Wildfire at Dawn (4 page)

“Deep or long?”

Akbar considered the map for a moment, looked at the shape of the terrain. Right at that moment, Henderson flew by low overhead and waggled the wings of his twin-Beech command plane in greeting. If he was here, the choppers wouldn’t be far behind.

“Make the cleared fire trail deep. The choppers will hopefully make it so that we don’t have to go too far along the ridgeline to trap this one. It’s only a baby, but we are not letting it get away from us. We all clear on that?” He shouted the last as a challenge to the team.

Twenty-three smokies shouted back, “Clear!”

“What do MHA smokies do for a living?”

“We eat fire!”

“Let’s do it!” And with a slap of his hands they were off. The first chainsaw was fired off before he even had the map folded and tucked away.

The first of the thin alders to expand the clearing fell before he’d picked up his radio. By the time he’d explained the plan to Henderson, the bluff had been leveled and was in the process of being cleared.

Akbar picked up his own saw. He’d burn through the first tank of gas, leaving the swamping to Tim. Swamping was tough work, dragging all the cut-off branches as far from the approaching fire as possible, but they’d be trading off on the next tank of gas.

He dropped the first tree—the eight-inch diameter, sixty-foot tall larch that had snagged Baker—making sure it fell with the chute on top.

Baker moved in to unsnag the chute he’d left in the upper branches.

Then Akbar began lopping off branches and Tim moved right in behind him with the rhythm of long practice to shift the detritus to the downslope side.

Chapter 3

Laura had avoided the
worst of Grayson’s attention by descending to stratagem. She recruited everyone to unsaddle, groom, and feed their mounts. Part of the “country” experience. When they proceeded, as a group, to the Lodge for drinks, she had casually breezed through the “Employees Only” entrance to the kitchen and out the far side to her car.

Once safely off the grounds, she checked her phone. Still no response. Well, what had she expected? Nothing much. So why was she disappointed?

Had she thought that just maybe Akbar had been serious? He had taken the initiative to charm her mother along with herself. It was stupid of her to feel put out. He and his tall friend had made it clear what they wanted right from the start. Akbar, if that even was his real name, had done it with an unexpected grace and style, but it had still been the same old game.

She’d fallen for that trap twice in her life. One of the times she’d actually been foolish enough to think the altar might lie at the far end of the rainbow, only to learn that not just no, but no-how no-way. The only thing lying under Elgin’s rainbow had been his wife, who had laughed in Laura’s face. She not only knew about it, she did the same herself.

The other had talked a good game, as good as Akbar’s—to every girl he passed.

Why had she thought Akbar was any different?

She loosened her hands on the steering wheel after she almost went off the hairpin turn on the way down the mountain and toward her cabin home.

Wouldn’t that be the ultimate joke? Careening off a cliff because of someone who didn’t even have the decency to call her back.

# # #

The blowup hit at 4:38 in the afternoon. Akbar had guessed it was coming, had even sent a runner down the line around four o’clock to make sure everyone had their heads still in the game after nine straight hours.

They’d sliced a mile-long clearing fifty feet wide and turned most of it into a bone yard—scraped down to the mineral soil by hand, all of the organics had been cleared out of the fire break. Without the organics, embers would have nothing to ignite.

The fire break ran along the ridge. The choppers had worked a line of retardant to the south until it met with Krista’s cut. No fixed-wing tankers available to help; all of those resources were committed down in California and Nevada at the moment. Still, the choppers had done it.

But mid-afternoon temperatures in the Siskiyous had hit over ninety degrees, and the wind was parchingly dry. He’d been able to feel the moisture being dragged out of the trees. And himself.

At 4:30, they’d still had a five- or six-hour window of time to complete their fire break to the north. At 4:45, that had been reduced to half an hour by the blowup. Flames now tore at the sky, reaching a hundred feet into the air and releasing a hungry roar that shook the ground. Shouted orders couldn’t even be heard.

The sun was behind the smoke plumes making the sky an evil blood red and turning the day dark. The fire started ripping trees up by their roots and tossing them aside. The updrafts over the fire and the downdrafts over the ridge made it too dangerous for the choppers to get close.

