“Dave?”
“Oh, shit!”
“What?”
“I’ve broken something.” He tried to stand again and went down. “Jesus, Karen! I’ll use my shelter. Run!”
“No!”
“Karen, RUN!”
For a microsecond her mind flashed back to the Storm King Mountain disaster in Colorado, when they had all run for their lives. What had haunted her ever since was upon her again like a second chance. She remembered no voices from behind calling for help on Storm King, nor any twisted or broken ankles. Nor had she been the squad leader.
But three of her jumping compatriots had been left behind to die when the juggernaut of fire and heat overwhelmed them from behind.
And she had survived.
Never again would she be the survivor, wondering whether she could have done more.
“Come on,” Karen said to Dave without hesitation. “You can lean on me. We’re going to make it one way or another.”
“No! Karen, listen to it back there. We can’t make it this way.”
“Well, you can’t stay here! This is thick fuel we’re in! It’ll burn fast and hot, and we don’t have time to fire out.”
He grabbed her sleeve. “Karen, I’m not kidding! You get out of here.”
She smiled at him. “Not a chance in hell, buddy! Hold on to me, and let’s go. We’ve got to figure this out quick.”
Chapter 33
IN FLIGHT, LEAD PLANE FOUR-TWO
“Jones, are you there? I say again, Jones, are you there?”
Sam felt the muscles in the back of his neck almost knotting with tension. He’d spotted the orange smoke grenade. They were in deep trouble with the fire at their heels and still more than four hundred feet from the protection of the rocks, and now she wasn’t responding.
He switched radios.
“Tanker Eighty-eight, we’ve got a situation on the eastern flank. Do you see my location?”
“Roger, Lead.”
“Okay. Roll off the perch right now, and Tanker Ten, roll off in trail behind him. I’m going to lead you in for an emergency drop coming right over the saddle, then laterally diving you down to the east to set up a protective barrier. We’ve got the smokejumpers trapped and trying to reach safety near the ridge. Punch half your load.”
“I’m coming at you right now, Lead. We’re bringing the flaps out and ready to follow.”
“Lead Four-Two, Tanker Ten’s right behind Clark.”
“Okay, guys, this will be tight. I’ll need a hefty dive, but don’t start the release until you’re just past the rocks on the north side of the ridge. I’ll call out when I’m there.”
There were two terse “Rogers” as Sam pulled his throttles all the way to idle and ran the flaps to the “approach” position, then pushed the propellers up to high rpm for maximum drag, diving for the ridgeline from the south.
He held the nose low and skimmed over the ridge at less than fifty feet, feeling as if his right wing was going to be dragging the trees as he aimed for the fire front and just to the east of where the orange smoke had been. It was the hottest part of the day, and the temperature of the fire front would be higher than fourteen hundred degrees, making it even harder to slow.
The protective rocks flashed beneath the King Air, and he thought he saw the other smokejumper waiting there.
“Now!” he called on the radio. “Keep it dumping until you get to the edge of the fire, but not beyond.”
The updrafts and side gusts were amazingly intense and buffeting him mightily, but his eyes were recording almost everything, and for just a split second he thought he saw two-thirds of the way down the outline of firefighters running through the forest in the opposite direction.
“Stay as low as you dare, guys! We need an impenetrable barrier!”
He was well aware that there was no such thing when the hottest crowning fire met fire retardant. You could slow it, yes. Extinguishing it was highly unlikely.
Sam began pulling out and pushing his throttles back up as he impacted the superheated gases and debris churning into the air at the flame front. The King Air bounced unmercifully, knocking him around and triggering a quick, rueful reminder of his promise to treat the executive propjet gently.
He banked sharply to the right, catching a glimpse of the last of Clark Maxwell’s run as the DC-6B crossed the same fire line with red streaming from its belly.
“Tanker Eighty-eight is pulling up.”
“Roger. Follow me for an immediate repeat.”
There was a thirty-second interval before Bill Deason reported his pull up as well.
