Summer of Fire - Linda Jacobs [12]
When most of the cable had rolled up, Deering’s rescuer reached for him. The big man was alone in the rear compartment. “We were heading back from dropping groundpounders out east and heard your Mayday.”
Deering was dragged through the doorway. The horse collar stripped over his head. When he fell forward to land with his cheek on the deck, he appreciated the heat of the metal.
Clare watched the Chinook bank away from West Thumb. Thank God, someone had been rescued, perhaps the pilot judging by what looked like a flight suit. Had there been more than one person aboard?
The wind gusted, she guessed at over forty miles per hour. Her pants and shirtsleeves popped like sails and she wished she hadn’t left her turnout coat in the truck.
She cast another look at the crown fire eating its voracious way up the lake shore and noticed something out of place in the world of gray pumice, pink rhyolite and pine. A hundred yards down the beach something lay half in the water. With a squint, she recognized the beacon of a yellow Nomex fire shirt.
As she leaped from the end of the boardwalk, she slipped on a white crust of pea-sized rocks. For an instant, she teetered on the rim of a hot pool, remembering stories of people and animals parboiled in Yellowstone. When she regained her balance and ran down the beach, it was tough going. Trees that had been battered down by winter storm waves tripped her.
The smell of fire grew stronger as she struggled. Hung up in ragged limbs, she twisted to the side, trying to ease herself out without tearing her trousers. A look ahead showed the potentially drowned person, lying between the approaching flames and the lake.
To hell with it.
She ripped her pants and splashed the rest of the way through shallow water.
A broad-shouldered man in fire-retardant olive trousers and the yellow shirt lay on the rocks, his clothing and dark blond hair streaming. He might be thirty or fifty years old, face down with one arm flung over his head.
The wind shifted to blow onshore as the convection cell sucked oxygen to feed the flames.
Clare crouched and called, “Are you all right?” She felt the déjà vu of the opening steps of CPR. The last time was in Houston on a heart attack victim and the man had died anyway.
She pushed away the vision of performing ventilations in waist deep water, for without a solid surface she would not be able to do effective chest compressions.
“Can you hear me?”
She checked for a pulse in the carotid artery at the side of his neck. Feeling a flutter beneath her fingers, she exhaled a sigh.
Not a hundred yards away, the Shoshone reared like a cobra.
Clare rolled the victim over and discovered a Park Service badge and nameplate. “Damn you, Steve Haywood,” she raged. “Talk to me!” That one wasn’t in the rescue manual.
He stirred and opened his eyes, silver gray like the sheen of light on a lake before a storm. The look on his face was one of confusion.
Flames spotted not thirty yards away. A two-foot thick pine blasted apart with a crack like a howitzer. “I hate to tell you this.” Clare forced a note of cheer. “You’re about to go swimming again.”
Steve was fresh out of adrenaline, but he knew he had to move. He felt the woman’s hand beneath his shoulder and, with her help, he managed to get to his knees. Although his legs threatened to collapse, he crawled back into the freezing lake.
She stayed with him, shedding her rubber boots. Dazed, he looked at her turnout pants and Houston Fire Department shirt. “What are you doing here?”
“I hope to God I’m saving your ass.”
He hoped so, too. Not because he looked forward to spending more time on this planet, but because he needed to survive in case Deering managed to dodge the bullet. If Steve had his way, he’d see to it that Deering