Flash of Fire (7 page)

She'd had to remind herself of that when Mickey directed her to land at the apparently much less desirable side of the field. “Listen to Mickey.” That was the only one of Emily's final instructions she could remember with any certainty. He could explain what the others did and why. Like maybe he had some sort of stupid crystal ball.

So why did she still want to attack him even after he explained why the grassy side of the field had been best? And why did she want to jump his bones after the way he'd slid so easily into her kung fu stretching routine? Maybe she could ask him and he could explain both to her.

Good luck with that, Robin. You can't even explain you to yourself!

She certainly wasn't about to ask Carly and Steve. After sleeping for most of the flight—leaving her to do the whole thing solo—the instant they hit ground, the two of them had jumped to life like newly batteried bunnies, fussing over the trailer and their equipment.

And now Mr. “You Need to Listen to Him” Hamilton was saying that real soon now, the crappy Mount Hood Aviation base accommodations were going to look like a luxury.

She'd camped plenty before joining the Guard. Sleeping out in back of the truck stop to watch the desert's starry sky. Sometimes driving up into the Tucson Mountains to get away.

In the Guard, helicopter pilots always made it back to base because that's what pilots did each night—got themselves back for equipment service and security perimeters. Pilots slept in their bunks, not out in the dirt; it was part of the gig.

Robin glanced down the flight line. Denise the mechanic's portable machine shop was already open right where Vern had parked it on the line. The little blond was hustling out of the container wearing a tool belt. As if this was all completely normal.

A rusty red fuel truck had ground to life with a black puff of diesel and was headed to the first helo in the line with a loud grinding of gears.

Well, if they were camping, this
was
a better place to park the helos.

“Okay,” she told Mickey to show that she'd accepted he was right and would just swallow the bitterness of her initial irritation.

He waited a long moment, with that half grin that she was tempted to wipe of his face with a quick right jab.

“What?”

His grin widened. “I wasn't expecting you to wind down so fast. Thought you'd want to beat up on me some more about parking us here.” He was busy assuming all kinds of things about what sort of a person she was. Next he'd be judging what kind of a woman she was.

Robin shrugged and felt the tightness across her shoulders. Tried cricking her neck but the tension of the flight wouldn't release.

He made a twirling motion with his finger.

Robin scoffed at him.

He made it again.

“What?”

“Can't you even turn around without an argument?”

It was either paste him one in the grin or turn for him. Since it was her first day on the job, she opted for the latter. Though she certainly reserved the right to land one of the former.

When they faced each other once more, his eyes still hadn't drifted downward—which was what she had expected him to be doing.

“Halfway around, Robin. Halfway.”

She turned her back on him; that was easy.

Then his fingers dug into her shoulder blades. She hadn't really noticed his hands, not separately from his general form. But—oh God—they were strong, and he knew exactly what to do with them. She braced a foot forward to keep herself in place as he dug his thumbs into her tight muscles.

Mickey gave the impression of being a solid guy. Not heavy or anything, just…solid. She didn't have a better word for it. Like he was anchored right to the earth. And his hands—she could see them clearly in memory even as she closed her eyes in appreciation of the deep massage—were strong, powerful.

Working man's hands. Yum,
Mom would have purred.

Grandma Phoebe would have agreed.

Robin was caught between purring herself and complaining loudly as painful knots released. She could finally feel her shoulders let go and slope more normally. Robin pushed back against the lovely pressure, ignoring the unexpected intimacy in the sheer relief from the aching tightness.

Good hands were one thing. Knowing what to do with them, oh, that was something special. And Mickey was good at it.

When he finally stopped, her head was spinning slightly. She cricked her neck left and right. There was a freedom of motion that she hadn't felt…perhaps since showing up at MHA's base for the interview flight last week.

She didn't turn or open her eyes, just stood for a moment relishing the loose feeling.

“Damn, Mickey. If you can do that, it makes a girl wonder all sorts of things.”

* * *

Mickey was wondering too. His hands tingled with the memory of her. And all he'd touched were her shoulders.

