Fire Flight

by John J. Nance

  The turbulence from the truck was massive, but there was a soft thud and the sight of sandbags around his windscreen as a massive deceleration gripped him. He felt the truck slowing and the Baron sliding forward slightly on the sandbags and stopping as the front of the vertical tail fin—which was merely an inch or two above the concrete—caught the back end of the trailer with a crunch and held.

  He had been afraid the Baron would tilt left or right and catch a wing and be pulled off, but the cradle was holding its wings level, and somehow the propellers had stopped rotating before he’d touched.

  Sam reached forward to the panel to cut off the master switch, but not before the radio exploded in shouts of victory and the squeals of too many transmitters relaying congratulatory messages at once.

  He turned the switch off. All motion and sound had stopped only to be replaced now by sirens and the urgent noises of people scrambling up on the trailer to yank his door open and help him out of his upside-down position and out of the cockpit.

  Sam stood too fast on the wooden surface of the trailer as the blood rushed from his head to his extremities. The world went fuzzy, then dark as he collapsed benignly into the arms of two firemen.

  Chapter 17

  IN FLIGHT, JACKSON HOLE AND GRAND TETON NATIONAL PARK

  The newly confirmed secretary of agriculture, Charles Bower, an old Washington hand with little knowledge of his new department, pressed his nose to one of the Air Force Gulfstream’s passenger windows and tried to make sense of the scene unfolding below as Sherry Lacey narrated.

  “Okay, see the column of smoke over there to the east of Teton Village?”

  “I think so.”

  Lacey, the director in charge of wildland fire fighting for the Forest Service, had been talking nonstop for the past ten minutes and was now pointing to the full-color display on her laptop computer as a topographic map unfolded on the screen.

  “The fire front is in the process of joining up with the two plumes you see on the left. We managed to contain two others closer to Lake Jackson, but the backcountry fires took more time to reach, and with the relentless winds, we lost control of them. Now, the southern fire that started due east of Jackson Hole has roared north and is in the process of joining with these other formerly isolated blazes to form a huge front. We were concentrating all our efforts on this area around Pinnacle Peak until an hour ago when the winds exceeded safe operational limits.”

  “So…now we’re doing nothing?”

  “No, no, no. We’ve had to suspend airborne operations, but not ground. Of course, that’s a huge problem, because some of these isolated spot fires need smokejumpers and retardant. We’ve got a growing force of several hundred firefighters on the ground and everything moving in by logging roads, but what they’re trying is probably not possible. We needed the airtankers and especially the helicopters to keep the spot fires outside of the main line so none of the fire crews get caught. So now…with the exception of the inbound smokejumpers”—she pointed to the computer screen once again, and his eyes left the confusing reality outside the window to follow her finger—“nothing’s happening by air until the winds subside.”

  “Where are the jumpers headed?”

  “See that small saddle between the two mountain ranges running northeast and northwest?”

  He nodded, not entirely sure he did.

  “Well, we’ll drop them right there to cut line as fast as possible, and backfire it to slow the head of the fire before it crests the ridge.”

  “Whoa. You’re dropping them right in front of this blaze? I read about a major fire somewhere in Canada years ago that killed a bunch of smokejumpers because they got trapped in a valley and couldn’t outrun the fire. Something gulch?”

  “Mann Gulch, and that was in Montana, Mr. Secretary. And yes, this valley does have a rough resemblance to the Mann Gulch area, but there are differences. I mean, it is dangerous, and more so than normal. But the jumpers know what to do, and we can yank them out by chopper if it doesn’t work.”

  “Even in these winds?”

  She grimaced and shrugged. “I think so. But if we can protect that ridge and keep the fire out of that next valley, we’ll split the main blaze and have a better chance to contain it on the north side. But there’s far more at stake. Can you see what looks like a small clearing down valley?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s a town. It was nothing but a scattered collection of old mining claims belonging to a disparate list of families and companies around the country until the late seventies, when a couple of very bright people figured out that mining claims are very difficult to void. These folks quietly staked numerous claims in the mouth of that valley and created a wonderful little thorn in our side called Bryarly. There’s one primitive road in and out of there, and six hundred well-heeled, well-connected residents, and if the fire jumps that ridge, they’re next.”

  “Have they been evacuated?”

  “Not yet. They’ve been too busy burning up the phone lines to their congressional angels demanding protection.”

  “And you said Yellowstone’s beyond?”

  She nodded. “If we lose it here, or if splitting the fire around this huge valley doesn’t work, we’ll end up with a firestorm roaring into Yellowstone within two days, and from there it’ll look like 1988, or worse, all over again.”

  The secretary looked away from the window and studied Sherry’s face for a few seconds.

  “So, how did this happen, exactly?”

  “What? Tactically, strategically, or generically?”

  “All, I suppose. Understand I’m still trying to figure out what questions to ask.”

