Flash of Fire

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  Also by M.L. Buchman

  The Night Stalkers

  The Night Is Mine

  I Own the Dawn

  Wait Until Dark

  Take Over at Midnight

  Light Up the Night

  Bring On the Dusk

  By Break of Day

  The Firehawks

  Pure Heat

  Full Blaze

  Hot Point

  Delta Force

  Target Engaged

  Copyright © 2016 by M.L. Buchman

  Cover and internal design © 2016 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover art by Judy York

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  Fax: (630) 961-2168

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  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  A Sneak Peek at Heart Strike

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  Chapter 1

  An alarm shattered the predawn silence. Not some squeaky little beeper. Not Macho Man in the Morning on the radio. And, thank all the gods there ever were, not the bloodcurdling “incoming enemy fire” siren that Robin Harrow had heard a lifetime’s worth of during her six years of Arizona Army National Guard service—both in practice and during a pair of six-month deployments the AANG had rocked in Afghanistan.

  But it was just as strident.

  Wildfire!

  She lay in her bunk a moment longer, as grunts rolled out of their own racks up and down the barracks hall, feet thudding to the floor, moans and groans sounding through the thin plywood walls. With no drill sergeant to move them along, there was more shuffle than hustle, but they were moving.

  Robin had been awake and glaring at the blank darkness of the bunkhouse’s low plywood ceiling for hours, only now coming visible in the first light through the thin curtains. Awake and ready to go. Day One on the job, also Day One of the fire season. She’d lain there wondering just what she’d signed up for and how long it would take for the action to start. Part two had just been answered—not very long.

  Bring it, people.

  In the interview for Mount Hood Aviation, they’d promised her that when it hit, she’d be scrambling. She was absolutely down with that, no matter how little she actually believed them.

  After the worst of the clatter in the neighboring dormitory rooms had settled, Robin dropped out of her bunk. She’d used her dad’s firefighter trick—at least her mom was pretty sure her dad had been a firefighter, so she’d watched a lot of firefighter movies and learned what she could. Her flight suit was pre-slipped with fire-retardant cotton long johns and the legs of her flight suit in turn were already in her unlaced boots. In thirty seconds flat, she went from sleeping bare on top of the covers to lacing her boots.

  She’d spotted the job opening for a temp one-season piloting job and, needing to get out of her post-service life in the worst way, answered the ad. Her time in the Guard had included certifying for heli-bucket brigade on out-of-control wildfires. It was a damn sight better than her gig in her mother’s truck stop restaurant playing the “Hi! I’m Robin!” perky waitress. She’d had way more than enough of that as a kid and teen.

  Phoebe’s Tucson Truck Stop—founded by and named for Grandma Phoebe Harrow—was one of the last big independents on the routes. A massive complex that sat on the I-10 just south of Tucson. They could fuel over a dozen rigs at a time and park hundreds. Truck wash and basic service, certified CAT scales, motel if you wanted a night out of your rig, barbershop, and—the bane of her existence—Mom’s Grill.

  Peddling herself as a waitress was part of the gig, or at least pretending to: tight—and too goddamn short—outfit to reveal her soldier-fit body, her light-blond hair kept short with that chopped look that men thought was so cute—and she liked for its low maintenance. She really did do it herself with a pair of scissors.

  Robin double-checked her Nomex pants and her leather Army boots, now that’s what a girl should wear, not some damned hot-pink mini-skort. She pulled on a white cotton tee—screw the bra, she’d never liked the damn things anyway, and on a Harrow woman, they weren’t mandatory. Nomex jacket in one hand, personal gear bag over her shoulder, and she was good to go. Nobody was going to mess with Robin the firefighter pilot.

  She headed out into the hall of the now-silent dormitory. Not a soul in sight. She put on some hustle down the dark and narrow hallway. But she’d gone the wrong way and hit a dead end. Turning back, she went looking for a way out of this place. The corridors weren’t long, but it was a maze worse than dodging the truckers with straying hands.

  Despite Robin’s constant battles at the truck stop, the tips had been really good; Grandma Phoebe’s pointers on how to work money out of the late-night guys’ soused brains—and their deeply overinflated illusions of what was never going to happen—paid well, but…GAG!

  Much to her surprise, when she told Mama and Grandma about the ad for a seasonal firefighting job, they’d shuffled her ass out the door and over to the airport so fast it had left her head spinning. Robin had always assumed she’d eventually settle into the traces to become the third Harrow woman to run Phoebe’s Tucson Truck Stop, but maybe not. At least not this season.

  Robin zagged the other direction through the MHA camp’s labyrinthine barracks after hitting a second dead-end corridor. The building was far bigger than it looked from the outside. Actually, it simply had more cramped into it than should be possible. She spotted a few guys coming out of a door, holding their toothbrushes. But when she arrived, she didn’t see any women’s bathroom close beside it.

