Full Blaze

by M. L. Buchman

  When Jeannie glanced over, he was grinning at her. Oh crap! She knew that look. Another smoke jock thinking, “What’s a woman doing flying a big nasty helicopter like this? And how far can I get with her?” The answers were: she’d busted her ass for years to get here, and he would get absolutely nowhere. She was half sorry that Steve’s drone had found a safe way in to him and she’d rescued him.

  “Pretty damn stupid of me, now that you mention it.” His voice was deep and wry over the intercom.

  Well, okay, he got another half a point for not saying the expected. Add that to the one he’d earned jumping into space to reach her chopper, and he was still nowhere. In her personal system, it took at least ten points to get a date, though this guy might need twenty.

  “Huh. It’s not like I wasn’t already wearing the strap across my chest. I never really understood a buddy’s story until this moment. He told me about being at a forward air base in Iraq when he heard a shell coming in. Says he knew he was dead and it was too late to move, so he chucked his bag out of their foxhole to save the pictures he’d taken.”

  Damn, but he had a nice voice for storytelling, all deep and warm. No way that was worth another point. Couldn’t be.

  “Ralph figured they might even support his wife awhile after he died, if the cameras were recovered. But the damn mortar round missed their barricaded position and landed square on the bag. Blew six grand of cameras and lenses and a month of dangerous work to smithereens; didn’t do anything else other than make a hole in the dirt. Guess I thought the same thing on some level.”

  Jeannie shook her head and paid attention to the smoke wall. It was thinning near the ground, but the air at the lower edge of the plume still had a mind of its own. And they were getting down into power-line territory. Power lines loved the taste of fresh rotor blade and always threw a little power party over roasted downed chopper.

  Married. Figures. How many jerks went voluntarily and died on Everest or in some godforsaken hole, leaving behind a family while in pursuit of their sport? Military was different. If you were in the service, like her brother Randall in the Royal Australian Air Force, and the RAAF said, “Go there,” you went. It’s what you’d signed up for.

  This joker wasn’t even fire crew; he was a photographer. He’d literally jumped off the cliff without a safety net, and he’d saved his camera bag first.

  “Calvin Jackson, at your service. Everyone calls me Cal.”

  “Got a twin brother named Hobbes? Did people call you Calvin and Hobbes? Are you the evil one?”

  “No brother.” For a just a moment his voice was hard and clipped, then he asked, “And you are?” His voice was abruptly all smooth in that way guys always thought was so charming.

  “Smart enough to be your worst nightmare, mate,” Jeannie replied. She’d met a hundred guys like him, maybe a thousand. Wife at home, chatting up the pretty pilot in the field. She could see them homing in on her from ten thousand feet away. Ever since her days flying in the Australian bush. She’d wing into some remote cattle station, with emergency supplies or a doctor aboard, and every puppy-dog lonely cowhand would start circling around the Sheila pilot.

  That silenced him.

  Before he could find a new tack, she cut him off. “Are you okay? Or do I have to stop this run to get you to some medico?” She managed to clear the bottom of the plume before she reached the Santa Barbara suburb crammed up against the base of the foothills. One of the engine crews waved while spraying down houses against the flames approaching from another draw. She rocked her cyclic left and right to return the wave as she flew out.

  “I’m fine. Do what you need to do.”

  “You mean what I was doing before I had to fly up and rescue your sorry behind for your wife’s sake?”

  “Yeah, that. Except I’m not married.”

  Jeannie headed for the nearest swimming pool, a lot of those in this high-end neighborhood, then glanced over at him. Cal had settled in comfortably, looking out the window like any normal rubbernecking tourist, not like some freaked-out survivor of a close brush with death. Good recovery time. His smoke-smeared face actually highlighted his light brown eyes and bright smile. The man was several points worth of handsome and clearly knew it.

  He turned to meet her gaze.

  “Biding your time? It’s not going to work on me,” she informed him.

  “Damn, and I had such hopes what with not knowing your name and all.”

