Fire Flight

by John J. Nance

  The little remote had been the only item on her Christmas wish list eight months ago, and her husband, Trent, had forgotten it completely. Instead, he bought her a bottle of perfume and two hundred dollars’ worth of skimpy things from Victoria’s Secret. Maybe she was being selfish, but the incident had truly hurt her feelings.

  Karen slid behind the wheel and strapped herself in, trying to separate important thoughts from painful ones. It was over with Trent, and they both knew it, but she’d probably wait until the fires were out and the season was over to formalize it and get on with her life. She’d said nothing about her intentions when she’d seen him at the hangar an hour ago—his tepid hug was their first physical contact in the nearly five months he’d been living in West Yellowstone without her. Besides, she figured, if she brought up divorce now, he’d probably just start hitting her again out of anger—a startling propensity she never knew he had before January.

  She’d warned him years before when they were married that if he ever hit her, the first blow would be the last. But after the brief battering in January, she’d elected to stay in their Seattle area house for at least the next few months, ignoring his apologies and growing increasingly uncomfortable with his anger, and his presence. When it was finally time for her to go to Missoula once more to take up her seasonal smokejumping duties, the departure was a great relief. Trent was heading off as well to work for Jerry Stein in West Yellowstone, and in truth, Missoula and West Yellowstone were only four road hours apart. Yet in the intervening time, neither of them had made the effort to bridge the distance.

  She put the Suburban in gear and glanced at her watch. Then she put the shifter in park again, suddenly unsure of where she should go.

  The original plan had been to head straight for the airport and fax a copy of the medical release back to the jump base in Missoula. But now she was in one of those momentary quandaries she hated, between an urgent mission and scheduled relaxation, with license for neither. There was really no reason to rush back to the airfield since she hadn’t yet succeeded in getting the medical clearance. But suddenly kicking back and doing nothing productive seemed too much like loafing and letting everyone down.

  Not that getting hurt in the first place hadn’t let the squad down.

  The injury had been her own fault, of course, and that was both embarrassing and aggravating. The jump two weeks ago into a remote section of forest eighty miles north of Boise had been routine—her eleventh jump of the season, and her second as squad leader. She was first out the door and stuck the landing in the middle of the small meadow they’d selected, a bravura performance she knew the others had seen but would say nothing about.

  The fire had eaten away at only a few acres so far, and within eight hours they had managed to cut line rather easily around the south side and halt it with no need of helitack or tankers. The task accomplished, she decided they would camp in the black—one of the burned areas incapable of igniting again—and walk out in the morning. But she’d neglected to lace her boots tightly before hiking a few yards downslope in the dark to relieve herself, and what would have been a routine stumble over a small, unseen branch became a twisted ankle—though not bad enough to preclude the next day’s ten-mile hike to the road.

  She’d cinched her boot up as tightly as possible and decided to say nothing to her squad. But when she stepped off the bus after the long ride, the limp gave her away.

  She had already developed a reputation when serving as squad leader of harping about proper medical clearance and the willingness to ground yourself if you weren’t ready to jump, as well as warning against the dangers of too much “can-do” machismo. Once she’d been found out, turning herself in to the doctor in Boise was unavoidable—as had been the act of checking in with the designated physician in West Yellowstone.

  The sound of her cell phone corking off triggered a flash of irritation. She knew who it was without looking at the screen, and almost regretted giving the jump duty officer her number so soon, especially since she had a few minutes to herself. Karen punched the call over to her mailbox. Her squad couldn’t be used until tomorrow anyway, and if Trent was trying to find her through the jump shack because he’d lost her cell number once again, so much the better. She would just be out of pocket for a while.

  Okay, I’ll relax. I’ll relax for, let’s see, two hours, then drop by Ops.

  The sudden urge to drive east into Yellowstone Park tugged at her as a possibility, but she rejected it. She knew she should go back to the hotel, ice the ankle, and pop pills for the rest of the day. But she wasn’t into “should.”

