Fire Flight

by John J. Nance

  He hurriedly located the number in Helena and hit send, listening to what sounded like static on the digital connection as they motored farther away from the cellular tower. Clark made sure his headset microphone was too far away to pick up his voice and transmit the words to Jerry.

  The receptionist answered, and once again he asked for Agent Blackson.

  “This is Blackson.”

  “Agent Blackson, Captain Clark Maxwell here. Can you hear me? I’m in flight.”

  “Ah…a little scratchy, but go ahead.”

  He cupped his right hand around the bottom of the phone. “Agent, what are you talking about with the message about Denver? I spoke to you only once, and I never mentioned anything about a Denver FBI agent by any name.”

  There was silence on the other end.

  “Hello?” Clark queried.

  “Yes, I’m still here, Captain. I’m just…checking my notes. You called me again the same afternoon.” He repeated the essence of the conversation he’d had with Clark Maxwell. “If that wasn’t you, whomever it was knew precisely what we had said to each other earlier. Did anyone overhear your first…I guess your only conversation with me?”

  “Not that I know of. Have you talked with Randy Michaels about that?”

  “I’m sorry…I’m picking up some echo effect. Who?”

  “Randy Michaels. The trainee you sent who interviewed me.”

  More silence, broken at last by the sound of Blackson clearing his throat.

  “Captain, we’ve got a big problem if someone claiming to be from this office interviewed you. I sent no one, and we have no one here named Michaels, agent or otherwise.”

  “Then, who…oh my God, I just saw the guy…the Michaels character, or the guy who claimed to be Michaels…at West Yellowstone just before I left. What should I do?”

  But there was silence on the other end as the cell phone lost signal and disconnected.

  Chapter 27

  WEST YELLOWSTONE—TEN-TEN A.M.

  The beauty of investigating the home of an unattached pilot, Joe Groff thought to himself, was knowing that said pilot couldn’t show up unannounced when he was off flying. It had taken just one call to Operations to confirm that Clark Maxwell was airborne, and thus safely distant—although the news that Jerry was with him seemed somewhat odd.

  Joe drove past the log house and motored on down the street, deciding to park three blocks away by one of the hotels. He pulled a few tools from his briefcase before securing his car and pulling on a baseball cap and leather jacket, the same “uniform” many of the tanker jocks affected. Strolling down residential streets in almost any American city was easy for a man with a forgettable face, and his confidence level was always astronomical that no one would or could recognize him.

  And even if they did, he thought, the assumption would be that I’m where I should be.

  The front door lock was a fairly simple challenge, and he kept a newspaper under his left arm to look like a returning resident as he worked to get the tumblers in place. There was no evidence of an alarm system on the place, but his contingency escape plan was carefully constructed for the possibility of mistake or the sudden arrival of the police. He had a Stein Aviation I.D. card as a pilot with his picture and real name, and a note with Maxwell’s forged signature granting access to the house.

  The door swung open, and he moved inside with a confident air designed to alert no one, checked the rear exit and unlatched it just in case, then returned to the living room.

  As a detective, he had studied forensics far more carefully than the average gold-shield carrier, and his techniques went far beyond just bagging something for later analysis. He’d learned how to stand or sit very still and gain a sense of a place, almost like reading vibrations—though he liked to sneer at people who seriously espoused such ideas as “getting in touch” with one’s environment on a metaphysical level.

  Joe moved to an empty chair in front of the fireplace and stood for a few moments, studying the small items on the hearth. Two tumblers, one of them with a little liquor remaining, a book of matches, and a scrap of a torn revenue seal from a liquor bottle.

  He pulled on latex gloves before picking up the unfinished glass first, sniffing the aromatic liquor after swishing it around.

  Scotch. A good scotch, and he’d just opened it.

  He ran his fingertips lightly over the impressions in the two leather chairs. The one on the left had held a good-sized body, more than likely Maxwell, and if so, the pilot had slid forward before rising, partially obliterating the sitzmark in the loose leather cushion.

