She dropped the snorkel and started pumping.
Even as she lowered the water in some stranger’s swimming pool, there was no question in her mind.
She was already in over her head.
***
Cal waited until Jeannie was out of sight, then looked around at a bit of a loss. He was too damn tired and dirty to be up on the chopper with her. Besides, keeping his hands off a woman whose kiss felt the way hers did was becoming problematic. Wouldn’t be his best idea to mess with the pilot while she was flying a chopper. No, staying on the ground had been the right choice.
He then considered bedding down somewhere, but he’d never been able to sleep during the day except in stolen naps on a fire line.
Was messing with this pilot totally out of the question? Maybe it was now that he’d just turned her down again. All of his standard knee-jerk responses were getting a workout today, but he was too tired to deal with them at the moment.
The other problem was that when Jeannie had taken off to help with the cleanup crew, she took his field pack with her. That included his change of clothes, a razor, a towel, everything. His personal kit was in the back of the hotshots’ Box, which was parked who knew where. The truck that was the rolling home of a twenty-person hotshot crew was rarely in one place for more than a few days. And his big pack was at their base camp up near Sacramento, four hundred miles away, not that they were often there either. He’d lost his gear before, one feature of his itinerant lifestyle, but he’d rarely been this scattered.
He snagged some paper towels and a to-go ketchup container’s worth of hand soap from the food truck and found a water carrier. After taking a wholly unsatisfactory sponge bath, he pulled his grimy pants back on. He couldn’t face the T-shirt or boots. The day was warm enough that he’d just work on his tan until some piece of his gear showed up.
Returning to the food truck, he grabbed an iced tea and, parking himself at a picnic table, pulled out his tablet to finish the story of the MHA chopper rescuing a family and a cop car. Had he gotten a shot of the family? Yes, with their home burning behind them. He captioned the photo. Thankfully, it was the back of their heads so he didn’t need releases from them; who knew where they were by this point.
For the pilot shots, he had too many choices. He glared at them. Yes, Jeannie was immensely photogenic, but he had a disproportionate number of images of her: looking over her shoulder from the cargo bay, looking down through the bubble window on her door as her chopper sucked up a fresh load of water, of her curled up asleep under a blanket. He didn’t even recall taking that last one. It was embarrassing how many photos he had of her, but even with the blurry ones, he had a debate with himself before deleting. Even after he was done sorting, he’d kept far too many.
He finally included the second shot from the triptych he’d taken at their first meeting. The deadpan shot of her surrounded by her chopper, fire out the window behind her, and the photographer reflected in her sunglasses. She looked so damned powerful in that shot. No fire was going to dare even breathe wrong in such a woman’s presence.
Cal got himself a fresh iced tea. It was too warm now for coffee, and he really didn’t want to be fighting the caffeine. He reread the story, polishing and tightening. He’d been a decent enough writer in school, when he cared. When he was a hotshot in Alaska, then Idaho, he’d started doing the team’s newsletter and updating their website. Now he edited from long practice with little real thought. He’d long since learned that if he thought too much, he destroyed the story. He simply looked for sections that didn’t feel right and tinkered with them until they fit. It wasn’t efficient, but the method worked for him.
Someone thunked down a tall soda and a burger with fries beside him. He looked up—right into the sun—and couldn’t see shit. Henderson dropped down across from him.
“Why aren’t you up there?” Cal nodded toward the sky. The sun said it was barely ten a.m.
“You guys kicked it so hard last night that they don’t need me anymore. One of the fastest downgrades from Type I Incident Management Team all season. We just handed off to the Type II team. It’ll be down to mop-up in a couple days. You came out with the smokies. Hotshots probably out by end of day. The choppers are still in it for the rest of the day and maybe tomorrow, but Carly and Steve have that wired.” Henderson chomped into his burger.
“Where’s the kid?”
“Kidnapped.”
At Cal’s shocked expression, Henderson nodded toward the food truck. “Betsy’s had her all morning and won’t give her up to me. Claims my daughter needs more gal time.” He shrugged his indifference, but Cal noted that rather than sitting straight across from him, Henderson had landed at the table so that he could turn just enough to keep an eye on the truck.
“Should I go steal her back? That burger looks good. I could use one too.”
“Five says you can’t do it.”
“Ten says I can.”
Henderson nodded that the bet was on.
Cal went for his burger, a fresh iced tea, and the kid. When he came back to the table alone, Henderson laughed at him.
He held out his hand for money.
Cal shook his head. “Nope, you owe me a fiver.”
“Bet was ten.”
Betsy came up behind Henderson with the girl in her arms. “You owe me the other five.”
“Aw, crap!” Henderson dug out a pair of fives and handed them over.
Betsy made a show of tucking the five in her cleavage and then turned back to the truck, still carrying the little girl.
“Hey! Bring back Tessa,” Henderson called.
His daughter cooed at him over Betsy’s shoulder and waved bye-bye.
“Women,” Cal intoned solemnly. “They sure can be a fickle lot.” Then he wished he could bite off his tongue. It was a classic hotshot line when a woman picked up in a bar for a shallow, sex-only fling suddenly wanted a relationship on top of it. It was so inapplicable in a world inhabited by the likes of Beale and Jeannie.
