Читать книгу The Big Burn - Terry Watkins - Страница 11

Southern California

Anna Quick felt a rude jolt when turbulence from an eighty-mile-per-hour gust of superheated air slammed violently into the jump plane. Her breathing was shallow from the tight constraint of the chest strap on the jump harness as she stared out the open door, the plane orbiting drunkenly over the raging inferno below.

A voice behind her said, “They’re somewhere in that gorge, but there’s no way out. Fires are moving in on both ends. It’s going to blow up.”

“How many people?”

“Four. College students on a backpacking trip. Two girls, two guys.”

Anna nodded. They would be scared out of their minds, desperately searching for a way out. Then they’d face the realization they weren’t getting out. Four college kids unequipped, unprepared. They would die the most horrible of deaths, screaming, choking, burning…

In the distance, two massive smoke columns broke through the inversion layer and shot hundreds of feet into the air. Tongues of fire snapped across the ridges and raced into the heavy brush and trees on the southern edge of the canyon.

The jump plane bucked again, with increased violence. The plane lurched sideways as updrafts of the ferocious, high-octane Santa Ana winds knocked them around as if they were a toy boat on a raging sea.

Anna’s face and nostrils and eyes were dry and tight. The roar of the wind blasting from the gorges grew thunderous as the gusts hurled smoke and flames across the horizon. She studied the orange tidal wave as it swept up the slope of the mountain to the south, ten miles from the mountain community of Big Bear. She noted the axiom that every twenty degrees in hill slope doubled the rate of speed the fire spread. The vicious whirlwinds and updrafts were being created by the fire itself.

Anna processed the variables that produced this disaster: fuel loading, clear-cutting, weather, topography. In a decade of firefighting she’d never seen anything to match this. Her boss said it was becoming another Yellowstone disaster.

“Not going to happen, Anna. Back away from the door. This is a no-go,” Carter yelled over the roar. “You can’t risk it. I won’t let you. There’s no way out of that canyon now.”

There’s always a way out, Anna thought. The fire would burn over this canyon very quickly and the worst of it would stay up on the ridges.

“I’m going in,” Anna insisted as she tightened her leg straps.

“The hell you are.”

Another huge fire swept down from the north, threatening to marry with the one below, forging a giant tsunami of flame. Smaller fires snaked aggressively along the ridges, and out as far as she could see more flare-ups triggered by flying embers burst across the hills.

Anna Quick’s team had been jumping small outback fires for twelve days. She was exhausted from slogging equipment up and down hills, digging, cutting, torching backfires. Behind her on the jump plane’s nylon seats sat her seven teammates, tired, dirty and in a stupor only firefighters know. All they wanted to do was go back to base camp and collapse.

Anna, a lifelong mountain climber and college soccer star, had formidable reserves that gave her, at the most competitive level, more endurance than any other male or female on the strike team, but this time even she’d overdrawn her account. She was functioning on nothing now but sheer willpower.

“Dammit, Anna,” Carter persisted, leaning in close over the roar of the engine, both of them holding on to the door frame for support against the slipstream and turbulence. “It’s a no-go.”

She ignored him as she pulled on her helmet, snapped the chin strap, dropped the heavy wire-mesh mask over her face and pulled on her Nomex gloves.

Carter grabbed her shoulder. “Abort now! That’s an order!”

She stepped closer to the door, dropping into a sitting position with her legs out. She was going in light. She’d dumped all but the necessities into her PG bag and snapped it under the reserve chute on her belly. She had extra lightweight fire shields jammed into the nylon webbing of her Kevlar fire suit.

In the distance a superscooper dumped “mud” on the southern wall of fire. A futile gesture. Above the scooper she spotted a hovering chopper. Probably getting news footage, though it didn’t have the coloring of one of the news birds. It looked military.

Her eyes focused on the horizon, searching for markers. The backpackers, communicating by cell phone, were last reported to be in the narrow gorge below, hiding in a dry creek bed. The fire would overtake them in a half hour or less. The heat and smoke would kill them sooner.

“Anna!”

She broke free of Carter’s grip, pulled her legs up, got her feet under her and launched herself before he could stop her. She rolled out into the dark, choking sky, hearing nothing now but her own jump count:

Jump-thousand.

…now feeling the adrenal rush of the tumble into space, feet up, body twisting as she plunged.

Look-thousand.

