Wild Fire

by M. L. Buchman

  “You must really love that helicopter. Making me jealous there, Ripley.”

  “Don’t be. I love you way more than that.”

  And the world went strangely silent. Like that slow motion moment that occurred during the split second before an accident. The words had come out of her mouth. As she slowly raised her head to gauge Gordon’s reaction, she saw small blades of fresh mown grass tumbling slowly across the pavement, driven by an afternoon breeze so light she hadn’t noticed it on landing. At the distant terminal she could see one of the rare passenger planes taxiing up to the terminal—she could practically see each beat of its propellers—but she didn’t hear a thing louder than her own indrawn breath and the pounding of her heart.

  Gordon’s face changed even as she focused on it. There hadn’t been anger there, which she had totally deserved. Instead, there had been a thoughtful expression as if she were an intriguing puzzle.

  Then, a smile formed slowly. One that started simultaneously on lips, cheeks, and crinkling at the corners of his blue eyes richer than the sunlit sky.

  “More than your helicopter. Wow! That’s a good thing, right?”

  Ripley could only nod, her hair swooping slowly back and forth, her brain still turning everything into slow motion.

  “I’m glad we got that straightened out.” He waved a hand back toward Brad and her helicopter, “Then what was all that?”

  If she could answer that…

  She went to put her face back down on her arms, but Gordon reached out and caught her chin, forcing her to continue looking at him. But he didn’t speak. He just waited. Waited and smiled when he should be screaming at her for unprofessional and dangerous conduct.

  “I do love you.” It was less surprising the second time she said it. And the world snapped back into focus. Normal speed. The thrumming of the passenger plane’s propellers as it reached the terminal and wound down. The groan of someone…

  “Brad!” Ripley jolted to her feet and raced back to the scene of her crime.

  Brad was sitting up, blinking hard, and rubbing the back of his head.

  “Oh, god!” Ripley knelt beside him. “I’m so sorry. I can’t believe that I did that.”

  “I can’t either,” Janet didn’t sound too angry. “Do you really love Gordon so much that you had to punch Brad?”

  “Do I what?” Yet she’d said it to him just moments ago. It simply hadn’t sunk in yet.

  Janet rolled her eyes.

  “I’d roll my eyes at you,” Brad said softly. “But it would hurt too much.”

  “How can I ever make it up to you?”

  “First, never do that again,” he hissed sharply as Ripley ran gentle fingers on the lump at the back of his head. It was a big one, but her fingers didn’t come away with blood on them.

  “I swear. Oh god, I absolutely swear.”

  “Second,” Janet actually had the decency to smile at her, “we’ll come up with something really juicy and totally embarrassing later.”

  “More embarrassing than knowing all the steps to the Rocky Horror ‘The Time Warp’ dance?”

  “Way!” Brad and Janet said in unison.

  “Water in the aft tank,” Brenna announced as she walked up. “Who checked the fuel this morning?”

  Ripley bowed her head. She’d done the pre-flight on the helicopter to avoid dealing with Gordon.

  “Janet,” Brenna said harshly enough to have Ripley looking up at her in shock. “Didn’t your maintenance instructor ever tell you to never, ever, under any circumstances let a pilot touch your aircraft?”

  “Totally my bad,” Janet agreed.

  “Crap,” was the only response Ripley could think of.

  “I checked everything else,” Brenna said in a more kindly voice. “Looks good. Fuel truck is done. Boss man is itching to go.”

  Ripley looked around and saw that Gordon was already back in the observer’s seat, working the encrypted radio channel.

  “What do you say, Brad?” Ripley asked as gently as she could. “Still willing to fly with the bitch?”

  “You mean the one with the sucker punch?”

  “That would be me.”

  “Sure.” He started to his feet, then sat back down on the pavement abruptly and winced his eyes closed. “Or maybe not so much.”

  Ripley felt worse than awful as she and Janet helped him slowly to his feet. They each took an arm and led him over to where a water cooler, Denise, and a couple of extra chairs had been placed under an awning.

