After all, he wasn’t stupid. He could see where this whole thing with Jeannie was heading. He hadn’t ever been this far down Relationship Road, but neither was he ever stupid about women. While Calvin Jackson was old enough and hormone-laden enough to no longer think that girls had cooties, he certainly knew they had talons. And who the hell was he kidding with a woman like Jeannie Clark? If he ended up with someone, it would probably be an undereducated tough bitch to match his own undereducated tough bastard.
He checked his watch. Ten a.m. In Santa Barbara. Okay, that was a useless piece of information. Midnight here? Maybe? Long time until any flight out was all that meant. His brain just wasn’t working. He’d been awake a day and a night, felt like two.
“Where are you going to find a plane at this hour?”
“Where’s your faith, Cal Jackson?” Henderson headed toward a dark hangar area.
“What, the good Lord will provide?” Cal fell in beside him for lack of anything better to do until the sun rose and the airport started back up.
“If the good Lord starts dispensing aircraft, I’ll climb back aboard a DAP Hawk.”
“DAP?” Cal hadn’t heard of that one.
“Direct Action Penetrator. It started out as a Black Hawk, before we started messing with it. Nastiest helicopter ever launched into the night sky by any army.”
“You miss SOAR?”
“How about I take away your cameras, then tell me how you’ll feel after a year?” Henderson’s easy tone had suddenly turned into a snarl. For all his easy manners and pleasant attitude, the man did have a sore spot. Cal wondered if anyone else knew about it. Even his wife.
“Then why?” They crossed the airfield’s centerline, no runway lights at this hour. Not even a need to glance for incoming traffic. Just the moon glowing off the center stripe for a long way in either direction.
“Little girl comes along, it changes your world. You’ll see someday.”
“Not a snowball’s chance in—”
“—the Outback?” Henderson cut him off.
“Yeah. That’s about right.”
They made it to the hangars in silence. Henderson approached a small twin-engine aircraft parked out on the apron. An envelope with Henderson’s name on it had been taped to the pilot’s window. He peeled it, pulled out a key, and unlocked the small plane. Security wasn’t much of an issue when there was no one around. With a flashlight he circled the airplane to inspect it, signaled for Cal to climb aboard, and started the engines.
Cal let himself drift, floating along. No doubt the lack of sleep explained his lack of willpower. No questions. No real thoughts. Just along for the ride. He tried, but he really couldn’t picture himself with a kid or giving up everything he wanted to keep that boy or girl safe. What about his life? Definitely not a snowball’s chance.
As the plane rotated up into flight off the dark runway, Henderson spoke quietly, so softly that Cal didn’t know if he was supposed to respond or even hear it.
“I thought the same thing just a few years back.”
Cal knew his life was changing faster than it had since he’d run away to fight fire and changed his name, but some things weren’t going to change anytime soon. He’d definitely catch the next flight out in the morning, didn’t matter where it was going as long as it was away.
Henderson climbed and turned west.
Or was that east because they were south of the equator? No, that was stupid. Cal must be even more tired than he thought. If he dozed, he wasn’t aware of it. After some indeterminate amount of time, Henderson pointed.
“Your analysis, Mr. Jackson.”
A broad vista before the plane was filled with the blood-orange of a fire at night. From their altitude he could see the extent of the fire. At least some of the extent; it stretched out of sight to both the right and left despite their altitude.
Australian Outback bushfires were different from American fires, the fuels more spread out. Even the big savannah fires didn’t act this way. There were some dense forests that existed to the south and the tropical jungle in Queensland along the coast, but here it was primarily grassland with a few trees. That meant a very thin front from the leading to the trailing edge of the burn. It looked as if some drunk had drawn a wandering line of orange flame across the black night. The front wasn’t deep, but it had sprawled very wide.
“What are our assets?”
“Six local engine crews, five helicopters, and Akbar’s team, which should be arriving in another couple hours.”
“That’s a laugh.” The local crews might total fifty or a hundred guys, mostly trained in structure fires. Akbar the Great and his dozen smokies, and the five choppers. “Anything else?”
“There’s a broken-down road grader for cutting firebreaks, but no one’s been able to get it started. We’ll let Denise’s team loose on it tomorrow. Even if they can fix it, we’re still miles from the nearest track. Attack begins in three hours.”
Henderson turned to fly up the line. As he did so, Cal could see that the fire was moving.
“Is getting the hell out of its way an option?”
“Alice Springs is about a two-day burn away at the current rate of damage. Most of the Aussies’ assets are tied up in trying to save Canberra and someplace called Ferntree Gully.”
“That’ll definitely keep them busy. National capital and a suburb of Melbourne.”
“How did you know that last one?”
Cal smiled at the memory. “A nice blond Sheila took me home for a while at the end of the fire season a half-dozen years back. She lived up there in the hills, but there’s a lot of population around about. It’ll be as ugly as what we were just doing in Santa Barbara.” That wiped away any smile he’d been feeling. Susy had been fun. She’d been disappointed when he left, but her emails hadn’t followed him for long. Some homegrown boy swept her up. No real surprise—she’d been cute, sweet, and cuddly.