“You work out.” He'd found some splendid muscles and used that as a subject change before he simply grabbed her around the waist and dragged her down into the tall grass.

“Lifting dishes.” Her voice was soft and a little dreamy, though he was sure she'd shake that off in a moment.

“Dishes?”

“Mom owns a truck stop. Actually Grandma still owns it, but Mom had taken over most of the operation. I'm a soldier-pilot turned waitress.”

“Duh, that explains it.” Soldier. Of course. That explained the way she moved, and soldier-pilot would explain why she flew a Black Hawk.

Robin turned abruptly. “Being a waitress explains what?”

Mickey laughed right in her face; he couldn't stop himself.

The blow to his gut was good, solid, and would have winded him badly if he hadn't spotted it coming and tightened up his gut muscles in time.

“Hell of a way to say thank you for a massage.”

“Thank you for the massage,” she said in an overly sweet tone. Then she stepped in until their noses were almost touching; her voice went low and dangerous. “Now what does being a waitress have to do with anything?”

Mickey glanced down the line. The other pilots were all moving about their craft. He heard the sharp buzz of Steve's little drone's engine. It was a distinct whir on the otherwise abandoned airfield, followed by the sharp
whoosh-snap
of the launcher and the six-foot-long bird shot aloft at ninety miles per hour.

Robin also spun to look up at the sound.

“C'mon.” He started walking. “They'll have pictures for us soon.”

He bet himself sixty-forty against her following.

He lost the bet—or perhaps he won—when she followed along, trotting quickly to catch up and then unexpectedly stuck out a foot to trip him.

Mickey let his martial arts training turn it into a forward roll and made it back up onto his feet, barely breaking stride.

“I must have tripped on something.” He spoke as if in surprise.

She grabbed his shoulder and jerked him around to face her. “Answer what's wrong with me working as a waitress, Mickey, or I'll make sure you don't get up so easily the second time.”

He faced her, waited a moment as Denise circled around Firehawk Two, which they were now alongside. Robin was ready to take on the world, challenge it mano a mano—or rather womano a womano—and it looked damn good on her.

“Waitress explains the strong arms and shoulders—very nice shoulders, by the way. Pilot explains the Black Hawk. I'm guessing National Guard because Emily wouldn't have sent you out solo unless you had flown to fire before, at least on occasion.”

“I've done it plenty.”

Mickey decided he'd wait a week and see if her response was the same.

His Dad had told him to
always speak truth to power.
Mom was one of the head brewmasters at Deschutes Brewery and one of those amazing-women role model types, so Mickey figured Dad knew what he was talking about.

“Soldier,” he continued, “was the last piece I was missing. It explains the awesome posture and fitness that makes you so incredible to look at. A capable, strong, beautiful woman. What's not to like?”

Then he walked away to see what Steve's drone would show of the fire.

No steps rustled through the knee-high grass behind him—neither the run-up to an attack or any sign that Robin was following at all.

He'd have to remember to tell Dad that he'd been right.

* * *

For a moment, Robin wished she'd flown to Leavenworth with Gordon. Him she understood: nice guy, too polite for his own good, probably shy, and if you dug deep enough, plenty smart.

Mickey Hamilton she didn't understand at all.

She had hit him, failed to thank him, and tripped him—and he'd told her she was strong and capable. He'd seen her in a state of tired, sweaty, disheveled mess at the end of a long flight—and he'd complimented her on her posture and called her beautiful.

If he was messing with her, she couldn't spot it. If he was trying to bed her, giving her a brief shoulder massage without the slightest inappropriate gesture was an odd way to let her know it.

The man was a puzzle, which only made him more intriguing. Maybe that was his nefarious plan…but she wasn't buying that explanation either. The man hadn't played a single game that she could spot yet. He either had a masterful poker face or was genuinely decent and plainspoken.

Yeah, right! Since when had there ever been a man like that?

Fire. She'd focus on the fire.

Sure, it was clear she didn't know MHA's routines, but she'd seen plenty enough burns to know she understood those. Even if Mr. Smug Hamilton's expression had warned her she was in for some surprises.

