and Jerry Stein flew in silence through the twenty air miles between the crash site and the airport, speaking only during the approach in the staccato and sterile language of checklists and flaps and landing gear.

  They ran the shutdown checklist and sat immobile in their respective seats as the props and the sounds slowly wound down and stopped, the puzzled ground crew approaching with increasing concern over why no one was moving out of the cockpit. The refueling crew and the retardant-refill crew were both waiting.

  “I don’t know what to say, Clark,” Jerry said at last, his voice low and husky.

  “I know. Me either.”

  Clark inhaled and sat up, looking over at Jerry. “But it is time for some hard answers about the DC-6 fleet.”

  “I know.”

  “That’s my point, Jerry. I think there are things you do know that you’ve been hiding. What happened back there…” He choked up momentarily and fought to regain his composure, taking a ragged breath in the process. “What…happened back there, Jerry, while unrelated, has pushed this over the edge. What happened with the DC-6s? Where have they been? How much did they fly? And why?”

  Jerry’s head was bobbing slowly, but his eyes were unfocused and staring unseeingly at the instrument panel.

  “The answers are going to come out one way or another, Jerry. Better they come from you. And I mean now, man! Go ahead and fire me for challenging you, but—”

  “I’m not firing you, Clark.”

  “Okay, then, answer the damned question.”

  “The answer is, I leased them to the Company.”

  “I’m sorry? You leased them to your company?”

  “This aircraft. Jeff’s. All of the DC-6s. I’m not supposed to tell anyone.”

  “What are you talking about, Jerry?”

  Jerry sighed, his right hand flailing the air in a resigned gesture. “It was, I was told, my patriotic duty not to ask too many questions.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Jeff. There was a lot of money attached, of course, and all I had to do was sign a few papers once the airplanes had reached Roswell, then bring them back up here in the spring.”

  Clark swiveled to the right, an incredulous look on his face.

  “Hold it. Jeff? What…I don’t understand what Jeff is doing in this equation.”

  “Well, he said no one would believe it if it ever came out that he was…what did he call it…an aviation assets procurer for the CIA.”

  “We are talking about the same Jeff here, right? Jeff Maze?”

  “Yes.”

  “The ranking maverick of the whole group? The head of the Airtanker Fliers Association?”

  “The same.”

  “Jerry, is there a less likely candidate?”

  “I know, I didn’t believe him either at first, but he had the papers, he had the money, and he performed exactly as he said he would.”

  More silence as Clark tried to work through the utterly bizarre idea that Jeff Maze could have been associated with anything more official than an FAA pilot’s license.

  “You leased them the whole fleet?”

  “Not the PB4Y-2s or the other birds. He said the Company…Jeff said they really do call it that…just wanted the DC-6Bs.”

  “Why?”

  “Simple humanitarian cargo runs that had no direct connection to the U.S. That’s all I was told. I inspected the planes and the retardant tanks and everything myself when the birds came back to Roswell, and everything looked good.”

  “And the logbooks?”

  Another sigh, and Jerry’s head dropped. “God, Clark, I believed him. The money was too good, so I believed they were going to log everything carefully and put no more than a hundred hours on each plane. And all but one of them had exactly that range of just about a hundred hours.”

  “So how much did they really fly?”

  “I don’t know, but what you found in Tanker Seventy-four? The dust and the dirt? That shocked the hell out of me. They reported only about a hundred and fifty hours on her.”

  “Jesus Christ, Jerry! Is Southlight Aviation a CIA operation, too?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so. The deal started and ended in Roswell.”

  “But that’s illegal! These airplanes are considered national resources. Remember that new law?”

  “No…actually, what’s illegal would be my renting or leasing them to nongovernmental parties. But this was our own damned government, Clark!”

  “And you have no idea what’s been done to these birds? Where they’ve been? Whether they were maintained, or not, and by whom?”

  Jerry shook his head.

  “God, Jerry. Rogue pilots not qualified to handle these engines could have been doing assault landings in the jungle, or flying off a Pacific beach too near salt water with corrosion going crazy, and you don’t even know?”

  The ground crew had rolled the steps up to the airplane’s crew entrance and were opening the door.

  “I just didn’t ask. I got paid not to ask. Jeff knows…knew these ships, and I trusted him, especially with the lease contracts.”

  “The contracts were with the CIA?”

  “No, no. One of thos
e front companies. Kind of like the old Air America they used in Vietnam, except this one was called Standard Aeronautics.”