Sam heard himself breathing hard. He kept the aircraft in a fairly smart, right-climbing turn to reposition himself and the big ships behind him for another pass, then used the seconds in between to pull out the handheld radio and try once again.
“Jones, this is Lead Four-Two, how copy?”
Nothing.
He tried three times and replaced the radio, missing the response from Pete Zable, who had been on lookout by the rocks.
Pete tried again. “Station calling Jones, please identify and repeat. This is Smokejumper Zable. Go ahead.”
This time, Sam heard the call as he banked back around to the right and once again lowered his flaps while yanking out the radio microphone.
“Zable, this is Lead Four-Two. Are you with Jones?”
“Negative. I heard her talking, but I can’t raise her now either.” He relayed where he was on the mountain.
“Zable, they were running toward you.”
“Yes, I heard you advise that.”
“Keep trying to raise her.” It was time to reclip the microphone and fly the airplane. “This is pass number two, guys,” he said, violating just about every established standard for the procedural callouts. “Tankers Ten and Eighty-eight, pull up to a left-hand hold in trail formation at ten thousand five hundred, just south of the ridge, and hold for me to dry run it again. I need to find them.”
Once more Sam sliced over the ridge at too intimate an altitude and nosed it over, walking the rudders to keep on track and knowing that Clark and Bill would have to do the same behind him once he located the squad. To his dismay, he could see the flame front marching past the end of their last drop, the red-stained areas burning less brightly, but the trees exploding in flame nonetheless.
Oh, Lord! We’re coming the wrong way! he realized.
The mistake was now so obvious, yet had been so obscure. If he’d had the tankers approach over the eastern shoulder of the mountain and lay down line directly in front of the flames, the retardant effect could have begun instantly. Instead, he’d left too much space between the slurry line and the advancing fire, giving it room to accelerate and grow.
“Shit!”
This time he had seen no sign of the smokejumpers, and no sign that they’d slowed the fire.
Somewhere down there on that steep mountain slope Jones and some of her smokejumpers were literally running for their lives. The sinking recognition that they might have created yet another Storm King disaster was bouncing off the margins of his mind and threatening panic, which wouldn’t help.
Once more he pulled out, throttling up the King Air as he made a wide left turn.
“Okay, Ten and Eighty-eight, I can’t see them, but I can see what we need to do for them. This time we’re coming over the eastern shoulder, and we’re going to draw a line in front of the blaze.”
Two more full tankers reported inbound, and he quickly assigned them slightly higher holding altitudes and instructed them to fly over and watch Tankers Eighty-eight and Ten on the next pass.
“Keep it tight, guys, they need us down there,” he said in the right turn, honking the King Air around too rapidly before remembering that the DC-6 and P-3 Orion following him couldn’t make such a tight radius turn.
Once more he pulled out the handheld microphone and called, and once more he reached only a semifrantic Pete Zable.
“I still hav
en’t raised them, and I can see the fire coming this way!”
“Call me when they show up!”
Tanker Eighty-eight was calling. “This is the last of my load,” Clark warned.
“I have a thousand gallons left,” Bill added. “Let’s make this count.”
Dear God, do what he said, Sam thought. The idea that any of the smokejumpers could be left unprotected was as unacceptable as leaving a downed pilot behind enemy lines.
Only this time, Sam reminded himself, the fire was the enemy, and this enemy took no prisoners.
Clark glanced over at Jerry, whose expression was hard and serious.
“I’m going to dive it over the ridge behind him at treetop level. I could ding a prop, Jerry.”
“Keep us out of the mud, but do what you need to do. He wants to lay a protective line down in front of it, right?”
Clark nodded as he pulled back the throttles. “Flaps twenty, please.”
“Roger, flaps coming to twenty.”
“Flaps right to forty.”
“Flaps forty.”
“Yeah…that’s what he wants. We may have wasted the first load.”
