Wildfire on the Skagit (Firehawks Book 9) (3 page)

“Yes, sir,” he saluted sharply.

“Do I look like a
sir?”
She cupped her big hands beneath her breasts which were framed by the chest and waist straps of her safety harness. “These aren’t over-muscled pecs, Rook.”

“Wouldn’t know, sir,” he nodded toward her chest. “You haven’t shown them to me.”

She saluted back, but he could tell it was a civilian gesture; and not just because it was made with a middle finger flicked against the brim of her hardhat and a laugh.

Still, Master Sergeant Krista Thorson definitely fit her—military or not. Odd, he knew the background of most of the crew after the three weeks of season-prep and dozens of practice jumps.

He knew nothing about Krista.

Chapter 2

Their cargo dropped in
clean and they soon had the drop zone secure. Akbar led half of the team up the right flank of the fire, leaving her to lead the rest of them to the left.

“Nick the Greek,” Krista pointed downslope. “I want you to get a pump anchored down at the stream. Once Ant-man gets back out of his tree, run a couple hoses. I want you to focus on killing the tail.”

“You hear that?” Nick shouted up at the tree.

Ant-man had lowered himself down safely, and was now climbing back up into the tree to retrieve his chute. “Is that shit speaking?” a shout sounded from seventy or eighty feet up in the thick branches.

Nick turned back to Krista, “We got ya covered.” His evil grin said that Ant-man was a long way from living down his tree landing. But if Nick said they had the situation under control, there was no doubt they did.

“Axe, Jackal, Ox, and Rookie,” she turned to the remaining smokies, “you’re with me.”

“I have a name,” Evan protested. “It’s—”

“Not yet you don’t,” Ox’s deep voice shut him down. “You don’t got a name until Mama Krista tags you. Until then, you’re just Rook.”

Krista offered Evan a smirk to keep him in his place. She might have cut him some slack if he hadn’t scared her by flying into the Black. The Black was more dangerous than tall trees, but he’d flown a perfect pattern. She doubted if she could have done better; man was a born jumper.

“Give me a goddamn break, Ox,” he groaned but you could tell he knew it wouldn’t do any good and was just fighting the good fight.

“Nope!” As they bantered, Evan was sorting through the piled up gear just like the rest of them.

The parachutes and reserves were all stuffed into a big sack to be sorted out and repacked back at base. They rummaged through the fatboy boxes for food. Snickers went fast and vegetarian MRE’s went slow—because veggie-anything Meals, Ready-to-Eat weren’t fit to be eaten. Not by woman or beast.

They also loaded up on Pulaski fire-axes, chainsaws, and a jerry can of gasoline. They all drank their water bottles dry, refilled them, and Ox added the rest of the five-gallon cube of water to his load—they’d drain it fast enough.

Akbar and four smokies had gone to the right flank, Krista led her four up the left, leaving Nick and Ant-man to deal with the tail.

The fire wasn’t very active up the left flank. They beat it back with cut-off pine boughs and shovelfuls of dirt. The smaller trees that were burning, they cut and dropped them back into the fire. When a bigger one was burning, they’d cut away the small trees around it that were not yet burned so that the bigger tree couldn’t spark across. Ones that were really bad—snags getting ready to fall across the line or clearly dead and looking for a smokie to drop on—they cut and dropped back into the fire and attacked it with more dirt.

With a little quick handwork as they climbed, they ensured that the lower flanks of the fire weren’t spreading any further before the hose team could get to them. A big wind shift might drive the flames, but there wasn’t one predicted this morning. And by the time the afternoon heat hit, this flank should be burned down, soaked with stream water by Nick and Ant-man, and not up to threatening anyone.

The team moved with all the kinks of the first fire of the season. Knee problems, wrenched lower backs, and old shoulder injuries wouldn’t start surfacing until later in the season, but they all moved like a bunch of rookies. Digging a line with the hoe side of his Pulaski, Jackal almost nutted Axe with his handle. Ox was so head-down on the line he was digging that he actually walked sideways right into a burning tree. The only one working clean at the moment was the rookie.

“Hey,” she couldn’t resist. “Is Rook the only one who remembers how to fight a fire?”

The crew grumbled but started falling into a cleaner rhythm. Pity about the rookie not giving her anything to tease him about.

Five hundred feet vertical and a half-mile up the slope, she called a brief halt. Two hours had passed with hardly a pause. The next three thousand feet up would not go nearly as quickly.

“Take ten,” she called.