  He groaned as he settled. Brenna handed him two aspirin, a bottle of water, and an ice pack.

  Ripley stood there for a moment, feeling completely helpless. She needed another pilot. Technically, one pilot could fly an Aircrane, it was that gentle an aircraft, but the bird was neither certified or advisable for solo flight. Especially not with the busy radio work over a forest fire.

  She looked at the three women hovering around the disabled pilot. There was only one other choice for a pilot.

  “Sorry,” she whispered to Brad as she kissed him on the head.

  “Maybe once the aspirin kicks in,” he said softly.

  Ripley decided that was one of the nicest things that anyone had ever said to her. Despite her momentary irrationality, he was still willing to fly with her. She looked up at Janet over Brad’s bowed head.

  “You’ve got a good man here.”

  Janet was suddenly all teary and nodded fiercely. “So do you,” she whispered. “Now go.”

  Ripley went.

  “Front seat, Gordon,” Ripley nudged his shoulder to rouse him out of his intense focus after she latched the door.

  “What?”

  “Brad’s down. You’re up. Let’s go!” She didn’t wait, but climbed into the front right seat and began working down the “Warm Start” checklist while Gordon moved.

  Not having Brad beside her was strange.

  But having Gordon beside her was so right. Which shouldn’t be possible, but it was. Somewhere between calling him “lover” and punching out poor Brad’s lights, Ripley had changed. Had changed so much that being with Gordon they way they’d been now made perfect sense. Perfect sense? No, she wanted…more. Wasn’t that a shocker.

  Gordon managed to get settled in the seat about the same time Ripley had it ready for takeoff. It took him a few moments to figure out how to patch the encrypted radio into the selectable radio feed. He couldn’t find a place for the tablet that Steve had given him to monitor the drone’s feed.

  Ripley snatched it from his hand and stuffed it into a door pocket. Then she leaned over across the middle console until she was practically in his lap. She tapped the controls around one of the big LCD screens mounted in the main console dashboard. Steve’s drone feed appeared on the screen.

  But his attention was on the line of her shoulder and neck. And the smell of her. Her scent was so unique that he’d never been able to classify it, had never thought to. She simply smelled like Ripley.

  “I love you,” he whispered over the intercom.

  “You smoothie. You never said that before,” she sat back up, her voice once again a tease as she exchanged hand signals with Brenna.

  Hadn’t he told Ripley that he loved her? It felt as if he had.

  Gordon looked around in time to see Janet climbing up the ladder on the side of the hull close beside his seat. It was one of the strange parts of starting an Aircrane. On every engine start, a mechanic climbed a dozen feet up until their head was just a foot or two from the massive rotor whirling above. From there they performed a final visual check, which was very effective because the engines were uncowled—their workings visible for all to see.

  “You certainly showed me enough times, though,” Ripley said softly. “I’m sorry that I was so slow to pick up on that.”

  “You’ll get better with practice,” Gordon was finding that himself. At first thinking about being in love with Ripley had been a deep shock, but he was now to the point where he couldn’t imagine not lo
ving her. Not even when she was in a pissed-off stupid mood like a few minutes ago.

  “I thought we were already pretty good, but I’ll practice with you anytime you want…lover.”

  There was a strange pause before the final word that he wasn’t going to try to analyze. As if she was tasting it for the first time. No, he absolutely wasn’t going to ask what she was thinking.

  Ripley waved at Janet’s thumbs-up from safely to the side and then lifted off to head back to the fire. Firehawk Oh-three was inbound for refueling and Ripley waggled Diana Prince’s rotor in a friendly wave.

  “Not quite the kind of practice I meant,” Gordon figured that was a safe enough reply. Then he pictured her with her back against the glass of the bathroom wall and her eyes closed as he took her in the shower. “But that’s a date.”

  To stop the conversation before it ran completely our of hand, Gordon switched the encrypted radio into the shared circuit.

