Carly talked about burn behavior as if wildfire was a conscious thinking force capable of choosing which type of tree, undergrowth, and terrain burned the best. Any of the species that Carly didn’t know, Jeannie could backfill.
Rather than making her feel incompetent, it made her feel included. With each passing moment she gained a better understanding of how she fit into a firefight, even if the one she was battling mostly by herself was by and large pointless.
They weren’t merely knocking crown fires down within reach of ground teams. The Firehawks and the 212 were double-, even triple-overlapping their loads to fully extinguish hard-to-reach areas, forcing the fire into more accessible terrain. Twice there were medivacs of injured firefighters and several times they switched to helitack—picking up a crew of a dozen per Firehawk—and repositioning the teams at tactical weak spots during critical fights.
And still she circled from the Son River to the ever-nearing Son Doong Cave.
The countryside here was astonishingly beautiful. She wanted to share it with Gordon, but he was too busy, not even looking up when she had to return to the airport to refuel—not a moment she’d been looking forward to.
“He’s asleep,” Janet informed her.
“Is that safe?” Ripley was having trouble meeting Janet’s eyes.
“Tham Chau had a top doctor from the local hospital come out to see him. He’s the one who suggested sleep.”
“That’s good, I guess.” She kicked the pavement. She ought to be kicking herself.
“Ripley.”
She inspected her boots some more.
“Ripley,” Janet ducked down and twisted so that her face was directly in Ripley’s field of view and looked her right in the eyes.
As she stood, Ripley was forced to look up as well.
“We get that wasn’t you when you hit Brad.”
“How do you know?”
Inexplicably Janet hugged her. “Why do you think we requested every assignment we could get with you? And we had to sign contracts with Mount Hood Aviation as well. We both know you, Ripley. You’re the best.”
“Yet I punched Brad.”
“He’ll recover.”
Ripley couldn’t help herself and smiled at Janet. “He may. Question is, will I?”
“From being in love? God, I hope not! It’s the best thing ever, Ripley. Now go. They’ve got you refueled.”
Brenna passed by giving her two Banh Mi sandwiches, two Chuong Duong orange sodas, and a thumbs-up.
She handed a soda and sandwich to Gordon as she reboarded. Once he finished his, he took over long enough for her to eat as well, showing he wasn’t completely unaware of her. At least as a pilot.
“How is this monster so light on the controls?”
“Diana Prince is not a monster.”
“Okay, to quote your Gilbert and whoever, ‘she’s a neat little sweet little craft.’ Just like her pilot.”
“Sweet? What drugs are you taking?”
“Ripley Vaughan. Straight up. Undiluted.”
Ripley took back the flight controls. “Go play with your fire.”
“Don’t really need to. They’ve got a good handle on it. That head will be trapped inside the hour. If all goes well, they’ll have it fully contained this evening and dead by the morning. Then we can really tackle this head. Until then, I’m just going to sit here and think about you in a slinky red dress.”
“Dream on!”
“Oh, I will. While I’m dreaming about that I can also fantasize about how you’re going to make it up to me for punching Brad.”
“I’m what? You think that I’m going to give you awesome and amazing make-up sex because I punched my copilot?”
“Guilt has its uses,” Gordon agreed happily. “I’m really looking forward to it.”
Ripley couldn’t believe this was Gordon. No, she could. This was almost the guy who had accused her of being “serious eye candy.” Now that she looked back, she could see that he’d been trying to be the guy who “fit in” rather than being himself. But he’d also thought that about her from the very beginning. He saw her as beautiful. He also saw her so strong. And Janet said that Ripley loved him, just in case she didn’t know that herself. Well, she did now.
And, dammit, he was right—the make-up sex was going to be awesome.
Gordon gasped in surprise as they crossed the ridge.
There’d been no sign, no warning.
One moment they’d been in clear and level flight.
The next a tailwind completely cut the lift out from under them.
He’d been riding his hands on the controls, liking the connection with Ripley through the shared movements. Suddenly she was heaving up on the collective, feeding every horsepower the Aircrane could deliver into the rotor.
Downdraft and turbulent winds were common on the backside of a ridge, but helicopters by their nature were much less susceptible to such issues.
A few hundred meters in either direction were thick with smoke flowing smoothly over the ridge. They were in a pocket of clear air.
Even the massive climbing power of the big Aircrane barely slowed their descent. If they were in a fixed-wing air tanker, they’d be crashed into the trees already.
It was the same problem the stealth helicopter had in the bin Laden compound before it crashed. The air trapped by the compound’s high walls became so turbulent that there was nothing for the rotor blades to bite on and create lift.
The smoke to either side was now rolling toward them.
“Two hundred meters down,” he called out, knowing Ripley would be too busy flying to look down at the flight instruments. “Three hundred.”
So far the land had fallen away at the same rate they were descending, but they were going to run out of steep, descending hillside in moments. The jungle of the valley floor was fast approaching.
The smoke closed over them like the slamming of a door. The heat in the cabin rose sharply as the view completely disappeared. It was suddenly so dark in the cabin that Gordon flipped on the console lights. The big landing lights did little more than glare off the smoke.