Which left him thinking of Jeannie. Was that how he’d describe her years from now? Not a chance. Splendid, challenging, stunning—much better descriptors for her. He wished he didn’t feel the twinge when he thought about her in the past tense. Well, he’d worry about that after he flew out tomorrow. Or later today?
The fire line continued to snake ahead for a long way. At least there wasn’t much out here. Not even many cattle stations, as they called their ranches. There might be three or four in fifty miles. Fodder was thin out here in the Red Centre, so their cattle would roam far and wide, some of them birthing, living, and dying without ever seeing a human. But the fire wouldn’t let them go.
“Cut the fire into three or four parts,” Cal decided. “Assign a pair of choppers to each of the outer ones until we kill them.”
“But then we’re fighting three fires,” Henderson protested.
“If the winds kick in, these can move at fifty klicks, thirty miles per hour. We need to cut them up, narrow each side part out of existence. Then, if we have to, we can steer the narrower damage path of the central fire away from people. Aim them into dry arroyos or cliff faces if we can line any up.”
Henderson flew for a while, barely resting a fingertip on the wheel to keep them straight and level over the fire. How different from his attack helicopter or even Jeannie’s far simpler Firehawk?
Behind the blaze, the black stretched away as dark as charcoal except in a few spots where scattered trees still burned. Mulga trees, some part of Cal’s brain recalled. They weren’t just burning, they were being turned into ash as well. This wasn’t your average bushfire; it was burning too hot. Normally a tree would catch fire, but it wasn’t an intense heat, at least not for the tree. The fire would scorch off dead limbs, old leaves, and some bark and the tree would be back next year. These fires were burning so hot that there’d be nothing left of the trees when the bushfire was done.
“Go lower,” Cal instru
cted Henderson. “Hit your landing light and fly in front of the fire line.”
Henderson swung down until they were close enough for the bright light under the wing to light the ground. Thick clumps of brown grass came into view. It was tight, closer together than over much of the Outback that he’d crossed. He had enough pictures of this type of vegetation from his last trip to Australia. He felt a shiver of cold up his spine. He remembered the Black Saturday bushfires and really wished he didn’t.
Then he thought of Jeannie. This was going to be a tough fire for her. She’d lost something in that fire. A house, maybe even a friend? The similarities would get to her.
He cursed, then signaled to Henderson to take them back.
Cal wouldn’t be flying out to anywhere in the morning. He couldn’t leave the woman who’d saved his life to face this alone.
***
“Buffelgrass.” Cal purposely hadn’t looked directly at Jeannie when he said it, but he was absolutely right. She flinched as surely as if he’d kicked her feet out from under her again.
“What’s that?” Akbar asked. The rest of their crew and gear had arrived just before sunrise on the first commercial flight into Alice Springs.
Denise had her team going over the choppers to make sure that the fliers hadn’t screwed them up without her there to oversee them. She’d already been en route to LAX when the plans had changed sending the choppers into the Mojave Desert to get transport to the Australian desert. Apparently that had made her very nervous. She’d muttered something about never trusting a pilot with anything more complex than a joystick and headed off.
The rest of the teams had assembled for an immediate briefing right out on the tarmac. They sat in a circle amid the helicopters, some of the team sitting on gear, others on the ground, a few standing. Jeannie had been in a low squat that looked as uncomfortable as could be, except she looked very relaxed in that position, feet spread wide and flat on the ground, her butt a few inches in the air.
At his mention of what was fueling the fire, she sat down hard.
Cal kept his silence, knowing that if Jeannie had to explain the significance of buffelgrass to the group, that would help her not dwell on whatever memories were fighting for her attention. Others noticed where his focus was, and several turned to face her. When she finally caught on that others were waiting on her, a brief flicker of annoyance crossed her features. But then she offered Cal a nod of deep chagrin and stood. A quick scan, and she pointed at a waist-high patch of dead grass growing off the edge of the paved parking area they’d taken over.
“That’s buffelgrass. Doesn’t look like much, does it? They seeded much of central Australia with it decades ago. It does well in arid environments and is an excellent dust suppressant as it grows densely and remains in place even after seasonal plants die off. Normally it wouldn’t be so bad, but Oz had unusually heavy rains last year and the grass really grew, making for much more fuel per hectare than typical. It also burns far hotter than native species, especially because of the denser growth. So, a buffelgrass fire kills everything in its path: trees, cattle…homes.”
Cal spotted the brief pinch across her features. He doubted anyone else would see it, but he already knew her expressions so well that they were like a storybook for him. She’d lost her home? Seemed likely. More than four thousand buildings had gone up, along with a million acres of grasslands, as four hundred separate fires burned on that dark February day.
“It will behave like a denser American forest. We can’t just slow it down so that it loses momentum and peters out like most bushfires this deep in the Outback. Instead we’ll have to really kill it dead. And anything that gets ahead of us will start fanning back out. The material is dense enough to reach sideways to start new fires as well as expanding downwind.”
“Any suggestions on how we do that?” one of the other pilots asked.
