A Hotshot Christmas

by M. L. Buchman

  For now, only the fire mattered. It was getting even more aggressive and it took a punch from both of their birds to kill the next flare-up.

  “I’m back to base for fuel,” Vanessa announced on the command frequency.

  “Roger,” Henderson called down from his spotter plane three thousand feet above the fire. “Gordon, fly twice as fast.”

  Typical. “Sure thing, boss man.” He flipped a finger aloft, then wiggled his cyclic control side to side to wave at Vanessa by rocking his helicopter. She returned the gesture and peeled off to the northwest. By pure chance, this fire was less than a ten-minute flight from MHA’s base on the eastern foothills of Mt. Hood. The eleven-thousand-foot volcanic mountain was a shining beacon of glaringly bright glaciers, even in late September. The midmorning sun was blinding off the high slopes. In moments, Vanessa was a black dot against that white background. She’d be back in under half an hour and then it would be his turn.

  Below him was a land of brown and green, heavy on the brown. Eastern Oregon had none of the green lushness that everyone associated with the Oregon Coast and the Willamette Valley. Out here, Ponderosa pine grew far enough apart for grass to grow tall between them. And now, late in the season, the grass was all dried to a dark gold and carried fire fast and hard. The pine and western juniper weren’t in much better shape. Several seasons of drought had taken their toll. The hundred-foot grand firs and the fifty-foot alder were all as dry as bone and lit off like Roman candles.

  Gordon climbed an extra fifty feet, crossing the worst of it. He remembered back in his rookie year with MHA when Jeannie had a tree blow up directly under her. The superheated sap had cooked off and sent a big chunk of treetop an extra hundred feet aloft. It had knocked out her rear rotor over the New Tillamook Burn Fire. She’d managed to find a clearing the same size as her helo’s rotor blades and somehow set down safely in it. Gordon had seen it and still wasn’t sure how she’d stuck that landing.

  He kept up the hustle: lake, climb over fire, hit the latest flare-up, climb back over, and dive down for more water. Occasionally one of the big helos would be tanking at the same moment he was. He’d always liked his little MD. The Firehawks—the firefighting version of the Black Hawk helicopters—could carry a thousand gallons to his two hundred, and they were damn fast in flight, but they had none of the finesse of his MD. They didn’t get up close and personal with the fire. They flew higher and could knock crown fires out of trees. He flew lower and could put out your campfire without messing up the rest of the campsite…well, not too much.

  He harassed his best friend Mickey at one point in his Twin 212 as they tankered together. Two-twelves were midsized helos, halfway between his own MD and the big Firehawks—the modern version of the Vietnam-era UH-1 Hueys. It made for a good spread of capabilities on the team, but it didn’t mean he had to let Mickey fly easy just because of that.

  “Hey buddy, you actually getting any work done?”

  “More than you, Finchley.”

  “Believe that when I see it. Honeymoon over yet?”

  “Not even close!” Mickey sounded pretty damned pleased.

  “You better be saying that, hubbie” Robin cut in as she hovered her big Firehawk Oh-one down over the water.

  Gordon was glad for Mickey. His easygoing friend had fallen for Robin, the brash, hard-edged blonde, the moment she’d hit camp at the beginning of the year. They were an unlikely couple from the outside, but it looked like it was working for them. They’d hooked up on day one, married last month, and showed no signs of the heat easing—of course, anything involving Robin Harrow would be fiery hot. Gordon wasn’t jealous, he really wasn’t. MHA’s lead pilot was a primal force and would have run right over any lesser man than Mickey. Way too out there for Gordon. The quiet Vanessa had seemed about perfect for him, except instead of fire between them, there hadn’t even been ignition.

  Not being jealous was one thing. But when they were in camp during those rare quiet moments of the busy fire season, Mickey paid much more attention to Robin than to his old still-single pal. Gordon supposed it only made sense, but he was all the happier about finding a friend in Vanessa to fill that unexpected void.