Downdrafts.

He stopped and looked up at the sky.

Tim came to stand beside him.

Akbar pointed.

Tim still didn’t see it.

Akbar tried to shout, but his voice was hoarse from smoke and weak from hard work. The air was moving up from the fire; much of the smoke pluming upward and to the east. He traced the downdrafts with his arm to demonstrate. With the intensity of the blowup the low-level smoke was being pulled back in with the air to feed the base of the fire. For the moment, the fire-induced wind was actually blowing downhill, from their position atop the ridge back toward the fire to feed the raging combustion.

“Burn it,” he managed to croak out. He grabbed his radio, “MHA Smokies. Burn out the whole line. Backburn now!”

He grabbed a drip torch and sprinted across the fire break they’d spent nine hours cutting and scraping to the very edge of the ridgeline. The monster roared with a hot and hungry breath. Even though it was still far downslope from their position, he could feel its heat radiating toward them, desperate to eat, to consume.

But the fire had made a mistake. And if they were fast, they could turn it into a fatal mistake.

Lighting the wick on his drip torch, he pulled the trigger releasing the fuel. The fuel dribbled out over the burning wick and splattered onto the pine needles and dead branches along the edge of the fire break at the top of the ridge; the edge toward the fire. Even the torch’s first tiny flame tips were sucked downslope toward the oncoming blaze, drawn back toward the fire by its own heat-induced weather system.

If they could burn the whole line, sending their own fire burning right into the face of the main fire, there was a chance that the fire break could hold even against the monster coming toward them.

He and Tim headed in opposite directions along the ridgeline, spattering bits of flame as they went. He kept glancing back, saw their own fire building behind him, consuming the dry tinder. Soon, he saw other fires as the rest of the crew got moving.

Back on the radio, he pulled half of Krista’s team from the south end to the north. He had to shout to be heard over the massive roar of the approaching flames. It would be a long, hard run of more than a mile over rough terrain, but he needed all the force he could get for the unfinished north end of the line.

“Mark,” he called on the ICA’s frequency as he ran with the drip torch in one hand and his chainsaw propped over his shoulder, his forearm across the blade, his microphone bobbing in his hand, “hit the north end with everything you can. That’s our hole. We can’t let it through the gap.”

For six more hours they fought the fire back and forth across the ridge. It would spot across the line at a weak point, where the slopes had been too steep to clear well—one of the small choppers would dump a couple hundred gallons and kill it. Steve’s drone managed to be everywhere up and down the line, feeding Akbar information almost before he needed it.

The big Firehawk circled back time and again dumping a thousand gallons per load in a shower louder than any cloudburst, a resounding
whomp!
almost loud enough to drown the fire’s roar each time. Radio calls flew back and forth, the airwaves a clutter of moves and countermoves.

Twice he sent a runner down the line to make sure everyone was staying hydrated and were solid on their feet.

It was well past sunset—when only Emily in the Firehawk and Jeannie in her little MD500 were authorized for nighttime firefighting—that they finally broke through. They connected the retardant line to the fire break on the north end and trapped the flame.

Around midnight, they declared it contained and Akbar sent half the crew to sleep for three hours. By the time they hit crew turnover, Krista at least no longer looked cross-eyed with exhaustion. He reported to her that they had kept the fire contained—little chance of it escaping now—and were letting the flames burn out the fuel within the containment boundaries of: the burned-over black, the two heavy lines of retardant to either side, and the firebreak along the ridge. Twenty-four people had made and held a line a mile and a half long.

Now he could sleep for a few hours.

He ate an energy bar and checked his phone.

Still no signal.

He collapsed for three hours and dreamt of fire.

Chapter 4

“The locals still can’t
get an engine crew up into this remote corner of the Siskiyou National Forest,” Krista told Akbar when she woke him up at six a.m. “They have a dozer cutting in a new road and they should be here before noon. Jeannie and Emily in the Firehawk are both down until noon with the FAA mandated eight-hour break. So, unless you want to walk home, might as well do some work.”

