Firestorm (22 page)

“Go,” she said quietly, turning from him.

“What?”

“I said go.” Her voice was a little stronger this time.

“Reyne, I can’t go without you really meaning what you’re saying.”

She turned back to him, gathering anguished fistfuls of his shirt in her hands as she spoke. “Logan, you obviously have to go—”

The phone rang, interrupting her speech. She ignored it, staring into his eyes. “You’re probably right. Now they’re calling me. And we have a job to do. You go and do yours, and I’ll do mine. But promise me—”

“Anything, Reyne.”

“Promise me you will take the extra second to make the wisest choice you know how.”

“I will, love. I’ll take extra care.” He grinned and pulled her to him while the phone rang for the seventh time. “My woman’s counting on me.”

Reyne let the tiniest smile edge her lips before leaving his embrace to answer the phone.

T
he call had been for Logan again, not her, with information on where he was to report, where his crew was, and what shape they were in. He had left immediately for the airstrip to welcome home his weary crew, help them clean, repair, and pack their equipment, and prepare them to head out again. They were gone in twenty-four hours.

The storms continued for days, and as predicted, the lightning touched off countless fires. Most were held in check by the rain, and because of the crazy antics of fires across the West and the chaos they were causing in the ICS, crews from New Mexico ended up fighting Montana fires while the Montanans flew to New Mexico to fight theirs. It was precisely what Logan railed against, Reyne thought; the bureaucracy often made incongruous decisions to play the game of jurisdiction and first rights. She did not envy her bosses and the choices they had to make.

By the time Logan left town, Reyne had taken herself off leave and received her own orders days later; she was to help manage a team outside Wenatchee in central Washington.

When she arrived, Reyne had to admit that it felt good to go back to work. Her last days with Beth and the time afterward with Matt and Hope and Beth’s parents had taken their toll, and concentrating on something tangible—their collective battle against the fire—came as a relief. She needed an enemy she could get hold of
and strangle, pouring out all the anger she felt inside. More than ever in her life, she needed to destroy the dragon.

First, however, she had to outsmart him. And that meant she had her work cut out for her. Already this fire had eaten up more than thirty thousand acres.

The fire camp was located on the south shore of Lake Chelan, normally a pleasant spot for campers and vacationers, with boating and sunning and swimming. Now the entire south end of the lake was surrounded by a huge tent city that housed more than three thousand firefighters.

Reyne had been to the lake once years before to visit Holden Village, a church camp on the north end. Campers had been picked up at the ferry landing, now just visible through the smoke, and dropped off at the camp, which Reyne even at sixteen had deemed “just this side of paradise.” But Holden Village had been evacuated two days before, and they all feared that there would be little left of the fifty-year-old refuge. The ferry had even been pressed into service to carry firefighters northward.

Reyne remembered giant mountains ringing the lake valley, mountains that plunged from high in the sky down into the blue black depths of the lake. Yet with all the smoke that choked the skies now, the mountains were obliterated. Reyne could barely see across the water and make out the other side, let alone the ridges that she knew towered high above.

She rolled up her sleeves and grabbed her duffel bag and briefcase. As usual, a rookie was waiting to show her to her tent.

In Central Oregon, Logan had been digging chains for five hours and was just wondering what he saw in this line of work when his hip radio crackled to life. “McCabe, this is headquarters. Come in.”

Logan wiped his brow and pulled the radio from his belt. “McCabe here, over.” He squinted, listening for the medical unit manager’s voice to come back over the sporadic connection.

“McCabe, we’ve got a jumper in trouble. He’s …” Their connection was breaking up. “He landed square … pretty much came right through his thigh … team is carrying him out … you meet him at these coordinates … clear a landing so we can evacuate him.”

Logan looked over his shoulder at his partner, Wyatt Franklin, a rookie from eastern Montana. He nodded, beckoning, pressed the intercom button again, checking to make sure he had understood the rendezvous coordinates, and then told headquarters that they would meet the team as requested.

He and Wyatt began moving right away. They had limited time to hike the two miles over the ridge, and they still had to clear a site in which the emergency helicopter could land.

Several hundred miles away Reyne went into action herself. The fire was nearing the picturesque German tourist town, Leavenworth, and across the mountains appeared to be closing in on Lake Chelan from several different directions. Three separate lightning fires had broken free of initial attempts to contain them, then gone on to join forces and wreak havoc. Within minutes of arrival, Reyne was ordered onto a helicopter to observe the three fronts firsthand and report back accordingly.

The short, stocky pilot introduced himself as Ray Firigno, looked her over appreciatively, and then handed her a headset so they
could talk over the noise. They shot upward and then tilted forty-five degrees, banking toward the west.

