Page 103 of Into the Fire

Chapter twenty-six

Boone

Dante was already moving along the edge of the shelf, keeping the seam in the smoke open between himself and the shadowy figure. I caught his arm.

“Hollis.”

He walked over with the binoculars still in his hands.

“You’ve got the crew and you’ve got the rock. If anything changes—wind, a new start above you, anything you don’t like—you take them over the top into the black. Don’t wait for me and don’t call for permission. Just go.”

“Copy.”

“Keep air attack on him. Position reports every time you can see him. That’s your job now, not the fire.”

Hollis looked past me, down the slope, and found the figure without the glasses. “And you two?”

“We’re going after him.”

Shep had drifted a step off the rock toward us. Hollis put a hand on his chest without looking at him, and Shep stopped.

“Nobody follows us,” I said to all of them. “Nobody.”

I keyed the radio. “Air attack, Silvertip. The starts are human-caused. We have eyes on the individual—on foot, upper third of the fork, moving uphill along the new starts. Relay to county for Deputy Hanson. The name is Keene.”

“Copy Silvertip. Relaying.”

Dante had pulled away from me. He was at the west end of the shelf, looking at the ground between us and Marty.

He laid out our route. “Not straight down. Straight down puts us below that last start. We stay on the top edge of the shelf until we’re just above him, and then we take the spine down.” He looked at me. “If we stay above him, he has to come up past us or go back down into the fire.”

“I’m behind you,” I said.

I counted my crew, and then I followed Dante along the shelf with the fire working below us and the smoke pulsing up through the timber in waves.

Marty saw us inside the first hundred yards. We crossed a stretch of open stone where the smoke thinned, and down the slope Marty stopped. He held still a moment, a torch hanging from one hand. Then he turned uphill and left the flagged line for the first time all afternoon, angling toward the head of the draw.

He took the shortest route. It was a strip of loose ground running up between two ribs of rock, gray with old ash and shale. Dante didn’t even glance at it. He kept us on the stone.

Marty hit the loose strip at a climb, and his boots slid. He grabbed at a rock, went down on one knee, got up, and made maybe ten feet of progress with the next twenty steps.

Dante brought us onto the high rock while Marty was still fighting the shale, and we came out on a rounded spine of bare stone at the head of his route with the unburned timber of the upper draw at our backs. Below us, Marty stopped climbing.

He stood on the slope, breathing hard, and looked for another way up.

There wasn’t one that didn’t go through us.

From the spine, I saw what he’d been climbing toward. A gray tab sat on the nearest trunk at chest height. Further on was a second strip of ribbon hanging off a limb.

Everything below us was burning or lit. This was what was left of the route.

I shot two photos with the phone—the tab and the ribbon beyond it.

Marty quit trying to climb. He cut sideways instead, walking under the base of our rock. He reached the low western toe of the timber ahead of us and tipped the torch to the first marked tree.

“Marty!” Dante started to run. “Don’t—”

Marty looked up. He watched Dante coming across the rock toward him as he lowered the torch into the duff.