by Louise Penny
“We’re in a tight spot already.”
“Well, bear with me,” Roy said. He looked at Hector. “You got any bright ideas?”
“Give yourselves up. At least you’d be walking out of here instead of carried off in a meat wagon.”
“Good advice. But we’re both lifers, and neither one of us is going back, not for another thirty years in the joint.”
“All right,” Hector said. “What’s your bright idea?”
“You get us out of here,” Roy said.
“How? There must be roadblocks, police presence, the whole nine yards. They’ve set up the end zone, you’re inside it.”
“Escape and evade.”
“Never happen,” Hector said.
“It better,” he said. “Your life is going to depend on it, Deputy, not just ours.”
Eddie came in from out back and thumped a big Bakelite box on the table between them. “Found this with the freeze-dried stuff in the storage shed, and the canned goods. Like they were getting ready for the end times.”
Roy looked at the radio. “You know what this is?” he asked Hector.
Hector did. It was a basic survival tool, something useful in the third world, or post-apocalypse. No batteries, but a couple of paddles on each side, like bicycle pedals. You cranked it by hand, and it built up enough DC charge to give you half an hour of reception.
“Wind that sucker up,” Roy said. “Buy yourself some time.”
“This isn’t helping,” Frank Child said to the watch commander.
“Might flush ’em out, though,” the state cop said.
“Along with every bunny rabbit and bear in the mountains.”
They had the National Weather Service feed up, tracking the path of the fire on radar.
“Sitrep?” Child asked the FBI agent in charge of the SWAT team. They’d made it in from Bozeman a little before ten-thirty the night before.
“We can’t mount an operation in these conditions,” the SWAT guy told him.
“We can get the choppers back in the air first light,” the state cop said. Oh six hundred, an hour away.
“Fire crews?” Child asked him.
“First responders are on the Stillwater, east of the fire, with a second squad establishing a perimeter on the near side of the Yellowstone, to the west. Smoke-jumpers are on their way. Any luck, we’ll have a company of National Guard on duty by late morning. But they’ll be assigned to the fire lines.”
Child nodded. Everybody had a full plate. Nobody had time to look for two escaped cons and a missing deputy sheriff.
He signaled the SWAT team leader to one side. “Looks like we’re the fifth wheel,” Child said.
“My people aren’t trained for this,” the guy said, “but you issue us shovels, we’ll volunteer.”
“No,” Child said. “Get your gear on the helicopters. Lock and load.”
The team leader ducked his head. “We on the same page?” he asked, meaning they were violating chain of command.
“Anybody spots those guys, we’ll need boots on the ground,” Child said. “State police can’t spare the personnel.”
“Roger that. Anything else?”
“Save me a seat.”
“What’s wrong with this freakin’ thing?” Little Eddie demanded. He gave the radio a shake, but it still wasn’t pulling in a live signal.
“There’s nothing wrong with it,” Hector said. “It’s thirty years old is all.”
“It doesn’t work.”
“Sure it works. They’re presets.”
“What are you talking about?” Roy asked him.
“It’s got crystals inside, for preset frequencies, that’s why it doesn’t have a dial. Back when these were made, there was an emergency broadcast system, 640 and 1240 AM, what used to be called the Civil Defense Network. Nuclear attack.”
“So how do we hear anything?”
“There should be ten or a dozen dedicated channels.”
“I think you’re a lyin’ sack of shit,” Little Eddie said to him. “And about as useful as tits on a bull.”
“Eddie,” Roy said wearily, “why don’t you go outside in the rain and hump the chickens? Leave the heavy lifting to me.”
“I don’t trust him,” Little Eddie said.
“I don’t trust him either,” Roy said. “We have a choice?”
Little Eddie stalked off, radiating hostility.
“Looks like I’m not your only problem,” Hector said.
“Well, when God passed out the brains, Eddie was at the end the line,” Roy said. “He got seconds.”
