Wild Fire

by M. L. Buchman

  He faced Tham Chau, “Someone wishes your park to burn. Not nature. Not old bombs. That may have started it, but this is malicious. Find out who.” He half expected her to go running from the room to find out. Instead, he could see her jaw clench tightly as she puzzled at it herself.

  While she did, he turned to Steve.

  “Look within the body of the fire for—Ripley, what temperature does thermite burn at?”

  “Four thousand Fahrenheit.”

  “Steve, look for that.”

  “What are you thinking?” Ripley tried to follow where Gordon had gone. Very few people made her feel slow, but mild-mannered Gordon was moving in a direction she couldn’t follow.

  “Those three jumps aren’t enough to explain this fire’s erratic behavior. What if there are thermite booby traps spread throughout the forest? Those three were probably sparked off by embers traveling just ahead of the fire. Normally, the fire would roll over the thermite and the ignition and flare-up would be masked by the flames themselves.”

  “Got ’em,” Steve called out. “Holy shit! It has been going on all along. I have over a dozen of these.”

  Gordon was just nodding. “And if you map the trail of them, they’re leading straight into the heart of Phong Nha-Ke Bang Park.” He didn’t make it a question.

  “Yes,” Steve confirmed. “That’s why the bulk of it is continuing due north despite the easterly winds blowing it toward Laos.”

  Tham Chau jolted at the last word.

  Gordon didn’t need to know what she was thinking to know that the threat was real—humans rather than nature were at work here.

  He began barking out orders as he strode out of the dining room, Tham Chau racing along beside him. They all hurried after the two of them, breakfast abandoned without a thought. Even Mark had to scramble to keep up. Though Ripley was unsure why he was so happy—it seemed an odd moment to be grinning like an idiot.

  The few diners watched them go with looks of alarm. The dawn light was only now illuminating the palm trees and beach beyond the windows and most people at the resort were probably still asleep.

  She spotted several looks of surprise as the rest of the team raced after Gordon. They kept looking at Mark in surprise, even though he was no longer smiling.

  Mark had been the strategist to the team’s tacticians, especially his wife.

  Now it seemed Gordon was the master strategist to the team’s tacticians, especially—

  Ripley caught her boot hard on the threshold as she raced out the door to the waiting vans.

  Especially her?

  A glance back revealed that there wasn’t any threshold marring the smooth floor.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “We’re changing it up,” Gordon announced at the airfield. “Tham Chau, you’re with Vanessa. I want the two of you hunting the thermite traps. Their placement through the jungle is very linear and the spacing is relatively predictable. Tham Chau, get your ground teams ahead of the fire and track those down. I want them disabled, cleaned up. Use encrypted radios only. I don’t want whoever is out there doing this to know we’re onto them.”

  They rushed off together.

  “Mark, you’re with Vern; you’re the oversight and protection for them. Fight the fire where you can, but your top priority is their safety.”

  Mark thumped Gordon once hard on the shoulder. No words were necessary. Gordon could feel that he finally had a lead on this fire, one that even Mark hadn’t seen—though there was no doubt that Mark was no more than seconds behind him.

  What was strange was that none of the others had seen it. It was as if he’d pulled a magic rabbit out of the hat. Not Mickey with all of his experience or Vern with his military background.

  Not even Ripley, which was particularly interesting. She’d followed along quickly enough when he led the way, but she was…she was the military half of Emily’s latest pairing. Gordon could see the big picture, but she was the one that the rear admiral had treated with such respect.

  Ripley was the one who knew about thermite.

  Ripley was also the team builder. He could see how the women had embraced her. After just a few weeks she was already as close to them as Gordon was to the guys he’d worked with for years. He didn’t doubt that she’d have them all swooning around her as well given a little time—and it wasn’t just her looks.