  Okay, she’d give him another half point for funny. She had a weak spot for funny, not that she’d ever admit that to this man.

  ***

  Cal alternated between watching the nameless pilot and admiring her skill.

  She was very easy to watch. While the heavy gear covered her frame, what he could see was exceptional. Fine-fingered hands that rested lightly on the controls. She flew with no hesitation, absolute confidence in what she was doing.

  It was her face that was so captivating. Not some pretty girl, though she was beautiful. Her face had character. He’d bet that behind her mirrored shades her eyes were dark. They’d be dark, thoughtful, even penetrating, staring right through any bullshit. Her face wasn’t merely narrow. The features were delicate, sophisticated. He liked that; it looked good on her.

  Her hair, which he hadn’t noticed at first because of the high-backed pilot seat, was great. It was thick, dark brown, and streamed down behind the earmuffs of the headset in a wind-tousled cascade past her shoulders.

  She leaned over to look out the bubble window built into the door.

  He did the same on his side. The upper half of the door was a Plexiglas window that bulged outward enough for him to stick his head into it and look straight down. They were hovering twenty feet or so over someone’s swimming pool. Lawn furniture skittered away in every direction beneath the downward blast of the rotor wash.

  But they weren’t descending any farther.

  He glanced over at her and noted a dark red streak down the back of her long hair, reaching down past her shoulder blades, heart-of-fire red. He had the recent experience to remind himself of how accurately she’d reproduced the color. It looked like a home dye job by a woman skilled at doing things for herself, but it was also cute and worked on her. She was craning her neck to look toward the stern.

  He looked back out his window and down. A six-inch snorkel hose hung twenty feet down into the pool. Even as he watched, he could hear the pumps kick on. Despite being at the other end of the hose, they vibrated the airframe against his feet on the deck plates. A swirl of water formed around the jet pump as it drove water up the snorkel hose. The chopper felt as if it was settling or perhaps stabilizing as it sucked up the load.

  “How much can you hold?”

  “A thousand gallons at this altitude. Minus a hundred for the foam tank I have rigged in the stern and minus thirty more for you.” She said it matter-of-factly, but he could hear the insult.

  He didn’t feel the least bit guilty—too damn glad to be alive. This time when he looked over, he noticed more than the color of her hair. Her position, twisted to look out and down at the pool, revealed a trim waist despite the heavy jacket she wore. He took another bet with himself that in addition to warm brown eyes, she’d have a light form, making an even nicer package. And she made her living floating like a vapor through the air. It reminded him of the old song about the girl with the light brown hair.

  “I dream of Jeannie with the dark red hair,” he sang lightly.

  ***

  Jeannie jerked around to stare at the photographer chap.

  “How did you know my name? And it’s ‘with the bright blue hair.’”

  “Because it, uh, used to be blue? No, because it never was blue.” He laughed at the joke. “Sure. How did I miss that? Didn’t know your name. I just liked how you fit the song, floating on the smoke of the fire.”

  The jet p
ump whined as it sucked air. Turning once more to the window, she descended to get the lower end of the snorkel back in the water and watched the fill gauge. Five more seconds to full. She shut off at 920 gallons. And—done. Retracting the snorkel onto the hose reel and rising back into the air, she made sure that she stayed clear of chimneys, tall trees, and power lines.

  No one had ever gotten that right. Her hair had never been blue. She’d put in the red streak after her first flight against fire. The woman who’d certified her in Australia had said Jeannie was so good that she must have a fire-red streak down her back. She’d showed up with it the next day and flown that way ever since.

  The thing about the blue had always been her little joke, a line to keep guys at a distance. And it had always worked to make them look foolish or confused, occasionally ticking them off, which worked just as well. But not Cal Jackson. He’d done it with fewer clues than most. That had to be worth another point, though she gave it up reluctantly.

  She called Mark Henderson, flying air attack command in the Beech Baron up at seven thousand feet. “Air attack, this is Hawk Oh-two with a full load of water and foam…and a passenger. Where do you want me?”

