Rain of Fire

by Linda Jacobs

  Cass answered in a hearty voice that became subdued as soon as she learned who it was. “I heard about Stanton. How soon do you think he’ll be back?”

  Kyle had been lying to herself about that, but because it was Cass, she was able to say, “He won’t be back anytime soon … maybe ever.”

  The line went silent for a beat.

  “You knew he’d retire,” Cass said. “You just didn’t expect to take his place under circumstances like these.”

  “Hollis Delbert is in charge.” Kyle spoke over the hard feeling in the back of her throat.

  “How in hell did that happen?”

  “It’s a long story. Colin Gruy had a hand in it.”

  “Doesn’t Stanton have a say?”

  “Since they moved him to the CCU, he’s not talking.”

  It turned quiet again.

  With an effort, Kyle got to business. “What I’m calling about is I need some portable seismographs for Yellowstone. There’s a swarm of activity and Hollis is holding the Institute’s supply hostage for the Wasatch.”

  “I saw the Yellowstone action on the Web,” Cass said. Even when she and Kyle weren’t in touch they kept up with each other through the little tracks and traces of their projects.

  “What you didn’t see,” Kyle told her, “is the vertical motion on the caldera. It’s coming up like an active volcano rather than a dormant thermal area.”

  “Where’s the fire?”

  “I’m afraid it may be Nez Perce Peak.”

  “I’ve been worried about that mountain ever since we learned it was such a young volcano,” Cass said. “Honest to God, I wish I could help, but we’ve got everything in the field.” Kyle heard a sound like a fist striking a metal desk. “If there was anything in storage, I’d overnight it.”

  Did Cass’s sense of urgency make her feel better or worse? At Nevado del Ruiz, they’d learned together the meaning of “death toll” in a way neither Hollis nor Colin seemed to grasp. On the other hand, as Kyle preferred to believe, the men did know such things at a gut level and refused to let it out.

  At least Wyatt seemed to understand.

  “I guess I’ll try Volcano Hazards.” Kyle skipped to her next line of backup, the USGS Cascades Volcanic Observatory where Colin worked. “I can check what Colin did about sending me some help.”

  Cass hesitated. “Do you know about the new group in Volcano Hazards?”

  “No.”

  Volcanologists had the same toys as seismologists; maybe they could help. Kyle snugged the phone against her neck and reached for a piece of paper. “Wait till I get a pen, and give me a name.”

  “You won’t need a pen,” Cass said slowly. “The new group leader is Nicholas Darden.”

  Her luck had run out. Nick was only a call away, and she had the best excuse on the planet to make it.

  Slumping forward, Kyle put her head onto her crossed arms. Over the years, she had kept up with Nick’s career so she’d know how not to run into him. After he became a volcano junkie and was out of the country for most of the year, she continued to attend professional meetings with antennae out, ready to turn on her heel if she so much as saw him.

  She never had … but in her imagination, in dreams when he came to her, he was always the same shining youth who had wakened at dawn and scaled the highest peak before noon.

  Lying with her head on her desk, Kyle felt like a fool for being hung up over a thirty-year-old affair. If she saw Nick again, she would simply meet a fellow traveler, someone else whose bright hair had faded and whose lips had thinned.

  Surely, she could find equipment elsewhere.

  The IRIS/PASSCAL Instrumentation Center in New Mexico provided field equipment for people with grant money, but you couldn’t just call and order seismographs like carryout pizza. The National Earthquake Center in Boulder was an option, but they indicated Hollis had already requested assistance and it was being taken care of. The same thing happened at other research centers, where they politely assumed she was helping Hollis with his calls.

  When she got to the end of her list, Kyle hung up and stared at a geologic map of Yellowstone on her office wall. Though the surface had been mapped and even the floor of the lake, there was no truly reliable picture of what went on beneath the earth. Everything geoscientists did—seismic, gravity-oriented, and magnetic surveys—all were forms of remote sensing. Each piece of data was only an inexact piece of a larger puzzle.

