Firestorm (2 page)

“Good to hear your voice, Lolo. Just wanted you to be aware that the winds are picking up a bit. You better hustle on to a rendezvous point with the New Mexicans and come on home.”

Reyne pulled out her own tiny, experimental anemometer and watched as the flaps whirred to life. The wind velocity
had
changed. She and Stan had been right.

Reyne eyed the distance to the ravine where the pines were and calculated how long it would take them to close it. “We’ll be done in an hour, Thomas. I spotted the New Mexicans an hour ago. We’re meeting ’em in the middle of this pretty little ravine.” She glanced at her worn map. “Starburst, it’s called. Over.”

“Got it. FYI—in case something goes awry—according to our chopper pilot, there’s a meadow just northwest of you. Say an eighth of a mile. Over.”

“Thanks, Thomas. Maybe we’ll have a little picnic dinner after we’re through.”

“You trying to make a date with me?”

Reyne smiled, picturing the weathered, grinning face and grizzled hair of Thomas Wagner. The older man, the first fire boss she had ever served under as a Forest Service rookie, relished giving her a hard time.

“That’s right, Thomas. It’d be a private occasion. A simple, romantic affair with just me and my crew of twenty.”

“Ah, well. I always say that more than two’s a crowd.”

“Don’t feel too bad. You can buy me a Coke when we come in tonight.”

“Promises, promises. Now quit flirting with the fire boss and get your hotshots back to those chains, girl. Over.”

“Work, work, work,” she groused, still smiling. “It’s only July, and I already need a vacation. Oldre out.”

Reyne slipped the radio into her belt loop and walked the line again, checking their progress. Stan shook his head as if in warning, lifting his face to the wind. Waves of smoke were blowing into their ranks now, separating digging member from digging member for seconds at a time.
It’s nothing
, she told herself.
Thomas’d call us off if there was anything to be concerned about. We’re almost there
.

They moved into the edge of the forested ravine called Starburst Gully. Reyne called her sawyers forward, carefully avoiding eye contact with Stan, knowing he thought they should leave. A team of three went to work with chain saws, cutting a swath of trees down before them. She set two groundpounders to work with fusees—small torches that lit the dried tinder behind them—creating a backfire to stop Oxbow from simply climbing trees and crossing their fire line.

Reyne occasionally thought she heard a dozer and surmised the
New Mexican team was near. Once they met, their lines would form an effective flank; Oxbow would be cut off, and hopefully their work would be done.

They drove deeper and deeper into Starburst Gully’s forest. Fifty feet. A hundred. Suddenly Reyne lifted her head and listened. The bulldozers were just around the corner. She waved the sawyers to silence. But the wind … the wind had definitely changed again.

Stan ran to her side, his face a silent mask of apprehension. She pulled out her anemometer and took another quick reading, her eyes flying to Stan’s. He’d known a second before she had. The wind had died for more than two minutes, then picked up speed as it changed direction, suddenly angling toward the gully instead of straight downhill.

Both feared the proverbial calm before the storm. It was the staple of a firefighter’s war stories. “When the wind dies, get the heck out of Dodge,” Thomas had said just the night before, regaling the troops with the story of a firestorm his own crew had survived.

“Crew Boss Oldre, Crew Boss Oldre,” Thomas’s voice urgently crackled, barely discernible over Oxbow’s growing growl. She lifted the radio to her ear to hear him.

“Yeah, Fire Boss, we know.
We know
.”

“Reyne, the New Mexicans have to be right there. Get together and get out of that ravine.”

“We’ve almost got this line tied in, Thomas!” She shouted to be heard over the fire. “Ten more minutes and we’ll have him. Over.”

“I don’t like it, Reyne, but you’re the one who can see it. By my wind-velocity reading, I’d wonder if you have those ten minutes. Over.”

“Maybe not,” she mumbled, not pressing the intercom button.
Her mind whirled as she struggled to make a decision.
Father! Father! Where are you? What should I do?
Her call guided the lives of twenty crew members. Many of them had families. All of them had parents who struggled to understand this fascination with fire, this need to go out each summer and fight it.

Reyne knew the story well. Her own parents had tried to be supportive but were obviously baffled each spring when she’d break the news that she was heading out to the fire lines after school was out. Now she was a graduate student studying fire science in the fall, winter, and spring. Come summertime, this was where she belonged. This was what she loved. Chasing the dragon. Slaying it. Celebrating afterward.