“No you didn’t,” Jerry said. “Watch that updraft right over the edge, Clark. It’ll shove us up fifty feet.”
“Gotcha.”
The King Air had crossed the ridge and was diving down the face of the steep slope paralleling the fire line less then twenty yards in front of it, and Clark worked the rudders and the yoke continuously to follow, aware that their speed was already increasing as he approached the ridge and pushed as far forward as he dared, mentally counting the remaining yards as the DC-6B hurtled toward the rocky shoulder and the trees beyond.
Three, two, one, here we go! he thought to himself at the moment the ridge flashed beneath them with the predicted updraft.
Suddenly there were burning, exploding treetops off the right wing practically brushing the wing tip, and he mashed the release button, feeling the tons of retardant begin to leave the belly. He was in a combination dive and slip. His hands and feet were in constant motion as if the controls themselves were part of his body. He noted the rising airspeed, holding the DC-6B at treetop level, rolling it right against the monstrous rising heat currents generated by the flame front, and all the time holding the release just in front of the fire to surprise the beast with a sudden barrier of moisture and chemical retardant.
“Pull out!” Jerry called from the right seat at almost precisely the same moment Clark closed the dump valve and rolled wings level, pulling hard to reduce the number of trees in the windscreen, and then rolling into a tight left turn to start gaining altitude down valley.
“Tanker Ten coming over the ridge,” Bill’s copilot, Chuck Hines, reported from the right seat of the P-3.
Clark and Jerry were far enough into their left turn to see the P-3 cross the ridge at exactly the same point, and they watched for the red retardant to start pouring from the belly as Deason and Hines followed the same profile, skimming treetops to dive down the slope and add to the protective barrier between the escaping squad and the monster on their heels.
The P-3 Orion took the updraft over the ridge just as Bill had expected, and with the thrust levers severely retarded and the huge four-bladed propellers in high rpm and acting as speed brakes, the military version of the Electra nosed over and stayed mere feet above the trees and almost exactly over the fire line. Bill toggled the tanks open, but for some reason could feel nothing leaving the plane. They were less than a hundred yards beyond the ridge, and the liquid should have been pouring out. He mashed harder, his eyes flicking to the indicator and seeing nothing that indicated they were dumping. His attention was distracted for less than a second, but it was enough for a slight amount of pressure on the yoke to the right, causing the Orion to slide over the fire line and squarely into the column of superheated plasma from below. The huge kick of turbulence beneath them was a scorching updraft, and Bill’s hand pulsed forward slightly to oppose it, forcing the nose of the diving, skidding P-3 too far over at the same moment a small grove of lodgepole pine literally exploded beneath the left wing, the force of the fiery updraft rolling the P-3 to the right just enough to drop the engines on the right wing below the altitude of the burning trees.
The impact of the outboard and inboard propellers on the right wing with the solid canopy of flaming forest was enough to destroy the outboard propeller immediately, sending all four blades off in different directions, one of them cleanly slicing the hub from number-three engine and disintegrating its propeller as well. One of the fragmenting blades whirled across the underside of the P-3, punching gouges and holes and impacting the inboard left engine’s propeller with a glancing blow that was insufficient to blow the prop apart but enough to unbalance it.
“Jeez!” Bill hauled back on the yoke and jammed the left rudder to successfully pull the ship out of the trees and regain control, reducing the descent rate with the extra airspeed from the dive and slowly dishing out until he was level and turning left down the valley.
“Tanker Ten, Lead Four-Two. Are you guys okay?” Sam called. They had no time to answer.
“What have we got?” Bill called out.
“Loss of three and four, Bill!” a wide-eyed Chuck Hines replied, his head jerking back and forth from the forward panel to the right window.
“Okay…checklist…ah, let’s run the engine-loss and two-engine checklists, and give me max power on one and two.”
Hines leaned over his set of throttles, adjusting the settings.
“Did we feather three and four?”
“Bill, the props are gone. They’re just frigging gone!”