“No eight-hour rule for smokies,” Two-Tall, splayed out on the hand-scraped soil, groaned as Krista nudged him with the butt of her fire axe. Akbar lay there: still in his full gear, his Pulaski a foot from his hand. He looked up at the sky and saw the soft blue of a northwestern summer sunrise. Not towering flames. Not smoke. Actual blue.

It would be a long slog, but they’d nipped this one before it reached into the next valley. He sat up and looked down the back side of the ridge. Ten thousand acres of now untouched forest lay green below him.

“Worth the pain,” he made a point of sounding chipper as he rolled to his feet. Every muscle screamed. He ignored them because otherwise Two-Tall might not look so bad lying there griping about his aching body.

But Akbar couldn’t stop the groan as he leaned over to pick up his own fire axe. Tim barely managed a smirk before they both stumbled back toward the fire line behind Krista to do what they could until the mop-up crew made it in.

# # #

Mr. Awful didn’t join the nature walk. Whether it was the large crowd, the elderly and grandkid mix he’d spotted as he neared the group, or he really did have phone calls to make, Laura didn’t care.

Instead she had a delightful day bird watching, pointing out Sitka columbine and Scotch bluebell, and showing off her favorite little spot to watch deer by a stream. An ATV had arrived ahead of them at the final destination meadow and set out picnic blankets and a large lunch spread. They completed the afternoon with games for all ages in the meadow. The real secret to this loop was, at the end of a very leisurely five-mile walk, they actually had lunch only a few hundred yards from the Lodge; always a happy surprise for the weary.

When she finally got back to her tiny Lodge office tucked beside the ski rental shop, her phone had two messages. The first from a number she sort of recognized simply said,
Fire.

She’d already hit delete before it registered. That had to be Akbar and it explained why he hadn’t returned her call, he’d been on a fire. Suddenly she felt very small and petty. She’d been so angry at him ditching her like that, and instead he’d been jumping a fire.

He could have said a little more than the one word. Not even a
Sorry
. Four lousy characters, five with the period. Maybe that was all he had time for, or the energy.

The second message, about an hour ago read,
Sleep. Run tomorrow? –FB.

FB?
Didn’t sound like an apology no matter how she tried to shoehorn words into it. Was it a
Jetson
reference? She didn’t think so. Then she thought of the theme song to the show, “his boy Elroy.”
Boy? Fire Boy?
Even if that wasn’t right, it was enough to make her laugh.

She sent back
7a.m. at Lodge.
He’d find the message when he woke up.

Settling into her office chair she did a quick google and found the fire. A small but nasty blaze; small, two hundred acres had burned in a single afternoon and night. The photo, “supplied by MHA recon”—probably one of her dad’s drones—showed a towering wall of flame raging against the sky, a chopper in the foreground dwarfed by comparison. Nothing small about that fire. She kept reading. MHA had been on site for just twenty-eight hours and killed it. No wonder she hadn’t heard from him. He probably hadn’t slept in all that time.

As she finished the article, her phone buzzed with a new message. He sent back,
Glood!
Not awake enough to type accurately, but he’d answered her. She didn’t explain her smile when Bess remarked on it. And if Mister Ed noticed before they went out for a ride, he wasn’t saying a word either.

# # #

“Can you afford to be so far from base?” was Laura’s no nonsense greeting. Her welcoming smile was the only greeting Akbar cared about. Well, that and the way she looked coming down the broad stone steps of the Lodge.

The stone foundation and three stories of wood towered above her. The two main wings stretched off to either side. A central peak climbed several more steep-roofed stories above the entrance, complete with a cupola at the very top. Driving up he’d been able to admire the glacier-capped mass of Mount Hood rising directly behind the Lodge, though now he was close enough that the Lodge masked the peak.

