Wildfire on the Skagit (Firehawks Book 9) (12 page)

Chapter 11

“We’re what?” Krista’s voice
squeaked and she went white.

Her skin and hair were so fair that she’d only lightly tanned despite making her living in the outdoors, but Evan was still impressed at the color change—and more than a little startled because nothing surprised Krista.

The van had rolled the sleep-fogged smokies back to the airport. Half of them, including himself, were still eating breakfast. Sausages hastily wrapped in a waffle, weird bacon-with-egg-and-turkey sandwiches, anything they’d been able to lay their hands on. Half gallon cartons of orange juice were being passed back and forth like moonshine jugs.

They were aloft while they were still eating, which was a challenge on a DC-3. The plane was a tail dragger which meant her aisle was steeply sloped because her butt normally sat on the ground, until she reached take-off speeds and then she climbed like a mother. The forces drove incautious smokies toward the tail of aircraft. This time most of them had their hands full of breakfast, so heavy boots were propped against others’ hips or gear bags to keep from sliding to the stern in a confused heap.

They were aloft with the sunrise.

Once they had sorted themselves out and most of the eating was done, Akbar had told them where they were going.

And Krista had gone sheet white.

“We’re what?” she repeated in a dead monotone, clutching Evan’s upper arm with a desperation that was really starting to hurt despite the heavy jumpsuit.

“There’s a fire,” Akbar repeated himself, looking at her strangely. “On the Skagit River. Near a town named Concrete.”

Krista looked like a beached fish, her jaw working but no sound making it out.

“What, do they have a big cement plant?” Evan went for a joke, hoping to elicit some response.

Her eyes simply went wider and she looked as if she was about to be ill. Then she began shaking her head slowly in denial. Thankfully she eased off on the vice grip around his bicep and dropped her hands lifelessly into her lap.

“Two plants, though I think they’re both closed,” Akbar said carefully. “Small town up in the northern Cascade Mountains.”

“How bad?” Krista croaked out, clearly asking about the fire.

“It’s—”

“Pretty bad,” Evan cut off Akbar. “I’d say you’re being a real mess at the moment. A pretty mess though.”

Krista’s glare did his heart good; it was a bit of the normal Krista showing through. Perhaps teasing her wasn’t the best choice, but he had to snap her out of whatever was going on. She was worrying him.

He checked the rest of the guys. Most were finishing their night’s sleep.

Only Ox had caught that something was going on and had managed to stay awake.

“It’s not good,” Akbar said gently. “Officially the Twin Sisters Fire, it started up on the Twin Sisters mountains from a runaway slash pile. Lumber company lit off a dozen piles of slash, one got away and they abandoned all the others. It lit a mile-wide front all at once. We have strong winds out of the northwest driving it toward the town of Concrete. They aren’t evacuating the town yet, but they’re watching it. What’s the deal, Krista?”

“The deal?” Her voice was still sounded spaced out.

They’d jumped a half dozen fires already this year at least as bad.

Then Krista shook her head like a wet dog climbing out of a swamp.

“How soon do we get there?” And she rattled off a whole list of available asset questions without ever giving Akbar a chance to answer them.

“Krista,” Evan finally shook her.

“What?” she snarled at him.

Thankfully it was Akbar who answered, “Explain what the hell is going on or you won’t be jumping this one.”

She stared blankly at Akbar for a long moment, then looked at Evan in deep distress. But he didn’t know what was going on. So he did something they’d both been careful to never do in front of the crew. He took her hands, which were chilled and slick with panic sweat, and kissed her.

Ox grunted in surprise behind him. Evan ignored his jump partner. Time to deal with the fact that the Rookie was sleeping with Mama Krista later.

His kiss had the desired effect of surprising the daylights out of her and focusing her attention.

“Scaring us here, Krista. Just talk to me.”

He saw slowly her coming back into her own. Her brilliant blue eyes which had been over-wide and distant, focused on his, then went watery with unshed tears. That unnerved him more than anything; he had no idea what to do if she actually cried.

When at last she spoke, it was barely a whisper. “We can’t let those woods burn. Those are my woods.”

“You grew up in Concrete?”

She nodded and bit her lower lip hard enough to drive the blood from it.