  Kyle feared time was running out to solve it.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  SEPTEMBER 18

  Wyatt looked at the laptop display from the portable seismograph he and Helen Chou had just placed in Mist Creek Canyon. “Looks like we’ve got tremors now.”

  The snowy creek bottom was cold where the midmorning sun did not reach. Helen brushed a lock of black hair back under her knitted cap, unzipped her pack and pulled out a thermos of coffee. Her nose cherry red, she poured for herself, and pulled out another stainless steel cup for Wyatt.

  “Is Kyle coming back with more equipment?” she asked in her characteristic direct manner.

  “When she left Sunday, there wasn’t time to make plans.”

  “Speaking of plans,” Helen’s voice softened. “I guess this is as good a time as any to tell you.”

  Wyatt was hunkered down on his heels, but some nuance in her tone made him straighten up. “What’s that?”

  She studied the steam off her coffee. “I’ve given my notice.”

  Wyatt felt that little shift he always felt when the world changed. Helen was one hell of a partner. Brilliant, as well as a hard worker, she was the kind who came to Yellowstone to intern, then moved on. “Where to?”

  “The University of Seattle.”

  “Where Bill…?”

  “Yes. I hate to let you down.”

  Wyatt tried to swallow his disappointment. “People move,” he said. “We’ll manage.”

  “I’d stick around and help you out with”—she gestured at the seismograph—”all this, but Bill insists I get out of here right away.”

  Maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea. If Wyatt had a family, he’d probably find an excuse to send them to the in-laws until things settled down.

  While they finished their coffee, Wyatt tried to tell himself Helen’s loss would be somewhat offset by Xi Hong, but even so, her absence was one more blow at a time he and Kyle could ill afford it. Come to think of Kyle, she had suspected this might happen when he mentioned Helen’s relationship with Bill. Maybe woman’s intuition was better.

  Wyatt and Helen hiked back to the Park Service Bronco they’d left at dawn in Pelican Valley. In the sunny meadow, the day was warming, droning insects the only sound in the silence.

  However, when they climbed into the vehicle, the dispatcher broadcast a message to all units. “We need a wilderness first response in the Pelican Creek basin, up the flank of Mount Chittenden from Turbid Springs.”

  Wyatt opened the channel. “Ellison and Chou here. We’re parked on the Pelican Creek service road next to Turbid Lake.”

  “Proceed up the trail along Bear Creek toward Jones Pass,” the dispatcher instructed.

  “What are we looking for?”

  “We’ve got a report of a burn victim. His wife called 911 from a cell phone and said he fell into a hot pool.”

  Wyatt shot a look at Helen. “There aren’t any thermal features in that area.”

  The dispatcher came back. “The operator said the woman was clear on their location.”

  “Have them ask again. They’re probably up the other side of the valley at the Mushpots.”

  “They lost the signal.”

  “We’ll search where they said,” Wyatt agreed, “but you’d better send somebody up the north side, where the hot pools are.”

  Slamming the driver’s side door, he drove the Bronco as far as he could on the dirt track, jouncing over ruts. At the trailhead to Jones Pass, Helen pulled out the first aid kit while he grabbed a signal flare from the truc
k and stowed it in his pack.

  For over a mile, they hiked beside Bear Creek, gaining four hundred feet of elevation. As they got closer to where the campers were supposed to be they shouted and blew a whistle.

  Wyatt wondered about the hot spring. The park was full of thermal features, and who was to say they’d all been mapped? He particularly hoped this report was incorrect for he’d seen firsthand what scalding water could do.

  Last June he’d been walking on Old Faithful’s main trail near Castle Geyser, instructing one of the summer student rangers, when a woman on a bicycle hailed them. She braked to a sharp halt and pointed back the way she’d come. “A little girl. She fell in!”

  “Where, ma’am?” Wyatt asked.

  “Morning Glory Pool.”

  Radioing for the local ambulance, he commandeered the bicycle and left the student to calm the woman. It wasn’t a strenuous trail, wide and paved, but his heart pounded as he rode.

