Flash of Fire (25 page)

And for some reason, that thought didn't scare the shit out of her.

Day Two of the fire had been brutal, there was no other way Mickey could think to describe it.

Robin had pulled all four helos to the head of the fire to try and protect the ground crews, which meant flying in and out of narrow holes in the smoke through rough, superheated air. And not hitting each other.

For perhaps the first time on a fire, Mickey knew he couldn't have managed the flying alone. He did the firefighting, but when Tim shoved at the controls, Mickey let him have his way, because Tim was monitoring the air traffic. With no ICA up in a control plane and the North Koreans hovering so near, it was barely controlled mayhem.

He had no idea how Vern was coping because Denise had been grounded so that she could service the helicopters as they rotated out of the fire and back for fuel. Air filters, pump problems due to the silt-laden water, windscreens so coated with sticky ash inside and out that they might as well been night flying for all the visibility they had. Strained air-conditioning systems fought ash and heat to make the cabins at least tolerable, but still they were constantly restocking liter bottles of water.

MHA's efforts kept the wildfire from blowing up and devouring a hundred thousand acres, but they weren't able to hold it at bay either.

When they woke up for Day Three, Mickey figured they had twenty thousand acres of Black, mostly, and ten thousand of fire—fifteen square miles. Ten of that was merely burning, but five of that was hot and looking to spread. If they didn't stop it today, it would be solidly into the Kumgang Tourist Region. Unlike so much of North Korea, Kumgang had not been clear-cut for firewood and stripped of all game. It was one of the few stands of timber remaining in a country that had harvested sixty percent of their forests in the last dozen years and lost much of the rest to uncontrolled wildfire.

“What the hell are we doing here?” Mickey yanked on his Nomex pants.

Robin just shook her head as she dragged on the clothes she'd been wearing yesterday. They had some fresh gear in their packs, but it just didn't seem worth the trouble of digging it out.

“Shit!” Robin's curse had him looking over. “I didn't even get any wake-up sex.”

“Hell, Robin, we barely made it through going-to-bed sex last night.” It had been fun, way too fast, and they'd fallen asleep within moments of rolling apart.

“I've been robbed,” she protested as she continued dragging on her clothes. “A girl goes and lets herself get all soft and mushy on a guy and she doesn't even get wake-up sex!”

Still just three-quarters dressed, he pulled her into his lap.

“What? We don't have time, Mickey. I was just whining.”

He kept her across his legs when she struggled to free herself.

“What's with the cat-ate-the-canary grin?” She squinted those startling blue eyes at him and inspected his face from inches away. “Did you get wake-up sex and I didn't? Who was she?”

“You got all soft and mushy about me?”

She looked at him aghast. “No, about Hugh Jackman. He's the guy I want wake-up sex with. Now unhand me, you cad.”

And he had to. They didn't have time no matter how fast they were, so he kissed her and she melted against him with a “Damn you!” that was very satisfying and offered him great hope for the future.

But when they hit the air twenty minutes and a folded-over stack of pancakes with bacon “sandwich” later, he couldn't find much to be cheerful about.

“I have a new strategy,” Carly had said at the morning briefing—the three-minute car ride from hotel to airport.

“Bring it on,” Robin said with more enthusiasm than Mickey could find.

“It looks like the
other
mission”—she was circumspect even in the privacy of the car—“is a flameout. There's only the fire now and this has to be our last day on it.”

Robin glanced at Mickey, Jeannie, and Vern. The lead pilots had all crammed in with Carly for the drive over.

“The storm system, once upon a time—like yesterday—was headed for China. Overnight it has decided to stay at sea. It's barreling down on the southern coast already. In a dozen hours, we'll start feeling the effects up here at the DMZ. Full-blown by sunset. Category Two to Three, so figure hundred-mile-per-hour winds.”

“That's a strategy?” Mickey protested.

“That's a goddamn nightmare.” Robin backed him up.

“No. The strategy is no longer to kill the fire. I just need you to delay it. Delay it until the rain front that's coming ashore with the typhoon can get here and snuff this bastard.”