“Can you promise me you won’t do anything stupid?”

She nodded, but he didn’t quite trust it. And he wouldn’t let anyone else take the risk if she did, but he knew to keep her off the fire would be a cruelty.

He looked over her shoulder at Akbar, “How would you and Ox like to buddy up on this one?”

Akbar the Great studied him carefully. He hadn’t missed any of what had just happened, not even that Krista could well become a liability in the middle of the fire.

He started to shake his head, but Evan cut him off.

“I’ve got this one, Akbar. I’m good with it.”

# # #

Krista had never felt so disoriented as the moment she eased up behind Evan in the DC-3’s jump door.

Akbar and Ox were gone. She leaned out until she could see them fighting their way down through the air. Normally looking down was easy, Akbar might be powerfully built, but he was a shrimp. Evan was not. He sat tall in the door and the only reason she could see was that he was also leaning forward to watch the first stick’s progress.

“Better than the Bitterroots, worse than Mountain Home,” he shouted up at her encouragingly.

At least she liked to imagine that it was encouraging. No one had ever stood for her as Evan had…there’d never been a need for anyone to, but still it was surprising. Someone had her back. Not a soul had…not even her father really.

Focus, Krista.
But all the commands in the world couldn’t drag her eyes off the fire. Even as she watched, the blaze found a way past the Twin Sisters Divide at Bell Pass. To the west it was already past Lake Doreen and had begun torching along the South Fork Nooksack River, little more than a stream at this point.

The fire was spreading fast as it flowed into the valley, now moving on multiple fronts across two or three miles. And it moved like an arrow pointed at the town of Concrete, the Skagit River, and her entire childhood.

When she was twelve, she and her father had found a fallen madrona tree close by Lake Doreen—her father didn’t harvest green trees for furniture, he let nature do the drying. The challenge was to find the wood in that narrow slot of time between dead and rotted, a very narrow window in the wet forests of the Pacific Northwest. They’d hauled the dense and heavy trunk the dozen miles back to his workshop over rough terrain and old fire service roads. Together they’d made a beautiful rocking chair that she’d lusted after madly long before they were done with the making of it.

Despite their desperate situation and the high price the rocker would have brought, he insisted that it was her thirteenth birthday present, as she was a young woman now she deserved something fine. It was one of the few possessions left of her childhood and it dominated her tiny private room back in the MHA barracks. Grandpop’s knife even now on her hip, that chair, and Pop’s old Ford pickup—which would be a classic now…if she ever got around to restoring it—were all she had left other than memories and a few photos.

Terry’s slap came on her jump partner’s shoulder and he was gone from in front of her.

Krista looked at Terry who stared up at her in shock.

“Go!” he shouted in urgent surprise and reflex jerked her out the door.

She was much farther behind Akbar than normal.

Except it wasn’t Akbar, it was Evan.

Despite the distance between them and the heavy masks they both wore, she could feel his dark gaze boring into her.

He pulled his chute.

Her count!

He’d been waiting to make sure she was counting—and she wasn’t.

Nor had she done the 360-degree survey to make sure she was in the clear. She did a quick safety check as she continued to fall. She was nearly on top of Evan’s position before she pulled her own ripcord.

The chute jerked her hard—crotch and breasts; she should have cinched the thigh and chest bands more tightly.

But she’d forgotten.

Now she was too low, exactly the same height as Evan rather than safely above him. She tried to adjust her rate of descent, but that’s when the first fire-hot gust slapped at her and sent her sailing in a direction she didn’t want to go. In this turbulence, slowing her descent would also risk collapsing her chute.

So, they spun and dodged about each other for the last thousand feet into the drop zone. They both managed to avoid the trees, but only because Evan was kind enough to land on a small open spot on the far side of Bell Creek. He had to wade back across it and took a fair amount of teasing for his “missed landing” from the other smokies.

“Left-Bank Rook,” almost stuck when Nick the Greek shouted it out. But Krista didn’t pick it up, still it was a close call, him being tagged with that for his entire career with MHA.

She felt awful, but when she tried to apologize, he shut her down.

“You stick close by me,” he whispered fast and quiet while the last stick was landing. “Don’t do anything stupid and we don’t have a problem. Roger that?”