Several of the smokies simply dropped to the ground. At this point it wasn’t exhaustion, but rather energy conservation. Sitting on the ground and letting your muscles relax for ten minutes would pay off tenfold if they had to be on the fire for a couple of days straight.

Evan kicked a log out of the fire and dug a steel mug out of his personal gear bag. He filled it with water from the half-empty water cube and set the mug right on the coals of the wood. Standard smokie practice would have him dumping two or three instant coffee packets into the cup, probably swallowing one dry on top of it.

“Should save the caffeine for later, Rook,” Krista scowled down at him. “Or are you so out of shape that you need it already?”

He grinned up at her and dug into his PG bag. He didn’t pull out an instant coffee packet. Instead, he pulled out a pouch of hot chocolate and flapped it at her before dumping it into his rapidly heating cup.

Krista did what she could to suppress her laugh, “With or without the marshmallows?”

“With, of course. Only way to drink it.”

“Rookies,” she did her best to sound disgusted as she shook her head sadly.

“Hey, I’ve got skills,” he grinned up at her as he stirred his cocoa in with a stick and then pulled on a glove so that he could lift the mug off the burning log. He kicked the log back into the flames and sipped contentedly, making loud “Ahh!” noises.

“Remind me if I ever need a cocoa expert on the fireline.”

“Honor to serve, Master Sergeant.”

Krista could see the urge to salute still rooted deep in the man. She’d met enough of them in her time to recognize a soldier turned firefighter. Most did well, except for the poor suckers who weren’t ready when the fire triggered PTSD. Maybe he hadn’t served front lines, or maybe he’d gotten it out of his system during his years with the Zulies. She’d have to wait and see.

Until Krista was more sure of him, she wasn’t going to risk letting him too far out of her sight.

She turned away to survey the fire.

It was making noises, but not the deep-throated wildfire roar that would deafen them higher up the valley. She heard shouting voices sounding up faintly from below.

“Rook,” she called without turning.

“Yo!”

“When you’re done with your after-school snack, trot down the slope and find out how Ant-man and Nick the Greek are doing on the tail.”

“Radio broken, Master Sergeant?” he joshed her, but slugged back his cocoa and was disappearing down the slope before she could respond.

No, her radio worked just fine. Smokies hated going downslope when they’d just have to come back. So, test one: did he respond well to orders? Now answered with a yes. Test two: how clear would his communication and observations be as he went down and back up the line?

Third, it was always a good practice to send a man back over a finished line every now and then to make sure no sparks had jumped over. Especially when the firebreak was as narrow as the one they’d cut around the tail.

Four? There was a fourth reason there, but she wasn’t so sure what it was.

Just before he disappeared over a small rise and down into the smoke, he turned back and saluted. She could see from his smile that he knew exactly what she was doing…even if she didn’t.

Which pissed her off all the more.

“Okay. Enough lazing about,” she told the other smokies. “Let’s hurt a little.” It came out harsher than she intended.

But the others were on their feet in seconds and they prepared to attack the fire’s flank up the face of the ridge with no more than the usual complaints. This next section was going to be tougher and much hotter. In five minutes they’d forget they’d had a break at all, in ten their bodies would start wondering when the next one would be.

She could hear the helos working the head of the fire and Akbar calling on the command frequency. His people were at the same elevation as her team but on the far side of the fire, working upslope, making sure it didn’t spread sideways. She could picture Akbar right there across the Black. Less than a half mile away, invisible beyond the smoke-wreathed land that lacked even the least speck of green.

Mr. Lovesick…no. Mr. Lovedrunk…not that either. Akbar was…just too damned happy. He’d always been an upbeat guy, but watching him with Laura was enough to make a girl’s teeth ache because they were so damn sweet together.

Krista turned away to assess the slope and the fire ahead.

It was time to leave the Black behind and start cutting a serious fireline. From now until they met Akbar’s team around the head of the fire, the teams would be separated by fire, not by char. They’d trade nose-tickling carbon for the sweetness of burning sap.

If there was a flareup, her people still had a good escape to the west, but it wouldn’t be any fun. Their best escape would be to create a wide fireline that the flames couldn’t breach—which was the whole point anyway.

“Give me a break ten yards wide,” she called out, having to raise her voice to be heard over the fire. It was all the direction they needed. Akbar had taken the two snookies, so these four were all hard-seasoned MHA firefighters.