Mickey knew there was nothing Carly despised as much as a wildfire that wouldn't lay down. Fire had taken her father and a fiancé who came before Steve. “Well, that is a new strategy,” Mickey agreed. “Intentionally putting out a wildfire with a typhoon. I wonder if that's ever been done before.”

“The challenge is,” she continued as they pulled up beside the helicopters, “the winds will arrive before the rain. You have to hold the fire in place until the rain arrives, or it will drive the fire straight up to the Russian border.”

“Oh joy,” Robin commented drily as the car arrived, and she jumped out to head over to Preflight Firehawk One.

Mickey met Tim at the Twin 212 and filled him in as they climbed aloft.

“Well, bro. It's gonna be one hell of ride.” Tim held the collective with his left hand and Mickey held the cyclic with his right. They high-fived with their free hands.

“Hell of a ride,” Mickey acknowledged.

Like the emotional roller coaster of Robin Harrow. It was so good right now that he couldn't imagine it going bad again. But she'd made “no promises” absolutely clear and Mickey didn't doubt that Robin was a woman of her word.

* * *

Robin could think of plenty of foul words to say but didn't have time to say them.

The early edge of the storm winds had hit them shortly before the break for lunch. Which meant no break for lunch. She and Lola had taken turns on the flight controls so that they could each wolf down a couple energy bars and a bizarre-tasting sports drink from Japan with the unlikely name Pocari Sweat.

The fire bucked and spewed.

The North Korean escort helos backed off as the winds picked up. Actually, they'd backed away after her third complaint yesterday. One of the pilots managed to slip in an apology of “orders” in the middle of one of his messages. Their shadows now flew a quarter of a mile away.

To make up for that, the North Korean commanders had added a monitoring plane—Lola identified it as a 1950s-era MiG-21. All Robin cared about was that it was a very nasty-looking jet fighter that raced back and forth along the line behind their helicopters. It often passed tipped to the side, so that she could see the four air-to-air missiles on its belly. That it occasionally made the pass at supersonic speeds and slashed by with a sonic boom easily audible over the sound of her own helicopter only made it worse.

Without Lola's steadying presence, Robin might well have ordered them all back to the south and to hell with the fire and to hell with the President.

Then the fire jumped the line they'd been holding and started a fresh blaze. It trapped a group of forty or fifty of the ground crew, burning from both sides at once.

Her request for permission to land and extract them was summarily denied.

So they fought the battle, dedicating all four choppers to punching a lane for the ground crew to race along only moments before the jaws of the fire closed over their narrow space.

And while they'd been doing that, the northwest flank had jumped a ridgeline that they hadn't been there to hold, and the battle was now on there.

The scene grew more chaotic as they shifted deeper into North Korea. A dozen miles in, Steve's drone could no longer get a good angle on what was happening on the front. Carly began asking for particular flight lines so that she could watch through the helo's cameras. Robin did her best not to think about the mess Carly was facing: a wildfire, a poor-quality map of North Korea over uncertain terrain, and a scattering of dizzying images.

She had enough dizzying images of her own, thank you very much.

Mickey got right down into the flames to hit a particular spot fire. He wasn't actually in the flames, but it certainly looked as if he was. That he carried less than half the water of a Firehawk didn't appear to phase him in the slightest or decrease his usefulness. He slipped his helo into tight places and nailed burns that she wouldn't have trusted herself and her less-agile Firehawk to mess with.

She brought the hammer, but he often brought the finishing tap to make sure a particular spot was nailed down hard.

It was too much like their relationship to be comfortable.

I love you.

Total chaos from Robin Harrow's emotions that were never designed to process such a statement.

I'm going to be so steady and reliable that you trust me anyway.

And goddamn it, it was working!

Robin felt battered from a hundred directions, and her relationship with Mickey was oddly nowhere near the top of that list. But that was only because that list was so full.

Four helos she had to keep safe.