  “I’m going up with Ripley and Brad,” he continued doling out the changes. Partly because he just flat wanted to, but mostly because he didn’t want to be stuck flying a fixed-wing aircraft above the fray if this got down and dirty. “Steve, rig me a couple of screens at the observer’s seat on the Diana Prince: visual, infrared, and get a drone up there with radio surveillance. Can you do that?”

  “An EM package? Sure, but why?”

  “EM?” Now it was his turn to be confused.

  “Electro-magnetic surveillance package. I can pick up radio, cell phone, most anything you want,” he began unpacking a second drone as he spoke.

  “What the hell?” Ripley had come over and looked down into the black crate Steve had opened.

  “Great, huh?” Steve rapped a knuckle on the drone’s skin. Rather than a bright ring of aluminum, there was a dull thump of composite material.

  Ripley dragged Gordon aside. He used it as an excuse to sweep her into his arms and kiss her. He ignored the fist thump against his shoulder and just pulled her in closer. For six days he’d done little more than hold her while he slept. Occasionally they managed to stay awake long enough to shower together, but over the last few days even that had become more about getting clean than playing together. Had they even had sex in the last few days? He didn’t think so and at the moment couldn’t imagine how he’d done that.

  Right now he felt supercharged. Ripley leaning so hard against him that he was pinned against the clear acrylic bubble of the Aircrane’s observer’s window made him wish they could take each other down this second. Here. Now! Just bury himself in the glory that was Wonder Woman Ripley Vaughan. She made him feel more alive than he had ever imagined possible.

  When she finally broke the kiss but continued to lie against him, they were both gasping for air.

  “Do you,” Ripley managed between desperate breaths that were heaving her chest against his, “have any idea…how sexy it is…to watch you think?”

  Gordon burst out laughing, “As good as watching you fly?”

  “Better!” She leaned back enough to smile up at him.

  “Not a chance!” That got them both laughing.

  Then she sobered abruptly in that I’m-now-all-business way she did—a transition which was also sexy as hell. It made him want to push and see just how much he would have to do to break that military shell, that mighty shield she wore against her past. What would it take to make Lieutenant Vaughan groan with that sound his lover Ripley made the moment before sexual release slammed into her?

  “Gordon, seriously,” and there was his Lieutenant Ripley in full force.

  Because now wasn’t the time, he kissed her on the tip of the nose, wondering how a woman could be so powerful and so cute at the same time.

  “Mount Hood Aviation has a stealth drone?”

  Gordon shrugged. He knew it was stealth. “It’s part of the non-disclosure agreement we signed. You shall not discuss MHA’s drone capabilities with any other party. I assume that’s the bird they’re talking about.”

  There was the sharp hiss and clang of the launcher as Steve got the stealth version of the ScanEagle aloft.

  “We didn’t even have one of those on the John C. Stennis! That’s top-tier, and probably very secret military gear. You are…a civilian outfit.”

  And there it was. You. MHA was something other than Ripley Vaughan and even in the heat of frustration, she didn’t let go of that. Well, he took some courage from the thought that no one had ever said it would be easy to lasso Wonder Woman.

  “Well?”

  “Well what? We don’t have time for this now,”
he squeezed her lovely taut behind as a tease.

  This time the protesting fist thump slammed into his shoulder hard enough to hurt.

  “Get your helicopter ready,” he told her.

  As if in answer, the APU screamed to life right over their heads. In seconds, the Aircrane’s main engines were clawing to life and the big rotor began turning.

  She kissed him on the nose with the same light tease he’d just done to her. Then she squeezed his ass before stepping aside and climbing the ladder up into Diana Prince’s cockpit.

  The entire flight was aloft in minutes.

  Ripley flew the firefight.

  She wished she could turn around and see what Gordon was doing. She couldn’t hear what he was saying most of the time. He, Steve, Vanessa, and Mark had set up a dedicated radio link, an encrypted one.