But being chased made her uneasy. It hadn’t happened much in her years on the line. As she studied Oxbow and the flames that gradually grew, climbing beyond their original two-to-five feet high, she stalled. They were
so
close to finishing this job. Maybe the wind would die in a few minutes and the alarm would be proven false. Or maybe it wouldn’t.

Reyne looked along the line again, counting heads through the smoke. Twenty, all accounted for. She glanced up at Stan, who still waited beside her, and then back to Oxbow. The fire was climbing trees now. No more time for stalling. They needed to get out, even if it meant giving in to the dragon this time.

She nodded curtly to Stan, and he began shouting, instantly understanding, summoning the team together. They assembled within a minute. As they gathered, Reyne radioed Thomas, telling him that the New Mexicans could still not be seen, but they had to be close. The smoke thickened as Oxbow drew near, groaning and screaming as sap-filled firs heated and exploded into flames.

Then the wind died and changed direction yet again.

“Oldre, come in. Oldre, come in,” came Thomas’s voice within a minute. “The line has hooked! I repeat:
The line has hooked
. Over.”

Reyne forced a calm edge to her tone, aware of the crew watching her. “I copy. Can you give me coordinates?”

“I don’t have current coordinates. But the New Mexicans are cut off. They’re heading for cover.”

“What’s your call, Thomas?”

“Looking tight. If I’m reading this right, I think your only option is to get to that meadow and take cover. Get moving and let me know your plan. Over.”

Reyne waved to the group, shouting over Oxbow’s growing roar. Embers floated down around them, glowing red-hot. Ashes settled in a thick layer on shoulders that were still for but a moment. “Let’s move!” she called, struggling to keep her voice in firm command, not give in to the sickening panic she felt inside. The crew broke from a fast walk to a jog, feeling the unspoken urgency.

The Lolo group followed Stan and her as they ran uphill in a diagonal line, in the general direction of the New Mexican crew’s fire line but above it, toward the meadow. They struggled under their heavy packs, but all were in peak condition. They had to be to make it as hotshots.

In five minutes they had reached the meadow, Oxbow not far behind them. The fire, growing louder and hotter by the second, was bearing down from the ridge as well as from below.

Reyne struggled to catch her breath, to resist giving in to lungs that begged her to cough and never quit. She knew that once she started it would be tough to stop, so she swallowed hard, concentrating on the twenty yellow, fire-retardant Nomex shirts that
collapsed on the hard, dry, bulbous clumps of grass that covered the meadow floor. Reyne counted the orange hard hats, each with a crew member’s name emblazoned on its front, not wanting to confuse her team with the New Mexican crew, who had also arrived.

There was Zeke Johnson, who was always quick to respond in a crisis. Over there were Haley Carlson and Josh and Nate, who worked together as smoothly as train wheels rolling over new tracks. Her eyes scanned the rest. Everyone was accounted for. Reyne left them and went looking for the New Mexican hotshot crew boss.

Jojo, a short, stocky Hopi tribesman with a wide grin and a nickname of untraceable origin, pushed his hard hat back and reached out to shake Reyne’s hand. “Good to see you, Oldre,” he said, smiling up at the tall woman. “Seems we got ourselves in a spot.”

“Seems that way, Jojo,” Reyne allowed in the easy give-and-take, traditional on the lines. She forced herself to remain as calm as Jojo appeared to be. They conferred together, then set the crews to preparing shelter sites.

Reyne felt none of the calm reserve that her voice depicted as she shouted orders. This was the reason they came. The thrill of adrenaline in the heat of battle. Fighting a monster that threatened forest or grasslands or homes.

Still, none wanted to lose their lives. In all her years of fighting fires, Reyne had never had to deploy the tiny firesafe pup tent that always hung from her waistband in its yellow pouch.

Each crew member wore one of the folded tents, always at the ready. They were all trained to deploy the four-pound structure in seconds, and each knew that they would have to pray if that was all that came between them and the thousand-degree heat of a runaway fire. Yet none really thought they’d actually have to use the tents.
Reyne could see it on their faces. Maybe clear a spot. But shaking out the tiny shelters and getting under them was very rare, even among seasoned veterans.