“Stupid people do dangerous things.”
Roy shook his head and smiled. “Nice try, Deputy,” he told him, “but if I leave anybody behind, it’ll be you.”
Hector, switching frequencies, picked something up.
“What have you got?” Roy asked.
Hector tipped his head closer to the tinny speakers. “NOAA weather radio,” he said.
“We need local news, or police band.”
Hector didn’t change frequencies. “You’d better listen to this,” he said. “They are reporting local conditions.”
Roy leaned forward.
Hector turned up the volume, but it distorted the sound, so he turned it down a little.
Roy frowned, concentrating. He sat back. “You catch it?” he asked. “They’re talking about something called the Sugarloaf fire, north of Yellowstone. Mean anything to you?”
“Where’s that USCGS map you took off me?”
Roy went and got it out of Hector’s backpack.
“Give me those coordinates again,” Hector said.
Roy waited until they were repeated and wrote them down.
Hector squared up the map. 45 north, 110 degrees west. He checked it again and looked across the table at Roy.
Roy could read Hector’s expression, and he didn’t think the cop was good enough to fake it. “Let’s have it,” he said.
“Fifteen, maybe eighteen miles from here, winds blowing north-northwest. It’s coming straight at us. We’re in a funnel between the Beaver Creek watershed and the Boulder.”
“How fast are the winds pushing it?”
Hector shrugged. “No way of knowing. We might have half a day, we might have half an hour.”
Roy sucked on his teeth. “Cuts it thin,” he said.
“We can’t stay here,” Hector said.
Katie had set up the aid station by the creek, where there was glacial runoff, but the water was flecked with ash and the air heavy with smoke.
The firefighters were deployed in a ragged line on the other side of the stream, working their way upslope, turning the soil and clearing away brush. It was hard, sweaty work, and a couple of them had already been sent back, smoke inhalation or heat exhaustion. Joey Raven came back to check on them. It was seven o’clock in the morning.
“I want you and the medical staff prepared to evacuate your position, Dr. Faraday,” he told Katie.
“Formal request, Joey?” she asked him, smiling. He usually just called her Doc.
“On the record, ma’am,” he said. “I’ll put it in writing.”
Katie shook her head. “No need,” she said. “You’re the guy in charge. I’m here in support. You tell me to pack it up, we’ll be ready to pack it up.”
“I appreciate the fact that you’re here at all.”
“I know,” she said. “It wasn’t an empty compliment.”
“But if it goes bad, I won’t have time to think about you.”
“You don’t have to, then,” she said.
“We’re going to start a back-burn, up on the ridge, top of the hill there. If we can keep the fire from jumping the creek and going into the trees on this side, we’ll be ahead of it.”
“Your other units calling in?”
He nodded.
“What’s your reported containment?”
“Reported containment is zero. The fire’s blown up, over a hundred square miles, last kn
own, and rough country to get to.”
“You have the men?”
“Good men, probably not enough of them. The hotshots jump at oh eight hundred, into the Absaroka, east of the Needles.”
Into the Absaroka. Katie looked stricken.
Joey Raven was suddenly embarrassed. He swallowed the lump stuck to his Adam’s apple. “He’ll be okay,” he told her.
“We can’t go north, that’s where the cops are,” Eddie said.
“You can’t go south,” Hector told them, “or you want to get burned alive. That forest is alight. You think hell is hot?”
“I’m tired of listening to your mouth,” Eddie said.
“Jesus, get over it,” Roy said. “You want to take your chances on your own, then take your chances. I’m going out with Deputy Moody. He’s my free ticket.”
Little Eddie looked at his feet, sullen and intransigent.
“Oh, Christ, it’s like pulling teeth,” Roy said. “When were you going to get past being a moron?”
“I’m with you,” Eddie said, but his feelings were obviously hurt. He cut a savage look at Hector.
“Let’s take a walk,” Roy said.
