Pure Heat (20 page)

Steve looked down at the map spread across the picnic table at the Cornelius Skyport. The corners were pinned down by bags of burgers and fries. Sweating paper cups of soda sat forgotten as Carly attacked the plastic-covered map with markers.

Beale was over nursing her daughter and making the maintenance crew nervous. They were using the break to perform some quick service on the Firehawk, changing air filters and whatever else it was they did. One of the 212s came in for fuel, but it didn't stay long.

Besides Steve and Carly, all three incident commanders were there. Henderson for air, TJ for ground, and Rick Dobson, the overall commander. Steve hadn't really met him yet. He'd expected the IC to be older, but he was maybe early thirties, a handsome guy with black hair and blue eyes that radiated a quiet confidence.

Carly tossed a black and a red marker at Steve. “Draw the black and the fire perimeters.”

An orange marker almost hit Henderson in the chest before he caught it. “Air attack lines.”

Totally in her element, she shone like the Flame Witch that she was. She had the fire on the run, even though it was less than ten percent contained. He could feel her confidence radiating out into those around her.

Somehow, the heat in his own direction had turned up as well. He didn't know what she saw in him, but he sure as hell wasn't complaining.

Henderson sat down across the picnic table from Steve and began drawing.

They took turns checking the drone's feed on the tablet. Steve re-aimed it a couple of times to double-check the line and had the outline of the black drawn fairly quickly. The fire took a bit longer because it was on the move in so many directions. Forty-five square miles, thirty thousand acres and growing.

She tossed a green marker at TJ, who'd come over for the conference. Chutes, TJ, and Betsy were supporting the smokies and the jump planes that were dropping supply loads out of Hillsboro Airport. That meant the tanker crews were at least getting Betsy's good food, small consolation there.

“TJ, show me the crews.”

He sketched quickly. “Smokies here and here. Hotshots along these lines. Wildland engines are working to hold the southern edge along these fire roads. The local districts have mobilized a half-dozen quints.”

Only the first three of a quint fire truck's five capacities really applied to wildfire, but the pump, hose, and built-in tanker combination was essential. If the ground ladders and extensible multistory ladder were not called for, neither were they in the way.

TJ referred to his smartphone display as he drew. “The locals we're keeping along the west here and along this line. They'll be even more motivated than usual since they're defending their own turf. I've embedded MHA supervisors into each local.”

Locals were fine, but wildfire wasn't their specialty. It was one thing to beat down backyard brushfire or a small wildfire that you could contain with a half-dozen crews, some cut and slash, and a backburn.

It was a whole other art to fight a fire that could leap crowns at twenty miles per hour or roar over a prairie at twice that with the right motivation. TJ knew that and had given each team someone who could help them. That thinned MHA's resources, making it look like a bad idea at first, but it would ease communications and increase safety for the overall fire teams.

“Rick, what's our total count?”

The Incident Commander looked up at the sky for a moment.

Steve followed his gaze. It was gray with ash. Ash that was being thrown so high by the roaring fire that it was spilling in every direction. Portland and Salem, as well as the coast towns, were already dusted. If this continued, they'd be grayed over in the next day or so.

“We've got about three hundred folks on this fire.”

“You need to find me another two hundred.” She phrased it as an order, completely ignoring the fact that Rick, as the Incident Commander, was her boss.

That drew Steve's attention from the dirty skies back to Carly. They already had all of MHA's smokies and their two hotshot crews in the field. They'd even scrounged up two more flights of smokies and another hotshot crew. Add to that the locals and all of the fire dozers in this part of the state.

Dobson wasn't looking surprised. He was past that and merely gazing down at her speculatively. “And where do you be suggesting I get them? We're already mobbed across state lines.” He'd added an Irish accent that, based on his looks, he could well have come by naturally.

“Don't care where they're mobilized from. They won't be anywhere near the fire, so they don't have to be firefighters. Loggers, power-line guys, tree trimmers, dozer operators, that's what you need now.”

Rick squinted those blue eyes at Carly, then at the map, then back at her. “And what the hell are they supposed to do?”

“This.” Carly took a blue marker and slashed it down the eastern edge of the Coast Range.

***

Carly waited for them to see it.

Steve was first, of course. He knew what she was going to draw on the map almost as soon as she did herself.

While Steve and TJ had been making their markups about fire and crews, she'd drawn little boxes of each of the recent clear-cuts where the trees hadn't grown back yet. They followed a broken line right along the edge of the state forest.

Rick was nodding his head. Clearly thinking about it and liking it more with each moment.

