Flash of Fire (3 page)

Mickey had never thought about getting serious with a girl, not really, until he'd first seen Mark and Emily together when they took over the outfit three seasons back. Joke was Emily Beale was still showing her mama bear spine of steel; Mark was the one who was so mushy around her it made you wonder if he was the one dosed with massive waves of pregnancy hormones rather than his wife.

Of course, thinking about getting serious with a girl versus actually doing it…well, that was something he'd do as soon as he found the right girl. Maybe.

He'd only been at his sister's wedding for four days but totally missed the new pilot's eval and training process. It had happened so fast. That had to be some amazing pilot to take the lead slot. He was sorry he'd missed the action; watching the candidates roll through camp had been amusing. Some of the candidates, especially the high-hour pilots, invariably male, would get really torqued when a beautiful, pregnant woman showed them the road home.

Of course Emily had never told them she was an Army Captain with the Night Stalkers Special Operations helicopter regiment. Or had she been Major? Emily and Mark rarely talked about their military backgrounds. It didn't matter. They were the two best pilots Mickey had ever flown with.

For more serious possibilities, Mickey had his eye on the lovely yet shy Vanessa, who flew one of MHA's little MD500s. But it never hurt a guy to look around.

A shift in the jostling smokies and Mickey got his first good look at the newcomer.

Her short plume of white-blond hair that shagged its way to her collar shone in the low-angle morning sunlight. She stood bone straight, which either meant ballerina or maybe workout instructor. She didn't look like any ballerina he'd ever seen on one of those TV shows Sis loved—
Nutcracker
every damn Christmas like religion. She might be long and lean, but she was no waiflike frail flower either. The pilot had shining, blue eyes and high cheekbones on an elegant face that went well with the choppy haircut.

She looked right at Mark, not shying off despite his reprimand for being late, which meant balls of steel. Metaphorically. Even though she had her flight jacket shrugged on and he couldn't see much of the figure beneath, there was no question of a hundred-percent babe.

“Told you she was hot shit!” Gordon leaned over to whisper in his ear.

“No ring or tan line on the finger.” Mickey played along as she raised her energy bar to bite off another chunk.

“She doesn't walk like a married person.”

Mickey Hamilton had missed her walk. He'd make sure to watch until she moved again.

He was tempted to ask Gordon how a married woman walked just to see what his friend came up with.

To pass the time, Akbar and the other smokies renewed their hot debate over which would eat a tree first. Their shifting positions exposed Vanessa standing beyond them, just a step away from the newbie.

A soft-spoken and dazzling brunette right out of an Italian travel magazine to one side.

To the other, a slender, blond Anne Heche look-alike from that movie on the island with Harrison Ford and a power stance straight from Angelina Jolie.

Side-by-side comparison of the two women during a summer sunrise, with a fire on the way. His day was off to an exceptional start.

“What's her name?”

Gordon cursed. “Thought you were after Vanessa. I was gonna have a clear shot at…”

“Buddy, she'd eat your lunch.” And by the look of her, she would.

Gordon was too decent a guy at heart for someone who looked as tough as the newcomer did.

“Besides, I
am
thinking about Vanessa. She just doesn't appear to be thinking about me so much.” Hurt to admit, but it was true. His attempts at charm had produced exactly no results. Yet. He could be patient when a woman looked as good as she did, and his ego wasn't ready to admit defeat. Yet. At least not in front of his buddy.

“In other words,
she
ate
your
lunch. I thought everybody fell for the Mr. Northwest outdoors guide.”

“Dad is the adventure guide. And it doesn't mean that. It means—” Mickey stopped.

The leaders of MHA were done with their conference.

Besides, it meant exactly that, but he still didn't want to admit it. Not to Gordon. Not to himself. Vanessa had a real spine under that quiet exterior, which only made her all the more attractive for what good it did him. It wasn't that the vibe was off or whatever it was that women said. It just hadn't…clicked for him. Or he hadn't clicked for her?

But watching her side by side with the new recruit, he was suddenly glad that nothing had clicked. The blond was spectacular. Suddenly all of his some girl, someday talk didn't seem quite so remote.