Henderson must have seen Cal’s look of chagrin and let it slide by. Instead he grabbed back the five-dollar bill that Cal foolishly hadn’t pocketed. “There goes your five.”
Cal grinned his indifference in thanks for Henderson not nailing him for the bad line. So he went for a subject change.
“Got something for you to look over before I send it out.” Cal swiped his screen to the top of his article and turned it for Henderson’s inspection.
Henderson went silent while he read and worked on his burger.
Cal did his best not to be nervous. He wasn’t used to watching someone read his work. Usually he just sent it out and was done with it. “Write and release” was how he liked to think of it. But on the chance that he would end up working with these folks… Henderson handed back the tablet.
“Irene, Jimmy, and Kate. Single mom, no phone or radio. Didn’t hear the evac order. Cop was an Officer Reynolds and asked me to kiss your feet right after he kissed Jeannie’s. Apparently there’s a hell-load of paperwork to replace a cop car. Accounting for every round of ammo, the assault weapons, each piece of gear…worse than an IRS audit, at least so he said.” Henderson pulled some crumpled paperwork out of his back pocket. “Here are their releases to use their images. Jeannie told me what you did.”
“In that case…” Cal made a couple quick edits and inserted the picture he’d left out before and handed it back to Henderson.
“Damn, that’s a good shot.” It was a two-parter. The long shot of the chopper, cop car dangling below, and a home going up in flames. The inset was their faces. The cop staring down at his car looking terribly pleased with a job well done; the family, horror-struck. You could even see the little girl clutching a small stuffed toy, a white cat, tightly around its middle. It was a real tearjerker of an image. The MHA logo on the door stood out clearly in the close-up.
“Send it.”
Cal had already composed the email to a couple newspapers and two of the wire services. He attached the article and images and sent it off along with his standard contract. He shoved the computer aside and turned his attention back to his own food. Cal could feel Henderson watching him.
“What?”
“You got a passport?” Henderson sounded as if it were a perfectly normal question.
“Yeah.” In Jeannie’s chopper.
“Any criminal record I should know about?”
“Not that I’ve ever been caught for.” Some juvie crap and lying about his age to get on a hotshot crew at sixteen. He’d fixed that record when he jumped from Alaska down to the lower forty-eight and legally changed his name. He’d been nineteen by then and no one cared about his age. All they wanted to know was that he’d already been working three years on a fire crew.
Henderson’s totally impassive stare said that wasn’t good enough.
“Long in the past, just some stupid kid shit.” Show him a foster-care kid who passed through a dozen homes in ten years and didn’t jack some booze or steal a few issues of Playboy, and Cal would pay them a grand. He’d never escalated to grand-theft auto or groped a girl who wasn’t willing, so he figured that rated him dead clean. Hell, with his looks he’d never even had to pay a girl to join him. How clean did a guy have to be?
Henderson eyed him a moment longer, then nodded as if satisfied.
“How do you feel about Australia?”
“Like it fine. Why?” Cal usually went to South America for the off-season. When the northern hemisphere wasn’t burning, the southern usually was. The whole Amazon fire-ecology thing was one of those perennial stories he could cash in on each year. He also found the images he saw to be of constant fascination to himself as well as his readers. He’d spent one season embedded with a small tribe as their jungle habitat was systematically burned out from under them. He’d gotten an inside article in Outdoor and another in Condé Nast Traveler from that summer. He hadn’t been Down Under since his last year as a hotshot on those Black Saturday fires.
“MHA has a summer-season gig down there this year. We’re number one under a CWN contract. So, we want to be local.”
A call-when-needed contract was how most places, including the U.S. Forest Service, kept costs down. Or tried to. CWNs had higher hourly rates than dedicated contracts, but supposedly that was offset by fewer hours of usage. The last five years of fires had run so hot that the Forest Service would have been better off keeping outfits like MHA on permanent retainer, paying them even when they weren’t flying. Thankfully all of those decisions were done way above Cal’s pay grade, because they just sounded like a goddamn headache to him.
“Number one, huh?” That was sweet for MHA. It probably meant steady work, but it would also mean that they weren’t called out for the grunt crap. When called, they’d really be needed.
Henderson wiped the last of the ketchup off his plate with the last french fry. Clearly waiting for Cal to finish his thinking.
“Why me?”
“I have an uncle who is always quoting business books at me.” Henderson shrugged his indifference to the subject. “Since in addition to being my uncle he is Marine Corps General Edward Arnson in charge of the President’s Marine One helicopter squadron, I do try to listen to what he says at least some of the time. He also treats Emily like his favorite daughter for reasons I still can’t find out. Anyway, he’s always told me to worry about finding the right people first, then figure out what to do with them. It certainly worked in Special Operations Forces, so I suppose it will work here in MHA as well.”
“Special Ops?” Two contracts pinged into his email in-box. He ignored them for the moment. Jeannie had said something about Beale and Henderson being in the Army, hadn’t she? Beale was a major or something.
“My Emily and I flew with an outfit called the Night Stalkers.”
