Fire Flight

by John J. Nance

  “Okay, guys, I’m gonna turn around and put her in the lake. I’m going to fly up the valley here and come around a low spot there to head back east.”

  He glanced at the altitude, shocked to see it winding down through nine thousand. He was already too low to make it over the next ridge ten miles to the west, and he doubted he could turn tightly enough with one engine to follow the road.

  For the first time, real apprehension, like cold groundwater around the feet of a trapped man, began to creep into his thinking. The descent rate at the slower airspeed was now three hundred feet per minute, and he’d lost the tailwind. He thought of bailing out, but the aircraft was not far from Old Faithful and the Old Faithful lodge area, and God knows where it might go with no one at the controls.

  If nothing else, I can just pancake it onto the nearest flat surface, he thought. This old girl’s tough as nails. She’ll stay together.

  “Bill, get out of that thing, now! This is Jerry.”

  “Too late, Jerry. Too much danger it might come down on a tourist bus or something. Stay with me. I’ll make it back to the lake.”

  Eighty-seven hundred! Bill read on the altimeter. That was decidedly lower than he’d figured.

  There was a particular turn point ahead, and he knew it led to a corridor of lower terrain that could take him back over the ten miles to the lake. Lake Yellowstone was seventy-three hundred feet above sea level, and the terrain he would have to cross was a little under eight thousand in his memory. Inevitably, he would lose additional altitude trying to make the turn, but maybe he could hold on to her.

  Bill reached over to the only remaining live throttle and forced himself to push it above its torque limit, beyond the red line.

  The small area known as Porcupine Hills slid beneath his nose as he banked and skidded the Orion from a northerly to an easterly heading. He was within a thousand feet of the surface now, and the surface was going to rise in altitude.

  How much higher is it this way? Bill wondered, grabbing one of his sectional charts and trying to open it to the right panel while hanging on to the controls. Finally the contoured lines of the park fell into view, and he studied them with great speed, his heart sinking.

  Oh my God, it comes up to eighty-two hundred along here!

  He could see it wasn’t going to work, and the airmen in the adjacent airplanes could sense it, too.

  “Dave, this is Clark.” The transmission was sudden and crisp. “This will sound nuts, but if we got our respective noses under Bill’s wing tips and pulled some upward pressure, couldn’t we get him from here to there? Buy him some miles?”

  “What?” Dave asked.

  “We might just be able to do it. Just a little buoyancy could stretch him ten miles or so.”

  There was a brief hesitation before anyone responded.

  “You are nuts, Maxwell. Let’s give it try. Get in position but don’t make contact before we’re both ready.”

  “Hey, guys, no! You could crash us all!” Bill was saying, torn between grasping at a straw and hoping for a suspension of the laws of physics. Without help of some sort, he almost certainly wouldn’t make the lake. But if they fouled up, all three could crash. “Clark? Dave? Are you sure you want to try this?”

  “Hang on,” Clark said.

  Both DC-6Bs were already maneuvering into position, braving the disruptive effect of the wake turbulence from the Orion’s wings by positioning their cockpits just aft and below the respective wing tips of the Orion. Their altitude above the terrain of Yellowstone Park was now less than seven hundred feet. It was now or never.

  “Okay, Dave, on my count of three, we engage by coming under the wing tips so as to lay them just behind our cockpits on top of the fuselage as we come up. Understand?”

  “Roger.”

  “Are you in position?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Bill, hold her as steady as you can, whatever happens.”

  “Roger.”

  “We may blank out your ailerons, but we’ll be keeping your wings level on our own.”

  Clark realized both he and Jerry were holding their breath. Even though he owned all three airplanes, Jerry was saying nothing, five lives at stake completely overriding his usual penurious tendencies.

  The right wing tip was less than three feet above the fuselage of Clark’s DC-6, the wake turbulence not as severe as he’d expected. Clark pulsed the yoke to make sure of the feedback and the response, and triggered the radio as he came forward, aligning the front of the Orion’s wing with his forward window. He could see Dave doing the same thing, and waited until the other ship looked steady.