  “I have his location,” Steve said over the radio. “What he called R-17 is our T-15. That means that there must have been two more thermite reactions back in the fire that we missed. Probably from before our arrival.”

  Ripley didn’t need to be a genius to figure out what they were talking about. Steve had numbered each thermite booby trap as it led away from the fire’s point of origin. Someone else had a different numbering system. That meant they’d overheard a bad guy.

  “Vanessa is closest.”

  “Vanessa,” Gordon called over the radio. “Make a pass or two over the area Steve identified. Make it look as if you’re carrying water back and forth. See if you can spot this guy.”

  “Roger.”

  “Steve, can you get me the other end? Where he’s headed?”

  “Still working on it. I figured to focus on the mobile element first.”

  “Good call. Now hurry it up. Sunset isn’t that far off.”

  Ripley had reached the Son River. She lined up and lowered the snorkel to refill the tanks. “Why is sunset important?”

  “The transmission Steve intercepted said that ‘they’d really show the Vietnamese scum tonight.’ Or words like that. Tonight is ninety minutes off.”

  Ripley came in close behind the two Firehawks. They flew side by side along the latest firebreak, knocking a double-wide swath of fire out of the crown. She went for a lighter coverage intended to cool the whole area farther. Ripley made four separate runs dumping twenty-five percent of her load each time.

  “I do like this aircraft,” Gordon kept turning around to watch the results of the drop out the observer’s window wall.

  “She’s such a neat little, sweet little craft. Never mind, you still don’t know Gilbert and Sullivan.”

  “Same show, or a different one? Are there more than one?”

  “There are over a dozen, but that’s the same one.”

  “What’s it about?” Gordon sounded genuinely interested.

  “How do you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Do what!” Ripley could only shake her head as she returned to the river. The two Firehawks, with Mickey’s 212 in formation this time, were already headed back to the fire. “How do you segment your emotions like that?”

  “Segment them from what?” He was poking at the damn screen, changing colors and zoom factors. Was he even paying attention?

  “I need to decide whether or not to get a new pair of boots and what color dress to wear to the ball.” She loaded up another twenty-five hundred gallons of water and turned back for the fire.

  “Red,” he said in a gravelly voice. “You, in a slinky red dress? Oh yeah, now we’re talking.”

  “You heard that?” She glanced over but he hadn’t looked up from the screen. “Are you really listening to me?”

  “Not any more. I’m still back on the slinky red dress. Do you tango?”

  “No!”

  “Me neither. Too bad. Bet we’d look good together. Well you would; no one would notice me. Not with you around.”

  She would. He was the sort of man she’d never have noticed before, and couldn’t help noticing now. He left far more of an impression than an alpha like Mark or everybody’s buddy Mickey. He was…

  Ripley had no idea how to finish that sentence. Why did that happen every single time she tried to describe Gordon to herself?

  Asking the question didn’t help her find the answer.

  Chapter Twenty

  The rugged landscape broke the firefight into several pieces.

  A long sideways leg of wind-driven fire had sliced to the west.

  The eastern branch that he hadn’t dared touch, for fear of revealing their knowledge to the arsonists armed with thermite, was now open for the battle. Thank goodness. There were a half-dozen villages under immediate threat.

  He now unleashed everything MHA and Tham Chau could bring to bear on the eastern flank. They slammed into the flank like a juggernaut; nothing was going to stop them until it was killed dead.

  A third head, a nasty burn punching into the center of the massive park, climbed up the middle between the two other fronts.

  Fighting the center of a fire was typically a fool’s errand. Every effort would be in constant risk of being flanked to either side. A wind shift, or even an unexpected fire jump across the uneven terrain, could trap and kill a ground team.

  “Stay on the east,” Gordon told Mickey and the three Firehawks. It was where the Vietnamese ground teams were concentrated anyway.

  Tham Chau had protested, but Gordon was forced to ignore that. He couldn’t win the central firefight without any assistance on the ground.

  Yet Steve had localized the other end of the arsonists’ radio communication as being in the general vicinity of this middle fork of the fire.