  But the other was still rather precisely recorded, and had held a smaller posterior, probably petite, and almost certainly female. And whoever had made the impression had not scooted forward to get up. He thought about the possibilities. Either she had lifted herself vertically with her arms, or had been lifted from the seat. He smiled at the thought that Maxwell had lifted her and carried her to bed. He moved toward the bedroom, but on the way he noticed the thrown-aside covers on the couch, plus light indentations and a few blond hairs on the unmade bed led him to conclude that they had not coupled.

  Come on, he chided himself. You’re being a voyeur. You have no need to know what they did sexually. This isn’t a divorce investigation.

  He moved through the bedroom and began carefully examining Clark Maxwell’s possessions, looking at each scrap of paper. It was the second drawer in the small bedroom desk that yielded the purloined copies of the DC-6 maintenance logs taken from the hangar office. He laid them on the bed and used a digital camera to record the contents, then replaced them in the same spot in the drawer. When he’d examined virtually everything and assured himself he’d left no trace of his presence, Joe returned to the living room and sat again for a few minutes on the edge of the hearth.

  Okay, so what do I tell Jerry, if anything? This bozo thinks he’s gone to the FBI: he’s copied maintenance documents, made calls to the Florida maintenance base, and yet Jerry needs him in the cockpit.

  He sighed, thinking it through. He could say nothing and just wait and watch; he could try to intimidate the man into frightened silence; or he could choose the third option, as distasteful as it was.

  Joe sighed again and pulled off the latex gloves. He moved to the bathroom and flushed the gloves down the commode, remembering his mistake once of leaving a pair in a kitchen garbage sack, which the target later found. He relocked the back door, pulled on his baseball cap, checked that the street was clear of dog walkers or other potentially curious people, and moved outside, locking the front door behind him.

  Perfect! he concluded. Whatever I decide we need to do, Señor Maxwell will never see it coming.

  NORTH FORK RIDGE DROP ZONE—TEN THIRTY-FOUR A.M.

  Karen wiped her forehead with the back of her glove and turned toward the south, facing into the stiffening wind. She could see the towering plume of smoke that seemed to stretch for as much as ten miles from east to west. She could already smell the smoke, and it was getting stronger, but the visibility was still good enough to see the flames as they chewed through the forest northbound, at times leaping more than a hundred feet in the air.

  Is it my imagination, she wondered, or is the flame front moving faster?

  She unclipped her radio mike before remembering that there were no forces of men and equipment between where she and her squad were working and the oncoming fire front. She kept the radio on the same frequency and keyed the transmitter as she scanned around to locate the King Air.

  “Lead Four-Two, Jones. How copy?”

  The voice came back crisp and clear. “Five by, Jones. How’re you doing?”

  “Steady progress, but I have a question. The wind seems to be picking up speed, and the fire front looks a lot closer. What’s your estimate?”

  There was a hesitation before Lead Four-Two’s voice came back. She could see him off to the east, altering course to fly back toward her, and noticed that the plane was now de
scending.

  “Okay, Jones, I estimate the flame front is now about six miles from the base of the mountain leading to your ridge, which means it’s about eight miles from you. It…does appear to be moving faster, but over a broad front.”

  “Copy,” she said when he paused.

  “Ah…I’m coming at you to measure the wind speed. Stand by.”

  The King Air buzzed overhead and banked sharply left.

  “Okay, my GPS tells me we’re at nearly twenty-nine knots now. It’s picking up faster than predicted.”

  “I was afraid of that,” she replied. “We’re strip burning and hot spotting some, and we’re about halfway done with the reinforcement of the line, but please keep me informed of the distance between us and the fire.”

  “Roger. And we’re going to resume the slurry drops in about five minutes.”

