Summer of Fire - Linda Jacobs [46]
The smoke they were headed for wafted from a canyon on Bighorn Peak. Within the valley, the midafternoon air was turbulent.
Sherry conferred with the pilot through headphones. Finally, she pointed and nodded, then climbed back between the Beech’s front seats, squeezing past Clare and the others. As she began to shout her briefing from aft of the open door, the plane lurched in a pocket of rough air. “The drop site is downhill from the smoke, about three hundred yards. A clearing along the ravine looks grassy, so I’d suggest it as your target. Since the air’s tricky I’ve asked for a recon pass before you jump.”
Hudson leaned to looked at the rising smoke. “That doesn’t look like a two-man job.”
“Radio if you need reinforcements,” Sherry told him. “We’re short all around this summer.” West Yellowstone was the smallest of the Smokejumpers’ bases, with fewer than twenty trained and ready to parachute.
They flew up the drainage and made the first pass over the target at about a thousand feet. To check the wind Sherry tossed a pair of weighted streamers, fluttering banners of pink and yellow that drifted smartly up the canyon.
Clare studied Hudson’s face through the grille on his helmet. He was a pro, yet as they flew, his songs and jokes had quieted. Now that he’d seen the fire, his expression was taut.
They came into the valley again and Sherry called, “Randy, you’re on deck.”
He crouched in the doorway, Hudson behind him. Sherry checked Randy’s chute to make sure a red thread was still in place, signifying no one had tampered with it since a certified packer had placed it in queue. Here was where the element of trust came in, as men and women jumped with chutes packed by other team members.
It was the same in the department. When Frank had asked her to back him up on the hose, he’d placed his life in her hands.
“See you in a few days,” Randy told Sherry. He sounded a little shaky, even for a rookie. The Beech’s engines seemed to whine more loudly as it entered the steep-walled valley. Sherry had told Clare that when they exited at one hundred ten miles per hour, it was like hitting a wall. The jumpers preferred their other plane, a Twin Otter that flew at a more sedate ninety.
Clare’s heart pounded as though she were the one about to jump out of a perfectly good airplane.
Sherry tapped Randy on the calf. He vanished through the doorway.
Behind the plane, his thirty-foot round canopy, striped in blue, yellow and white, opened like a graceful flower. The static line flapped and Sherry drew it back inside along with the deployment bag that had held his main chute.
Looking out the window, Clare saw Randy’s parachute, floating toward the spiky green forest. She couldn’t see the clearing Sherry had spotted.
“Hudson,” Sherry called.
A tap on the leg and he left an empty doorway to the sky. Clare expected to see his canopy unfold, but he disappeared without a sign of deployment. Sherry hung on and stuck her head out the door to look back. The wind whipped strands of her brown hair free from her helmet.
“Four . . . five . . . “ Sherry shouted. “Reserve!” Her cry came with the unfurling of Hudson’s secondary parachute, a smaller twenty-eight foot round that lacked the steering capacity of the main.
The Beech hurtled up over the wall of rock at the canyon’s head. Clare didn’t see the men land. As they circled back, she put her weight behind shoving supply boxes down the tracks toward the door. Sherry checked the fifteen-foot diameter cargo chute and stuck her head out the door to see whether she could drop the load in the targeted clearing.
With a heavy drone, the plane dove earthward. Huge rocks and the sharp texture of the pines had looked much more benign from higher up. Just when it seemed that they would crash, the Beech’s nose lifted and they flew up the ravine at two hundred feet. If Clare had thought it turbulent before, she’d not realized how wild the ride could be. The pilot flew the big twin-engine