Full Blaze

by M. L. Buchman

  Halfway down the line Cal broke down and reset his radio. He’d put down the hard cash for a two-way of as high quality as his cameras. One of its cool features was that he could set two frequencies, but prioritize one of them. He set the smokies’ team frequency as the priority so that he could stay informed of when they were on the move. He set the second frequency to the helitankers. In moments, Jeannie’s acknowledgment of where to target a flanking load sounded from the radio.

  How much better it made him feel almost made him shut her frequency back off. A woman like her wasn’t for him, but hell, it didn’t hurt a guy to do a little daydreaming.

  The top of the ridge above them was now alight with backfire, burning low and slow, just eating up the fuel and lighting up the heavily shadowed afternoon.

  ***

  Jeannie watched the monster coming. They’d flown continuously since dawn to herd this fire. They’d cut off the south front, forcing it to a standstill where, unable to progress, it burned itself out of fuel and slowly died. So damn slowly.

  The growing Santa Anas had actually solved the problem of the northern and western fronts. With the wind driving the fire southeast, it had been turned to reburn the black. Now that the fire had to desperately clutch for fuel rather than gobbling it up as it went, containing its upwind edges was a fairly easy task.

  The heart of the black had been a beast. Jeannie had doused so many flare-ups that she’d lost track. Normally the 212s and the MD500 could handle that, but there’d been too many. Overheated, unburned fuels threatened to reignite whole fronts unless the spark and ember were beaten severely with tons of water.

  Jeannie wanted to be flying against the main front because she knew Cal was down there. Though she’d be damned if she knew why he was there rather than aboard her chopper. Maybe he saw something wrong in her that she didn’t. The man’s vision was unreal. Those photos had delivered gut punch after gut punch. Sometimes knowing what he must have done to take the photo was what really made it powerful.

  To see the triumph on a hotshot’s face shimmering through the flame meant Cal had stepped around an active fire, probably placing the main body of it at his own back. To capture the anger when a firebreak failed beneath a windstorm of embers meant he’d been right there in the fire and heat, constantly brushing off the embers that stuck and burned on clothes.

  The short sequence that had really struck her to the core had been in the folder with the National Geographic cover. But she knew that article by heart, and Cal hadn’t published the most powerful sequence of photos he had taken.

  It was a burnover.

  Overrun and unable to escape the flames, a hotshot or smokie crew would pull out their foil emergency shelters. It was a choice of last resort. It meant that many, many things had already gone wrong and the chances of survival were marginal at best.

  Jeannie had trained for it, even now had a shelter pouch tucked in the door-pocket of the chopper just in case she went down hard and couldn’t escape the fire in time. The training alone had scared her close enough to death to never want to experience the real thing.

  Cal had caught four shots. The moment as everyone pulled out their shelters. A towering wall of flame on the rampage beyond a team of yellow-clad, hard-hatted firefighters who looked like they had all chosen the same moment to fly a silver foil kite.

  The second had been a row of small silvered mounds all in a neat line, glittering orange with reflected firelight looming just beyond. He must have been the last into his shelter, waiting those few seconds of immense risk to get the shot while the heat and smoke ached in his lungs.

  The third, the crew emerging, as if reborn. Their faces red from the heat, the foil shelters still wrapped about them like protective shawls, and the look of wonder on their faces that they’d survived.

  The last, the one she couldn’t believe, must have been moments later. The crew, still wrapped in their shells except for one man kneeling by the head of a lone shelter still on the ground. The person on his knees was replacing the shell back over the body of their comrade as others around them reacted to the shock of losing someone they’d lived and fought fire with until minutes before.

  She hadn’t been able to face Cal after looking at that one. She had nothing to hold up to that. When her home had burned, she’d already heard that her parents were out clean and she’d been safe in the sky. Before the fire had taken everything, Mum had always talked about how Da’s strong spirit lifted her up. When the fire had burned away their home and their livelihood, it had broken his heart. And just as surely as he’d lifted Mum up, Da had dragged her back down after the fire until Jeannie could barely stand to visit them anymore. They were both fading away so fast. The fire hadn’t killed them, though it was taking them nonetheless.

  It was as if Cal had shown Jeannie the pictures only to emphasize that he was from another world. A world where lives were on the line every minute of the fight.

  And that was the choice she saw him make today. Armed with nothing but a camera, he’d walked away from her and her helicopter to rejoin his team. To go back to where he belonged. And she didn’t.

  Damn him! Damn him for making her feel small. She’d worked hard to get where she was. Well, it wasn’t going to work. How many spot fires did his hotshot buddies not have to deal with because she’d been there today? Hell, for that matter, he’d be one dead little photographer right now if not for her saving his sorry behind.

  Feeling a little better, she turned her full attention back to the fire. They’d killed or at least trapped most of it, losing only two small neighborhoods totaling perhaps fifty homes. No fatalities yet.

  The heart of the fire was making up for all of the avenues that the firefighters had cut off and throwing its force against the last front. She heard Henderson warn the ground team that they were minutes from contact.

