Hot Point (8 page)

It was horrid that Yuri was gone, but that his old helicopter had ended up with Vern was wonderful. It was such an immaculate old machine that it would be a pity if it went to a lesser place. She felt a little better about Yuri being gone. “You said he's the one who taught you to fly?”

Vern nodded. “Taught me to
love
to fly. Did six years aloft in the Coast Guard because of him.” Then he bit into his burger and chewed before mumbling around his food. “Of course if you want to fly in it, you'll have to fix it up first. I can't do a thing with it.”

The laugh burst out of her yet again. She couldn't help it. How could a man who flew as…flew as…beautifully as Vern Taylor did, not know how to maintain something as simple and reliable as a Bell 47?

* * *

Vern cursed as Denise laughed at him in her Spider later that night. Clearly it was becoming a thing with her. The laugh would start small and bright, often masked behind a covering hand. Then it built until it sparkled in the air. And each time it was because he was being a complete idiot.

“I know how to drive a goddamn stick shift,” he growled. “Irene hates me. You're right. She's a tricky woman.” He wanted to blame it on being drunk, but he'd had only one beer over the two wonderful hours spent with Denise Conroy telling dumb-things-I-did-as-a-kid stories. He wanted to blame it on the drugged feeling coursing through his nervous system just from being near her. Maybe he could blame it on the weather. Nope. Nothing above but stars on a warm, cloudless night.

Without an excuse of any kind, he was sitting out here on the streets of Hood River and totally humiliating himself by stalling her car three separate times in the first two blocks. If Bruce and Mickey caught him doing that, he'd receive a Bambi-bucket sized load of shit for it.

“Irene is a 1973 Spider,” Denise said as if that was somehow helpful.

“Which means what?” He tried not to snarl as he restarted the engine. With a silent plea, he begged Irene to please stop embarrassing him in front of such an attractive woman. This time he made it a block, then he foolishly tried for second gear and almost ate the windshield as the stall flailed him forward. “Switch,” he ordered as he set the brake and climbed out.

“The 1973,” Denise explained as they passed each other in front of the car, the flash of headlights shining bright against their legs and reflecting enough light upward for him to see her green eyes and far-too-amused smile, “has a hardware linkage for a throttle rather than a wire. One end is mounted on the frame and the other end on the engine. When you accelerate, that torques the engine and the engine twists slightly on its mounts, lengthening the throttle linkage. That in turn slows the engine, which detorques it, shortening the linkage, and it accelerates again without you touching the pedal. It takes a practiced touch to get a smooth start. You shouldn't feel bad.”

“No. Why would I feel bad?” Just because he hadn't been able to drive a beautiful woman's car that she drove like a racing dream.

Just because she'd left him feeling like a panting schoolboy the entire evening, neither one mentioning Jasper. What was up with that anyway? She wasn't flirting with him. Denise Conroy did not flirt. But she's been as friendly as if she'd never earned a reputation for possessing battlements of steel.

Then she proceeded to make him look like a complete idiot by making the car launch in a perfectly smooth leap from a complete standstill to racing back up the mountain road.

He slid down lower in his seat and mumbled below the volume of the engine's roar, “Irene hates me.”

Denise's laugh was whipped away as she slammed up into third and they shot out of town.

Four a.m.

Vern, Jeannie, and Emily huddled around Mark with to-go cups of coffee clutched in their hands. Vern was actually on his second cup, but it wasn't enough. He didn't know what was wrong with him this morning. Between the years as a Coastie and now MHA, he knew to anticipate chaos in his sleep schedule. So that wasn't it.

The dark night air had a damp chill to it. Fall was definitely coming; the weather felt as if it had arrived last night. Hadn't he been riding in an open-top sports car with a beautiful woman about six hours ago? Now he'd have the top up and the heater on high. Though he'd still be sure to put her at the wheel. Irene hated him.

Of course, he totally despised Jasper now. The one time Vern mentioned him, Denise had looked so sad, as if some of the light had gone out in her. He'd done his best to steer the conversation anywhere but there throughout the evening. And it had been absolutely great. It killed him that she was involved with someone else.