…seeing now the earth and sky somersaulting over one another, the plane slipping past like a quick hawk, then seeing the fire.

Reach-thousand.

She grabbed the green rip cord. Windblown embers exploded against her mask.

Pull-thousand.

Her hand ripped across her chest.

The quick drop, then the tug of the blossoming round of orange and white canopy was always a beautiful sight to a jumper. There were no tension knots at the corners, and the steering toggles were okay.

She pulled directly into the wind as tongues of fire leaped up at her. Her gut tightened, her nerves stretched taut. The full fury of the firestorm mocked her descent toward the dragon’s fiery mouth. It was starved for fuel, waiting to be fed.

At three hundred feet, she set up the brakes with the toggles halfway down, easing to her right, then left, reefing down on the toggles, maneuvering, deeper into the brakes, then full brakes as she zeroed in on her landing zone, a flat piece of ground.

Then, without notice, a sneaky backwind shooting up the canyon grabbed her.

She was in trouble.

Two thousand feet above the wildly gyrating smoke jumper, in an unmarked, Sikorsky SH-60 B Seahawk naval antiship chopper, John Brock held on to the frame of the open door with one hand. With the other he held binoculars, tracking the jumper’s descent through the smoke as he held on against the violent rocking and rolling.

He watched in dismay as the winds grabbed Anna Quick’s chute and drove her horizontally at great speed toward the slope and a stand of trees.

Behind Brock, a marine lieutenant was yelling on his satellite phone at some assistant to the director of Emergency Services at the California Emergency Control Center.

Through his headset Brock heard his chopper pilot declare, “That’s suicide.”

Brock had traveled twelve thousand miles to recruit Anna Quick. Wasted miles. He watched her vanish into the smoke. She was supposed to be on her way back to her base camp. Instead she was jumping into an inferno.

“She have any chance at all?” he asked.

The pilot said, “That’s up to Big Ernie.”

“Who the hell’s Big Ernie?”

“He’s the smoke jumper’s god of fire. You gotta play the cards he deals. And he’s a jokester.”

Brock wasn’t amused.

The marine lieutenant finished his conversation and moved over in the doorway next to Brock. Brock pulled back his headgear so he could hear the lieutenant.

“Sir, the strike-team boss ordered an abort. She disobeyed a direct order and went ahead and jumped.”

Brock nodded. That was consistent with the file they had on her. He swore softly to himself and continued to try to see something on the ground.

He said to the pilot, “Can you get this thing down there?”

“I can get it down. Getting it back out is the problem. Those Santa Ana winds are running sixty miles an hour down there. With low visibility and high winds the chances won’t be good.”

“I need that damn woman alive.”

“Sorry, sir,” the pilot said. “What you need is a miracle. The best I can do is to keep circling until the winds die down.”

Brock stared in frustration at the gathering firestorm. He knew the pilot was right, that they’d have virtually no chance of getting to her and then getting out again.

The marine lieutenant said, “That’s got to be the worst way to die.”

Angry as he was at the woman’s defiant jump, Brock couldn’t help but admire her courage. As an operator with Delta Force, Brock had gone into his share of extreme-risk situations and he knew the kind of mind-set that it took. She had to know something about the conditions, something no one else was taking into account. Either that or she was suicidal. He hoped for the former. He hadn’t come all this way for a charred corpse.

All attempts by Anna to keep her direction, to lock in the topography, had been blown away, and now she was in the hands of the wind. A vicious gust spun her around and she had to fight the near collapse of her chute.

It was now a desperate battle to get it under control. She was using every bit of her upper-body strength to keep the chute oriented.

When Anna found a break in the smoke, she saw the fantastic spectacle of fire crowning the treetops at unbelievable speeds.

The superheated winds buffeted her. She was engulfed in smoke, and for the moment, completely lost sight of the ground.

When the smoke cleared enough for her to see, it was too late. She sailed into a hundred-foot-high tree snag, her feet smashing through the top branches. Anna stopped with a violent jerk. The pads and Kevlar were all that saved her from being impaled. She still wore deep scars on her body from one such landing and was happy to have the new, stronger protective gear.

Anna looked up. Her chute was caught precariously. She looked down. It was an eighty-foot drop. Just great. She pulled out her drop-rope and hooked it up, released herself from the harness and began to rappel, trying desperately to get down before the chute gave way and dropped her like a stone.