  In a few minutes, he covered the mile and found a crowd beside Morning Glory Pool. Once of the hottest springs in the park, it had been named for its blue-white appearance and trumpet shape. Over the years, park visitors had thrown in things that blocked its neck and cooled it enough for algae to dull its sheen.

  By the pool, a man bent over oddly, holding his arms to his chest. When Wyatt saw a woman in a lavender dress kneeling beside something on the white rocks, he realized the man must have burned his arms pulling the girl from the pool. “She slipped through the fence,” he moaned.

  Wyatt found it odd that the mother wasn’t holding her daughter until he saw the bright, boiled look of the child’s skin. In places, it had peeled off, leaving bare flesh and muscle that looked like when you skinned a deer.

  From the somber way people parted to let him through, Wyatt knew he was too late.

  When he and Helen had walked for half an hour, he began to notice wisps of steam rising in places along the trail. That was odd, for he’d hiked this stretch with Alicia back in July and hadn’t noticed any. Of course, it was a lot warmer then, so he might not have seen them.

  Another hundred feet, and he definitely saw a small field of fumaroles, vents like chipmunk burrows, except they blew steam like teakettles.

  “Something new?” Helen asked cautiously.

  “We’ll have to check them out later.” He kept up the pace.

  A few minutes later, she stopped and held up a hand.

  Wyatt listened. The wind tossed the tops of the pines, and a crow gave a raucous warning.

  Then he heard a high-pitched call that sounded like a human voice.

  He blew his whistle, cupped his hands, and shouted, “Halloo.”

  “Over there.” Helen started down the hill at a right angle to the trail.

  Wyatt followed, sliding in slippery evergreen needles. As they approached Bear Creek he could hear it rushing, normally a soothing sound.

  Another cry, this one louder, helped them home in on a yellow tent beside the stream. Someone in jeans and a brown hooded parka knelt beside another person in a sleeping bag. A red North Face jacket lay on the ground near the remnants of a campfire.

  “Hello, we’re with the Park Service,” Helen said.

  The kneeling person turned, a slender woman of perhaps sixty years with the tanned and weathered look of the inveterate sportswoman.

  “Gretchen!” Wyatt blurted. He’d had drinks with Gretchen and her husband only a few days ago in Mammoth.

  She leaped to her feet. “Wyatt, thank God!” She cast a swift glance over her shoulder. “David doesn’t know how bad …”

  “We’ll have a look.” Helen headed in.

  Wyatt hung back, having trouble with the fact that the victim was one of the park’s own. David Mowry, a longtime naturalist and resident of Mammoth, was the renowned author of over a dozen books on the Yellowstone region. He worked across the hall from Wyatt in the Resource Center.

  “What happened?” Wyatt asked.

  Gretchen twisted her hands together and looked confused. As Wyatt knew her to be a bright and determined woman who never minced words, he wondered if she might be going into shock.

  “Wyatt,” Helen said, in a calm voice he recognized as forced.

  “Right here.” He moved closer.

  David’s face and neck bore a parboiled look with the skin peeling away from the flesh. His eyes were wide open and their strange whiteness made Wyatt wonder if he was dead.

  The fallen man writhed. “Christ Jesus, it hurts!” He waved an arm and connected with Helen’s shoulder.

  She recoiled as his hand brushed her parka and left a patch of skin on the rough material.

  Wyatt realized David was blind, his eyes cooked along with the rest of his flesh.

  Helen pulled back the sleeping bag with care, exposing his bare torso. In places, his skin had sloughed to reveal weeping raw flesh. Wyatt made a guess at ninety percent/third-degree, which made it tough to imagine him surviving. Especially as he and Helen could not start an IV.

  “I’ve been making him drink water,” Gretchen offered.

  “That’s good,” said Helen.

  Numbly, Wyatt reached for his radio and called the base. “We need a chopper stat! Victim is David Mowry, Caucasian male around sixty years, third-degree burns over most of his body. Conscious … at this time.” He gauged the small clearing. “With the trees in here, the stretcher will have to be roped up into the chopper.”

  Helen poured water from her bottle over David’s torso and he seemed to become calmer.

  “We’ll have you in the hospital in no time,” Wyatt said loudly.