“Eddie’s right,” Hector said. “You can’t go north, and you can’t go south. Six of one.”
“Then we go out through the fire lines,” Roy said.
They had two choppers, twin Hueys. Fixed-wing wasn’t of much use here, although there was an observer aircraft up, watching the fire. You could see smoke on the horizon, and when they got closer, they actually saw treetops bursting into flame, like Roman candles lit off on the Fourth of July. The fire was a greedy hunger, something that had to be fed, a living thing, and almost as if it had a will of its own.
“Swing around,” Child said to the state police pilot.
“I don’t know what you’re looking for, sir.”
“Circle over to the Gallatin Trace and find that truck.”
Ten minutes later they spotted it, up on the hogback.
“Okay,” Child said. “Make a pass, backtrack, see if we cut any sign.”
They quartered across the ridgeline, flying into the smoke again. The fire was eating up ground. From their altitude, a couple of hundred feet, it was like looking straight down into a blast furnace.
“There,” Child told the pilot. “The meadow, those cabins.”
“Beaver Creek Ranch,” the pilot said.
“Can you set her down?”
“I can’t give you much of a window,” the pilot said.
“Ten minutes?”
“If that.”
“Do it,” Child said.
They dropped into one of the corrals. The second chopper orbited overhead. On the ground you could feel the superheated air, and the acrid haze was thick. The team moved fast but stayed loose, checking the buildings. Time was tight. They had no margin for error.
“Somebody spent the night here,” one of the SWAT guys said, coming out of the bunkhouse. “Fireplace is still warm.”
“Ambient heat?” Child asked him.
“Nope. Freshly opened canned goods scattered around too.”
“All right. Come on.”
They dog-trotted back to the chopper and scrambled aboard.
“Wind it up,” Child said to the pilot, buckling in.
They lifted off. “What’s our heading?” the pilot asked.
“Which way would you go to outrun the fire?”
“Fire’s traveling almost due north. I’d be moving east.”
“Let’s hope Hector made the same call,” Child said.
They were walking into the sun, but the sun was only a smear of patchy light through the smoke. Behind them and back on the right, the woods were smoldering, heating up toward flashpoint. All it would take was a sudden gust of wind, or a backdraft, and the trees would ignite, quick as a matchhead. They were in a sort of a vortex, or vacuum, a self-sustained system. The fire had created its own momentum, its own pressure gradient, its own weather, sucking air in like the eye of a hurricane.
Hector was out in front, where the other two could keep him in their sights, Roy a few paces back, Little Eddie behind them both. It meant Hector was breaking trail, which was tiring, but it meant he was setting the course. Even without a compass, he could plot their general direction, using dead reckoning and the position of the sun. A little past 8 a.m., some six or seven miles until they reached the Stillwater and an uphill climb, but once across, they’d be on level ground, the fire downwind, and some protection with the creek at their back. Somewhere this side of the Stillwater, he knew, the early initial attack crews would be maintaining a firebreak. The way Hector saw it, he had to make sure none of them got in the way of an itchy trigger finger.
More to it than that, he knew. Roy had enough sense to button his lip and let Hector do the talking, even if Little Eddie was the wild card, but after Hector led them out, they’d have no real reason to keep him alive.
Hector wasn’t out of the woods yet.
The slurry tankers came in at 500 feet and dropped chemical retardant on the leading edge of the fire. They were PBY Catalinas, with a load capacity of 1500 gallons apiece. The hotshots jumped at 2000 feet, from a Twin Otter flying above the Catalinas. Their drop zone was a burned-over area between the Boulder River and Iron Mountain, and their immediate objective was to suppress spot fires and contain any back-burn.
“Smoke-jumpers,” the state police helicopter pilot told his passengers, pointing out the red chute canopies opening.
“They must have asbestos balls,” one of the SWAT guys said. “That LZ’s hotter than a cast-iron griddle.”
