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  Pilots also had all these unspoken rules and codes that the women they picked up in bars seemed to already know. It was as if every one of them had gone to the same training course, but no one had told her she needed to enroll to understand men.

  Denise understood none of them.

  Once he was gone, she could relax a little. She sat back on her heels atop the helicopter. It was one of her favorite times of day, and she took a moment to enjoy it.

  Malcolm shot her a wave when he noticed her watching. He’d finished servicing one of the Twin Hueys and was moving to the other one. Brenna, her other assistant, was deep in an MD500 and didn’t look up. No need to worry though. Brenna could handle almost anything on the smaller birds; she was good.

  The sun was setting into the Oregon wilderness over the massive shoulder of glacier-capped Mount Hood. You could practically taste the pine-sharp chlorophyll on the ice-clean air. The birds were coming home to roost, the seven helicopters and three airplanes of her firefighting fleet.

  The flesh-and-blood birds were also dancing in the last of the sunlight as they headed into their own nests among the towering Douglas fir trees on the north side of the runway. And if even one of them pooped on her helicopters, there’d be hell to pay.

  By U.S. Forest Service contract requirements, right on the stroke of a half hour before sunset, all of the aircraft were out of the air and lined up on the grass. For the next dozen hours, the crews still fighting the fire on the ground would be on their own.

  Emily and Jeannie were certified for nighttime firefighting, but that was awfully expensive and wasn’t called for except on the very worst fires. Also, if the pilots flew at night, they still needed the mandatory eight-hour break out of every twenty-four.

  Better to let them sleep and fly again at a half hour past sunrise rather than miss part of the morning.

  Jeannie climbed out of Firehawk Oh-Two and waved at Denise. She treated her helicopter with the most respect of all the pilots. Emily in Firehawk Oh-One was so skilled after ten years in the Army that, while she didn’t baby the firefighting Black Hawk, she never stressed the bird.

  They were home safe now.

  The two small MD500s for hitting spot fires were parked at the west end of the runway. A pair of the midsized Bell 212 Twin Huey choppers were lined up next, then her three Firehawks parked neatly down the side of the grass-strip field at midfield, directly opposite the main camp buildings. The seven choppers looked so pristine and glossy in their black-and-flame paint jobs. All glossy, that is, except Firehawk Oh-Three with a dark smudge down the tail section from the scorched hydraulic fluid.

  Denise sighed. She really shouldn’t have harassed Vern. It wasn’t his fault the line had cracked and sprayed the compartment with slimy, silicone-based goo. At least it hadn’t been the old hydraulic oil. That stuff would have burned rather than merely scorching and caused a major mess, if not an engine fire.

  She finished the repair in ten minutes and was about halfway through the cleanup when the dinner bell rang. Her hands would reek of the cleaner for hours despite the gloves. She hoped it was a knife-and-fork dinner tonight.

  Betsy, the camp cook, had brought the bell back from when they’d been fighting fire Down Under in Australia over the winter. The old, brass, twelve-inch fire-truck bell announced the exact moment of sunset, spooking aloft the last of the birds who were just settling into the trees. You think they’d get used to it—Betsy rang her new toy every night at this time. It echoed from one end of the airstrip to the other, calling the helitack and smokies to come eat.

  From her high perch atop the Firehawk helicopter, Denise had a clear view of the whole field. Malcolm and Brenna downed tools and checklists from the nightly inspection they performed on each aircraft and began wandering across the grass strip toward the cluster of picnic tables. Mark Henderson’s twin-engine Beech King Air, the Incident Commander—Air’s aircraft, had landed without her noticing and was parked by the DC-3s used for transporting the smokejumpers when they were needed.

  Actually, some part of her brain had noticed.

  She could recall that the engines had sounded clean, nothing to trigger her internal alarms to hurry over to inspect them immediately. Mark’s landing had been as immaculate as you’d expect from a long-term Army pilot. Like his wife, Emily, he flew smooth and clean every minute of every day. So no other warnings arose in her head, and she knew it would be a normal nightly inspection.

  All routine.

  That was good. That’s what it was supposed to be when she wasn’t creating a failure like Oh-Three.

  She set up a pair of work lights so they’d be ready after dinner when it was dark. She laid her flask of cleaner and her gloves across exactly the spot where she’d left off so she’d be sure to start in the right place after dinner.

  Today’s fire had been a grassland range fire seventy miles to the southwest. Only the helicopter crews had been out today to help the local ground crews who’d been able to drive trucks to the fire. The MHA smokejumpers had the day off, so a lot of them were in town and the tables were less full than usual.

  Most of the pilots, support crew, and ground personnel were already sitting around, reading or playing cards held in place by small stones against the light evening breeze that wandered lazily through camp. Thankfully, that same breeze washed away the bitter smells of cleaners and the sharp kerosene scent of Jet A fuel that the pumper truck had dispensed down the row.

  As Denise headed for the chow line, Emily and Jeannie came up to her. They were out of flight gear and looked casually pretty. Someday she’d like to find the nerve to ask how they made it look so effortless.

