Wildfire at Larch Creek Read online

  “Who was the fourth?” Macy gave him a subject change for which he was grateful.

  “Axel Rodriguez. Died in a car wreck. He was always pushing the envelope. On the fire he was rock solid. But he was out in the world doing a hundred and forty plus when he lost control of his brand new Camaro. Empty road, broad daylight. Cops think he rolled it upward of ten times. Hell of a firefighter though.”

  “Sorry I asked.”

  Tim shook off the memory, “No problem. It was just one of those things. At least fire didn’t get him.”

  # # #

  At least fire didn’t get him.

  Macy wondered at that simple statement. Tim had changed in a lot more ways than she’d thought. He wasn’t only in better shape, he’d faced death. Death of friends, death by fire.

  Macy knew some folks who had died. The suicide rate in the roadless villages to the north was especially bad. She’d bring in a piece of mail, and a parent or friend would come forward to take it. She’d learned to recognize the solemnity marking that the recipient was no longer alive, and hand it over with as little reaction as possible.

  Sometimes she’d haul a corpse off Denali, or as good as, because they were too far gone for even the medics to save. And each one of those unmet and often nameless losses hurt.

  But none had been close to her; she knew she’d been lucky.

  Tim had gone completely quiet as they walked back to the helo.

  Juniper Willow was parked there, leaning against her U.S. Mail jeep, earbuds in, rocking out to her music player while she waited for them.

  “What’s on for today?” Macy shouted loud enough to be heard as she signed the register for the mail bag.

  “Taylor Swift. She’s so retro.”

  Macy managed not to laugh in Juniper’s face. Juniper was maybe a year younger than Swift.

  Juniper was gone by the time Macy had the mail bag and Baxter in the back of the LongRanger.

  Tim still looked numb; hurt by the memories she’d stirred up.

  She stepped up and rested a hand on his chest in apology.

  And then, like a miracle, as if it was the most natural thing on the planet, he folded her into his arms and pulled her against him.

  Macy didn’t freeze in surprise this time. She let herself flow against him; one arm trapped between them, the other around his waist that she used to pull herself against him. He was not supposed to feel better than her imagination, but he did. He was real, alive, and—for this one moment—in her arms.

  She laid her head on his shoulder and he buried his face in her hair.

  They stood like that for a moment that she knew she’d cherish as if it had lasted a gazillion hours rather than just a few seconds.

  Then he whispered in her ear as if speaking to himself, “Missed you, Mace.”

  He shifted back a half step and banged up against the passenger side door he’d left open.

  “Sorry,” he cleared his throat. “Shouldn’t have done that. I just…” His voice petered out.

  Her hand still rested on his chest. She could feel his heart racing, but she didn’t think it was passion by the look in his eyes. They were closed, tight and hard against memories.

  She slid her hand up behind his neck and pulled her down to him. It was meant to be a friendly kiss, sympathy and no more.

  It started there, just the merest brush of lips.

  Then his hands were back around her and he hauled her against him. She’d never kissed Tim before, not even a kid’s practice kiss, but this was something else he was really good at. Really good.

  Macy leaned into it until he was pinned against the side of the LongRanger. She dug her hands into his hair to keep him there, to keep him from evaporating back into her dreams. With those big powerful hands, he clamped onto her; one scooped into her hair and the other wrapped around her waist so hard she could barely breathe.

  Didn’t want to breathe.

  Just wanted to—

  Baxter let out a yip from behind the window to the passenger cabin.

  And just that fast, the moment was gone.

  One moment Tim had been giving her the most amazing kiss ever and the next she was two steps back with his hands planted firmly about her waist.

  “Shit, I’m sorry, Mace.”

  She hit him. A hard punch to the gut that he wasn’t tensed up for this time.

  # # #

  Macy hadn’t forgotten any of her training.

  Tim tried to wheeze in a breath, but his spasming stomach muscles wouldn’t have anything to do with it yet. He managed little gulps that sounded like backward hiccups.