“Connect the dots.” Steve's comment turned on the lightbulb for TJ and Henderson.

Then everybody started talking over each other.

She didn't need to participate in what came next. The three Incident Commanders could take it from here. Carly rose and grabbed a bag of food and one of the big sodas.

Henderson dropped his tablet computer on the corner before it curled up, and began making notes.

She snagged Steve's hand and headed down the runway. It felt so damn good to stretch her legs. For a hundred feet or so, he didn't say a thing. She just tipped her head back and felt the relatively cool air of a midsummer field, one that wasn't on fire and burning the air.

A laugh bubbled up inside her.

Before it could escape, Steve spun her into his arms and his kiss crushed down on her mouth. With those strong arms, he wrapped her so hard against his chest that she couldn't breathe. She couldn't think, couldn't do anything but feel.

It wasn't just a toe-curler.

All on its own, one of her legs wrapped around his hips, pulling him even tighter to her body.

When at last he moved his attention from her bruised lips to her throat, she breathed out on a sigh of the heat that had scorched up her body from the moment she'd touched his hand.

“You know it won't be that easy.”

He nuzzled her neck. “Never is.” His voice a thrum direct from his chest to hers, his hands exploring down her back and up her sides.

For a moment she hoped that he understood she'd been talking about the fire.

The way he was making her feel, she knew the fire wasn't the only thing that was getting out of hand.

Steve lowered her to the grass runway.

“No. Hold it, Mercer. You are not making love to me in broad daylight right in front of everybody.” Then she remembered the two of them lying naked in an old burn with a helicopter hovering overhead. “Okay, you're not going to do it again.”

His kiss said otherwise, but he didn't start stripping off her clothes.

Instead, he traced his fingertips down her arm to the paper bag she'd somehow retained through his dizzying kiss.

With a slight pull, he tugged it away and opened it. After looking down at the contents, he offered her another of his smiles that didn't make her feel naked, but rather made her wish that she was.

“So, Ms. Thomas. What are you going to have?” And he folded the bag closed and held it possessively against his chest.

She leaned forward, brushed her lips on his, and idly leaned a hand on his thigh above his injury so that her fingertips slipped along the front of his pants and all the hard heat straining against the denim.

“I'm”—she teased his lips with her tongue—“going to”—she deepened the kiss until she almost lost her direction again, but managed to recover enough to lean back by a whisper—“have this.”

She slid the bag from his nerveless fingers.

Carly was halfway through the first burger before Steve recovered enough to pull another one out of the bag.

Carly checked the plan that the three ICs had cooked up. They stood in silence around the picnic table while she inspected their additional markings.

“Tell me.”

“If the fire comes this far east”—Rick pointed at Carly's blue line—“they'll have a good chance of stopping it. We'll cut fire lines, as wide as possible, from one clear-cut to the next. As soon as they cut the full line, they'll go back and cut it deeper.”

A two-hundred-foot-wide swath along a half-dozen miles. It was a task of impossible scale under any other conditions. But by connecting the old clear-cuts, two-thirds of the way was already cleared. The cleanup and salvage of such a massive amount of cutting could take months, but a hundred percent of the timber would be recoverable instead of the typical ten or twenty percent that might be salvaged from what remained inside the black. In the Tillamook Burn, they'd salvaged almost half of the old growth, just because the trees were so damn big that the core was still usable.

Henderson pointed at the markings he and TJ had added to her blue line.

“We're going to work it in waves from the center out. That way, we can respond more quickly to either the north or south if the fire shifts.”

“It sounds solid.”

“Good, because we already have the first teams en route. We'll have the crews out and switch in the fire teams if the fire even gets close.”

“Based on the forecast”—Carly had brought over her own laptop and checked the latest reports—“the center of the high pressure is going to pass south. That means that the winds will be hammering straight in from the coast. Maybe even a little from the south. Rare for it to come up the coast this time of year, so I'm betting it will be pretty violent. They call the pattern the ‘Pineapple Express' as the winds are coming off Hawaii.”

“What fun.” Dobson found some cold french fries. “By the way, just got a report from the inspection team. You nailed the ignition point. Twenty thousand acres were burned before we even arrived, and you nailed it dead-on.”

Carly arched a look at Steve, who merely grinned. When she considered their last midfield kiss, having him as a sex slave might be a more dangerous bet than she'd intended.

“Two vehicles were parked at the end of that fire road.” Rick scrounged up a burger somewhere and took a bite. “Down the trail they found a campfire and some tents, crisped up nice. Found a bunch of spent shotgun shells and some personal effects. Source wasn't the fire, but about fifty feet away.”

