Wild Fire

by M. L. Buchman

  The more he worried at it, the less he could see; but he somehow knew it was there. If only he could find it.

  Ripley didn’t like feeling helpless; it wasn’t a skill she’d spent a lot of time practicing. But how to help Gordon was beyond her.

  He staggered off the Diana Prince like a man wounded or in shell shock. He might well have wandered off aimlessly into the dark of Dong Hoi Airport never to be seen again if she’d let him.

  Tham Chau had minivans waiting for them and they were soon at a luxurious hotel. No question of checking in; each team was whisked onto waiting elevators and escorted to their rooms.

  “Half an hour to sunrise, breakfast downstairs,” Gordon roused himself enough to inform the group before they went their separate ways.

  She hadn’t known what to expect, but the room they were led to was shocking. It might be the nicest hotel she’d ever stayed in. The spacious room’s entryway was white marble inlaid into dark stone. Ahead was a luxurious looking king-sized bed—though at the moment, any bed would look luxurious. Tasteful soft brown-and-white décor was accented with panels of exotically-grained wood of a golden luster and ornate gilded metal dividers that were more design than substance, yet made the room appear even larger. One wall was all glass and looked out over a large swimming pool, the beach, and the dark sea beyond.

  The only real oddity, which she didn’t notice until after their guide had deposited their duffels, handed over their room’s keycard, and departed with a bow, was the bathroom. The dark stone flooring of the hallway continued sideways into the space and all of the fixtures were modern, even elegant…but the walls dividing it from the bedroom were floor-to-ceiling glass.

  She’d served four years on carriers. Clambering into the small steel boxes of the John C. Stennis’ shower stalls was comfortable and familiar; well, until Gordon had joined her there. It had invoked unstoppable fits of un-Ripley-like giggles. They attacked her each time a naked firefighter followed her so eagerly into a four-minute shower.

  She supposed that the hotel room’s glass walls made both the bedroom and bathroom feel bigger, but it was still odd to her American sensibilities.

  Gordon was out of it. She guided him to bed. Stripping him down wasn’t as fun as it should have been. His body barely reacted as she got him naked and then tucked him in. It looked as if he was out before he hit the pillow. She shut off the bedroom lights, but the subdued bathroom lighting still lit the bedroom softly.

  He might be too out of it, but Ripley desperately needed a shower.

  She stood for a long moment staring at the glass walls, then finally decided to stop wasting time or she’d pass out standing up and Gordon would find her in a little heap on the cool tile in the morning. The shower was hot, but the fan was strong enough to keep the windows from steaming up. She ducked into the hard spray and let the water wash off…the days.

  The first day of the firefight rinsed down the drain. The shampoo washed away the tension of the Chinese Chengdu J-20s flying so aggressively at the American ships. The soap finally cleared away the general grime from returning to an aircraft carrier and seeing Weasel for please god the last time ever. But the long, soaking heat did nothing to wash away her feelings for Gordon.

  She leaned her forehead against the window, mostly to stay upright as the hot water pounded against her shoulders, and studied the dim outline Gordon made on the bed.

  Telling herself she was not in love with the man wasn’t going to work much longer.

  Then what the hell would she do?

  Gordon floated in the bed, so numb with exhaustion that he could barely feel the clean sheets.

  The fire was a disaster…and somehow, he was supposed to fix it. Even Henderson had been at a loss as they had flown the King Air back and forth over the fire earlier in the day.

  “Steve and his drone can tell you what the fire is doing,” Mark had spoken softly. “Carly can tell you what the fire is going to do. Jeannie, Vern, Mickey, Robin, and Vanessa are some of the best firefighting heli-pilots you’ll find anywhere.”

  “But none of them can tell me what to do,” Gordon made it a statement.

  “Exactly,” Mark agreed sadly. “Regrettably, on this one, I’ve got nothing you don’t.”

  “Would Emily?” Mark’s sigh made Gordon wish he hadn’t brought her up. “Sorry, you must miss her.”

