Summer of Fire (2 page)

Drapes and couches blazed, giving off toxic gases that made her glad for filtered air. The ceiling sheetrock was burned away, revealing the space beneath the roof where storage boxes blazed. Did they contain old clothes and junk, or precious family heirlooms from Southeast Asia, belonging to the young woman who waited below?

A thousand degrees from above drove Clare and Frank onto their stomachs. While hot water rained onto shag carpet, she inched along, one gloved hand feeling the way and the other on the hose. If you let go of your lifeline, you could lose orientation, the sure first step to a mayday situation.

Through the drop-spattered mask, there was no sign of life in the living room and nothing that looked like a crib or playpen. Clare looked toward a door that must lead to a bedroom, but flames licked at the frame and walls. No haven there. Sick with the possibility of failure, she dragged herself toward Frank. She had not yet told a mother that her child had died in a fire.

If hell existed, this must be its antechamber. Frank lay ahead of her, directing the hose. By the tugs, she felt him move forward, risking the dragon backing around and coming down with searing breath. Clare found herself staring at the constantly changing colors of combustion, unable to resist the inferno’s splendor. Her love-hate relationship with fire hurt most at times like these.

An ominous rumble began, the vibration resonating in her chest as though the dragon cleared its throat. Cold horror cut the heat.

Through the steam cloud from the power cone, she caught a shifting in the rafters, a barely perceptible sideways slide. She couldn’t grab Frank’s collar to warn him, couldn’t do a thing except scream his name into the maelstrom.

One moment, Clare was crawling toward him. The next, he disappeared in a shower of light.

CHAPTER ONE

Yellowstone National Park

July 25, 1988

Extreme Fire Danger.

Clare Chance gave a bitter smile at the warning sign on the Grant Village Laundromat. The lodgepole pines behind the building burned like merry hell. With the drought that had parched Yellowstone since May, moisture in the forest fuels had ebbed, making the park a two million acre tinderbox. The wind that came with the dry fronts completed the equation for disaster.

Clare hooked a hose to a hydrant and dragged the other end across the parking lot to water down the Laundromat roof. Beneath the heavy coat of the Houston Fire Department, sweat ran between her breasts and down her sides. At least it wasn’t as hot as it had been in Houston on that ill-fated July afternoon, over three weeks ago.

Quick agony swelled her chest until she felt it would burst. The flaming forest became a wavering vermilion blur as she blinked hard and hoped Javier Fuentes and the other men of HFD didn’t notice her tears.

Coming to the West to fight wildfire had seemed a convenient escape after she’d witnessed Frank Wallace’s death. If it could happen to him, it could happen to anybody. He was . . . had been . . . one of the good guys, an older veteran who’d acted blind to the fact that she wasn’t one of the boys.

Since becoming a firefighter, Clare had learned she didn’t qualify as a bona fide adrenaline junkie, but she’d tried to match anybody’s bravado. People who hadn’t seen her coach basketball or yell at her trainees at the Texas A & M fire school were surprised to learn what a thirty-seven-year-old woman did for a living.

Today, at Grant Village, she watched the younger men from Houston with a warning on the tip of her tongue. The wind shifted continuously, first a puff on the back of her neck and then relief for her heated forehead.

Watering down the buildings was a last ditch effort before they would have to fight the approaching flames face-to-face. Clare didn’t know what she’d been thinking when she’d assumed wildfire was somehow tamer than structural fire. Less collateral damage, maybe. In the forest, the odds were against her having to face another distraught mother.

A single look at Clare’s face when she emerged from the burning apartment house told Tammy Nguyen that her small son Pham was gone. Strangers, yet kindred in loss, the two women had gone into each other’s arms and sobbed. Channel Two News had carried it at six and ten.

Clare had forced herself to face Frank’s wife, Jane, too, beside the closed casket. Within the older woman’s kindly embrace, she had thought her heart would break.

