“You know better than to call me pet names, Herb.”
“You’re right, darlin’, I do.” He grinned, even more amused at her eye roll. Herb had been piloting Missoula jumpships for twenty-three years and had three grandchildren and the trust of everyone, but he loved to yank everyone’s chain with innuendos and jokes that sometimes crossed the line.
The pilot checked his fuel gauge and clock before looking back at her. “So, do we go back? I’ve got enough fuel to loiter, but—”
“I had the same weather briefing you did, Herb. No change for at least twelve hours. We have no choice. And we’re going to lose that ridge, and the whole valley and that little town if we can’t get in there in time.”
Herb nodded, pointing in the general direction of West Yellowstone Airport to the northwest through the new, rising plumes of smoke from the broadening flame front.
“I’ll let Ops know we’re returning, Karen. We’ll be on the ground in thirty minutes.”
“Okay.”
She patted his shoulder and pulled off the headset, leaving it in the empty copilot’s seat before moving back to brief her squad members on a reality they’d already figured out. There would be no question of their understanding the reasons. There would be disappointment, of course, the same as a psyched, winning baseball team filled with excitement but suddenly denied their game by rain or a last-minute default.
They took it well. She returned to the copilot’s seat and pulled on her headset, watching the fire-threatened greenery pass as she shifted her mind to the subjects she’d been avoiding all day.
The scheduled jump had been a welcome balm, and she’d thrown herself into the planning process, from the successful eight A.M. return to the doctor’s office for her medical sign-off to the extraordinarily detailed briefing she’d given the squad when they’d all assembled. It might take two days, she’d said, internally grateful that for the same length of time she would not have to think about Trent and divorce filings and logistics of where to live and how to avoid ever being in his presence again.
The smoke plume from a new fire dangerously close to the eastern boundary of Grand Teton’s valley was sliding by on their left, but she took note only in passing, nodding without comment as Herb pointed it out.
She remembered the snarl on Trent’s face when she’d opened her hotel room door in the early hours of the morning after stupidly agreeing to let him talk to her face-to-face. He’d shoved his way inside, drunk, furious, and belligerent, yelling about her “damned boyfriend.” The blows had come when she’d tried to push him out, and she’d been astounded at the anger and ferocity of his attack. The only other time he’d hit her had been little more than slaps and a squeezed arm. Suddenly he was trying to slug her. She knew that the attack was propelled by a deeper frustration, but that was no excuse.
There could be no excuse.
She’d finally landed a few blows of her own and thrown him out of the room and into the adjacent wall in the hallway with a thud that brought other hotel guests to their doors.
“You tell Maxwell to stay the hell away from me!” he’d snapped as he pulled himself to his feet, about as unsteady as she’d ever seen him.
“What are you talking about, Trent?” she’d asked. “I was right there. He didn’t threaten you.”
“Yeah, right. He left a message on my windshield after I left the bar.”
“What message? You’re making this up.”
“No, I’m not. He wrote it in soap, like on a used car. He wrote that you belong to him now, and if I get in the way, he’ll get the FAA after me.”
She’d hesitated as she stood there and almost felt sorry for Trent.
Almost. But she knew better. Once she’d looked down her nose at abused women, branding them as too stupid or too blind to understand that once abuse happens, it will always happen again. And yet, Karen O’Farrell Jones had rationalized herself into a version of the abused wife. It was frighteningly easy, she realized, to fall into that trap of believing that abusers could be redeemed or changed.
Until last night.
“Karen? You hear me?” Herb was asking.
She shook her head and smiled at him as she punched the interphone.
“Sorry. Just thinking. What did you say?”
“You want to consider scaring up a Chinook crew to try dropping the squad on the ridge?” He took his left hand from the yoke and matched his right in pantomiming a two-rotor helicopter.
Karen shook her head. She knew enough about the operational capabilities of helicopters to know that while a Chinook was probably available and could carry far more than all of them and their gear, landing in such high winds would be anything but safe and assured. And in many ways—even though she knew it was illogical—she feared being killed in a crash far more than she feared falling victim to a fire or a parachute jump gone bad.
No, they would return to West Yellowstone and regroup. It was the only rational decision, and she relayed that fact to Herb, who merely nodded.
Chapter 18
WEST YELLOWSTONE AIRPORT, MONTANA
The early return of Jerry Stein’s entire ragtag fleet of airtankers had all but overloaded the ramp by nine A.M. when Clark landed and parked his DC-6B. He left Rusty to grapple with the usual postflight duties and returned to the unexpected cacophony of Operations, which was just as packed as it had been before the morning launch. Animated conversations were in progress in all directions. In calmer times, the paperwork would be sent out to the pilots, but the intensity of the battle had changed the dynamics. Groups of pilots had converged on Ops and were leaning over topographic maps while others made phone calls and checked weather reports, as if the synergy of their determination by itself could calm the winds and relaunch the fleet. In the corner of a table too rickety to be fully trusted, someone had set up a well-worn twenty-one-inch TV and spliced it into the building’s cable service to display CNN’s Headline News—which was reportedly running a story on the growing forest-fire disaster threatening Yellowstone and the Tetons. One of the pilots had been posted to watch for it and was waiting to sound the alarm.
