Wildfire

by Chris Ryan

  ‘Oh, brilliant!’ shouted Amy. ‘We’re here trying to do some good, and a joyrider steals your blinking car.’

  She heard a crunch behind her. When she looked round, Timi was kicking down a white picket fence.

  ‘Tim!’ she exclaimed. ‘What are you doing?’

  Joseph grabbed Timi by the arm and pulled him away. ‘Hey, man, that doesn’t help anyone.’

  Timi swore at him in Korean, a furious sound like an animal snarling. His foot kicked out like a whiplash, splintering the white wood to smithereens. The violence of it made Joseph flinch.

  ‘I’d just finished making the down payments on that car,’ Timi snarled.

  ‘Mate, it’s not these people’s fault,’ said Joseph, looking at the ruined fence.

  Timi whirled and grabbed him by the front of his T-shirt. ‘No? They just look away – turn the other cheek, whether it’s petty crime or the rape of the whole planet! It’s all their bloody fault!’

  He reached over the splintered fence, grabbed a garden gnome and dashed it to the ground. Plaster fragments shot everywhere. ‘We’re just wasting our time!’ Timi was screaming. ‘The world’s going to hell and nobody wants to know.’

  The noise was attracting attention. Amy saw grubby curtains twitching in the house next door. ‘Timi, please – people can see …’ she said quietly.

  But Timi was in a blind rage. He didn’t care whether people could see or not. He was caught up in his own world of fury.

  * * *

  Dodge took the hatchback around the streets at breakneck speed. That was good for about five minutes, but he soon got bored. The car had the reactions of a possum in a coma and it didn’t even have air conditioning – he would have taken a tyre iron to it if he’d had the energy. But the two beers he’d drunk that morning, coupled with the heat, were making him feel a little sleepy. He drove to the municipal park, stopped and lay back in the car for a snooze.

  He was awoken by a tap on the window. He saw a pale face and greasy dark hair. Snoopy. Dodge looked at his watch. Eleven a.m. That figured. Eleven was about the time Snoopy normally got up.

  Dodge got out. ‘Hey, Snoop, want to buy a car?’ Snoopy was holding a can of lager. Dodge grabbed it and took a swig. With his other hand he clapped Snoopy on the shoulder. ‘You can pay me later.’

  Snoopy looked in through the window. ‘Anything interesting in there?’ He noticed the boxes of leaflets in the back. ‘What’re all these? And what’s all this about?’ He gestured at the windows, where there were several stickers. NUCLEAR POWER – NO THANKS! STOP GLOBAL WARMING. OZ PROTECTORS FOR A HEALTHY PLANET.

  Dodge went round to the rear and opened the door. He finished the beer, tossed the can into the car and lit a cigarette. With his free hand he picked up a couple of loose leaflets and touched the flame of his lighter to them. ‘Yeah, stop global warming, eh?’ he said to Snoopy, and sniggered.

  ‘Hey,’ said Snoopy, pointing to the flaming sheet of paper. ‘Did you see that?’

  ‘What?’ Dodge replied. The flames reached his fingers and he dropped the burning paper, waving his fingers and blowing on them.

  ‘The flame went kinda funny,’ said Snoopy. ‘Do it again.’

  Dodge picked up another leaflet and lit it. The flames licked up the page, turning it black and crisp. Where they met the green Oz Protectors logo, they glowed bluey green.

  Dodge grinned at Snoopy. ‘Hey, pretty colours.’

  ‘Told you,’ said Snoopy.

  He picked up some more of the leaflets, put them down on the parched grass and lit them with his lighter. They watched the flames intently, waiting for them to change colour when they reached the green printer’s ink. When it happened, they grinned and took some more out of the box. A light breeze stirred the trees and fanned one of the flaming pages in Snoopy’s hand. Curls of paper floated away across the grass like scraps of burning lace …

  Chapter Four

  Adelaide was surrounded on three sides by hills of vineyards. On the fourth side was the glittering blue ocean and thirty kilometres of white beach. Tram and train lines led from the beach to the city centre, which was laid out in rectangular blocks. Further out, in the residential areas, there were also parks and golf courses, a cemetery and a racecourse. Horses the size of ants were making their way around the white rails of the course.