Axe and Jackal fired off their chainsaws, Ox began clearing what they’d cut to the far side of the firebreak. Not many guys could swamp for two sawyers at the same time, but Ox could. He dragged branches and rolled sections of tree trunk through thick brush to get it well clear of the fire’s edge. Ten yards of fireline cleared of flammable fuels. Another five hundred feet up, they’d have to double the width of the line.

Krista came along behind the team and worked the soil with her Pulaski, cutting a line down through all of the organics. She dragged the highly flammable top layers of dried leaves and needles back a dozen feet so that they didn’t catch any embers. The underground organics she cleared from a yard-wide swath. Even a small gap of exposed mineral soils could stop a ground fire that was creeping through the duff.

Krista wasn’t much of a one for deep thinking, but she did wonder why she’d decided she should keep a close eye on the rookie and then sent him downslope just moments later. The first decision was a safety issue—Evan Greene was still an untested quantity. Sending him down the line was something else.

Instead of thinking about her team moving close above her or Akbar’s team on the other flank or what the goddamn fire might be planning next, her thoughts were with a tall handsome rookie who kept saluting her like it meant something.

Not good.

She firmly turned her attention to the soil.

# # #

Evan cruised down the slope. At first he was glad of the chance to stretch out his legs after the first two hours of bent-over work.

He stopped only twice to shovel more soil over small flareups. The line was holding clean. He’d have made it wider, but Krista had called it dead on. She’d read the tail of the fire at some level he couldn’t see, understood what it could and couldn’t do with a master tactician’s expertise.

Nick the Greek and Ant-man were working a pair of one-and-a-half inch hose lines along the tail. They had it doused hard and were now working up both sides at once.

“You guys going back to hotshotting?” Normally an Interagency Hotshot Crew would be here by now to do the lower-end handwork.

“Mount Hood Aviation is a full service firefighting outfit,” Nick announced. Then grumbled, “Hell of a way to spend your first fire of the season. The access road washed out last winter. It was patched, but not well enough for any service vehicles, so the IHCs are hiking in. Still a couple hours out.”

“I think Krista hates us,” Ant-man had shut off his hose and come over when he saw Evan arrive.

“No, man,” Nick sounded gleeful at the fresh opening. “She hates
you
for flying into a tree and
I’m
stuck suffering along with your sorry ass.”

“Then she must hate me even worse,” Evan drew some of the fire to spare Ant-man who was getting irritable, “for landing in the fire.”

“How you figure that?”

“I’ve been sent down to check on you guys.”

Ant-man looked at him strangely, “Her radio broken?”

“Nope,” Evan did his best to sound cheerful, but he felt a little like a Private First Class who’d just been bucked back down to Private.

“Well, you gotta get her back, Man,” Nick insisted. “Or you ain’t no man.”

Twenty minutes and a five hundred foot vertical climb later, Evan was wondering just who had been gotten back in this deal. Both of his arms were screaming: one from carrying five gallons of water, the other from hauling another five-gallon jerry can of chainsaw fuel. He’d stopped to switch off pretty often, not that it made any difference; they were both over forty pounds of goddamn heavy.

The guys had painted a picture of him striding back onto the line with the extra supplies and being welcomed like a returning hero. Instead he felt like a returning wet rag. The sun had cracked into the valley and on the occasions when it found a hole through the smoke, it cooked him in his gear. Nomex didn’t burn easily, it also didn’t breathe for shit. Give him some desert camos, a forty-pound ruck, and a combat rifle any day.

Well, at least a fire didn’t shoot back much, but still.

Evan dug in and tried to find an easy-going stride as he crested the last rise into where they’d stopped for a break.

Effort wasted. No one there.

He’d been gone thirty, maybe forty minutes, and the fire team was nowhere in sight. It might have been an elaborate dodge-the-rookie trick if it weren’t for the fresh-cut fireline ranging up the slope ahead of him.

A slice had been made alongside the fire, a wide slice. To one side unburned forest so thick he couldn’t see twenty feet in. To the other, flames were kicking up fifty, even a hundred feet into the sky. Even as he watched, smoke and ash from the active flank of the fire curled into the newly opened firebreak…and died.

A black-and-fire painted Firehawk helo roared down into the valley. Pounding in a hundred feet above the thick, unburned forest, it unleashed a long shower of a thousand gallons of bright red retardant to further guarantee that the fire didn’t jump the new line. Little droplets of the retardant drifted over to land on him, tiny stings like bug bites everywhere it touched skin. Well, between the morning on the fire and the drop at least his gear wasn’t stand-out pristine any more.