  Macy was livid as she stomped away. When she turned to stomp back, he knew he’d never seen her so angry. For an instant he regretted all of those Kung Fu classes they’d done together.

  She stormed right up to him and shouted at point blank range.

  “Are you really that stupid?”

  “It’s my,” he managed another tiny gulp, “Stu-pid Day. So. Yes. I am.” He hadn’t crossed one line, he’d crossed a hundred. He didn’t know what had come over him. He’d never before kissed a woman without permission. He’d certainly never used his strength to overpower someone.

  But the smell of Macy Tyler’s hair had been his undoing. Her intensely fit body had molded against his in ways that had lit fires inside his own. And her hand resting so lightly on his chest…

  “Won’t. Happen again,” he managed four syllables on the last breath.

  She stared at him in shock, and then she did the damnedest thing. She clamped her hands on either side of his head, pulled him down to her, and kissed him hard.

  Angry hard.

  Full of need hard.

  So hard that it filled his head with images that suggested maybe he should have dragged her off into Heinrich’s fields.

  So hard that it went soft, pliant, and warm until at some indefinable moment they shifted from kissing to simply lying against each other wrapped tight in each other’s arms. She lay against him, he lay against the helicopter, and Baxter offered sharp barks of frustration mostly muffled by the Plexiglas, but very close to his head based on the thumping he could feel against the back of his skull.

  Macy’s head was on his shoulder. His face was in her hair.

  His arms were holding her.

  Macy.

  This was so not right…but it was right in so many ways.

  He raised a hand from her back to glance at his watch.

  Six-thirty a.m. He’d been awake for three hours.

  How had so much changed in three hours? He needed some time to absorb all this.

  “Guessing it’s time to go deliver the mail.”

  Without moving out of his arms, she pulled back enough to look at his face for a long moment.

  Then she closed her eyes on an exasperated sigh and began beating her forehead against his shoulder just as she had knocked it against the breakfast table this morning.

  Chapter 7

  Macy could still feel that kiss as she lifted the LongRanger from the Ladd Airfield runway and turned northwest to begin her standard loop that she’d dubbed the Great Village Circle Route, because it ended at the town of Circle on the Yukon River.

  It started at Stevens Village, which with a population of eighty-seven was the largest of her stops. Stevens was twenty miles from the nearest road and sixty northwest of Fairbanks. After that she’d travel generally eastward stopping at over a dozen roadless villages until she was northeast of Fairbanks at Circle, which had been isolated all summer due to a shift in the Yukon River that had erased the only road access.

  Her lips were sore from the power of Tim’s, her head was spinning…and Baxter sat happily on the copilot’s seat beside her looking out at the sunny summer day and the green forests rolling by below, interrupted only by glittering lines o
f the Yukon River and its tributaries.

  She was still trying to piece together quite how that had happened.

  Tim had delivered the all-time, history-making, dumbest, post-amazing-kiss line.

  Ever.

  Then he had opened his mouth to say something that was bound to be even stupider, if possible, when feet came pounding up behind her.

  “Tim!” It had been Hank Hammond. “You’re still here. Great! I can’t find Tony anywhere and we’ve got a call. Please say you’ll jump with me. It’s a hot one deep in the ANWR. We’ve got to stop it before it gets down to Arctic Village.”

  Arctic Village was about the farthest out village anywhere in Alaska. A fire could burn almost anywhere in the massive Alaska National Wildlife Refuge and affect only wildlife, and not much of that. By pure chance a wildfire was threatening the only small community for a hundred miles around.

  Tim had at least had the presence of mind to look at her in confusion.

  “I…We…” he stuttered like an airplane piston engine with a failing magneto.

  “…need to…”

  “…talk….”

  “…don’t we?”

  At least he got that much right.

  “Come on, man,” Hank pleaded. “Tony’s our lead, I’m second-man on his stick, not a lead. I need the Two-Tall Harada magic.”

