by Cassie Cole
“He seems like a good commander,” Trace allowed. “I’ve heard good things about him from the other jumpers.”
Foxy nodded. “He was a hard-ass at smokejumping school, but that’s kind of the job. All the stuff he said about transparency was good to hear.”
I almost started arguing with Foxy, then stopped myself. Up until now, I thought he was aware of what was happening between Wallace and Derek. But Derek must not have filled him in.
Funny that guys will share a girl in bed, but they won’t share their emotions. Men could be so stupid sometimes.
“I’m going into it with a positive outlook,” Trace said. “I believe in giving every new boss a fair shake before rushing to judgement.” He raised his cup of water. “Here’s hoping Wallace lives up to expectations.”
We all raised our glasses except Derek, who stared off at nothing.
By the end of dinner I was nodding off in my chair. I went back to my room, closed the blinds on the window, and slept for sixteen hours straight. It was already lunchtime when I finally woke, took a shower, and wandered into the big common area.
“Decided not to lead the jog around the runway this morning?” I asked Trace, who was reading a book in an armchair.
He lowered the book. “We had the run.”
“Thanks for not trying to wake me for it.”
Trace snorted. “I did try. You shouted at me to go fuck myself.”
“Hah! I don’t even remember doing that. Sorry. I needed the sleep.”
“I don’t blame you.” Trace gestured around the room. “Half the base has been sleeping or napping.”
Foxy was on one of the couches, head tilted back and snoring loudly. In the chair next to him, Derek was frowning at his laptop.
“Whatchya doing?” I asked, sitting on the arm of the chair.
He hesitated before answering. “Looking for public news about Commander Callaway. There hasn’t been anything in the Redding Herald. Nothing about the disaster of a mission, either.”
I put my hand on his arm. “Don’t stress too much about it.”
“I won’t,” he said unconvincingly.
Later that night, Trace and I were watching Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune in the common room with some of the other guys. Foxy left the base with a backpack and returned with it slumping heavier than before on his shoulders.
“Psst, Haley,” he said, waving me over to the kitchen. I joined him and he opened his backpack. “Want to celebrate tonight?”
Inside the backpack was a bottle of Maker’s Mark. “Celebrate what?”
“It’s not every day a smokejumper deploys their fire shelter and survives. If that’s not worth celebrating, then what is?”
“You had me at Maker’s Mark,” I replied. “Are we celebrating with just the two of us, or…?”
“Nah, you can invite Derek. Trace too. Meet you in my room.”
I tapped Trace on the shoulder and led him down the hall to the barracks. “Foxy wants to celebrate how we survived the wildfire.”
“I’ll drink to that for sure,” Trace replied. “Are you sure I’m invited?”
“Foxy said so.”
“I just figured…” Trace shrugged his massive shoulders. “Foxy and you and Derek getting together for some drinks. I wouldn’t want to be the third wheel.”
“Technically you would be the fourth wheel,” I pointed out. “But like I said, Foxy invited you.”
“Huh,” Trace grunted.
He had a point. If Foxy had invited Trace, then it meant he didn’t want the night to end in romance. Or he was hoping Trace would eventually leave so the rest of us could have some fun. Either way, it left me curious about where the night would take us.
All curiosity about that disappeared when I reached Derek’s door.
“Hey,” I said, knocking gently before opening the door. “Hope you’re not sleeping, because Foxy needs help emptying a bottle of whiskey…”
The room was empty. He must be somewhere else on base, I thought, turning away.
Something shiny on his pillow caught the light from the hall.
Somehow, I knew what it was before I approached it. Maybe because it was what I’d been afraid of all this time, deep down where I hadn’t acknowledged it yet. The pin left on Derek’s pillow was a pair of silver wings, but with a parachute in the middle. Depicted in the center of the parachute was a pine tree. The pin of a United States Forest Service Smokejumper.
“No,” I breathed when I realized what it meant.
