Three separate heads were still running hot, finding more fuel as they climbed to the ridge, not less. They fired showers of shining sparks upward into the climbing smoke plume that darkened the sky ahead of them.
The pilot tipped the Firehawk helicopter and headed toward the embattled smokejumper crew on the ground.
“No, wait.” Carly hadn’t finished understanding the fire from their vantage point five hundred feet above the ridge crest. Most Army hot-rodders thought you fought fires down between the branches. It was a relief that this one didn’t, but would she get close enough when it mattered?
The pilot pulled back to a hover, and Carly could feel the woman inspect her. Rumor was that the pilot almost never spoke, except to her husband and her newborn girl. Carly could appreciate that. She tried to recall the silent woman’s name but decided it wasn’t important. Time enough to learn names if the new pilot lasted.
The flames climbing toward the fire crew were bad, but the crew had an escape. They could forge a path through that notch in the ridge and down the other side, ahead of the fire.
The number two head from the north was clawing up the ridge with no one to stop it yet. It radiated a malevolent, deep orange, as if saying, “I’m going this way, and just try and stop me. I dare you.” The next sticks of smokejumpers would be here shortly. That’s where they needed to jump.
“Base, this is ICA Thomas. How many smokies in your next load?”
“Three sticks, Carly.”
“Roger, jump all six of them on the number two head. Out.”
The number three head…
“That’s the one.” Carly pointed for the pilot. “That’s the bitch. Hit her. Hit her hard.”
The pilot didn’t move. She was just looking toward Carly again, her face unreadable behind silver shades.
They simply hovered five hundred feet above the ridge, dancing on that margin between enshrouding smoke ahead and below, and sunlight above and behind.
Had she nerved out?
“The crew’s okay for now. We’ll drop more smokies on number two. Number three is going to cross the ridge and burn into the southern slope. Then we’re in a whole new world of hurt.”
No nod. No acknowledgment. Frozen for half a moment longer. No waver in the hover, a good trick in the jumpy gusts that heat-blasted first one way and then another above a fire. Carly now felt as if she were the target of study. As if she were the one being assessed, analyzed, and mapped instead of the fire.
“Drop in twenty seconds, chief.” The pilot spoke over the intercom with absolute surety, warning the crew chief in the back to be ready on his fire-dump controls. “Fifty percent drop in three hundred feet of flow, so give me a dial setting of two for two and a half seconds. Eight-second hold and then the second half of load.”
Evans Fitch, who’d been silent so far, acknowledged with a simple “Ready.” That was weird because normally Evans was one of those guys who couldn’t shut up.
He had flown a training run with the woman and had simply described the flight as “Serious, man. Real serious.”—whatever that meant—in his atypically abbreviated speech, as if the pilot had stripped him of his voluble word supply.
Not counting Carly as spotter, there would normally only be one person flying in the Sikorsky Firehawk, but with a newbie pilot, even one who came with helitack certification, they were overstaffing. Evans was manning the duplicate set of drop controls, which connected back to a console in the helicopter’s cargo area where everyone except the pilot and copilot rode. Carly would have to decide how long they needed to have Evans at the backup controls.
The woman’s numbers were wrong. The drop length was okay, but the turn couldn’t happen that fast. Before Carly could protest, the helicopter dipped and turned so sharply that Carly found herself hanging on to the edges of her seat so she wouldn’t be thrown against the harness. The rotors beat harder through Carly’s headset as they dug into the air, thrusting the Firehawk toward the third head of the blaze.
“Winds?” the pilot asked.
Carly blinked as they dove into the smoke. Visibility alternated from a hundred yards to a hundred inches and back as they plunged toward the maelstrom. The heat in the cabin jumped ten, then twenty, degrees as they flew into the hot smoke over the fire.
“Pretty mellow, steady at fifteen from the west-northwest.” She could tell by the shape of the smoke plume and the slight movement in the droopy-topped hemlocks still outside of the fire.
The pilot simply left a long enough silence to remind Carly that she wasn’t stupid and had known that. Of course, any decent pilot knew how to read the winds at altitude. The woman was asking about the real-world winds, a hundred feet over the treetops. That was a whole different question. As a pretest for planning a parachute jump, the smokejumpers would spill out weighted crepe-paper streamers that would twist and curl in the thousand conflicting air currents that battered above a raging fire.
“Chaotic. Winds can microburst from forty knots to zero and back in a couple seconds, and the worst of that occurs vertically. Horizontally, the winds will carry more or less up the slope, probably about thirty knots and chaotic at the moment. The winds are better at two hundred feet, much more stable.” She offered the woman an out.
“But the retardant is best at a hundred feet.”
Carly considered. “In these tight canyons, yes, if you can get it in the right place.” The accuracy would be better, and the tighter spread would provide heavier coverage per acre. That would be an advantage right now.
Through the next visibility break, Carly could see they were already at the hundred-foot mark and moving fast. She glanced down at the unfamiliar console, needing a moment to spot their airspeed. Damn, but they were moving fast.
The pilot returned to her silent mode, and Carly worked the numbers in her head while she held on. Dial setting of two would be about right at this speed, if the flame retardant landed in the right place.