  Up over the fire, they headed for their respective targets.

  The real battle, the make-or-break on the fire, was going to happen in the next thirty minutes. Gordon checked his fuel. Yes, he’d be good for that long and Vanessa would be back in another ten.

  The wildfire would soon be slamming up against the fire break that the smokies had punched through the trees. Flames were climbing two hundred feet into the air in a thick pall of smoke gone dark gray with all of the ash that the heat was carrying aloft.

  With a single load, Gordon managed to hit three separate flare-ups behind the smokies’ line. He could see the soot-stained smokie team below, clearing brush and scraping soil by hand even though the main flames were less than a hundred feet away. They had inch-and-a-half hoses charged up and were spraying down their own line.

  Gordon swung for the lake, climbed through the smoke, and dove—

  Something slammed into his windshield straight in front of his face.

  He flinched and jerked.

  Wrong shape and color for a bird.

  Mechanical!

  A hobby drone. A big one. Four rotors and a camera.

  It star-cracked his acrylic windshield, then slid upward.

  He didn’t have a moment to plead with the fates before he felt his MD jolt.

  Perfect—the drone slid straight into his engine’s air intake.

  Not a chance that his Allison 250 turboshaft engine would just chew up the plastic and spit it out the exhaust. Even if it did, the battery was like throwing a brick into the turbine.

  The primary compressor, spinning at fifty thousand RPM, choked on the three-pound drone.

  A horrendous grinding noise sounded close above his head.

  Red lights flared, starting with “Engine Out” at the upper left of his console and a high warning tone in his headset.

  Other indicators flared to life, but he ignored them. With the engine failed, nothing else really mattered.

  Gordon eased down on the collective and twisted the throttle to the fuel cutoff position. The grinding sound slowed but grew rapidly worse—his engine wasn’t just dead, it was shredding itself. He slammed a foot on the right pedal as the nose torqued to the left.

  “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!” At least he still had electrical power to the radios. “Hobby drone strike, straight into my engine. Going down.”

  The radio fired up with questions, but Gordon was in the death zone and didn’t have time to listen. A lift-failure emergency in a helicopter below fifty feet or over four hundred was generally survivable. The range in between those two altitudes cut life expectancy a lot more than he wanted to think about at the moment. He was currently in heavy smoke, descending down through the one-fifty mark.

  It was little comfort knowing that the FAA would slap the drone owner’s wrist if they could find him. Of course, if this went as badly as Gordon was expecting, MHA would go after the asshole for a million-dollar helo and the cost of one funeral.

  “God damn it! And I was in such a good mood.” There, that sounded more like Vin Diesel than Austin Powers. Truly sad—he was going to have to die to get it right. Though he couldn’t place what movie the line was from.

  The smoke wrapped around him and visibility left altogether. He fought for best auto-rotate speed, but at the rate he was falling, there wasn’t a whole lot of time to get there.

  He’d started flying fifteen years ago on his family’s ranch, spent the last three years with MHA, and this was his first real-life crash landing. All the practice in the world didn’t count for shit.

  His palms were sweating against the slick plastic of the controls. The cabin was filling with smoke, but he couldn’t take his hands off the controls to close the vent to the outside.

  With his right shoulder, he nudged up the release lever o
n the pilot-side door. It swung open two inches and stabilized just like it was supposed to. The additional airflow helped the smoke flow through the cabin faster, but it still burnt his eyes and his throat. As a firefighter, he supposed that it was no surprise that death smelled like hot wood smoke.

  His visibility was under twenty feet, and the smoke was taking on a distinctly orange glow. At sixty miles an hour, that gave him absolutely no lead time for maneuvering.

  He wrestled east for the water.

  The first treetop that slapped against his windshield was brilliant orange with flame. Lodgepole pine.

  The next one, Douglas fir, snagged his left skid, jerking him sharply to the side before he was past it. If the one that slammed into his right-side pilot’s window, white fir, made him scream, he didn’t have time to realize it.