Four North Korean helicopters, one shadow for each of their craft, plus that stupid MiG-21 that kept booming by with alarming regularity.

An ineffective ground crew that she couldn't talk to—constantly in the wrong place and dangerously exposed.

Carly demanding imaging information and visual confirmations.

Mark's ICA instructions that she then had to alter as necessary and turn into flight instructions for her team.

Rotation schedules on the refueling back at Yangyang International so that Denise was never confronted with two aircraft that needed work at the same moment.

Oh yeah, an approaching typhoon.

Mickey was the least of her problems. Which only confused her all the more. How had the man become so important to her that she was constantly aware of where and how he was flying?

She used one of the rotation switches to shift the team around, shifting back to the helicopter pairing they'd used in Alaska: Vern and Mickey, Jeannie and herself. It didn't make her think any less about Mickey, but it did ease the workload some as Mickey took on whole sections of the fire with only the vaguest of instructions.

* * *

Mickey shifted his battle tactics as he and Vern beat against the northeast corner of the fire. If this was a holding action and they were merely waiting for the rains to arrive, then killing the fire was no longer the top priority.

Harnessing it, steering it, was what became the goal.

It didn't matter if the fire shot up a particular valley, as long as it was one with no village at the head of it. It could climb the ridgeline in northeast grid 3-17, but it couldn't slop over into 3-18 because of a particular scenic waterfall in the Kumgang National Tourist Region that drew many tourists. And tourist money.

The ground crews were concentrated to the northeast, in the direction of the park and Kumgang Mountain itself. So his method of driving the fire north and west also helped to protect them.

“Damn, bro.” Tim was working mainly as a spotter, though Mickey could also rely on him to do an accurate drop when he himself was too busy with instructions from Robin. Tim still didn't have the complexities of fire chatter down when she kept asking for details of his area of the fire battle.

And then she'd come back with a brilliant line of attack.

Robin was an amazing pilot, but she couldn't read fires that well yet and was constantly asking for more information.

Hell, Mickey couldn't read this fire that well himself.

He could feel Carly pulling all of their strings and he was totally thankful for it.

“What?” Mickey finally found a moment to respond to Tim's exclamation as they hovered low over a river and snorkeled up a quick 450 gallons.

“I think I'm looking forward to the peace and quiet of getting back to a battlefield, where just the people are shooting at you.”

At the moment, they were fighting their way through a stand of sappy Japanese red pine. The highly flammable trees had invited the fire in, and once they were about fifty feet behind the line, they were superheated enough to explode. Typically they threw only clouds of sparks, but occasionally they launched branches or whole trees into the climbing column of fire-driven winds. Fighting the leading edge of the fire, it wasn't at all unusual to see fifty feet or more of a tree go shooting by.

“On a Montana fire last year, I was hovering outside of a mountain drop zone. A fire roller developed just as Vern entered it. None of us had never seen anything like it. Flipped him over in the air and punched a five-inch branch right through his fuselage. We still don't know how he came out of that one alive.” Mickey double-checked escort helos, Vern's position, exploding trees, and cliff walls, then ducked in for another run at the fire.

“Definitely gonna feel lucky next time I'm flying in somewhere bad. Why didn't you ever go military? You really bring it, my friend.” Tim triggered the load smack on target as Mickey listened to Robin's latest chatter, but it was all to Jeannie.

Mickey didn't have a good answer for Tim. “Never thought about military really. I got my helo license as early as I could. There was a two-year combined college-and-aviation program right in my hometown of Bend, Oregon. I did the whole early start while I was still in high school thing. MHA swept me in right out of school.”

“Well, you're good enough to have gone the distance.” Then Tim called, “Goose!”

Like a game of Duck-Duck-Goose, Tim had taken to calling the racing North Korean MiG-21 “Goose” every time it ripped pointlessly by in the background.

Mickey snorkeled up a fresh load of water and returned to the fire while he thought about it.

The distance
to someone like Tim meant that Mickey was good enough to have gone Night Stalker, because nothing else was far enough. He liked the way that sounded.