Pure Heat (6 page)

Carly looked up at the fragile rig she'd just helped assemble. A tall pole with a sideways extension sticking out of the top and a couple of thin guy wires for support. From the tip of the extension, a rope dangled down. Steve—“Merks” was just silly, though the nickname did kind of fit him when he'd rappelled out of the helicopter to save TJ's life—moved with a speed borne of confidence as he set up the equipment. Not just born of practice, but of innate skill. She'd bet that whatever he did, he'd do it well.

“What does this do?” He clearly wasn't going to talk about his leg and how he'd injured it. And she didn't want to talk about how scared she'd been by TJ's accident and how chaotic her emotions had been all yesterday. She'd come out to help him this morning as an apology for the total shit she'd been to him yesterday, newbie or not. Apparently not.

She hadn't pinned him as a smokie, though she should have. Only a smokie would have jumped the fire in a light shirt and jeans to rescue TJ. Only a first-class smokejumper would be so driven to overachieve.

Steve attached a couple of heavy shock cords to the lower end of the rope and attached those to the trailer, drawing the rope taut.

“It's how I land the drone. I fly it into the rope. The rope slides along the wing and gets caught on the wingtip. Sort of snags it out of the sky.”

“And if you miss?”

Steve stood up from finishing the attachment on the trailer. He aimed his ridiculous smile at her. She'd thought it ridiculous the first time she'd seen it. It started on the left side of his face, a quirk of the corner of his lips, then a sideways slide that would have been a leer on most men's faces, but his dark eyes joined in and softened it.

“I never miss.”

“Yeah, right.” What else could she say to a line like that?

“If I ever did, I'd fly it around and come back at it again. In an emergency, I could aim for a clump of bushes or a field of corn, maybe. But then I'd have a lot of repair work to do and MHA wouldn't appreciate the spare-parts bill.”

She looked up at the rope again and tried to ignore how he looked at her. She'd long since learned that guys couldn't stop looking at her and that it meant absolutely nothing.

But somehow with Steve it was different. She had a nasty feeling that he didn't just look at her, but that he saw her. How had he known to ask that one question last night? Her one and only weak spot, and it was the first thing he'd arrowed in on. Okay, one of two spots, but she couldn't even bear to name the other.

Subject change. Time for a subject change.

“How long until you fly one?” She focused back on the stack of plastic cases in the back of the truck.

“Couple hours.” He didn't move to start. Carly could feel him standing behind her and a little to the side. Could feel those dark eyes watching her. She didn't need to turn to see him clearly. Her mind's eye had captured him the way it captured the terrain of every fire and almost never captured a guy.

Tall and lean. Fit. Damned fit, as you'd expect from a former smokie, all nicely accented in his midnight blue T-shirt and worn jeans. He wore a smokejumper's heavy boots; they all did. On her feet they looked heavy and clunky. On him, they just made him appear strong, powerful despite the limp. Clearly a sore subject. Well, she'd proven yesterday that she had her own sore spots.

She liked that he'd let her help and that he hadn't used it as an invitation to push at her. Or to chat her up. Or brush against her. Or… She'd had enough guys see her as a target that it was a pleasure not to be treated like one.

“You need a hand with the rest of it?” She turned to find that indeed he had been staring at her. But there was no guilty turn away. No abrupt shift of the eyes upward. He'd been looking at her profile, not her butt, with no downward drift of eyes now that she faced him. He simply looked at her as if considering the question.

Was it part of some passive-aggressive trick he'd worked out to woo the ladies? No, she decided after waiting a beat. It felt clear and honest. Which simply made it all the more powerful.

Well, her first dating rule of no rookies didn't apply, not if he used to jump fire. Her second rule of never dating a smokie usually completed her protection, but in Steve's case it was null and void because while he had been a smokejumper, his limp made it clear he wouldn't be, at least not this summer.

She'd need to come up with a third rule, and come up with it soon, because she had no defenses against nice guys.

“Nothing hard. I'm okay if you need to tackle something else. Appreciate your help on the antenna and catcher. Those are a pain to do on your own.”

Again, he'd made it her option. Clearly not turning something into make-work to keep her close, but not closing the door either. Leaving it up to her about what to do. Leaving it for her to decide if TJ was full of it about Steve's attraction to her.

She'd just decided to stay and help when she spotted the Beech Baron turning final in the landing pattern for the runway. Rick. She still had to find out why Rick was no longer ICA and who this Henderson guy was. SOAR or not, why the hell was he ICA on fires?

