Air Force Eagles (48 page)

McCarley's voice came on again, now tinged with fear. "I can see the smoke already. We've got to get moving, Willow, and try and beat it out of the canyon."

"Can you stop it?"

McCarley didn't bother to unplug the radio. They couldn't stop it and there was no way to pack the radio out.

Dasmann was slinging his leg over the polished cockpit side when a woman raced out of the operations shack, waving a sheet of paper.

"Don't matter; if a fire goes down that canyon, it'll make its own winds. I've been in there; it's thick with manzanitas and scrub pine that'll burn better'n matches."

None of McCarley's men needed to be told what to do—their lives depended upon reaching the road before the fire reached them, and they dumped everything to lighten the load for the steady jog eastward.

From above, the fire looked like a blossoming Rorschach inkblot, spreading slightly to the north and south, contained toward the west, but racing in an all-consuming flame to the east, licking down the canyon in great leaping arcs of flame, throwing firebrands ahead to spot new fires. The lightning had struck little more than two miles from McCarley's crew, but the wind was advancing it eastward at eight miles an hour. An invisible balloon of heat rolled ahead of the flames, roasting the foliage, stripping it of every molecule of moisture so that it exploded into flame when the first spark reached it. The canyon, now changing into a chimney, pulling heat and flames up to ignite the sides, was burning like a dynamite fuse, a snaking, rustling stream of fire aimed at the small fire-fighting party racing toward safety.

The twenty-six men strung out in two parallel files, forcing themselves along the paths they'd cut to get in that morning. McCarley had a good eye for time and distance, and they'd covered the first mile in a little over twelve minutes, not bad for tired men in rough terrain. But he knew the fire would be doing better, striding with long tongues of flame, never stumbling, never falling, never short of breath.

One of the young firefighters fell in step beside him; McCarley couldn't remember his name even though he knew his father.

"Think we'll make it, Warren?"

McCarley knew almost certainly they would not, that unless the wind died down—unlikely given the self-generating venturi effect of the canyon—that the fire would overtake them somewhere before the sanctuary of Eagle Pass, a slit in the mountains now just a little less than two miles away. There the rocky ground inhibited growth, and they'd have a chance to outdistance the flames, to make it to the trucks and safety.

But he knew they'd never reach it. It was like a high school algebra problem—the fire was traveling at eight miles per hour and accelerating; they were doing five and slowing. The old Western movie "head them off at the pass" cliche came to mind—they were going to get headed off at the pass, and more.

"No problem, son, but we've got to keep hustling. Can't fool with Mother Nature, you know."

The boy dropped back, reassured, as McCarley, heart pounding, increased the pace.

As Roget strapped Dasmann in the backseat, gave him a rudimentary briefing on using a parachute and bailing out, and showed him how the intercom worked, Marshall started the big Wright engine. They were off the ground quickly, the ungainly landing gear folding up inside the Avenger's thick wing as they climbed westward.

"Mr. Marshall, did you ever do any water-bombing before?"

"We've had a lot of practice sessions, getting the rig to work. But I've done lots of other kinds of bombing—I think I can handle it."

"Let's try to drop as low as we can—fifty feet or so—we'll lose less by evaporation, won't we?"

"No, it looks to us like about one hundred fifty feet is best—you get a maximum dispersion, without dissipating the hit."

Dasmann had given him a westerly heading, but their course was soon no problem, for they could see the convection column of smoke from the Copperhead Canyon fire climbing up three thousand feet before merging with the cloud deck. To Dasmann it was a good sign; the fire had not progressed to a fire storm yet.

Marshall had shoved the prop, throttle, and mixture forward, and the old torpedo bomber groaned along at 240 mph.

"Walk me through this, John. We're doing four miles a minute, and they're only about forty-five miles away now. That puts us over them in about eleven minutes, right?"

"Right."

"They're probably not making more than three miles or four miles an hour over the rough ground they've got to cover. It's 16:28 now. That means we should be there by 16:39. If the fire is moving as fast as I think it is, they're goners.."

John was figuring with him as he eased the power farther forward, coaxing another thirty miles per hour out of the old bomber in their slight descent. "Too close, Joe, too close."

Just over forty miles ahead the twenty-six men were strung out in long uneven lines, the younger men forging ahead now, the older ones gasping for breath as they struggled on. The scrub at the bottom of the valley had been the major beneficiary of the little moisture that had fallen that year and had grown into an impassable tangle that forced the men to climb up the canyon wall to edge through it. The older men felt the stress, and neither the buzzsaw crackle nor the lashing hot breath of the fire behind them could drive their legs faster.

McCarley, breathing hard, head pounding, was in the middle of the pack. He stopped and let the others stream by him as he listened to the ugly turbine-like roar of the fire heading toward them, the throaty growling punctuated by the sharp explosion of trees bursting into flame.

McCarley felt the hot wind gusting and realized it was hardly worth making the effort. He felt a tug on his belt—it was the kid.

"Come on, Warren, you said we've got to hustle. Let's do it!"

