Wild Fire

by M. L. Buchman

  Their location flashed up on the heat map that Steve had linked to the cockpit.

  If Ripley ever needed to know how to act after a crash, she’d behave like Gordon or Vanessa. It still didn’t seem right that they weren’t together. But if they were, she wouldn’t be with Gordon, so she wasn’t complaining.

  It took forever to claw their way clear of the smoke. Even straight up altitude didn’t break them free, they were over the heart of the fire and the smoke column had reached tens of thousands of feet up into the jet stream.

  Finally clear of the smoke, she could see that twilight was already upon them.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Ripley raced the Aircrane toward the barricaded cave and tried not to think about Gordon sitting in the MD helo dangling on the ropes beneath her.

  “Do you have eyes on him, Tham Chau?”

  “Yes, two of them. An odd way to ask.”

  Ripley didn’t take time to explain the military idiom.

  “He is in the pilot’s seat. I have waved,” she hissed in pain. “But my injured arm wishes I hadn’t done that. I think it is broken. But he has waved back.”

  Even Tham Chau was more polite than herself. She was the wild beast who punched her copilot because…what was it Janet had said? Do you really love Gordon that much?

  Ripley laughed. She couldn’t help herself. It was so obvious that everyone except her could see it. Well, she did now. And all they had to do was survive to see what else there might be.

  “Along that river,” Vanessa pointed.

  This was not one of the big open stretches of the Son River. They were following the winding course of a narrow tributary of the Chay as it twisted between hillsides. Tall trees reached out from either side as if hoping to ensnare her rotors, crash her, and end this whole fiasco.

  She wanted to keep low, but she had a man and a helicopter dangling seventy feet below her. At each turn she had to be careful of the amount of swing the MD helicopter took. It was a pendulum at the other end of her line. Slewing him sideways into a tree was a real possibility.

  It was getting so close to full dark that she had Vanessa take the controls for a moment.

  “Do not hit the hoist release on the cyclic,” Ripley warned her. “That will open the tank doors and release the MD.”

  “I will not lose him for you,” Vanessa answered the real reason for the order.

  Ripley pulled out the night-vision goggles and clipped them onto the front of her helmet. Clicking them on turned the world into brilliant green relief. There was still plenty of ambient light for the image intensifiers to enhance. Ripley had used them for night drops any number of times, but she had never tried to fly up the gut of a narrow river valley using them.

  Ripley turned off the running lights before she took back the flight controls. If the bad guys didn’t have night vision, she would be invisible. The bullet holes in the MD helicopter had been instructive.

  Whoever lurked in that cave had wanted to be close to the fire. The main leg, the one they had egged along with their thermite booby traps, would pass close above their hideout. The bulk of the fire that still burned to the west of that had entered the park itself. The fire’s head had been beaten back and narrowed to several times smaller than its original area, but the front was still a kilometer-wide behemoth eating a path through the jungle.

  They swung around the final curve in the river and she could see it. An unnatural amount of heat clarified the image all the more in her goggles.

  A great wall had been built across the mouth of this secluded cave. Big enough to cover the twenty-foot high entrance. Now to hope that it wasn’t strong enough to resist their battering ram.

  “Now, Gordon,” she transmitted over the encrypted link.

  “Already on it.”

  Ripley waited, wishing she could remove a hand from the controls to wipe the sweat off her palms.

  “Fuses lit,” he announced.

  At a hundred miles an hour, this was going to be a brutal maneuver. The timing was trickier than any water drop on a wildfire. She tried juggling all of the unpredictable factors in her head, but couldn’t.

  The river flowed close by the cave itself; several boats were tied up near the entrance. The jungle-covered cliffs rose to either side. She was aimed directly at the massive stone wall above the cave entrance.

  “You better be climbing fast,” she told Gordon, not daring to distract herself with the radio button.

  Three hundred feet.

  Two hundred.

  One fifty.