“Shit!” Cal had heard of them. The Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment had the best helicopter pilots on the planet. No wonder Jeannie was so impressed by Beale’s flying. She really was that good. Even if he didn’t have the training to tell the difference, Jeannie did.
The choppers were coming in for their scheduled lunch break. Cal heard the diesel engine on the fuel truck fire up, so they could be refueled and ready to go. Henderson didn’t look up, but probably knew exactly who was where just by the sound. Instead, he sat quietly, awaiting Cal’s response.
“What are you doing here?” Cal asked. “Why aren’t you out…?”
“Keeping America safe?” Henderson completed the thought for him. “We got a little surprise along the way.” He nodded toward the food truck where Cal could see Betsy sitting in a chair with a book and the baby snoozing in a swing chair beside her. “Didn’t seem right to stay on the front lines after that.”
Cal watched the pilots climb down. The tall, blond ex-SOAR pilot Emily Beale, every movement so precise, so practiced. Carly the Fire Witch climbing out the other side. From the second Firehawk, the lithe Jeannie clambered down like she was descending from a great carnival ride. She shed her Nomex gear and turned away to toss it back into the helicopter. It had smeared to an indefinite smudge, but his sooty palm print was still in place.
Right people? Henderson thought he was one of the “right people”? Whatever in the hell that meant. Didn’t seem likely to Cal, but he was looking at another reason not to argue. Jeannie shot him a smile as soon as she spotted him and sauntered in their direction in that delightful way of hers. Rather than reaching for a camera, he simply enjoyed the spectacle.
Just before she arrived at their table, he managed to break the hypnotic spell the woman cast and turn to Henderson.
“Australia sounds like a great idea.”
***
Jeannie made her decision as she crossed from the chopper.
Cal was sitting there with Henderson, as if hanging out at a helibase with that magnificent chest all out in public was perfectly normal. The man was beautiful! Given a choice, she’d tell him to never put on a shirt again. He might be a photographer, but there was no question he could still pass all of the wildland firefighter fitness tests without even thinking about it.
He was absolutely dazzling, not that she’d ever admit it out loud.
She also liked that she freaked him out. Jeannie couldn’t imagine why. She’d spent much of the morning aloft considering just what she had done to cause that, but hadn’t come up with a decent answer. She ate lunch at the table with them, Emily, and Tessa. And enjoyed Cal’s easy manner. He was fun to flirt with, sharp and funny.
He walked her back to her chopper. She’d never been self-conscious about a bare-chested man walking beside her. Too many firefighters, once clear of the flames, stripped off all the clothes they could as if the fire’s heat still burned nearby. But with Cal, she was aware of every breath he took. He wasn’t some muscle-bound grunt. Walking beside her, he just looked like a normal, strong guy.
When they reached the chopper, he reached into the back and grabbed his pack from where it dangled on a hook in the cargo bay. It wasn’t until then that he turned his back to her—and she saw a hundred thin, white lines crisscrossing his back.
“What the hell, Cal? You get dragged by a camel across the entire Outback?”
He glanced over his shoulder at her, then grimaced at some dark memory. “At least they aren’t burns.” He dug around in his pack. “I didn’t have a clean shirt.”
It was a shame to cover such nice skin. She couldn’t feel too guilty about taking his only change of clothes aloft with her when she’d so enjoyed looking at him through lunch. She took a deep breath and decided
to go with her gut instead of her brain.
“If you put it in the third tent down the row on the left, you’ll know where to find it later.”
He turned slowly to face her. After what felt like forever, he shook his head no.
“Not the best idea, Helitack.”
“Probably not,” she admitted. Then she reached deep. “But the offer stands.” She turned away quickly to preflight her chopper. It had only been thirty minutes, so she really only needed to do a minimal check, but she’d seen that Beale always did a full preflight on her Firehawk and Jeannie wasn’t going to do a single bit less. She also didn’t want to face Cal’s turndown. The shame was burning her cheeks. And she was the one freaking him out?
He just stood there being all handsome and quiet and interesting while she did the full circuit of her machine: checking air filters, no water polluting the fuel tanks, and inspecting for physical damage. She closed one of the big cargo bay doors to expose the built-in toe and handholds so that she could climb up and inspect the rotor. On her MD500, she’d been able to span the shaft with her two hands. On the Firehawk, the assembly was bigger across than her shoulders; the blades themselves almost eighteen inches wide. She sighted down each one looking for signs of damage or weakening. She popped the engine cover, but saw no signs of blown hydraulic fluid. All pretty damn clean considering the last few days’ workout.
Jeannie wanted to get away from him, but he held her door open for her while she climbed aboard. She buckled in and reached for her headset.
A brush of his hand on her cheek made her turn back to face him. He stood there filling her doorway, his pack hanging easily from one shoulder. His light brown eyes were alight with amusement, but his smile was small.
“What’s so damned funny?” Her voice was sharper with irritation than her feelings actually justified.
“Me, Jeannie. Just me. Do me a favor?”
“As long as you don’t take your hand from my cheek, I’ll do anything.” It was true. The simple brush of his thumb was sending shivers of heat up her spine.
Full Blaze Page 9