The problem was far more complex, of course, than just a debate over the issue of whether naturally caused wildland fires should burn or be doused. But a century of preventing natural forest fires had helped to create vast regions of forests with heavy buildups of dead vegetation, dense stands of trees that hadn’t evolved an adaptation to fire, and sometimes an increase in fire-prone plants. Forests unburned for three hundred years were primed to explode and just waiting for the next hot, dry summer. It was precisely the same situation that had sparked the multiple firestorms of 1988 in Yellowstone National Park, a monstrous series of fires that burned almost a third of America’s first national preserve.
And in the summer of 2003, the stage had been set once again, with a tinderbox of dry, vulnerable forests, a record drought born of global warming, and sustained high winds from the south. Everything was ready and waiting for nature to strike a match.
Nature obliged.
The storm had crackled and boomed through the Jackson Hole valley on Sunday, but the first wisps of smoke hadn’t signaled the inflammatory result for another twenty-four hours, and then the Forest Service had blinked once more, hesitating too long to launch the remaining airtankers.
“Until the media arrives, we sit,” Jeff Maze, who served as the president of the Airtanker Fliers’ Association, was fond of saying to anyone who’d listen.
The DC-6B was bucking now, its fuselage kicking violently upward as the wings struggled to follow and Maxwell fought to descend. The mountains and ridges—and the massive presence of the Grand Tetons looming ahead to the west—generated confusing wind currents that in turn spawned mechanical turbulence and bone-jarring updrafts and downdrafts. The DC-6B had to run the gauntlet of roiled atmosphere even before approaching the massive columns of rising, scorching air that could flip a plane on its side in an instant. Clark was familiar with the washboard of disturbed air, but one never got comfortable, and he could see Josh was sitting white knuckled in the copilot’s seat and breathing hard.
Clark Maxwell began slowing the old Doug—as the pilots called any member of the Douglas family. He glanced at the airspeed, satisfied with 145 knots. Slow enough to make the drop effective, slow enough to minimize the beating the aircraft would take with the turbulence, yet enough kinetic energy to pull up and escape if he lost an engine or some other problem occurred.
He felt the massive old control yoke shake in his left hand as she bumped through the first of the ridgeline updrafts and then hammered through the combination of heat and wind, yawing to the left and right and slamming through the angry columns of air like a Laramie broncobuster.
“Here’s where you just have to watch him pass over the release point, and then count yourself down to the same point,” Clark said, his voice wavering in the turbulence.
Josh was nodding and trying hard not to appear rattled.
They hung on, Clark moving his thumb lightly on the smooth surface of the red release button and waiting for the precise moment when instinct and experience would triumph over training and tell him when to loose the retardant into its arcing, cascading trajectory.
In the lead plane, Sam Littlefox was already pulling up and turning right, having just passed over the initial release point and leaving the target to the airtanker behind him. Clark could see the target downslope and just ahead. He could also see the flames roaring up the ridge, but still only halfway to the top.
Maxwell banked right and nudged the rudder left, feeling his stomach protest as the heavy airplane dropped below the steep ridgeline and sideslipped with an alarming sink rate, the trees and boulders becoming intimate visions in motion below. He rolled back left suddenly and aimed his cockpit at the unburned trees above the fire, then rolled sharply right again and pulled hard, hitting the release switch when it felt just right.
“Now,” he said to Josh, his thumb already to the hilt on the drop switch. He could feel the DC-6B shake loose the remaining slurry and perk up aerodynamically—like a good quarter horse suddenly promised the barn after a long day of riding.
They punched into a rising plume of smoke and the cockpit windows suddenly went opaque. There were more shuddering impacts with the superheated air rising angrily from below, and the wings of the converted passenger liner flexed alarmingly, torturing and twisting the 1946-vintage fuselage in the process. He could hear the airframe itself protesting and squealing loudly as he moved the throttles forward and held his bank through twenty-five degrees of turn, following neither vision nor instruments for a few seconds as he let memory guide them through his mental picture of the escape route down the narrow valley.
And suddenly they were in the open again, precisely where he intended to be. The cockpit filled with a fresh blast of smoke, but blue sky engulfed them in a comforting embrace as the adjacent ridges dropped safely away and the DC-6 leapt for thinner air, its commander mentally plotting a course for the retardant base at West Yellowstone.
“Wow!” was the only comment from the right seat.
“What?” Maxwell asked with a grin. “You thought we were in trouble?”
“No…I mean,” Josh began. “Well…I couldn’t see anything for a few seconds there.”
“Tanker Eighty-four, Lead Four-Two,” Sam was saying. “I don’t care that I’m not supposed to report the results all the time. The crew boss is telling me on the air-to-ground that you guys nailed it. Nice job.”
“Roger, and we’re returning to base. Understand Tankers Eighteen and Twenty should be with you in five minutes?”
“Roger that.”
Clark Maxwell strained ahead to see the approaching aircraft, which would be little more than dots on the horizon, if he could spot them at all. He’d already heard both pilots checking in on the frequency, but not knowing where they were in the smoky skies ahead was always a worry.