  Civilian Mount Hood Aviation. Stealth drones and encryption-capable radios. Gordon even had Vanessa drop one to the ground team sent ahead to look for the thermite traps. Everyone else had been instructed to discuss nothing except the fire itself over the air.

  Maybe it was just as well. She’d almost said far more than she was comfortable with. You are…a civilian outfit, had only been a last-moment recovery.

  It was obvious that MHA was heavily equipped and supported by the military. Whoever heard of a firefighting team getting a ride on an aircraft carrier? But the line was clear. MHA was technically a hundred percent civilian. Not some military contractor like Blackwater (now called Academi), G4S Risk Management, Triple Canopy (now also part of Academi), and all the others. MHA were like special firefighting consultants.

  Now that they knew where the fire was headed and how it was behaving, they could tackle it rationally. The head was over five kilometers wide, but the thermite trap line was only a half-kilometer path up the east side of the fire. So they hit the west side hard and began the process of narrowing the fire.

  By focusing all of their forces, the ground team cleared a fireline through the trees a half kilometer long and twenty meters wide in just a matter of hours. The fire slammed against the firebreak full force, but between the clean fireline and the helicopters dumping water on it, they were able to hold it at bay. Embers sparked and spit, but once they pulled off the teams from the now-beaten flank fires, they had enough people to battle flying embers. It was a pitched battle to hold that section of the fire in place until it had burned all its fuel or been soaked down. But it was working.

  But protests about MHA’s role and equipment hadn’t been what almost slipped out: You are…killing me here, Gordon. Despite the stresses and exhaustion of the fire, he had proven different from any male she’d ever met.

  He was more interested in holding her than screwing her. Even when he was past exhaustion, every night he had pulled her back against him until it seemed they were one body. And when they did have sex, he still wasn’t “screwing” her. She could feel the need in him sometimes, that hot, frantic frustration desperately seeking release. Somehow, somewhere inside him, he always managed to turn it. At times he was gentle, at times desperate, but he never failed to recall that there were two of them and she wasn’t just some soft and warm vessel waiting for a male to empty himself into.

  And she hadn’t been kidding. Watching Gordon take threads she couldn’t even see and weave them into a tapestry of the obvious had been incredible to watch. And there was more there. Ripley could see that, even if there hadn’t been time to ask what it was.

  Yet even in that moment, he’d given. A kiss that wasn’t amused, triumphant, or condescending. It was a kiss of welcome.

  Gods! He really was killing her.

  Fire. She understood fire. That’s what she’d focus on.

  She was able to run the sea snorkel in long, swooping re-tankings along the Son River. She even flew close enough to the end of the river to see where it disappeared into the Phong Na Cave. There it ran twenty kilometers underground before reappearing on the other side of the mountains. Phong Na had been the record-holding cave in the world prior to the 2009 discovery of Son Doong Cave, now the biggest in the world by far.

  She’d like to see that. There weren’t a lot of caves in Oklahoma and even fewer on aircraft carriers. Actually, except for members of the deck crew and air wing, a carrier pretty much was a steel cave with no windows, but it still didn’t count. She’d only ever been in one natural cave, the one-hour tour of the Oregon Caves not far from Erickson Air-Crane’s operations base in Medford. Son Doong must really be something.

  “We found one,” Tham Chau reported, her voice going even higher than normal in her excitement.

  Gordon sagged with relief. Good! He wasn’t going crazy. “Describe it.”

  Tham Chau relayed the ground team’s description in bits and pieces. “Approximately twenty liters of powder.”

  That made his head spin. A five gallon paint bucket’s worth of powder and Ripley had told him that a thermite grenade held perhaps a cup.

  “Spread in a line three meters long. With magnesium strips every half meter. A spark on any one of them would be enough to light the entire mass.”

  “Where would whoever did this get so much thermite?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Ripley,” Gordon turned up the volume on the intercom. He had enjoyed having her voice in the background even during the moments when he couldn’t be paying attention to the fire itself.

