“I don’t get what we’re doing.”
“Ladder fuels,” Luke replied. “Fire wants to burn and climb up a tree. Get rid of undergrowth and it has less to burn, stays cooler on the ground. Cut away the deadwood and it has nothing to climb. The real problem happens when it reaches the crown. Hard to fight a crown fire from the ground.”
With two of them swamping, they made quick work of what had already been cut.
Luke fired up a second saw and began clearing the undergrowth. Colin couldn’t keep up with both of them, but whenever Tori or Luke ran out of fuel, they’d help him catch up as part of their refueling. Mid-morning he knew trouble was coming when a tanker plane roared by low overhead and dumped a broad swath of retardant on the trees. For a quarter mile, the big jet plane sent down a shower of the dark red liquid in an impossibly dense downpour.
Tori arrived beside him as the tanker finished the run and turned back for its next load. “Retardant coats the wood and keeps the oxygen from reaching it. No oxygen means no fire.”
“Then what have we been doing here?” Colin waved at the trees, at the whole area they’d been parking-out.
“Layers of defense, like chapters in a book. Chapter One, we have a fireline cut about a half mile back. We’re hoping to narrow the blaze, maybe even knock it out of the crown because it’s running high and hot at the moment. Chapter Two, hopefully most of it dies when it hits the retardant line. Chapter Three, if we can really slow it down here, it won’t do much more than mow the grass in your meadow before we can extinguish it. End of story.”
He’d been right about smart and kind. She’d thought to switch her words into his metaphor to make sure he understood it easily, rather than assuming he could cross to her side of the fence.
“And if all three chapters fail? What’s the fourth?” He’d miss his cabin. He’d rebuild, but there were a lot of good memories here; he could hear the stories that had been written in this idyllic spot.
She pointed up at the sky.
A small helicopter painted black with red flames came pounding up the hill. They watched it together as it flew over his cabin, a huge, bright-orange bucket on a cable dangled far below. The pilot didn’t even slow down, just released the load of water dead-center on his roof. It soaked down the shingles and poured off the eaves in a waves.
“That’s the epilogue, just in case the fire didn’t get the message or tries to throw a few hot embers your way.”
Colin could see it clearly. All of the different pieces and how they fit together as neatly as any story.
But he couldn’t stop looking at the quietly competent woman he’d been working beside all morning.
“Just in case I don’t get a chance to say it later, I meant what I said. You’re welcome anytime.”
9
Tori didn’t know what she was doing. It was her first break in weeks. The fire season was running hot and heavy, but Candace had finally declared that enough was enough and shuttered the Leavenworth Hotshots for five days. Thirty days without a break, they were all so punchy that safety was becoming an issue.
Tori had thought about hanging out in town like usual. But she didn’t want the noise and the bars. She wanted the quiet that a smokejumper had introduced her to an age ago.
By the time she parked her battered Toyota pickup beside the shiny Jeep Wrangler, Tori at least knew her destination. As if she hadn’t looked up the access road on a topo map the moment she’d gotten off the Checker Mill Fire.
She spent most of the hour’s hike up his trail telling herself she was being an idiot. A kiss, one bowl of chili, and one fire killed right at the very edge of a vegetable patch. That’s all there was between them.
But each day on the fires since, she’d been watching Candace and Luke. And each time she thought about the second kiss, the one after the fire—the more she knew that she at least had to answer the question that she and Colin had written between them.
The climb to his cabin followed a fast-running stream and then stretched out over a long green meadow. The fire had been killed in the woods. The last lines of trees stood green as well except for some char on the bark. For once, the fire’s story had gone exactly as she’d predicted it.
His kiss had been a place of peace that had felt so right, so perfect. Part of it was the land, most of it was the man. The last of it was that he was the sort of man who had chosen this gorgeous stretch of mountainside for himself.
But how would he react to her arrival? Was he just being so thankful to be rescued from the fire that he’d have invited Medusa to come visit?
It had taken her a week after the Checker Mill Fire to make the mental connection. Tori had pulled one of Colin Steele’s thrillers off her own bookshelf to discover that the man pictured on the back had introduced himself to her as Colin James.
And that had almost kept her away.
She didn’t want to arrive as some sycophant, fan-girl no matter how much she enjoyed his novels. Yet here she was anyway, despite telling herself to stay away.
Tori almost turned from his front porch and headed back down the trail, which was beyond stupid. She closed her eyes, trudged up the steps, and struck out at the door.
There.
Now she’d knocked and there was no backing away without looking even beyond stupider than she felt. Stupiderist? Even by Ginger standards, this was extreme.
And she kept standing there.
And standing there.
She knocked again, harder.
Still nothing.
Well, she hadn’t driven and hiked and nerved herself up to quit so easily. Perseverance, she reminded herself and stalked off to the back side of the cabin.
10
Colin looked up the moment she came into view. It was like that utterly impossible moment that always occurred between hero and heroine that he could never resist writing. First sight of each other at the same instant.