“Firing their shotguns into the woods for the fun of it.” Steve felt disgusted.

Henderson nodded. “Fire took off so fast they lost one of the vehicles. The plates had melted, but the VIN on the engine block was still readable. We were able to find the owner. He and his buddies were out for a drunken guys' weekend. That's exactly what they said happened. Even dumb enough to admit they saw the ‘No discharge of firearms' warning on the red-alert fire-hazard sign going in.”

“It's going to cost them.”

Rick's smile was grim but righteous. “Gonna cost them over ten million so far, and we're a long way from done here.”

“Damn straight!” TJ looked ready to beat the money out of the idiots.

Carly checked Steve's grin again. He didn't look at all upset at what their bet was going to cost him. She really needed to get her head on straight and figure out what she thought about that.

“Want to go double or nothing?” She wasn't sure what the bet would be, but it might get her either out of or deeper into trouble.

“What's the bet?” Steve smiled down at her in a way that was sparking heat that just might cause her bodily damage before it was done.

“Will you two cut it out?” Henderson was grinning, though. Clearly he'd guessed what they'd bet. “Let's say we get back to it before it costs them twenty million that the Forest Service will never see.”

“Let's do it.” Steve's voice was enough of a caress that TJ turned to see Carly's reaction, but she couldn't look away from her lover's dark eyes. She couldn't even raise her hands to her burning cheeks.

In minutes they were aloft and back in the maelstrom.

“Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! Hoodie Little Four is hit. Repeat, I'm hit. Going down.”

Steve's brain had gone fuzzy. It was late afternoon in a very long day, but the adrenaline of the call snapped him wide awake. The interior of the Firehawk was unchanged. Five more hours of ferrying retardant had done nothing but add some energy-bar wrappers to the trash.

Shaking his head to clear it, he looked at the position of the MD500 on his feed from Beale and saw the drone was close.

He swung the drone north. North. Shit! All he could think was another surface-to-air missile.

Beale called, “Nature of hit?” Her voice was far steadier than his would have been. Obviously she had the same thought.

“Damn tree!” The pilot cursed. Female. Pissed, not scared. “Fire shot a chunk of tree over a hundred feet up when it blew. Damn! And I was having such a good day.”

Steve had the chopper on screen, spinning, but not wildly yet. It was in a controlled autorotation, also known as going down fast. She'd flown past the fire and was spinning in the air well over the black. A small, black-and-red four-seat helicopter in the midst of the nightmare world of charred hundred-foot spikes. She needed a—

“Clearing,” he called out, then remembered to key his mike. “There's a clearing a couple hundred yards due west.”

“What? Where?”

But he could see on the drone's camera feed that the trend line for the tiny helicopter slewed in the right direction even if it kept spinning around. Sometimes backward, sometimes sideways, but still moving toward the only opening among the burned trees that was anywhere close.

“You're coming up on it in,” he estimated wildly, “about ten seconds.”

“I'm gonna be down in ten.”

“You'll do it.”

She'd better or she was in trouble. On every side were trees still smoking from the recent passage of the fire. Massive limbless trunks stretched forth, seeking to take out her rotors. Then she'd free-fall the last hundred feet of her life.

It was more of a ledge with a small flat spot above a steeply descending slope, but there just weren't any other options.

“Glad you think so.”

“Pretty damn cool operator” was all Steve could think.

Then the tiny chopper flared sharply and fell the last twenty feet hard. Hard, but right onto the center of the ledge. It tipped sideways, downslope, but the steep hillside at the clearing's edge kept the spinning rotor from catching the ground.

After a precarious moment, with the chopper balanced on one skid tottering toward an ugly fate of rolling down the hill with flailing rotors that would ruin the chopper and probably do worse to the pilot, it flopped back onto its skids and remained upright.

“Hoodie Little Four is down safe,” the pilot reported. Steve could see the rotors already spinning down. Her voice was impossibly steady, as if she hadn't just had a brush with death. He'd bet she had the shakes pretty good now that she was on the ground.

“Roger. Hawk Zero-one en route.”

“Uh, thanks. And thank whoever found that hole. Saved this girl's ass.”

“All part of the service,” Steve answered, trying to mimic her steadiness of voice. Then he sat back in his chair and stared at the drone's camera screens as Emily flew to the crash site. He rolled back the drone's camera to the moment that the “Mayday” had gone out. While he hadn't caught the hit that damaged the helicopter on tape, he did have a clear view of the camp beneath the trees from that same time stamp.