The sun was headed for the horizon. Time to learn all she could tonight, so that she'd be ready for tomorrow's flight.

She hurried to Firehawk One to see what Steve and Carly could teach her. Another piece of Emily's instructions clicked back into place; they were part of her information flow.

And while she was learning what she could about the fire, maybe she could figure out a little more about Mickey Hamilton.

Robin arrived at the open cargo bay door of her Firehawk One in time to hear Steve cursing.

She stopped and stared at the setup. She hadn't paid as much attention as she probably should have to what was in the back of her helicopter—as in none at all other than chucking in her gear bag.

The cargo bay on a Black Hawk was six feet wide, a dozen long, and four and a half high. The two big side doors slid backwards on each side to expose the center of the bay, making it almost feel like outdoors. The rear held about what she'd expected: fire safety gear, spare supplies, and some camping equipment. She'd seen Mickey dump his own camp gear behind his bird, so she snagged hers and tossed hers to land clear of her tail rotor.

It took her eyes several moments, and a lot of blinking, to focus on what Steve had set up in the forward four feet of the bay. In the AANG birds, that was where the two crew chiefs sat in sideways-facing chairs close behind the pilot's and copilot's seats. From those, they each controlled an M240 machine gun sticking out of the side windows.

Instead of nine hundred rounds per minute of flying 7.62 mm death, Steve had a pair of keyboards with a joystick to one side and a trackball to the other. Bolted to the sidewall and the back of Robin's pilot seat was an array of four laptop-sized screens. Like the Firehawk's cockpit, it was an electronic wonderland.

Carly sat intently in the only other chair close beside her husband.

Mickey squatted—which was necessary in the low cargo bay—easily behind Steve.

Robin's shoulders felt fine, but her legs were still stiff enough from the long flight that she didn't want to squat. Maybe Mickey gave leg massages as well. Now there was an interesting thought.

She opted for leaning on the door frame and looking over Steve's shoulder.

In moments, Jeannie, Cal, and Vern had gathered around, kneeling or sitting on the steel deck of the cargo bay. Only Denise was missing, still tuning up their helos.

Vern must have seen the question on her face. “She's making sure that we didn't damage her precious birds.”

“All those hours were straight-and-level flight. What could we have possibly done to them?” It had been ideal flying weather. Nothing but clear air and sunshine, visibility fifty miles plus the whole way. Flying north along the Inside Passage had actually been one of the prettiest flights of her life. She'd like to do it again someday when she wasn't stressing about first-day-on-a-new-job performance anxiety.

She also wished she'd had someone to share it with. Like…her mom. Robin finished the thought lamely, not knowing who she'd really want beside her.

Vern chuckled at Robin's question. “You'll learn. Denise is like that. She's still pissed at herself that I actually had one of her birds break on me last year.”

“Last year?”

Someone had arrived with a fuel truck and began working along the line refilling tanks.

“She's convinced that it broke her hundred-percent flight-availability record, even though I was able to fly back to base and land without a problem. I've given up trying to convince her that it doesn't count.”

Robin opened her mouth and then closed it. A hundred percent? No one ran a hundred percent except the Marine One geeks—and if you were flying the President, you sure as hell had better be at a hundred percent. Hell, she'd thrown a party for the mechanics back in the Guard when they broke eighty percent aircraft availability.

If that was true about MHA's mechanic, then… Maybe she'd just keep her mouth shut.

“Tell me what I'm seeing.” She turned from Vern back to Steve's displays. They looked as if she should know what was happening, but Robin couldn't make sense of all of it.

It was enough to distract Steve from his ongoing stream of quiet curses. He tapped each screen, moving clockwise from the bottom left. “ScanEagle flight controls.”

That one she recognized, a very simplified version of her own displays.

“Top left screen, visible light.” He traced a finger along a line. “You can see the main fire line here. Top right, same view in infrared light. We can see the core temperatures of the flames.” He tapped a key on one of his keyboards and numeric labels spread across his screen.

They were helicopter-melting numbers—some of the temperatures were four digits instead of three.