  At just a hundred feet from the cave wall, she let her instincts take over. She watched, like a passive observer, as all of her years of experience took control of Diana Prince.

  Hard up on the collective—maximum power.

  Full back on the cyclic—tipping the Aircrane’s nose high in the air. It was like slamming on the brakes full force.

  Looking down between her feet—out the part of her lower windshield not obscured by knees and rudder pedals—she could see Vanessa’s ruined MD 530 helicopter swinging forward at the end of its rope. Their precious pendulum.

  Just above it, she could see Gordon swinging on the end of his own knotted rope like a Cirque du Soleil trapeze artist. At least he was out of the MD.

  The moment before both man and helicopter reached the peak of their arc, she pressed the tank release button.

  For a moment it seemed as if nothing happened. She feared that it had all gone wrong. A single snag in the lines holding the helicopter would be fatal at this moment. Failure of their attack, and probably their flight as well.

  But the MD continued its swinging arc, taking one last flight toward the false wall across the cave’s entrance.

  With its release, Diana Prince decelerated even faster, backward and away from the cliff face—now no more than a dozen meters from her wheels.

  As she backed up and away, she continued to watch through her night-vision goggles. The crystal-green view showed the heat radiating out all the doors and windows of the MD helicopter—the magnesium ribbons that Gordon had lit fired off. The thermite in each of the stacked buckets began to burn in a brilliant white-red conflagration.

  Gouts of flame shot through the hull just moments before it completed its arc and slammed into the cave’s front wall.

  Fifteen hundred pounds of MD helicopter and thermite reaction smashed through the door. It blew inward. As the burning helicopter tumbled deeper into the cave, it spewed and scattered unquenchable fire in all directions. Deep in the cave the fuel tank burned through; an explosion turned the helo into a thousand pieces of burning shrapnel.

  A dozen or more people raced out of the cave, heading for the boats.

  The conflagration grew as more and more of the thermite reaction took hold. Soon the cave entrance was blindingly bright and she had to look away.

  A thousand meters back and five hundred up from the burning cave, she slowed to a hover. Now the fear slammed into her.

  “Is he—”

  “He is alive,” Tham Chau assured her as she opened the back door and let in the roar of the two engines and the heavy rotor.

  “You sure?” Gordon’s familiar voice asked.

  At first Ripley didn’t cry. It just wasn’t in her, never had been, except that one time in Gordon’s arms.

  But hearing Gordon ask the same question as when they’d rescued him from an Oregon lake, she couldn’t help herself. Tears and laughter spilled from her simultaneously and she couldn’t stop them.

  When his strong hand rested on her shoulder, she pinned it there with the side of her helmet.

  “Well,” and she managed to say the Galaxy Quest line in unison with him this time. “That was a hell of a thing.” His nervous laugh reassured her more than anything else. The mighty hero who had just shattered the bad guys’ hideout in the middle of a Vietnamese jungle was still the same man she’d first met.

  He swung over the jump seat and sat down between the two pilot’s seats.
Again the connection of his hand on her shoulder. She didn’t begrudge him for a second placing a hand on Vanessa’s shoulder as well. Her face too was tear-tracked.

  “Did it work?” Gordon asked and peered forward.

  “You did not see?” Vanessa handed him a set of NVGs.

  “I was a little busy trying not to get tossed along with the helicopter.”

  He clicked the NVGs into place and turned them on.

  The front wall across the cave mouth must have been only for show, cloth painted like rock. Vanessa’s MD 530 had tumbled far into the cave, spewing fire in every direction as it went.

  The people from the cave, at least any survivors, had piled into a trio of speedboats and were racing down along the river.

  “How do we stop them?”

  “We must capture them,” Tham Chau spoke up.

  Gordon didn’t know how four people in an unarmed helicopter were going to capture three boatloads of bad guys. Someone was bound to have a weapon and probably a lot nastier than the handgun they’d used on the ranch to put down the occasional injured cow.

