Page 93 of Into the Fire

I told him I’d pass it along and got off the line.

I called Marty’s cell. It rang four times and went to voicemail. I hung up and called again. Voicemail on the first ring this time.

Ramirez’s cousin was covering the radio in Operations. He was a kid who came in when Marty needed a body to cover. When I entered, he put his pen down and sat up straight.

“Where’s Keene?”

“County run. Hanson’s copies. He left about—”

“No, he isn’t.”

The kid blinked at me. Behind him, Marty’s desk sat the way Marty kept it: neat stacks, pen laid parallel, glasses gone, reading lamp off.

Except it was eleven-fifteen in the morning.

I was reaching for the phone on Marty’s desk when the dispatch line rang.

The kid took it. I watched him reach for the pad, and I watched him write. His shoulders tensed, and I knew what kind of call it was.

“Smoke report,” he said, reading it off. “Aerial detection, confirmed column. Requesting jumpers for initial attack.”

“Say the location again.”

He read the legal description. It meant nothing to him.

“Carson Ridge. North Fork of the drainage,” I said.

I stood with my hand still hovering over Marty’s phone and made the kid read it again. It was the same.

I looked at the weather clip on the wall. There was no lightning to start the fire. There was nothing natural on the mountain to start it, but it had started anyway, in the one fork on the one ridge where a pencil line ran down through the timber.

I knew where Marty was.

Paper could be retyped. A statement could become a summary. A map could be read and remembered and carried back out the door in a man’s head. For five years, every record of Carson Ridge that human beings kept had been reachable, and Marty had been in reach of all of them.

The mountain kept its own record. Evidence had to still be up there. There was only one way to get rid of it.

Burn it.

“Sound it,” I said, and the kid hit the horn, and two long blasts went out over the yard. Silvertip started to move.

I headed into the yard. Men were already converging on the racks: Hollis first, then Ramirez, Teller half into his jumpsuit before he was fully out of the bunkhouse. Fellhauer came across from the loft with Nash’s meadow notes from the last jump in his shirt pocket. Nash himself appeared in the loft doorway in the boot.

“Load of six,” I said, and the names came off the top of the rotation, in order. “Me. Hollis. Shepherd. Teller. Ramirez. Kincaid off the ground crew for cargo. Fellhauer’s spotting. Nash, get him whatever he needs at the door and stay off that leg while you do it.”

The racks came alive, harnesses off the third rack, reserves seating, men checking the man beside them.

I gave the kid in Operations three instructions, flat and in order: dispatch gets our load-out and our ETA. Hanson gets a call, tell him Keene missed the nine o’clock, and tell him to call me on the aircraft frequency if anything moves. And nobody, for any reason, could touch Marty’s desk.

Then I went to the ready room and stared at the board, at the inch of white space below the eighth name.

Every other jumper suiting up at those racks was about to fly to a fire not one of them could read, on a mountain they’d never bled on. I hadn’t seen the North Fork. The man who could read it was forty minutes down the valley, talking to a federal agent about why his chute hadn’t opened.

Dante was the one who’d stood on the crest and watched fire run down the North Fork against the wind and the slope. He’d seen it happen. He’d heard Dutch shouting inside it.

And I’d taken him off the board.

Chapter twenty-three