  “It doesn’t matter.” David’s voice was faint.

  Wyatt drew Gretchen aside. “He’s going to have to go to Burn and Trauma in Salt Lake.”

  Gretchen picked at her sleeve and nodded. She was shivering.

  David went into another fit of screaming. Helen moved back a few feet.

  Wyatt decided to examine the scene. He and Alicia had actually been right here two months ago, dropping down off the trail to hike the creek bottom. That big fir with the moss on it leaned a little farther out over the cut bank now. On the sandy beach below, where the bank sloped gently, they had taken off boots and socks and cooled their feet.

  He’d mentioned at the time that this would make a nice campsite.

  “Where was David when he got burned?” he asked.

  “Just there.” Gretchen pointed to the place where Wyatt had gone wading two months ago. He didn’t see anything that looked like a thermal spring, none of the usual white or buff-colored mineral deposits, no colored algae.

  He walked closer and stopped. Faint wisps of steam rose from the edge of Bear Creek. Another step forward and he saw the boiling, where sand spun in hundreds of tiny caldrons. Mindful that many visitors got an unpleasant surprise when they couldn’t resist testing the water temperature, he put out a careful hand.

  An inch or so from the surface, he felt the heat.

  “Did David fall in?” The footing looked solid enough.

  “We both swam there yesterday,” Gretchen said. “The water was so cold that we sat by the fire when we got out. This morning, he decided to go skinny-dipping and dove straight in.”

  Wyatt let himself down and sat on the creek bank.

  Gretchen spoke slowly, “When he staggered out, he kept saying, ‘I’ve killed myself.”

  On the one hand, David Mowry had done something stupid, but the signs were so very subtle. Who was Wyatt to say he might not have done the same? The first time he and Alicia had hiked into the backcountry, they’d made love on a sun-warmed rock beside a sparkling stream and dived in naked without testing the waters.

  Wyatt pushed to his feet and moved upstream. He knelt and refilled his canteen with cold water to ferry to Helen.

  Gretchen went to her husband’s side and spoke words of encouragement that Wyatt felt rang hollow. He squatted on his heels near David. “Hang in there, buddy.”

  Over the burned man’s head, he met
Helen’s serious dark eyes. She gave a barely perceptible shake of her head.

  Minutes passed and David thrashed less. His respiration became labored, making Wyatt suspect fluid buildup in lungs seared by boiling water.

  Finally the chop of an approaching helicopter sounded. As it came into view, Wyatt recognized a Bell 206, the kind he’d done some fieldwork out of in the park interior. He dug in his pack and sent up a flare, then stood in the center of the clearing and waved. Dark clouds scudded across the patch of sky and the chopper danced and shuddered as it lowered.

  Shielding his eyes from flying grit, Wyatt watched a man descend a cable carrying a folded stretcher and an equipment bag. Once he got to the ground, Wyatt led the way.

  Helen had her back to them, hugging herself as if she felt cold. Gretchen Mowry knelt beside her husband, cradling his red jacket instead of his disfigured body.

  The dead man looked smaller somehow, as though more than breath had left his body.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  SEPTEMBER 18

  YELLOWSTONE CAMPER DIES AFTER

  DIVING INTO HOT SPRING

  Kyle’s blood surged as she stared at the tagline on the breaking news page of her Internet provider. Sitting up straighter in her office chair, she clicked on the story.

  YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyo.

  Sixty-one-year-old David Mowry died in Yellowstone Park this morning after jumping into a stream and finding it to be a hot spring. The noted author and naturalist was pronounced dead on arrival at the Intermountain Burn and Trauma Center in Salt Lake City after being taken from Yellowstone by helicopter.

  Lord, not David Mowry. She hadn’t known him personally, just read his books, but…

  First on the scene, Park Rangers Helen Chou and Wyatt Ellison told reporters waiting in Salt Lake that Mowry was so thoroughly scalded he never stood a chance of surviving. The search and rescue helicopter pilot, Chris Deering, a veteran of Vietnam and many western fire seasons, said the pickup was routine, Mowry having passed away just before he arrived.