Chasing Fire: An I-Team/Colorado High Country Crossover Novel

by Pamela Clare

  Ramirez called someone. “I’m fine. Don’t worry. It’s pretty bad up here. Gabe Rossiter and seven other people were entrapped at a camp. The fire burned through. I’m on a helicopter that’s going to search for survivors. Yeah, I hope so, too. I love you, too.”

  He ended the call. “My wife Mia. She’s nine months pregnant with our first.”

  Despite the heaviness in his chest, Eric found himself smiling. “Congratulations, man. That’s great. You’re going to love being a dad. My wife, Vicki, is expecting our second.”

  “No way!” Silver toasted them with his water bottle. “Congrats to both of you.”

  The helo was landing as they pulled into the hospital parking lot.

  “Do you really think there’s a chance they’re alive?” Silver asked.

  Eric didn’t know how to answer that. “If they are, they need us.”

  They grabbed their gear out of the truck and ran to the helipad, ducking down as they boarded. Eric sat in front where he could have the best view, Silver and Ramirez in back with their gear. He buckled in, put on his earphones, gave the pilot the GPS for Camp Mato Sapa. They would go there first.

  “You know I can’t carry more than six people at a time,” the pilot said.

  “We’ll be very lucky if we end up facing that problem.”

  The pilot lifted off, nosed its way forward, gained altitude.

  Eric typed out a quick text message to Vicki telling her he was on his way to look for survivors at Camp Mato Sapa and to find Taylor.

  That son of a bitch better be alive.

  Eric wouldn’t be able to live with himself otherwise. He’d been the one who’d asked Taylor to head out to Haley Preserve.

  “Holy fuck.” Silver’s voice came over the earphones.

  Eric’s stomach knotted at the sight. “Is that your professional opinion?”

  “Pretty much.”

  The fire looked impossible to stop, a wall of smoke and flame stretching from the backside of Ski Scarlet, across the canyons, down the backside of the ridge they’d tried to hold, and off to the northwest to the highway. Soon, it would make a run through mountain homes to the top of Dead Man’s Hill, where Tall Bull and his crew were already setting a backburn.

  Silver nudged his arm, handed him a bottle of water. “I haven’t seen you drink anything in a while.”

  “Right.” Eric was always nagging his crew to stay hydrated. He needed to follow his own good advice. “Thanks.”

  He took a drink, capped the bottle, did his best not to think beyond this moment, this rescue mission. If he let himself get caught up in grief, he’d be no good to anyone, and saving Scarlet Springs was still his responsibility, no matter who was Incident Command.

  Wind blew the smoke plume eastward, compromising visibility, so the pilot radioed for permission to climb. Eric glanced at the radar, saw three blips that represented the two SEATs and the Skycrane, all of them on the way back to refill their tanks, the Skycrane at the reservoir just east of town and the SEATs at the airport.

  “This is where it gets bumpy,” the pilot said.

  A big wildfire like this one made flying hazardous. Convective currents of hot air rose up from the blaze, causing turbulence. In Eric’s experience, fixed-wing aircraft had a harder time managing it than helos, but he grabbed the handle near the door anyway.

  Thunk!

  Something hit the window next to Eric’s head. At first, he thought it was a bird, but it flew into pieces.

  The pilot cursed. “A fucking drone!”

  Another thud. A mechanical whine.

  The helo began to spin out of control, heading straight toward the flaming front.

  Holy hell.

  If they crashed in the fire, they would be dead in an instant.

  “Fuck!” he heard Silver say.

  “Madre de Dios.” That was Ramirez.

  “We’ve lost our rear rotor. Fragments from the drone must have damaged it. We’re going down!” He called it in. “Mayday. Mayday. Mayday. Helicopter Ninety-Eight Echo is going down. A drone hit the aircraft, and we’ve lost our tail rotor.”

  “Can you crash us away from the fire?” Not that Eric wanted to tell the pilot how to do his job, but that seemed really important.

  “I don’t know, but I’m sure as hell going to try.”

  It was hard to tell which direction was which, the world spinning around them, the ground racing up at them as the helo lost altitude.