  The next one, too buried in flames to recognize, ripped the door off entirely.

  Gordon’s instincts did what they could, with the controls now gone useless. One tree after another battered his helo: Ponderosa, western juniper—he ricocheted off the side of a massive Doug fir harder than being tossed by a bucking bronc.

  The ends of rotor blades snapped off.

  Then more of them.

  The other skid snagged and twisted him the other direction, which saved him from the next flaming tree coming in through the missing door and killing him.

  He realized that he was falling, treetop to treetop, down the steep bank toward the water.

  His broken helicopter smashed through the last of the flaming line in a slow tumble thirty feet above the water.

  With one final effort, he stomped on the right pedal and shoved the cyclic left.

  No rotors. No effect.

  That’s when he remembered where the movie line was from. It wasn’t Vin Diesel at all. It was John Goodman playing the hapless Al Yackey in the firefighting movie Always.

  “No offense, John,” he spoke his final words aloud to his dead helicopter. “But I’d rather die as Vin Diesel.”

  He plunged into the water upside down.

  Five minutes earlier, Ripley Vaughan flew into sight of the firefight and eased her Erickson Aircrane to a hover.

  “Wow!” “That’s a mess!” Brad and Janet White, her married copilot and crew chief, did one of their synchro-speaking things.

  They were right. It was.

  The Black, the area already burned by the wildfire, ranged across five hundred acres. No cleanup had been done, there were spot fires dotted all over the Black, and the fire’s flanks were eating sideways into the trees in addition to the main head of the fire driving toward a community. It could be the textbook definition of zero percent contained.

  Ripley could see the hard slash of a smokejumper defense line across the rugged hills, cleared of trees and brush. It looked so small against the towering wall of fire bearing down on them, but then it always did from altitude. And there was a heavy airshow going on. The battle of this wildfire was about to be engaged big time.

  They needed help.

  But without a contract, she wouldn’t be insured or paid if she fought on this fire…unless.

  “Are those aircraft painted black?”

  Brad pulled out a small pair of binoculars. “Yep! With flames and all.”

  That meant it was Mount Hood Aviation, their new outfit.

  Ripley watched the airshow for another thirty seconds and could see the smooth coordination of the attack effort. She’d been flying her big Aircrane helicopter to fire for a couple of years, but had never imagined she’d get the chance to fly for Mount Hood Aviation. They had the best reputation in the business. Their for-hire smokejumping team was right on par with the Forest Service’s Missoula, Montana Zulies, but nobody had the renown of their helicopter team.

  Back at Erickson’s Medford airfield in southern Oregon, Randy had called her into his office.

  “I’ve got a rest-of-season contract request here.”

  Ripley hadn’t particularly cared where she went, as long as it kept her flying.

  “For some reason, it came through with your name on it. Something going on here I don’t know about?” He sounded some kinda pissed about it. Upsetting a chief pilot with his years of experience was never a good idea—especially not when he signed her paychecks. Randy’s cheerful demeanor and the easy smile that normally showed through his white beard were completely missing. Now she could see a flash of that kick-ass retired Army Chief Warrant that was typically hidden away. Word was that he’d graduated top of his Army flight class and hadn’t slowed down for an instant during his years with the 2/10 Air Cav, not that the stories ever came from him.

  “Unless it’s for dancing,” Ripley eyed the paperwork Randy was waving at her, “I can’t imagine why it would be for me.”

  With her crew being named Brad and Janet—and Janet looking like a young Susan Sarandon, it was inevitable that their crew would learn “The Time Warp” dance from The Rocky Horror Picture Show…and then get known for it. But she hadn’t been shopping for someplace else to be; she liked flying for Erickson more than she had liked anything else since she’d left the Navy.

  Randy had tossed over the paperwork and Ripley had glanced down at it. She didn’t spot her name anywhere. It was a contract for “your best pilot” from Mount Hood Aviation.