On this, another sizzling afternoon, her hand on the rough-textured hose felt familiar, yet somehow distant. She was still getting used to the pungent incense of burning evergreen, so different from the grassy aromas of the Texas coast.

The two-way Motorola radio at her belt gave a crackling sound. She passed off to Javier Fuentes, who’d been first to sign on with her to fight wildfire. “Chance here.”

“We’ve got to get those civilians out of Grant Village.” Garrett Anderson’s deep Atlanta drawl came over the airwaves. She imagined him behind a desk in West Yellowstone, his ample stomach hanging over his belt while he chomped on Fig Newtons and drank mugs of creamed coffee. One of the seasonal bosses of big fire, he’d been the first black to make fire general at the training center in Marana, Arizona. He was also the man who’d arranged through Clare’s boss at A & M for her and the men from Houston to be here.

She put her foot onto the running board of the fire truck and pulled off her hard hat. God, her sweat-soaked head itched. The side mirror revealed heat-reddened cheeks beneath bloodshot amber eyes. “I thought the evacuation was proceeding as planned, Garrett.”

There’s a bottleneck on the road out. Harry Gaines’s crew set a backfire that got away.”

“You mean that’s not the Shoshone trying to burn down the Laundromat?” She considered the wildfire fighters’ eccentric habit of tagging fires with a name. It was as though naming their adversary made the fight a more personal one.

“When you see the Shoshone, you’ll know.” Garrett sounded grimly certain. “The backfire’s jumped the road and nobody will drive into the smoke. I’m trying to raise a chopper to drop water, but I need you to get those cars moving before the Shoshone gets there.”

Clare glanced back at the battle beside the Laundromat. “We’ll go as soon as we can.”

“Go
now.
The Shoshone has crowned.”

When wildfire leaped into the treetops, Garrett had told her it released the energy of an atomic bomb. It sounded improbable, but when she cocked an ear, she heard a distant dull rumble like an approaching train. Her nostrils flared at a fresh and stronger mix of tart resin and char. Her heartbeat accelerated.

With a tap on Javier Fuentes’s shoulder, she cupped her hands and shouted to the others from Houston, “We’ve gotta leave you. If it blows up, head to the lake and get in the water.”

Javier leaped to the driver’s seat of the fire truck. As she climbed in the passenger side, she said a silent prayer for the safety of the men they left behind. She hadn’t gone an hour in the past weeks without asking what she could have done to prevent Frank’s death. “These things happen, Clare,” her friends at the station had drilled her.

They were right. Before she’d joined the ranks, she’d seen on the news that every few months some firefighter paid the ultimate price.

“You have to pick up and go on,” they’d said.

She had, but in a different direction. Her flight to Yellowstone, and that’s what she now knew it to be, had been a headlong rush toward peaceful woodland and natural beauty. She’d believed she wouldn’t have to face another monstrous specter of dancing heat and light.

Javier steered along the deserted inbound lane to Grant Village, past the stopped column of sedans, pickups with camper shells, and trailers. Despite the emergency, he drove slowly, bronzed hands light on the wheel.

The approaching fire had been started by a lightning strike at Shoshone Lake, six miles southwest. After smouldering and creeping along for a month, high winds had fanned it into fury.

They came to the head of the line, a stopped behemoth of an RV. Ahead, perhaps a hundred yards, tightly spaced pines burned on both sides of the road.

Clare clicked the Motorola’s button. “Come in, Garrett.” She slid out of the truck to scan the sky. The sun was reduced to an intermittent copper disk. “Come in.”

On the RV driver’s side, she hailed an elderly man with wild white hair and wire-framed glasses. “I’m Clare Chance with the firefighters,” she told him in what she hoped was a reassuring tone. She’d always had a raspy low voice that people mistook for a man’s on the telephone.

“What shall we do?” The ginger-haired woman passenger leaned across.

“A helicopter is going to dump water ahead,” Clare told them. “As soon as the fire dies down I want you to drive as fast as you can.”