  “This one is mine,” Ripley announced as she rolled Diana Prince to fly downstream and began giving orders for Tham Chau to pass on to her army troops.

  Less than a mile downstream, at a wide spot in the river, Ripley again turned to face sharply upstream. There was a long, straight stretch here and she flew down to ten feet above the water and lowered the sea snorkel.

  Gordon watched as she swept up fifteen hundred gallons of water before the first boat appeared from the jungle-shrouded upper stretch of the river.

  She continued flying as if she didn’t see them.

  “Look out!” Gordon couldn’t believe she didn’t see it. “You’re going to—”

  But it was too late!

  The long strut of the sea snorkel impacted the first boat solidly in the square bow. There was hardly a jolt as the wide dive plane at the base of the strut tore the boat apart, then sheared itself off (exactly as Ripley had told him it was designed to do if it hit a log).

  Above the second boat, Ripley released her load of water in a massive salvo of her entire load. Six tons of water crashed down on the small boat, sinking it instantly.

  The third boat tried to swing wide.

  As calmly as could be, Ripley veered to match their new course.

  He barely saw the gesture as she released the pond snorkel. Unlike the sea snorkel strut that was gently lowered, then raised for each usage, the pond snorkel could only be released once per flight; after that it was simply down.

  He looked back in time to see the latch let go of the pump at the end of the twenty-foot-long, ten-inch-across reinforced hose. The five-hundred-pound pump head swung down and shattered the third boat with a bullseye strike.

  “Oopsie!” Ripley said softly as she eased up on the collective to observe her handiwork.

  The survivors—probably shell-shocked into near paralysis—floated along helplessly in the current.

  Around the next bend, the river widened, shoaled, and slowed. One of Tham Chau’s firefighting teams dragged the arsonists one by one out of the water. If they’d had their boats and guns, they might have raced through and managed to disappear somewhere downstream; but not one of them escaped the firefighters who had fought the fire for two weeks. Especially not after they’d been told exactly who was floating downriver toward them. They had been told not to kill the perpetrators, but he did wonder quite how battered they would be by the time they reached interrogation.

  Oddly, he didn’t feel any pity.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “Knew you still had some tricks up your sleeve!”

  Despite his being dressed in casual slacks and a plain men’s shirt, Ripley resisted the desire to do something unkind to Rear Admiral Parker. They were all squatting in the back of Firehawk Oh-one reviewing the footage that Steve had captured on the drone’s night-vision cameras. Ripley wasn’t going to admit anything out loud, but she was pretty damned pleased with herself.

  It had taken two more days to beat the fire, but without someone egging it along, it hadn’t taken long to kill off the last heads of the wildfire.

  She’d personally made a point of checking on the doline jungle of Son Doong Cave several times during the firefight and found one other fire there that she nipped quickly enough. Not having a replacement wing foil for the strut of the sea snorkel, she’d been relegated to the slower suction of the pond snorkel—which hadn’t even been dented as it destroyed the arsonists’ third boat.

  Her most surreal memory of the last days of that firefight was putting out that doline fire. The tank of water she’d been carrying hadn’t been quite enough to quench it. So, she’d flown into the massive opening in the side of the cavern, actually hovering inside the cave over a broad underground pond complete with a sand beach. There she’d pumped up another tankload to finish off the fire.

  Brad had been flying beside her.

  Gordon had been aboard Mickey’s 212.

  But she wished he’d been there. Wished she had a bikini so that they could have swum together in that underground pool and made love on the sandy beach inside a cave in the middle of the Vietnamese jungle.

  There was a precious quality to their victory as a team that Admiral Parker’s overly-pleased manner was rubbing the wrong way. He acted as if he had arranged everything and that the firefighting miracle that MHA had achieved was none of their doing. Not Vanessa being shot at, not Gordon’s insightful choices and impossible bravery, and not her use of an Erickson Aircrane as a weapon of war.