  Robin gave up on finding the women’s bathroom and walked into the men’s. While she leaned over the cracked porcelain and brushed her teeth, the guys who were rushing by half-dressed gave her odd looks reflected in the sheet of scratched steel screwed to the battered wood wall as a mirror. In moments,
she was the only one there, staring idly at the “Jimmy + Theresa” inside a heart and a thousand more inscriptions carved into the fir-plank wall with a penknife over the years.

  Robin pocketed the toothbrush and rinsed her face. If this were the AANG, grunts would all be formed up on the line by now, but in the civilian world…the men would still be moving slow and the women were probably back in their rooms doing their hair. She stroked a damp hand through her short hair and she was done with that. Robin headed for the field.

  Robin headed down the hall and banged out the doors, ready to leap at the fire…and was staring at the gravel parking lot. Not a soul here. The lot was crowded with dusty pickups that had seen better lives a long, long time ago, an impressive array of muscle cars—enough to make a good drag race—and several motorbikes—some hot and some not. But no people.

  Damn it! She’d come out the wrong side of the building.

  * * *

  “How was the wedding?”

  Mickey Hamilton was moving too slow to avoid Gordon’s cheery punch on the arm. He’d pulled in late last night and he’d been more stumbling than functioning since the fire alarm had rousted him. He’d had enough hours of sleep, but he really needed some coffee.

  “Morning, Gordon.” Mickey rubbed at his eyes, but it didn’t help. The first day of MHA’s fire season, he should have been allowed to sleep in. But no-o. Sunrise hadn’t even hit the horizon yet, though it was only minutes away, and the first call had come in. Most of the team were already at the base of the airfield’s two-story control tower even though it was less than five minutes since the alarm. MHA tried to hit fifteen minutes from alarm to airborne and no one wanted to screw it up on the first day.

  The rising sun was dazzling off the glaciered peak of Mount Hood that loomed to the west. The air smelled ice fresh and pine sharp on the June breeze—especially after spending four days back home in the Eastern Oregon, where the grass was already going dry and dusty. It was going to be a hell of a fire season.

  He breathed in deep. Here the Doug fir and spruce that surrounded the camp rolled for dozens of miles in every direction, except up the face of the mountain that spilled glacier-cooled air down through the warm morning.

  The grass strip runway split the ramshackle camp buildings behind them from the line of beautiful firefighting craft parked down the farside. Straight across stood Firehawk One. He could almost see a frown on its blunt nose because Emily wouldn’t be aboard. But his own Bell 212 was three down the row and was just as eager to get going as he was.

  “Smells like a good morning to go fight a fire.”

  “Avoiding the question, Mickey. Tell me, was the bride hot?”

  “My sister, Gordon. Get a grip.”

  “Right, sorry.”

  Vern, one of the Firehawk pilots, moseyed up looking about as awake as Mickey felt.

  “Hey, Mickey. So, was the bride hot?”

  Mickey sighed. “Yeah, she was…” And he left the guys hanging for several very long seconds. “But not as hot as the number-two bridesmaid.”

  “Yes!” Gordon pumped a fist. “Details, Mickey. We want details.”

  Mickey scanned the crowd gathering. MHA’s pilots, smokejumpers, and support personal were all hustling up. The team’s leaders, Mark and a spectacularly pregnant Emily, and Carly, their genius fire behavior analyst, were all conferring on the platform landing one story up the control tower stairs. But they didn’t look ready to announce anything, so he turned back to his audience, which now included Steve, the drone pilot, and Cal, the photographer.

  “Suzanna Rose. Went to high school together, but we never hooked up. Saw her at rehearsal dinner and let’s just say I saw a whole lot of her after that.”

  “It’s those blue eyes of yours.”

  “Nah, it’s because he looks like an ex-Marine.”

  “Which I’m not.” Mickey had started flying helicopters before he started driving cars. Actually, he’d flown his first helicopter on his tenth birthday and never looked back. It had been a ten-inch-long, radio-controlled wonder with red-white-and-blue racing stripes that he’d crashed and rebuilt a hundred times. It still ruled a place of honor on his dresser at his parents’ house in Bend, Oregon. He’d been fifteen before his first real bird. Had been with MHA for eight years since graduation, all of it flying to fight wildfires.

  “Women don’t care.”

  “It’s because you’re so pretty.” Gordon tried to pat his cheeks until Mickey fisted him lightly in the gut.

  “Let’s just say it was an awesome wedding.”

  “Seeing her again?” Vern, the cowboy-tall pilot from Washington State.

  “Nah.” Mickey tried to sound casual about it. A part of him—a past part—should have been pleased by how neatly it all worked out, but another part of him—one he didn’t know well—was disappointed. “She’s leaving for a job in Europe next week. Be gone at least a year.”