The mass of the building could easily have overshadowed a lesser woman, but Laura looked like a queen descending from the heights. And as she came closer he could really appreciate the rest of the view. At the Doghouse her jeans had suggested great legs, but her running shorts delivered on that promise. And the fluorescent yellow runner’s top affirmed the slender waist and athletic chest. When he finally reached her eyes, she was glaring at him—he could tell despite the wrap-around shades—but there didn’t appear to be any real heat behind it.

“Damn, Space Ace. You could make this boy want to go AWOL. Mandatory rest day, everyone else is still sacked out.” He patted his fanny pack. “Doesn’t mean I don’t have my radio. Sorry about no response before. Got your message right before I entered a no-cell zone.”

“Right before you jumped into it, Fire Boy.”

“Yeah.” He liked that Laura had figured out the
FB,
but didn’t want to play the smokie card on her. It was an odd reaction that he didn’t understand. It was a surefire line, “Couldn’t call you because I was jumping out of a plane into a fire at the moment.” But he didn’t want to game Laura.

She waited a long moment, and when he said nothing more, she nodded to herself—whatever that meant. It was a comfortable silence while they stretched out. Akbar had done a full warm-up before the short drive to get here, even done a quarter mile up the airfield and back to work out the soreness from yesterday’s fire. He didn’t want to look like a total lost cause, but he wasn’t going to complain about a chance to watch Laura stretch out. Damn the girl was limber, she was awesome to watch. Which definitely planted some other thoughts in his imagination. Very nice thoughts.

“I have to visit someone before we go,” she pulled an apple out of her fanny pack and tossed it lightly in the air.

He shrugged his acceptance.

“A big, very handsome male.”

He tried to show he didn’t care, but he did. Jealousy wasn’t a feeling he was particularly used to and he didn’t like the creeping sensation clamping his jaw down. He’d thought her invitation… Then he noticed the teasing edge to her smile and he changed his tack at the last moment. Too late he knew, but he had to try. “Can’t wait to meet him.”

Her laughed flowed out of her so easily, as if joy were her natural state in the world. That he could get used to; the jealousy shit not so much. Though its tendrils still clawed at him.

She led him around the Lodge and into the woods at an easy trot, still clutching her apple. Laura in motion was even better than Laura standing still. He’d labeled her “hot” when he first saw her. Now he could see that he’d seriously underestimated the situation.

She led him up to a horse corral. Even before she reached the fence, a big tan gelding trotted eagerly over to greet her. The first time he’d ever tested out jealousy, and he’d wasted it on envying a horse. That would teach him.

“And how’s my big man today?” she cooed at the horse. She pulled out a knife and began cutting and palming apple slices for the beast. When he was done, she gave him a nose rub and then hugged the horse’s big head.

Akbar did find himself being jealous of a horse of all stupid things. They were so close. As she held the horse, the world seemed to go quiet around them. The two of them were absolutely still. The only motion was the gently swishing tails of the other horses in the corral. The only sound, the sharp chatter of a pair of bald eagles riding the thermals high above as they hunted for breakfast.

The smile on Laura’s face was so soft and gentle. He could easily imagine how she would look waking up in the morning. Akbar knew he was losing his grip on reality, but didn’t particularly want to stop.

“Mister Ed, this is Akbar. Akbar, Mister Ed.” She’d saved back the core which she handed to him.

He held it out on his flat palm. The horse snuffled at him suspiciously then took the core with a soft flap of lip. He scrubbed his fingers into the horse’s cheek and the animal leaned into it as he chewed.

“He likes you.”

“Mister Ed, huh?” he addressed the horse, not her. “So you got caught up in this whole TV thing too, you poor unsuspecting beast. Does he talk?” he turned to Laura. They were suddenly inches apart.

This was the closest he’d been to her, closer even than in side-by-side chairs at the Doghouse Inn. Now he could feel her warmth radiating on the cool morning air. He smelled horse, as he continued to pay some attention to the gelding, but he also smelled a woman like none he ever had before. Like snow and sunshine on the trees. He’d never smelled another woman like her…never expected to again.