  For that’s what this was…or rather had been. It was an act of war by Laos against Vietnam. If it had been her country that was crisscrossed with great slashes of black char, she’d have invaded the bastards. Jungle wasn’t like the US and Australian forests. Wildfire was not a part of the natural plant life cycle. It might take generations for these scars on the landscape to heal.

  But the Vietnamese had proven why they were the diplomats and she wasn’t. They had obtained confessions of high military ranks and uncovered proof of the approval by a deputy prime minister and several cabinet members of the socialist party’s leadership—and turned the whole thing over to the ASEAN and UN tribunals.

  “Glad to have been of service, sir,” Gordon said, saving Ripley from achieving personal disgrace by chewing out a rear admiral for his arrogance.

  “It’s good to know who I can count on.” He shook Gordon’s hand, then gave her a sharp salute. “Lieutenant.”

  Parker then earned Ripley’s respect by ignoring Mark Henderson’s outstretched hand and instead punching him on the arm and saying, “Hug Emily for me.” A moment later he was gone. The last words she could hear as Parker walked away in the company of Tham Chau were, “So, Major General Vo. What’s your analysis of…”

  Ripley glanced at Gordon, but he hadn’t heard it. That meant that Tham Chau, with her arm still in a sling, was the Vietnamese Army equivalent of a rear admiral. Now there was a shocker.

  Dong Hoi Airport was quiet now. No passenger planes stood at the small terminal.

  The five remaining helicopters were parked neatly around the paved apron. The drone was down and packed, even the service container was closed up.

  “What now?” Ripley asked as Gordon slipped his hand into hers.

  “Don’t really know.”

  “Now,” Mark said. “Now we go home.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The quiet start to the Australian fire season had continued while they were chasing arsonists through the Vietnamese jungle. There was no need for them to return. Gordon wondered if there’d ever been a reason for them to go.

  The only interesting part of the whole journey home had been while the helicopters were being reloaded onto the Antonov An-124s at Noi Bai International Airport. They’d flown up to Hanoi that morning because Dong Hoi’s runway wasn’t rated for the heavy wheel load of the massive jets.

  He’d been sitting with Rip
ley on the edge of the front ramp of the Antonov, trying to escape the tropical sun. The massive curve of the raised nose cone to allow access to the aircraft’s cargo hold made the most ridiculous sun parasol Gordon had ever seen: twenty feet across and two stories above them. In its shade, they’d been quietly discussing what was going to happen to them once they were back in the US. Would her contract be terminated? If so, which direction would she go? Would he go? Would they only be together off-season? The questions had pointlessly whirled and snarled for lack of information. Or—

  A man in his fifties walked straight up her. He wasn’t tall or heavy, but he was solid. His neat white beard framed his tan face, which revealed nothing about what he was thinking. He gave the impression that he was about to have a truly serious talk with someone and it wasn’t going to turn out well for whoever he was addressing.

  Ripley jolted to her feet.

  “Randy?” Ripley took a hesitant step toward the man. “What are you doing here?”

  She’d mentioned her boss’ name at Erickson on occasion. This must be him.

  “Me?” He sounded pissed as hell. “Came into Hanoi on a passenger jet. I’m transiting to Australia. Two of Erickson’s Aircranes, Elvis and The Incredible Hulk, are contracted Down Under this season. But apparently I’m here because some idiot borrowed a Beechcraft King Air a couple weeks ago and the Australians want it back. I have no idea why it’s up to me to get it back to them, but it is. You know how I hate fixed-wing aircraft. Besides, I’m supposed to talk with you.”

  “With me?”

  Gordon was amazed at the squeak of surprise in Ripley’s voice. She’d never struck him as a woman who squeaked.

  “At least I think so. I can’t make heads or tails of this paperwork, I just know that it requires your signature. Here,” he shoved it at her.

  Gordon rose to his feet to look over Ripley’s shoulder while she puzzled at it.

  “Are you as much trouble as she is?” The man asked sourly.