Fire Flight

by John J. Nance

He circumnavigated the building to find his truck in the parking lot, his mind already working over the problem of how to contact Karen without upsetting Trent.

  Clark slipped his flight bag in the right seat of the pickup and drove around the runway to the Stein Operations shack. As he approached on foot, he could see that Karen was inside. So, too, he noted, was her husband, the chief of maintenance, who was wearing a more worried expression than he’d ever seen on the man. It was logical, Clark told himself, as he reversed course without entering and climbed back into the cab of his truck.

  Trent Jones would be under immense pressure to immediately repair Tanker 84, the crippled DC-6 Clark had managed to fly safely back to base. At the same time Jones would be defending virtually everything the company had done to maintain the DC-6 that had killed Jeff Maze. He wondered whether Jones was given to resisting Jerry’s penurious approach to maintenance, or facilitating it. The man was very hard to read in his brief contacts with pilots on the ramp.

  Yet, the haunted look he’d seen through the window on Jones’s face was worrisome, and once more Clark felt his mind tunneling back into the why and how of Maze’s crash with the same inchoate worry that he was somehow still missing something important.

  In fact, perhaps they all were.

  Chapter 8

  BEST WESTERN, WEST YELLOWSTONE, MONTANA

  Karen Jones slid the room key into the lock and pushed into the room, surprised by a blast of refrigerated air from the air-conditioning unit she’d left on.

  Damn! It was hot when I checked in this morning.

  She closed the door and turned off the air conditioner, then turned the small clock radio to an easy listening station and plunked herself on the edge of the bed, feeling decidedly off balance. She took a deep breath and pulled out her cell phone from the depths of her purse, scrolling to the very welcome message she’d received earlier and listening to it again.

  “Karen. Clark, here. I know you and Trent are staying at the Best Western, but I wonder if maybe you’d have time for a beer over at the Coachman Lounge. That’s where we flyboys tend to hang out, as you may already know, in the…ah…Coach, no, Stagecoach Hotel. I’m not staying there, by the way, because I’ve rented a house on the edge of town, so…I’m driving over, but…if you have time, I’m thinking I could meet you there about seven P.M. I figure we’ve got a lot of catching up to do. Oh, and, of course, Trent’s welcome to join us, if he’s around. I figured he’d be working late….”

  He laughed, that deep, pleasant rumble of a laugh she remembered well, then continued, obviously flustered.

  “I’m sorry. That made it sound like I’m trying to arrange some sort of illicit liaison, and I don’t mean it that way at all. So, please, the two of you come on over. Or just you. Either way. I’d just like to get together and catch up.”

  Her message in return had been purposefully cryptic and teasing, and she already felt bad about that. Clark Maxwell was far too nice a guy to mislead, and she was still Mrs. Trent Jones, and this was not a date they were arranging.

  Karen forced her mind to other matters as she opened her bag in the bathroom and worked over her makeup and hair and perfume before laying out a dress, then hanging it up, then pulling it out again in aggravated confusion. She’d been in jeans all day.

  What was wrong with jeans?

  Pulling the dress off the hanger again, she slid out of her jeans and blouse and wiggled into it, worrying that just about anything she wore would send a wrong message one way or another.

  Hi! I like you, Clark, and want you to know I’m a girl, so I took off my jumpsuit and wore a dress and heels, even though the last woman to be seen in that bar looking like this was Jerry Stein’s flashy wife.

  I do look good in the dress though, she thought. She’d splurged at Nordstrom’s several months back and had hauled around the carefully packed little black cocktail dress for months with no place to wear it. It was required. The requisite LBD—little black dress. All young women should have one at the ready, carefully packed and checked, the way she carried her parachutes, instantly available for use.

  She was pleased at the way it emphasized the curves that none of her squad would ever see under the bulk of her jumpsuit.

  Of course, Trent had taken one look the day she’d bought it and snorted, making crude comments he thought were hilarious about the missing accessory—a coin-changer belt—and asking whether she’d reserved her street corner yet.