34
Haley
I ran back out into the hall and paused in Foxy’s doorway. “Derek’s gone. He left the base.”
“Maybe he went to get his own whiskey…”
Foxy cut off as I tossed the pin to him. Then I ran out into the common room.
“Has anyone seen Derek Sale?” I asked.
Ramirez looked up from his game of foosball. “He left a few minutes ago.”
“Did he have anything with him?” Foxy asked, rushing into the room behind me.
“Umm. His ruck sack, I think?” Ramirez said.
“And you didn’t stop him!” I demanded.
Poor Ramirez gawked at me. “Why? He’s probably doing laundry…”
We ran out the front door of the base into the night, then turned left toward the commercial terminal for the Redding airport. Foxy ran alongside me, with Trace close on our heels.
“You think he’s leaving?” Foxy asked.
“I know it.”
“But why?” Trace asked.
“I’ll let him tell you if we catch him.”
Even though the smokejumping base and the commercial airport shared the same runways, the buildings were half a mile apart. Just far enough that we caught up to Derek before he made it inside the terminal. He groaned when he saw us approaching, and dropped his ruck sack to the ground.
“Don’t try to stop me,” he immediately said. “This is what I have to do.”
“Wait, so you really are leaving?” Foxy said. “Bro, what the fuck?”
“You’re abandoning your duties as a smokejumper?” Trace asked. “Is this because of how poorly the last mission went?”
Derek looked at me. “You didn’t tell them?”
“You said it was a secret!” I shot back. “If you want them to know, tell them yourself!”
“Tell us what?” Foxy asked. He seemed genuinely hurt by the fact that our friend was leaving without even saying goodbye.
Derek sighed, and sat on his ruck sack there on the side of the road. The three of us did the same.
“Wallace has a vendetta against me,” he said. “He’s been trying to hurt me since I arrived because of something that happened in Syria…”
He spent the next few minutes explaining everything to Trace and Foxy. They listened quietly while he went through all the details and evidence. The weird spotting mistakes, and the lousy jump points where we drifted directly into the wildfire’s path.
“Bro, I wish you had told me,” Foxy said. He put a hand on Derek’s shoulder and squeezed. “You know you can tell me anything, right?”
“I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but it kind of makes sense,” Trace said with shock. “All the strange little things that have been happening. I chalked it up to incompetence and burnout. But Commander Callaway did say he was being pressured from above to use you three rookies more aggressively…”
“Now you see why I have to run,” Derek said gloomily. “There’s a plane leaving for Chicago in thirty minutes, and I need to be on it. It’s the only way to keep everyone safe.”
“That’s what you were doing on your laptop this morning,” I said slowly. “I thought I saw you closing a window before I looked at your screen. You were booking a flight out of here!”
The guilty look on Derek’s face told me it was the truth.
“Fuck your flight,” Foxy announced. “I bought a bottle of Maker’s Mark to celebrate Haley and Trace surviving the wildfire, and it was not ch
eap. If you don’t help me drink it I’m gonna be awfully butthurt.”
I rubbed Derek’s back. “You can’t leave. We won’t let you. I’ll follow you into the terminal and tell TSA that you have a bomb shoved up your butt if I have to.”
Finally Derek let out a chuckle. “I’m not in the mood for a cavity search. Fine. I’ll come back, but just for tonight. You need to convince me why leaving isn’t the best thing for everyone.”
Trace took his ruck sack, and I put an arm around Derek as we walked back to the barracks.
“Good thing we caught you before you went through baggage check,” Foxy said. “I know from personal experience that it’s a huge pain in the ass to retrieve a bag once it has been checked.”
“When was that?” Trace asked. “Chickened out going to a furry convention?”
“Ha ha, very funny,” Foxy said. “Naw, it was when I was going to Jacksonville to visit a girl I met online, but then she dumped me as I was boarding the plane…”
Airplane. Baggage. A lightbulb went off in my head. “That’s where my phone is!” I blurted out.