She was about twenty feet above ground when the chute broke free. She plunged. Instinctively Anna pulled her legs together and angled them to the side in the standard parachute landing fall.

She hit hard.

Dazed, she rolled over and pushed herself up. The great fear of such falls was to have a sprained ankle or something broken. Anna made a quick survey of her body parts.

Everything seemed intact—until she rose to her feet. Her left ankle was weak. She skipped on it a couple times and decided it wasn’t a disaster as she headed down into the deepest gut of the ravine. She picked up her walkie-talkie to let Carter know she was down. “Do you still have communication with the hikers? Over.”

“Roger that. They saw you. They should be just up the ravine a few hundred yards.”

“Ten-four. I’m on my way.”

“Anna, I can’t believe you just did that! The fire’s coming over the ridge. Moving fast. You can’t outrun it.”

“I know, but I couldn’t leave them down here.”

Anna reached into one of the inner pockets of her jumpsuit and took out a small pair of binoculars. She tracked along the ridgeline, acknowledging the treacherous beauty of the snaking line of fire, then she tracked down the hills into the gorge. How a fire feeds depended on where the fuel load was the heaviest, plus how the winds were directed by the lay of the mountains, and where inversion would multiply velocity.

What she was looking for was an area where the fuel load would be the least, the topography the easiest for the fire to quickly burn over.

When she turned and looked up the canyon, she saw the students running toward her. Stumbling, falling, getting up. Panic-stricken.

John Brock watched the rolling fires converge and explode down the gorge in a swirling avalanche of flame.

He had the marine pilot circle for nearly an hour before the wall of flame had moved on and the winds relaxed enough for them to hazard a landing. The firestorm had left behind smoldering brush, burning trees and blackened ground.

“Nobody’s surviving that for long,” the pilot said as they made their descent.

Brock held out no hope, but he had to confirm the deaths.

The pilot found a flat, burned-over area where he set the helicopter down, the rotors blasting up a cloud of blackened soot and dust.

Brock and the marine lieutenant exited the chopper, ducked under the orbiting blades and jogged away from the ash and dust.

He stared at the surroundings. It looked like a giant blowtorch had scorched everything. Embers still hissed and snapped like exploding firecrackers at the tail end of a Fourth of July celebration. Hundreds of smoke tendrils drifted skyward.

Brock tracked back and forth along the canyon and the arroyo as the acrid smoke wreaked havoc with his sinuses and eyes. “The bodies have to be around here somewhere,” he said somberly, then sneezed.

They began the melancholy search. Brock was moving along a dry, shallow creek bed, when he stopped. Dirt under an overhang just ahead of him moved. It occurred to him that he might be looking at the covered den of a mountain lion.

When the dirt and ash moved again he started to ease his hand toward the 9 mm Glock in the shoulder holster under his left arm.

He stared drop-jawed at what he saw next. They came out one at a time, dirt and ash falling off their protective shields. All of them. All five.

The college students appeared to be in total shock. They stared silently, amazed to be alive.

The one in the fire gear barked orders like a drill sergeant at her rescued lambs, telling them to pack the heat shields and whatever else was on the ground that wasn’t burnt up. She had to be Anna Quick.

She was a tall, striking woman, even when covered in ash. She wore her golden-brown hair short and had a confident swagger as she walked toward him. She was prettier than the picture they had on file.

“You are, I believe, Anna Quick?” Brock asked.

“I am. And I appreciate whoever you are for getting here so fast.”

She turned and started to direct the college kids to the chopper.

“We’re not the rescue team,” Brock interrupted, then radioed the chopper pilot who told him a rescue bird was on its way. Brock then relayed that information to Anna.

They ducked away from gust of ash the wind had kicked up.

“If you aren’t here to help, who are you? And what are you doing here in the middle of this mess?”

“My name is John Brock. I came here especially for you.” He showed her a Military Intelligence ID.

She studied it for a moment, then handed it back. “What could Military Intelligence possibly want with me that’s so important they’d come looking for me in the middle of a fire?”

“We need your help. Or, more specifically, your father needs your help.”

So much for the intelligence part. These guys were wrong. “My father’s presumed dead. Has been for the past eight years or hasn’t anyone bothered to pass that information on to you?” It came out harsher than she’d meant it to, but she was exhausted. She turned to walk away.

“Well, actually he’s not dead. At least not yet.”