A loud bang could be heard even over the heavy beat of the Firehawk’s rotors. A tree had just gone off like a bomb. Superheated until the pitch didn’t ignite, it exploded. A thousand shards of tree in every direction. But the pilot had them moving fast enough that they were in the clear on this one. Not even the bright patter of wood chips against the fuselage.
“Drop in five, four, three, two, one. Drop now. Now. Now.”
Carly more felt than heard the mechanical door opening on the thousand-gallon tank of flame retardant mounted under the belly of the helicopter. Most pilots drifted higher as the load lightened. This pilot was good enough that their altitude remained steady. Even better, the pilot held the same height above the treetops as they dipped into the valley, then climbed up the other side. She’d seen pilots who tried to hold stable to elevation above sea level. They either learned fast or were thrown out of the service. It was fine in a chaparral fire, but up here in the mountains, firefighting altitudes always had to be referenced from the terrain or you could fly straight into a mountain.
Leaning into the curved side window and twisting to see what she could, Carly pictured the pattern of the red mud. With a slight arc, half of the mud landed just at the very leading edge of the fire, and half on the trees just ahead of the flames. Textbook perfect. Normally, you’d attack the flank, narrowing the fire to extinction. But here they didn’t have that luxury. By the time they flanked it, the fire would be over the ridge. It was still small enough now that maybe they could just cut its throat.
She’d counted to two and half, then again felt the slight vibration through her seat as the dump hatch’s hydraulics slammed shut. The Firehawk helicopter somehow went from a hundred and twenty knots in one direction to a hundred and twenty in the other.
Carly couldn’t quite tell how they’d done it so abruptly, though her eyes did momentarily cross from the g-force that knocked the air out of her lungs like a punch.
&nb
sp; Some part of her mind had continued to count seconds. At eight seconds, Evans popped the retardant hatch again even as the pilot repeated her call of “Now. Now. Now.” Somehow, impossibly, they were lined back up on the fire. It had taken a hard-climbing turn to avoid slamming into the wall of the valley that they had been crossing laterally. But again, they were just above the top edge of the flames, bouncing through the rough edge of superheated air currents bolting for the skies.
Carly sat on the uphill side, making it so that she couldn’t see exactly where the pilot placed the drop. That was a good sign. Beginners thought that dumping the retardant directly on a fire did something. It really didn’t. Retardant had to be dropped ahead of the fire. It was a sticky, nasty goo that clung to branches and bark like heavy glue, tinted bright red so that you could see where it lay. It cooled the unburned fuel that the fire sought and trapped the oxygen-laden air away from the wood so that it couldn’t burn. No oxygen, no fire.
So this second pass, if the pilot did it right, should be laid just upslope from the first pass, overlapping to allow for the different direction of flight to coat the back side of some of the unburned trees and branches that had been coated in the first pass. But mostly the second pass would be targeted on the untouched and yet unburned trees. All to create a wider swath of protected fuel.
This one drop of retardant wouldn’t be enough. Carly could tell that by the rough ride of the Firehawk helicopter through the air pockets as they hammered down into the valley and back up the opposite slope. They’d need another load right away, and probably two or three after that, to cut this head. The fire-heated wind roared up the valley too hard, too fast. Even the wide barrier laid down by the near-perfect drop wouldn’t stop this beast.
But they’d sure slowed it down.
The ex-Army pilot hovered once again over the point of the ridge, turned so Carly had the best view of the fire below.
Carly keyed the radio.
“Tanker base. This is Firehawk Zero-one. Come back.”
“Tanker base. Go ahead.”
“Three heads. We hit north hard. You’ll need two flanking loads to trap it. But first load we need water and foam on top of the crew on the south head. They’re jumping the next couple sticks of smokies into middle head. Over.”
“Roger that. Out.”
“Out.”
Even as she took her hand off the mike switch, she saw the jump plane, MHA’s beautiful old DC-3 twin-engine, with the next round of smokejumpers. The plane was swinging above a high meadow not far from the middle head of fire. Two brightly colored paper streamers spilled out into the wind. They fluttered and twisted, showing a strong draft up the valley but no chaotic crosswinds. She’d seen the winds tie smokie streamers in knots while they still turned in the air. The smokies would be watching them intently to decide their best approach.
The plane turned again, and on the next pass, four jumpers spilled out, two sticks. The smokies’ rectangular parachutes popping open in a bright array of Crayola red, white, and blues. In contrast, their heavily padded and pocketed jumpsuits were a dusky, dirty, soot-stained yellow.
As the plane circled to drop the next stick of jumpers, the pilot spoke, breaking Carly’s reverie as she watched the choreographed ballet of a coordinated fire attack.
“Seen enough?”
“Roger that. Let’s get another load.”
The nose of the chopper pulled up sharply. In some kind of crazy compound maneuver that Carly had never experienced before, the body of the helicopter spun on its axis. Now they were equally abruptly nose down and moving fast back toward the firebase. Not one wasted moment of motion.
“Where did you learn to fly like that?”
Again that long, silent moment of assessment from the pilot.
“Army.”