Only the lead-plane pilot had a traffic collision avoidance system on his panel, a newly installed TCAS that graphically displayed on a small screen where all the other air traffic was around him. The Forest Service didn’t require TCAS units on the airtankers they used under contract, which meant there was no way the pilots were ever going to get them. Jerry Stein was too cheap to buy such expensive luxuries for his ancient DC-6 fleet voluntarily. As a result, Clark lived with a low rumble of worry that one day he was going to pull up through a plume of smoke and find another tanker in his windscreen. The mere thought of trading paint at a combined speed of four hundred knots could still bring him awake at night in a cold sweat.
Usually on such nights he could go back to sleep, like most pilots. She, on the other hand—if he was lucky enough to have feminine company—seldom could, and at least one relationship had been worn away on the lathe of that repeated nightmare.
Once again Clark snapped himself back to the present, this time aided by a strange shuddering that had momentarily rippled through the airplane.
“What was that?” the copilot was asking.
Clark shook his head slowly. “I don’t know. It felt like number three or four.” He checked the engine gauges, finding everything steady, and put his hand on the throttles, finding nothing amiss. “A transient, I guess,” he explained.
“Sorry?” Josh managed.
“A transient problem. Flashes into being, then cures itself without a trace.”
“Okay.”
“We have a lot of those in this machine. Like warning lights. Keeps you guessing what warning light you almost saw go on and off.”
Clark felt wholly dissatisfied with his glib dismissal. Obviously it had been something, and in older airplanes, anything out of the ordinary was a cause for concern.
“It was kind of a…a racheting feeling,” Josh added.
“A feeling or a sound?” Clark asked.
“Feeling.”
“Yeah. I agree.”
“But I don’t feel it now,” Josh said.
“Keep a close watch on the gauges,” Clark ordered, turning back to the task of looking for West Yellowstone Airport on
the horizon and working to suppress the creepy feeling that he was missing something.
Chapter 2
WEST YELLOWSTONE, WYOMING
Karen Jones’s already-limited patience suddenly expired.
She threw the dog-eared copy of People back on the small coffee table with a sigh and crossed with a catlike pounce to the small receptionist’s window.
“Excuse me,” Karen said softly, pulling the sliding glass open as she looked the startled, white-frocked young woman in the eye. She couldn’t be older than twenty, Karen decided, yet she was trying to play the stern senior nurse. The effect was almost comical.
“Sorry to be pushy, but I’ve got to see the great medicine man right now,” Karen told her. “No more delays, please. I just don’t have time.”
“Now, Ms. Jones, the doctor is with another—”
“No!” Karen’s right hand snapped up in a stop gesture as she shook her head. The young nurse fell silent, eyeing Karen’s hand as if it were a coiled snake. “No, I need him now. For just a minute.”
Down the short hallway from one of the exam rooms, Karen could hear laughter. She could also hear the clock ticking loudly on the wall as she waited for a reply that she realized probably wasn’t going to come from the startled girl.
“Look,” Karen tried again, “I really don’t want to be rude, but let me try to explain. We’ve got a mess of fires trying to bake Jackson Hole. I’m one of the people who needs to parachute in and put them out. But before I can do that, I need the doctor to sign my release form. No signature, no jump, no trees, no town. So I really do need you to go ask the doc”—Karen paused and chuckled at more muffled laughter from down the hall, recalling how good-looking young Dr. Rafferty was—“if he’ll step away for a moment and sign this slip so we can get me back to gainful employment. That make sense to you?”
“Well…”
“He’s having entirely too much fun anyway.”
More silence.
“See…I’m not asking here, I’m more or less telling you that’s what I need you to do right now. Please!”
“I have strict instructions not to disturb him.”
“I can just imagine,” Karen said, glancing down the hall again. “But in the interest of municipal security, you’ve got to.”
“Sorry?”
“My poor smokejumping squad is leaderless as long as I’m on a medical, and that could be dangerous.”
“Sorry?”
“I’m their squad leader. Our base is jumped out, and I’m on the top of the list again, and even as we speak, they could be arriving out there in town, prowling around aimlessly with chain saws, looking for fires to douse and terrorizing the local women. Poor guys.”
The nurse-receptionist stared at her blankly.
“NOW, please!” Karen added.
The woman jumped slightly, her face betraying the progress of a brief internal struggle between policy and prudence, concluding with the decision that the patient before her might be dangerous—especially if she really was a smokejumper. She fairly leapt up from her desk and disappeared into the diminutive clinical warrens of the converted house, returning with the amused doctor in tow.
He’s almost datable, Karen thought as he approached, instantly taken aback at the premature nature of the concept. Her marriage was dying, but she was not yet single.
Dr. Rafferty smiled. “Ms. Jones, are you terrorizing my nurse?”
“Someone has to, Doc. She should have been chasing after you with a whip and chair to keep you on schedule. I’m dying of boredom out—”
“What’s the emergency?” he interrupted gently.
“Burning trees, requiring my presence.”
“I’m not following you.”