“Roger that,” she agreed hastily. She’d never needed someone to watch her back. It was an uncomfortable sensation—shrugging her shoulders didn’t shake it off—that this time she just might need the help.

When their paracargo gear also landed across the stream, much of it in the trees, Evan got his payback. All of the smokejumpers had to slosh back and forth several times through the ice-cold, thigh-deep water that poured off the glaciers of Mt. Baker before everything was consolidated in one spot.

Chapter 12

The fire had the
dry forest in its sights and it seemed that no matter what they did, it wasn’t going down.

Evan had led the strike team of Krista, Nick, Ant-man, Axe, and Riverboat two thousand feet up the side of the South Fork Divide. They created a firebreak line the whole way up in order to narrow and focus the fire toward where he knew the battle would be.

Akbar, Ox, and the rest of the first plane load were headed down the valley of the South Fork Nooksack River. It would be a far more difficult target to secure. When the second load of smokies jumped, they’d probably all go to help Akbar.

He’d wished he’d watched the fire more during his jump, but when Krista hadn’t jumped, then followed him late, he’d spent all his attention willing her to pull her ripcord. At any altitude, he didn’t care.
Just pull the damned thing!
he’d finally shouted and she finally did, though there was no way she could have heard him.

He’d been on the verge of shutting his eyes so he didn’t have to watch the most amazing woman he’d ever met do a “chute failed to open”—because she was too scattered to pull the cord. Worse, he’d been the one to let her jump, so he’d have been the one who’d killed her. He’d cried out in relief when she finally yanked the rip cord. Evan was so happy when she made it down in good form that he’d been ready to forgive anything, even freezing his nuts off when he waded that bitterly cold creek.

He pulled Nick the Greek aside and told him to keep a sharp eye on Krista and then placed her on the line between Nick and himself. Evan needn’t have worried.

On the line, Krista was head down. Rather than doing her normal work of any two other smokejumpers, she was doing more like four or five.

Evan had to struggle to keep up.

As a result, their team moved at manic speeds, climbing and cutting, bucking tree trunks into sections, and swamping branches downwind of the growing firebreak.

They cut soil deep and scraped it hard, often down to bare rock because the steep slopes held little soil. Their Pulaskis were a blur of sharp steel and more than once he had to tell Krista to ease up because a poorly swung Pulaski could cut through her boot leather and flesh far more easily than the root-entwined sod they were hacking at.

Five hours since the jump, he had Ant-man run the line to make sure everyone was staying hydrated and taking a break for an energy bar. He wanted to do it himself, but he didn’t dare leave Krista.

“Drink, Krista.”

She ignored him.

“Krista Thorson…”

“Out of my way, Rook.”

On her next upstroke with the axe, he grabbed the handle.

She was so powerful, she almost tumbled him over with her attempted downstroke.

But he braced and held on.

“Fine,” she let go abruptly and he actually did fall over backwards at the sudden release of the tool.

“You just gonna lie there, Rook?” She knocked back the contents of her water bottle and looked down at him. “We do have a fire to fight you know.”

When she grabbed for her Pulaski he pulled it away even though he was still on his butt.

“Okay, Mom,” she snarled, but took out a couple of Snickers and began wolfing them down.

He climbed back to his feet. Before returning her Pulaski, he kissed her on the nose while she chewed. “Good girl.”

“Go jump in a hot spot, Rook.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he saluted.

When she fisted him in the ribs, none too gently, he felt much better about her mental state.

In moments they were both back at it. It was obvious that she was taking this fire personally. She’d gone to some dark place where this was a contest of wills, never a good bet against a wildfire.

Evan had once watched an eight-year Zulie snap, right out on the fireline. They’d been working it steadily for four days with only a couple of short breaks; the whole team riding the edge of hallucinations caused by lack of sleep. The Zulie had started yelling at the fire. Not the normal trash-talking a smokie sometimes did to the flames about its mother and the ember it rode in on, but a screaming rant. It had taken five guys to drag him off the line and back to safety when he strode up to “get in the fire’s face.” Suddenly calm, a helo had medevaced him out strapped to a stretcher. He was gone; never came back. Last word said he was teaching high school English in Missouri.