“I’ve flown with plenty of Army jocks. They don’t fly like you. I’ve been up with enough of them to know that the Army doesn’t teach this.”
“I flew for the 160th SOAR, Airborne. Major Emily Beale.” Then a note of deep chagrin entered her voice. “Retired, I guess.”
It was now Carly’s turn to remain silent as they roared back toward the helibase for the next load of retardant. SOAR. The Army’s secret Special Operations Aviation Regiment. The best and scariest helicopter pilots on the planet. Well, they certainly wouldn’t need Evans as a backup on any future flights.
“Why are you flying fire?”
“As I said, had a kid. Didn’t seem fair to her if I kept flying military.”
“Oh, like flying fire is so much safer.”
Emily Beale again answered with silence.
Take Over at Midnight
The Night Stalkers
by M.L. Buchman
***
NAME: Lola LaRue
RANK: Chief Warrant Officer 3
MISSION: Copilot deadly choppers on the world’s most dangerous missions
NAME: Tim Maloney
RANK: Sergeant
MISSION: Man the guns and charm the ladies
The past doesn’t matter, when their future is doomed
Nothing sticks to “Crazy” Tim Maloney, until he falls hard for a tall Creole beauty with a haunted past and a penchant for reckless flying. Lola LaRue never thought she’d be susceptible to a man’s desire, but even with Tim igniting her deepest passions, it may be too late now…With the nation under an imminent threat of biological warfare, Tim and Lola are the only ones who can stop the madness—and to do that, they’re going to have to trust each other way beyond their limits…
***
“Quite simply a great read. Once again Buchman takes the military romance to a new standard of excellence.”—Booklist
“Buchman continues to serve up nonstop action that will keep readers on the edge of their seats.”—Library Journal Xpress
For more M.L. Buchman, visit:
www.sourcebooks.com
Light Up the Night
The Night Stalkers
by M.L. Buchman
***
NAME: Trisha O’Malley
RANK: Second Lieutenant and AH-6M “Little Bird” Pilot
MISSION: Take down Somali pirates, and deny her past
NAME: William Bruce
RANK: Navy SEAL Lieutenant
MISSION: Rescue hostages, and protect his past—against all comers
They both have something to hide
When hotshot SOAR helicopter pilot Trisha O’Malley rescues Navy SEAL Bill Bruce from his undercover mission in Somalia, it ignites his fury. Everything about Trisha triggers his mistrust: her elusive past, her wild energy, and her habit of flying past safety’s edge. Even as the heat between them turns into passion’s fire, Bill and Trisha must team up to confront their pasts and survive Somalia’s pirate lords.
***
“The perfect blend of riveting, high-octane military action interspersed with tender, heartfelt moments. With a sigh-worthy scarred hero and a strong Irish redhead heroine, Buchman might just be at the top of the game in terms of relationship development.” —RT Book Reviews
For more M.L. Buchman, visit:
www.sourcebooks.com
Hell for Leather
Black Knights Inc.
by Julie Ann Walker
New York Times and USA Today Bestselling Author
***
Unlimited Drive
Only a crisis could persuade Delilah Fairchild to abandon her beloved biker bar, let alone ask Black Knights Inc. operator Bryan “Mac” McMillan for help. But her uncle has vanished into thin air, and sexy, surly Mac has the connections to help her find him. What the big, blue-eyed Texan has against her is a mystery…but when the bullets start to fly, Mac becomes her only hope of survival, and her only chance of finding her uncle alive.
Unstoppable Passion
Mac knows a thing or two about beautiful women—mainly that they can’t be trusted. Throw in a ticking clock, a deadly terrorist, and some missing nuclear weapons, and a man just might find himself on the wrong end of the gun. But facing down danger with Delilah is one passion-filled thrill ride…
***
“The heat between the hero and heroine is hotter than a firecracker lit on both ends… Readers are in for one hell of ride!” —RT Book Reviews, 4.5 Stars
For more Julie Ann Walker, visit:
www.sourcebooks.com
Full Throttle
Black Knights Inc.
by Julie Ann Walker
New York Times and USA Today Bestselling Author
***
Steady hands, cool head…
Carlos “Steady” Soto’s nerves of steel have served him well at the covert government defense firm of Black Knights Inc. But nothing has prepared him for the emotional roller coaster of guarding the woman he once loved and lost.
Will all he’s got be enough?
Abby Thompson is content to leave politics and international intrigue to her father—the President of the United States—until she’s taken hostage half a world away, and she fears her father’s policy of not negotiating with terrorists will be her death sentence. There’s one glimmer of hope: the man whose heart she broke, but she can never tell him why…
As they race through the jungle in a bid for safety, the heat simmering between Steady and Abby could mean a second chance for them—if they make it out alive…
***
Praise for Julie Ann Walker:
“Julie Ann Walker is one of those authors to be put on a keeper shelf along with Nora Roberts, Suzanne Brockmann, and Allison Brennan.” —Kirkus
For more Julie Ann Walker, visit:
www.sourcebooks.com
Bad Nights
by Rebecca York
New York Times Bestselling Author
***
You only get a second chance…
Full Blaze Page 28