  It was the second time Ben had seen it all from the air and he was starting to get impatient. Kelly had said he could have a go at the controls, hadn’t she?

  ‘We’ve done the scenic tour,’ he said. ‘Surely it must be my turn to have a go at flying now?’

  ‘Shh,’ said Kelly. She checked something on the map on her knee and muttered to herself as if she was figuring out something important.

  Ben suspected she was deliberately ignoring him. He leaned forward and pointed at the items on the instrument panel, one by one. ‘That must be the altimeter … that’s the airspeed indicator … radio … this is a global positioning system, fuel gauge, engine temperature, engine HT – that’s the rev counter, isn’t it? It’s just like Microsoft Flight Simulator.’

  Kelly made a contemptuous noise. ‘Microsoft Flight Simulator? You sure know how to have fun. And don’t imagine it’s anything like real flying.’ She raised the plane’s nose and they climbed a little.

  Ben sat back and folded his arms. ‘Looks pretty much like a flight sim to me. In fact it’s a lot less complicated than a Boeing Seven Eight Seven. Where’s the artificial horizon?’

  Kelly tapped a mark on the middle of the windscreen. ‘There.’

  She was pointing to a piece of black tape. For a moment that took the wind out of Ben’s sails. Surely she was joking? But there wasn’t another artificial horizon on the instrument panel.

  Kelly looked pleased at his reaction. ‘Flying this is not like playing a computer game.’ She moved her legs and looked down at the map on her lap again. Ben saw the pedals move on his side of the foot well. She was making little adjustments the whole time. It was fascinating.

  He stretched his feet towards the pedals. ‘What did you do just then?’

  Kelly looked up from her map immediately. ‘Don’t touch those!’ she snapped.

  Ben pulled his feet back. ‘So what do they do?’

  ‘They’re attached to the rudder.’

  ‘And this joystick? That’s steering, right?’ He reached for the lever between the seats. ‘Where’s the throttle? Or is it on the joystick?’

  Kelly batted his hand away from the controls. ‘It’s called the stick. A joystick’s the thing on your Gamecube.’ She made an irritable noise. ‘Before you touch anything, I’m going to give you a rule. When I hand over to you, I will say, “You have control,” and you say, “I have control.” Otherwise you might think I’m flying the plane and I might think you’re flying the plane and—’

  Ben said: ‘I have control,’ and closed his fingers around the black rubber handle.

  He thought Kelly might stop him but she didn’t. He was now in charge of the plane. Butterflies danced in his stomach.

  ‘Just push the stick forwards a tiny bit,’ said Kelly, ‘and keep an eye on the airspeed indicator here.’

  Ben nudged the stick carefully forwards. The nose of the microlight pointed downwards. The racetrack below became visible through the front window and started to draw closer. He watched the airspeed indicator, watching the needle creep up. When it had gone up to about 50 knots, Kelly spoke again.

  ‘OK, now level it off. Pull the stick back gently.’

  Ben brought the nose slowly up again. The view of the racecourse disappeared and the windscreen was lined up with the horizon as before.

  They were once again flying level.

  Ben felt inordinately pleased with himself. He gave Kelly a wide grin.

  ‘Now we’ll try a turn. You can turn using the stick, but if you don’t use the pedals as well you’ll get too much yaw. Have a go at turning her right. Keep your right foot on the rudder pedal, but not too much.’
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  ‘How will I know when it’s too much?’

  Kelly tapped the horizon. ‘Keep this as close to the middle as possible. Oh, and don’t turn too sharply because we’ll lose lift and airspeed.’

  Ben looked around at the controls. ‘Will we need the throttle? Where is it, by the way?’

  ‘Forget about the throttle,’ said Kelly firmly. ‘Just turn using the stick and pedals.’

  Ben pushed the stick away from him and pushed his foot gently on the pedal.

  The microlight turned. This was easy.

  Suddenly Ben’s stomach seemed to leave his body, making for the top of the craft. He let go of the controls.