  She listened to the directions and grinned at the cooing sound in the background. His one-year-old daughter would be curled up in her tiny car seat flying copilot beside him—the team’s most junior member.

  The hotshot crew that Cal had been with had repositioned to cut a firebreak across a feeder of fire reaching north along an overgrown greenway. The residents hadn’t dead-limbed trees or cleared brush, despite warnings, even though the greenway reached deep into the rich-people suburb. The ever-growing urban-forest interface was always risky, but an untended one was just asking for what you deserved. And then they wondered why their homes burned. Jeannie was instructed to follow Emily Beale in Hawk Oh-one to give the hotshots a hand.

  “I can drop you back in with your hotshot crew, if you want,” Jeannie told Cal over the intercom. “We’re headed over to give them a hand.”

  “I’m fine where I am, if that’s okay with you. They’re probably tired of me anyway.”

  “Great. So now I’m saddled with your deadweight?” She climbed to six hundred feet above ground level, turning to a heading of one-two-zero, and spotted Emily setting up for her attack run a half mile ahead.

  “I know it’s a burden, but I’m easy.”

  “Well, I’m not.” What idiot part of her brain decided to add sexual innuendo to this conversation? It wasn’t the sort of thing she ever did.

  She heard a camera-shutter click sound over the headset. She looked over, right into a big, fat camera lens barely two feet away. She heard another click.

  “Cut that out!” Even as she opened her mouth, she heard a third click.

  And then he laughed aloud. “Oh, we gotta frame that one.”

  Turning away, she lined up on her attack run, then checked in on the hotshots’ frequency for final guidance. Her best option would be to just ignore the man in the copilot seat. She wished that was easier to do.

  ***

  Cal had enjoyed flustering her. She was so smooth, so professional. In addition to the lovely Australian accent, like Nicole Kidman’s when she wasn’t covering it, Jeannie’s voice had all the markers of higher education. He flipped through the three photos on his viewfinder’s screen. The last one was funny: her mouth open, the anger obvious, and the camera reflected in the mirrored shades clearly illustrated the reason for her ire. He should blow it up and laminate it to the side of her chopper some night.

  The head-on shot of her still and quiet a moment earlier was far better, though. It captured the serious pilot, the frank gaze of a professional, a very pretty professional, doing her job. Though that shot had the mood spoiled by the dual reflections of his camera.

  It was the first shot that stopped him. That was an amazing photo. The same intentness, now in profile—she had an exceptionally pleasant profile—high forehead, nice nose, and womanly lips above a well-defined chin and a splendid length of neck. But the wide-angle lens had captured her hands on the controls of a vastly complex machine. Beyond the window, the wall of smoke and flame hung so close he could feel his nerves starting to return.

  He’d never been afraid of fire. Respected it? Immensely. But afraid? Not until he’d almost been burned to death for the second time in his life.

  He lowered the camera and inspected where he had come to rest.

  As a hotshot for seven years, he’d been delivered by helitack any number of times but he’d only gotten to ride up front a few times. Those trips had been in a much smaller and simpler chopper. The Firehawk was a monster. A dozen smoke eaters could cram in the cargo bay along with their gear. The controls up here in the front were arranged in a giant T. A long console between the seats offered a bewildering array of electronics. It was set up with three columns of gear, some of it radios, but a lot of which he didn’t recognize.

  Then the broad top of the T spread sideways just below the main windshield. It presented each seat with two large glass squares like laptop screens, with a half-dozen control buttons on each of the four sides. A quick glance showed that his two screens and Jeannie’s two were each showing different information. Terrain map, radar with tiny blips that must be other aircraft, and the other two completely cluttered with images of dials and gauges that he couldn’t begin to interpret.

  Overhead, above the windscreen, was another bank of controls mounted in the ceiling with levers for two engines and a bunch of switches and circuit breakers. As far as he could tell, it would require a serious college course to even understand what half of the labels meant, never mind how to use them.