  Of course, MHA’s first two Firehawk pilots wanted to know what had gone wrong with the third craft.

  * * *

  “Damn!” Mickey, Vern’s bunkmate and one of the twin-Huey chopper pilots, let out a low whistle of appreciation. “I’ve got to say…Da-amn!”

  Vern glared at his poker hand a moment longer, puzzled because his own cards certainly weren’t worth any such statement. He saw that Bruce and Gordon were both still in the game, so he folded and tossed his cards into the pile, careful not to drop one between the boards of the battered wood of the picnic table. Then he glanced up and offered a low appreciative whistle of his own.

  “Da-amn is right.”

  Denise, flanked by Emily and Jeannie, was strolling across the green grass airfield in the light of the setting sun. The sky was orange behind them, and the lights above the chow line illuminated them like a Maxfield Parrish painting—kind light and impossibly beautiful women who belonged exactly where they were.

  The image did strange things to his heart, as if it had caught and stumbled on something it had never seen before. Or perhaps seen but not noticed.

  Maybe his pulse was still stutter-stepping from that pressure alarm.

  Bruce and Gordon turned to look over their shoulders and didn’t turn back too quickly. Bruce was a very careful card player, except when women were involved or even in the general vicinity. Vern saw enough to be glad he’d folded.

  “Every time,” Mickey whispered. “Every single time they come walking toward you side by side like that it takes your breath away. It’s like you never get used to it. If Carly joins them, I could die a happy man.”

  Vern hadn’t actually been commenting on the group; it was the diminutive mechanic who he would never tire of watching. He idly wondered if she’d ever been a dancer, or if she’d always walked as if she was floating just above the earth.

  The trio moved into the chow line. Except when it was raining, Betsy always set up a long table outside. MHA ate buffet style, but their cook made sure it was the best quality.

  The three looked so earnest that his ears were buzzing. He’d make a totally safe bet that they were discussing the smoky failure of Firehawk Oh-Three. Three beautiful women talking about him, but not. Yeah, that sounded about right.

  Then Carly came out the door of the kitchen and joined the others. Mickey was right. They really did take your breath away. That they were hanging together was a common enough phenomenon at camp, but you still never got used to it. The noise level among the guys’ conversation fell off by half across the entire chow area.

  Emily Beale, with her toddler daughter riding on her hip, was the commanding cool blond—more than a little terrifying in her quiet control. Carly, MHA’s fire behavior analyst, was as tall and slender, her Nordic light hair and pale skin aglow like a shining flame—the woman was also seriously intense. Jeannie was a sharp contrast with her dark hair, black leather jacket, and black jeans. She was as splendidly figured as the first two women were trim, and yet was as casual and easygoing as the other two were completely daunting.

  But it was Denise who was really knocking him back tonight.

  She was always around—she’d been with MHA for the last eighteen months of his four years here—but it was as if he was seeing her for the first time. She stood shorter than the others. As wonderfully built as Jeannie and with dusty blond hair that fell well past her shoulders and offset the softest imaginable tan that came from having immensely fair skin but living most of the summer out of doors.

  “Yep.” Mickey sighed. “Seeing that much female beauty in one place is a burden that a man has to bear if he works at MHA. Now that’s a serious perk.”

  Vern nodded. It was. Three were married and Denise presented a bastion of pure steel to repel all boarders, but the women were amazing to look at. Far be it from him to deny himself the pleasure of enjoying what millennia of species-based conditioning had trained, nay, bred him to appreciate.

  There was something about De
nise though.

  He squinted the way his mother had taught him when she started studying painting. The four women were in line to get their fried chicken and mashed potatoes, which he could smell from where he was sitting, and it was making him really hungry because Betsy made killer fried chicken. The women looked the same when he squinted, but now he could see them a little differently.

  MHA’s chief pilot Emily Beale was actually the one with the spine of steel. Her military training made every motion appear both effortless and meticulously planned. Carly was the driving force, a brilliant spark, and Jeannie the soft, steady one flustered by nothing.

  But green-eyed Denise eluded him. As if she had a cloak of invisibility over her character.

  “I’m hungry.” Vern started to get up, but Mickey pulled him back down. It was probably just as well. His knees felt no steadier than after the landing when he’d had to lean against the chopper to remain upright. He’d lost three buddies to a mechanical failure when he was in the Guard. Thankfully he hadn’t remembered it was five years ago today until after he was on the ground.

  Denise had laughed at him as his knees almost gave out when he walked away—not a sound he was used to hearing from her. But it had sounded like a kindly laugh, not a cruel one. He’d been kinda pissed, but he didn’t think there was a cruel bone in the woman. Maybe he’d missed some joke.

  “Gotta finish this hand.” The other guys turned back to the game at Mickey’s prompting, but Vern had already folded. There was no money on the table anyway; they had been just killing time until dinner, not getting serious about poker. The only bets were who was buying the first round next time they went to the Doghouse Inn.

  So he stayed put but still watched Denise as she moved through the line. She’d exchanged her work vest for one of soft leather that wrapped and showcased her figure. He watched how the ends of her hair curled down the back of the dark leather, mirroring the curves of her splendid behind that invited a man to dream of…

  He shook his head. Who in the world was he kidding?

