Summer of Fire - Linda Jacobs [4]
There’s a bottleneck on the road out. Harry Gaines’s crew set a backfire that got away.”
“You mean that’s not the Shoshone trying to burn down the Laundromat?” She considered the wildfire fighters’ eccentric habit of tagging fires with a name. It was as though naming their adversary made the fight a more personal one.
“When you see the Shoshone, you’ll know.” Garrett sounded grimly certain. “The backfire’s jumped the road and nobody will drive into the smoke. I’m trying to raise a chopper to drop water, but I need you to get those cars moving before the Shoshone gets there.”
Clare glanced back at the battle beside the Laundromat. “We’ll go as soon as we can.”
“Go now. The Shoshone has crowned.”
When wildfire leaped into the treetops, Garrett had told her it released the energy of an atomic bomb. It sounded improbable, but when she cocked an ear, she heard a distant dull rumble like an approaching train. Her nostrils flared at a fresh and stronger mix of tart resin and char. Her heartbeat accelerated.
With a tap on Javier Fuentes’s shoulder, she cupped her hands and shouted to the others from Houston, “We’ve gotta leave you. If it blows up, head to the lake and get in the water.”
Javier leaped to the driver’s seat of the fire truck. As she climbed in the passenger side, she said a silent prayer for the safety of the men they left behind. She hadn’t gone an hour in the past weeks without asking what she could have done to prevent Frank’s death. “These things happen, Clare,” her friends at the station had drilled her.
They were right. Before she’d joined the ranks, she’d seen on the news that every few months some firefighter paid the ultimate price.
“You have to pick up and go on,” they’d said.
She had, but in a different direction. Her flight to Yellowstone, and that’s what she now knew it to be, had been a headlong rush toward peaceful woodland and natural beauty. She’d believed she wouldn’t have to face another monstrous specter of dancing heat and light.
Javier steered along the deserted inbound lane to Grant Village, past the stopped column of sedans, pickups with camper shells, and trailers. Despite the emergency, he drove slowly, bronzed hands light on the wheel.
The approaching fire had been started by a lightning strike at Shoshone Lake, six miles southwest. After smouldering and creeping along for a month, high winds had fanned it into fury.
They came to the head of the line, a stopped behemoth of an RV. Ahead, perhaps a hundred yards, tightly spaced pines burned on both sides of the road.
Clare clicked the Motorola’s button. “Come in, Garrett.” She slid out of the truck to scan the sky. The sun was reduced to an intermittent copper disk. “Come in.”
On the RV driver’s side, she hailed an elderly man with wild white hair and wire-framed glasses. “I’m Clare Chance with the firefighters,” she told him in what she hoped was a reassuring tone. She’d always had a raspy low voice that people mistook for a man’s on the telephone.
“What shall we do?” The ginger-haired woman passenger leaned across.
“A helicopter is going to dump water ahead,” Clare told them. “As soon as the fire dies down I want you to drive as fast as you can.”
The runaway backfire wasn’t going to kill anyone, but the Shoshone’s rumbling underpinned all other sound. If it arrived before they could escape . . .
She prayed the chopper came soon.
Steve Haywood looked out the helicopter window into hell.
Great tongues of orange flame leaped through the crowns of lodgepole pines, then reached another two hundred feet into the white-hot sky.
“Swing over Grant Village,” he ordered pilot Chris Deering through their headphones, wishing he were anywhere but in the air. Although this recon flight over Yellowstone’s raging forest fires was important, Steve had already decided that for him it was a terrible idea. He wiped the sweat at his temples, right where the gray had started last year.
Steve watched Deering peer out at the boiling smoke through his Ray Ban Aviators,