  “It shouldn’t be possible to miss a woman this much—I saw her just last week—but it is. And no, Emily wouldn’t be any help. She’s a consummate team builder and an incredible tactician. You give her a plan and she can execute it better than anyone, anywhere. But getting her head up into the plan isn’t her forte. That’s why we always made a good team.”

  In between guiding the firefight, Gordon had spent much of the afternoon since that conversation thinking about those teams. And just because he was lying in a comfortable bed watching his gorgeous lover shower, those thoughts didn’t stop.

  Carly and Steve made perfect sense as a couple—the fire behavior analyst and the man who could feed her the data.

  Jeannie the pilot and Cal the photographer. She was the best trained person on fire behavior other than Carly…and she flew with Cal—the nation’s leading wildfire photographer. Somehow he’d been recruited to the MHA team. Because…? Details. Nobody saw details the way Cal did. Origins, terrain anomalies, tortured winds—he often spotted all of those before anyone else.

  Vern and Denise. A straight-ahead fantastic pilot and an ace mechanic. Both major assets.

  Mickey and Robin. MHA’s most seasoned flier and their newest one—a tough lady from a US National Guard background. Gordon recalled Mark chewing out Robin for not looking after her team first of all. And he’d seen her learn that lesson. Almost in that moment, Robin had become the den mother of Mount Hood Aviation. Not the nurturing type you went to and cried on her shoulder—more the kind who’d kick your ass, with all the love in her heart, if you performed one iota less than your best.

  Even Vanessa and Brenna somehow made sense together in the same way Vern and Denise did—another great pilot-/mechanic pairing.

  “Was it intentional?” He’d asked Mark.

  “Was what intentional?”

  But Gordon hadn’t bothered to repeat the question because even as he asked it, he knew the real answer. Just as Mark had said, it wasn’t him who had built the Mount Hood Aviation team. Emily Beale was the one who tested, hired, and trained pilot after pilot. MHA was as much her creation over the last three years as it had been the founders like TJ, Chutes, and Carly’s father three decades before.

  And yet Emily had stayed on the ground rather than flying on this trip.

  Now, as he floated on the edge of sleep, Gordon watched Ripley showering. Watched the white suds slide over that luscious dark skin. Watched her lean against the glass, her eyes too shadowed to see, but he could feel them closing as she gave herself to the sensations of the hot water streaming over her.

  Now, to round out the MHA team, there were he and Ripley. Brad and Janet were also a good addition, but he and Ripley were the next key to Emily’s MHA team.

  No. They were the final key. That’s why Emily hadn’t needed to come along. Ripley was a fantastic pilot and her aircraft was an amazing complement to the team.

  Was it intentional?

  Perhaps some parts of it and not others. He and Vanessa should have been predictable, plannable. But they weren’t. So, Emily had gone to the next step.

  Consciously or just by feel and intuition?

  Gordon decided he didn’t even care if it was a complete and total setup. Had Emily chosen a fantastic pilot in a hugely powerful aircraft, or had she specifically chosen a woman who she thought Gordon would like? Would fall head over heels for?

  Again, didn’t care.

  Whether chance or Major Emily Beale (retired) had brought them together, didn’t matter. Gordon was smart enough to know that he’d never find another woman like the one currently toweling down on the other side of th
e glass.

  When she slid into bed beside him, he was just awake enough to roll over and pull her tightly against him. He wasn’t going to mention his Emily Beale theory. It would probably freak Ripley out and send her running the other way.

  Instead he was simply going to hold onto her so tightly that she could never escape. He’d take her soft hum of contentment as a good sign when he buried his face in her ever-so-fresh hair the moment before sleep finally crashed in on him.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “What the hell is up with this fire?” Steve stabbed his chopsticks into his breakfast rice, apparently just to poke holes in it rather than eat any.

  Nobody, least of all Ripley, was going to argue with Steve’s sentiment. Especially since his tablet offered him the only view of what was happening this morning. After two full days containing the flanks, MHA and the Vietnamese forces had worked for four straight days attacking the fire’s head. It had grown, twisted, shifted, and burned afresh in unlikely—and worse, unpredictable—ways.

