Summer of Fire (44 page)

Clare’s stomach clutched as she remembered the people on the widow’s walk, daring the firestorm’s fury. She bent her head and noted that Devon’s fingers were cold and a little blue. Definitely, she had a bad sprain, maybe worse.

“Can you climb just a little way?” She tried to sound upbeat.

“I think so.” Devon sounded dazed and with that bump on her head . . . Clare helped her up and wondered if she would be able to support her up the hill, for her own legs felt unsteady.

Steve and Karrabotsos arrived together, both limping, but looking game.

Deering faced the older pilot. “I’m sorry, man.” He gestured toward the ruined helicopter. “I know you didn’t want to hire me . . .”

Karrabotsos gave him a level look. “I never do anything I don’t want to do.” He surveyed the topography. “Wind currents can be murder in a spot like this.”

Clare helped Devon to the ridge top. Steve clapped an arm around her shoulders. “You found your gal.”

She gave him a smile through the sting of tears she’d held back while being a medic. With one arm around him and the other around the taller Devon, she managed, “She’ll always be my little girl.”

“I’ll just scatter this fire on the rocks,” Deering suggested.

Clare turned to help, but Karrabotsos pointed back the way they’d come. “Won’t matter.”

Driven by the wind, the Clover-Mist had worked its way up the slope close to the ridge crest. It leaped ahead in the trees, heading for the summit on a diagonal that had the potential to intersect their path. Beside Clare, Steve cursed.

If her great-grandmother had not survived a fire on this very mountain, she and Devon would not be standing here today. Grabbing her daughter by her uninjured arm, she urged her onto the trail.

Deering took the lead. He moved well, but looked more pale and depressed than when Clare had seen him at Old Faithful. Between Deering and Clare, Devon climbed like a robot, one sturdy bare leg in front of the other. As the slope grew steeper, sweat darkened her hairline. Behind Clare, Steve limped grimly while Karrabotsos brought up the rear, favoring his lame foot.

The wind shifted and brought the fire’s path more directly toward them. The stench of burning grew stronger. Clare eyed the patch of brush and scrubby trees they had to cross to reach the summit.

The flat-out race made her think of other times when people had been caught in the open and tried to outrun a fire. In the worst disaster the Smokejumpers had ever experienced, thirteen had perished in 1949 at Mann Gulch, Montana. Once fire had chased them out of the trees and onto the grassy slope, they had never had a chance.

As the ridge widened onto a more open hillside Deering slung an arm through Devon’s. They moved up and slightly ahead of the fire.

After a single glance over her shoulder, Clare refused to look again. The survivors of Mann Gulch had been lucky to slip through a rocky crevice and emerge above the fire.

There was no place of safety like it in sight.

Their hope lay on the treeless summit. It was only another fifty yards, then twenty-five, but the men at Mann Gulch had been overcome mere seconds from safety.

As fire attained the brush, its sound sharpened from a dull roar to a snapping. Clare helped Deering with Devon and the first aid kit fell from her hand. It landed with a clatter and bounced down about fifteen feet, then wedged into the rocks.

Clare abandoned it.

The straggling group struggled on. How slim the margin between life and death, how fine the edge they trod. Everyone said she’d been lucky when the roof came down on Frank, a few feet and a hair’s breadth from horrifying cremation. Had he had time to know this screaming rush that drove her? Had he watched the rafters begin their slow deformation and felt the choking certainty?

Don’t look back, she thought, but knew Steve had fallen behind. A scream built inside, but she could do nothing for him with her daughter staggering and about to fall short of the finish line.

Above, Deering made it to bare gravel. Clare shoved up out of the weeds, gasping and supporting Devon with an arm around her. Her impulse was to keep running from the fire, but on safe ground, she looked back.

With one good leg, Karrabotsos had gotten ahead of Steve with his two bad knees.

“You making it, Haywood?” Deering called down.