  I’m pregnant.

  Vicki’s sweet face flashed through Eric’s mind—her happy smile as she’d surprised him with the news, the sparkle in her eyes. He couldn’t leave her.

  Not now. Not like this.

  The pilot fought with the machine. “Brace for impact!”

  Chapter 14

  Jesse hooked the water hose to the last of the fan guns on Eagle Ridge, the highest point at Ski Scarlet. He walked back to the hydrant, cranked the handle, watched water surge through the hose. Then he walked back to the fan gun—and turned it on.

  Water sprayed from the mouth of the machine, flying maybe thirty feet before falling to land on grass, shrubs, and trees.

  It was the damnedest thing he’d ever seen—every fan gun the resort owned spraying water onto the upper reaches of the mountain in the middle of summer. In the winter, at the right temperatures, the fan guns made snow, enabling the resort to stay open when Mother Nature got stingy with the white stuff.

  Today, it was all about rain—and a chance to stop the south head of the fire from burning through the slopes to threaten lives and mountain homes south of Scarlet.

  The fire was almost here now, racing up the back of Eagle Ridge, embers carried high above him by the wind. A crew of mostly volunteer firefighters stood by with UTVs, tools, and brush trucks to beat the shit out of any spot fires. But none of that stood a chance of working if the fan guns couldn’t deliver enough water.

  Two thousand gallons a minute.

  That’s how much water poured through the pipes when all of the fan guns were on full. The water was pumped at high pressure from the reservoir in the winter and returned to the reservoir as snowmelt in the spring. It was more moisture than any air tanker or helicopter could lay down.

  Would it be enough?

  Jesse had watched while the fire outflanked the backburn. He’d watched it jump the narrow canyon and finger off, spreading through the forest on the flanks of the mountain. It had been his idea to try the snowmaking machines, and Matt and Hawke had given him the thumbs up. But it was no easy task to hook up the system—or to haul all twelve one-ton fan guns up dry slopes and into position.

  Had they been fast enough? Would the trees and grass be wet enough?

  If this failed, the fire would destroy the fan guns, setting the resort back millions. Worse, it would burn through the glades and advance on Scarlet from the south. There was little chance it would burn down the resort buildings, not with the pumper truck there to spray them down. But there were a lot of homes south of town.

  At least Ellie and the kids were safe. She had texted to tell him she’d finally made it to her sister’s house in Boulder.

  He reached for his hand mic. “Forty-two to Dispatch. The last gun is running.”

  “I want everyone away from that ridge,” Matt, his boss, replied.

  He would get no argument from Jesse. The gases from the fire as it reached the top would be hot enough to kill in an instant.

  “Copy that.” Jesse motioned for his fellow patrollers to move away.

  That’s when he saw it—a helo spinning out of control.

  It looked like it was heading into the fire.

  “Son of a bitch.” He wished he had his Team radio because he would know what the hell was going on and who was in that aircraft. Instead, he heard only radio traffic from the ski resort.

  He called his boss. “Forty-two to Dispatch. I just saw a helicopter go down. It looked like it had lost its tail rotor. I think it crashed into the fire.”

  �
��A drone hit an observation helicopter. I heard the mayday. I think your buddy Eric Hawke was onboard.”

  The news hit Jesse like a blast wave, drove the air from his lungs.

  God, no!

  Hawke had been a mentor to him when he’d tried out for the Team. He’d helped him improve as a climber. He’d helped him land his ski patrol job.

  He was one of the best men Jesse knew.

  Matt’s voice sounded in Jesse’s earpiece again. “I’m sorry.”

  Jesse jogged to the top of the ridge again, looked toward the north, but smoke obscured his view. “Someone needs to get the hell out there with a rescue helo—now!”

  “How long would it take a chopper to get airborne and reach them? If they landed in the fire, they’re dead already.”

  Helplessness turned Jesse’s dread and fear to rage. “For fuck’s sake, we can’t just stand here and do nothing while they burn alive!”

  “If you’ve got a plan, tell me, and I’ll call it in to Scarlet Command. If not, focus on keeping yourself and your fellow patrollers safe. Now, get the hell off that ridge!”