  “Did Vietnam develop some kind of a smart forest fire?” Robin growled in exasperation.

  “Maybe we just don’t understand how the plants burn here,” Mickey stared down at his morning tea.

  “That’s not it,” Jeannie poked at her xoi nep than black rice a few times, then threw her chopsticks down with a loud clatter. “Before I came to the US, I fought several jungle fires Down Under and some in Papua New Guinea. Jungle burns just like any other fire—hotter in the hardwoods, faster in the conifers. None of that explains this.”

  “Well,” Steve dropped his tablet on the table. “Day Four report: we lost half of yesterday’s gains.” No one bothered picking it up to double-check his terse summary.

  The heavy silence descended over their group again.

  It was still dark outside the dining room’s sweeping windows. Today not even the nicely restrained beauty of the white-and-black stone floor and the high ceilings with more of the golden wood that Ripley was definitely going to decorate her home with (if she ever had a home) was able to cheer them up.

  She looked around the table. Everyone was glaring at their breakfast or staring up at the ceiling in dismay. The broad buffet table set with both Vietnamese and European dishes—though some were slightly odd for breakfast, like this morning’s Irish stew—had been barely touched by the MHA crew. Half hadn’t gotten food at all. They weren’t even all sitting as couples anymore. Vanessa and Brenna were several seats apart and Gordon was across the table from her, though she refused to read anything into that.

  Except Gordon didn’t look sullen. His expression was puzzled. He was looking around as if he’d missed something.

  “What?” Ripley mouthed at him when his glance slid her way.

  He shrugged like an itch was—

  “Robin!” It shot out of Ripley suddenly enough to startle everyone at the table. She wasn’t sure why she’d said it. “Repeat your last comment.”

  Robin narrowed her eyes at Ripley, “I don’t even remember what I said.”

  “I do,” Mickey nodded. “You said, ‘Did Vietnam develop some kind of a smart forest fire?’ Word for word I think.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “I remember everything you ever say, my love,” and Mickey leaned forward to plant a big mushy kiss on her.

  Robin placed a hand over his face and pushed him back into the chair. “He’s full of crap, but it sounds like something I might have said. Why?”

  Ripley didn’t answer, but was looking at Gordon, who had jolted upright in his seat just as Tham Chau came in to fetch them.

  “Tham Chau!” This time it was Gordon who spoke loudly enough to make everyone jolt.

  The few other early morning Vietnamese diners, who had been so quiet as to be invisible, jumped and twisted as well to see what was happening.

  “You said that old munitions started this fire. Old bombs. How do you know?”

  “There is a crater, a very big one.”

  “Larger than usual?”

  “This one, it may be the biggest ever. Over ten meters in radius.”

  Ripley gasped. She’d done some ferrying for effectiveness teams on Naval bombing ranges. She’d fly a team of scientists from ship to beach to inspect the effectiveness of the latest five-hundred-pounder JDAM bomb dropped by an FA-18 Super Hornet. By those standards, a three-meter radius was a massive hole. The damage range would be much broader, but blowing a hole in soil took an immense amount of energy. To jump from an eighteen-foot diameter hole to a sixty-foot one was an enormous energy factor.

  “I’m guessing that’s big?” Gordon asked.

  Ripley could only nod.

  “That can’t be some random bomb drop that never went off. Someone had to collect a lot of munitions together to cause that,” Mark confirmed grimly.

  But Gordon wasn’t looking at him. Instead he was up on the edge of his seat.

  “Steve, can you run me everything you’ve got from the last six days. Start with the moment we arrived and give me the whole fire, as much as you can.”

  Steve tapped away at his tablet for a minute, mumbling about how much easier it would be to do on the Firehawk with the full console. “There. I’ve set it to do a thermal gradient. Straight visual won’t show you what’s really going on. But this will show the fire from blue ambient temperature, rising in gradients of a hundred degrees Celsius, about one-eighty Fahrenheit. To dark red over two thousand degrees Fahrenheit. The smoke plume will cause irregular variations and the resolution may miss spot fires that—”

  “Just run it,” Carly cut off her husband.

