Wildfire on the Skagit (Firehawks Book 9) (13 page)

Krista turned to follow his gaze, forcing her hand free from his clenched grasp so that she could turn to look.

Due south, beyond the crest of Loomis Mountain, there was an orange glow filling the sky.

Their fireline had held.

Akbar’s hadn’t.

The valley of the South Fork Nooksack was burning—funneling its fire straight down to the Skagit River.

Chapter 13

Emily Beale was still
aloft in her Firehawk when he called, which Evan took to be a bad sign. The helos usually bedded down from sunset to sunrise. Night flying took special skills, which MHA’s senior pilot definitely possessed, and also earned special bonuses. The U.S. Forest Service Incident Commander had to authorize the budget for night flights and they didn’t do that very often.

A little quick wrangling and he had Emily on her way to pick them up after she was done moving Akbar’s team down the valley. Krista was hustling about, getting the other smokies to gather their gear while Evan ran a chainsaw and cleared a helispot.

Starting from Krista’s small dance floor, he circled out fifty feet in all directions and cut down any remaining trees or stumps that stuck up more than three feet high. The helo itself needed a spot ten-by-forty feet cleared to land in, but the spinning rotor blades needed a sixty-foot diameter circle with nothing sticking up high enough to snag a blade—which meant they had to clear a hundred feet for safety.

He finished the same time they did. Smokies left nothing behind, not a hose, not a parachute, not a piece of trash. They were there to defend the forests, not screw them up like so many did.

Evan tried to remind himself of that as he clambered up and down over the heavy slash he’d created, nicking off the occasional branch that stuck upward from the felled trees as he went. Most of the branches had been burned away, so that didn’t take long.

# # #

While they waited for Emily to arrive they ate, but didn’t talk much. It was past midnight and they had pushed hard since early morning. But for a smokie as skilled as Akbar to have lost the line he’d chosen meant that it must have been grim and he’d need help badly.

Krista felt hammered, both physically and emotionally. She’d been holding on so tightly.

In one direction, she could look at all they’d accomplished. The bulk of the valley defined by Bell Creek still burned, but they’d contained it. Now it would be up to the ground crews, who’d only recently arrived at the base of the fire, to kill it the rest of the way. The area would need a major recovery team after that, this forest had been burned hard and wouldn’t be springing back easily.

It was the other direction that was making the smokies silent rather than victorious.

To the south, the orange glow was climbing. They were below the peak of Loomis Mountain, so the rocky peak was outlined in an arc of smoke glowing deep and dangerous orange. The stars which had finally begun showing to the east were blanketed out by the smoke still rising heavily from the west. Even though they sat in silence, the clear air was a relief after eighteen hours of eating smoke.

Krista felt her throat choke closed.

Hearty Creek and all of the animal habitats there, burned. George Peterson Butte, one of the best viewpoints west of the South Fork Nooksack, probably now a pillar of fire.

“C’mon!” she growled at the night because sitting still was killing her.

No one responded. They couldn’t know. To them it was just another fire.

The Twin Sisters Fire was erasing her past. One burning acre after another, it was killing off and erasing everything she’d known as if it had never been. Didn’t anyone understand how little she had to spare?

A hand slid out of the darkness and rested on her shoulder.

“Easy, Krista. We’ll stop it. The forest will come back.”

“But it won’t be the same.”

Evan rubbed her shoulder in what he surely thought was a comforting way.

And it was comforting, damn him. She wanted something to rail against and he wasn’t giving her a target.

“The past is never the same,” he whispered and she could hear his pain.

Yet another thing they had in common, though she had no way to speak of it.

And how could she help but be in love with a man who reached out from inside his own pain to comfort her.

# # #

“Glad you’re still flying,” Evan shouted to Emily as he slid aboard the helo and leaned forward in the gap between the pilots’ seats. “Saving a tired crew from a tough hike.”

MHA’s lead pilot looked back grimly, “It’s what I live for.”