  Was there a Starbucks in town?

  No, she reminded herself. She’d searched on the Internet from Boise. West Yellowstone was still too small for its own Starbucks, although there was one espresso kiosk as a poor substitute.

  Karen put the Suburban in gear once more and maneuvered out of the parking lot onto the street, turning away from the Stagecoach Inn just to the south where she was staying and driving past the other motel where Trent had been living for the past five months. She tried to push Trent’s scowling face out of her mind. He had worked for Jerry Stein off and on for fifteen years. Karen didn’t care much for the man, nor did she like his ragtag fleet of tankers and helicopters, though the men he employed to fly them were a fun bunch—a wild cross section of humanity ranging from quiet, professional family men to unforgettable characters with no fear and less restraint.

  She passed the espresso stand set up in a parking lot and continued on for a block before deciding her caffeine deficit was too serious to ignore. Relaxation was fueled by coffee.

  Her cell phone began ringing again, and this time she reached over and punched the “send to voice mail” button without looking as she rolled down the window to place her order.

  “Grande nonfat, no-whip, double mocha,” she said, amused at the puzzled reaction. “What? You don’t speak Seattleese?”

  “Sorry?” the attendant replied with a blank stare.

  She rolled her eyes at him and chuckled.

  “Okay, I’ll go real slow. You do make mochas, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Make one for me, please, but use skim milk, a double shot of espresso, no whip cream, and put it in the twelve-ounce cup. Got it?”

  He look relieved and nodded, taking her money as the cell phone beeped to signal a waiting message.

  She sat waiting for the mocha as she drummed the top of the steering wheel with the fingers of her left hand, her eyes falling on her ring finger again. The lighter band of skin was almost completely gone now, the summer sun having erased the evidence of her unhappy marital entanglement. Parachutists had no business wearing rings that could easily get caught on the structure of the aircraft they were departing, or on a tree branch or numerous other objects—mistakes that could literally yank off fingers. As soon as she’d heard the stories in jump school, she’d made a habit of carefully placing her wedding rings in a safe-deposit box every May before the season started.

  She’d married Trent in an impassioned November fever, which began with a simple slow dance at an upscale Sacramento watering hole. God knows what she’d been thinking. Right out of graduate school and suddenly swept up by Trent’s overpowering attentions, it had seemed a dream. He’d barely wrenched his B.A. from a tiny college in Missouri, but he was exciting and he kept calling and calling until he wore her down and she began to believe they were really in love. But by May—the first season his veteran smokejumping bride removed her rings—the newly married veteran firefighting aircraft mechanic was accusing her of having an affair.

  “With whom?” she’d asked in anger.

  “Hell, woman, I don’t know. Probably one of the college studs on your jump squad. Maybe you didn’t want ’em to know you’re married.”

  “Oh, yeah, Trent,” she’d snorted. “You broke the code. Now the whole world will know that we’re not there to fight fires, we’re just dropping in for an orgy, and I didn’t wa
nt the rings to intimidate the studs.”

  “Well…”

  “We only need a few hours to douse the fire, then we can spend the next three nights on the mountain boinking our brains out.”

  “Hey, darlin’, I didn’t mean—”

  “Yes, you did. You meant the accusation: you just didn’t think it through. Grow up,” she’d sneered at him. “I take off my rings because I’m kinda fond of my fingers remaining attached, and my whole squad knows I’m happily married.”

  Correction, she thought now. Was happily married.

  That was five years ago.

  She felt a twinge of regret at how his face had fallen into a sort of lost-puppy look. He’d made a bumbling, if sincere, apology, and things had been good for several years. But the truth was, their fire had already begun to cool, the mutual loss of interest propelled into free fall by whatever had been eating him for the past two fire seasons. Karen knew she wasn’t the problem, nor was there another lover. But something serious had driven him to a far-away mental place where she could no longer reach him—even if she still cared to try.

