Summer of Fire - Linda Jacobs [117]
Or maybe it did. The prospect of life without Georgia scared the living shit out of him.
He forced himself to concentrate on the turbulent sky and realized that Garrett was speaking through the headset. “ . . . thing working?”
“Yeah, Garrett?”
“Guys down there. It looks like they’re getting cut off.”
Deering looked where Garrett was pointing and tried to focus on a group of four yellow-shirted people on the ground. They were inside a roped-off area that surrounded a small meadow. Two knelt in the weeds and the others were standing, writing on clipboards. “They don’t seem to realize,” Garrett said in a worried voice.
Deering couldn’t afford this, absolutely must not fall apart in front of Garrett Anderson. If he did, his fire charter days would be over. He inhaled through his mouth and let it out slowly, imagining that he was blowing out the knots inside. Some people had panic attacks, going mindless in the middle of their kitchen, but it had never happened to him. He’d thought it a sign of weakness.
The night he’d come home from Vietnam, Georgia had cooked his favorite Greek meatballs, poured stout red wine from a jug, and lighted candles on the porch that overlooked the Portneuf. Drawing her against him in the creaking metal glider, he’d made a mental note to put some WD-40 on it in the morning. The old place had gone to hell without a man to take care of such things.
“Aren’t you happy to be home?” She snuggled close and he felt the warm curve of her breast.
“Of course.”
“You seem . . . preoccupied.”
He’d left that damned jungle, a godforsaken place where men’s feet rotted in their boots and souls were etched, on the other side of the planet. Unfortunately, he already knew that distance had failed to silence the jerky cacophony of shot-out rotors, the rattle of incoming machine gun fire, and the screams of nineteen-year-old Johnny Washington who’d died in the seat beside Deering.
“Don’t you feel better now that nobody’s going to shoot at you?” Georgia looked at him with soft green eyes, her hair a red-gold cloud around her luminous face.
He opened his mouth to tell her how wonderful it did feel to be safe, but he stopped. It was then, at that peaceful moment with the river running by and a sliver of moon peeking through the top of a cottonwood that Deering realized.
Waking up in the morning without the prospect of combat was dead boring.
It did not make sense, therefore, that on this afternoon over Old Faithful, he should be hyperventilating and sweating like a grunt under fire.
“Are you all right?” Garrett asked.
“Must have gotten hold of some bad chow,” he managed. Turning to the man in the left seat, he lifted a hand to wipe his brow. “I’m gonna have to set her down.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
September 7
Clare watched the Huey’s rotors wind down on the Old Faithful Inn parking lot.
“They’re bailing out of the sky,” Javier Fuentes said. He kept the hose from the foam tank trained onto the employee cabin near the one where Clare was staying.
With a worried glance skyward, she realized that no other planes or helicopters were in sight. Without air support, the battle could be lost.
The chopper door opened and she saw Garrett Anderson climb out. He headed across the parking lot to a man she recognized as Duncan Rowland, Incident Commander of the North Fork. Clare said to Javier, “I’m going to find out what’s happening.”
She ran to Garrett.
“Hey, gal. This is one bad mutha, “ he shouted with a baleful glare at the North Fork.
Fire swept over the southwest ridge while cinders the size of a man’s hand pelted the parking lot. Rowland, a slender man with narrow features, listened to his Motorola. “This is it,” he told Clare and Garrett, yanking off his ball cap and throwing it down. It tumbled away like a soccer ball.
Press vans were retreating from the perimeter, filming as they drew back to the open space beside the inn. Everyone in sight wore a bandanna or some kind of cloth tied over his or her face.
With a start, Clare realized that there were eight or