  “Tactically we failed to send the maximum number of airtankers and choppers in at the first sign of smoke. Of course, part of the problem is that we’ve grounded too many tankers. We don’t have enough. I need an air force, and I don’t have one. And I need my nineteen lead planes back, and I only have eight that are still airworthy, and with what happened an hour ago, I’ve now had to permanently ground them. Now all I’ve got for lead planes is a Cobra helicopter from California and a couple of Cessna Citations from Alaska, but we haven’t been able to get the Citations here yet. We were in the process of leasing King Airs, but one of the vendors who was an unsuccessful bidder on the contract filed a protest, so everything is on hold. Anyway, even though we scrambled, we didn’t scramble fast enough because we didn’t anticipate the sustained winds. And strategically? We’ve been ignoring the fact since 1988 that these are still exceptionally dry, so-called thousand-hour fuel forests, primed and ready to explode. The possibility of a dry lightning storm coming through to light them up in midsummer is hardly a novel idea. And generically? Whether it’s a politically popular reality in the White House or not, global warming is real, it’s here, and it’s going to continue making things dryer and hotter sooner each year. In other words, Mr. Secretary, sooner or later these forests are going to burn, despite the current mandate to minimize such fires.”

  “So, gratuitous political swipe aside, we should have had a force already fully assembled.”

  “Yes. Plus we don’t need the constant pressure on the fire budget from members of Congress who want to cut it each year,” she added.

  He was nodding. “Okay, and I understand that the so-called cost pools that the other branches of the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and Park Service take off the top of the budget for administrative support each year are also hamstringing your capabilities.”

  She motioned to him to wait and spoke into a telephone handset connected to the cockpit.

  “Major Wallace? Would you please bring us back across the same route but just about fifteen miles farther north? Then we can land back in Jackson Hole. Thanks.”

  She turned back to him.

  “Okay. We should’ve had more resources. We had a team ready, but I have to take a bunch of the responsibility for this, Charles, and if you want my resignation, you’ll have it. My staf
f and I were too focused on the current wildland fire situations in Idaho and Nevada, and we didn’t see this coming, and didn’t preposition enough personnel and equipment. Yes, we should have assembled a big force, and I should have been standing on your desk begging for help with Congress and funding and solving the airtanker and Air Force problems. But we didn’t, and here we are.”

  “Bottom line, how bad could this get?”

  She shook her head and sighed. “Well, we’re about to lose another third of Yellowstone, and we’ll very likely lose most of the east valley of Grand Teton National Park when the winds shift, as we expect them to. We’ll lose several small towns, probably including Bryarly, and if the winds should entirely reverse, we could lose parts of Jackson Hole along with billions in very expensive private real estate.”

  He sighed. “So what do you need? Military help? Money? National Guard?”

  “Mainly we need luck. And some National Guard and Air Force Reserve assets. But mostly luck. There’s no time for anything else.”

  IN FLIGHT, TWIN OTTER JUMPSHIP N555N

  Karen Jones stood in the open doorway of the twin-engine de Havilland jumpship and wrestled with the overwhelming feeling of sadness that had enveloped her quite without warning. There was no question that the startlingly beautiful alpine forest unfolding a thousand feet beneath her had less than a day to live, and that knowledge was an unwanted burden. The growing northbound blaze was just fifteen miles away. Only a major shift in the weather could alter its course, and she had somehow been appointed the bearer of that terrible news with the inevitable roar of backfires and the whine of their chain saws.

  She knew all about the enlightened philosophy of fire being a natural process essential to the long-term health of forests, and of the century-long policy that had spawned Smokey Bear and the national will to let no forest burn—a policy now considered somewhere between controversial and sadly mistaken. The results were a tinder-rich, bone-dry, overheated western United States, filled with centuries of unburned fuels and clogged with massive encroachments of housing developments and towns and cabins whose owners demanded protection from wildland fires as well as so-called controlled burns.

  But enlightened policies or not, Karen’s lifelong love of verdant mountainsides and cathedral forests inevitably made forest fires painful, and purposely burning timber in backfires—part of her job at times—was equally disturbing.

  And in this case, she knew, success would require a rapid sacrifice of many of the trees below her, some of which were a hundred and fifty years old or more. The forest at her feet would become the crude, denuded battleground on which they would try to slay the oncoming thermal dragon.

  But first they had to get to the ground, which would mean jumping with a static line from the open door of the Otter and trying to land on a tiny meadow as they approached on the shoulders of too high a wind, at speeds as high as forty knots. That would be a ridiculous chance she wasn’t about to let her people take.

  She looked around the interior of the Otter, glad to be back in this particular jumpship. N555N was known as “Triple Nickel,” the same as the famous Triple Nickel unit of the U.S. Army, the 555th Parachute Infantry Company, an all-black unit that in 1943 began smokejumping over northwestern forests to meet the threat of Japanese incendiary balloons launched to cross the Pacific for the bizarre purpose of starting American forest fires. The Triple Nickels became adept at putting out the few that started, and made more than a thousand jumps.

