“Cal?” He still hadn’t responded.
“Huh, oh. No. Last sleep I had was at the Santa Barbara helibase.”
She aimed a smile at him. “Not sure I let you sleep all that much, then.”
Again no response, which hurt. Well, if she’d been awake for two days, she’d be out of it too. She’d just give the guy some slack.
One of the things she found interesting was that they’d had some very skilled firefighters in this morning’s meeting, so why had Cal done the briefing? And the plan had apparently been his. Sure, he’d seen the fire, and neither Akbar nor Carly had. But they’d listened to him. And the more she listened, the more impressed she became. He’d understood the interplay of the fire and the unique environment of this section of the Australian Outback. He also understood how to communicate that to firefighters in a way that made them feel secure in understanding what they were about to face.
“Do you have any idea how good you are?” She tried to tease a response out of him, but it was no less the truth for her doing so.
“That’s the sex talking, and thanks, it was fun.”
Fun? She wanted to smack the man again. If her hand wasn’t busy on the collective, she might just have gone for the satisfaction of another left to the jaw. Their lovemaking had been way more than fun. And he’d missed the point.
“No. I was talking about your fire assessment.”
“You haven’t even seen it yet.”
“Cal! You’re avoiding the goddamn issue here. MHA has all of these amazing resources, and you were the one they were listening to.”
He shook his head like a bull coming awake. He studied her silently for several minutes while his mind churned at something.
Finally he made a grunt and faced forward again.
Next time they were on the ground, she’d have to beat a response out of him.
They’d taken off with a full load from the airport’s pumps. They weren’t going to provide anywhere near the turnaround time they’d need, almost three minutes a load. Even with a fifteen-minute round-trip, they’d lose a load an hour to such slow pumping to fill the chopper’s belly tanks. They were going to be dipping water all day at forty seconds a load.
“This is the vasty nothingness,” she observed as they flew over the rolling hills along the bed of the dry Todd River.
Cal still didn’t respond. Must not be a Firefly fan, yet. She’d have to take care of that soon. Another newbie to abduct into the browncoat fandom—she could hardly wait. How easy it was to picture being curled up beside him, sharing a pizza and DVD. Almost too easy, as if they’d been together for months rather than days. Strange, that wasn’t like her at all, not that she was complaining.
For now, she’d focus on the task at hand and make sure to keep her temper until the man had some sleep.
They definitely needed dip tanks. As she followed Henderson’s directions to the northeast, she could see that no one would be setting a tank out here any time soon. The nearest track lay well north of the riverbed, and she couldn’t spot anything to the south.
No question about where they were headed, though. The line of black and gray smoke rose like a vertical wall to the east. A line of flame dozens of feet high rose from the soil like a shield wall around an ancient city. Except this one was on the move and killing everything in its path.
She was assigned the southern edge of the fire, and she hit it and hit it hard. Bruce in his Huey came in tight behind her. She spun to face the fire and see what they’d done. They’d punched a twenty-meter hole in the fire line to cut it off from the centerline, which started closing even as she watched.
“Damn!” Cal’s soft curse echoed her own feelings.
It was going to be a really long day.
***
After the first run, TJ, Chutes, and Akbar had the smokies organized and had put together a ground plan. The engines were already headed out toward the fire, but with no roads, it would take them hours to arrive. So, she and Emily loaded up six smokies each, along with all of their gear. Almost all. They wouldn’t need their parachutes, and there was nowhere for them to dip water with their portable pumps and inch-and-a-half hoses.
Akbar and Two-Tall Tim looked distinctly unhappy about that last, but no one had a better answer. She flew out and, after giving them a visual of the blaze, dropped them about three klicks ahead of the fire where a ridge climbed across the path of the southern head. Akbar had wanted to go for a nearer drop site, but Cal had warned him off. The fire would be moving too fast to create a firebreak any closer to the blaze.
Before she was even back aloft, they had the chain saws running. By the time Jeannie and Cal were back with the first load of water, she could already see a line of felled trees along the back of the ridge. She left them to it and returned her attention to the fire itself. Their job was to make a break that the fire couldn’t cross. Her and Bruce’s job was to punch it down hard enough that the sucker would actually die against the smokies’ firebreak.
The fire knew someone was after it, and it fought back. When they punched a gap, a falling mulga tree would reignite the black and start a new expansion of the front. She’d lay down a thousand gallons of water with foam along the top edge of a wide gully, and the fire would leap straight over to the opposite bank as if the twenty-meter gully wasn’t even there. She’d had to go back to the airport to refuel after three hours before they even broke the back of their one head. It was small comfort that Emily and Mickey Hamilton were having little better luck on their own battle to the north.
By the time she made it back to the blaze, it was hard against the ridge. The three engine crews for their side of the fire had arrived to reinforce the smokies, but they wisely had all of their engines turned around and aimed west just in case this didn’t work out and they had to run for it. They each had a half-dozen hose lines out.
“Steve must be sending down his drone images to them as well.” Cal pointed down at the defensive positions.
“How can you tell?”
“Look at how they’re arranged. Just about perfectly for what’s coming at them.”