“Not too hot in this area.”

Robin did her best to nod wisely. As a Guard pilot certified to fly to fire, she'd been trained in the use of a last-resort emergency foil fire shelter. If she was knocked out of the sky over a fire and had to ride out a burnover, she had one tucked in the pocket of her Firehawk's door. The little one-person shelters were typically good to around fifteen hundred degrees, but to think of a thousand degrees as “not too hot” still boggled her mind.

“Here”—he tapped a line of faint dots well in front of the fire—“are the smokejumpers cutting their first line of defense.”

Robin looked back to the visible light screen but could see no sign of the smokies. Then, even as she watched, she spotted a tall tree fall over like a needle falling among a haystack. Once Steve superimposed their heat-signature images on the visible-light display, she could see the impossibly thin lines through the vast forest.

She'd never been a part of this side of the firefight. She'd arrived on a fire and the Incident Commander—Air had told her where to drop. This setup provided a great level of detail, which would make it much easier to keep the ground crew safe. “That's sweet.”

“The bottom right screen is the kicker.”

Kicker? Once she focused on it, Robin sure enough felt like she'd been kicked in the stomach. It was a wide area view and what it showed was a freaking huge fire. There was a scale across the bottom that she had to study several times before it made any sense. The numbers were way too big.

They were facing a fire that had traveled over thirty miles, starting from a narrow strip of Alaskan forest, expanding as it moved, and was now a front five miles wide. A thirty-mile-long, expanding teardrop shape of wilderness had been scorched into burned black.

A hundred spot fires burned within that scorched area, seeking to kill the few scattered spots of green in the mile upon mile of black char. Flames danced along both flanks, still burning sideways into fresh forest.

“The Black,” as the area of smoking wasteland was known, had about a tenth as many trees as stood ahead of the flames.

And the front of that five-mile-wide fire was moving over the landscape like the blade of a massive orange bulldozer. In front of it, a hundred thousand spires of green trees and groundcover already gone brown climbed rolling ridges and clogged valleys. It was a world of startling shades being eaten by a mile-wide blade of orange-colored hell mostly hidden beneath a shroud of black-and-gray smoke.

It was only upwind that the fire was truly visible, for all the smoke and sparks were being blown downwind—eastward by the strong westerly winds.

Now she understood Steve's earlier stream of profanity.

“How much…” was all she could manage from a throat suddenly gone dry.

“We'll crack a hundred thousand acres in the next hour or so.”

Robin was glad she was leaning against the door frame so that she didn't collapse outright.

She caught Mickey and the other pilots exchanging glances. Not worry, rather, determination showed on their faces. They'd obviously faced things like this before, but she hadn't.

“Once we get some more data—I've only had the drone over the fire for fifteen minutes—this will look more impressive.” Having spent his anger, Steve now continued with all the passion of someone watching
Jeopardy!
on TV. He did something with the trackball and the fire shrunk a little, then expanded again when he reversed the gesture. “Watch the clock in the upper right corner.” He did it again.

He was going backward and forward in time. She didn't know whether to be impressed by the technology or to be terrified that the fire had moved enough for them to see the change in the last fifteen minutes.

“Not much help to you yet. Sorry, honey.” He addressed the last to Carly, who didn't appear the least bit put out. “The smokies are here and here.” He again did something on the keyboard, and two thin, red lines showed up on the wide-area view. They were a miniscule presence against such a beast.

“See.” Carly pointed to the fire. “They did a smart initial set. If they can cut these two firebreaks in time and then hold the lines, we'll be facing three miles of flame, not five, when it clears the next ridgeline. However, in a few hours, there will be a wind shift, so they'll have to watch for the northern edge slipping around behind them.”

Robin glanced over her shoulder at the sun; it was already heading down to the horizon.

“Shit!”

“What?” Mickey was still squatting with some form of perfect balance.

“I wish we had time for a couple of runs before sunset to help them out.”

“We do.”

She waved her hand at the sun to indicate that he was an idiot.

“We're in the Yukon Territory,” he countered with that irritating complacency of his.