  Then instructions began flying fast and furious. First, all of the ground teams were told to go to the uppermost edge of the firebreak.

  Steve’s drone image showed that every infrared dot of the crew was against the high side of the firebreak. She and the air tankers laid down massive swaths of retardant on the lower edges of the firebreak. Any sparks that jumped into the slash hopefully wouldn’t be allowed to reignite.

  Then they flipped to water to try to slow down the fire itself. The heat currents made the flying chaotic in the semidarkness of mid-afternoon glower. They had to climb an extra couple hundred feet just to make sure some microburst didn’t slap them into the ground.

  They should have drowned the monster with the volume of water they dropped. He just shook them off like a spring sun shower and drove against the firebreak at full roar.

  Jeannie flew. The time and flights blurred. Spot fires jumped the lines and were doused. Several times the slash at the lower edge of the firebreak ignited and was beaten back. Twice Henderson had called her in to drop water directly over a ground crew. The warnings had gone out that a thousand gallons were about to fall from the heavens in a single dump. She hoped Cal had time to get his cameras covered and brace himself before she released her load. Wouldn’t that tick him off, if she was the one who ruined one of his precious cameras or tumbled him down a slope and broke his leg.

  The recall came as a shock. Night was falling somewhere beyond the smoky pall. Only Beale was certified to stay aloft after dark. And she did.

  Jeannie dragged her Firehawk back to the helispot and parked her bird. She did the shutdown and patted her bird on the nose for a job well done before collapsing onto the grass.

  Too damn tired to move, she lay there and looked aloft. Night certified. She had to get her ticket. If something happened because she couldn’t fly, she’d…she didn’t know what. It was like all her worst nightmares were surrounding her, even though she was awake. The fire breaking through and heading for the heart of Santa Barbara. Her childhood home burning in the Outback. All of her
memories burned and gone. A photograph of the one lonely foil shelter over the dead body. Except this time she could see the face and it was Cal.

  That was the image she couldn’t shake. She should have said something to him. Would if she saw him again. But what would she say? Exhaustion took her before she figured it out.

  She woke only briefly when Beale’s chopper finally came in. Someone draped a blanket over her and she fell back asleep.

  Chapter 5

  Cal shuddered with exhaustion as he looked down at Jeannie asleep in the dawn light. He considered kicking her, lightly, just because turnabout was fair play, but his knees didn’t hold out long enough and he simply sank to a sitting position.

  Somewhere in the long, hot night he’d known that he had to take the risk and talk to her. It had gotten to the point where he’d swear he could tell the difference between the two Firehawks on a drop run. At first by the way they flew, and finally by the way they sounded. Beale’s flight was arrow perfect and absolutely steady; her bird didn’t wiggle or mistrack for a single second, no matter what crazy turbulence the fire’s heat was kicking out. Jeannie’s flight swooped and flowed. Beale arrowed to the target; Jeannie snuck up on it. Both appeared to nail it perfectly every time, so same result, just different technique.

  When Jeannie was called to return to base at sunset, he’d felt the physical blow. Gods, it must have pissed her off.

  Cal smiled as he looked down at her sleeping form. No matter how pissed she was, it hadn’t sustained her more than three steps from her chopper. She must have been as exhausted as he now felt.

  Maybe he fell asleep sitting up himself. One moment he was staring down dreamily at one of the most beautiful and amazing women he’d ever seen, and the next he was flat on his back and his arms were full of Jeannie.

  “You’re alive!” She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him.

  Any thoughts about some humorous response were washed away by the heat of that kiss. It scorched him right down to his gut.

  “I’m getting you dirty,” he finally managed to gasp out. That broke the moment as she rolled off him and looked down at herself. The blanket had shielded most of her front. He decided he’d better keep to himself the large sooty palm print on her butt. He didn’t exactly recall groping her in that instant she lay against him, but he’d wager she’d felt damn good. Would have been nice if he’d been awake enough to enjoy doing it.

  What the hell.

  He dragged her back down on top of him and kissed her hard. One hand brushed into her long hair—so damn soft—and, sure enough, the other hand just naturally seemed to wind up on her butt to hold them tight together. And his guess had been right—she felt amazing. She might sit on her backside all day while flying, but it was an exceptionally fine one despite that. Tight with muscle, full with shape that complemented her as nicely below as her chest did above. Not bountiful, no need for it on her frame, but every inch of her exceptional.

  She felt so good that he barely resisted pawing more of her. But he was aware of his grubby hands. Jeannie didn’t appear to be in any hurry to get away. When she finally propped herself a few inches away and looked down at him, he was again breathing as hard as she was.

  “I really like the way you wake up, Helitack.”

  “Huh. We do seem to have this thing about waking up together.”

  “Remind me to try it again after I’ve gotten some sleep.”

  She blinked at him several times as if she were the one lacking sleep. It gave him the opportunity to admire her forest-dark eyes and again appreciate the liveliness of her face that he’d managed to capture in pictures.

  “The fire. The fire!” She tried to jerk up and away, but he kept her pinned comfortably against him with that hand still on her butt.