“Uh, I need to catch up with him.” She waved at the small twin-engine settling to a perfect landing on the grass strip.

Disappointment clouded Steve's features but he covered it quickly. Which was sweet of him on both counts.

“Well, your help is welcome, anytime.”

She turned and headed off. A quick glance back showed that he was still watching her, and that crazy smile had slid sideways across his face. He stood a little hipshot, favoring his left leg. His near-black hair just long enough to be tousled by the morning breeze. And those dark eyes watching her. Not her butt, like most men. Watching her.

Carly did her best to turn her look into a glare.

Steve appeared unfazed. “You make a picture, angel. A damn fine picture.”

Angel? Sure. Whatever. She turned and walked to the line where Rick was taxiing the Baron into place.

Angel.

The way he said it, with a voice gone smooth and an extra half octave deeper than his normal speaking voice, she could like that even better than “Flame Witch.” Clearly, Merks Mercer was used to mowing down the ladies.

The problem was, she could feel it working on her all too well. And she didn't find herself complaining much.

Steve set up the command console at the end of the workbench in the back of the truck. Then he tackled the launcher on the trailer, doing all the boring stuff first. He knew he'd draw a crowd as soon as he unpacked the drone.

He pulled out the bottom gray case and had the first drone assembled in about fifteen minutes. They'd painted it the black and flame red of MHA, which looked pretty damn cool. He ran a hand over the paint job, so smooth it felt like water. They always said if you were going to do something, why not make it the very best. He'd liked that about SkyHi.

Fifteen minutes was longer than he really needed by about ten minutes, but he wanted to be dead perfect on this one. Also to make sure his training was really anchored into place in his head when he didn't have a SkyHi instructor to hawkeye his every move.

Sure enough, in that fifteen-minute span, his audience grew from the occasional curious passerby to at least half of the base personnel. About twenty stood in a loose circle a dozen paces back from the truck and trailer.

He assembled the drone directly on the rail of the trailer's catapult launcher, a narrow steel rail ten feet long that angled up into the sky. The drone's sleek body was as big around as his thigh and short enough that he could easily touch both the nose and the three-bladed rear propeller at the same time.

The lower side of the nose was made of clear plastic. From above, he inserted the standard dual-mode camera, normal and infrared light. The camera was little bigger than a high-end digital and included a steerable mount so that he could remain focused on one point for several seconds as he flew by or longer if he circled. Into the mid-bay he snapped the flight control and radio circuit boards, neither much bigger than his open palm.

While he had the middle open, Steve attached the pair of slender swept-back wings, each as long as the drone itself. Then added the bent wingtips with the catcher hooks so that he could land it. Everything slipped together perfectly.

Fully assembled, the drone weighed just fifty pounds, including the two gallons of gas that would keep it aloft for the next twenty hours, if needed. Once he fired off the engine, he'd release the motorized catapult. In just seconds she'd be flying along at a sweet ninety miles per hour.

The console at the end of the bench was already powered up. He flipped on the bird's electronics. All of the radio links to the main console showed good, so he was ready to go. Fire off the bird, step into the truck, and sit down at the console. Then he'd be flying.

He tried to scan the crowd surreptitiously.

Angel was back, along with an older guy he didn't recognize, maybe the Incident Commander Rick Dobson. Henderson stood with his wife; she cradled a baby and leaned against him.

“Kid looks ready to go.” Steve admired the tiny hard hat atop the baby's head. It was knit of bright yellow yarn, with a tiny pink flame for an emblem on the front of it.

“I think four months is a little young to be fighting fire.” Emily's voice was dry. Was she humorless or teasing? The woman was damned hard to read.

“Not a bit. Right, Tessa?” Mark leaned down and made a funny face at the kid, who cooed in response. “See, she agrees with me, honey.”

Emily patted her husband's cheek, as if in sympathy for being such a charming idiot.

Cute. The three of them were really cute together. Steve wondered what the angel's kid would look like when she had one. It was easy to picture her with one, maybe two.

He caught where his mind had gone and stamped that ember out quick. Since when had he thought kids were cute or he'd ever want one?

Dobson, the family trio, and his angel crowded up close.

“It looks like a toy.” Carly tapped the drone's nose in a friendly manner.

“I've read all the report.” The IC had a strong baritone voice, one clearly used to commanding a fire. “Supposed to help, but I never actually saw one up close or flew a fire with one. I'm trusting you on this, Henderson.”