  “Okay, one…two…three…up!”

  With an unpleasant crunching sound of metal to metal, the underside of the Orion’s right wing tip made contact with the metal above the cockpit. Clark pulled back slightly on the yoke to compensate for the disturbed aerodynamics, fighting the roll and the turbulence and the tendency of the extra weight on the forward part of the DC-6B to push the nose down. Instead, the body angle of both airliners increased nearly five degrees as they fought to remain steady while exerting close to equal lift on the Orion’s wings, doing what the single remaining engine could not.

  “Jerry, push the throttles up a bit. Give me more.”

  Jerry’s left hand gathered the throttles and nudged them forward.

  “It’s working, fellows,” Bill said, his voice strained but excited.

  “Rate of descent is down to zero,” Jerry announced.

  “Great!” Clark managed through gritted teeth, his control movements trying to keep pace with the asymmetric gyrations of the Orion, which was in effect resting with its wing tips on the backs of both DC-6s.

  “Clark, we’re still below the terrain we’re approaching,” Jerry said.

  “Yeah…stand by…” was all Clark could manage. The control inputs he was making were not matching those Dave was using, and they were beginning to fight each other in a resonant gyration that was causing the Orion to roll left and right. There would be only moments left before the Orion would end up lifting a wing off one of them and crashing it back down, with possibly catastrophic results.

  Come on! Come on! Oh, no!

  “Break away!” Clark snapped on the radio as he pulsed the yoke forward and tried to disengage, feeling the Orion’s wing following him down until Dave Barrett did the same thing on the other side.

  Clark dropped thirty feet below the Orion as Bill tried to regain control, stabilizing the pitch of the crippled P-3 quickly, but beginning to descend again.

  Clark saw Dave Barrett moving out to the left and climbing. He looked at his radio altimeter and read three hundred feet above a rising landscape.

  “Dave, get back in position. We can do this.”

  Bill’s voice came over the headset before Dave could respond.

  “No, we can’t, guys. Thank you for a noble attempt, but there’s not enough time or room ahead. Move out to the right, Clark.”

  “Bill, dammit, we’re not going to let you crash.”

  Jerry had hold of his right sleeve. “Clark.”

  “What?” Clark said, turning toward Jerry.

  “He’s right. Move out of the way of his wing tip.”

  With his throat dry and his heart pounding and his mind screaming No!, Clark banked right slightly and soared clear of the descending Orion. They were less than two hundred feet above the surface now, with another problem ahead. What had been a flat, burned-out moonscape with very little re-growth since 1988 was giving way to unburned timber standing as much as eighty feet high.

  “Just my luck to find the one unburned forest in these parts,” Bill radioed.

  “I’m going to shamelessly overboost your engine, Jerry.”

  “Go for it,” Jerry replied, his voice small and strained, his eyes on the rising tide of green ahead of them.

  Bill shoved the remaining thrust lever as far forward as he dared, hearing the huge Allison turboprop as it screamed at illegal
speeds and temperatures. It was truly the last ounce of power he could wring from it, and it appeared to be working, flattening the descent rate but producing no climb.

  “How far to the lake?” Bill asked.

  “Ah…six miles, Bill. If you can clear this plateau ahead.”

  Clark moved to the left again, slightly higher than the Orion, seeing alarming readings on the radio altimeter. He could see Bill in the left seat holding on to the yoke, his head moving in various directions as he worked to find another solution. But ultimately they all knew it was a matter of Newtonian physics, of gravity and thrust and kinetic energy, and he was losing the battle. The tops of the trees were now less than thirty feet beneath the Orion’s fuselage, and the plateau had flattened to level. The lake was visible in the distance, but the P-3 was still sinking slowly into the thick forest, and there was simply too much distance between it and the water.

  “Bill, don’t let go of her, man. We’re so close.”