  The plane was dropping out of the sky.

  The map flew off Kelly’s lap and over her shoulder, like a trapped seagull. She snatched it back and, with her other hand, grabbed the stick. ‘You idiot!’ she yelled. ‘What did you do?!’

  Just as suddenly, the plane flew smoothly again. But the altimeter said they had fallen a hundred feet.

  Ben was white. He was gripping the seat so hard his fingers hurt. ‘I didn’t do anything. It just went by itself.’

  The respite was short-lived. The plane started to jump up and down, like a boat on choppy water. Kelly tried to control it with the stick and the pedals. She pointed the nose upwards and the engine roared as she tried to regain the height they had lost.

  But at least it seemed to be under control again. Ben’s stomach was calming down. He even felt able to make a joke.

  ‘When do we get to loop the loop—?’

  His words ended in a strangled sound. The plane dropped again, like an elevator plummeting with a snapped cable. Ben’s buttocks lifted off the seat. If he hadn’t had the seat belt on he’d have gone clean through the roof. He was paralysed with fear, only just able to hold on.

  Kelly was struggling with the controls. The engine above them seemed to be screaming. Ben caught a glimpse of the instruments. They were doing crazy things, the needles swinging from side to side.

  Then the bright blue sky around the cockpit went dark, and Ben realized he could smell smoke.

  Something was burning.

  Was the microlight on fire? He looked behind and above. Where was the smell coming from?

  The windscreen cleared again, the smoke disappeared and they soared away into blue sky. Kelly watched the dials with fierce concentration, making adjustments. Ben gripped the seat, dreading it happening again.

  But the craft was flying calmly now. And he could no longer smell smoke.

  Kelly relaxed and unclosed her fingers from around the stick. She was breathing hard, like she had been running.

  Ben let go of the seat again. ‘I didn’t do that, did I?’

  Kelly shook her head. ‘You couldn’t do something like that even if you were flying in boxing gloves. There must be something outside that did it.’

  Ben craned around in his seat to see where the smoke had come from. A black plume rose from the park below. Bright orange flames flickered through the tinder-dry trees, consuming them one after the other as though they were no more substantial than twigs. Ben had never seen anything like it.

  Kelly was peering out of the other side. ‘We caught the thermals from that fire. It must be giving off heat like a furnace.’

  The park adjoined a street of houses and the fire was eating through the trees like lightning. Soon it would run out of trees, and the next thing in its path was the row of houses.

  ‘Oh my gosh,’ said Kelly. ‘That looks really out of control. Call nine-one-one.’

  Ben slid his phone out of his pocket. He knew she meant the emergency services – 999 in the UK. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘here it’s treble-zero.’

  Wanasri Kongprapoon had only finished her fire-fighter training the previous week. She had signed in for her first shift and was just stashing her kit in her new locker when the call came in. The trees in the municipal park near the cemetery were on fire. Now she was in the cab of Engine 33, craning her neck out of the window to look at the pall of smoke on the hill.

  In the cab with her were her new team-mates, whom she had met for the first time that morning: Petra Wardell, the driver and team leader, and fire-fighters Andy Delmonte and Darren Beogh.

  The crew hadn’t exactly looked thrilled when they were introduced to their new colleague. Wanasri’s family were from Thailand, and although she was tall, her build was slight. Andy, Darren and Petra were all big Australians with broad shoulders. Andy was in his forties and heavy-set. Wanasri could see what was going through their minds as they were introduced. What use will someone so small be as a firefighter?

  Now they might have to trust her with their lives, and she had to trust in them. Today, Wanasri had a lot to prove.

  The smoke was drifting towards them. All the crew coughed as it caught at the back of their throats. There was no smell like it. Wanasri recognized the resiny tang of burning eucalyptus. It sent a surge of adrenaline pumping through her veins. She felt ready for anything, like a soldier psyched up for combat.

  Ahead was a big wooden fence. The tall trees behind it were blazing, sending orange flames shooting ten metres into the sky.