The runaway backfire wasn’t going to kill anyone, but the Shoshone’s rumbling underpinned all other sound. If it arrived before they could escape . . .

She prayed the chopper came soon.

Steve Haywood looked out the helicopter window into hell.

Great tongues of orange flame leaped through the crowns of lodgepole pines, then reached another two hundred feet into the white-hot sky.

“Swing over Grant Village,” he ordered pilot Chris Deering through their headphones, wishing he were anywhere but in the air. Although this recon flight over Yellowstone’s raging forest fires was important, Steve had already decided that for him it was a terrible idea. He wiped the sweat at his temples, right where the gray had started last year.

Steve watched Deering peer out at the boiling smoke through his Ray Ban Aviators, noting the sunburst of lines around the pilot’s coffee-brown eyes. As he gauged the faint smile playing at the corners of the taut mouth, Steve realized that Deering was actually enjoying this.

He knew the type. All over the mountain west, wherever choppers were flown, there were guys in military-style flight suits with winged patches on their shoulders that proclaimed
Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association.

He’d come to Yellowstone for the peace it afforded, not to wind up in a war zone.

Deering fiddled with the radio and was unable to raise West Yellowstone Airport, as had been the case for about five minutes. He banked the Bell 206 into a steep turn and Steve looked straight down into leaping flames.

It wasn’t the fire that had him on edge, but the flying. His decision to do recon had been one of those grand defiant gestures; he hadn’t wanted to tell his boss Shad Dugan that he was unwilling to get back on the horse that had thrown him.

Turbulence seized the chopper. Steve’s stomach clenched as they plunged earthward and then rebounded. Reaching for a handhold, he saw that his palm left a damp print on his green fire-retardant trousers. In the three years he’d been a park biologist he’d successfully stayed out of aircraft, preferring to visit the backcountry via the serenity of horseback. If only he were on a remote trail right now, breathing clean air instead of eating smoke from thousands of torching trees.

Deering took them lower into even rougher air.

Looking out through the bubble of glass, Steve tried to ignore vertigo and focus on the solid earth. Below, in Grant Village, at least twenty fire trucks lined the south shore of Yellowstone Lake. Near the boat ramp, pumpers equipped to fight wildfires suctioned water from the lake. With hoses connected to hydrants, firefighters sprayed the roofs of the visitor center and lodge.

Deering dipped the chopper left and Steve looked where he pointed. The road out of the village was a narrow corridor between two walls of flame. Down this slender needle, a dozen cars and several fire trucks were threaded. The knot inside Steve twisted tighter as he realized that they were stopped.

Black smoke billowed around the Bell’s windshield and the visibility went to zero.

“Fuck shit!” Deering pushed right pedal.

“Easy,” Steve blurted. The hard look Deering shot made him wish he’d kept his mouth shut. The pilot obviously didn’t think a ranger should be telling him how to fly his chopper. His pride of ownership had been clear at the airport. Steve had stood on the ramp with reluctance while he showed off the custom paint, ultramarine edged in gold.

Deering moved the collective between the seats and put the Bell into a climb. The veins on the back of his hand stood out where he gripped the cyclic stick in front of him.

Steve tried to look through the window, but merely saw his reflection against the roiling blackness. Silver-gray eyes rimmed with red gave testimony to the irritating smoke. His thinning blond hair revealed a sunburned forehead between the insulated headphones.

The sky lightened, and as the chopper broke back into clear air, Steve realized he’d been holding his breath.

He exhaled and found it didn’t help him relax. He kept a wary eye on the way Deering’s feet feathered the pedals while adjusting the pitch of the rotors. They made another pass over the stalled line of cars and trucks. This time Deering avoided the smoke.

“Okay,
Doctor
Haywood, look behind you.” The pilot’s patient tone said he regarded Steve as learning-impaired.

On the rear deck, coarse canvas made a crumpled pile, a bucket attached to a cable hooked beneath the chopper.