  The night he’d hit her, however, had been the final evidence that it was way over.

  She took her mocha and motored slowly away from the kiosk, ignoring her phone as it rang again. She lowered the ringer volume and sipped the drink, making the decision to think of herself for a change. At least for the next two hours.

  Karen steered her way onto South Canyon Street heading north, then west on U.S. 20, turning off eight miles later onto a dirt road that wound its way through fields of late-blooming wildflowers as it meandered up a small mountain ridge toward the Continental Divide. She reached a clearing in the trees near the top of the road and turned the Suburban’s nose toward the valley as she parked and killed the engine, leaving the window cracked open to the fresh breeze that ruffled her hair. She clicked on the accessory part of the ignition switch and fussed with her collection of CDs, trying to find the right track for her mood, as the radio came on and Karen Carpenter’s voice suddenly filled her ears.

  It was the wrong song to hear just then. “We’ve Only Just Begun” had been her hope chest song, the golden oldie she’d found as a starry-eyed teenage girl that presaged the kind of marriage she would have some day. The words were perhaps sappy and incredibly idealistic, but, then, so were teenage girls, she thought. “Working together,” “side by side,” “sharing horizons,” and the feeling of two people with a world of time ahead.

  Yeah, right.

  And here she was pushing thirty, already in a failed marriage with no kids—not that she was ready for kids yet.

  Karen realized she was leaking more tears, this time from a different class of pain.

  “Dammit,” she said to herself, rubbing angrily at the liquid emotion, but unable to force herself to hit the button and silence the radio.

  That song had always made her cry. It wasn’t just Trent and his failure to be what she wanted. Even if she’d married the perfect man, that song would have made her cry.

  But wouldn’t it be nice, she thought, to have someone you’d want to be that close to forever? I wonder if it’s possible?

  There was a faraway chirping noise coming from her phone, and this time she answered with a curt “Hello.”

  “Karen? This is Chris Levine in Ops,” the male voice on the other end intoned. “Ah, could you come on out to the field as quickly as possible? We’re going to need some extra help here.”

  “Chris, I’m not cleared to jump until tomorrow at the earliest, and my team won’t be—”

  “Karen…Karen…” he interrupted.

  She stopped. “What?”

  “We’ve had a terrible accident.”

  A series of images crackled through her brain, chronicling the better moments in the short anthology of her dying marriage, followed in a nanosecond by a glimpse of the guilt she was going to feel if Trent had somehow been hurt or killed.

  “What’s happened?”

  “One of the DC-6s went down northwest of Jackson a few minutes ago.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “I’m afraid so, and we’re gonna need help in here with the phones and, you know, administrative stuff. Trent volunteered you.”

  Then he’s not hurt, she thought, shaking her head to expunge the personal thoughts.

  “Karen, it sounds exactly like last summer’s disasters. An eyewitness said it came apart in the air. One of the wings.”

  “Oh, God! Trent said everything had been checked a hundred times over and it could never happen again!”

  “I know. We don’t have details yet. Can you come help? I know your squad isn’t available until morning.”

  “I understand. I’ll be there in about ten minutes.”

  “Good.”

  “Wait…” she added, not sure she wanted to ask the next question. “Who was aboard?”

  A small shudder ran through her middle. There were no names she wanted to hear, but there were a couple of names in particular she prayed she wasn’t going to hear.

  “It was Tanker Eighty-six, Karen. Jeff Maze. Mike Head was the copilot.”

  “Oh, God!” Karen gasped, rubbing her eyes. Jeff Maze. She remembered the last time she’d spent a great evening in the company of the almost legendary pilot. Jeff and Trent had always been great friends. It had been just a year ago.

  She sighed heavily. “All right. I’ll be right there.”

  But the line was already dead.

  Chapter 3

  FOREST SERVICE AVIATION OPERATIONS,

  WEST YELLOWSTONE AIRPORT, MONTANA

  News that Jeff Maze had gone down in Tanker 86 hadn’t reached Clark Maxwell in the air.