“He’s pretty vocal,” Laura spoke as if wholly unaffected by how close they were; that knocked down his ego a few pegs. All part of the game. “He kept chattering at me in horse the whole time I was trying to decide whether or not I could afford him. He was so chatty, that I bought him even though I couldn’t afford to. Called him Mister Ed and the name stuck.”

“You my competition, mate?” Akbar addressed the horse and did his best to make it sound funny. To his ear, it sounded right. Inside, it felt a little too serious. When had he ever worried about the competition?

He wished she weren’t wearing the shades so that he had some chance to see what she was thinking.

# # #

Laura considered Akbar for a long moment. She could hear the slightly false ring of his question, but couldn’t pin down what it was. He’d made it sound gruff and macho, as if he was ready to battle a horse for her affections. It was actually one of the nicer compliments she’d ever received. “Hey babe, you’re hot,” was far more common. It was hard to believe guys actually thought that was charming.

“Mister Ed,” she answered him, “is my protector. So don’t mess with me or—”

“The horse will pull out his
Jetson’s
ray gun and fry my behind. Got it.” He turned back to Mister Ed. “You must be one dangerous horse.”

She could feel her guard weakening around the man. Actually, she poked around a bit, she didn’t feel her guard was up much at all.

“What if…” Akbar trailed out the question and paid Mister Ed a bit more attention. Her horse was loving the strength of Akbar’s bare-handed rub down. It made her a little intrigued at what that might feel like. “What if I win your horse over to my side? Then you’re in trouble, right?”

Yeah, she was. If she was picturing how it would feel to have this guy’s hands on her instead of her horse, she was in deep trouble. Time for a subject change.

“Let’s run. I have a group to lead in two hours.”

As they set off, Mister Ed nickered at them; he wanted to come along. But which of them was it that he wanted to follow? She wanted to shout traitor over her shoulder.

When they reached the trail and it narrowed too much to run side by side, Akbar waved her ahead. Instead, she dropped back and gave him the lead. She wasn’t used to running with anyone else other than her mom, and didn’t like the idea of him staring at her from a pace behind. Of course now she was doing the same thing.

He might not have her height or length of leg, but she could see he was a powerful runner. A long, solid stride, very self-assured on the smooth trail. Used to running over untracked terrain among burning trees, this must be a cakewalk for him. But he wasn’t just a runner. From his trim waist up, he had a powerful build from hour upon hour of backbreaking labor.

They crossed a fast-rushing stream. He didn’t bother making the small detour up to the split-log footbridge, but trotted agilely over the protruding rocks with a quick set of almost dance-like steps and hit the far side in a clean stride.

“What’s it like?”

He didn’t ask for clarification as he slowed enough that conversation would be easier. “Fighting fire is like nothing else in the world. It has all of the intensity of an avalanche, with more safety and controls than you probably have when you guide tourists on a ride.”

Laura couldn’t believe that he was translating it into her terms. Nobody was that thoughtful, unless they were making it up. He didn’t feel false. Actually, he’d probably learned this trick so long ago that it was automatic: figure out the woman’s metaphors and use those to charm her. He was good at it. That it was planned didn’t make it any less thoughtful. She let her silence prompt him for more.

“If you get in really close to the main fire, that usually means that things aren’t going well. Small stuff we can get in close, but the bullroarers we try to anticipate rather than attack. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle.” At a “Y” in the trail, he turned upslope.

She didn’t point out that farther on, his choice became a significantly tougher route.

“No two fires are the same. Even one fire can change its behavior from one minute to the next.” He eased the pace on the steeper terrain so that he could keep talking, but didn’t flag at all as they continued to ascend.

They were at six thousand feet and the thinning air slowed most people down. She’d been up here for the last six months, so she was fully adapted. Apparently his lung capacity was sufficient. Of course, he’d just been fighting a fire at over five thousand feet.

“So, we do our best to be smarter than the fire and—”

“Smarter? Fire’s think?”

“In the most evil ways you can imagine. I can’t tell you how many times my crew has cut a line, only to have the wind go through three compass shifts so it actually goes around our line and comes at us from the other direction. Fighting a fire on two facing fronts, that’s an uncomfortable place to be.”