“Do what now?” Derek asked.
“Nothing,” I said as we walked into Redding Base. “I’ll meet you at Foxy’s bunk. I need to grab something first.”
I jogged through the base and out the back door leading to the runway. The two C23 Sherpas were sitting on the tarmac, still and silent in the night like two packhorses that were sleeping in their open stables. “Which one was I on?” I wondered out loud. I approached the first one and pulled down the hatch staircase, then climbed inside. It was eerie being inside the plane without the engines humming. Like setting foot in a house that had only just been abandoned, and had yet to collect any dust.
I rummaged around the seats, checking the equipment webbing underneath. No phone.
Back on the tarmac, I closed the staircase hatch and walked to the other Sherpa. To my surprise, the hatch was already open and there were noises coming from inside.
“Hello?” I called as I walked up the stairs.
There were two figures crouched on the ground inside. Commander Wallace was instantly recognizable as he stood and adjusted his uniform. The other man was familiar, but not so much that I immediately remembered his name.
“Hinch,” Wallace said stiffly. “What are you doing out here at this hour?”
I glanced down at the ground. A floor panel had been removed, revealing a mess of electronic circuits and wires. The other man had a pair of wire cutters in his hand and stared back at me like a boy who had gotten caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
“I left my phone on the plane when we jumped three days ago,” I said carefully. “It wasn’t on the other plane, so I came to check this one.”
Wallace cleared his throat and then stepped out of my way. “By all means, search away.” He gestured into the fuselage of the plane.
“What are you two doing?” I blurted out.
They both looked at each other, then at me. “We’re checking the equipment on this Sherpa,” Wallace said. “After all the spotting mistakes last mission, I suspect the root of all of Redding’s problems is in faulty observation equipment.”
He said it so easily and smoothly that my gut reaction was to believe him. He was Commander Wallace, my superior officer, and my Air Force instincts were still strong. Nobody advanced far in the armed forces by asking a lot of questions.
But the way the two of them were staring at me, like I had intruded on something…
“Are you going to search for your phone?”
“Right. Yeah.”
I walked down the aisle of the Sherpa toward the middle of the plane. As I crouched down and searched under the seats, I noticed Wallace and the other man still frozen in place, watching me.
Yeah, I was definitely intruding on something.
My fingers tightened around a piece of glass and metal, and I sighed with relief when the object I pulled out was my phone. “Found it!” I said, waving the evidence in the air.
“Very good,” Wallace said.
I felt uneasy as I walked back up the aisle. I was acutely aware that Wallace and the other man were blocking my way out of the plane. If they wanted to hurt me…
“I’m glad to see you have been succeeding here at Redding,” Wallace told me as I approached. “I’ve read nothing but good things about you in the base reports, Hinch.”
“I… Thank you, sir,” I said. The stairs to exit the plane were calling me, but I made myself stop. “Sir, can I speak with you? Privately?”
Wallace’s smile slipped. “My door is always open if you’d like to speak with me later.”
“I’d prefer now, sir.”
After a moment, Wallace nodded. “Edwards, keep checking the observation equipment. Hinch and I are going to take a walk.”
Edwards. Now I remembered how I knew the man: he was the other spotter Ramirez had talked about. The one who claimed there was an equipment malfunction in the airplane, although Ramirez couldn’t verify it.
I eyed the open equipment panel, then followed Wallace out of the plane.
“What can I help you with?” he asked.
“Sir…” I fumbled around for the words. I should have thought of what to say before now. “Can I speak freely?”
“Always.”
“I want to talk to you about Derek Sale.”
Wallace clasped his hands behind his back. His voice was even as he said, “What about him?”
“I know what happened,” I said gently. “About your son. And Syria. And how you may think Derek is to blame.”
I expected him to become more reserved, or to lash out at me for mentioning his dead son. Instead, he chuckled in confusion. “Hinch, I don’t know what you mean. Yes, my son Henry was killed in Syria. And I’m vaguely aware that Smokejumper Sale was in the same Army Rangers battalion. But I don’t see how that has anything to do with my son’s death.”