  Karen checked her watch, hoping her nervousness didn’t show. She smiled at the spotter standing close by and nodded her head toward the streamer in his hand. He was ready for the next pass. Streamers helped them evaluate the wind and drift over the drop zone, and the last one had rendered startling results, with a lateral drift factor of more than twenty-five hundred feet.

  The zone was behind them as the pilot got ready for the course reversal and return, which would be the fourth time the Missoula jumpship had passed over the zone at her request. Even though she knew what her decision along the south flank would have to be, she needed one more chance to see it nose to nose and think through all possibilities.

  In the jumpship’s cabin behind Karen, the eight members of her squad sat in pronounced discomfort, getting hot and airsick while they waited, all of them crowded together on low seats with their parachutes and gear strapped on and double-checked. They were as ready and eager to go as she was, but none of them was interested in committing suicide. It didn’t take much experience to know that hitting even the softest of meadows in a forty-knot gale was as physically perilous as leaping from a moving car at the same speed. For a smokejumper mechanically attached to the chute, however, there was the added danger of being dragged by the winds through rocks and other sharp objects, and sometimes even over cliffs, as well as getting hung up in a tree and having to use a “let-down rope” to find the ground.

  Karen’s eyes watered from the effects of the windstream in her face as she leaned partially out of the door. She reached up to wipe her eyes, hoping none of her team members had noticed the extra makeup she was wearing. She rubbed carefully with her fingertip, making sure not to strip the flesh-colored coverup from the bruise that was already turning a mild shade of purple. To allow herself to be hurt in such a way was deeply embarrassing to a woman who prided herself on being her own protector. She was determined not to be the object of well-meaning sympathy she didn’t need.

  And she was equally determined to set straight any man who thought he could be her self-appointed protector. If that was in Clark’s head, she would have to put a quick end to the idea.

  The Otter was in a gentle left bank and getting ready to make the next pass. It would be several more minutes before the streamer could be released.

  Clark.

  Suddenly she wasn’t sure what to believe about Clark, and maybe it was a natural protective caution overtaking her at last. He’d been a fond memory for four years, and suddenly she was dealing with the fact that she didn’t know the real Clark Maxwell at all.

  Trent had complicated the whole thing, she thought, showing up drunk and saying that Clark had threatened him with some sophomoric message on his windshield. She’d dismissed it completely. But then she’d learned that Clark had charged over to the hotel in the morning looking for her. If he was trying to engulf her and protect her, he could expect a quick end to whatever promise was brewing between them. It had been comforting to think of the possibilities with Trent out of her life, but the last thing she’d need was another possessive male.

  What she did need was the chance to concentrate on her work and shut out the rest of reality.

  Two vectors of her internal frustration met and merged, and Karen felt a rage giving birth to a scream she had to stifle. It would be comforting simply to yell into the wind, her words mattering less than the act of defiance. But with her squad watching her every move, it would be an indulgence she couldn’t afford. They needed to see steadiness and stoicism in their leader’s actions.

  The target meadow was a treeless saddle cradled ten thousand feet above sea level at the strategic point where two mountain ridges joined together. It guarded the entrance to a long, widening valley to the north.

  All of it was coming in view again. The jump spot where all nine of them were supposed to land and wait for the subsequent drop of their equipment was only a hundred yards wide, bordered on north and south by steep drops into the beautiful, peaceful forests below, and on the east and west by gentle ridges to the adjacent mountains, which were heavily forested and covered with snow during winter.

  All the snow pack was gone now, she noted. In the years before the recently confirmed acceleration of global warming, there would still be patches of the previous spring’s snowfall in the northern shade of large rocks and at the northern base of large trees beyond the meadow’s edge. She loved snowfall, and the thought pulled her away again, imagining what the terrain below looked like in the middle of a gentle winter’s st
orm, the image merging with log cabins and roaring fires and soft evenings.

  She shook her head to restore her grip on reality.

  Once more the drop zone was beneath them, and for a moment the fact that nothing stood between her and the low grasses of that tiny meadow became a demented lure, a physical siren song cynically beckoning her to step out the door.

  Karen gripped the handhold in response, steadying herself as she double-checked her safety strap and watched the last streamer descend. It confirmed her analysis. About two thousand feet of drift, she decided.

  The winds below were exactly the same as five minutes ago. She could see the graphic evidence of the small hurricane rushing up the south side of the slope as it rose four thousand feet from the adjacent forest and howled over and through their drop zone, bending the adjacent trees, kicking up a small plume of dirt and dust, and rippling the grasses in great waves she could track even from a thousand feet up. The wind howled through the trees on the northern rim of the meadow and plunged with equal speed and vengeance down the north side.

  Once again Karen moved from the door to the cockpit and plugged in her headset. Herb Jellison, their pilot, looked at her, his eyebrows raised in a clear question. She shook her head even before her finger found the interphone button.

  “It’s impossible, Herb, until the winds die down. I was looking for sheltered alternates, but there are none.”

  “I’m not pushing you, darlin’.”

  She thumped his shoulder lightly with her thumb and index finger then pointed at his nose.