When he came in, Clark had been almost instantly sidetracked by one of the small groups of pilots and almost missed the small tug on his sleeve. He turned, and one of the staff held out a portable phone.
“It’s for you, Clark,” the young woman said.
“Me? Who is it?”
She smiled. “Sam Littlefox.”
Clark pressed the phone to his ear and automatically strolled toward a quieter venue down the hallway.
“Sam, thank God you’re safe. Congratulations on a job incredibly well done,” Clark said. “You okay physically?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Sam’s slightly wobbly voice intoned from Jackson Hole. “I’m a bit fuzzy-headed, but okay.”
“Good.” Clark could sense the lead-plane pilot had something serious to say that was catching in his throat, so he continued to make small talk to give him time. “From what I heard, I don’t think you even scratched the plane or bent the props, not that it will matter much now.”
“Yeah, the Barons are permanently grounded as of the last few minutes, and you wouldn’t believe how fragile that wing looked up close. I don’t know how it held together.”
“Well, thank God it did.”
“Clark, thank you, man.”
“No thanks necessary. I—”
“I was losing it, Clark. I was shaking so badly at one point I couldn’t think.”
“You’d…never have known it from your radio voice.”
“Okay, I’m a good actor. But what I want to thank you for is saying precisely the right thing to me at the most critical moment. And don’t tell me anyone would have done it, because you were there and you got me through it, and I wanted to thank you, and, so, there it is.”
“Well, you planning to straighten up and fly right from now on?”
Sam groaned and chuckled at the same time.
“Like I haven’t
heard that about ten times in the past hour.”
“Too good to pass up.”
The silences became rapidly awkward, and they disconnected with a promise to get together soon. Clark took the portable handset back to the right counter, overhearing the last snippet of a radio message from the Otter.
“Is that the Missoula jumpship?” he asked.
The Forest Service radio operator nodded.
“Where is he? Did they drop their jumpers?”
“Nope. The mission aborted. They’re on the way back,” the radio operator explained. “The winds were far too high to permit the jump. Of course, the fire’s taking full advantage.”
“I’ll bet. Who’s the squad leader?”
“Jones. Karen Jones. You know her?”
Clark smiled involuntarily. “Yeah. What’s her…their ETA?”
“Maybe twenty-five minutes.”
“Thanks.”
Clark turned to find Bill Deason tapping him on the arm.
“Got a moment?”
“Sure, Bill.”
Deason inclined his head toward the ramp and Clark followed him out, walking in formation and in silence down the flight line. They stopped near a tree, opposite the permanently grounded PB4Y-2 that Bill had flown for more than a decade. Clark found a sawhorse to lean on as the senior captain turned, his eyes on the distant Operations building and his hands shoved in his pockets, his deep voice resonating with concern.
“Misty’s lying, Clark. Judy and I are convinced of it. She knows something really serious and probably very nefarious about Jeff’s activities, and she’s spooked, just like we figured.”
“Did you talk to her some more?”
“Judy did.”
He related the conversation Judy had tried to have with Jeff Maze’s girlfriend before Misty had hurried out of the motor home.
“She hasn’t been back, and that worries me on two levels.”
“Yeah?”
“You know, I’m asking myself, has she run off? Is there any chance she really could be in danger?”
Clark look startled. “She thinks she’s in danger?”
“Well, I’m interpolating, but why would she be so nervous when the subject of Jeff’s activities came up if she weren’t? I mean, I’ll admit that’s only one of several possible explanations for her reactions, but there are unexplained things going on around here, and when a wing falls off a sturdy airplane like the DC-6 and then I hear the NTSB is investigating sabotage—”
“Sabotage?” Clark interrupted. “Who said anything about sabotage?”
“One of the mechanics overheard Trent and Jerry talking with the NTSB investigator, who thinks Jeff’s wing may have been blown off.” Bill looked at him quizzically. “That’s a really strange look on your face, Clark. What are you thinking?”
“If anyone planted a…a bomb or whatever on that airplane, it would have had to be done earlier, and maybe the night before, right?”
“Probably.”
“Bill, I was scheduled to fly that airplane. Jeff was a last-minute substitution. And I’m the guy who wrote the anonymous article everyone already seems to know came from me, and that article could be considered a threat to…to—”
“Jerry, or any of the other owners?”
“Right.”
Bill sighed and looked away for a bit before meeting Clark’s eyes again.
“I think Jerry’s up to his ass in trouble, Clark, but you know him as well as I do. If Jerry wanted to murder you, can you imagine him imperiling one of his precious airplanes to do it?”
Clark smiled in response.
“No.”
“Yeah, remember this is Jerry we’re talking about. He might come after you with a shotgun, but he’d do it nose to nose and in person. Of course, he’d also use discounted, no-brand ammunition he’d bought at a gun show to save a buck. But he’s no midnight coward skulking around the flight line with a flashlight.”
The reference stopped Clark momentarily, as he recalled how easy it had been for him to skulk around the flight line for reasons other than sabotage. Clark shook off the thought.
“Why do you think Jerry’s in trouble, Bill?”