  “Perfect!” was Gordon’s response, but Vern looked a little sad for him, only reinforcing the feeling of disappointment that Mickey didn’t understand.

  Of course Vern was biased. He’d gone and fallen in love with the gorgeous and diminutive MHA chief mechanic over the winter. Oddest-looking couple, but it was working for them which was…good? There’d been a whole lot of weddings lately among the MHA top staff and it was…odd. He sighed but kept it to himself. Mickey missed the rest of the guys when he’d hit a bar and pick up some hot chick with the standard, “I fly helicopters to fight wildfires.”

  “Oh, hey. You gotta see the new pilot. Emily’s replacement. She’s amazing!” Gordon, however, Mickey could still count on.

  He glanced up at the pregnant Emily up on the landing. It was still wrong that she was grounded.

  So she’d finally found a replacement? Flying without Emily Beale in the lead this season was going to be like having one of your arms amputated and no one telling you. You just kept reaching out and getting nothing but air. Of course, one look at her huge belly as she stood there next to Mark up on the first-story landing of the tower, and he wondered how she’d even fit in the pilot’s seat for the candidate-interview flights.

  They’d gone on for weeks. Hopefuls—all guys—showing up, sometimes several a day, trooping into the Oregon wilderness and driving up to the high Mount Hood Aviation base camp. To substitute for Emily, someone was going to have to be seriously good. She was the best heli-pilot Mickey had seen in a decade of flying and eight years on fires.

  In between refresher flights up and down the slopes of Mount Hood, Mickey and the others had taken to hanging out at the wooden picnic tables in front of the mess hall, sipping cold sodas, and watching the slaughter.

  Mickey could see the failures almost as fast as Beale had them back out of the sky. Military-quality control but no feel for a fire—not even the flaming steel drums set up midfield. Weekend aviation jocks who thought that flying fire was just about taking the certification course—MHA wasn’t a place heli-aviation firefighters started, it was where they strove to end up. Top fliers from other outfits slipped into camp quietly so their current bosses wouldn’t know, then slipped out just as quietly when Emily booted their butts for not being up to MHA standards.

  And then she’d hired a female pilot. If it was anyone else than Emily Beale, you could claim gender bias, but not her. Emily only cared about finding the very best. She set an amazing standard.

  “So…” Mickey turned back to the other guys as Betsy the cook worked her way through the crowd with a stack of Styrofoam and a pitcher of coffee.

  Everything stopped while they all loaded up, then reconvened gripping cups of Betsy’s best brew.

  “So, what’s the new recruit like other than hot?”

  * * *

  Robin stood at the back door of the MHA barracks and stared up at the trees. She’d arrived four days ago at this funky, little camp lost in th
e foothills of Mount Hood, Oregon, for an interview and still couldn’t believe it every time she saw the forest.

  It had been six months since she’d flown, and that had been her last day in the Arizona Army National Guard. The army heliport in Marana just north of Tucson, where she’d spent most of her six years in the AANG, was three hundred acres of baking tarmac covered with long, neatly parked rows of Blackhawks and Apaches, surrounded by tens of thousands of acres of baking desert.

  Mount Hood Aviation was a tiny grass strip perched at five thousand feet on the side of an eleven-thousand-foot-tall dormant volcano. A runway stuck in the middle of trees that soared a hundred feet or more high. Spruce, Douglas fir, maples, and alder. Beneath them lay a thick mat of blackberry, salal, and a hundred other scrub varieties that she didn’t recognize. And moss frickin’ everywhere: dripping from tree branches, mixed into the grass, clinging to the north sides of buildings and roofs. The lush biomass was so dense that it was impossible to take in, but she could taste it in the air, thick enough with oxygen that it felt like she was in an emergency ward and they were pumping it directly into this Arizona gal.

  Robin had grown up in Tucson, served twenty miles away in Marana and ten kajillion away in Afghanistan—all places where oxygen was served in reasonable helpings rather than Oregonian truck stop–sized portions. She’d never been much of traveler, so Oregon was about as familiar as the moon.

  The MHA base camp was the run-down remains of a Boy Scout camp along one side of the grass runway. Plywood barracks, dining hall, and a rec hall turned parachute-and-supplies loft, all of the wood gone gray with age—at least all that wasn’t covered by the frickin’ moss.

  She decided that going back through the dim maze of the barracks would be ill-advised. Like Alice, she might slide down the rabbit hole and never be seen again. She began walking around the building.

  On the far side of the runway that cut this place in two stood a line of the finest Firehawks she’d ever seen, which more than made up for the disaster of the camp. MHA was one of the only civilian outfits to run the converted Black Hawk helicopters that she’d spent six years flying for the military. That was a huge draw, almost as big as getting out of her waitress outfit.