“A forest fire. I’m a smokejumper, remember? With a turned ankle? The initial diagnosis was in Boise, but I’m all repaired now and just need your sign off.”
“Oh, yeah. I remember the paperwork.”
She thrust the form at him with a pen, but he motioned her back to one of the exam rooms instead, where he began manipulating her right ankle.
“It’s just fine, see?” she urged. “It’s reasonably pink and I’m walking on it without pain. So please just sign me off and I’ll get out of here.”
“You sprained it?” he asked in an even voice.
“No, I just turned it.”
He was probing around the back of her heel, and she worked hard to keep her foot still and suppress a cry of pain. Instead, she gave him a broad smile, which, along with her short blond hair and tanned, Baywatch look, usually worked to alter male attitudes. She’d winked her way out of more traffic tickets than most cops could carry using the “cute chick trick,” as she called it. Maybe she could make it work on an overly cautious contract doctor.
“Doc, you sure all that touchy-feely stuff you’re doing down there is medically necessary?” she teased.
He looked up and met her eyes without a flicker of reaction. “When I do this—” He moved her foot sharply to the right and once more she had to concentrate hard to keep her smile and not wince in pain. “—does it hurt?”
“Course not,” Karen replied, her voice a bit too strained to be believable. She cleared her throat and tried again. “No pain, no problem.”
The physician stood up and leaned toward her, studying her eyes so long and from such a close proximity she was half afraid he was thinking of kissing her. But he reached out instead and gently wiped an escaped tear from her cheek.
“Medical exams always make you cry, do they?” he asked.
“Huh?”
He smiled. “Or just painful ankles?”
“I don’t understand.”
“The tear got you busted. That ankle is still tender.”
Karen sighed. “Well, big deal, Doc.”
“Just because you’re a brave girl and too tough to yelp when it hurts doesn’t mean you’re ready to jump yet.”
“Now, look, Doc—”
“Maybe you are and maybe you’re not. Ms. Jones, I’m not going to release you without a thorough exam, and I can’t do that until tomorrow. I’ve got other patients waiting.”
“Doctor, please! This really is an emergency. I’m needed in the morning.”
“When?”
“Ah, by noon.”
“Okay. Soak it tonight and come back at eight A.M. sharp and I’ll take a good look at it before I take care of anyone else. I’ll let you go if I feel it’s ready.”
Karen emerged from the building working hard to hide the slight limp from all the doctor’s probing. She had aspirin and water in her car and was going to need them.
A familiar noise caused her to look up. One of Jerry Stein’s DC-7s was rumbling off the West Yellowstone runway a half mile away from the physician’s office. She watched the ancient pelican clawing for altitude as it climbed slowly southbound in the thin air of nearly seven thousand feet above sea level. The four engines driving the huge four-bladed propellers were at maximum power, producing a familiar and comfortable roar of massive airborne horsepower wildly distinct from the cacophony of fanjets. Everything about the old prop airliners was different, she thought, especially the sedate way they climbed. It was a startling contrast to the mental image she had of Boeings. Turbojets always seemed to leap into the air and climb more like missiles than airplanes.
A far cry from our jump plane, too. The thought triggered a rush of memories of the many times she’d stepped out the door of a jump plane in flight to the sobering yank of the opening chute and the breathtaking, green vista of the forest spreading in all directions beneath her.
Working as a fire crewmember for the Forest Service in the summer of her collegiate senior year had been literally a baptism by fire, and she’d loved the challenging experience and the exhausting work. But the most crystalline memory had been watching from the ground as the first smokejumpers she’d ever seen unfurled themselves from a passing airplane, their parachutes looking like white mushrooms against the deep blue of
the sky as they floated down toward a distant ridge to do hand-to-hand combat with burning trees. The scene had become as indelible in her mind as the questions she’d asked her crew boss: “Who are they? What do they do?” And, “What kind of person would skydive onto a forest fire carrying little more than hand tools?”
“The best kind,” he’d replied.
By late September she was asking where to apply.
Karen O’Farrell’s acceptance the following spring as one of the fabled Missoula smokejumpers was in some ways more exciting than getting her bachelor’s degree in forestry and being accepted to graduate school.
“But why on earth,” a soon-to-be former boyfriend had asked the very evening of her impromptu celebration, “would any sane person do that? Especially a pretty girl?”
Karen’s answer had surprised even her. “To help make history,” she’d replied.
She’d been astounded to find that the very first smokejumper to skydive on a fire had done so no earlier than 1941. Before that, small forest fires routinely became large forest fires while fire crews tried to hike through inaccessible backcountry to reach them.
Smokejumping changed all that. Suddenly tiny fires spotted from the air could be attacked almost immediately, and she was thrilled to become a part of the tradition.
She returned to the present, smiling at the vibrant memories and pulling her new key chain remote from a pocket of her jeans before pressing a button to start the engine of her Suburban. The little remote was more fun than practical, but she took childish delight in starting the engine from across a parking lot when someone was standing unsuspectingly by her car. The look on the victim’s face when confronted with an empty vehicle coming to life was always a hoot.
Fire Flight Page 3