  Getting the hots for Denise Conroy was about as useless as getting the hots for some movie star on the big screen. Sure, a guy could lust after Zoe Saldana, but that didn’t get him on the bridge of the Enterprise.

  No way it was ever going to happen with Denise Conroy. To make it even more unlikely, she’d been dating some townie for almost a year, which struck him as pretty damn serious. And her attractiveness level was off the charts. Vern usually did pretty well—occasionally very well, though those occasions always surprised him—but Denise was up at a whole other level of amazing.

  Vern turned back to the game. “Come on, you losers. My stomach is grumbling.”

  Mickey flashed his hole cards at Vern. Vern slapped his roommate on the back in a friendly way. It was a good thing that they were only playing for drinks. No matter what last card was turned up, Bruce was about to kick Mickey’s ass.

  And boy did he ever, getting a three-drink raise before driving the hammer down.

  Damning himself for a fool, Vern swung wide as he and the guys threaded their way toward the chow line. The others bucked their way in the straightest line, weaving and dodging among the tables, occasionally goosing somebody as he was about to take a drink. You could easily follow the wake of turbulence they left behind as they went.

  Vern followed the line of least resistance, walking outside the perimeter of the clustered tables. A flight path that just happened to pass close by where three of the four women had settled.

  Carly and Denise sat with their backs to him. Denise was half a head shorter than Carly, even sitting down. But the way her hair caught the last light of day and shimmered with each tiny shift of body position was a siren call.

  He might have crashed right up on those rocks if Jeannie hadn’t been facing him from across their table. She watched him, puzzled for only a moment, then offered him a knowing smile.

  Shit!

  The woman was too smart for his own good. Well, hopefully she’d have the common decency to keep her mouth shut or he really would be crashing on the rocks.

  He cut farther to the outside to get clear. That had him passing close to Mark, Emily, and their daughter. Tonight their island nation was slightly isolated to one side from the rest of the group.

  He passed behind them just as Emily spoke softly to her husband.

  “Honduras?”

  Vern suppressed a shiver across his shoulders and paused at their table. “Honduras? If you’re thinking of a vacation now that the fire season is almost over, you can do way better than Honduras.”

  Emily closed a folder that was sitting on the table before they both turned to look at him.

  “You know Honduras?”

  “I do.”

  Tessa sat at the end of the table beside Emily, beating on a small bite of chicken with the back of her spoon and the enthusiasm of a two-year-old.

  He circled around and sat next to her, starting the airplane game with a small french fry to get her to eat it while he spoke to her parents. She was a bright, shining girl who looked much like her mother.

  “In 2009, I was serving on the Coast Guard cutter Bertholf. We were coming out of San Diego as the Honduras coup d’état of that year was kicking into full gear. Five months of political train wreck.”

  He managed to land the french fry, which Tessa began cheerfully chewing away on. He selected a bit of beaten chicken for the next flight.

  “The Navy felt that they didn’t have enough assets in the area, so they called us. Full steam south. Mine was one of the two MH-65C Dolphin helicopters they had on board. I had search-and-rescue gear, but they had an airborne use-of-force package ready for me if I needed to arm up. We were on constant patrols, stuck offshore from June through September. Back a year later for flood relief following Hurricane Paula. Honduras sucks. Highest murder rate in the world there just as a bonus. Try Belize or Costa Rica. Much friendlier.”

  The flight of the chicken was a crash and burn. As soon as the bit of food in question finally made a soft landing on the plate, it was beaten once more with a spoon to ensure its complete suppression.

  After they chatted for a few minutes and another successful french fry landing, he headed to the line for his own meal. Glancing back at the table, he saw that Emily had managed to fly some chicken in safe, but her attention wasn’t on the task.

  She and Mark had reopened the folder and both were studying its contents.

  * * *

  It was full dark outside as Denise sat in the pilot’s seat of Firehawk Oh-Three and cycled down the hydraulic pumps. Everything checked out. As long as she was here, she turned on the Health and Usage Monitoring System and checked the readouts.

  The HUMS tracked most of the problems and worked as a fair predictive tool for maintenance. It didn’t like surprises though, and it took her a few minutes to convince the computer that the line failure had been fixed. The HUMS was quite certain that the pressure drop and subsequent return to normal was a problem rather than external service done by a human it knew nothing about.

  Then it convinced itself that due to the pressure loss, the rotor was on the verge of imminent failure even though they were sitting on the ground and the engines were off. She didn’t start the twin turbine engines or even let them have any fuel, but she started the Auxiliary Power Unit and let the APU cycle the engines once. That cleared its miniscule computer brain. She shut down the power. The HUMS, well, hummed at her, happily green across the entire screen. She shut that system down as well.

  The large LCD screens across the control panel went dark, and now the only light was the soft glow beside the few mechanical instruments that were there in case the electronics were blown. Beyond the windshield, night had fallen. There were still a few lights over at tables across the runway and small groups gathered around them.

  Denise threw the last switch. The lights died, and now she sat alone in the dar—