Fire Flight

by John J. Nance

  She was looking for the pain in his eyes and seeing only discomfort.

  “I’m asking you, Trent, if you’re going to be in the crosshairs of the inevitable federal investigation,” Karen said, squatting down to pick up the bolt he’d just kicked. She handed it to him with a neutral expression. “Here. Wouldn’t want that to get sucked into a jet engine, would we?”

  He took the bolt and slipped it in his pants pocket without comment, looking off balance. He cleared his throat, his eyes straying away from hers in a manner that sent a small chill up her back. It was the same physical response he’d shown for the last two years any time she probed for details about why his work seemed to be making him so secretive and distant.

  “My crew did not do the major inspection work, Karen. Jerry had that done at another shop somewhere else. When I got here in April, everything was golden, the feds were happy, and my guys have done every required inspection on time since then.” He snorted again, raising his defenses. “What are you now, anyway, an FAA maintenance inspector?”

  “No. I’m just worried. I’m worried that you seem worried.”

  “Well cut it out, okay? It’s all under control.”

  Karen tilted her head involuntarily, suddenly puzzled by the response.

  “What does that mean, exactly?”

  “It means I know what I’m doing, Karen. Get off it.”

  “Look, I have a right—”

  “LEAVE IT ALONE!” he barked, the raised volume of his baritone voice actually echoing off the metal walls of the hangar. “Just…just drop it.”

  He shifted the subject to the routine, with questions of when her jump squad would be in and when he could expect her back at the motel. She answered vaguely, wondering why she’d even bothered. Maybe she’d been looking to comfort him when she first walked over, but his attitude had irritated her, and her reaction had sparked him off again, and…

  She sighed and shook her head.

  We can’t even talk to each other anymore.

  Karen left Trent quietly and returned to her Suburban to motor around the north end of the runway to the grim atmosphere of the Air Operations office. She reached the door just as Tanker 84 broke ground three-quarters of the way down the runway and rumbled off to the north.

  Chapter 4

  IN FLIGHT, YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, WYOMING

  There were no more racheting sounds from the engines on the right wing as Clark Maxwell roared through twenty minutes of Wyoming sky, carrying his desperately needed cargo of fire retardant to the front line of the battle. The relative silence should have been comforting, but there was a pregnancy to the normal readings on the engine gauges, and it fed a growing concern that something as yet undetected was seriously amiss in his air machine.

  He tried to write it off as mere paranoia, but the attempt wasn’t working.

  There was scant conversation between Clark and Rusty other than the normal, businesslike exchanges in preparation for descent and initial contact with Sam Littlefox in Lead Four-Two. The fire, they had been briefed, had already blown up and over the line all the airtankers had worked so hard to fortify along the ridge while Jeff Maze and Mike Head were doing load and returns.

  The fire was now churning down the other side of the ridge into a dangerously contained cirque that could easily become a wind tunnel causing what firefighters called a “blowup,” an out-of-control forest fire that crowns and quickly generates into a firestorm, pulling oxygen in from all sides and making its own wind.

  The teams of weary, dirty firefighters rushed in from the Jackson Hole staging areas were somewhat stunned at having been chased off the ridge. Everyone had expected the line just below the ridge to hold, but it hadn’t, and now the contingency position was to lay down a line of retardant—known as “tying line”—between a number of small lakes, and then set a backfire as the line of retardant was completed. If the fire got past the lakes and climbed the next ridge to the east—or worse, if it roared out of the narrow canyon to the north—stopping it would be improbable.

  The massive, practiced coordination among the array of firefighters on the ground was combined with helicopters ferrying water from nearby lakes to spot fires, bulldozers and other heavy equipment coming in by road, and the airtankers in a concerted attack against the common enemy. Watched over from Boise, led by an incident commander, and supported by the Park Service and the Forest Service as the lead agencies involved, it was akin to a major military operation with much at stake.