  She’d tried to swat him, but he’d moved too fast, and what once would have elicited laughter and a rapid adjournment to the bedroom had ended in pique and rejection on both sides.

  Karen did another turn in front of the mirror, simultaneously pleased and fully alarmed at the overt statement the dress was making.

  This is too much. He already knows I’m a girl.

  “Dammit!” she said out loud, even less sure what to do than before. She checked her watch again. A quarter till seven.

  Okay, okay. A fresh blouse and jeans. That’s safe.

  She carefully repacked her dress and slipped into a fresh pair of jeans, smiling at the memory of how she must have looked four years ago when she and Clark Maxwell had met for the first time.

  Her squad had jumped on a remote fire in southern Oregon that September and had spent two tough days cutting line to contain it when one of the more experienced jumpers tried to break the fall of a newly cut tree with his head. The concussion was serious, but whether it was life-threatening was unclear. The incident commander had radioed for a helicopter, and a Bell 212, the civilian version of the famed Huey, had shown up in the late afternoon with enough room for all but one of them to catch a free ride out and avoid an eight-mile hike. It had been no sacrifice for Karen to volunteer to stay behind to finish the cold-trailing of a small remaining area—a process of feeling for hot spots with her bare hand and using a small bladder bag of water called a Fedco to douse them. She was, after all, an accomplished outdoorsman, and the pilot had promised to return in the morning to pick her up.

  She had already pitched her tent and happily settled down to wait for sunset, anticipating a luxurious evening of solitude by the campfire cloaked in the delicious privacy of the forest, when the distinctive sound of an approaching 212 had overwhelmed the mountain ridge once again.

  The big helicopter settled in for the second time with the same pilot at the controls, and she watched while he secured his cockpit and climbed out, introducing himself as Clark Maxwell and explaining that his intent had been to fly her out before sundown.

  “I’m afraid it’s too late, though,” he’d said. “I guess I misjudged the time.”

  He was a trim, good-looking man, just over six feet in height and in his late thirties, with established laugh lines on his face and deep green eyes that seemed to be taking particular note of her. She’d been more than a little suspicious of his motives and very aware of the remote surroundings. It was always possible, she figured, that he was a “player” zeroing in on an eligible female with the practiced self-confidence of a cougar stalking a rabbit. But Clark Maxwell proved to be a perfect gentleman and a welcome companion who’d even thought to bring dinner.

  “Wait a minute,” she’d said. “Dinner? I thought you came back to fly me out before sundown.”

  “Ah, well…the food was kind of a contingency,” he’d explained with a shrug. “In case it got too dark.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, I was a Boy Scout. You know, ‘Be Prepared’?”

  “Right.”

  He’d picked up the food, he told her, by landing the 212 in a mall parking lot in Medford. “I confused a local cop. He was going to write me a ticket, but he couldn’t figure out which law I’d broken.”

  The two of them feasted on an amazing dinner of beef bourguignon. He’d even brought wine. Nothing distinguished, to hear him tell it, just a naive little white Zinfandel in a Styrofoam “ice bucket.” He’d brought paper cups to use as glasses, and a thermos of Starbucks house
blend.

  “It was next to the restaurant” was the explanation. “Starbucks.”

  They’d polished off the food and the wine and lain back on the mountainside nursing the coffee and talking until three in the morning. The night air was balmy in a gentle breeze as they lay under a canopy of stars with the Milky Way so incredibly bright and crystalline and startling that it had literally made her cry. Meteors and satellites marched across the starscape as the lime-green aurora borealis danced on the north horizon and purple flashes marked the passage of distant thunderstorms. The accompanying songs of the night owls and the distant cry of a persistent wolf had rounded out the symphony of ponderosa pine needles in the wind, singing their praises of the successful battle that had saved them from the flames.

  Jupiter and Saturn sparkled overhead, Orion and Cassiopeia and the Big Dipper undulated with the sparkle of a million distant suns, and the planet turned beneath them as if set on its course specifically for the two of them—right then, right there.