Steve’s wooden pace slowed and then he stopped. Clare imagined heat searing his back and thighs, burning his skin as though his Nomex clothing was made of paper. He swayed forward and planted both hands on the slope, pain twisting his features.

“Steve!” That shrill scream was her voice. She couldn’t move with Devon’s arm heavy over her shoulders.

Deering plunged back into the waist-high brush. Like a skier, he made a series of sidehill leaps, steadying each landing with a grab at the tough grasses. The fire was less than a hundred feet away when he reached Steve and slung an arm around his back.

Clare’s heart pounded while Steve redoubled his efforts. Deering speeded him along, half dragging him when he faltered. They passed Karrabotsos when he lacked fifty feet to safety, but now the heat blasted like a blowtorch and the foul taste of char filled the back of Clare’s throat.

Deering kept pulling Steve toward bare rock.

Clare stared at Karrabotsos. Not fifteen feet below, the pilot wasn’t going to make it. Her arm was still around Devon, supporting the most precious thing in her existence.

As though he spoke in her ear, Frank’s voice said distinctly, “Go!”

Without thought, she shoved her daughter uphill and leaped toward the inferno.

Fire swirled around Karrabotsos. An errant prayer came to Clare, that this was going to be like passing a finger through a candle flame. Perhaps if they moved fast enough . . .

She grabbed him by the arm. He gave a shout, more a scream.

“Go!” she echoed the voice in her head. “Go, go!”

For an instant, they teetered together on the verge, but she dug in her boots and pulled. The soft gravel gave. She raised her leg and tried to get elevation, and managed to keep half their gain. The next time she put her foot onto a tuft of tough grass, then another. Teeth clenched, she wasn’t letting fire have another soul.

Everything seemed to be in slow motion as she dragged Karrabotsos up and out of the flames. The world was on the other side of wavering orange air that shimmered and distorted. In the last few feet, Deering grabbed Karrabotsos’s other arm and they made it to clear air.

The acrid, animal aroma of singed hair stung Clare’s nose in the same instant she felt Devon’s hands slapping at her head. Thankfully, the wind had whipped the flames away from her skin.

Steve flailed at Karrabotsos’s burning hair as the pilot collapsed to his knees. His fire retardant flight suit was in good shape, but his face showed bright scarlet. “God, that hurts,” he moaned.

With the burns he’d already suffered, this was going to be nasty. “Okay,” Clare snapped. “Let’s get him on board.”

She and Deering pulled Karrabotsos to his feet and assisted him up the unstable gravel slope. It was just as she’d feared, tough and treacherous footing. Behind, Clare noted that Steve and Devon were helping each other.

When they reached the chopper, Deering maneuvered until Karrabotsos could sit in the doorway on the deck and scoot backward. White lips pressed together as he slowly made it inside.

Clare helped get him situated with Devon on the rear seat in the back of the Huey. She placed herself between them to keep an eye on both.

“I’m sorry I lost the first aid kit,” she said.

“Nothing in there that would help.” Although Karrabotsos’s burns were blistering, he bore them with the stoic air of a man who had seen much worse.

Clare turned to Deering. “Get us in the air!”

He moved toward the front seat.

Steve looked at the skid and the step up to get inside with a reluctant expression. Flying over the mountain’s sharp rocks and steep slope must have brought back a frozen peak in Alaska, where he’d faced the worst a man should have to. Now he waited once more to fly with the man Clare knew he despised.

With a painful grimace, he climbed in. Wrestling the handle, he slammed the sliding door home, and met her eyes. “Hell of a job you did back there.”

“I had help.”

Steve probably thought she meant Deering helping him outrun the flames. Sure enough, he shot a glance at the man in the right front seat putting on headphones.

How many times had she bargained for a sign from Frank? She’d wished to believe the dead sent signs to the living, but had never thought it possible.