  Two small communities built on old mining claims in the national forest only four miles to the northeast would be in the crosshairs of the fire if it jumped the ridge. The flame front had already crested the top of the west ridge, the stiff south winds literally pumping in the oxygen it needed to crown and leap from treetop to treetop, causing the flames to jump hundreds of feet in the air.

  The battle-hardened firefighters regarded such blowup fires as malevolent, living things, and in their eyes the beast had indeed shown itself for a brief moment, standing two hundred feet tall at the summit in defiance and declaration of its omnipotence, as if shaking its plasmic fist at the army trying to defeat it.

  Every member of the firefighting team knew that the larger stakes included Yellowstone National Park, and there was a common determination never to allow a repeat of the out-of-control firestorms of 1988.

  The summer of ’88 had begun innocuously enough with the Park Service following their new policy of permitting naturally occurring forest fires in the park to burn themselves out as a normal cycle of nature. But in mid-July, while only a tiny number of acres of the park and adjacent wildlands to the south were on fire, there were voices of caution warning that things were going too far. The extreme drought that had parched the entire area justified a policy change, they warned. A quick effort was needed to put out all the fires, whether naturally caused or not. But the voices went unheeded, and within two weeks Clark was on his way in from Idaho, along with a small air force of airtankers, because ten times the initial acreage had erupted in flame. Propelled by almost unprecedented dry, hot winds sometimes as high as seventy miles per hour, seven major fires blew up around the park, consuming three hundred years of dry, unburned forest fuels and becoming a roaring mass of firestorms that ultimately consumed 1.2 million acres of forest, including 36 percent of Yellowstone’s 2.2 million acres.

  The memories were still very fresh in Clark’s mind. Never before or since had he seen such walls of flame, with fireballs leaping hundreds of feet higher in hellish bursts no one had adequately described in words or pictures. In the end, despite the largest recorded firefighting effort in American history—a joint civilian-military operation involving twenty-five thousand firefighters at a cost of $120 million—nothing could stop the fires except nature herself. On September 11, 1988, the first snows of fall began accomplishing what the exhausted force of firefighters could not, and the fires faded away and died.

  Now the stage was being set again, and the remaining unburned two-thirds of Yellowstone stood exposed, tempting fate and the laws of thermodynamics.

  While the fires gaining ground east of Jackson Hole were an increasing worry, within Yellowstone Park itself, some thirty-eight miles to the northwest of the main blaze, there was a new threat—the spot fire started by Jeff Maze’s disintegrated aircraft. Ground equipment was expected to reach that site just inside the southern boundary of the park within the hour, but there were no roads. The flames had already passed the birthing stage and were maturing into a running and torching front encouraged by the wind.

  Clark couldn’t keep himself from flying over the crash site, even if it delayed his arrival at the main fire by a few minutes. The wreckage was not far from their route.

  He slowed the big Douglas and began making the required radio calls. A restricted area had already been placed around the crash site and helitack crews—firefighters brought in by helicopter and able to rappel down to the site—were already on the ground and working. Clark
relayed his latitude and longitude, speed and direction of flight before switching to a dispatch frequency to report on the size and direction of the blaze started by the crash. He stayed above a thousand feet over the blackened swath of wreckage in the forest, some eight miles west of the southern entrance to the nation’s oldest national park. The wreckage was still smoldering, even though the fire it had started was busily burning northward.

  Clark circled the crash site in a single left orbit, noting that the sole eyewitness had been right: The fuselage had gone in almost vertically, and the right wing lay in identifiable pieces almost a mile to the northwest. The confirmation made him squirm internally, but he wrestled the incipient fear back under control as he climbed back to a safe altitude, locking it away in a mental recess marked “for ground use only.”

  Still, his ears had become more sensitive, his instrument scans more frequent, and his airman’s senses for anything amiss had become somehow more acute. His very body was monitoring the pulse of his aircraft—the subtle movements and subvibrations that a nonaviator would never perceive above the throaty roar and rhythmic shaking of the engines and props.