  He left his DC-6 with the ground crew, expecting them to rush the loading of some twenty-five-hundred gallons of fire retardant at the same time as they filled the cavernous fuel tanks with the prescribed fuel load. But he’d hurried away before they could tell him the entire West Yellowstone airtanker force had just been grounded.

  Clark checked his watch as he bypassed the so-called pilot standby shack and pushed through the door to the building that held the Operations Room. He was due to be airborne again in twenty minutes, and he glanced up expecting to see the usual kicked-over anthill of activity.

  Instead, the room was quiet and somber and populated by a collection of ashen-faced people who looked up as if a ghost had just joined them.

  What’s this? Clark thought, looking around until he caught the eye of Rich Lassiter, an old friend and the Air Operations boss. Clark had known Lassiter for fifteen years and seen the same haunted look on the retired Navy captain’s face too many times before when disaster had struck and they’d lost another pilot or crew. Clark moved quickly toward Rich, reading the scope of the disaster in the older man’s eyes. There was no mistaking the hunched shoulders and the grim expression. They’d lost one of their own.

  “What happened?” Clark asked quietly. Uncharacteristically, Rich Lassiter placed a hand on his shoulder, and Clark listened in stunned disbelief to the headline version, his mind reeling as much over the fact that he’d been scheduled to fly that particular DC-6 a few hours before as over the possibility that Jeff and his copilot might really be dead.

  “You’re sure…. I mean…”

  “That they didn’t make it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, but the reports don’t hold out much hope. The wreckage is burning,” he said.

  Clark shook his head, the imagined crash site vivid in his mind, intellect smothered by the raw emotion of unreasonable hope. There had been an eyewitness, Rich said, who’d sworn she’d seen a wing come off, and when such things happened with big airplanes, the fate of the occupants was inevitably sealed.

  Nevertheless, hope always sued for an alternate ending.

  “My God, Rich. How many more are we going to have?” Clark asked. Rich Lassiter started to answer, his voice catching, then shook his head and turned to attend to a ringing phone.

 
Clark recognized one of the Forest Service public affairs officers near the back of the crowded room, a validation of the seriousness of the moment. The man’s counterpart from the Park Service would be arriving as well, he thought, as would the well-meaning Critical Stress Debriefing Teams sent in to help counsel those who wanted to talk about it.

  That would be all of us, Clark thought, equally convinced that every pilot in the shack would try to tough it out rather than risk appearing vulnerable by openly seeking counsel.

  Rusty Davis suddenly materialized at Clark’s side, his face equally gray and grim. Rusty held up his hand to forestall Clark’s question. “One of the guys called me,” he explained. “What do we know?”

  Clark repeated the basic details, his voice inadvertently accusatory, as if Rusty had somehow been complicit in the disaster. He’d felt the flash of anger slip past his reserve and regretted the tone instantly. But he was too distracted to apologize.

  Three off-duty airtanker pilots were in the building, all of them equally grim, all of them friends of the downed crew.

  Clark knew the routine in depressing detail. Even if they had a video of Maze’s wing coming off, there was a procedure to follow. They still had to ground all aviation operations from the aircraft’s home base and quickly test all the fuel supplies for contamination. That meant draining the fuel out of each aircraft, then reloading once they were given the green light. The frantic operation was already in progress on the ramp outside, deeply impacting the ability to support the firefighters east of Jackson Hole.

  But far beyond the rote procedures, there was a collective chill affecting each of the pilots in the shack, a cold feeling of mechanical betrayal. Each of their old warhorse airplanes had supposedly been so thoroughly inspected following the disasters of 2002 that there could be no recurrence of wing loss—especially among the DC-6B fleet. And now…

  Clark looked around to see Bill Deason approaching. The senior airtanker captain was now one of the grand old men of the profession, as well as a good friend, and it was painful to see the anguish in his eyes.