  “Here, Gordon,” her voice was deeply sultry enough to have Brad laughing.

  He felt it like a punch below the belt. He’d never needed anyone the way he needed her. It was strange to sit here, back to back, unable to see her.

  “Did you need something?”

  “Yes, to get my breath back. And that’s a loaded question.”

  Ripley’s happy giggle tickled down his spine. Gordon had twisted enough that he could see Brad’s startled expression as he turned to look at Ripley in shock. Gordon would take that as a good sign.

  “They found about five gallons of thermite in a pile. How hard would that be to make?”

  “Five gallons?” Ripley nearly choked on her own surprise. “Uh, rust is everywhere. Aluminum powder needs only soda drink cans and a very good blender. Magnesium strip is also very easy. Good thermite mostly takes more effort, but only a little more technology. Pretty common ingredients. There are some common additives, but they aren’t needed to be effective.”

  Gordon sighed. No help tracing the culprit there. He turned his attention back to his encrypted radio link to Tham Chau.

  “Have them load it into buckets. Vanessa can carry them back to the base for your people to deal with. Get the mess cleared up and have your people search for the next one.”

  “Now that we know what to look for, we will be much faster.”

  “Good news. We need that on this fire.” He looked at the terrain ahead and knew they needed more than that. They were headed into the more rugged mountains. The ground crews would soon have to be part goat to navigate the terrain.

  They would also have to be very careful about deploying the teams in such a harsh landscape. Steep slopes would slow down a ground crew—but not the fire. They’d have to be very careful to not let any personnel become trapped. It was a safe bet they didn’t each have their own individual five-hundred-dollar foil fire shelter. A burnover event here was guaranteed to be fatal.

  He could shift the fire battle to the east side and trust that the investigation team didn’t miss any thermite surprises. Then at least they could start squeezing the fire away from the most precious sections of the park.

  Some instinct stopped Gordon’s hand halfway to the radio. Maybe they should leave that side of the fire alone…or was he just being paranoid?

  “Hey, Ripley?”

  She concentrated on scooping the last five hundred gallons out of the Son River and into her tanks.

  “Two thousand,” Brad called out. “Two-two. Two-three. Two-four. Twenty-five hundred,” he announced as she retracted the sea snorkel and p
ulled aloft.

  “Yes, Gordon.” It was such a lovely view, the jungle crowded tight to either edge of the river. Up ahead, the massive cliff face with the dark cave’s mouth that the river poured into. Tham Chau had said that normally tourist boats would be lined up at the cave entrance. Phong Na cave was much more accessible and Son Doong—a hard day’s hike over rough country even though they were less than ten kilometers apart by air…or fire. Two days for tourists.

  “I need a reality check.”

  “You’re an awesome lover. You have no concerns in that department.” It came out as a tease but Ripley couldn’t believe she’d just said that. Lover? Who the hell was she kidding? Ripley Vaughan never took lovers, at least not any more. It was a word that had been stricken from her vocabulary by the “Weasel.” Even then she hadn’t used that word.

  “That isn’t what I was asking,” Gordon sounded as if he suddenly was doubting himself.

  Ripley peeked at Brad. He was keeping his attention carefully out the right-side window, though if his face was as red as his neck below the edge of the helmet, then he was actively glowing with embarrassment.

  “Well, you shouldn’t be asking about it,” the tease slipped out despite her rapidly escalating horror at what was happening inside her. “You rock my world every time, lover.” She could practically feel the heat radiating off Brad’s face. Teasing two men for the price of one made it a good day in any girl’s book.

  And it was true. He did. Every single time. But for the price of a tease she had spoken…truth? Well it was no goddamn truth that she wanted to know about.

  “I meant about the fire.”

  “Spoilsport,” she managed to keep her tone even as she climbed up over the new fireline the ground team was cutting and worked spot fire control for the newly-narrowed flank.

  “I’ll make up for it later.”