Ahead he could see the sun glinting against the sharp line of granite outcroppings that marked Eagle Pass. The terrain beyond the entrance to the pass was nothing but spilled rocks from past floods for over a mile; if they could make it there, they might have a chance. He glanced at his watch and couldn't read the ash-coated dial. Rubbing it clean, he saw that it was 4:40, just as the roar of the TBM's engine broke through the crackle of the fire rushing behind him.

In the Avenger, Dasmann saw the foliage of the canyon floor melting away at the inferno's edge like a sheet of paper thrown into a fireplace, tendrils of flame first browning then igniting the scrub.

"There they are—about a quarter-mile from the pass."

Marshall was checking the terrain, remembering how he felt only a few years ago, checking out a Korean valley in his F-86. He mumbled, "At least there's no flak" into the intercom and Dasmann yelled, "What?"

"Nothing, I'm going to make the first run-in from this heading, no time to set up; I'll make two drops, the first one right at the end of the line of firefighters."

"Get with it, John, the fire's almost on them."

Below the twenty-six men were running now, flogging the last reserves of energy from their desperately tired bodies as the fire roared only a few hundred yards behind them, the point of the flame cone-shaped on the valley floor, its flanks extending back up the canyon wall. A heart attack dropped one man, two others stopped momentarily to help him, then left him to press on knowing they could not save their friend, could not save themselves, as the horror howling behind them accelerated.

Marshall put his landing gear down and then lowered his flaps, slowing to 140 mph; he lined up carefully, checking the wind, his wingtips no more than forty feet from the sloping canyon wall. When the last man disappeared from view beneath his nose he toggled off the first drop, calling "Water away!" as he poured power to the Avenger, pulling up his gear and flaps and climbing straight ahead, the TBM bucking in the smoky turbulence above the fire.

McCarley was amazed to see the water blossoming from the plane's belly, a great white balloon that expanded until it hit the ground behind them with a rush, bouncing up to meet the fire in a massive hissing embrace. The fire suddenly sagged, recoiling upon itself, as if it were regrouping for another attack. McCarley turned and ran with the rest of the men, racing for the pass, where the rocky floor now gave them a chance to live.

As soon as Marshall cleared the lip of the canyon he turned back for another run.

"Good drop, John. Can you put the next one right at the fire's edge? If we can give them another couple of minutes, they might be able to make it to the trucks."

Marshall clicked his mike in response, lowering the TBM into the canyon again. "This time I will drop to about fifty feet, and just bowl the water along the center of the canyon."

McCarley was standing at the entrance to the pass, his arm swinging in encouragement to the last of the men stumbling toward him. The TBM passed low overhead, the pounding of its engine reverberating against the canyon walls.

Ahead the fire was moving forward, slower now with less dense growth to fuel it.

Marshall used two rivets on the cowling as a primitive sight, lining them up with the fire's leading edge. He was lower and slower this time, and he dropped just as the fire apparently moved between the two rivets, calling again "Water away."

There was no one to see the three hundred gallons of water hit the ground, then rise up like a wave cascading into the surf, a sheet ninety feet high and forty feet wide that fell across the fire's edge like a huge wet blanket, blunting its rush.

There was no time for celebrations when they got back to Willow; Dasmann quickly organized another team of firefighters to go in to contain the Copperhead Canyon fire and try to recover the body of the man who had died.

Roget bridled, but Marshall put his fingers to his lips and laughed. "Joe, listen, Uncle's screwed me before. Don't sweat it; I figure I'm learning a trade, right, Hadley?"

Roget grinned broadly. "Hell, I hadn't thought about it that way. Sure, Bones, if the goddamn government won't buy these airplanes, we'll go into business for ourselves. We ought to be able to rent them out, follow the] fire season around the country."

Marshall shook his head in agreement. "Yeah, maybe we'll even find a use for that solid water-scooping Catalina of yours."

*

Little Rock, Arkansas/December 18, 1954

Sitting in the high-backed chair, under the all-seeing eye of his wife's portrait, Milo Ruddick pretended to be absorbed in his newspaper as Ginny walked in. It was two in the afternoon, but she was still wearing her orange satin robe and fuzzy slippers.

"There's no liquor in the house, Ginny, and there won't be. You've got to pull yourself together and do something with your life."

As expected, she stormed out of the room. Ruddick began reading again; there was a long editorial on the Senate's censure of McCarthy. Damn fools, he thought. McCarthy's one of the few patriots in the whole damn government.

He heard her sidle back in and sit down. He didn't look up.

"Daddy, don't be mean. You don't know what I've been through."

"No, I don't, not anymore than you know what you've put me through, first with that business about Nathan, then having Stan leave, now your drinking. Where is it going to end?"

"Wrong. Let me tell you a way out. First of all, you've got to forget about this business with Nathan. I don't know why it happened, but it's over. Now you've got to get a job, get back into the mainstream of life."

He looked at her and shook his head. "Do you think I'm pimping for you, that I'm selling you into white slavery? For Christ's sake, Ginny, you're my daughter! I mean, be pleasant, be helpful. The governor owes me a lot of favors; giving you a job is just one way of paying me back. You can work with Dixon Price over there, he'll keep you busy."