  Deep down he knew he was waiting, spring-loaded, for any return of the odd vibrations they’d felt before.

  Or worse.

  Sam Littlefox was nearing the end of his shift, and Clark could tell the hardworking lead pilot was getting weary. He’d already fumbled two transmissions in a row before finally getting Tanker Eighty-Four’s call right.

  “Okay, sorry about that, Clark. Ahem. Tanker Eighty-four…you’re cleared in to follow me,” he said.

  “Tanker Eighty-four, roger. Long day, huh Sammy?” Clark added.

  “Roger that,” he replied. “Okay, we’ll turn inside Doubletop Peak and cross a ten-thousand-five-hundred-foot ridgeline. The start of the line we’re cutting is at about ninety-four hundred feet above sea level about two miles from the ridge.”

  Picking the high ground as the best place to slow down a fire’s progress was a tried-and-true method all airtanker pilots understood. The higher the altitude, the more rarified the air, which meant less oxygen and a cooler fire that couldn’t move as fast from tree to tree.

  Sam continued, “Then there’s a very tight passage slightly to the right, in five miles at eighty-five hundred feet, and the terrain just keeps on getting lower from there. It’s both the normal egress route and a perfect escape route, until the smoke fills it up in another hour or so.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Clark rolled off the downwind leg and reversed course in a broad turn, throttling back and descending two miles behind the Baron, his mind still back at the wreckage of Tanker 86. The distraction worried him, even though this drop would be easy once they had passed the ridge and descended to the right altitude.

  The cirque was more in the shape of a sloppy Y, with the ridge they were about to cross at the southern end of the Y and the forks to the north, all of it surrounded by ten-thousand-foot peaks. Had the one forested canyon leading out of the cirque at the top right of the Y shape not been there, descending into it would have been too risky. Rusty had already pointed out the trap, a rising volume of smoke moving north that could cut off visual access to that escape canyon, leaving a heavy tanker too low to clear the ridges and with nowhere to go except into the side of a mountain.

  As was customary, the lead-plane pilot was monitoring the firefighter’s ground and command frequencies as well as those of the tanker and helicopter pilots and headquarters, all simultaneously. The airtanker pilots were normally monitoring only the air-to-air frequency, but Clark was well aware that Sam was dealing with as many as four frequencies and a confusing and constant volume of chatter that increased with the intensity of the battle.

  “Hold…standby,” Sam was saying, returning just as quickly. “Okay, we’re going to need two runs, Tanker Eighty-four.”

  “You got it,” Clark replied, checking his airspeed. They were approaching the ridge now, less than a mile away, and he’d forgotten to brief the copilot again.

  “Rusty, I’ll bring us in no more than two hundred feet AGL…above ground level, over the ridge—”

  “You know, it’s frigging amazing, but I actually do know what AGL means, skipper.” Rusty smiled. “You really can talk in Av speak to me if you’d like.”

  Clark nodded. “Yeah. For some reason I keep confusing you with the greenhorn who took your place this morning. Nice fellow, but really…”

  “Just off the turnip truck?”

  “Naw. Just a newbie. Okay, two hundred AGL. We’ll ride the tailwind over the ridge as a safety buffer. I wouldn’t do it the same way if the wind was coming at us.”

  “Got it.”

  “Gear down,” he commanded.

  The copilot glanced over with a puzzled expression, and Clark grimaced.

  “I forgot to brief that.”

  “Roger, gear down.” Rusty lowered the gear lever and the DC-6 shuddered and slowed appreciably as the large main wheel assemblies moved into the slipstream, producing a serious increase in aerodynamic drag. It was almost like hanging an open parachute out of the back, giving the ability to descend more steeply down the slope without picking up as much airspeed.

  The cirque ahead was a little more than eight miles long, but if they followed Lead Four-Two at the end as it branched off to the right, and as long as they didn’t lose visibility and blunder left, the descending terrain was enough to permit an easy escape without a frantic climb attempt.