Cal looked at Akbar, who shrugged. They’d had a moment where Cal had described the fire to the lead smokie and to Carly. Steve had launched his drone after the mandatory sleep period that Beale had set for all active crew. Cal figured that made him chopped meat, because he’d gone off flying around with Henderson instead of sleeping. But the best fire behavior analyst in the business and a lead smokejumper had come up with no better plan than Cal’s. Which told him they were really screwed. So they were leaving it to him to explain and be the bearer of bad news.
“We’re dealing with a five-mile-wide front right now. So—”
“Eight kilometers, mate,” one of the smokies called out. “We’re Down Under after all.”
“Chas, you’re from Poughkeepsie, New York. Shut up,” one of his team razzed him.
“So,” Cal continued, “we’re going to chop it into three chunks, a kilometer on either side, and let the center keep burning. Vern in the MD500 will keep hitting the sides of the central head. Don’t try to stop it. Just don’t let it get any wider. We’ll put a Firehawk and a 212 on either side-head along with three engine crews each. Akbar, your team will embed a two-man stick with each local engine. The goal is to choke the two side-heads off. Then, we leave a mop-up engine on either head and cut off the next two kilometer-wide chunks. We keep chasing it inward from the sides.”
“Here’s the kicker,” Henderson stepped in. “We have to kill two kilometer-wide fires every four hours, because if it takes longer, the central head will overrun downtown Alice Springs and we’ll have twenty thousand people living in the desert and a bunch of smoke eaters looking to dodge a lynch mob. We clear?”
Bruce from one of the Huey 212s raised a hand. “Where are you setting up the retardant mixer?”
“You’re Down Under. The United States is still pretty much the only country to use retardant. So, we use water. We’ve at least got foam, but no retardant.”
“Water? Where do we get that? This place is so dry, it hurts to breathe. Is there a river we can dip?”
Jeannie snorted out a laugh.
“You wanna break the bad news, Jeannie?” Cal asked her.
“Sure. The Todd River cuts right along the eastern edge of town. Its tributaries are up in the hills to the north and south. You missed the annual Henley-on-Todd Regatta by a few months. It’s held on the riverbed itself and is the world’s only dry regatta. The boat race has been canceled just once in the last fifty years.”
Many of the crew were looking at her like she was nuts. Someone fell for the trap and asked, “Why’d they cancel it?”
“Flooding. There was actually water in the Todd River and they had to cancel. Of course, the race is held in August in the middle of the Dry, that’s the arid winter season, and people wear their boats rather than ride in them. They run down the coarse sand. There are also sand skiing, mini- and maxi-yacht races, the “Tour de Todd” race in human-sized hamster wheels, and even a battleship war—quite majestic. Whole ships built on four-wheel drives complete with fireworks cannons. As this is Oz, they’re often blind drunk while doing this. It’s a great party.”
She had them laughing and joking about entering a papier-mâché helicopter next year to show those yachties how it was done. Cal watched as she let them joke but not run it into the ground before she cut them off. She was good with groups, yet another professional skill she had hidden up her sleeve.
“This is November and the Wet is now here. They typically get as much as thirty millimeters, just over an inch, of rainfall…total for the month. Don’t be fooled, though. It will come as a single dump and create flash floods that will kill more than their fair share of tourists who think it’s funny to go wading in the river as it actually fills in.”
Cal and Henderson had scoped it out from the air on their way back from the fire and then talked to the local fire crews, so Cal had already heard the background. He took back over.
“You scrounge from swimming pools, just like in Santa Barbara, or you head out to the big pond in the mid
dle of the golf course to the east of town. It’s pretty shallow, but they’ve promised to keep their well pumps running. We’re trying to put together some water trucks, but the tracks out to the fire are mostly deep sand and need special vehicles to navigate them. In Oz there aren’t sealed roads once you’re off the Stuart Highway. There are just tracks across the Outback.”
Henderson slapped his hands together. “Sun’s up in five, in the air in ten.”
“What about the half-hour hold?” Vern called out, already turning for his small chopper.
“One, that’s U.S. Forestry rules. Two, we’re in the desert—sunrise to full light is about a three-minute transition. Stay hydrated, people. Let’s show them what MHA can do!” And Henderson had them all on the run.
***
“You get any sleep yet, Cal?” Jeannie settled into the chopper, glad to have Cal climbing aboard beside her. She hadn’t slept much after they landed. Partly because she’d slept so well on the flight, but also because each time she’d cracked open an eye, Cal hadn’t been sitting there watching her. It had been weird at first on the flight, but she’d come to like the idea of him watching over her. As unlikely a guardian angel as he might be, she wouldn’t be lodging any complaints with whatever forces had made their paths cross.
And she so loved being back in the Outback. Her family home and cattle station had been down in New South Wales, which smelled more of eucalyptus. They’d frequently traveled to the Red Centre, which smelled of its rusty-red, iron-rich soil, and she’d also worked for several more years as a flying taxi out of the Top End of the Northern Territories, where the ocean smell pervaded for hundreds of kilometers inland. When she was here, a part of her that she’d never felt tense up simply relaxed. The way Cal had held her as they’d watched the night had been such a sharing of that feeling. No other man she’d been with had understood so easily.
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