The ICA stood easy, his thumbs caught in his jeans pockets, his eyes behind his standard Ray-Bans. “Oh, these birds can do some interesting things. Up until now, the few drones used on firefights were flown by NASA as a courtesy. MHA is the first time that they've been released to a private outfit. So they sent along their best.” He nodded toward Steve.

Or at least it would look that way to anyone other than Steve. To Steve it looked as if Henderson were actually acknowledging the equipment racks in the truck over Steve's right shoulder.

Steve half turned before he stopped himself from looking again at the black boxes. When he turned back to Henderson, the man smiled blandly as if of course he'd been just acknowledging Steve. No way could Steve ask him, “What the hell?” in front of this crowd.

About twenty people had gathered round. He recognized Chutes, the loadmaster, and Betsy, the camp cook. Two of the 212 pilots who he'd shared a dinner table with last night showed up, though he'd missed their names, Tom and Jim maybe? Andy and Bruce? He'd met too many people too fast. Mickey and Bruce, that was it.

TJ came swinging up on his crutches.

Steve pulled out a small folding stepladder that made an okay seat and set it down for him.

“How's the ankle?”

Angel came up from behind to help TJ as he settled onto the ladder with a nod of thanks. “Still swollen like a son of a bitch, but pain's down to about half. Got yourself an audience today, kid.”

The man's broad wink made it clear who he thought mattered to Steve in the impromptu crowd.

Yep. The guy had him down cold. Angel remained close behind TJ. Steve tried not to look up at her. Didn't do him any damn good; he looked anyway.

She rolled her eyes at TJ's back, knowing exactly what her uncle had done, even if she couldn't see it, but she rested one of those fine hands on TJ's shoulders.

Focus, dude. Focus.

Steve went through the full preflight. Not that he hadn't already checked everything, but he was too damned aware of the effects of a screwup. These folks were all pros and he was the outsider. He'd been jumping for Sacramento smokies and on a fire in southern California when it all went bad. They didn't know him from Adam.

He again checked the launcher, thirty degree up angle, aimed down the side of the runway. He didn't want any trees or other surprises, like an aircraft suddenly entering the flight pattern, to screw things up.

He keyed his handheld radio on the control frequency to chat with the tower.

“Tower, this is SkyHi flight”—he checked the number on the drone's vertical tail fin—“November-three-five-seven-sierra-hotel requesting clearance for launch. Over.”

“Roger, SkyHi. Let's see what she can do, Merks. Pattern is clear. Winds out of the west at ten. N357SH cleared for flight.”

That's exactly what the gear mounted on the antenna was telling him as well.

“Thanks, Zach.” One of the guys from his dinner table last night.

“All clear,” he called to the crowd, though it was fairly pointless. Everyone had left a lot of space around the launcher. Far more than necessary. Steve hit the power switch on the launcher and started the drone's engine. He slapped the off switch.

“What's wrong?” someone called out. It felt like the beginning of a heckle.

“Sounds odd. Just take a second to check it out.” He moved in to inspect the engine. He started with the foot-long, three-blade propeller, which looked just fine. He leaned in to check out the spinner cover, ignoring his own reflection in the chrome-bright cone at the center of the props, and wiggled it. Nothing loose there.

Then he spotted the problem. He blinked and looked again. That wasn't right. He stepped over to the gray case he'd slid back on the lowest shelf in the truck after pulling out the drone. He read the code descriptions stenciled on the side of the case.

“H.E.” Hush engine. They'd given him the quieted engine option, a pretty damned expensive option. Why would they do that? You didn't need to be quiet near a forest fire; you needed earplugs. Then he glanced up at the two black cases atop the rack that he still hadn't opened. Something odd was going on here, but now was not the time. Maybe they sent him the wrong truck. No, it had opened to his code and the birds had been MHA-logoed.

“So, we gonna see some flyin' today, boy?”

“Sure, TJ. Sure. Just hold on to your seat.”

“Shoulda brought a Barcalounger. Be a damn sight more comfortable than this here ladder you gave me.”

“Wouldn't need a seat if you knew how to avoid falling trees.” It was a low blow, but it got a good round of laughter from everyone, including TJ. Everyone except Carly. Damn, he'd offended her again. It wasn't as if he was bragging about saving TJ. He'd just…

Let
it
drop.

Focus.

