Page 96 of Into the Fire

Hollis looked at me, and I watched him understand what my being there meant. His eyes went past my shoulder to Boone on the ramp. Boone was talking to Fellhauer about the second pass and didn’t look over.

Hollis clicked his pen. He wrote VEGA on the manifest, below the others.

“Hip’s going to hate the landing,” he said.

“The hip’s been briefed.”

“Ice it after.”

That was all. I climbed through the door.

Hollis came up behind me and pulled the clipboard in after him. Boone came up last, and Fellhauer pulled the step in behind him.

I strapped in with my gear bag between my boots, and Boone took the seat across from me. Teller cinched his helmet, and Ramirez leaned over to shout something in his ear that got a nod. Fellhauer worked his way forward and crouched by Lancaster with the wind numbers. Shep held the streamers in his lap like a man holding a casserole at a funeral banquet.

Lancaster held us at the end of the runway while something on the radio finished. Teller had his eyes closed, lips moving—counting, or praying, or running exit sequences.

I’d been in this same seat for the Whitmore jump with my heart racing the same way. What was new was what I understood beneath it. Every other man on this load was flying to a fire, even Boone, because he never saw the North Fork. I was returning.

Lancaster brought the power up, and the floor buzzed through my boots. Boone watched me from three feet away.

I lifted my chin at him, half an inch. He nodded once and looked out the door.

The Otter rolled, lifted, and Silvertip swung away below—the racks, the tower inside its cones, and my truck parked beside Shep’s.

We climbed out over the valley and turned northwest. The country opened up underneath us, hay meadows up to the foothills where the forest took over. Then the ridges ahead of us separated, and there it was.

The smoke column rose out of the north side of Carson Ridge, leaning with the wind, dark at the base and graying as it rose.

Five years ago I left that mountain in a helicopter, packaged and strapped, with the pieces of my memory rattling loose.

Now I was back, qualified and ready.

Chapter twenty-four

Dante

The Otter climbed toward Carson Ridge with the crew packed along the benches, knees and gear knocking with every pocket of rough air.

I sat across from Boone. Every time the plane bounced, he looked at me as if he was checking I was still there.

Teller sat beside me, checking his gear for the third time.

“You know it’s not going to change,” I said.

He checked the chest strap again. “That’s what I’m hoping.”

Ramirez leaned into him and shouted something. Teller gave him half a nod without looking up. Kincaid sat on a cargo box.

Fellhauer worked his way back from the cockpit, hand over hand along the frames, and crouched in the aisle where most of us could hear him.

“Column’s standing up,” he said. “Air attack’s got a plane over it. Wind’s southwest down here, eight to ten. Up there it’ll be doing whatever that fork wants.” He looked at me when he said the last part. He’d been on the south flank five years ago, and he knew what the terrain did to the wind.

“Gusts?” Hollis asked.

“Fifteen in the open. Less in the timber.” Fellhauer moved forward again.

Hollis reached across the aisle, took hold of my letdown rope where it rode on my harness, and checked the tie-off.