Emily Beale was rock steady. Never happy-go-lucky, but never down either. She was the solid bastion that held MHA’s pilots to such incredible standards. For her to be grim…

“How bad?” he asked.

“Akbar lost half of his gear. He had six people ride out the blowup under their foil fire shelters on a rocky island in the middle of the river. Jeannie had to medevac two to the hospital for second degree burns. Prognosis is good on them, only burned on the extremities.”

“Shit!” was all he could think to say as the smokies piled gear in behind him. Deploying shelters was a last ditch solution, only used when every pre-planned escape route had failed.

“That’s why I’m still aloft, running him fresh supplies because it’s too dark to safely drop any paracargo and he can’t wait until morning.”

Evan tried to remember his map, “Where’s he setting up?”

“Goat Mountain.”

“Whoa!” That he remembered clearly enough, too clearly.

It had the advantage of being far from the present fire, but it would be a last ditch battle before the town. If the fire crossed over or found a way around the forty-seven hundred foot peak, it would sweep down the brutal valleys and near vertical cliffs of the southern face in less than an hour—far too little time to build another defensive line.

If it did escape them it would scorch Krista’s home town of Concrete right off the map, jump the Skagit River, and race off into the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest without blinking.

He remembered how it felt flying in with his ODA attacking an objective up in Lataband Pass, knowing that a lot of munitions supplies were going to reach the bad guys if they didn’t stop them that night. And that would mean a lot of dead soldiers over the next months.

“Not gonna happen!” Evan yelled back at the fire crew.

“Right, Rook!” “You bet!” He could tell they were behind him even though they had no idea what was lying in wait for them.

“This town is
not
gonna burn!”

The shouted agreement sounded with a renewed energy.

Krista looked up at him as they sat on the hard decking of the helo’s cargo bay.

“We won’t let it happen,” he said to her as softly as the rotors.

She nodded, uncertainly, then with more confidence, and finally with conviction.

Evan turned to watch out the front window as they climbed into the night sky. Six of them and their mound of gear barely fit into the Firehawk’s big cargo bay. Within moments, the smokies had located a couple of fatboy boxes stowed aboard the helo and broken them open to restock their PG bags. Someone shoved a banana into his hand. To make it easier to peel, he bit into the stem—tasting that sharp bitterness and not caring.

When they flew clear of the top of Loomis Mountain, the bitterness didn’t stop, even though he was now down to the sweetly ripe fruit.

Akbar’s original fireline had been a wide slice between George Peterson Butte and Loomis Mountain. The two-mile wide valley carved by the South Fork Nooksack had clearly served as a funnel when blowup occurred. On this, the west side of Loomis Mountain, it had blown down the valley like a howitzer.

The fireline had never stood a chance no matter how deeply it was cut.

Now spread below them was a towering wildfire. With sunset, the winds had died and the humidity had climbed a few points. That wasn’t stopping this fire, it was too big, too dug in, but the change was slowing the it down.

Right now it was two miles wide and a half dozen long, coming up fast on ten thousand acres. If it wasn’t quite that big yet, it certainly would be by morning. And it would be climbing Goat Mountain by nightfall. They had half a night and a day to stop it.

“Not much sleeping in tonight,” Krista whispered beside him.

“Not much.”

# # #

From her perch on Goat Mountain, Krista watched landmark after landmark get eaten during the long day. There went the old oak she and Pop camped beneath so many times and the spot she’d bagged her first deer with her bow and known that she was the one making sure they hadn’t gone hungry that month.

The fire was hot enough to send most of the smoke upward. That was a good thing, because it saved them from breathing smoke all day. It also totally sucked because she could watch her childhood being erased with each passing hour.

By the time blowup hit on that second afternoon of the fire, Akbar had a line all down the south and west side of the fire. The helos and four large airtankers had inundated the forest beyond the line with long stripes of red retardant. The backfire wasn’t as effective as the one the day before above the South Fork Divide, but it did the job.

The fire was narrowed and turned.

And the flames was mighty pissed about it.

“Works for me,” she told it. She was pretty damn pissed too.