  She reclipped the microphone and hesitated, surveying her western part of the squad all with fusees in hand, and the eastern group now some 250 yards to the east and working hard to complete the last widening of the line with the saws. They needed to go only one more quarter mile along the ridge until there was nothing of significance to burn. The job of chopping away at the grasses and the accumulated brush that could provide a pathway for the fire across the top of the ridge to the unburned, tinder-dry forest on the north slope had gone rather rapidly. But the number of trees along the ridge had taken time to fell, and the task had taken a toll on everyone’s energy. Karen had tried to calculate the speed of the flame front and divide that into the distance remaining, but there were too many variables. She’d watched each retardant drop as the airtankers finished working the ridge to the north and began soaking the forest to the south beyond their backfire line. Hopefully that would be enough, but if there was a magical method of cutting half the trees on the upper southern slopes, she would authorize it in a heartbeat.

  She saw a DC-6B in the distance beginning a turn in his holding pattern, with another one just behind him. They were too far away to make out the numbers on the tails, but she knew who was flying Tanker 88, and she smiled at the mistake Clark had made earlier in assuming they were talking on a discreet channel. It was sweet of him to try to reach her, and that thought triggered a deeper feeling she suppressed as she picked up her Pulaski and returned to the job of following the thin burn swaths the squad was laying down.

  BRYARLY, WYOMING

  Larry Black shielded his eyes against the dirt and grit being flung into the air by the rotor blades of a powerful Chinook helicopter, and backed up slightly, a handheld radio clutched tightly in his right hand. As city manager, he’d been issued the radio to communicate with Forest Service personnel in an emergency, but it had remained in its charger base for the last six months.

  Suddenly the radio was a lifeline.

  Nearly eighty of the citizenry were arrayed behind him in the makeshift landing zone one block to the west of the tiny town square in what was a beautiful little park.

  The Chinook pilot unloaded the rotors, and the craft hunched down on its struts as built-in stairs came out of the right side and two men in Forest Service shirts almost tumbled out.

  Jon Pardo and Charlie Foss, Larry thought, trying to maintain a pleasant expression in the face of the rescuing enemy. Pardo and Foss, both Forest Service land survey officials, had fought long and hard in the courts to terminate the rights of Bryarly citizens to occupy the old mining-claim lands. They had failed, but not without a decade-long battle.

  He waved, and they waved back as they moved in his direction, feigning pleasure at having the opportunity to help him.

  Come to think of it. Larry mused, they’re smiling because the fire may do what they couldn’t.

  He knew the two men especially despised Jimmy Wolf, and had long gone out of their way to sue, harass, and cite Wolf for violations on national forest land when even Larry had to admit the violations were petty and trivial at best.

  There were the usual handshakes before Pardo spoke.

  “Well, Larry, this is, of course, one of the reasons this place really isn’t suited to be a town. One road in—”

  “Don’t start, Jon. Okay? Not today. I’ve already been nice to you. I sent Jimmy up to his little log mansion to keep him out of your faces.”

  Jon Pardo laughed. “So we haven’t been on the ground two minutes and already you’re name-dropping Jimmy Wolf. What are you thinking, Larry? If we don’t see things your way, you’ll send Jimmy down to babble incoherently at us?”

  “Absolutely. Don’t mess with me, dude. I have a toxic rock star, and I’m not afraid to use him!”

  The laughter was a truce of sorts, a bonding of those who’d had the agonizing task of dealing with Jimmy, and it took the edge off the difficulty surrounding this encounter.

  “How are we going to do this, gentlemen?” Larry asked when they had turned away from the idling rotors.

  Pardo pulled out a copy of the evacuation plan and unfolded it, pointing to the particulars.

  “We’re going to assume thirty-seven passengers per flight, Larry, and we’ve got three CH-47s like this one, so if you’ve only got about four hundred in town, we can do this with about ten to twelve trips.”

  “And I assume it’s only about twenty minutes back to Jackson Hole Airport?”

  Pardo nodded. “Yeah, but we’ve got a landing zone set up for everyone closer to town, and we’ll parcel them out to several school auditoriums, motels, offered homes, whatever.”

  “This isn’t a needy crowd, Jon, as you know. They can afford hotel rooms.”