Jeannie looked again, but obviously Cal was seeing something that she couldn’t. Of course, a decade as a hotshot versus her half-dozen seasons flying helitanker gave them different views of what was happening.
“Just don’t let that north edge get around the ridge.”
“That would be bad?”
“That,” Cal acknowledged, “would be really bad.”
Jeannie punched it down with a thousand gallons of water and foam, and headed back for another load.
***
Impossibly, Cal had felt himself come awake as they continued to fly, due to the challenge of the fire, the adrenaline that surged as he tried to second-guess what was happening.
Henderson was good. His advice from seven thousand feet above in the twin-engine Incident Commander Air position was solid. Cal could start to see where his tactics were rooted. Henderson was sneaky, sliding his helitanker assets sideways, as if to catch the fire unaware. He’d often hit the hottest spots first.
That worked some of the time. But unlike an entrenched enemy, if you killed off the stronghold of the fire, it still had plenty of life out in its limbs and it could rebuild the central stronghold quickly.
Cal began calling advice up to Henderson about how to pinch the fire, squeeze it hard. The center didn’t burn hotter; it couldn’t. There was only so hot a flame could burn, and there was only so much fuel available to feed the fire at any one place. By flanking it from the sides, they forced the fire to slowly cave inward.
Over the next couple hours, Henderson’s tactics shifted. He began incorporating Cal’s plans as often as not in his initial instructions. Damn, but the man learned quickly. He must have been a hell of an amazing commander when he was flying military.
In the end it to
ok seven hours, but they killed off the first two heads. The main fire was still on the move, still driving toward Alice Springs. Perhaps unaware that it was a quarter narrower than it had been.
“I bet the fire engines on the ground are getting low on water.”
Jeannie made a quick call on the ground frequency and verified they were.
“How the hell did you know that, Hotshot?” She turned the Firehawk back for a refill.
“Drove an engine for part of a couple of seasons.”
“Thought you couldn’t drive a car.”
“Highways scare me to death. People are crazy. But I’m pretty good at getting a wilderness engine where it needs to go.”
Jeannie looked at him as if he’d lost his mind.
“What?”
She shook her head and focused on the run back for water. This time, rather than dumping on the fire, she moved to each engine. While she hovered, they hooked up a hose and filled their fifteen-hundred-liter onboard tanks. One chopper load just about equaled three wildfire engines. A quick call to Emily, and the senior pilot set off to do the same for her ground crews.
As they returned once more to the golf course pond, he asked again, “What were you going to say earlier?”
She brought them down low over the water, lowering her snorkel before replying with a shrug.
“I’m still trying to find something you aren’t good at, Hotshot.”
Cal watched the gauge as the tank filled. No one ever saw him as competent before. A good man on a fire crew, sure. But not as broadly skilled as Jeannie appeared to believe he was. He tried to figure out how to tell her he wasn’t even clos—a loud thunk! reverberated through the chopper.
“Damn it!” Jeannie swore.
“What the hell was that? Are we going down?” Cal studied the console, but didn’t see any flashing red lights or hear any alarms or whatever helicopters did before they fell out of the sky.
“Golfers!”
Another loud bang elicited another curse from Jeannie.
“They’re drunk enough to think that pinging a chopper is fun. They’re going to dent my nice finish. That’ll piss off me, Henderson, and Denise in that order. No damned way we’ll ever pin down these assholes, either.”
Cal stared aghast straight ahead where Jeannie indicated a foursome with a nod of her head. Four guys were lined up at a nearby tee with the clubs out. They all cocked their clubs ready to strike the balls.
“Move, Jeannie! Now!” He flipped open the window and snapped a shot with his long lens.
She flipped off the pump and drove forward and up.
Cal glanced down as all four balls passed low or to the side. Barely. The chopper had little speed yet, especially with a full load of water in her belly. He thought for a second, waited three more, then hit the dump switch on his own cyclic, careful not to jar the controls.
“What the hell, Cal?”
“Oops. Let’s turn and look.” He flipped over to video mode and concentrated on his viewfinder.
Jeannie spun them around. Cal sighted and caught the video as the last of the water was still pounding down upon the golfers. In this mode he also captured a high-res image every second on top of the video. The tee was drenched and wouldn’t be usable for hours. The two golf carts had tumbled down into a sand trap. They’d be there for a while.
“Gee. I sure hope they signed the extra insurance clause for those.” He flipped off the video and kept snapping stills.
Golf bags and clubs were scattered everywhere. The golfers themselves huddled on the ground, their heads still covered in case more retribution was going to fall from the skies. With the telephoto he even caught their drowned-fish looks.
“Uh…” Jeannie apparently didn’t know what to say.
“I guess I must have hit something with my camera. I’m so clumsy sometimes. You’ll have to reload. I’m really sorry about that.”
Then Jeannie unleashed one of those radiant smiles at him that made him glad to be alive and in her presence. Far better than any fire-based adrenaline response. She made him feel good and worthy until his body was humming with it.
“Right. Watch yourself next time,” she offered drily as they circled back to the pond for another load of water. No golf balls were pinged at them this time.