“Which means?” She could see that most of them understood something that she was missing. Jeannie didn't either. At least that was one less person she needed to be pissed at.

“Pretty much the same latitude as Fairbanks, Alaska.”

“Mickey.” She managed to not go for his throat. He was clearly having too much fun, which she'd make him pay for later.

“The Arctic Circle is only a hundred and fifty miles that way.”

The lightbulb went on for Jeannie.

Now she was the only one who didn't—“Wait a minute.”

“Ding!” Mickey called out, terribly pleased with himself. She shoved against his shoulder, but he was so stable in his squat that he merely rocked to the side and then re-centered.

She recognized that type of training. When Mickey had joined so smoothly in her stretching routine, she'd figured him for having been a soldier or an athlete. Not a soldier, she'd decided. He didn't have enough attitude.

But now she could see by the way he let her shove ripple through him and the way he twisted that he too had martial arts training. For just a moment, she wondered what it might be like to spar with him. It also told her that frontal assaults were not going to affect him.

“Arctic Circle.” Robin spoke aloud to show that she wasn't a total idiot. “Today is June 18th, four days to the summer solstice. So when the hell is sunset around here?”

“Twelve forty-eight,” Steve read off one of his screens.

“Hold it! The sun doesn't set until after midnight up here?”

“And sunrise is just three hours later, shortly before four a.m.” Steve look amused. “Twilight in between. No true darkness.”

“Four a.m. I'm going crazy.” Robin's head hurt.

“Then you'll fit right in at MHA.” Mickey looked beyond amused.

Robin surveyed the group of pilots crammed into the back of the Firehawk. They'd just done a punishing flight lasting a dozen hours and not a one of them was showing it.

Not when there was a fire waiting.

Not when their friends were already on the ground facing the beast.

They were all watching her. Waiting for…what?

For someone to take control. Robin suddenly wished that Emily Beale was here and she was still chasing tips at Phoebe's Tucson Truck Stop.

Well, Emily wasn't here and she was.

“Mickey?” She did her best to make her voice all sweetness and light.

“Yes, Robin?”

She leaned into the cargo bay until her face was mere inches from his. His easy and open expression almost invited her to lean in the last inch or so and kiss him. She would have if she thought it would shock him, but he'd been a step ahead of her since the MHA airfield back in Oregon and she'd had enough of that.

Robin rested a palm against the center of his chest.

Then she shoved fast and hard.

He tumbled over backward and landed against the rear cargo net, snagging his foot high in the net and getting stuck there.

“You have five minutes to get that cute ass of yours in the air. People”—she turned back to the others—“get calories from Betsy's cooler and double-check your safety gear. We're going in.”

There was no answering cheer.

No calls of any kind.

Instead, they scrambled out of the cargo bay, grabbed a couple of sandwiches out of the cooler, and hit the ground running. Carly shifted forward into the copilot's seat and began setting up a laptop where it mostly blocked the woman's access to the flight controls.

Robin decided that Carly hadn't been kidding when she'd told Robin not to have an emergency that required the copilot to fly.

Mickey untangled himself from the cargo net and rolled out of the cargo bay, landing on his feet close beside her on the grass.

“How did I do?” she couldn't help asking and then felt like an idiot for doing so. That wasn't how leaders led.

Mickey looked her up and down like a man suddenly turned greedy, but his big smile wasn't a leer. Not quite.

“Picture just keeps getting better and better, lady.” Then he placed a hand on either side of her face and kissed her hard and fast.

He'd sprinted halfway to the next helicopter before she managed to recover.

“Hamilton!”

He stopped and turned. “What?” He had to shout over the sound of the grinding fuel truck as it finished fueling the last bird.

“What the hell?”

“Hey, lady, I got a fire to fight. You can pay me back later.” His cheery wave explained exactly what kind of payback he was hoping for.

That little shit!
If he thought he was going to get that, he was in for a major wake-up call.

Of course, Robin couldn't help noting that she was grinning as she stuffed a sandwich in her mouth and started pulling on her Nomex gear.