  “I guess I picked a bad plan here,” Bill said. There was a pause and then an open channel and then another resigned chuckle in that familiar, friendly baritone voice. “Well, fellows, it’s been a great career, if this doesn’t work out. Clark, tell Judy…tell Judy…” His voice caught, then resumed. “You tell that cutie of mine that no matter where I go after this life, I’ve already been in heaven for all these years in her arms. Tell her that, please. And that I love her. Not all of us get to say good-bye, you know.”

  He released the transmit switch.

  The trees were ten feet below the belly of the P-3, flashing past at 140 miles per hour. Clark pushed his transmit button.

  “God bless you, Bill,” he said, knowing nothing else to say and feeling impotent and stupid and helpless, tears obscuring his vision as he raged internally at the lack of anything left to do.

  “Amen,” Dave echoed.

  There was a brief moment of beauty as the Orion settled gently into the treetops creating a bow wave that followed along like wind waves in a ripe wheat field. But beneath the uppermost boughs were bigger and thicker boughs, and like a million tiny hands reaching up to pull him back to earth, they padded and then clawed at the Orion’s slick metallic belly and the one remaining propeller until the gentle brushing became lethal impact and the big aircraft seemed to submerge suddenly into the green canopy with a roar of fragmenting metal and wood clearly audible in each DC-6 cockpit overhead.

  And he was gone.

  Clark struggled to pull up before he, too, fell victim to the trees that were now falling away and sloping down to the lake just three miles ahead.

  “I’m breaking right and climbing a little,” Clark said on the frequency, his voice utterly flat.

  “Roger. Behind you,” Dave Barrett replied.

  He brought them around to a westerly heading and then back north. There was no trouble marking the site. A tall, angry column of smoke was rising from the location, and a single pass overhead confirmed the worst: burning wreckage strewn in a line of broken trees through the forest.

  Chapter 35

  NORTH FLANK OF NORTH FORK RIDGE

  Phil Dale had been the first to discover that Karen and Dave were no longer bringing up the rear. He’d glanced around, then stopped in abject surprise, searching the forest behind them for any sign of movement and scarcely believing that he couldn’t see them. The roar of the fire was growing in the distance, and no one knew the dangers better than Karen.

  He yelled back up the trail after the others, but the sound was lost to the noises of men crashing frantically through the woods. He reached for his radio but his hand found an empty holster. Oh, no! I must have knocked it out when I was struggling to ditch my pack! If he turned to go back now for Karen and Dave, they’d be looking for him, too.

  He could see the ridge looming impossibly high above them and knew they were all exhausted from climbing on the run. They would need every minute to get to safety.

  Something terrible must have happened to Karen and Dave, he thought, for them to fail to keep up. Some sort of accident, or injury.

  Indecision was killing him, and he swore at himself as he swung around and took a few steps back down the slope, then stopped, cupping his hands to yell for Karen.

  The only sounds were the primeval roar of the oncoming fire.

  He turned back and began to run after the others, angry with himself for wasting so many precious seconds.

  Maybe one of the other guys has his radio! he thought, the idea justifying a renewed sprint as he crashed through the underbrush, leaping over snags and trying not to fall. Fifty yards ahead he saw George at the tail end of the squad suddenly turn around, his eyes wide in surprise and searching back through the forest the same way Phil had moments before.

  George turned and began moving back to intercept him, absorbing the fact that Karen and Dave were missing.

  “Do you have your radio?”

  “No. I must have dropped it.”

  “Dammit. What do we do, Phil?”

  “Man, I don’t know. It’s a huge forest.” Phil hesitated. “Look, George. Go after the others. Tell them I’m going back to find Karen and Dave. No sense in imperiling the rest of you.”

  “You can’t go back,” George said quietly. “There’s no time. It’s on our heels.”

  “But we can’t just leave them out here!” He cupped his hands again, shouting at the top of his lungs. “KAREN! DAVE!”

  “You know the training, Phil,” George said. “We may not make it as it is. They know what to do, and they’ve got their shelters. There’s no guarantee we’d find them even if we tried.”