Reyne walked by her crew, inspecting each one’s progress, ignoring the few jaded members who mumbled this and that about “useless Forest Service regulations.” The most likely scenario would be that they would dig their holes to be prepared, then sit with helmets or packs in front of their faces and watch the fire roll by, their shelters undeployed after all. Reyne had sat out many fires in that manner, happy to have another war story to tell at the evening campfires.

She moved on to inspect the New Mexican team, since Jojo had gone out to take a last look at how the lines were holding. But even from where she stood, Reyne could tell the wind’s impact had been deadly.

Nearly three hundred feet below them, the fire was building, climbing Starburst’s trees and crowning, throwing a thick black column of smoke into the air. Oxbow had spent all morning and afternoon drying out the forest canopy. Now, with the aid of a new wind, he was climbing to claim his prey.

Jojo came running back, the ashen tone to his skin barely visible under the grime of a day’s fire. He had never even made it back to the place where the bulldozers had left for home base. But Reyne didn’t need to see his face or hear his breathless words. She knew by his expression, from the dread she seemed to sense.
O God, this is it, isn’t it? You’ve been trying to warn me!

The crew seemed to sense it too. The naysayers stopped grumbling, and they all dug in more earnestly, matching Reyne’s pace. The four sawyers who had no hand tools anxiously began pacing, waiting for a turn to dig their own safe haven.

Reyne glanced up worriedly and met Jojo’s gaze. The crew was making little progress. The meadow, choked with thick brush, resisted their tools. Men and women, strong from months of heavy physical labor, were only able to clear small spaces with their Pulaskis. The biggest clearing was two feet square.

Oxbow was coming down the pike. A great churning noise began, as if an old steam engine were nearing, chugging, chugging, chugging.

“Dig! Dig! Dig!” Reyne shouted, unable to disguise her concern any longer. “Dig in! Give it your shoulder!” Each member kept at it, sweat pouring down their blackened faces in tiny, shining rivulets.

But it was clearly hopeless. Fat glowing embers began falling on their meadow, igniting small smoldering fires that the crew quickly stomped out. Reyne kept at them, shouting like a drill sergeant and vaguely aware that Jojo was seeking an alternative or an escape for them all. Reyne looked up. Oxbow was beyond the closest line of trees, approaching fast.

“Backpacks!” she screamed over the fire’s roar. “Get rid of flammables!” All about her, hotshots threw out metal gasoline and oil bottles they carried to feed the saws and the flarelike fusees, flinging them away. On the outskirts, she saw veterans digging through rookies’ packs, taking care of them like irritated older siblings. They had left the fire line barely fifteen minutes before.

Reyne heard her radio and struggled to make sense of what was coming through. Then she recognized Jojo’s voice. “Up here! A road!” She glanced up and through the smoke saw him waving madly.

“Come on! Come on!” she screamed to be heard over the forest’s own mewling. Without hesitation she ran, knowing that to stay in
the meadow would be to end all their lives. Her crew ran with her. They reached the road—if it could be called that—thankful for at least the two ruts that were devoid of brush.

There was no time to dig away stray grasses. They had a minute, maybe seconds. They immediately began deploying the fire tents, madly wrestling the foil shelters with fingers that felt stiff and un-cooperative.

It wasn’t that they did not know how to use the tents. Each spring they spent hours training, learning how to use the corner straps with hands and feet, preparing to hold the narrow side flap down with elbows and knees.

But Oxbow had become a full-fledged firestorm, creating its own high-velocity winds and miniature weather pattern. Instead of rain, flaming pine cones pelted the ground. Instead of clouds, choking smoke filled the air. Instead of stormy breezes cooling their bodies, breathtaking heat robbed them of oxygen. In those conditions, shaking out the tiny folded tents, setting boots into foot straps, and ending up underneath the entire contraption was a daunting challenge.

The meadow behind them was afire.

All around her, hotshots were swearing, fumbling, not daring to watch the fire approach. But Reyne turned. Two walls of the fire met and surged even higher, a billowing wall of orange. The flames reached a hundred feet. Two hundred. She had not seen anything like it. As entrancing and electrifying as it was, she hoped never to see it again.
Dear Jesus. Dear God in heaven. Help us!
She turned to run.