  He frowned, but hit the play. “It’s at a factor of three thousand time compression,” he had to finish.

  “Three thousand?”

  Steve obviously felt he was getting a little of his own back when he said, “Six days. A hundred and fifty hours in just under three minutes.”

  Ripley didn’t listen as the crew teased him about going from a lead smokejumper to a geek. Ripley hadn’t known that about his past—lead smokies were very tough guys. She wondered how his bad limp played into that career change.

  On the display, the fire head grew as it chewed its way into Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park. Within fifteen seconds the results of Gordon’s opening strategy of attacking the flanks could be seen. Over the next thirty seconds—a full day—the fire collapsed in scale, shrinking in size by two-thirds as the flank, tail, and finally the spot fires in The Black were all beaten down and killed in the next thirty-second day.

  “I did not think it was so dramatic,” Tham Chau said softly. “You were right Gordon, to do that first. It also gave us hope and new energy.”

  Every thirty seconds the background image swung from day to night and back. But the thermal overlay showed the constant deep red of the head fire. It was several kilometers wide and moving steadily.

  Then it jumped during one of the nights.

  “Wait.” “Did something happen?” “Go back.”

  “No!” Gordon ordered. “Let it run.”

  Twice more the fire jumped significantly. Each time it was close by the head of the fire, but not quite in the fire.

  “Give me a tight view on each of those three events.”

  Gordon’s voice had gone deep and dangerous. What did he know? She was afraid to ask. With that tone of voice, apparently so was everyone else. They all waited in silence, breakfast forgotten and shoved aside. Helpful waiters attempted to clear some of the plates but were merely snarled at by the MHA members crowded so close together that they formed a solid wall around the table.

  “Here we go,” Steve was less officious about it this time, simply hitting play.

  The display took about three seconds, flashing like a strobe light.

  “Wait, sorry. Have to slow it down.” He ran it again.

  The sequence took thirty seconds to play, but still the flashes were extremely brief.

  He trimmed off the chaff and ran it again, even slower. He cut
it off after the first flash. “Shit! Give me a sec.”

  Nobody interrupted his deft alterations to the playback settings.

  “Weird,” he kept tinkering. “Okay…here are the three fire jumps in real time.”

  The leading edge of the fire was a range of deep oranges and bright reds, indicating eight hundred to a thousand degrees. The darker reds of fifteen hundred degrees in the central fire would be off the edge of the screen.

  In less than a second, the first fire-jump transitioned from the pale blue of ambient air temperature to black.

  “What’s black?” Ripley asked, afraid that she already knew.

  “That’s what’s weird. That’s at least three thousand degrees, perhaps four. And the time cycle is strange. A bomb should be a single hot flash, not like this.”

  It flared hard black for over thirty seconds. And when it faded away, the area turned into deepest red of very active fire, which the main blaze engulfed moments later. Also, it didn’t burn in one spot, but rather in a longline.

  While the screen repeated the pattern a second and then a third time, she glanced around the group. It took her a moment to sort out those with puzzled expressions versus those with grim ones—civilian versus ex-military.

  Mark, Robin, and Vern (she hadn’t known that about Vern) all recognized a thermite flare when they saw one.

  No wonder the wildfire wouldn’t die.

  Gordon had known he was close when he’d seen Ripley’s surprise at the size of the ignition crater that had started the whole fire. And when she unerringly exchanged looks with Mark, Robin, and Vern, he didn’t need to turn to see their expressions.

  “What is it? What burns so hot?”

  “Thermite,” Ripley whispered softly. “Rust and aluminum powder. In the military we use thermite grenades when we really need to melt through something: destroy a weapons cache, burn into a bunker, something like that. When we left Afghanistan, there were thousands of vehicles too disabled to bring home, but we didn’t want anyone else using them. Thermite grenade on the engine block will melt straight through in seconds. Needs a strip of magnesium to ignite it, but any fire can do that.”