  Taken all together, it meant only one thing to him: Way out of your league, Cal. He was good at two things: fighting fire and photographing the fight. Those were the only skills he’d ever found, and the only real pleasures. Jeannie was from a whole other level of the world that he didn’t get to play in. He rarely even had the opportunity to watch it from the outside.

  Between his knees, the cyclic control wiggled back and forth, mirroring Jeannie’s smooth control movements with her right hand on her own stick. A lever between the left side of his seat and the door rose and fell slightly. A quick glance revealed that it too was matching her left hand’s actions.

  What he really liked was the view. In addition to his bubble window in the door and the broad windscreen above the console, the chopper also offered a wide view through a window that formed the lower front corners of the helicopter’s nose down around his feet. The numerous windows offered an unprecedented view of the fire.

  He stayed with the wide-angle lens, wanting to capture the feeling of the view from the safe bubble of the chopper. They bounced and twisted through the air currents, rising heat creating updrafts and microbursts that were keeping Jeannie busy.

  Then with the long lens, he snapped the hotshots, tiny blots of yellow before a wall of smoke and fire that appeared to stretch on forever. When you were in it, tasting the fire, hawking and spitting to clear the ash from your tongue and cursing the loss of even that much moisture, all you saw was your part of the battle—a couple dozen yards, sometimes only a couple of dozen feet. Here, above it but still in it, the fire took on a different character. The battle looked hopeless, the tiny twenty-man hotshot team and the massive forest ablaze around them.

  Yet that was how the battles were fought, up close and personal. And other than the smokejumpers, the hotshots were the ones closest to the front. Engine companies, dozer teams, and locals worked where their equipment could go. Where they couldn’t go, the hotshots hiked in. And where the hotshots couldn’t go, the smokies jumped out of their airplanes and parachuted in. Above the ground teams flew helitankers and fixed-wing air tankers, raining water, water with foam, or retardant down from the heavens, depending on what the ground team needed and what was available.

 
Just past the hotshot crew he could see the lead chopper start its dump. Retardant. The dark red cascaded down like a heaven-born waterfall. Jeannie had said a thousand gallons, a couple of hot tubs worth all at once. Didn’t sound like much when he thought of it that way. Though he knew from working previous fires that a thousand gallons had a huge impact on holding a line.

  With his telephoto he watched the trees the lead pilot was hitting just outside the fire’s flank, trapping it into a narrow band that could then be cut off with a firebreak. They’d steer the fire to its own destruction when it ran out of places to escape to and reignite.

  The retardant would coat the unburned timber and block oxygen from the surface. No oxygen, no fire. They left a red stripe across the forest for hundreds of yards, clearly marking what had and hadn’t been hit.

  Jeannie swung to the east of the first retardant drop over the burning flank of the trees. He felt the motorized vents open, could feel the helicopter lighten, become more jittery in the heat-wracked winds.

  “Hey, you can’t see it.” He tried looking out the side window, but the water and foam was, of course, pouring out directly behind them as they flew forward. Even the bulge in the window wasn’t enough to see anything.

  “You got it in one, mate,” Jeannie answered him. “We dump blind.” But she was making minor course corrections even as she flew.

  “Then how?” He flapped a hand like a snake to indicate her course changes.

  “Following inside the Major’s line. Best pilot I’ve ever met, just unbelievably good, so whatever the Major does, I do. Always works out.”

  “The Major?”

  “Ex-major, former Army. But when you meet her, there’s no question. She’s in total control.” Jeannie flicked a switch on the handle of her cyclic control and he heard the drop doors shut beneath their feet.

  She. He’d fallen in with the helitanker girls of Mount Hood Aviation. Cal had heard about them and dismissed the stories as exaggerated because they were told by men about firefighting women. Women were a rare breed in wildfire, so the grunts either gunned for them, placed them on impossible pedestals, or, more typically, did both.