“I saw something,” Ripley grunted out. “Not sure.” She twisted the Aircrane to the west, higher into the narrow mountain valley rather than lower.
“Down four hundred. Rate of descent slowing,” Gordon managed. He trusted Ripley’s instincts and Diana Prince was recovering better than any MD 530 or Firehawk could have.
“I always like good news with my morning blackout.”
“More of a gray out.” The landing lights revealed that the gray smoke was thick with dark ash. “Outside temp crossing upward of one-fifty.” Which meant that they’d have even less lift due to the thinning of the air as it became hotter.
“I’m not sure that the air conditioning was made for that,” Ripley managed as she slalomed around the first tree to stick its head through the smoke. “This is good. I was rusty on panic.”
Gordon was glad that he wasn’t the only one who quoted from bad firefighting movies when he was stressed. Of course she’d quoted Richard Dreyfuss, who had far more macho in Always than Gordon’s John Goodman.
The next tree came close enough that it might have passed between the rear wheels as Ripley slewed sideways.
“Not exactly agile here.” The big Aircrane could be precise, but for agile they needed his MD hel—
“Bank right!” Gordon called out.
Ripley followed his call without hesitation. The smoke had a current here and it curved abruptly upward—he’d take any updraft they could find, even in a cloud of superheated smoke. They punched through the wall of it and arrived in clear air. In the calmer air she was able to stabilize their flight and ease them into a hover.
Gordon’s heart rate was running faster than the rotor’s spin, not that he’d noticed it until this moment. If Ripley had been one tiny bit less of a pilot, they’d be dead by now.
After flipping into the Oregon lake, he’d said that crashing and b
urning once in a lifetime was enough for anyone. He decided that this last thirty seconds of flight was something else he could say a grateful farewell to, as in never again.
The outside temperature gauge plummeted, first back into October-in-Vietnam normal temperatures and then ten degrees cooler. The lowest he’d seen since leaving Oregon.
“Look at that.”
Gordon glanced up. They were in a great circle of smoke, no, a solid dome shape. He could dimly see the wall climbing to all sides, passing directly over their bubble of clear air.
“No, down.”
What he saw didn’t make sense at first. The jungle around the edges of gray dome was actually slightly above them. Their refuge was over a hundred yards across—at least four times the diameter of their own rotor. But the jungle below them lay the same distance below. It was like someone had taken a giant cookie cutter and punched a hole in the earth. They hovered in the center of the opening. The little bit of light that penetrated the swirling smoke revealed a vast cavity in the earth.
“It’s a doline into the Son Doong Caves,” Ripley voice was a gasp of wonder.
“A who into the what?” Though he certainly couldn’t question the wonder. It was one of the most dramatic settings he’d ever seen. The inverse of the time he’d taken his father’s ranch helicopter and landed it on the very top of the Red Butte that gave Red Butte, Wyoming its name—a stunt his father had thrashed him soundly for, for wasting time and fuel and making a spectacle of himself.
There he’d been perched over a vast expanse of arid land, the iron red soil turned almost bloody by the setting sun. Here, they were hovering over a lush jungle that filled the great circular cutout below them. Even in the dim, smoke-shrouded light, the color was vibrantly alive with green growth.
“Doline, a giant sinkhole. It’s from the collapse of a cave’s roof.”
“This was a cave?” He could see the curves that indicated this indeed had once been a domed roof, the upper walls arching inward. Down below, the space expanded to two football fields in size, maybe three. It would be enough room to park a half-dozen Aircranes without any problem. Even the Antonov An-124 transport would fit in here easily. The jungle wasn’t as thick as it was above the rim, it grew on the rough-and-tumble rock of the collapsed roof—an entire underground fairy world now open to the sky. “There’s no way that all of this was once underground.”
“The Son Doong Cave is nine kilometers long and they only discovered it in 2009. Tham Chau told us about it, the largest cave in the world. This isn’t even the biggest chamber.” Ripley began descending toward the cave’s floor.
“I’m not sure this is the smartest idea.”
“You want to fly back into that?” She nodded upward.
Gordon looked up at the heavy swirls of smoke being kept aloft by some strange current that was pumping cool air upward out of the caves.
“Not my first choice.”
She eased over to a clear perch, a flat-topped hill that rose fifty feet above the jungle growing on the floor of the ancient cave-in. Unlike Red Butte, with the sharp escarpment of its limestone cap, this hill looked like a stack of decreasing-sized pancakes. Actually, “It kind of looks like a giant had diarrhea and pooped out layers of rock.”
“It’s called a stalagmite. I’ve never seen one so big. Haven’t you ever been in a cave?”
“Sure,” Gordon replied as she settled the Aircrane atop the stalagmite. There was just room for all three wheels to be safely on the flat top.
Ripley locked the wheel brakes so that they didn’t roll off, and eased the engines down to idle. “We should let the madness up above stabilize a bit.”
“Calling Diana Prince,” Steve’s voice squawked over the radio.
“This is Ripley,” she called back.