Ray nodded to the steaming natural hot springs just over the hill from camp. “Maybe you and me can take a dip after our shift ends,” he said suggestively.

“I don’t think so, Firigno,” she said. “Don’t think my boyfriend would like it.”
I wish Logan were here. A dip in a hot spring with him would be fun
.

Ray glanced over at her. “Reyne Oldre has a boyfriend? Since when?”

“Yeah, it’s possible. Just concentrate on the job at hand, will ya, Ray?” Reyne pushed away her own thoughts of Logan. Better not think about him right now. She needed to concentrate on the job at hand too.

Ray quieted and did as he was told, working to keep control of the chopper in the quirky winds stirred up by the fire. Within ten minutes the ride grew even more precarious, however, as the helicopter responded to the near-storm conditions created by the heat of the big front they were studying. Up and down they went, and Reyne had to will herself to focus on their task so that she would not lose her lunch. She took photo after photo, hoping to study them further back at base camp.

Reyne disliked this part of her job as a fire behaviorist, but such trips were often invaluable in deciphering the fire’s intentions. There had been many occasions where her advice to the command had been a key element in getting the fire put out. It was worth all the bouncing and the jolting and the smoke.

They hovered as near to the front line as they dared, within a quarter of a mile of the furious wall of flames. Then she nodded
curtly to Ray. He banked the chopper, and they headed to the second front.

Logan and Wyatt reached the ridge, coughing hard after their physical exertion in the smoke-laden, high mountain air. Within minutes, the other team arrived with the injured man. Two carried the makeshift stretcher—a tent held at each corner with sticks tied through knots—and the third carried the downed jumper’s pack alongside his own, a combined weight of over two hundred pounds.

“Glad to see you, McCabe,” Jill Anderson said, as soon as she spotted him from around a tree. They laid down the unconscious man, who moaned in pain, and Anderson rubbed her neck as she talked. “This is Ned Price. He caught some surprise down air and went straight into a grove of dead lodgepole pines. They were like huge impaling poles. One of the branches came straight through his thigh like a lance.”

Logan winced as he heard the story, and Ned groaned again. The stob remained where it had broken off—a two-foot section of limb that emerged on either side of his thigh.

“This lucky guy,” Jill continued, “somehow avoided hitting an artery. He was woozy and shocky, but he didn’t seem to be losing much blood. Still, we were afraid to move the stob in case it’s just blocking the artery. Thought we’d leave that to the guys on the medevac.”

“When did he pass out?” Logan asked.

“About half an hour ago.”

“Well, we’ve been working on this clearing for about an hour. As
soon as you all catch your breath, we could use your help. The chopper will be here at about 1600 hours.”

Anderson checked her watch. “We’ve got a whole hour, huh? Boy, nobody can ever call us loafers.”

Reyne was eating with the crew in the mess tent when she first heard of the injured smokejumper.

“The way I heard it,” one hotshot shouted over the din, “he had half a tree coming out of his stomach!”

People groaned and threw pieces of rolls and other food at the guy.

“No way. It was a tree through his arm!”

“His leg!”

Reyne’s heart was pounding, and she had lost all her appetite for the food on her plate.
Oh no, not again
.

“Please,” she said, leaning across the table to the woman in front of her. “Do you know the real story?”

The woman studied Reyne, undoubtedly recognizing the strange urgency on her face and in her voice. “Smokejumper. A boss, I think. Caught a crazy cross wind and some down air that blew him into some dead lodgepole. Impaled him through the thigh, as near as I can gather.”

Reyne sat back, feeling dizzy. Her companion leaned forward. “I think they got ’em out.”

“Where? Where was this?” Reyne managed to ask.

“Central Oregon, I guess. Somewhere outside Bend.”

R
eyne paced in front of the computers in the command center, waiting for any word about Logan or his crew, until the commander ordered her out. “Oldre, you’re off-duty, and you’re distracting those of us who are working this fire.

“I’ll send for you as soon as we hear,” he added as he ushered her to the door. “But right now you’re supposed to be getting some shuteye so you can be of use to me at 0600 hours.”

She stood outside the tent, sputtering, wanting to return despite the direct command. What if they didn’t watch the monitor for news of Logan? What if they didn’t let her know? She paced outside the command tent for a while. Then, when the commander caught her eye with a disapproving glance, she turned and walked to her tent. After pacing inside it for several moments, Reyne knew she had to get out. Get away. It might be a day or two before she found out about Logan anyway. But it was after midnight. Where could she go?

Suddenly the image of the shimmering hot springs appeared in her mind. She would go there and soak. But not with Ray. Alone. Spend some quiet time with God. Just the thought of it was like a balm to her irritated soul, and she quickly changed into shorts and a T-shirt.