Even without the fire gear, he’d know her anywhere. There was a confidence, a surety to her stride unlike any other woman he’d ever known, or written. She came around the corner of his cabin as if she’d always been there, always belonged.
He stayed where he was and waited while she crossed the back porch, shed her pack, and came up into the vegetable garden. She wore hiking boots, shorts atop some of the longest legs he’d ever seen, and a light t-shirt luridly aflame, but patterned like a checker board. Across her chest it announced the Checker Mill Fire and the dates. The second date was the last time he’d seen her; twenty days and three hours.
His gaze finally made it up to her eyes as she arrived in front him.
“Great t-shirt.”
“I brought one for you. You worked it too.”
“Is that why you’re here?”
“No. Nor is it because I know who you are.”
Colin froze. Here it comes. All of the fantasy and hopes had just become meaningless.
“I’ve read a lot of your books. I thought you should know. I almost stayed away because of that.”
“You what?” He hadn’t expected that. “Then why are you here?”
She reached out and brushed her fingertips along his cheek. Not hot like fire, but rather cool like his stream, a caress that calmed and anchored him in this moment.
“You feel it too, don’t you?” Tori asked softly.
He could only nod.
She closed the final step that separated them. When she slid her arms around his neck and kissed him, it was a scene right out of fiction. He’d never imagined anyone feeling so right in his arms.
Colin knew that Tori Ellison never stopped once she found what she wanted. She’d keep right on fighting fire or whatever came next in her life just as he’d always be writing.
When they lay down together on the garden path, he knew that he needed her as much as the blank page needed words. And their story would have many, many pages.
Road to the Fire’s Heart
Wildfire engine driver Jill Conway-Jones loves driving
the big engines. But her real goal? Get up close and personal with a fire, just like the Interagency Hotshots. She gets a little too close when a burning tree crashes onto her fire engine.
Hotshot Jess Monroe loves the fire’s heat, but can’t seem to find a woman who sparks his own. At least not until he arrives to rescue the driver of the shattered truck—just in time to watch her kick out the windshield.
And that’s only the first turn on the Road to the Fire’s Heart.
Introduction
This story comes from two sources.
First, Jess is the assistant superintendent of my Leavenworth Hotshot team from my first two Hotshot stories: Fire Light, Fire Bright and The Firelights of Christmas. It seemed to me that he was getting lonely what with his supervisor and his fellow assistant both finding true love in those previous stories.
Second, my sister once introduced me to a good friend of hers who was partnered with a top urban firefighter (both female). This was decades ago when women were still fighting for the legal right to even join a fire department; she was so good that she’d made captain in an atypically progressive department. Though they’ve been together for all this time, they’ve only recently gotten married—now that it’s legal.
I also met their three-year-old (at the time) daughter.
That’s where I found Jill—by wondering what my sister’s friends’ daughter was up to. She was in her mid-twenties by the time her moms were allowed to be married.
Rather than asking my sister, I wrote this story to find out. (I finally did ask and it turns out she’s doing great, by the way, even if she didn’t follow in her mom’s firefighting footsteps.)
1
Squinting her eyes didn’t help.
“Driving through pea soup would be easier.”
As usual, Trent made no comment. Instead, he leaned closer to the wheel and also squinted out at the wildfire’s thick smoke. He was trying to turn strong-silent type into a lifestyle as if that was a good thing. He also didn’t deal well with abstract things like metaphors. He was a reliable enough partner, just not the most flexible.
A decent enough person, just kind of clueless and…such a guy. Despite his being two years older than her, she’d taken to thinking of herself as his big sister, taking care of him when he was being particularly ridiculous or pitiable without his even realizing it. His fire skills were good, so she didn’t have to fix that, he was simply a social train wreck and needed a bit of a buffer from the world at large.
Jill Conway-Jones looked back out the windshield of their heavy-duty Type 4 wildfire engine—the big truck was only a year old and still shone despite her and Trent driving to several fires already this season. She wished she knew more about paintings so that she could say one of those educated sounding phrases about how the raging, fiery hell was so awful that only Matisse could have done it justice. But even as she thought it, she knew it was wrong. Her best friend from childhood was the hotshot New York City artist. Jill was just a hotshot.
Actually, that’s what she wanted to be. At the moment she was a wildland firefighter and engine driver lost deep in the Cascade wilderness of who-knew-where central Washington. A wildfire engine driver, but it wasn’t even her turn to drive. Trent was at the wheel and all she could do was try to figure out where they were.
US Forest Service fire road FS-273E was invisible, if that’s what they were still on. Smoke was pouring across the road in thick black billows. Showers of brilliant orange sparks lit ash swirls from within as they blew by in vast clouds like the Monarch butterflies she’d once seen rising from a field of milkweed—a cloud of orange and black so thick that they seemed to block the sun.
Not that the sun was still aloft. She double-checked her watch, sunset should still be purpling the sky, but being deep within the steep mountains to all sides and the heavy smoke filling the valley, it was full night here. Wherever here was.
The headlights punched only a few feet into the smoke before reflecting back like high beams in fog.