She still didn’t. That voice, so like Frank’s, had not come from beyond, but from inside her. She’d trained with him, drill after drill, back when she was green. He’d kept her moving, taught her not to let the dragon’s voice distract her from the goal. He’d bandaged the burns she’d earned and then let her tend to him. Everybody in the station had sensed their unbreakable bond.

No, he hadn’t come back from whatever new adventure he was surely on. She had simply known what he would have said as certainly as she knew her own name.

She stared out into the sky, into an image of Frank’s smiling eyes. “Thank you,” she whispered.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

September 8

Deering looked at the Huey’s controls and thought he would be sick.

Not again.

Not after ditching his
Georgia
in Yellowstone Lake. Not after the panic at Old Faithful and landing in disgrace. Not after crashing with Clare’s child on this remote peak.

Last night, he’d lain beside the wreckage of the Huey Karrabotsos had trusted him with. Hearing Devon’s labored breathing, he had hoped she’d be all right. He’d given her the only blanket and lay down back to back with her to preserve body heat. With a rock hard beneath his spine, his temples had pounded where his pulse had turned timpani. He’d pulled back his sleeve to reveal the lighted dial of his Timex.

He wasn’t blind, then.

Lying on the remote mountain with a sour taste in his mouth, he’d realized that while he slept he’d been on another black excursion to Vietnam. One of those trips across space and time that spirited him away when he closed his eyes. No matter the passage of years, he still rested fitfully, as though staying awake would keep the demon at bay.

All the way up the mountain, Deering had counted on Karrabotsos to fly them out of here.

The vis was terrible with the smoke rising off the Clover-Mist, but if he took off to the northeast, he’d probably be able to get them free. With Karrabotsos and Devon both needing medical assistance, he’d have to risk flying on instruments to West Yellowstone.

A good plan, but he clutched the cyclic stick as though he had tunnel vision. Fresh sweat that wasn’t from the climb broke out on his forehead and felt cold in his armpits.

On that afternoon back in July, over Yellowstone Lake with wind whipping in the door, Deering had fought the dizzying sway of the sling load beneath his helicopter, acting as yin to the aircraft’s yang. He’d wanted to believe that Steve Haywood was to blame when the heavy bucket had engaged his Bell in a tug of war, a pair of pendulums in dynamic opposition.

“Let’s go,” Steve said from behind him. Deering sensed the impatience in him and in the other passengers who hadn’t spoken.

Still, he sat. Last night he’d made a promise, sent a message through the night to Georgia, swearing to God that if he just got off this mountain alive, he’d never take the controls of another helicopter.

Steve bent his head between the seats and stared hard at him. “Come on, guy. You can cry in your beer about crashing when you get home. Now, it’s time to fly.”

A man who hated him, who was terrified of flying . . . and yet Steve’s voice was strong and upbeat.

“When did you figure that shit out?” he muttered. Sonnavabitch, if Doctor Haywood didn’t sound like he was ready to go for another ride with him driving.

“All kinds of strange things have happened this summer.” Steve clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Go with the flow.”

What the hell.

Deering took a deep breath and started his preflight.

Clare felt the skids touch down at West Yellowstone. The ride had been white-knuckle all the way. Karrabotsos seemed to be in a lot of pain but doing as well as could be expected.

That was more than she could say for Devon. Although her daughter was sitting up, the look in her eyes said that once danger had passed she had retreated within. She cradled her damaged wrist close to her chest.

Clare’s forehead and cheek stung, but it didn’t feel like she was going to blister. Her hair, already short, came away in singed corkscrews when she ruffled her hands through it.

Steve slid open the chopper door to admit the paramedics. Clare related Karrabotsos’s status, cautioning them that he’d been burned before, while the attendants transferred him onto a stretcher.

A look around revealed that they had landed near the main terminal of West Yellowstone where she and Deering had set down the night of the Mink Creek blowup. Just as he had that evening when she waited to grill him about his duplicity, he was shutting down the aircraft.