“Where are you?” His signal faded out at the end. The drone must have passed directly over the doline for them to be heard. Anything else would block their radio signal.
Ripley made a long transmission, repeatedly describing their situation to give Steve a chance to discover when he had a drone directly over them enough to keep a clear signal.
“You guys okay?”
“Happy as two hogs in a waller,” Ripley told him. “Just going to let that turbulence settle for a few minutes.”
Gordon snorted out a laugh that the mic picked up before she let go of the transmit switch.
“What?”
“Just picturing wrestling with you in the mud. Not quite what I imagined, but I could get into it.”
“Finchley! You’re not getting me in a bikini for some mud wrestling.”
“How about a bikini in general? Or are you more of a one-piece gal?”
“I,” she climbed out of her seat, “am going to stretch my legs since we’re here for a few minutes. Because it’s completely clear where your mind has gone.”
Gordon supposed it was.
There wasn’t room in the pilot’s seat, so he rose close behind her and followed. As soon as she stopped to open the cockpit door, he dropped into the more spacious aft-facing pilot’s seat and yanked her into his lap.
He covered her initial protest with a kiss.
She sighed against his kiss and then leaned harder into it, running a hand up around his neck. As he worked his way from her mouth down her neck, she lay her head back against the top of the radio console. With the tip of his nose he could feel her pulse quickening at the base of her neck.
He unzipped the front of her flightsuit and buried his face between her breasts, only the thin cotton of her t-shirt separating him from heaven.
“A man could lose himself right here forever and die happy.”
“In my cleavage?” Ripley’s laugh rippled against his face.
“Can you tell me a better place to be?”
In response she wrapped her arms about his head and he was overwhelmed with the sensation of being held—of being precisely where he belonged—lost in a deep, dark… “Hey!”
“Hey what?” Ripley voice was smooth and languid as she kissed the top of his head.
“Lost in the deep…”
“…cleavage of a dark Wonder Woman.”
“No,” he struggled to sit up and she finally let him.
Her expression was deeply puzzled by his abrupt change of mood. “No?”
“Well,” he looked down at her cleavage where his face had just been. Where one of his hands was still full of the finest breast he’d ever held. “Well, yes. But no.”
He could see Ripley getting irritated at the sudden change, but some thought had occurred to him. He was halfway back down to nuzzling her chest, when the rest of the non-Ripley thought came back.
“Lost in the deep, dark—”
“Which is what you’re supposed to be doing at this moment,” she growled. “Or letting go of my breast and letting me off your lap.”
“It’s an awfully nice breast. I would hate to let go.” He rubbed a thumb over the tip earning him a sharp hiss of frustration. “You have really amazing breasts, Ripley.”
“My best feature, I’m sure. Are you going to do something about it?”
“No,” Gordon looked out the tall aft-facing window. Directly behind the Aircrane, the side of the towering stalagmite sloped down to the jungle floor. But it didn’t stop there. Just beyond the base of the hill was a vast, deep opening. An entrance to the cave.
He took his hand off Ripley’s breast, which was hard to do because it really was such a very nice one, and grabbed the handheld microphone hooked at the aft pilot’s position.
“Steve, they’re in a cave. That’s why you’re having trouble finding them.”
“Huh!” Gordon could feel Steve thinking about it. “That would certainly change their signal pattern. Give me a minute.”
“Take all the time you need,” Gordon hung up the mic and placed his hand and face right back where they had been a moment before.
“Goddamn you, Finchley!” But no matter how much he was ticking her o
ff, Ripley couldn’t help but arch up against his mouth where he had buried it against her breast.
His hand wandered down the inside of her flightsuit, inside her shorts, and cupped her hard.
She couldn’t find enough leverage lying in his lap to press against all the parts of him that she wanted to press. But Gordon didn’t make her wait. The analyst who thought about caves and radio transmitters was gone. This was her deeply sexual man, the one who she wanted to take her apart. She clamped her arms around his head to make sure he didn’t go astray this time and prepared herself for an incredible ride.
This wasn’t going to be some short, fast shot at ecstasy. Actually, it would be, but somehow it was totally different from what she had done to him this morning. This morning she had used him, as if it somehow had been a smart idea to drive him away.
But Gordon wasn’t doing this for himself, to her. Just the opposite, he was doing it to her and yet for her. Somehow he was able to forgive her idiocy and just—
All thought blurred away for a moment as he found some wild new connection within her body.
And even as she strained against his mouth and hands, she knew how he had done it. How he’d forgiven her.
It was because he’d never felt there was anything to forgive. It was because he loved her.
“Too simple,” she murmured to herself. It was too simple that this is what love felt like. It felt like belonging.
It felt like rising up.
It felt like arching into—
“Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!”
It felt like that, but not in Vanessa’s voice.
“Merda!” Vanessa swore over the radio. “I found the mobile agent. But he has got me.”
Ripley considered warning her that the FCC wasn’t a big fan of profanity over the radio. But since the curse was in Italian, the FCC was in the US, and they were in Vietnam, she decided to leave well enough alone.
She also considered turning off the radio until Gordon had finished driving her completely mad with need and release.
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