Page 26 of Into the Fire

He looked at me across the ready room, and he almost smiled.

Chapter seven

Dante

Igrabbed a mug of coffee from the ready room at eleven a.m. It tasted like it had been strained through the toes of an old boot. I drank it on the steps with the sunlight creeping toward me and heard Marty through the open Operations window, running somebody in Helena through the same fuel invoice for the third time that week.

Then his voice changed.

It didn’t get louder. It got shorter. “Say the legal again.” A pause. “Time of report.” Another pause, and I heard his chair roll. Then the horn sounded.

Two long blasts. Fire call.

Marty emerged from Operations with a printed page in his hand and read it without ceremony. “Smoke reported, Whitmore Creek drainage, broken timber, couple acres at report. Lightning went through there Sunday night. Air attack’s requesting jumpers for initial fight.”

Boone appeared. The base moved around him, nobody running, but everybody suddenly headed somewhere.

“Load of four. Me, Vega, Hollis, Shepherd. Nash is spotting.”

I was at the rack before the horn’s echo off the mountains died. Jumpsuit. Harness with leg straps and a chest strap. Helmet and gloves. Letdown rope. Reserve seated and pinned. Gear bag. Water. Then check the man beside you.

Shep was beside me. “Whitmore’s good country,” he said. “There’s a stock trail that comes up from the creek. We used it on a fire two years ago, well, near it, it was really more toward—”

“Save the oxygen for the plane,” Hollis said.

Boone came down the line and checked us. Hollis first. Then me, with a tug at the leg straps and chest strap, and a look at the reserve pins.

We walked out to the Otter with Nash ahead of us carrying the drift streamers he’d drop over the fire to test the wind. The plane sat with its door off, the spinning propeller sending hot, choppy air across the ramp.

I climbed in and took my seat. The floor buzzed up through my boots. I smelled canvas, exhaust, and someone’s sunscreen. Boone sat across from me with Marty’s page folded into his chest pocket.

Lancaster brought the Otter up to power, and the vibration deepened under my boots. We rolled, lifted, and the base swung away below: the racks, tower, ready room roof, and Marty standing in the Operations door with his phone to his ear.

For a month, I’d been the man who came back. Now, I was just another jumper.

Nash worked his way aft and crouched in the door with the wind beating his shirt. He pointed. I leaned forward to see. Whitmore Creek lay below with timber on both sides, and out of the green one thin column of smoke rose, leaning gently with the wind.

“There’s your fire,” Nash said.

We circled Whitmore Creek at fifteen hundred feet while Nash hung out the door reading the landscape.

The fire sat a third of the way up the east slope. It crept through the timber, barely two acres. Below it, alder and willow crowded the creek bottom. Above it the timber ran patchy to a rock band near the ridge.

The opening was obvious. It was a dry meadow on a flat shelf of land below the fire. I’d have picked it from the ground. Nash threw the first set of streamers, and we watched them fall, weighted crepe paper unspooling color against the green, drifting steadily toward a line of dead pines, gray snags standing above the living timber.

Nash pulled his head in. “Three hundred yards of drift. Wind’s up the drainage, no surprises in it. First stick, Boone, Vega. Hit the upper end, stay off the snags.”

The plane climbed to jump altitude, and the floor tilted. The chill of fear arrived right on schedule, the same as it had on every jump I’d ever made. Anyone who says it stops is lying or dead.

Boone got in the door. Nash slapped his shoulder, and he was gone. I shuffled into the space behind him, toes over the sill.

Nash’s hand came down on my shoulder. I stepped out into the propeller blast.

I counted: one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four—the chute opened hard, the harness catching me at the shoulders and thighs and jerking me upright.

I checked the canopy: round, full, lines clear. I found Boone below me and to the left. The streamers were dead in the grass at the south end of the meadow.

I steered across the wind toward my landing point, trading altitude for position. The creek rushed over rocks somewhere below me. Heat off the open slope bumped the canopy once, and I rode it. I angled up the meadow for the last hundred feet, turned into the wind for my landing, and the ground did what the ground does at the end: stopped drifting and arrived.