Goat Mountain was going to be hammered, but Akbar had made a good call, they were ready for it. Or as ready as they could be.

So, in between felling trees, swamping branches, and sweating like a pig in the midday heat, she watched the fire creep toward them.

There went the Jefferson’s couch, a beautiful spruce she and Pop had found lying in the deep shade along Wanlick Creek. The cedar for the Michelson’s dining room set had fallen at Springsteen Lake on of the best swimming spots she’d ever found. When it took out the aspen that one long-ago autumn was, “Spilling gold coins all over us, Krissy,” she knew her father was truly dead and gone. Then the white oak…

Krista turned her back on the fire and did her best to not look again.

Chapter 14

Evan had fought across
the sands of Afghanistan.

He’d jumped two-hundred-and-twenty-three fires over the last five years.

He’d been in his fair share of bar brawls.

This was about the ugliest and most impressive battle he’d ever seen.

They had joined up with Akbar’s crew at two a.m. A fire normally called for two to six smokejumpers. A bad one was jumped by a dozen. The Bell Creek Fire threatening Concrete and the Skagit Valley had the entire MHA contingent of twenty-four smokies and a half-dozen Zulies who’d been returning from Alaska and gotten rerouted.

The fire reached Goat Mountain at sunset. The sky was a fantastic blood red painted in grand swirls by the ash and smoke.

Aircraft had been circling above them all day. Mount Hood Aviation had all six of their helicopters ducking in and out a hundred feet above the treetops, ranging from the thousand-gallon powerhouse of the Firehawks to the little MD500 spot fire killers.

The Forest Service had two of the new, jet-powered BAe-146 fixed-wing air tankers dumping three-thousand gallon loads of retardant in long red stripes. They scattered the crowd of helos with their long straight runs at equally low altitudes.

Circling above them all was MHA’s Incident Commander Air Mark Henderson in his Beech King Air.

Even in pitched battle while in Special Forces, Evan had never seen such an array of air support all in the same place.

A red biplane buzzed around the edge of the fire. Moving through the sunset-and-fire-hazed smoke like it was dodging about a World War I battlefield.

“What the hell?”

“What day is it?” Krista asked beside him. “Friday?”

“Thursday, I think.” Evan watched as one of the helos raced over toward it. Despite the distance, he could hear snatches of someone yelling at the biplane pilot over a PA. Airspace above wildfires was always closed to all other air traffic for safety reasons.

The biplane did a wingover and dove away, back toward the Skagit River.

“Early arrival. Friday through Sunday there’s the North Cascades Vintage Fly-In. It’s one of the big annual events for Concrete. Good thing the helos are based out of Skagit Regional Airport over in Mt. Vernon. Mears Field is going to get crowded fast.”

Evan called that information up to Mark.

Mark didn’t swear much, but began cursing a blue streak on that one; Evan could practically hear him continue despite Mark having let go the transmit key. Moments later, Evan spotted the King Air diving down from its position toward the small airport along the Skagit River. Apparently they were on their own while Mark had a word or twenty with the fly-in’s organizers.

The fire had burned fifteen thousand acres, not counting the five thousand currently on fire and headed right for them.

Darkness descended, though it was still a half hour to sunset. The sun wasn’t strong enough to do more than color the overhanging pall of smoke and ash. Four of the helos not certified for night flying headed back to the airport.

The big fixed wing tankers were grounded as well. Running a high-speed jet two hundred feet above a wildfire on this terrain—in the dark—was a trick that made Evan glad he’d always been a ground-pounder.

“One hour of sleep. That’s all I ask for,” Evan muttered as he scraped more organics off the fireline, away from the fast approaching flames.

“Wimp!” Krista aimed a white-toothed smile from her smoke blackened face. “You had six hours sleep just two nights ago.”

“I did, but my body doesn’t seem to remember it for some reason.”

“I remember a shower,” she teased him.

“No you don’t, Krista. You were out on your feet. I soaped and scrubbed your body and didn’t even earn a happy moan for my troubles.”