Evan would be damned if he was going to lose Krista to the fire, but he didn’t know what to do other than fight it alongside her.

They were both swamping for Nick and Ant-man who were on the saws when Krista croaked at him from a voice gone hoarse with smoke and lack of use.

“Blowup.”

He stopped to listen.

Blowups typically happened between two and four in the afternoon. When the day was at its hottest and the last tiny bits of moisture were sucked out of the trees. The intense dryness in his throat told him they were under ten percent humidity. There was a tipping point between desperately dry forest and tinder dry—the latter needing only the tiniest encouragement to explode into flame.

Then he felt it. The wind shift.

In one way, it was incredibly encouraging. Whatever headspace his gal was in, her fire senses—which were the best he’d ever seen—were fully engaged and she was listening to them.

The wind shift was also one of the scariest and least predictable moments on a wildfire.

The world’s winds had been driving the fire steadily toward their position, down out of Bell Pass across Bell Creek, and climbing the ridge of the South Fork Divide.

The burn now covered much of the wide valley between Twin Sisters Divide and their position. They had come up Bell Creek to the east side of Loomis Mountain and Akbar’s team had followed the South Fork Nooksack River to the western saddle between the Twin Sister’s ridge and Loomis.

The air was impossibly still, despite the roaring of the chainsaws and the grunts of the laboring crew. All sounds fell on dead air and were oddly muffled. One by one the other smokies stopped what they were doing and looked up from their tasks.

Even the heavy pounding of the big Firehawk helicopters, passing close by overhead as they delivered thousand-gallon loads of retardant to the unburned forest behind the fireline, seemed to slow. It was like that slo-mo moment in war movies before everything went to shit.

Which, Evan knew, was exactly what was about to happen.

“Cone of silence,” he agreed with Krista. He hated this moment. The heat of the sun pounding against his Nomex and not the least breath of a breeze to cool him. His hardhat, no longer protection but now a baking oven threatening to cook his brain. His gloves stuck to him by his own sweat.

Then the wind returned, in the opposite direction to how it had been blowing steadily all morning, feeding their faces with smoke.

Now he tasted fresh, clear air for the first time since they’d jumped this morning.

As gently as a whisper, it turned and began blowing toward the still distant fire. The wildfire would grow two or three times in ferocity and height in the next ten minutes as it sucked oxygen in from every direction.

Even as he listened, the thick sap in the giant Douglas fir trees down in the valley began cooking off. With that harsh body-pounding thump of 155mm M777 howitzer shells, trees exploded in the suddenly increased heat.

“Light the backfire now,” he and Krista screamed out in unison, breaking their mutual paralysis. They laughed at the exact synchronicity of their calls even as they rushed across the fireline and grabbed up drip torches.

The cans of gas-diesel mix had a spout that dribbled out over a flaming wick. In moments, they were both splashing fire along the entire fireline, on the wildfire’s side of the break.

The growing wind, driving toward the heart of the fire, whipped their tiny fires to life. Little splashes of fuel turned dry grass into flaming torches. That in turn lit the lower branches of the nearby trees.

The wind had already built to ten miles an hour and was growing quickly.

He and Krista turned in opposite directions and they sprinted down the line dribbling their bits of fire.

Mark Henderson up in the Incident Commander’s plane had reacted before Evan had time to even think to call him. Suddenly a line of helos were pounding the fireline close behind him with heavy retardant loads.

As usual, the fire had chosen the when and the where of the next battle.

Thick showers of gooey red slammed into the forest coating branches with a slime that would block oxygen from reaching the wood. A hot ember cast into that would die—the wood was dry enough to burn and the embers would be hot enough, but with no oxygen, there was no fire.

The wind now roared down the slope from all directions to feed the blowup of the wildfire. North, east, south, and west—all winds blew toward the center and the fire erupted.

Orange flames, bright with heat and dark with ash, shot five hundred feet into the sky. Hundred foot trees were uprooted and tossed aloft like blades of straw. The roar was so loud that Evan couldn’t hear even his own shout of wonder.