  She could still remember the subjects they’d discussed, the perfume of cedar wood smoke in their hair. From childhood toys to quantum physics, puberty to philosophy, and, most of all, the aching joy of being alive in such a place. They had found a kinship of wonder that was unlike anything she’d ever experienced with anyone, male or female, friend or lover.

  He hadn’t as much as touched her hand that night, and she smiled at the thought of kidding him someday that the reason had been the nightmarish image she must have cut in the starlight with her smudged face and dirty jumpsuit and hard hat–pressed hair. But it had been one of the most moving moments of her young life, and when they’d lifted off with all the chain saws, Pulaskis, and parachutes the next morning, there was a powerful, unspoken bond between them—as if they were the only two humans on the planet who knew what they knew about the cosmos and life.

  She had never told Trent about that magical experience with Clark Maxwell, since he would have responded only with anger fueled by jealousy. Trent had already grown maliciously fond of maligning the other members of her smokejumping squad, and what that lone pilot-philosopher and she had shared that evening was far too beautiful to be sullied by the likes of Trent’s discontent with life.

  Whoa! Gotta get going! It was five past seven, and she’d been lost in her memories.

  She opened the door, then closed it quickly to recheck her appearance in the mirror; then she rushed into the hallway and pulled the door closed behind her. Surely Clark wasn’t going to turn and leave if she was stylishly late by ten minutes, she told herself. But nonetheless, being too late was also a statement, and one she did not want to make.

  IN FLIGHT, EAST OF JACKSON HOLE

  Sam Littlefox, the pilot known as Lead Four-Two, pulled his Beech Baron back up to a safe altitude some fifteen hundred feet above the ridgeline and leveled off heading south. His eyes searched through the purple haze and heavy smoke-filled valley to the east for the P-3 Orion retardant tanker just finishing its last drop.

  “Tanker Seventeen is clear and climbing,” the pilot of the four-engine Orion reported, still unseen.

  “Roger, Seventeen,” Sam replied. “I just got your marks from the judges. Eight-one, eight-three, eight-five, and a six-two from the East German judge.”

  The Orion pilot keyed his transmitter, chuckling. “Must’ve been the dismount,” he said. “I think you’ve been up here too long today, Sammy.”

  “You got that right.”

  There were two clicks of the other microphone, a universal signal of acknowledgment, eliminating the necessity for words as the tanker pilots climbed and headed back to West Yellowstone for the night.

  But Lead Four-Two had one more mission to accomplish before he, too, could head for West Yellowstone. The dispatch center in Bozeman, Montana, needed more than satellite data—they needed a short detection flight.

  “Sorry, Sam, but our only call-when-needed detection ship is timed out,” Dispatch had told him by radio. “You’re all we’ve got for eyes.”

  “No problem,” Sam replied, the ever-ready load-me-up response that had become his trademark—and a fatigue-inducing bad habit.

  There was no so-called air attack platform—usually a larger aircraft orbiting at ten thousand feet and coordinating the battle on the growing fire. Supposedly, one would be in place by midday tomorrow, but the entire confusing, whirling mass of tankers and helicopters and the strategy to deploy them had been the responsibility of the lead-plane pilots all day long, and he was exhausted.

  The thirty-six-year-old Native American banked the Model 58P Forest Service–owned Beech Baron back to a northeasterly heading, his eyes tracking the flames that an hour ago had jumped the lines along the middle of the Y-shaped cirque and crossed to the northeastern side, crowning at times and throwing firebrands downrange to light new spot fires. The ground crews had fallen back three times in one day, and were now moving like a routed army toward the same pass the tankers had used as an escape route all afternoon. Much hard work had been too easily overrun by the fire, and it was a major defeat, plain and simple.