She slammed her Pulaski into the soil beside where his had stuck and together they managed to break free a thick clump of roots and toss it toward the far side of the firebreak. As they did so, she let out a deep throaty moan that galvanized his body despite his exhaustion.

She laughed at him as his libido raged him into breathlessness.

Krista was still moving faster and working harder than anyone else on the line, but she’d eased back from scary to merely impossible to keep up with.

“You doing better, Mama Krista?” he asked the next time they rested for a moment to chow down on a couple fistfuls of trail mix that Krista had stashed away somewhere. The chocolate chips had melted, making them a sticky mess that picked up the flavor of the soot on his palm, but he was past caring.

# # #

“I am,” Krista blinked in surprise. She was doing better and it was suddenly disorienting.

The fire had consumed her. She had no love for the town, no real connection to it anymore—nor had she for years.

“Now it’s…just a fire?” Well mostly. “I still want to kick its flaming ass, but it’s no longer destroying my past. I guess that happened a long time ago.”

Evan offered her another handful of her own trail mix as the tendrils of smoke swirled about them. All up and down the line, the smokies would be doing the same, taking on hurried calories in preparation for the imminent arrival of the fire when there wouldn’t be time.

“I lost so much here. I still am losing it,” she waved toward the flames eating up her childhood memories one by one. “But it seems less important now.”

As she said it, she knew why. This man beside her. This man who had cleaned her up in the shower. Who had trusted that she would be safe on the fire. Who hadn’t let her out of his sight for more than a few moments in the last thirty-six hours because he cared that much that she
remained
safe.

Well, she cared that much about him. And that alone made the present more important than the past.

She glanced toward the fire, they still had a few more moments before they had to get back to it.

Krista rested a hand on Evan’s chest and looked at him. He needed—

No, he deserved to know the last piece of the story.

“I know how it must feel to have lost your sister.”

His face clamped down hard. He had the decency not to protest, only shaking his head once in denial, but it was clearly costing him.

“My father was dead within weeks of my starting my first fire season. My only true friend, the only person to ever really believe in me. He didn’t use a rifle, but he might as well have. He had cancer but never treated it because we couldn’t afford it. Never tried, never admitted to it. I found the hospital tests buried in his papers when I cleaned out the house. He held it together until I was gone.”

Evan’s face had shifted. His hand slipped up to cover her own on his chest. “That’s why you fought against the fire the way you did.”

She nodded, now speechless at his perfect understanding of her.

“It was erasing all you had left of your father.”

Krista buried her face against his shoulder. She’d thought it would be easier if she said it, told him why. But it hurt so damn much. All the pain she’d been hiding throughout the two days on the fire, maybe throughout the decade she’d been fighting fire, poured out of her all at once.

She never cried. Not when she had received news of his death, not at his graveside, not when she’d sold the house and shop.

Now, against the shoulder of a man she’d known only a few months, it poured out of her. Not in great wracking sobs, but in streaming, silent tears.

Evan still held her one hand tightly against his chest, and wrapped his other around her shoulders. Held her tight despite the mess she was.

The heat of the tears washed away so much of the pain, but they didn’t fix who she was. Didn’t change that someone who looked like her could never deserve a man like Evan.

She shouldn’t care.

Sure she was crazy about him. Hoped he stayed deluded about her for a good while longer.

But she did care.

Wanting what you can’t have, Krista.
The curse of her life.

She’d wanted a good wife for Pop, but Mom had skipped mere months after Krista was born.

She’d wanted prosperity for him too, but that had never come.

She’d wanted to fit in, to belong, but by sixth grade she’d been the tallest girl in the school—including the high school—and twice as wide.

Firefighting with Mount Hood Aviation was the only place she’d ever fit in, doing a man’s job with her man-strong body.

Firefighting…and curled up against Evan Greene in full gear, stinking of sweat and char.

Oh god. That freshened the font of tears she couldn’t seem to stem. When she eventually lost Evan—when he woke up, saw who she really was and it finally ended—it was going to rip her completely apart.

