Wildfire on the Skagit (Firehawks Book 9)

by M. L. Buchman

  “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 alon
g 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.

  Once the helo peeled off, he could hear chainsaws chewing away at the trees above him, but they were out of sight in the smoke.

  Had another team jumped in while he was gone to get so much done?

  But as he trudged up the line, the crew slowly resolved into view. There were just four of them. Two sawyers, one swamper, and one who appeared to be everywhere at once.

  Clearly in her natural element, Krista moved about the fireline like a blond ballerina in a hardhat. One moment she was digging line, the next she was helping Ox catch up with the sawyers. She ran a gas can up the line when one of the saws sputtered to a stop and they had it running again before Evan had closed half the distance.

  Krista spotted him.

  “Took your time, Rook.”

  “Brought you a present,” Evan made a show of lifting the jerry can and the water cube though his arms wept when he did.

  “Whoo-ee!” She hooted out. “Better than a bouquet of roses. We just might keep you, Rook.” She hustled down the last of the slope and grabbed the jerry can.

  He was about to protest about the weight, when she turned and trotted back up to the sawyers with it as if it was as light as that rose bouquet.

  Roses for Krista? Evan was pretty sure he’d never given a woman other than Mom a bouquet of roses—and that had been for Mother’s Day at a girlfriend’s prompting. It wasn’t until the girlfriend was long gone that he understood he should have given her flowers once in a while too. He just never thought of it. And his mother didn’t deserve them. Neither of his parents had—ever.

  By the time he reached the other near-empty water cube to set down his full one, Krista was back beside him.

  “Take five, Rook. You earned it.”

  He wanted nothing more than to throw himself on the ground. Instead, he dug out a packet of electrolyte and dumped it into a dry water bottle. It was a challenge as his hands started shaking with the burn of lactic acid buildup in the muscles.

  Krista watched him for a moment as he filled it from the cube.

  “Nah,” he did his best to make it sound casual. He slugged back half the bottle, knowing that would help more than any rest.

  Clearly none of them had rested even a second of the time he’d been gone. It was the only way they could have gotten so much done. So resting wasn’t an option, but he bought himself a few moments for the shakes to stop by giving his report. It also let him keep Krista to himself for a few moments. That was a feeling he definitely liked.

  “The line below is clean. Only two small flare-ups and I buried them. Nick and Lee are moving well, though they need more hose dropped within the hour or they’ll be down to a single line.”

  She hopped on the radio with that and one of the helos promised to make a drop.

  He was as rested now as he was going to be on this fire. “Think I’ll give Ox a hand.” He took a step to go around Krista and she rested a hand on his shoulder.

  She squeezed it hard, hard enough to rub bones together if he hadn’t been muscled up for a fire season. “Thanks, Evan. You done good,” her voice was surprisingly soft and smooth.

  He flipped her a finger and grin just as she had done to him right after his jump into the Black.

  As Evan moved up the slope he felt lighter than any other time during his entire first day with MHA.

  It shouldn’t matter that much that Krista had complimented him and used his real name. But it did.

  And that smooth and silky tone in her voice…who knew a smokejumper could sound so sexy.

  Chapter 3

  The next time Evan was conscious of anything other than the fire, the sun was setting—for the second time.

  The first afternoon’s wind had brought flare-ups. Pitched battle had been engaged to keep the line. They were in country too steep for dozers and all the arrival of the Hotshot team had done was take over the flanks to free up MHA for the battle of the ridge.

  One moment he’d be digging line, the next across the ridge and down in the unburned valley to the north with Ox killing off a spot fire. As the wind kicked harder, they’d spent more and more of their time scrambling up and down the treacherous terrain killing nascent fires that embers were trying to spark on the next slope.

  In the quiet of the night they’d desperately cut more line trying to save the next valley over and then spent the entire second day defending that line.

  It was the evening of Day Two when he ground to a halt.

  The smokies all finished together high up in the saddle between two peaks. They just stood in the high clearing and looked dazedly about. Evan knew he was no better off than those around him, blinking hard in surprise at the sudden lack of anything to do.

  In front of them, the fire snapped and spat.

  But they’d contained it and it wasn’t going anywhere.

  The MHA helicopters were already down for the night—Forest Service contract said they were out of the sky from a half hour before sunset to a half hour after sunrise. Sometimes night operations were authorized, along with the stiff extra fee, but it wasn’t needed on this fire. All the fire needed tonight was a lookout, making sure it didn’t escape as it finished burning the woods inside the fireline.

  Behind them was a hundred thousand acres of untouched forest lands except for a few charred spots where they’d beate
n down spot fires—not one of them bigger than an acre.

  “Camping here,” Akbar croaked in a voice hoarse with firesmoke and exhaustion.

  Still there was little movement. Nick the Greek may have been the first one to drop to one knee, but in the next second everyone was down on the ground except Krista.

  Evan watched as she started gathering kindling and firewood.

  He forced his own legs—rubbery from two days and a night on the line—into motion and clambered down across the fireline to fetch a brand from the sputtering fire. He chose a well-burned branch still flaming hot enough at one end to start a campfire easily.

  He made it back up the hill—barely—and rammed it into Krista’s pile of wood before sitting down. He wound up next to Krista.

  She’d shed her hardhat, jacket, and long-sleeved fire shirt. All she wore now was a sweat-stained cotton t-shirt that clung to every curve and outline. Stretched wide across her breasts the shirt declared, “Smokejumpers do it best in a fire.”

  He was staring. He knew it, but damn.

  # # #

  “Good first fire, Rook,” Krista could see Evan battling to look her in the face rather than the chest. It was kind of sweet actually. Most men either talked directly to her breasts or took one gander at her solid frame and went looking somewhere else.

  She’d been built to be on the football team, not the cheerleading squad. Not that the high school in Concrete, Washington had much of either one, but they tried. She’d been told to go out for shot put and she’d told them to go to hell.

  And here was this guy, looking her in the eyes now, like she was something special. Absolutely no one had ever done that. Not even her father, though he was so meek he never looked anyone in the eye, and spoke only rarely. It was likely she’d inherited all the brass Pop had never found.

  “First fire. Yeah,” Evan’s voice sounded as tired as she felt. “The Zulies never let me actually fight a fire before. I was just a water boy for them.”

  “That’s what they told us, too.” Krista knew he’d been top five over there. Top five jumper with the Zulies meant MHA was damned lucky to get him.