  The valley’s toast, Sam thought to himself as he passed over the middle of the expanse and lurched through the superheated updrafts rising from the blaze on the eastern flank. The plan had been to contain the main fire in the cirque while attacking the spot fires that had broken out to the north and northeast, but the south wind had been relentless, and the broad expanse of partially forested valley beyond was already aflame. The fast-moving fire threatened to combine by the next day with a growing blaze in the high terrain six miles north. From there, mature forests that had gone untouched by fire for over three hundred years stood ready to explode, and if the wind shifted even slightly to the west, all of Grand Teton National Park was going to be in the crosshairs—not to mention the unburned portions of Yellowstone. Even the burned areas now full of dry, light fuels—the so-called “pioneer species” that had started growing rapidly to replace the heavy timber destroyed in 1988—were primed and ready to ignite.

  He put the Baron in a gentle right bank, his eyes falling on the folder he’d left on the empty right seat and the piece of paper that had worked its way out. It was a pen-and-ink rendering of a mythical dragon, fire and fury snorting from its nostrils as its claws raked the air, the personification of forest fire he’d drawn for his five-year-old daughter, Kelly. Somewhere between the technically correct and scientifically sound details and the shorthand version normally fed to kids, his tribe’s heritage of storytelling had shamed him into creativity. He’d given the beast name and form in a continuous story that Kelly seemed to love. The scientific details were there, too, and it had amazed him how fast she’d absorbed it all. There were insights there, he knew, about communicating with the open mind of a child, or with anyone, using pictures. But as a father, he was simply enjoying the profound connection. His lead plane was the dragon slayer, he the knight, and the beast was a respected part of the land. But sometimes, he’d told her, the beast had to be disciplined about taking more than its share.

  Sam chuckled at his long-standing worry that a true elder of his tribe might sue for telling such wild variations from traditional versions. One day he’d have to research how the Oglala Sioux really explained forest fires. He had always been too distant from his heritage.

  There was a muscle group in his shoulder that seemed to kink up and start hurting late in any flight, and he felt it now as it threatened to expand into a headache. Sam reached into one of the many pockets of the fishing vest he always wore in flight and closed his fingers around a small bottle of aspirin, working the cap open to pop two in his mouth. He fished a small bottle of water out of another pocket and drained nearly half of it, chuckling at the explanation he usually gave the uninitiated for why he wore the many-pocketed garment.

  “That’s why they call it a fishing vest. When you’re always fishing for small items, it’s the best solution.”

  He descended the Baron for a closer look at the new fl
ame front marching across the second valley northeast of the cirque, riding through the violent turbulence to fly behind a small ridge. Vast areas of charred and smoking timber already marked its path, and he wondered if the fire would, in the language of forest fire fighting, “lay down” overnight, as most of them did, or whether it would keep on roaring.

  The ultimate arbiter would be the wind. If the fire didn’t lay down, they would be helpless to intervene until morning. The technology was far too expensive to outfit airtankers for safely picking their way through smoke-shrouded mountains in darkness.

  He glanced back to the west, struck by the magnificent multihued, ruddy colors of the horizon as the sun dipped behind the Tetons, its rays diffused by the smoke.

  The firefighters would attack again in the morning with a squadron of airtankers and helicopters carrying water buckets, as well as with several huge Skycrane helicopters capable of carrying up to two thousand gallons of water with each refill at a nearby lake. The air attack would be assisting the growing force on the ground. There would be smokejumpers and helirapellers as well, or so he hoped. They were sorely needed to reach the fourteen smaller fires now growing to the north where the mountains became all but inaccessible by road.

  The engine of every one of the blazes was still the stationary low pressure gradient in upper Montana, which was sucking the wind and the flames northward and infusing the tinder box of brittle forests with the oxygen the fires needed to crown, join, and explode.

  And if that happened…

  He banked left, mentally calculating the route back to West Yellowstone as he punched an interphone button and pulled a small cell phone from its cradle. He mated a small connector to his headset cord before punching in the correct phone number for the Dispatch Center in Bozeman and pressing “send,” his mind already turning over what phraseology would appropriately convey how bad it was. They needed bombers and jumpers and choppers and time, and they had far too little of any.