“Krista, Babe?”

No one had ever called her “Babe.” That’s what you called pretty little things.

“Fire’s coming. You up for it?”

She nodded against his shoulder, relishing his easy strength for just a moment longer.

Then she yanked herself free from his grasp and wiped at her face, glad that the darkness and, soon, a fresh layer of soot would hide their tracks.

“Let’s do it,” she managed on a hoarse croak that sounded like a dying frog. Real attractive.

He nodded in acknowledgment, then did one of those crazy Evan things.

Hooking a hand behind her neck, he kissed her so hard and deep that she had vertigo when he abruptly let go and turned for the fire with one of those cat-ate-the-canary grins of his.

It was only as he walked toward the leading edge of the fireline that her body reported where his other hand had been.

She dusted at her Nomex fire shirt to smear the sooty handprint he’d left over her breast.

Then she too turned toward the fire.

To stand beside her man for as long as he was willing to stand beside her.

# # #

By the time the sun rose and they’d been on the fire for forty-eight straight hours without a break, the smokies were done.

Evan felt as if he’d been shattered, from the inside out. Every movement hurt. His body ached. His hands and feet were blistered and bandaged.

Ox was limping. Ant-man’s face was bloody from where a bad step had sent him tumbling down a slope—only a slash pile had stopped him from a far longer and more probably lethal fall. Akbar sat back against a boulder, head back, massaging a knee, and grinning like a goddamn idiot.

They all were.

The battle had raged back and forth across the ridges of Goat Mountain. Evan tried to estimate how many times he’d climbed it as he’d raced to beat the latest break in the line. Twenty-five hundred feet from valley floor to the peak, at least six times that he could remember, but it could have just as easily been ten. Another couple trips up and down and he’d have climbed the height of Everest.

Pass.
He’d be lucky if he could walk another dozen steps.

He stood beside Krista, looking down. They had their arms around each other’s waist and Evan would be content to stand like that for a long time.

Of all the smokies, they were the only ones not looking toward the still sparking and sizzling, but fully contained, fire.

Instead they stood alone on the south side of Goat Mountain’s summit.

The others admired what they’d done—they’d beaten the monster. Again.

To the south, nearly five thousand feet below them, the narrow slice of the Skagit River valley wandered through the towering peaks of the North Cascades. The trees were dark green with mid-summer, but the river was bright beneath the high sun, only thinly softened by the last of the fire’s smoke drifting lazily upward.

From this distance, they could see Concrete sitting inside a wide bend of the river.

“There’s a joke about Concrete,” Krista spoke softly beside him.

“Tell me.”

“Most of the town is down in the Skagit’s flood-plain. A lot of old single- and double-wide manufactured homes. We say one of the advantages of living there is that you never have to clean your house.” Like a good storyteller, she left a pause for him to fill.

“Never?”

“Nope. You just wait for the Skagit to flood each spring. Then you open the front and back door and it washes the place clean.”

He chuckled dutifully. “Small towns.”

They watched the vintage planes climbing up out of the field. With the helos and air tankers no longer on site, they’d opened up the air space and everyone was making a circle out to see the results of the burn. This was a year of the fly-in that would be talked about for a long time.

He made a point of waving at each one as it passed overhead and waggled its wings at them.

“Let’s go,” he suggested.

“Where?”

He nodded down the slope.

“Into Concrete? On purpose?” she made her voice sound horrified.

“Henderson said we get a couple days off. I’d like to see where you grew up.”

“Do I get to see where you grew up?”

He shrugged, surprised at how small a pinch remained. “Sure, as long as we don’t have to meet my parents.”

“Deal.”

Evan wondered at how easily they were both moving beyond their past. Until now it had so defined his every action, but with Krista beside him he now understood that the past didn’t matter. What mattered was who he’d become and who he’d be in the future.

He looked at Krista in surprise.

“What?”

He shook his head and simply let himself enjoy her stunning blue eyes.

Some things he wasn’t ready to say, even if he was thinking them.