Firestorm
Authors: Lisa T. Bergren
T
he meadow behind them was afire.
All around her, hotshots were swearing, fumbling, not daring to watch the fire approach. But Reyne turned. Two walls of the fire met and surged even higher, a billowing wall of orange. The flames reached a hundred feet. Two hundred. She had not seen anything like it. As entrancing and electrifying as it was, she hoped never to see it again.
Dear Jesus. Dear God in heaven. Help us!
She turned to run.
Many crew members were already tucked under shelters, working to seal the edges with knees and elbows and, Reyne was sure, mentally preparing themselves for the coming onslaught. They looked like Jiffy Pop bags exploding this way and that as they moved inside. Some of her team were not yet covered.
Reyne reached Janice, a trembling rookie from Tucson, and ripped the shelter from her hands to unfurl it. “You’ll be okay!” Reyne shouted to her. Their hair flew madly about, and Reyne fought off the insane urge to laugh. “Remember your training! Seal the edges and ride it out!”
She turned from Janice as the rookie finally got under her shelter. Next to her was Larry, on her crew for the last three years. He looked at her in macabre resignation, gesturing toward a rip in his shelter. “No!” she shouted. “Remember what they told us! Grab the rip and tuck it under you! You’ll be okay!”
The heat became noticeably worse. Reyne glanced over her shoulder. The fire was licking at her heels. With a last look around her team, packed tightly on the road—sometimes two or three in a row—she picked her spot next to two others and frantically shook out her shelter. She dove under it, tucking and praying madly.
Then the dragon came hunting.
LSO BY
L
ISA
T
AWN
B
ERGREN
R
OMANCE
N
OVELS
T
HE
F
ULL
C
IRCLE
S
ERIES
Refuge
Torchlight
Pathways
Treasure
Chosen
Firestorm
C
ONTEMPORARY
F
ICTION
The Bridge
H
ISTORICAL
F
ICTION
T
HE
N
ORTHERN
L
IGHTS
S
ERIES
The Captain’s Bride
Deep Harbor
Midnight Sun
N
OVELLAS
“Tarnished Silver” in
Porch Swings & Picket Fences
C
HILDREN
’
S
God Gave Us You
God Gave Us Two
(fall 2001)
F
IRESTORM
P
UBLISHED BY
W
ATER
B
ROOK
P
RESS
12265 Oracle Boulevard, Suite 200
Colorado Springs, Colorado 80921
A division of Random House, Inc
.
Scriptures taken from the
Holy Bible, New International Version
®
. N
IV
®
. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House.
All rights reserved.
The characters and events in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental.
Firestorm
copyright © 1996, 2001 by Lisa Tawn Bergren
Sandcastles
copyright © 1997, 2001 by Lisa Tawn Bergren
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
W
ATER
B
ROOK
and its deer design logo are registered trademarks of WaterBrook Press, a division of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bergren, Lisa Tawn.
Firestorm / Lisa Tawn Bergren.—1st WaterBrook ed.
p. cm. — (The full circle series; 6)
eISBN: 978-0-307-56533-4
1. Women fire fighters—Fiction. 2. Smokejumpers—Fiction. I: Title.
PS3552.E71938 F57 2001
813′.54—dc21
00-067313
v3.1
To Ryan
,
my brother and friend
,
who has gone through
some of life’s many firestorms
and come out on the other side
richer for the experience
.
“Then they cried out to the L
ORD
in their trouble
,
and he brought them out of their distress
.
He stilled the storm to a whisper;
the waves of the sea were hushed.”
P
SALM
107:28–29
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
If you are interested in learning more about forest fires and the people who battle them, you must read the resource I found most informative in researching this book,
Fire Line: Summer Battles of the West
, by Michael Thoele (Fulcrum). It is incredibly well written and reads like fiction itself. I am indebted to Mr. Thoele for allowing me to retell several stories that appear in his book and, in addition, for reading through my manuscript to make sure I had my technical details straight. Any overlooked errors, however, are entirely my own.
I also gleaned helpful information from
Forest Fires
, by Margaret Fuller, and
Young Men and Fire
, by Norman MacLean.
ROLOGUE
R
eyne Oldre was the first to pick it up. The sense of danger was subtle, intangible, but definitely there.
Two hundred feet in front of her, Stan Shaw, a long-trusted squad boss of the Lolo Hotshots, suddenly stopped digging. He sensed it too.
Reyne watched Stan lift his head as if to trace the wind—apparently to see if it had changed direction or speed—and looked beyond him to the last six chains he had dug. A “chain,” a trench sixty-six feet in length and two feet in width, was required every hour of a groundpounding firefighter. Stan was a chain ahead. She smiled to herself. He was always ahead.
Reyne looked back at him, meeting his eyes, listening with him. Beyond the Snap Crackle Pop that made fighting fires a nightmarish Rice Krispies experience. Beyond the shimmering heat from the flames and the hardworking firefighters around her. Beyond the radio at her hip that crackled with frequent transmissions from the fire bosses in the fire camp far below them on Boise’s county fairgrounds.
What had changed? The wind seemed to be coming from the same direction as before. But tiny hairs on the back of her neck stood on end, despite a layer of sweat and grime. She could not shake the sense of dread, the foreboding. It did not help that Stan, a seasoned firefighter, stood motionless, awaiting her direction. He obviously
sensed the danger too.
God
, she called silently,
what are you trying to tell me?
Reyne scanned the line of fire a hundred feet away. Her unease did not make sense. The fire, named Oxbow after the reservoir near where it had begun, was a mild one, slowly eating away at summerdried Idaho grasses and scrubby pines, one hill after another. It had traipsed on that way for days, the flames rising no higher than two feet. Now the wind was slowly pushing it downhill toward them. It was their job to stop its descent into a small suburb outside of Boise.
“No problem,” Reyne had said with bravado to the fire commander after receiving their assignment. “We’ll kill it by noon.” She was sure of her crew of hotshots, a solid team of twenty, five of them women. They had fought four fires together already and proven themselves. Even the rookies had quickly come up to speed, making sure they would not be assigned back to the crews who dug hiking trails or painted Forest Service picnic tables. They were tough, and no baby hill fire like this was going to stop them.
But now, as the morning persisted into afternoon, as the Lolo Hotshots finished lunch and began digging again, Reyne knew that something was afoot. She shook her head at Shaw after checking with the command center. They saw nothing different on the weather instruments. Reyne went back to digging and Stan did the same, still eying Oxbow like a dog not to be trusted.
They crested the next hill and spotted another crew a mile away, past a thicket of pines that fed off the seasonal valley runoff. The other group of hotshots had two bulldozers and a pump engine. They would meet them in the middle of that valley, Reyne decided. Show them what her hotshots were made of, even without the extra equipment. She powered into her own chain with renewed energy,
swinging her Pulaski, a small ax-hoe, as if she meant to wear it out. Most crew bosses did not do much digging. Reyne felt it was important to show her team that she was working right beside them when she wasn’t scouting ahead, talking with the fire boss, or checking out the line.
A helicopter flew overhead, dumping water beside the chains they’d dug to fortify the suburban defense. The choppers were an excellent asset on the line. They could turn around quickly, refill their giant buckets from nearby lakes, and enter places that were difficult for tankers to reach.
Reyne’s radio crackled again, her name filling the airwaves.
“Crew Boss Oldre, come in,” the division supervisor said.
“I’m here, Thomas.”