  His scowl changed to his usual cheery smile. “Man’s gotta have some fun. A couple pilots here are as good as you, but I don’t have any that are better. You want to fly with MHA for what’s left of the season, it’s yours. You’ve earned it. But…” and he’d aimed a finger out toward the landing apron where her helicopter baked under the Medford late-summer heat. That former-military voice came out again, “You better bring my bird back in one piece. Yourself too, while you’re at it.”

  She’d promised she would and then signed it on the spot. It was only later that she thought to ask Brad and Janet, but they were game as always.

  The three of them with their Aircrane were supposed to be transiting to MHA’s base today but now had stumbled on their new outfit in a full-on firefight.

  “Janet, let’s scoop up some water. Brad, find me this fire’s Air Attack frequency because I can’t fly into a restricted Fire Traffic Area without permission.”

  There was a lake down below that she could see the other helos were using. It was just long enough that she could use the sea snorkel instead of the pond snorkel. The latter would require hovering and pumping. The sea snorkel was designed to let her fill her tanks on the fly. She could lower the snorkel’s long strut to drag the tip below the surface and use the force of her own flying speed to fill the tanks. It was much quicker.

  She flew down over the south end of Rock Creek Reservoir.

  “Snorkel in five,” she called out. Ripley could run the controls from her left side command seat, but since she had her crew chief aboard for the transit, Ripley let her have something to do. Her real duties would be on the ground once they arrived, but it was a chance for Janet to get a little control time in her log book.

  “In five,” Janet called back. She sat in the observer’s seat directly behind Ripley, facing backward. That seat was positioned so that a pilot could control the helo during finicky winching jobs, like when they were assembling transmission towers. Not really needed for firefighting, but it gave her crew chief somewhere to sit and be a part of the firefight.

  Ripley flew down until her big helo’s wheels were just ten feet above the water. Once they slowed to thirty knots, Janet lowered the sea snorkel’s strut into the water. Their speed alone would cause the water to shoot into the two submerged openings on the pipe, each the size of her palm. The water would blow upward like a thirty-five-mile-an-hour firehose. In forty seconds and just over half a mile, they could load up twenty-five hundred gallons of water, a dozen large hot tubs’ worth, and be heading for the fire.

  She flew along the line of the burning shore as it curved around from east to north. Rock Creek entered at the northern tip of the reservoir, pro
viding her with an excellent gap in the trees for her climb out.

  Brad found the frequency.

  MHA’s communications blasted into Ripley’s headset.

  “Did anyone see where he went down?” The voice was nearly frantic.

  “All aircraft,” a powerful male voice called out over the airwaves. “Climb and pull back. There was a civilian drone over the fire. It’s already taken out one of our birds, we don’t want to lose another. We need to evacuate. Keep an eye out for Gordon, but continue retreat.”

  Ripley had been on a number of fires where all of the air attack—helicopters, fixed-wing tankers, and command aircraft—had to pull back because someone had spotted a stupid civilian drone. There wasn’t a firefighter aloft who hadn’t thought about the dangers. But…

  Ripley pressed the button on the back of the cyclic control with the tip of her index finger and transmitted. “If it already hit someone, then it’s out of the sky. The chances of two simultaneous idiots on the same fire seems pretty low.”

  “Identify!” The ICA snapped out the command.

  “This is Erickson Aircrane Diana—Oh shit!”

  Ripley saw the body floating directly in her path. It was too late to avoid by climbing or raising the sea snorkel’s strut.

  Gordon had been floating on his back, watching the sky. It was amazing how pretty the sky was when you’d suddenly been given a reprieve from certain death. Even the fire still raging along the shore was a wonder of smoke and light as it swirled aloft.

  He wanted to feel sad about the loss of his helo, but it was hard. His MD 530 had seen him through hell and given its own life to save his. He’d managed to release his seat harness and swim free before the helo hit the bottom of the reservoir. That first breath of air had been so clear and so sharp that he’d never forget it, not for as long as he lived.