  “What does Trent Jones know about all this?”

  “Same as me, I think. Maybe a little less. He didn’t like it much.”

  “He and Jeff were close friends. You knew that, right?”

  Jerry shrugged.

  “Jerry…you know the FBI is going to be all over this, right?”

  “Yes. I can’t say I’m glad you called them, but…let the chips fall where they may.”

  One of the mechanics came in and stuck his head in the cockpit. “You guys all right up here?”

  “Yeah. We’ll be down in a second,” Clark told him.

  “Okay.”

  The mechanic backed out as Jerry started to respond but caught himself and sat silently until Clark sighed and continued. “It’s coming unraveled, Jerry. You see that, I hope.”

  “Yes.”

  “You can’t let these planes fly again until a whole new round of very thorough inspections has been done. I mean, you’ve just admitted you have no idea how badly they’ve been treated, or how many hours are on them, or where they went, or anything.”

  “I know.”

  Clark sat in the thick atmosphere of embarrassed silence for a few more seconds, staring at the fearless entrepreneur and remembering their decades of friendship.

  “Why, Jerry?”

  “Because I truly thought it was the right thing to do. It was a lot of money…more than the planes are even worth…and I knew we’d have, tops, maybe two more fire seasons before it would all be over anyway. This was…kind of a way to build my own golden parachute, and I did not know they were abusing our birds. It was our government on top of it all. You may not believe me, Clark, but—”

  “Rationalization is a powerful hallucinogen, my friend.”

  Jerry sighed deeply. “You’ve got that right.”

  Clark swallowed his disgust. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Jerry hauled himself to his feet and turned from the copilot’s seat as Clark caught his sleeve. “Jerry, look, whatever happens…I mean, I’m deeply disappointed in you, but you’ve been there for me over the years, and I’m still your friend.”

  Jerry patted Clark on the shoulder. “I appreciate that.”

  Chapter 36

  NORTH FLANK OF NORTH FORK RIDGE

  The constant barrage of fire retardant from a procession of airtankers had continued as the smokejumpers ran for their lives westward and up the steep mountainside, trying to reach a modest-size step about a hundred feet above the base of the protective rock formation where Peter had been waiting. The fire retardant was serving the same purpose it had served earlier on the south side of the ridge. It wasn’t enough to put out the fire, but it was enough to buy them the time to escape.

  They came scrambling out of the trees onto the ridge utterly exhausted physically and emotionally, each of them well aware that two of their number were somewhere behind in the path of the flames. Tempers flared with a brief debate over what to do, but a quick radio check with the lead plane confirmed that there was literally no future in going back for Karen and Dave until the flames had passed and the smoldering remains of the lush forest were sufficiently blackened to be unburnable.

  They were adjacent to a rocky draw near the ridgeline that had promised protection if the original blaze from the southern flank of the mountain had roared over the top. Now it was coming around the eastern flank of the mountain, and they needed to find a safer place.

  “There’s no reason to risk using the shelters here with this monster on our tail,” Pete said. “Our original landing zone would be better. It’s burned over already.”

  “What are you saying, we have to keep going? I say we stay right here!” George snapped.

  “And I’m saying that any of us who’d like to live without the risk of third-degree burns or worse should follow me back to where we landed this morning.”

  “What about Karen and Dave?”

  “How are we going to help them by staying up here, huh?”

  The two men squared off silently for a few heartbeats, then broke away. The controversy was meaningless. The squad members shouldered the remaining equipment and retraced their path downward, around the ridgeline to the original landing zone.

  “There’s a small lake up there, a mile farther on according to the map. One of the Skycranes was using it a while ago,” one of the other smokejumpers said.

  “Yeah, but we’re in the black here. Let’s stay put,” Pete replied. He tried calling Karen and Dave again on his radio as they all hunkered down to wait for the fire to pass.

  They watched the smoke boiling off the oncoming fire, the flames leaping at times several hundred feet in the air, the endless oxygen provided by the stiff east wind now blowing through the funnel at the eastern end of the valley they’d labored so hard to protect.

  “Oh, God, Pete. How could we lose those two?”

  Pete was shaking his head, thoroughly stunned. “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think there’s any chance they could have made it through in their shelters?

  Pete peered for the longest time at the flames, listening to the roar and tasting the smoke, before shaking his head at the chilling reality.

  “No.”