Steve returned to the launcher and hit the power switch again. The engine purred to life. For a hush engine modification, it sounded exactly right. That's what had bothered him. You could talk over the noise of an H.E. even when it sat on the catapult. You had to shout to be heard over a standard engine.

He hit the release on the catapult launch, and the bird was gone. At three g's acceleration on the track, it jumped to flight speed in just over a second. Flying ninety miles per hour, it was simply gone. Little noise, especially with the quiet engine, and no fuss. Nothing in its wake except the mild smell of engine exhaust.

Just gone.

There was a universal exclamation followed by excited talking, not that he'd done anything yet. But the drama of it was pretty slick and he never tired of it.

He climbed up the back step of the truck and sat at the console. He left the drone on auto-climb for the moment. Locater and altimeter were good. Just crossing fifteen hundred feet above ground level. Ground here was at twenty-five hundred feet, so at fifteen hundred AGL, that put the bird crossing four thousand ASL, above sea level.

The only thing around here that the bird couldn't fly over was Mount Hood. The drone capped at ten thousand feet. Better performance if he stayed below eight thousand with the hush engine. Mount Hood punched through eleven thousand.

The dual camera was giving him a clear feed. He swung once over the airfield and felt that surreal bit of vertigo when he spotted the truck and the figure sitting in the back. It was always odd to watch himself on the screen through the drone's eye view.

He also spotted the shot of bright blond hair about to climb into the truck behind him.

“Hi, Angel.”

“Have you got eyes in the back of your head?”

He rolled back the observation stream on the side screen, like the best TiVo ever. Everything recorded and instantly available. The active view still rolled on the center console. The flight data showed as a broad sidebar displaying temperature, airspeed, speed over the ground, and altitude.

He paused the side frame and rolled the trackball to zoom in. Blond ponytail pulled through the back of his black SF Giants hat. Had she forgotten it was his? How odd was it that she'd kept it? He could imagine her pulling it on, probably the easiest way to keep it safe in the helicopter's cargo bay where he'd dropped it. But that she kept wearing it? He really didn't know what to make of that.

“You get that much resolution?”

He circled the bird overhead again, this time rolling in the 36x zoom on their location. It was tricky. At that level of zoom, the field of view was so much narrower that it was hard to manually aim at exactly the right spot at ninety miles per hour.

A quick glance at the readout for the truck, and he keyed in the exact GPS coordinates for the truck. The camera focused tightly on the antenna. He offset the view about fifteen feet to the west and was rewarded with a fine view of Carly's backside. The sunlight playing shadows down her back and over her hips. Her hair a golden flash down past her shoulders. The deep red “MHA Goonies” lettering easily readable across the back of the shirt.

“Damn,” was Carly's only low-voiced comment. He set the bird to circle and the camera to auto-track.

Carly's sunlit back remained screen center, slowly rotating as the drone circled. Her face showed on the screen as she turned to look up into the sky.

“That's creepy.”

He could almost see enough detail to watch her lips move as she spoke. A little too far aloft for that. But he noted the time mark on the recording so he could come back to the moment when she stared up into the sky, his hat shielding her eyes from the sun that now lit her so brilliantly from the front. That upturned face surrounded by the glow of bright hair, as near a real angel as he'd ever seen.

Voyeur.
Okay, maybe a bit.

He heard a bark of laughter as a figure on crutches came up in front of Carly on the screen. TJ. On screen, Steve could see that TJ wasn't looking at Carly, but rather into the truck. At Steve's console image of Carly's face searching the sky.

Steve released the lock on the drone's camera and zoomed back to view the whole helibase. All of the choppers were on the ground, and the planes too. The base had three small lead-spotter planes and the bigger jump plane for the smokies.

And he very carefully didn't look over his shoulder at TJ.

“Can we see the fire from yesterday?” By the tone of her voice, Carly hadn't seen his screen capture of her, which was a damn good thing.

It only took about ten minutes to fly there; the first real fire of the season had been unusually close. One of the reasons they'd been able to respond and douse it so quickly.

The other reason they'd been called was how remote it had been from any reasonable fire road. It had taken the ground assets hours to get in there. Fires had a bad habit of forming at the most awkward and distant of places.

And half the time all of the country's limited air assets were tied up somewhere else. The United States had about three hundred smokies and roughly sixty thousand wildfires a year. Most of them were too small or were readily accessible from the ground, making the high cost of smokies and air attack uncalled for. But the remote and the big Type I fires were still a hard squeeze to staff.