Cal pulled out his tablet computer and started working.
“What’s up?” Jeannie got her snorkel back into the pond, kicked on the pumps, and began refilling the belly tank.
“I’ll show you at lunch.”
Some days, Cal admitted to himself, were good days. And others, like today, were really good days.
Chapter 10
They settled back at Alice Springs airport for their second load of fuel for the Firehawk and their first load of food for the fliers. They’d killed the first head and they had an attack plan for the next kilometer-wide chunk.
Jeannie had once again airlifted Akbar’s crew well ahead of the fire to their next planned firebreak. Two of the engines would follow as fast as the terrain allowed. One remained behind to explore the black, where the fire had burned, and kill off any hot spots. Already Steve was calling in sightings of flare-ups and hidden coals for them to douse. His drone’s infrared camera uncovered areas of high heat, even those hiding beneath the surface debris. It was brutal work, much of it done by individual firefighters walking the tortured land with a Pulaski and a five-gallon water tank on their backs, breathing in the black charcoal dust as they hunted down the last of the fire in the brutal summer heat.
Back at camp, Cal was fooling with his tablet some more, just as he had been for the last several flights back and forth. She’d kept glancing over as they flew. The man was practically chortling at whatever he was doing, but refused to explain when she asked again. She wasn’t even sure he heard her.
On the ground, the temperature had soared into the mid-thirties, about a hundred Fahrenheit. The air was so dry that no matter how much water she drank, she was still thirsty. Over the last year in America, her body had adapted to the much moister American air, especially at MHA’s home base in Oregon.
Several of the crew started for the air-conditioned terminal, but she warned them off. It was a sure way to get a chill and the shakes when you returned to the heat. They kept it cold for the tourists. Any self-respecting Aussie stayed put in the Alice. If you had to leave, you took the bus, because no one should be in such a damned hurry all the time that you had to pay the serious tariff to fly to the Red Centre.
So, the crews all ended up in the back of a hangar where the cool concrete made the air tolerable and cut the sweat down to merely irritating. Denise’s service team hit the choppers. The three of them could do more in thirty minutes than most could do in an afternoon. Once again she was struck by the exceptional people MHA attracted.
Speaking of which, Jeannie glanced over to see Cal send something on his email before he tossed his tablet down in front of her roast beef and Vegemite sandwich. So good to be back with the tastes of home.
It was an article.
“Just sent it off to the Alice Springs News.”
Jeannie looked down at the title.
“Subpar golfers need nappies changed!” And subtitle, “Dumbest golfers on planet attack firefighters! Would you date these wankers?” She could think of several other things to call them, but most of them wouldn’t be publishable, and the play between the Ozzie slang for dickhead, “wanker,” and golfing was really good.
The first photo was an MHA chopper looking miniscule before a towering flame, representing the valiant flight into the fray against the monstrous foe. The caption noted it was from a recent fire in California before they had rushed halfway around the globe to aid in saving Alice Springs. In the next photo, all of the golfers were lined up, finishing their backswings in unison, their faces clear as day. Then a brilliant shot of the havoc wre
aked by the deluge Cal had dropped on their heads. The final was a shot of four of the five MHA choppers rising in unison into the dawn light that was unmistakably in the Red Centre to anyone who knew it. He must have taken the shot this morning.
Jeannie started reading the article and almost snorted her sandwich. Good thing she hadn’t been drinking a soda or something. Cal had written a straight-toned article attempting to assess the intellectual capabilities of each golfer based on his desire to foment an international crisis by a direct ballistic assault against civilians trying to save the Alice Springs from burning to a crisp. The extravagant, even inflammatory wording contrasted hilariously with the dry tone.
Cal went on at length discussing the golfers’ lack of skill, deeply critiquing each of their forms based on the photo and obviously questioning their manhood without quite saying so, making it all the worse. He’d made it completely clear that golf and “wanking” were the only two satisfactions these blokes would ever find. He didn’t quite say “wanking themselves off in a dark closet,” but he cleverly implied it.
“I also sent it to all of the pubs who list their email addresses in Alice Springs. Might have accidentally cc’d a buddy at Reuters International News while I was at it. Maybe I posted a bit of video on YouTube, Vimeo, and a few others. I don’t really remember.”
They’d be laughingstocks. Cal couldn’t have written it more perfectly to make every Ozzie love it. These men would never live down having their faces plastered on every bar mirror in the Red Centre. There wasn’t a bar in the area that would ever serve them. She knew the people of Oz. The men would have to leave the country to find a beer. This story would definitely go viral.
“Do you think it’s too much?” Cal looked all innocent as he stole some of her chips.
“It’s bloody brilliant. Good onya!”
Cal simply smiled and reached for another chip, changing his mind when she stabbed a fork hard enough into the wooden table to stick not two inches from his fingertips.
After lunch, the day began to drag. The heat was brutal, the fire tenacious. The distances from water supply to fire line were shrinking at an alarming rate. They cut off two more segments, leaving a single engine to clean up each one. The rearmost engine moved forward to bolster the flagging energy of the team at the fire’s leading edge.
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