  The engine stopped beside a big house clad in white weatherboard. This would be their front line – the territory they had to protect. If they couldn’t put out the burning trees, the fire would spread to the house and it would go up like kindling …

  Wanasri jumped smartly out of the cab, putting her yellow helmet on. She fastened the catch under her chin and pulled the visor down as the heat hit her like a furnace. Andy and Darren had already begun unwinding the hose lines and Petra grabbed one, ran in and started to play the water into the flames.

  Wanasri picked up a line too. The metal nozzle was heavy in her hands. The water started to course down inside it, making it move like a live snake. She looked towards the fire as she had done hundreds of times in training – and froze. This was a real fire, not a practice. Somebody’s home was under threat.

  Darren dragged a hose past her and shouted, ‘What are you doing? Get stuck in!’

  That kick-started something in Wanasri’s brain. There was a gap in the line, waiting for her. She ran in.

  Her firefighting career had well and truly started.

  She had never frozen like that in training. She didn’t know what had come over her, but she resolved that it would never happen again.

  The water poured out of the hoses in white arcs. When it hit the burning columns of vegetation it turned into steam. The eucalyptus trees were rich in oils and burned particularly well. The heat rose, creating thermal currents, sucking flaming fragments into the air. They landed on other trees and set them alight. As fast as one tree was put out, another was catching.

  Wanasri’s team was driving the fire away from the house. Meanwhile another team attacked it from the other side of the fence, and a third crew was drenching the walls and roof of the house in case a burning branch came its way.

  Wanasri had seen house fires in training, both as simulations and in films illustrating lectures. She had those pictures in her mind now. You could always see what it had been like before the fire: the outlines of paintings or mirrors on the walls; the sofas reduced to metal frames after the cushions had been gobbled up by the flames. Worse still were the items that were irreplaceable: the fragments of photos, the books, the videotapes. The devastation was obscene. That was what would happen to this house in front of her if she failed.

  Wanasri’s arms soon ached with the strain of holding the nozzle. Her turnout gear – as they called the heavy protective suits and boots – felt stiff and new, and stiflingly heavy. The heat was so intense it felt like it would crack her face. It made her think of a sausage skin bursting on a barbecue. But still she carried on. She blasted the flames with water and followed up every little orange tongue she could see. She would protect that house with every last breath in her body.

  They carried on soaking the charred fence; the trees behind it had b
een reduced to black skeletons.

  Finally Wanasri felt the hose sag in her hands. The hiss of the water stopped. For a moment the site fell silent. Every member of the three teams was on tenterhooks. Was the fire out?

  Steam made a grey cloud around the house. Water dripped off the eaves. The sunlight picked out droplets on the pink and yellow tricycle in the front garden The grass and the paved drive were littered with burned twigs and rubbish that had fallen out of the sky. Any one of them could have set the house ablaze.

  But none of it was burning any longer.

  A moment ago Wanasri had felt exhausted. Now, as she coiled up her hose, she was on top of the world. They had done it. They had saved somebody’s home.

  A white police 4x4 pulled up between the red engines. Two officers climbed out, pulling yellow safety vests on over their uniforms.

  One of them called to Petra, who was closing the water valves on the truck. ‘Is it all out?’

  Petra nodded. ‘It’s all yours.’

  A gate opened in the charred fence. A fireman from one of the other crews stepped through and beckoned to the policemen. ‘Officer, I think you should come and see this. Looks like this fire was started deliberately.’

  Chapter Five

  Kelly pushed open the glass doors of the flying club. Ben followed her in. The air conditioning was a welcome relief from the heat outside. Ben found it was no longer a novelty to be sweltering hot in the middle of February.

  When they phoned the police to report the fire they were told they’d be asked to give a statement, so Kelly had cut their flight short and brought them back.

  The foyer of the club was like a hotel: palm trees, an atrium and a few big canvases of aboriginal art. At the front desk was a young male receptionist in an open-necked shirt that showed off a tan. As soon as Kelly saw him, her behaviour changed. She checked her flying suit, which was once again knotted like a jumper around her hips, took off the orange baseball cap and shook her blonde hair free. Then she went up to the desk. Ben tagged along, feeling rather embarrassed.