  The fire was here.

  The roar like a dozen fighter jets. Fist-sized embers. Black, choking smoke.

  Son of a bitch!

  Hawke!

  Jesse ran down the slope, his fellow patrollers urging him on. He threw himself to the ground and glanced back as a hundred-foot wave of flame crested over the ridgetop, turning the world around him orange. Water from the fan guns became steam, and for a moment it seemed his plan wasn’t going to work.

  Then the length of the flames shrank. Fifty feet. Twenty. Ten.

  The fire sputtered, hissed, went out.

  Cheers.

  “We’ve got a couple of spot fires in the glades,” said a voice in Jesse’s earpiece.

  Crews scrambled to put those out, cutting down burning trees with chain saws, beating out the flames. But Jesse ran to his UTV and headed down the slope. He ditched the vehicle outside the ski patrol office and ran inside, where Matt sat listening to county’s tactical frequency.

  “… and we are deploying shelters!” Hawke shouted into his radio, his voice almost drowned out by the roar of the fire.

  Jesus!

  They had survived the crash, but they were entrapped.

  Son of a bitch.

  Sometimes the shelters saved lives, but they didn’t guarantee survival by any means. Jesse had heard stories—some from survivors, some from people who’d had the terrible job of bagging and tagging the bodies of firefighters who’d died in their shelters of burns or asphyxiation from hot gases and smoke.

  Now, every story came back to him as he waited, moments measured in heartbeats, seconds grinding by with unbearable slowness.

  Brandon dug at the ground with the Pulaski, scraping away dried pine needles, twigs, and grass to expose the cool, mineral soil beneath. Hawke had given Ramirez a spare brush shirt and brush pants from his pack and was telling the pilot and Ramirez what they could expect.

  “You’re going to think you’re burning alive, and you might get burned, but it’s going to be a thousand times hotter outside the shelter than inside. Do not come out, no matter how afraid you are, no matter how hot or painful it gets. Do you understand?”

  How could Hawke be so damned calm?

  Brandon had trained for this, too. He’d done deployment drills over and over again. He’d watched videos, listened to survivor stories. But he didn’t feel calm. He’d sworn to himself that he would never be careless enough to become entrapped. He hadn’t imaged a helicopter would crash-land him in the path of a fire.

  Libby.

  Would he see her again? Would he die here in his shelter?

  Don’t think. Dig.

  They’d run from the helicopter, searching for a good place to deploy, somewhere with minimal fuels where burning trees wouldn’t fall on them. The fire was moving much faster than they were, so they’d had just minutes to find a spot.

  Hawke had chosen this place—a clearing that looked like it might have once been home to a miner’s cabin. The cabin was long gone, but there was a sunken area in the shape of a rectangle toward the center of the clearing. It was as treeless as anything they could hope to find in the middle of a damned forest.

  Hawke was doing his best to help the others. “You can do this. I’ll be right here with you. We’re going to check your shelters and make sure they weren’t damaged in the crash.”

  The fire was close now, the heat already uncomfortable, the roar deafening, embers burning through Brandon’s brush shirt and igniting spot fires all around them.

  “That’s good enough!” Hawke shouted to Brandon. “Toss your gear! Deploy shelters!”

  Shit. Fuck!

  This was it.

  No drill this time. This was the real thing.

  Brandon tossed the Pulaski, pulled his fire shelter from his pack, then doffed his pack and hurled it as far away from their deployment site as he could. It held flammable fusees and other things that might ignite.

  “I’m taking my camera with me!” Ramirez shouted.

  “Fine, but don’t hold onto it! Hold onto the shelter!” Hawke shouted back. “The wind could tear it right off you! If you lose your shelter, you die!”

  It was a good thing that Brandon had practiced this so many times, because adrenaline was kicking the shit out of his manual dexterity. He fumbled with the red tear ring on the outer bag, pulled on it, and removed the fragile shelter. Tab labeled Left Hand in his left hand. Tab labeled Right Hand in his right hand.

  Clearly, they had tried to make the process both idiot- and adrenaline-proof.