Nothing. The camp appeared to be completely quiet. So it was just a bad-luck hit by some chunk of tree thrown aloft by the roaring whirlwinds of fire. Steve reported his finding to Beale and Carly over the intercom, then set the drone back to auto-flight.

He'd just saved someone—and saved them in a way he couldn't have done from the ground.

He blinked, trying to make sense of what he was feeling.

One part of him was pretty damned pleased that he'd helped save a life. That's what he was out here to do—douse fires and keep people safe.

But another part of him remembered the guy in the hospital earlier this year. Steve recalled the cripple in the mirror, haggard, leaning heavily on a walker, his emaciated leg dead to his requests to move. He, too, had teetered on an edge, one with a desperately steep fall and a bad ending. But somehow he hadn't gone there.

Instead he'd dug in. Found some inner reserve or determination or something that let him land safe, if not intact.

Despite several attempts, Steve had never been able to trace where that motivation had come from, but it had been somewhere deep. The motivation that had turned him into a model patient. Need stronger arms? He'd worked the Nautilus until he sweat and ached. One leg as good as gone? The other would have to make up for it. Pretty soon he'd shed walker, then crutches, and finally the cane.

He looked down in surprise. He hadn't even thought of his leg in the last forty-eight hours.

“Too damned busy,” one part of him said.

“Didn't need to,” another part argued. He flexed it tentatively. Sore, but sore from use. Since he'd ditched the cane, it had improved quietly over the last weeks. Because he was using it, or because he'd stopped paying so much attention to it? Perhaps more of the latter. And Carly hadn't appeared to care either, which certainly helped keep his attention on other things.

What he did know was that he'd finally found the thing that had turned him from being a cripple in the mirror to being in the right place to save the chopper pilot a world of hurt. He liked saving people. Way back to when he'd watched a firefighter save Vincent's life when his fellow first grader's house had burned. They'd grown up together as brothers, because neither of Vincent's parents had made it out alive.

So, that's how the change happened. He hadn't seen himself in that hospital mirror. He'd seen a cripple who needed to be saved and set about doing so.

Maybe he'd finally succeeded.

***

“Ready to do it again?” Beale asked over the headset.

“Huh? What? Do what?” Steve looked around the back of the Firehawk, but nothing had changed. Except on the screen.

In the drone's eye he could see the Firehawk hovering a hundred and fifty feet above the downed MD500 chopper.

“Uh, you can lift that?”

“Little Four. Tank status?” Beale asked over the radio.

“Dumped on the fire already. I'm light on fuel besides.”

“I can lift about six of them with this bird,” Beale responded over the intercom.

“Oh, okay.” Steve was glad yet again that he'd signed on with MHA. Firehawks were just too damned cool.

“I've got the lifting harness in the back with you, behind the cargo net. You okay going down a few feet on a rope to hook me up, or do I need to go find a clearing?”

“Rope is fine.” Steve got moving. First he kicked out the descending line that Kee had used this morning. He checked his watch, she'd been gone over ten hours. He hoped she was okay.

Mindful of Beale's earlier threat, he slapped on a hard hat. They were well inside the black and far from any flames, so he didn't suit up in the full Nomex gear. He wasn't going to the ground anyway. However, not being crazy like Kee, he pulled on the harness with the rappelling brake. After he fished out the head of the lifting harness, he sat on the edge of the cargo-bay deck in the open side door. A deep breath and he eased his line down.

And almost hung himself.

With a curse, he pulled off his helmet, undid the headset still wired into the helicopter, and tossed it back into the cargo bay on his seat before reattaching the helmet's chin strap.

Sliding a little lower, he got to where he could reach the harness hook in the middle of the retardant tank and got it snapped in.

That's when he realized his mistake. Again he hadn't attached himself to the winch. Getting back into the cargo bay was going to be supremely difficult. The rope was too thin to climb barehanded, and once again he'd forgotten to pull on gloves first.

He looked back up at the lip of the cargo deck so irritatingly close.

Carly, headset still in place, stuck her head out the door and looked down at him. He could see that she couldn't think of how to help him either.

Down below, the line had plenty of length.

When he saluted Carly, he could see her roll her eyes as if saying, “Not again.”

Then Steve slid down to the MD500. The ground was all red. Retardant. It hadn't stopped the crown fire from ripping through here, but by the lack of char he could tell it had minimized the surface burn. These trees, at least, would recover. But, his clothes were still clean, relatively, so he sure wasn't going to touch the ground and get them all sticky red again.