  Macy had thumped her forehead against Tim’s shoulder one final time in frustration and then given him a hard shove that sent him stumbling in Hank’s direction.

  Then he’d done the goofiest thing. He’d moved back to her and brushed his fingertips from her temple to her jaw, kissed her on the forehead, and then sprinted toward the smokejumper hangars. He’d called back for Macy to tell his mom he’d be fine.

  She didn’t even remember letting Baxter move to the front, or taking off and heading north. She could only hope that she’d cleared properly with the tower.

  Macy was climbing out of Stevens when her second radio, that she’d tuned to the Bureau of Land Management fire frequency, crackled to life.

  She’d been hoping for a call for her services, she could be there in a couple hours, or could have been. If she was called now, she’d have to double back to Larch Creek for equipment, refuel in Fairbanks, and then fly two hours north. But no call came in.

  The transmission was from the Sherpa which had taken an hour to even reach the fire because Arctic Village was so near the edge of the map even by Alaskan standards.

  “We’ve got two hundred acres involved, spreading before a thirty-knot wind.” Despite the crackle of radio signal breaking up across the three hundred miles that separated them, she recognized that it was Tim’s voice reporting, not Hank’s.

  He sounded different as he called out a plan to the two SEATs—Single Engine Air Tankers—that were following the Sherpa jump planes northward. This wasn’t Timothy Harada—her sorta older brother. It was completely the man who had just kissed her silly. This was Two-Tall Tim, premier smokejumper. His low voice was deeper, clearer despite the distance.

  All that uncertainty that he’d been displaying around her all morning was gone. No awkward stammers. No allusions to it being a Stupid Day whatever he’d meant by that.

  He called out jump coordinates and multiple attack vectors the way she’d call out a lunch order at French Pete’s, as if it was all second nature.

  She overflew the next village and had to circle back several miles.

  Well, that kiss hadn’t been second nature for either of them. Maybe she should cut Tim some slack. Macy had imagined kissing him since she’d decided kissing anybody could possibly be a good thing.

  Of course she’d come to the idea probably later than most. She’d read one of her mom’s books with an aliens-having-sex scene when she was nine and been so weirded out by imagining her mother writing a sex scene that she hadn’t recovered for a long time afterward. And by the time she’d warmed up to the idea, she’d been in junior high and Tim had been a high school junior dating Sally Kirkman. It would have helped if Sally had been more unlikable, or less well endowed.

  Then he’d gone Lower Forty-eight for school. Somehow her fifteen-year-old brain hadn’t caught up with quite what that meant until he was gone. Even that first summer, when anyone else would have come home, he was working wildfires and only made it back once for two days.

  “The way I see it,” she told Baxter as she lifted out of Alatna and headed for Allakaket—the two towns separated by a couple hundred meters of muddy river. “Tim gets one ‘Get Out of Dork-Jail Free’ card. He’d better de-Dork by the time he gets back from this fire.”

  And a sudden rage swept through her, so badly that her hand was shaking on the cyclic as she struggled to land at Allakaket. He was here a week at most—that was all she’d have him for before he returned to Oregon and his easy-women-filled life. One week, and he was off jumping a fire over Arctic Village for who knew how many days.

  God damn it. When did life start being fair?

  # # #

  Tim had tried several times to take a background role, but Hank wasn’t having anything to do with it.

  “I was always a Number Two man, you know that.”

  He did, but he hadn’t realized that Hank did. He had good fire instincts, knew how to read a burn, and wasn’t afraid of it. Give him even a hint of a plan and he could implement it with style.

  But the lead smokie had to be so much more than that. The Number One slot was the leader of a Type I Incident Response Team like smokejumpers. Tim and Akbar had even gone through the additional training together to make it to Type III Incident Commanders—not just team leaders. Earthquake, flood, hurricane…it didn’t matter; they had specific training on how to find a solution and make it happen.