  He shook the shelter out, the wind catching it, hoisting it into the air like a sail. He wrestled with it, held onto it with clenched fists.

  If he lost it, he would burn alive.

  He managed to get one foot inside, then the other, catching sight of Hawke as he helped Ramirez and the pilot get inside their shelters. “Hawke, for fuck’s sake, deploy!”

  The fire was almost on top of them.

  But Hawke didn’t seem to hear him. He showed Ramirez and the pilot how to hold on, how to breathe cool air close to the ground. “Don’t panic!”

  “Damn it, Hawke! Deploy!”

  Hawke heard Brandon that time.

  He checked the others, pulled out his shelter, shook it out.

  The heat was intense now, the fire rushing toward them like some vision of hell. Brandon dropped to the ground, feet toward the blaze, then slid gloved hands through the straps and pulled the shelter down around him.

  A shiver ran through him.

  It was like crawling into his own grave.

  “Silver, are you good?” Hawke called to him.

  “Yeah, chief!”

  Hawke shouted encouragement to them. “Stay with me, all of you! We’ll get through this! Burns heal! Fried lungs don’t! Don’t come out, no matter what!”

  Something bumped against Brandon’s shelter, and a cottontail rabbit dug its way inside, hiding beneath his chin. The little thing was shaking like a leaf.

  “Hey, buddy.”

  They would ride this out together.

  Beyond his shelter, trees cracked, shrieked, moaned, the roar of the fire like the approach of a thousand freight trains. Wind from the blaze threatened to rip the shelter off his body. Radiant heat drove up the temperature inside the shelter, making it hotter and hotter until he was sure he couldn’t take more. He lowered his face to the dirt where the air was a bit cooler and squeezed his eyes shut to protect them.

  Libby.

  He wrapped his mind around her, clung to the thought of her.

  Libby bringing him her latest brew to taste. Libby making dinner at his house wearing nothing but tube socks. Libby curling up against him while they watched TV, her golden hair spilling across his chest, her skin like silk.

  God, he loved her, loved everything about her. If she wasn’t ready to commit, he could live with that—as long as he didn’t have to pre
tend not to love her.

  Fuck!

  He cried out, something searing the back of his calves, the pain excruciating. The superheated shelter fabric—it had settled against him. He gritted his teeth and used an elbow to push it upward again—only to get burned on his elbow, too.

  Someone cried out in pain.

  Was it him? No.

  Hawke? Ramirez? The pilot?

  Goddamn!

  For all he knew, the others were dying. All it took was a gust of wind, a break in the fabric, a little exposure to direct flame…

  It was hot, too hot, too damned hot. The air singed his nostrils and every bit of exposed skin, pain from his burns and adrenaline making him dizzy. Or maybe that was lack of oxygen.

  He fought back a growing sense of panic.

  “Stay with me!”

  Had he imagined Hawke’s voice?

  Maybe. Maybe not.

  BLAM!

  The helo. Its fuel tank must have exploded.

  He drew another breath, choked, smoke making his throat constrict until he started to drift away. He fought the darkness, fought to breathe, reaching for Libby with his mind.

  At least you told her you loved her.

  Marc stood with Darcangelo and McBride, watching as Jack eased his trailer onto the highway and headed down the canyon, Kenzie and Harrison Conrad following in two separate vehicles, one of which carried Winona and her wolf. Marc’s relief at knowing that both people and animals would be safe didn’t take away the ache in his chest.

  If Gabe Rossiter was dead…

  Fuck.

  “Where did Jack say Kat was going?” he asked.

  “On her way down the canyon toward the Boulder County Fairgrounds,” McBride answered.

  Darcangelo pulled out his cell phone. “We should let the others know.”

  “You’re right.” McBride gave Darcangelo a friendly slap on the back.

  Darcangelo gasped, winced.

  McBride stared at him. “I didn’t hit you that hard.”

  “Burns from embers. I took off my shirt and wrapped Crank in it when I carried him outside.” Darcangelo lifted the back of his shirt, exposing red, blistered burns the size of quarters scattered across his back and shoulders.