As soon as his boots hit dirt and he freed the rappelling brake, Carly began pulling up the rope. He stuck his head in the open door of the helicopter.

The pilot still wore her headset. She'd somehow squished herself around in the tiny cockpit so that she slouched deep in the pilot's chair and her boots were up on the windscreen, heels resting on the top of the center console.

“Hi. Need a lift?”

She laughed and held out a hand which he shook, strong grip in black fingerless gloves. “Dude, that was sweet. How the hell did you see this little clearing in all… Wait, you're the drone guy. Merks.” She grabbed a handhold and leaned over backward out her side of the cockpit, looking up into the roaring downdraft of the Firehawk hovering a hundred feet above. She dangled practically upside down with her booted feet still atop the console.

Good legs in tight-fitted jeans. Nice butt. And an oversized Goonies T-shirt, hacked off at the waist, that had slid up far enough to reveal a well-muscled midriff and the lower curve of generous and braless breasts.

Then she popped back up and grinned at him. A face like an elf, narrow and laughing. Bright red hair.

“Hi, I'm Jeannie. Jeannie of the bright-blue hair.”

“Uh, your hair's red.” She made him feel a beat slow. He'd just walked into some setup and hadn't even seen it coming.

Her grin emphasized it was her point won and she knew it. “But it
was
bright blue. That's the point. So how high is your drone?” She didn't even leave breaks between her words. She leaned back out to inspect the sky again and he did his best to ignore the view.

“Six thousand feet up.” That popped her back up to a seated position.

“A mile up and you can see shit. That's frickin' awesome. Saved my sorry behind.”

Steve heard a clunk on the outside of the bird. He pulled his head back outside and looked up. Between Carly and Beale, they'd gotten the harness lowered. He checked the lie of it, then began snapping the clips onto the little helicopter's lift points.

Jeannie of the bright-blue hair had climbed out and was trying to hook up the other side, but she was having problems.

Steve came around to see if he could help, careful of the steep drop-off mere feet from her side of the chopper.

“Damned fingers aren't working.” She wasn't able to open the gates on the lifting clips. It was the first sign that he'd seen she had nerves. Miss Cool and Collected had been shaken right down to the core. Staring down that slope as her broken helicopter teetered over the brink would have unnerved him too.

He snapped them in for her.

“Uh, thanks.”

He circled back around and was just about to climb aboard when the forest floor at his feet moved and rose up before him. Steve wasn't sure if he cried out as he fell over backward. His butt landed in a puddle of not quite dry retardant.

Kee Stevenson stood above him in her carefully tattered camouflage, looking down at him as if inspecting an ant.

Jeannie crawled across seats and stuck her head out the passenger side of the cockpit to also look down at him. One cute redhead, one shocking soldier dressed like a green-and-brown alien and still carrying that long, long gun mostly shrouded in ragged burlap cloth. Both stared down at him where he lay on the forest floor, the retardant now squishing through his pants and soaking his butt.

“He's cute.” Jeannie's observation.

“Not my type, but yeah.”

***

Back at the Skyport base camp, Beale lowered the chopper carefully. Jeannie called the distance to ground. “Twenty, ten, five, slow, contact. Down.”

Kee jumped out of the chopper almost before they were down and headed over to the stack of pizza boxes someone had set on the table.

Steve helped Jeannie free the harnesses, though her nerves had recovered during the flight back to the Skyport. By the time they had it clear and the Firehawk was settled beside them, the shadows spilled sideways across the airfield. Last flights of the day. Whatever happened for the next nine or ten hours was up to the crews on the ground.

Jeannie was taller than she'd looked slouched in the pilot's seat. Her legs were longer and her waist slimmer. She'd ripped off the lower third of the T-shirt so it left a few inches of that trim waist showing above her jeans, which only emphasized the power of her curves.

Then she shattered the illusion. She pulled off her headset and pulled a baseball hat out of her back pocket. A blah-blue hat with the white “LA” logo of the Los Angeles Dodgers on it.

“I have to despise you now.”

Jeannie stood grinning at him, hipshot, hands in her back pockets definitely emphasizing her fine form.

“Any particular reason?”

He tapped his temple and she looked up at the bill of her own hat, then grinned back at him.

“Giants fan, huh? Then where the hell are your colors, man?” She flicked an idle finger against the brim of her hat.

Steve turned just in time to see Carly slide up beside him and wrap an arm around his waist, hat in place.

Then she jerked back—“Eww!”—and looked down at her red-stained arm. “What is it with you and retardant, Mercer?”