“It seems,” Mark called out over the assembled pilots and the twenty smokejumpers of MHA, “that there has been a new ‘export' problem and they've asked us to stop it from happening.”

Mickey looked at Gordon, who only shrugged. Even Akbar, the lead smokie, was looking a bit lost and he always had the inside scoop.

“I thought export problems was what the Customs Service was for,” some wag shouted from back in the crowd.

“Next you heli-pilots will be trimming trees and inspecting power lines,” a smokejumper called out, and others laughed.

“We'll start using smokies for express delivery of online shopping parcels,” Mickey shouted back, and the laughter grew. “About all they're good for anyway. Real battle is from the sky.”

There were a lot of tasks best done by helicopters, but not a one of them was as important or as hazardous as fighting wildfire.

Only the best of them flew to fire. And only the truly exceptional flew for MHA.

Which had Mickey looking toward the new blond again, as Vern riposted the next smokejumper tease.

Ballerina or workout instructor didn't get you in the cockpit of an MHA Firehawk. And especially not the lead ship. To do that, she had to be fantastic. So what did she bring?

At that moment, she turned to look at him.

* * *

Robin concentrated on not shifting foot to foot while she waited. Would the new commander hold her first-day tardiness against her? For getting lost in the goddamn rabbit warren of a barracks? And then gawking like a schoolgirl at the trees and the drone launcher and the line of Firehawks and…

The men.

Enough time had passed that everyone should have stopped staring at her by now and she could turn to scan the crowd. Time to assess just who she'd signed up with.

And the first place she looked, there was a guy staring at her from the far side of the crowd. No one else, just him.

And then another, whom she vaguely remembered meeting yesterday, looked over the man's shoulder. No comparison.

Blue eyes, short—almost crew-cut short—brown hair, and one of those friendly faces that looked like it smiled too easily and too often.

At the truck stop, they were the one kind of guy you could never figure out. The ham-handed ones were easy to spot and all of the women knew to look for the extra pair of straws that were always dropped along the outside edge of such tables, a clear sign that “This table sucks.”

Most of the truckers were fine, decent guys, and there were a lot of couples rolling down the roads, way more than in Mom's youth. She'd been able to pick out any of those types easily by the time she was ten and wiping down tables after school.

But then there were the ones like this guy on the far side of the crowd. Flying solo, looking nice…very nice, and wholly unreadable. Mr. Nice Guy or Mr. Jerk? It was hard to tell, because at the moment, he had a rather bug-zapped expression.

* * *

Mickey tried to look away, but that
so
wasn't working. Her eyes were a brilliant blue, the color of the morning sky now shining above them. High cheekbones and a chin that made him wonder what it would feel like to run his fingers along its lines.

“Told ya,” Gordon whispered behind him.

Mickey offered her a friendly nod. She returned it. Not cautious or calculating like you'd expect from a newcomer, but a short, assessing greeting. Then she turned her attention back to Mark as if Mickey had suddenly ceased to exist.

A soft “Damn” was all he could manage.
Hot
didn't begin to cover this lady.

“Told ya,” Gordon repeated himself beneath the last of the back-and-forth banter. The crew was feeling good, ready for the start of the season.

“Mount Hood Aviation sightseeing tours will be next. I've been telling Mark that's all you air jockeys are good for anyway,” Akbar teased them.

Mickey had been feeling good too. A final glance to the blond and he felt even better now.

“We have”—Mark raised his voice to quash the last of it—“a little lightning-strike fire east of nowhere in Alaska. It's in an area classified for limited to no intervention. Normally they'd just let it burn, as there are no nearby towns. However, it has grown up in the last twenty-four hours and thinks that it has a passport and entry stamp to cross into Canada.”

“That's
our
kind of export problem,” Mickey shot back at Akbar. First fire call of the year always felt great. It wouldn't be until they'd had a month or two of impossible hours and crappy camps that the feeling would wear off. Even then, it beat the dickens out of any day job he could imagine.