“You remember those guys who ended up doing time in a federal prison for selling and misusing C-130As the Air Force sold them for fire fighting?”
“Who doesn’t?” Clark asked.
Bill nodded.
“Well, I strongly suspect Jerry’s been skating very close to that line, too, during the winter. And Misty may have the key.”
“I’m not following you.”
“Clark, what if someone’s flying our fleet in the winter off the books? What if the planes are handed over to Central Intelligence, or one of the CIA’s phony baloney front companies, and then flown like the C-130s were, I don’t know, in the middle of South America, then quietly returned, but without any of the missions being logged?”
“Off the books?”
“Totally.
“Where we don’t even know about the flight time?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And…and you mean not just one season, but perhaps two or three or more?”
“Maybe for years, Clark. These airplanes could be far older than we know in terms of usage. Hell, Jeff’s wing may have come off due to a level of fatigue the mechanics never suspected could occur in a DC-6B with X number of flight hours, because it wasn’t a bird of X flight hours, it was X times two.”
Clark felt the blood draining from his face.
“Look, Bill, there’s something I need to tell you.” He related his midnight foray onto the flight line and the inspection bay that had been far too dirty to have been opened only a couple of hundred flight hours before, as well as his peek into the maintenance files.
“And, you called that shop in Florida?” Bill asked, when he’d finished.
“Yes, and one of the mechanics told me the fleet had left right after the inspections in October. But, Bill, they didn’t show up in Helena until mid-spring. So where were they in between?”
Clark also told of his chance discovery of a Colombian newspaper in the back of Tanker 88, and the business card of a Colombian tavern he’d found in the wreckage of Jeff Maze’s aircraft, acutely aware that Bill’s expression had darkened as he turned again to check that no one was approaching.
“Clark, we gotta tell someone. Right now. Before another wing comes off. We’ve gotta make a call.”
“To whom? The FAA’s impotent and scared of this fire-bombing business to begin with, and the NTSB has no power beyond reporting on cause.”
“Hell, I’m not a lawyer, but isn’t there a new law that says these airplanes can’t be used out of the country?”
Clark nodded. “Yes. It was passed last year, but I think it only applies to the ex-military airplanes, like your P-3 Orion. I’m not sure if it covers the DC-6 fleet.”
“That sonofabitch,” Bill said, almost under his breath.
“Who? Jerry?”
“Yes, Jerry! Who else? The little weasel isn’t making enough money? He’s got to go renting his fleet to the CIA to rake in more and then imperil all of us with secretly beat-up airplanes? Jeez!”
“Bill…we’d better be cautious here. Maybe Jerry doesn’t know. Maybe it isn’t what it appears to be.”
There was a sharp, derisive laugh from Bill Deason as he threw his head back and shook it. “How could he not know? If your entire business solvency depends on your fleet of airplanes, you think you wouldn’t be acutely aware of where they were at all times? Remember, we’re talking Jerry here. The king of micromanagers.”
“I’m just saying, not out of loyalty but out of caution, that we shouldn’t jump to that conclusion.”
The two men fell silent for a few moments, each examining his own horizon before Clark turned back.
“How about the FBI?”
Bill nodded without comment, and Clark continued.
“I know there’s a field office in Helena. I’ll go make a call
and get an agent down here and just, you know, at least alert them to the possibilities. You agree?”
“In a heartbeat” was the reply as Bill turned to look Clark in the eye. “What was it Yogi Berra was supposed to have said? I don’t want to wake up dead tomorrow and find I could have done something today to save myself.”
Clark chuckled. “Berra said that?”
“Who knows, but it sounds like him.”
“Yeah. Well, you’re right to be cautious. For one thing, Judy would kill you if you made her a widow.”
“You got that right.”
They walked back to the Operations building and Clark quickly slipped away to find an empty back office and phone book. The phone number of the nearest FBI office was in the governmental listings, and he made sure no one was listening outside the door before dialing and working his way through a secretary to the agent in charge. Clark kept the explanation short and urgent, pleased that the agent agreed to come to West Yellowstone.
“You know a good, reasonably safe location where others wouldn’t expect to find you?” the agent asked.
Clark gave him directions to Strozie’s Tavern, agreeing to meet at four, then quickly returned to the Forest Service complex and the standby shack to quietly relay the information to Bill.
“Okay,” Bill agreed. “I’ll meet you there. You going to be around the flight line in the meantime, Clark?”
“Any chance we’ll launch again this afternoon?” Clark countered, aware that Bill had been at the Operations counter.
“Almost none.”
“Then, yes, I’ll be around, but there’s something I need to attend to.”
“I’m going back to my motor home, Clark. You want to join Judy and me for some coffee later and go over what we should say?”
“How about now?”
Bill grinned.
“No, son, I mean later. I just got a beep on my pager, and my incredibly beautiful wife is waiting right now with some more personal activity in mind that doesn’t involve coffee or company.”
“What?” Clark teased, “She beeps you when she’s in the mood?”
“Actually, she’s pretty much always in the mood, which is why I’m an incredibly lucky guy, but you’re prying. Just come by after two.”
Fire Flight Page 22