  So, Tim had kept Hank in the loop, but stepped up into the lead slot. He didn’t know the burn rate of the sparse trees and grassland this far north, but Hank did. Was he looking at deep bog or a thin layer of growth over a hard layer of permafrost? The latter. Thin enough to clear easily down to mineral soils that wouldn’t burn? Not a chance.

  Between them, they knocked together a plan of attack and to the letter of Tim’s instructions, the Sherpa pilot dropped them and their gear right on target.

  As soon as he was down and had his parachute stowed, he walked up to a forty-foot pine, one of the larger ones, and tried to snap a one-inch branch. It should crackle, complain, bend and recover.

  With a sharp crack, it folded in half and only a small stringer of bark held it in place at all. Dry as a bone.

  He showed it to Hank who swore. “No way it should be that dry in mid-July.”

  Tim surveyed the terrain. This wasn’t a wildfire rolling through sparse woods. This was a blaze in a tinder box.

  The rest of the crew was jumping in while he was formulating a final plan of attack. He wished Akbar was here to run it by. He wished Henderson was circling his Incident Commander Air plane overhead with his daughter giggling in the passenger seat.

  Alaska Fire Service ran a smaller crew than most jump outfits—when it got bad, the Missoula smokies would fly up to lend a hand. Twenty-one of twenty-two jumpers had made it to the planes…still no word on Tony. MHA had that many, and another twenty-man Hot Shot team. Local fire service was almost always around to help if there was a logging road even close. The nearest road to Arctic Village was a couple of parallel creases in the permafrost that they’d overflown a hundred miles ago.

  Instead of the MHA complement of two Firehawks and three MD500s in addition to any fixed wing planes the US Forest Service might be sending in, he only had two SEATs which would be here in an hour to scoop river water and dump it on the fire. Each Single-Engine Air Tanker could carry about three-quarters as much as a Firehawk could deliver.

  It was all he had and he’d have to make do.

  All he had.

  The fire was his!<
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  He’d never commanded a whole fire before. Even on the small ones, it had been his and Akbar’s. He could hardly wait for a chance to rub this fire in Akbar’s face. While his friend was all down and snuggly with his amazing new wife, Tim would be leading his first fire.

  Leading his first fire, he acknowledged, and wondering what the heck to do with the woman who was waiting for him.

  Would it be with another kiss like one he’d never had in his life…or would it be a busted snout like the one she’d given to Billy Wilkins?

  He’d have to worry about that later.

  The Sherpa C-23s made a final pass dropping a pallet of pumps, hose, spare fuel, and food. They were in it now.

  He gave Hank a five-man team and the impossible task of getting the pumps into nearby streams and pools, and soaking the underbrush; there weren’t the resources to clear it.

  Tim took the rest of the team and began dropping trees, chopping them up, and dragging them downwind. Swamping all those branches was hard work, especially shoving through thick underbrush, but he couldn’t leave them where they’d let the fire catch and burn.

  They needed a firebreak a hundred feet wide, a mile-and-a-half long, and, at the fire’s current rate of approach, they needed it before midnight.

  Chapter 8

  Macy sat at the bar in French Pete’s and did her best to ignore the ongoing silence from her portable radio. She’d already called the BLM post clerk at Ladd Airfield twice on her cell phone.

  “Your boy doesn’t waste a whole lot of words on the air,” he’d told her. “But he thinks he’ll contain it sometime overnight without calling up any additional support. Hank Hammond says to trust him and I rang his boss down at Mount Hood Aviation. A Mark Henderson said that Tim is almost as good at reading a fire as their dedicated Fire Behavior Analyst. ‘Course I knew he was lying through his teeth, they’ve got the Fire Witch reading fires for them. Still, it’s high praise.”

  And Macy had to accept it whether or not she wanted to. Without a call-up, no one was going to pay her expenses up to the fire and once she got there, she wouldn’t be authorized to fight the fire anyway.