“I thought Canada wouldn't mind,” Jeannie asked. “They're into sustainable forest burn now.” Jeannie was getting good. Of course she'd have track of all of that, what with her fire management degree and working along with Carly the Fire Witch—as the fire behavior analyst was known all up and down the coast because she was just that accurate.

Let her be the next Carly; he didn't care.

Mickey was a flyer first, last, and all the way in between. Which left him to wonder again what the blond was.

“Not when it's threatening Dawson City,” Mark answered Jeannie's question. Mickey really had to focus. The new woman was already distracting him. Women didn't distract him; he enjoyed them and fully appreciated how easy it was to gather them up at bars or his sister's wedding with “I fly a helicopter to fight wildfires.” But this one was making him—

“Isn't that like twenty miles into Canada?” Gordon called out.

“More like forty,” Mickey answered, but Gordon's question made good sense. That was a lot of territory for a fire to cover.

“The fire burned forty thousand acres last night and is rated at zero percent contained. They want us to stop it before the strong westerlies help the fire chew up another hundred thousand acres and the only city for three hundred miles around.”

Mickey had flown enough fires in the Alaskan and Canadian wilderness to be familiar with Dawson City. It had thirteen hundred people, making it the second largest municipality in the Yukon Territory—an area bigger than California. It had fallen below “city” size with the collapse of the gold rush at the turn of the prior century, so it was technically the Town of the City of Dawson. And if the fire analysts were worried about a U.S. fire reaching all the way there from Alaska, it was an early-season monster in the making.

“Canadian firefighters are heavily engaged in the Banff fire at the moment and our crews are chasing a mess outside of Anchorage. The Alaska Fire Service put out a call for our full team. So, smokies: get outta here! Helicopters will be hot on your tails.”

* * *

The lead smokejumper let out a
Whoop!
that was picked up by the other smokies.

Robin froze, because the slightest movement seemed likely to get her trampled as they raced for the parachute shed and their full jump gear.

That thinned the crowd at the base of the radio tower by two-thirds and she could see the guy who'd kept watching her more clearly. He looked solid in the way of someone who'd always been fit, even as a kid. On a soldier, you could see the guys who'd been bulked up by weights and war versus the ones to whom it was just second nature. This guy had always looked this good.

He grabbed a second energy bar, which was a good idea, so she did the same. Once they were aloft, they'd need both hands for flying.

Adding to the general mayhem, Chutes—the head of MHA's paracargo operation who she'd met yesterday—fired up his forklift to run pallets of supplies across the runway to the waiting DC-3 and Shorts Sherpa C-23 jumper planes. The first load was a whole pallet of pumps, chain saws, and gas cans followed by another one of food and Pulaski fire axes. Each had a big parachute strapped on top of the tightly bound gear.

For two or three minutes, the field was alive with smokejumpers rushing to their ready racks, grabbing jump gear, and racing across the field to their two planes.

Robin estimated that for the planes, flying from Hood River, Oregon, to Nowhere-and-Gone, Alaska, would be six hours plus a fuel stop. They'd be jumping the fire by lunchtime.

It was the one thing Robin hated about helos, the long hauls. At a good solid cruise, they were over ten hours from the fire, not counting two refueling stops which would stretch it closer to twelve. And by then, they'd be too wiped out to do much more than sleep. They wouldn't be on the fire until tomorrow morning. It seemed like a crazy system to be sending them so far, but these guys seemed to know what they were doing.

* * *

“Helos,” Mark called from where he still stood with Emily and the others.

Mickey forced his attention away from the newcomer. She was taller than he'd first thought—close to his own five ten—and he'd always been partial to tall women. Her expression was intent. Despite being last to reach the line this morning, he'd guess there wasn't a lazy bone in that fine body. She looked as ready to spring into action as Akbar had.

“This is too far away for the MD500s,” Mark continued. “But fear not. Gordon and Vanessa, they have a mess up in Washington at Leavenworth that needs your services. The fire chief is in desperate need of someone able to tackle spot fires in severe terrain and the MDs are perfect for that. Gordon has lead.”