An intermittent heavy vibration was coursing through the P-3, and Bill’s eyes went to the instruments looking for some indication of what was wrong.
“What is that?” he asked.
“I don’t know…propeller on the left, maybe?”
There was a singular laugh from the left seat. “We can’t afford to lose another fan.”
Chuck Hines leaned forward, peering closely at the engine instruments.
“I think it may be number two prop,” Hines said. “Can I pull it back?”
“No! I need every ounce of torque I can get. Ah…call Operations if you can reach them. Tell them we’ve got a severe emergency and are coming straight back to West Yellowstone. Wouldn’t be a bad idea to get the fire equipment out for us as well.”
“Roger,” Chuck Hines replied, pulling his boom microphone closer and triggering the appropriate frequency.
“How’s she flying, Bill?” Chuck asked while waiting for a response from the radio.
“Like an eighteen-wheeler pulled by a Volkswagen. We never got any of that last ten thousand pounds out of the belly, did we?”
“No. I don’t know why the doors didn’t open.”
“Well, that’s not helping, but we should be okay. I’m climbing a little now.”
Once more the vibrations coursed through the aircraft, shaking the crew severely for a few seconds.
“God, we can’t continue with that!” Bill said.
“Are we closer to Jackson or West Yellow?” Chuck Hines asked.
“I think…we’d better go north. We can follow the Yellowstone River to Yellowstone Lake and ditch this puppy if number two lets go. But right now, I’m climbing a bit.”
“So, right turn over Bryarly here?”
“Yeah. Then down the valley. Make sure we haven’t forgotten any checklist items.”
“Roger.”
“Holy shit, I never saw that coming.”
“It’s okay, Bill,” Chuck counseled.
“No, it’s not. I’ve never broken anyone’s air machine before. Dammit!”
There was a burst of static on the radio, followed by Clark Maxwell’s voice.
“Tanker Ten, are you guys okay?”
Bill held a finger in the air indicating he’d answer. He pressed the transmit button on the yoke without letting up on the pr
essure he was having to maintain to roll left into the live engines.
“Well, Clark, I really screwed up this time. We’ve lost our props on three and four, the ship’s vibrating, and I think we may have damaged number two as well. But we’re airborne and limping home.”
“What happened?”
“Later, okay? I’m a little busy up here right now. But if Sam’s on the frequency, you need to know we couldn’t open the tanks on that last drop. All they’ve got is Clark’s contribution.”
“Roger Tanker Ten, Lead Four-Two here. I’m chasing after you now.”
“Ah, negative, Four-Two. Tanker Eighty-eight’s empty. Let him join up on me. You have more tankers in holding?”
“Roger. Three.”
“Then use ’em immediately! Just tell them to stay about fifty feet higher than the treetops. I just got too low.”
There was a hesitation.
“Ah, Lead Four-Two, get your tail back there and keep dropping, please! This is Clark. I’ll take care of him.”
“Roger. Four-Two is turning around, and if you guys can change frequency, I’ll work the others on this one.”
They all acknowledged, and the copilot dialed in the new air-to-air frequency as Jerry did the same thing on Clark’s flight deck.
“Tanker Ten, Tanker Forty-four. Bill, where are you?” Dave Barrett asked. “I heard you guys go to this frequency. I’m empty and north of the lake.”
“We’re somewhere south of the lake, Dave, going down the river valley and climbing slowly but steadily,” Bill replied.
“Okay, I’m going to circle back and join up with you guys.”
“Bill, Clark. I’ve got you in sight about four miles ahead, and I’m going to come up on your right wing and take a look. Approved?”
“Hell yes, approved! Something’s shaking the hell out of us up here every minute or so, and I suspect number-two prop.”
“Roger. We’ll take a look. But if you have any doubts you can make it, consider ditching in the lake.”
“Yeah, I am, Clark.”
“You guys…have chutes?”
“Roger. Two of them. Remember, I’m the old fool who refuses to fly without chutes.”
Fire Flight Page 37