Each time he saw this, it was new. And rarely had he seen it so clearly. It lay spread out like a textbook drawing across the valley to his perfect seat atop the ridge. This was nature at her most primal, most dangerous, and most dramatic.

It was out of their hands now.

The backfire was ripped downhill toward the mighty blaze, adding its heat to the raging main fire sending it even higher and hotter. But what the backfire had also done, despite being a lower intensity burn, was consume much of the fuel that covered the face of the ridge below their fireline.

Krista came to stand beside him in the impossible silence of the pause between preparation and battle.

For a moment they leaned their shoulders together. The spectacle was awe-inspiring, and for the first time he was with someone who fully shared that awe.

Girls from bars would always ask, “You jump out of planes?” or “Isn’t it dangerous?”

He’d get so tired of explaining the basics that sometimes it wasn’t even worth the effort to pick up a woman.

He had none of that with Krista. They shared a passion, a language…and a need. It wasn’t just a need for sex, it was fast becoming a need for her. He’d been thinking about that a lot while working the fire—ever since that terrifying moment when he thought she wasn’t going to pull the chute.

He turned from the fire to watch her profile. Her smoke-smeared face looked pale from the effort she’d been expending; his probably looked little better. She was focused, concentrating on the blowup. But clearly aware of his inspection, a smile touched her lips.

Gods but this woman made him feel good.

The only problem was that the Evan Greene he knew never needed anyone. And the one person who’d needed him, he’d let down in the worst way possible.

The other smokies of their team gathered along the top of the ridge while they watched the smoke climb like an atom bomb. A great column of fire and smoke and heat soared aloft so fast that it shattered against the denser air above and formed a mushroom cloud.

Somewhere far aloft, the cloud of smoke—nearly white because it had dropped most of its ash after its initial meteoric rise—hit the jet stream and was sheared off and smeared eastward.

Still unable to speak over the roar of the fire, Evan dispersed them back to the line with hand signals. The second part of the battle was about to begin.

# # #

Krista still couldn’t believe that they’d fought the fire to a standstill.

What flames did try to crest the ridge, were low, weakened by the loss of fuel burned in the backfire. They were still twenty and thirty feet of hell when they hit the fireline, but that was better than two hundred.

When embers sparked over the line, they died in the retardant, or were beaten down by the smokies before they could spread. During the daylight hours, they often called up one of MHA’s smaller helos to douse a particularly stubborn spot fire.

It was well past dark when they finally had it contained, but the fire was blocked. This fire at least would never cross over the South Fork Divide.

By midnight, it was beaten and the sky began to clear as the smoke cooled and dissipated. The moon finally had a location, a bright spot beyond the smoke, even if there were no clear views of the sky yet.

Krista stood on a smooth area of exposed bedrock, black ash surrounded her in every direction.

A man moved toward her through the falling darkness, lit by the dying flames, a bright headlamp shining ahead of him. She couldn’t see his face.

But no other man moved like that and Krista would know Evan Greene anywhere.

“Hey there, Rook.”

“Hey, Pretty Lady.”

She managed not to snort in derision. If he wanted to see her that way, she wasn’t going to complain even if she didn’t believe him.

He moseyed to a stop in front of her and killed his headlamp.

“Fought your first fire to a standstill.”

“You mean we killed its ass. And this isn’t my first dance.”

“You dance, Rook?” She loved that Evan shifted her statement to include the team though it had been just a tease.
We
even though he’d led the fight the whole way and everyone knew it. He’d handled her panicked efforts to save the forest of her youth right in stride without so much as blinking.

“Find me the right lady, I’ll dance all night,” he moved in close, rested one hand on her utility belt and wrapped the other around her hand on her Pulaski’s handle. He pulled her in and began rocking them back and forth on the small patch of rock.

“I’ll take you up on that one, Rook,” she leaned in, not caring that he smelled of firesmoke.

“Still gonna stick me with that tag?”

“Until I got better, yep! You’re stuck with it.”

He harrumphed, but held her a little tighter. She went to lean her head on his shoulder in a totally mushy move that she’d never really understood when she’d seen other women do it. The fact that her hardhat ended up klonking against Evan’s only made the moment more uniquely theirs.

Then he stopped as if quick frozen in place. His grip hardened against her.