  With everyone fighting the eastern front, the chances of tripping another thermite booby trap was significantly lowered. Besides, they had cleared them all the way up to the villages that clustered near the center of the park. Hundreds of homes, thousands of residents whose homes might now be saved.

  But if the one traveling arsonist was returning to base…he’d be somewhere near the central head.

  Publicly he re-tasked Vanessa to “fight” the central fire; and privately on the encrypted radio he kept her after their elusive quarry.

  Steve sent the conventional drone over the eastern fire and Gordon used his data feed to keep an eye on that fire. He assigned whole sections of the firefight to Robin, Mickey, Jeannie, and Vern aloft with Mark.

  Gordon wanted these bad guys. And he wanted them badly. He would fly oversight on the central head.

  “Work with Vanessa,” he told Ripley.

  “Against that?” She nodded toward the middle fire burning fast and hot along the steep slopes. “Diana Prince and an MD 530 against a hellcat wildfire. Sounds like my kind of impossible challenge.”

  “Go for it, Wonder Woman.”

  And she did.

  Ripley never ceased to amaze him. He had just given her an impossible task that could never succeed, and she’d made it a joke and taken it in stride.

  It made her outburst at the airport all the more surprising…outburst and a fine right punch. Her attack on Weasel Williams had been justified, even the admiral agreed. Though it still rankled deep inside that she was the one to deck him and not Gordon. It also really bothered him that she had slept with…that. He didn’t expect her to be a twenty-nine-year-old virgin. Or a thirty-two-year-old one or…he didn’t even know when her birthday was. But knowing that Slime-ball Navy Boy had ever had his hands on her incredible body just pissed him off.

  Then he connected the pieces and he laughed.

  “What?” Ripley asked.

  Nope! There was no way he was explaining that one to her.

  Gordon himself had never struck at anyone, except the most dangerous man he’d ever met. What idiot would ever think of attempting to punch Mark Henderson? His kind of idiot. One who thought he was about to lose Ripley Vaughan just two days after he met h
er.

  Ripley had taken on a much less dangerous target, poor Brad.

  But now Gordon understood that she’d done it for the same reason he had. She’d “used” him sexually, trying to prove that her walls were as high as the average male’s. And for just a moment, it had worked. She’d convinced herself that she’d scared him off. And it had taken Janet to see through it.

  “Do you really love Gordon so much that you had to punch Brad?”

  He had overheard Janet’s question and scooted for the safety of the Aircrane’s cockpit while he tried to figure that out for himself. He’d just realized that he’d felt that way since the moment he met Ripley Vaughan.

  No. He definitely wouldn’t be explaining himself any time soon.

  Ripley led a two-woman attack on a kilometer-long fire front.

  Worse, per Gordon’s instructions, Vanessa was traveling several minutes extra each way for water so that she could continue her search for the roving arsonist. Because the area was between the central and eastern head, it wasn’t safe for a ground team to search for him, even if they could have crossed the rugged terrain. The risk of them getting caught between the fires was unacceptable.

  Gordon remained focused on the eastern fire, coordinating everything from refueling breaks to attack plans and ground efforts. She eavesdropped as he conferred with Mark.

  Those were fascinating conversations. Despite Mark’s Night Stalker Major (retired) personality, he was an exceptional—if brusque—trainer. He never told Gordon what to do, but let him use Mark as a sounding board to test his ideas.

  At first she was a little piqued that he didn’t ask her first, but she got over that quickly enough listening to them as she and Vanessa did what little they could to narrow the central fire. Gordon and Mark were no longer talking about fire tactics.

  In her Seahawk, she’d been noted as a top tactician, able to execute any order flawlessly.

  They were talking strategy, which was almost another language.

  “If we can crowd the fire up against this slope, we can defeat it when it tries to cross the ridgeline.”

  “This firebreak would be more effective if we shifted it two hundred meters south. It will take the load off Ground Team Four until reinforcements can reach them—those guys have been at the center of the fight for the last forty-eight hours and must be hammered.”