  “Goddammit, George, look at your feet! Their emergency shelters won’t help if they’re sitting in all this fuel. They won’t make it.”

  “Neither will we! Come on, man. Other than suicide, we’ve got no choice.”

  Tears of frustration were squeezing past the testosterone barrier as Phil finally agreed, every fiber straining against the decision. He resumed scrambling uphill toward the ridge and the shelter they’d prepared earlier, guilt already tearing at him, hoping he’d hear Karen’s voice any second.

  ONE MILE WEST OF BRYARLY

  Jimmy Wolf steered the big Humvee around another fallen tree and then easily climbed over the next one. He was being thrown around against the seat belt in the cab of the machine, but he was loving it. To see through the increasingly thick pall of smoke, he’d switched on the row of halogen lights mounted on the roof, thinking how cool they looked stabbing into the murky forest.

  Must be hell to be lying there with a forest fire approaching wondering if anyone’s coming, he thought, feeling a flash of empathy for the downed helicopter crew, a long-dormant emotion he’d all but forgotten.

  Jimmy checked his GPS again. He had about another mile to go to reach the place where he knew the Jet Ranger had gone down. He’d heard a helicopter overhead minutes before, but couldn’t see it through the smoke. If the crash site was equally opaque, no one would ever find them in time from the air.

  The fact that the main fire was coming down the slope from the southeast and accelerating toward the town was merely an inconvenience. He felt neither heroic nor foolhardy, just satisfied. This is like writing a great tune, he thought. The variations were all his, and whether the decisions he was making second by second killed him or made him a hero was immaterial. What he was engaged in doing was his creation, and he was never happier than when flying against the wind.

  The Humvee bounced off another snag, the forward left wheel dropping into a hole and throwing him toward the windshield. He shifted back to low and let it right itself and crawl out before accelerating across a small meadow. The U.S. Army did a crackerjack job of thinking up this baby, he thought. It was impressive and tough.

  Once more he checked his progress on the GPS, letting the Humvee lurch ahead while he studied the glowing screen, then suddenly slammed on the brakes.

  The edge of the small canyon was no more than five feet ahead, with a 150-foot d
rop-off, and he’d almost rumbled over the edge.

  Right. Can’t drive this thing on autopilot.

  Jimmy set the brake and got out, peering over the rim. The bottom of the canyon was a riverbed lush in vegetation, and it was on fire, the choking, grayish smoke flowing along westward like a hellish river. He jumped on the hood of the Humvee and looked around. Visibility was less than a quarter mile, he figured, which meant that he would almost have to run over the survivors to find them.

  Provided there were survivors.

  Damn shame I can’t see any smoke from the crash, he thought. But they had to be somewhere out there in front of him.

  There were sounds behind him, a roar of some sort, or he could be imagining it. Then again, maybe it was an aircraft. The smoky pall over everything was weird and played tricks with sounds.

  He’d overheard a quick conversation in town about how incredibly loud the roar of a forest fire became as it closed in on you, and a small flicker of something approximating apprehension danced around his mind for a few seconds, spurring him back into action. He pictured the two men aboard the helicopter hurt but alive, with a monstrous fire bearing down on them, and he couldn’t let that happen.

  That’d be a terrible way to go, he thought. Hang on, you buggers. If you’re still alive, I’ll get you the hell out of here.

  He made note of the GPS reading and decided to use a grid search like he’d seen in a movie once. Statistically, one of the characters had said, a grid search worked better than a random search. He wasn’t entirely sure what a grid search meant, but he knew what a grid was, and it couldn’t be too different.

  Jimmy studied his GPS screen, deciding which direction to drive, how far to go, and how much to displace the return course to parallel the first. He marked the starting point electronically in the GPS computer and put the Humvee back in motion, rolling all the windows down and silencing the satellite music system he’d been listening to, just in case the pilot could call out to him.

  Damn! I forgot I’ve got a PA!

  Jimmy put on a headset and adjusted the microphone before turning on the PA system and blasting his voice into the murk.