They’d overflown the worst of it. Below them there was a lot of smoke, blanketing the trees like low-lying fog, but there were no flames they could see.
“Where are we on the map?” Child asked.
“That’s the Stillwater down there,” the pilot said. He put the chopper into a shallow bank, turning back west again.
“Fire line on the ridge?”
The pilot nodded. “If it breaks out and moves east, that’s where they hope to stop it.”
“Which way is the wind blowing?”
“Still steady, north-northwest, not as strong. Ten knots.”
“Jesus, we could use some more rain.”
“Ask,” the pilot said. “He might be listening.”
“God answers prayers,” Child said, “it’s his day job.”
They saw the planes go over, two fairly low to the ground, one at higher altitude. Roy and Little Eddie crouched under the trees. Hector didn’t bother. The aircraft were flying too fast and too far up to notice them.
“Get your ass down here,” Roy snarled.
“We don’t have time to waste,” Hector said. “Get your own ass up and get it in gear. We have to be over the Stillwater in an hour or we’re going to fry like bacon fat. Come on.”
Hector didn’t care one way or the other, of course. He would have been perfectly happy to leave them there, but he knew full well one of them would shoot him in the back.
He struck out again, and they followed.
“How far?” Roy asked him.
“Couple of miles, as the crow flies.”
“Home free,” Roy said, grinning.
And then they heard the choppers overhead.
Joey Raven, the fire boss, hadn’t given Katie the word to pull out, so she’d stayed on station. They were treating a number of Joey’s crew, some minor burns, abrasions, blisters, but mostly smoke in their lungs. The fire itself hadn’t approached; they’d been lucky so far. She hoped their luck held.
“Fifteen percent,” he told her. He meant containment, and it was better than expected, given the dry conditions.
“Chance of rain?” she asked.
“Sudden storm would be good,” he said. “We’d need a real frog-strangler, flood out the canyons and drown the bastard, but there’s nothing on the radar.”
“You good?”
“I’m good, Doc,” he said. His
face was streaked with soot, and he looked exhausted.
“Come inside a minute,” she said.
He stepped into her trailer.
Katie handed him a pint of Johnnie Walker Black.
“Shouldn’t,” he told her.
“Medicinal purposes,” she said.
“Where were you when my first wife left me?” he asked.
“Probably in third grade,” she said.
Joey uncapped the scotch and had a healthy jolt. “You’re a good man, Doc,” he said, screwing the top back on.
“You too, Joey,” she said.
“Proof is in the pudding.” He gave her the bottle and went outside again.
Katie turned the pint of Johnnie Walker in her hand. Hector didn’t drink hard liquor, just beer. Katie usually only drank wine. She took the cap off again and tipped the bottle up. The whiskey burned her throat and brought tears to her eyes.
This time Roy grabbed Hector and pulled him to cover. The big Hueys came in down on the deck, close enough that the rotor wash whipped the trees and the engine noise hammered the earth.
“Don’t even think about it,” Roy hissed in Hector’s ear, hugging him close, his whisker stubble scratching Hector’s skin.
The heavy thump of the twin turbos faded as the choppers crossed the next ridgeline. They dropped into the valley on the other side, but the reverberations still echoed behind them.
“You see their insignia?” Roy asked.
Hector nodded. “State police,” he said.
“Looking for me and Eddie.”
“Not necessarily,” Hector said. “I think the fire’s their biggest priority right now. They’re probably pulling emergency personnel from every available resource.”
“Where does that leave us?”
“I’d say you two were under the radar. Just be cool, don’t do anything stupid. And that goes double for him.”
Little Eddie gave him a poisonous stare.
“I can walk you out of here, but only if nobody gets hurt,” Hector said. “Any crazy shit goes down, we’re all dead meat.”
“You first, asshole,” Little Eddie said.
Hector was watching Roy.
Roy nodded. “Okay,” he said.
“You answer for Eddie?” Hector asked.