  They were close enough now to the steep sides of the glacial cirque to see the seventy-to eighty-foot-tall lodgepole pines to their left relaying the incredible heat of the advancing fire like a rock concert audience surfs one of its stars along the top of the crowd on outstretched hands. Adjacent treetops unaffected one moment were candling the next as the intense heat rolled downslope. Clark could see the process with startling clarity to the left in his peripheral vision as he kept his eyes on the target line in the valley ahead. Lodgepole pines as a species actually thrived on fire, relying on the monstrous heat of a forest fire to burn through the coating of their cones and release new seeds, and these were getting their prescribed dose of hell.

  The fire was advancing as much as twenty feet a minute, and accelerating, while the stand of trees he was about to lubricate with the slurry was on the east side of the scratch line the hotshots had cut.

  He leveled the ship out at less than fifty feet above the treetops and made the final mental calculations, ignoring the usual violent lurches of the heavy mechanical turbulence created by the interaction of wind and mountain—“turbies” in the verbal shorthand of some of the lead pilots. But this time they weren’t going to be directly over the fire, so the ship would be spared the worst effects of slamming through the rising heat columns that would strain every part of the metal structure and test the very limits of how much Mr. Douglas’s marvelous design could take before coming apart.

  “Gear up,” Clark said. They were at the right altitude now, and the extra drag was unnecessary.

  “Roger, gear up,” Rusty answered, raising the handle.

  Clark poised his thumb over the dump switch as the gear finished its retraction sequence. He counted to himself and pushed at the calculated moment, feeling the gravity-fed slurry jetting from the bottom of the plane at the same moment the ratcheting sounds from the right wing returned in force.

  “What’s that?” Rusty asked, the alarm in his voice clearly evident over the intercom. “Number four?”

  Clark’s eyes snapped to the instrument panel for clues before resuming the task of keeping them out of the trees ahead. He pulsed back on the yoke slightly to raise the nose and start climbing at the same instant he goosed the throttles, wholly unprepared for the sudden incredible vibrations that began coursing through the cockpit.

  It was as if the entire DC-6 had fallen into the clutches of a massive paint mixer. It was worse than any turbulence Clark had ever experienced, the cockpit shaking so profoundly it was
impossible to read the instruments or even make out the terrain ahead, and for a few seconds, with extraordinary internal calm, he knew the old airliner was going to disassemble itself in the air and kill him.

  Somewhere in the back of his mind the knowledge flashed that only a broken propeller blade could cause such planetary-class shaking, along with the fact that whatever was causing it, the aircraft structure wouldn’t take it for more than a few seconds.

  And just as suddenly as it had begun, the horrid vibrating ended, and a bone-jarring whump and the sound of ripping metal took its place as the right outboard engine tore loose from its mountings and buried the remaining two blades of its propeller in the leading edge of the right wing. There was an impressive cascade of sparks, followed instantly by the unmistakable feel of an airplane in serious trouble.

  Rusty plastered his face to his side window, aware of the trees passing entirely too close. The right outboard engine—number four—had literally twisted off its mounts and canted severely sideways and down to the right, instantly redesigning their aerodynamics. While the remaining three engines could have easily powered them over the mountains even before making the first drop, they were now flying with a modified barn door of extra drag pulling backward on the right wing. And they were well below the ridges of the mountain cirque and in a bowl that had only one escape route.

  Clark rolled the control yoke almost completely left to counter the wild tendency of the DC-6 to roll right. His mind was alternating at high speed between what was needed to keep them climbing and what was needed to keep them right side up. Time was dilating, stretching seconds into what seemed like minutes.

  “METO power on…on the rest!” Clark ordered, only marginally aware that his copilot had already done exactly that, pushing the old Pratt and Whitney recips to what was known as the “maximum except takeoff” setting.