“Sir,” I said. “You don’t have to play dumb.”
Wallace’s jaw tightened. “Speaking freely does not mean insulting me, Hinch.”
“Derek was a Sergeant. He was your son’s direct superior officer when he was left behind.”
“I suppose he might have been.”
“You can’t punish him for what happened,” I said. “I don’t know whose fault it was because I wasn’t there. But getting even with Derek now that he’s a smokejumper would be a terrible abuse of power. Especially considering it would put other smokejumpers in danger. I know you’re a better man than that, sir.”
Wallace walked along without saying anything for an uncomfortable amount of time. I was trying to think of another thing to say when he finally spoke.
“I don’t know who is at fault,” he said. “And I am certainly not taking out my grief on Smokejumper Sale. But as a man who has been alive for six decades, let me give you a piece of wisdom that I’ve learned. Eventually? Karma catches up with everyone. Whether it’s good karma, or bad. Have a good night, Hinch.”
Wallace turned and walked back to the Sherpa before I could say anything else.
35
Haley
If I had thought our bunks were cramped with three people, they were worse with four. Trace and Derek were sitting in the only two chairs in Foxy’s room, so I sat on the bed next to Foxy and accepted a shot glass full of whiskey.
“Find your phone?” Foxy asked.
“Right where I left it on the Sherpa.” I took a shot of whiskey, held out the glass so Foxy could refill it, then downed the second one.
“Easy there, tiger,” Derek said. “You alright?”
I wondered if I should tell them about my conversation with Wallace. Nothing useful had come out of it except Wallace’s comment about karma, which was hardly damning. Informing the guys that Wallace had denied everything wasn’t exactly helpful.
“I’m still reeling from you trying to leave us,” I said instead. “You weren’t even going to say goodbye?”
Derek leaned for
ward in his chair and studied his shot glass, which he twisted between his fingers. “If I said goodbye, you would try to stop me.”
Foxy smacked him on the knee. “You didn’t say goodbye to me either. That stings, bro.”
“You would have tried to stop me too!”
Foxy grinned. “I mean, yeah. Of course I would’ve, you big dummy.”
“Why didn’t you tell anyone about your connection to Wallace?” Trace asked quietly.
“It’s a painful memory,” Derek admitted. “I still harbor a lot of guilt for what happened, even ignoring all of Commander Wallace’s pressure. I don’t like to talk about it.”
“You told Haley,” Foxy pointed out.
“I had to drag the information out of him,” I chimed in. “It was like pulling teeth.”
Trace finished his shot and poured another. “I can see why you kept it to yourself. But now it affects more than just you individually. We’re all potentially in danger. So, let’s talk about how to proceed.”
“That’s a very leadership-oriented response,” I said. Trace glared at me.
“Do we tell other people?” Foxy asked.
“What good will that do?” I replied. “Wallace will just deny it. And if he has connections to the higher-ups back in Washington, then our complaints will fall on deaf ears.”
Derek nodded. “We need more definitive proof. From Wallace himself.”
“Honestly, is there even any danger going forward?” Trace asked. “Now that he’s in charge of Redding Base, he can’t blatantly retaliate against Derek. It would be too obvious.”
“That hasn’t stopped him so far,” Derek muttered.
“There’s a difference between pulling strings from McCall, and directly ordering us to jump into a dangerous situation,” Trace replied. “Now that he’s here, he might have to treat you fairly.”
Derek shrugged. “I’d love for that to be the case, but I doubt he came all this way just to stop exerting pressure on me.”
“It seems like our best option is waiting for evidence,” Foxy said. “Either nothing happens—which is a good thing—or Wallace tries to punish Derek or send him into a dangerous situation. If the latter happens, then we push back or use it as evidence that Wallace has a vendetta against him.”