They’d left the Stehekin River Valley Road what seemed hours ago. They were supposed to be delivering their seven hundred and fifty gallons of water to a beleaguered crew high up on Tolo Mountain. The one-lane dirt track had meandered up into the hills. The road’s edge was sometimes carved out by rushing streams and at other times the entire lane was blocked by fallen trees. More than once they’d had to stop, pull out their chainsaws, and chop up eighty feet of flaming tree so that they could tug it out of the way with the truck’s winch.
There was no turning around. No spot in the road to do so even if the hotshot crew hadn’t needed their water. The wildfire engine was the only ground vehicle with a chance of making it out to them. The front cab looked like one of those heavy-duty delivery trucks and had the big growling diesel engine to match. The rear had slab sides covered with doors for tools and supplies. On the main bed was three tons of water and twice the firehose that any city firetruck could carry. They could even drive slow along a fire’s perimeter and pump at the same time, a wildfire engine specialty that no city engine could match.
Jill loved this machine for its raw brute strength, but still wanted to test herself against the fire with the Interagency Hotshot Crews—the IHCs were the elite wildfire fighters, along with the smokejumpers, and she wanted to be a part of that.
Trent was hugging the cliff to her right on the inside edge of the lane, which was all they could do. After the third time a branch had slapped her rearview mirror flat against the side of the engine, she gave up readjusting it. Opening the window invariably filled the cabin with smoke and there wasn’t anyone crazy enough to be behind them anyway.
Jill looked up at the cliff and tried to see any dips or ridges. Maybe by the topography she’d be able to locate some similar shape on the map spread across her lap.
Then she saw it coming toward her. She barely had time to scream—
“Log!”
—before the tree tumbled down the hill and slammed into the side of the engine. It was three feet in diameter and at least thirty feet long. And it was alive with flame down its entire length.
The tree slammed into the engine and knocked it sideways as if it weighed nothing. The Type 4 engine weighed eight tons. Between fuel, the water, and crew, the engine was loaded with an extra five tons. Despite all of their mass and the grip of the rear dualies, they were swept sideways across the road like a dust bunny trying to escape a flaming broom.
They tumbled off the other side of the road. Even as they rolled down the steep slope, she could see Trent trying to steer. At the moment they were upside down, the engine roaring; he must also be trying the gas.
Jill nearly strangled when the throttle-hold of adrenaline fear clamped her throat closed at the same moment she had the urge to giggle. The image of the truck lying on its back and waving its little four-wheel drive in the air wouldn’t go away even as the cab’s roof crumpled dangerously low making them both duck.
The engine continued to roll, one side per panicked gasp until she was nearly hyperventilating. Once right side up, the spinning tires slammed them forward only for a second. The engine stalled hard then they continued once more onto their back with a resounding crash.
They finally came to a rest with the driver’s side door down.
She dangled above Trent, suspended by her seatbelt.
“Nice driving there, Ace.” It was either laugh or scream, and she struggled to avoid the latter.
Trent didn’t answer. Nor did he offer one of his trademark grunts.
Ahead of them, out the shattered windshield, there was nothing but the pitch dark of night. There was light coming in through the back window—dark, orange light that flickered ominously. She twisted around to look. The massive burning log lay in the back of the engine, at least one end of it. It was still burning which only added to the bad. Looking up and out her door, another massive branch lay across the remains of her window; the mirror was nowhere to be seen.
Her headlamp wa
s still on her helmet which by some miracle was still on her head. She clicked it on. Trent was still breathing, but out cold. And his arm was at an angle that didn’t look good at all.
Twisting herself around, she kicked at what was left of the windshield a few times with her boots until it broke free. The air outside the truck was marginally cooler than inside, which she took as a good sign.
Careful to brace herself so that she didn’t fall on Trent, who still wasn’t moving, she released her seatbelt. She crawled out to assess the situation. They were at the bottom of a dry ravine that hadn’t been on fire. Parts of it now were, though, due to the log that had brought them here and it was bound to get worse shortly.
She leaned back in to extract Trent. Unable to release his seatbelt, she pulled out a knife and cut the straps, but it didn’t help much. She weighed about one-twenty-five, and he weighed more like two-twenty-five.
“Great. We’re alone, a bajillion miles from no one knows where,” she told Trent’s still form. “All the training drills in the world don’t make me Supergirl.”
“You sure?” A man’s voice spoke close behind her.
2
The woman would have fallen over backward if Jess hadn’t grabbed her about the waist. She wasn’t a bad imitation of Supergirl at all. A blond ponytail hung out below her helmet. She stood two or three inches shorter than his own five-eight—he was still taller than Tom Cruise no matter how much he was teased on the fire line. And she was clad in full fire gear—which was always a turn-on. Firefighting women weren’t as rare as they used to be, but ones fighting forest wildfires were still a very rare commodity.
He let go of her as soon as he was sure she had her balance once again.
“No, if I was Supergirl, I’d be able to lift my partner out by myself.”
The Complete Hotshots Page 7