  WEST YELLOWSTONE AIRPORT, MONTANA

  Clark followed Jerry out of the DC-6B to the sound of departing helicopters, one of them carrying Steve Zale to the site of Bill Deason’s impact with Yellowstone’s forests. With the rising number of mechanical incidents and now the loss of a P-3, NTSB headquarters had finally launched a Go Team, but it would be hours before they arrived, and Zale, in the meantime, was the only NTSB representative on scene.

  They walked in silence to the Operations building, and Clark trailed Jerry as they pushed into another wake. The only good news was that Chuck Hines from Bill Deason’s P-3 had landed safely and been picked up by park rangers, and was en route back. Firefighters and search squads were already on the crash site, but from that location no good news was flowing.

  Jerry moved to the Operations desk and flagged Rich Lassiter’s attention. He picked up a notepad and wrote down the tanker numbers of every DC-6B in his fleet and handed it to Rich.

  “I’m grounding all my DC-6Bs immediately, Rich.”

  “Say that again, please.”

  “I’m grounding my fleet for safety reasons, if the Forest Service hasn’t already put everyone on the ground. Who’s still up?”

  “Good Lord, Jerry! You’ll gut our capabilities! Even if they put us down for a few hours—and you’re right, I’m sure they will, like yesterday—we’ll get back up and need everyone.”

  “Just do it.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  He shook his head. “I’ll explain shortly. Who’s still flying?”

  “Uh, Dave Barrett is…no, he’s on the ground. Clark Maxwell is here. Well, of course, you were flying shotgun with him. Tanker Seventy-four…let’s see…” He thumbed through several sheets on a clipboard. “Okay. Two others are working the North Fork Ridge right now.”

  “When they’re empty and back in, shut them down.”

  “All right, man. I hope it’s really necessary,” Rich said, clearly getting ready to yank up the phone and inform Bozeman Dispatch.

  Clark had already turned to the crew desk for any information on the smokejumpers.

  “It’s good news, Clark. They were racing to get up to a safe place, and they made it. I just heard the lead-plane pilot talking about their escape.”

  Clark exhaled sharply and smiled, feeling immeasurably relieved as he thanked him and turned to find a man he’d never seen before waiting for him.

  “Captain Maxwell?”

  “Yes?”

  He held out his hand, speaking quietly. “I’m Todd Blackson from Helena.”

  “Yes?”

  “From the office you called in Helena a few hours ago?”

  “Oh, yes.
I guess I didn’t expect you here so soon.”

  “Why don’t we find some place to talk privately.”

  “Sure,” Clark replied, instinctively glancing in Jerry’s direction and surprised he had already disappeared. “Ah…let’s go out on the ramp.”

  Clark led the way around the building to the parking area and turned to find Blackson holding out his credential wallet.

  “That’s okay.”

  “Well, you’ve already been tricked once.”

  “Yeah. You’re here to talk to Jerry, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. But first I want you to tell me everything you know about this situation with the maintenance of these aircraft. I’m aware of Captain Deason’s crash a while ago. I understand he was a friend, and I’m very sorry.”

  “Thanks,” Clark sighed, feeling bone weary and still disbelieving, unable to let the reality of the crash he’d witnessed sink in. “Well, first of all, I’ve got a shocker for you. I just found out the CIA is involved.”

  “Mr. Stein told you that?”

  Strange, Clark thought. He didn’t even blink. “Yes.” Clark related everything Jerry had said, as well as the wild incongruity that Jeff Maze could have been a CIA operative.

  “We’ll find out if it’s true.”

  “Yeah, but you guys don’t communicate well, do you?”

  “CIA and FBI? Cats and dogs, but, since nine-eleven, we do a lot of talking. You might call it a shotgun wedding.”

  “I think Jerry’s telling the truth,” Clark said. “I’ve known him a long time. He was probably duped.”

  Todd Blackson leaned against a parked pickup and studied Clark for a moment of uncomfortable silence.

  “Look, Captain. I’m not here to crucify Jerry Stein. I’m here to figure out if a crime’s been committed with regard to the use of Stein Aviation’s aircraft, and after all, you’re the gentleman who called to tip us off that something was wrong.”

  “He just grounded all the DC-6s.”

  “That’s good, considering your basic worry was whether or not the airplanes are safe.”

  “Right.”

  “But there’s more at stake here, as you’re well aware. And we’ll need some time to sort this out. We’re already working with the NTSB’s representative on Captain Maze’s crash.”