  “We beat it.”

  She stopped struggling and looked down at him, obviously waiting for more details.

  “I found out that Akbar the Great isn’t named that just for the fun of it. He and Tim were bloody everywhere at once. I tagged along as well as I could. He finally gave me a break by latching me onto an inch-and-a-half hose for a couple hours, but I guess having to work for a living wasn’t much of a surprise under the circumstances. Hell of a fight.”

  “And you got it all?”

  “In living color.” He patted the camera case that she’d knocked aside when she tackled him.

  This time when she moved aside, he let her go. She sat up and pulled her blanket around her.

  He shrugged off the pack he’d been too tired to realize he was wearing and the Nomex jacket; the under layer of long cotton underwear was enough to keep him warm on the balmy morning. He looked up at the sunlight. It was still bloodred from smoke and ash, but the eastern light was able to punch through. There was still plenty of cleanup for the choppers to work on, but they’d probably be able to turn it over to a Type II Incident Management Team sometime this morning. The tedious work of the mop-up crew had probably already started along the south edge. It would take them weeks to first make sure this one was beaten. Then the rehab crews could take over to figure out how to stabilize the burned-over slopes for the winter.

  When he looked back down at Jeannie, she remained wrapped in her blanket, her eyes hidden by the shadows of her hair. Made it hard to see what she was thinking.

  “I—” they both started simultaneously.

  She clamped down hard on her lips. Rather than play the game of who should go first, Cal took that as a signal that it was up to him to speak first.

  “I’m trying really hard not to be freaked out by you.” He blurted out the truth despite all of his years of avoiding just that. “Though that kiss went a long way toward making me not worry so much.” And it was true. She certainly hadn’t greeted him like a pariah.

  Jeannie hunkered in her wool blanket cocoon and inspected him through narrowed eyes.

  He tried to read her thoughts. This wasn’t the pissed-off warrior that his chin had met that first night. He also spotted no sign of the lusty lady who’d filled his arms moments before. He couldn’t read her at all, which bugged him. He was really skilled at reading women. He could sweep up the bar-challenge babe almost every time, the one a fellow firefighter had picked as too beautiful for anyone to go after. He’d pull it off time and again. A couple of times he’d even managed to escort the lady home despite one of his drinking buddies paying her off ahead of time to turn Cal down.

  But Jeannie was something else, like no one he’d ever gone after. Was that what he was doing? Going after her? Felt more like he should follow the old Monty Python line and run away.

  “I was going to say something very similar.” She spoke at last.

  Now it was Cal’s turn to inspect Jeannie through narrowed eyes. “Similar to what?”

  A slender index finger peeked out of one of the blanket’s folds and aimed toward his camera case. “Your pictures, Cal. They’re breathtaking.”

  “What does that have to do with you freaking me out?”

  “Why didn’t you publish those shots of the burnover?”

  “Didn’t feel right.” He shrugged. He’d told himself that he was saving them for a better venue. Of course, National Geographic was about as good as they came. “Truth was, I just didn’t want to. Still not sure why. Some pictures are too precious to be sold for money or fame.” It hadn’t been about not wanting to dishonor the dead; he’d probably have paid more of a tribute if he had sold and published them.

  “Who the hell are you, Hotshot?” Jeannie’s tone was almost sharp. But he was starting to figure out a tiny bit of how to read her. He frustrated her. That was as good a place to start as any.

  “I’m a tired and hungry photographer who just spent a long night pretending to be a smokie, Helitack.”

  She glared at him for a moment longer, then glanced up at the lightening sky. “I’ll probably be aloft in a
nother twenty minutes. Could do with some coffee before then myself.” She stood up on those long, lean legs of hers. Her form-hugging soft blue jeans stirred even his weary blood. Though not quite enough to let him stand on his own.

  He leveraged himself off the nose of her chopper, having to stand and wobble for a few moments before he stabilized. He slung the camera bag’s strap over his head so that it didn’t go astray.

  Jeannie retrieved his pack and tossed it in the rear of her chopper. An interesting choice; he wondered if it was conscious.

  They headed over to the food truck.

  On the way he admired the easy, rocking motion of his palm print on her butt.

  ***

  Cal had stood there on the outside of her windscreen and watched Jeannie go aloft. He made her so self-conscious that she actually had to think about each action in order to be able to fly: up on collective, forward on cyclic with just a bit of left rudder to compensate. Check the instruments. Don’t think about Cal. Think about the instruments: altitude, heading, engine temperature.

  She huffed out a breath as a slight roll in the hills masked the helispot behind her. If she could no longer see the helispot, then he could no longer see her. No man had ever so unnerved her; his attention was like a caress on her skin.

  But there was a dark side to Calvin Jackson. One that woke fighting. One whose gaze avoided hers when talking about those amazing pictures. She wondered if he’d ever shown those particular pictures to anyone else.

  Jeannie actually bobbled the controls as she descended toward her first watering load of the morning.

  The answer was no. He clearly had never shown them to anyone. She knew that was somehow true. Then why to her?