  Pardo laughed. “I heard you’d already been reserving hotel rooms. So much the better.”

  “Ah…I should ask, any room for pets and property?”

  “Pets, yes, provided we’re talking moderate-size cats or dogs in secure containers. Property is limited to a single suitcase of moderate size, and the loadmasters on the choppers are the final arbiters of what goes with the people, what goes after the people, and what stays. The more suitcases, the more weight, the fewer people we can carry.”

  Charlie Foss leaned in. “I think we’d better talk about timing, Larry. The flame front is less than five miles from the base of the mountain and moving at anywhere from three to four miles per hour. That means it can be expected to hit the base of the rise in a little more than an hour. From there, you remember the old rule about burning upslope with the wind? Even with all the fire retardant they’re laying down, it’ll accelerate in this low humidity to ten to fifteen miles per hour, and it has less than a mile to traverse. If they lose it over the ridge—if it blows up and starts down this slope, and especially if the winds stay above thirty knots, we’ll have no more than an hour and a half, maybe less from the ridge, before it gets to where we’re standing.”

  “That’s if it crowns, right?”

  Foss agreed. “Trust me. Larry, with that much energy, if it jumps the ridge, it will spot and rapidly rebuild into a wide front. That’s why the Skycranes are going to be standing by.”

  Larry poked at a rock with the toe of his shoe and decided the subject of Sir Jimmy couldn’t be avoided. He described the earlier encounter in brief.

  “Bottom line? He says he’s not going, and when he says ‘he,’ he means a herd of people up there from girlfriends to housekeepers to all sorts of other employees and hangers-on.”

  “And your question would be?” Pardo asked with a straight face.

  Larry looked at him in shock before grasping the joke. “Oh. Well, anyway, I’m going to need the sheriff, I guess, to get them all out, and that will be against the backdrop of threats to sue all of us into penury.”

  “The sheriff’s department is already on the way in one of their choppers.”

  “Okay. Then let’s get ’em out of here.”

  IN FLIGHT, TANKER 88—TEN FORTY-FIVE A.M.

  Clark was flying the DC-6B by rote, his mind almost completely back in West Yellowstone. Jerry had noticed Clark’s extreme distraction following the postdeparture p
hone call, and he decided to raise the level of camaraderie through the normally accepted needling all pilots were used to.

  “What’re you thinking about over there, Clark? A woman?”

  Clark glanced over and shook his head.

  “Well, I hear rumors, you know,” Jerry added.

  “What rumors?” Clark asked, well aware that Trent Jones worked directly for Jerry Stein.

  “About a new woman in your life.”

  “You heard wrong. That’s the same old thing. A male and female can’t be professional friends without someone making up stories.”

  “So, she’s a professional at something? What?”

  Clark sighed and turned toward the right, apprehensive about where the questions were going. “Jerry, please, and with the greatest respect, shut the hell up about that!”

  “All right.”

  “My distraction over here has nothing to do with a woman.”

  “Okay. Then what does it have to do with? Wings staying on?”

  Jerry watched Clark focus his eyes back on the horizon ahead, deep in thought as Tanker 88 approached the North Fork Ridge drop zone for the second time.

  “No,” he said, as casually as he could, his mind consumed with who Randy Michaels really was, and whether Jerry had any knowledge of him or what he was up to.

  Jerry pushed the transmit button and reported in to Lead Four-Two. Barrett’s DC-6B was already in holding, and Tanker 10—Bill Deason—was less than five miles in trail, as Dave Barrett’s voice boomed through the frequency.

  “Hey, Tanker Eighty-eight. Is that the amazing Mr. Stein?”

  “Of course it is, Dave. What, you think I’m gonna let you guys have all the fun?”

  “Are you there of your own free will, Jerry, or is someone holding a gun on you?”

  Clark gestured to the radio in a “see there” gesture, and Jerry rolled his eyes.

  “No, Dave, I’m here of my own free will. And no, I’m not attached to a parachute.”

  “Well, welcome to our job.”