The stars were out above. A few lights were on in the compound. Actually, that should cheer him up. When the Firehawks went aloft in a few minutes, they'd wake the entire camp. He'd make sure to pass directly over his and Mickey's room on his flight out. That way, if he wasn't getting sleep, at least Mickey wouldn't be either.

They stood midfield, staying out of the way of the ground crews loading the choppers. The smokies had sent back requests for additional gear and Chutes, the paracargo loadmaster, was getting it aboard.

The three of them were certified for night flight, so they were timing their departure for arrival at the fire just after sunrise. Vern wasn't certified for night drops from the Firehawk yet, but that wouldn't matter; it would be daylight by the time they arrived.

Mark was giving them the rundown. “Emily, you've got Carly and Steve as usual. You'll under-sling the drone's launch trailer so that we can set it up in Montana. We're not expecting anything unusual, but, Steve, you should grab the second bird anyway.”

The MHA Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, the UAV that everyone except Steve called a drone, had proven to be a fantastic tool for tracking hotshot teams on the ground and seeing fire conditions in places they didn't dare send a manned aircraft. They were pretty much the only outfit that the FAA allowed to fly drones.

When Mark's words registered, Vern looked up from staring at his coffee cup and begging the caffeine to kick in sooner rather than later. “Nothing ‘unusual'? What second bird?” The other two pilots had nodded curtly, once.

Mark ignored him.

Fine, whatever. A normal fire, though it was an odd way to say it. But it wasn't. The second bird meant something to everyone except him. Like Honduras. Mark and Emily hadn't reacted right if it were a vacation spot. But they weren't browsing a folder. They were studying it. He was about to ask a question, but something in Mark's look told him it wouldn't be welcome.

“Jeannie,” Mark continued as if Vern didn't exist, “Cal is with you.”

Cal was the ex-hotshot MHA wildfire photographer, media specialist, Jeannie's newfound husband, and an all-around decent guy. Too many of those here for Vern's taste. It made Vern want to be foulmouthed and crappy.

Damn Jasper! Vern had never considered trying to take a woman away from another guy. Even Mickey and Bruce's antics last night were outside his normal operating procedures. He'd always waited for the ones who were obviously looking and made a really clear offer. The formula had worked wonderfully over the years.

But Denise had slipped into his bloodstream through some doorway he knew nothing about. Even the memory of her reluctant but merry laugh made him feel better. Then worse because it couldn't be for him. God, he was such a damned mess.

What was it with MHA and couples anyway? It was like the Firehawk helicopters themselves went around making people marry each other right and left.

Steve—in addition to being the drone guy—was a cocky-as-hell former smokejumper who'd snared model-gorgeous Carly. Mark and Emily had been happily married back in their military days. Now Jeannie and Cal.

The morning air was thick with the reek of contented matrimonial harmony. He would be perfectly content with a cheerful cohabitation, but that was his outer limit.

“Chutes,” Mark continued to Jeannie as if the presence of Vern's morning mood wasn't polluting the atmosphere as badly as a wildfire, “is loading your bird to capacity with gear and food for the smokies. They're promising a clear helispot by the time you arrive. You'll stop off on your way to Missoula to unload.

“Vern, you've got Denise, and you'll under-sling her service container. So, you two will fly direct to the Missoula airport along with Emily before you hit the fire. It's a ten-hour drive, and I want Denise on-site faster than that. When the other choppers follow after first light, they can bring the other two mechanics. We clear?”

Okay, Vern was feeling less morose now. The morning—despite the obscene hour—had taken a sudden turn for the better. A three-hour flight with Denise Conroy sounded great. Even if she was someone else's, at least he'd get to spend the time with her. Then he thought about it again. For three solid hours she'd see every single technique he didn't do perfectly in his flight.

Dismissed, he headed over and started the preflight on his chopper, wondering if he'd regret a third cup of coffee before a three-hour flight. There were no rest stops along the way.

He decided against the coffee, figuring he'd find enough other ways to embarrass himself during the flight as it was.

* * *

“I haven't made a night transit before.” Denise leaned forward as if to look out the window.

“Stay inside your helmet,” Vern told her.

That was the problem. Her eyes didn't want to. They'd been aloft about fifteen seconds. Vern had climbed to hover five feet over her shop-box. It was a twenty-foot steel cargo container sitting on a flatbed truck. Inside the container was MHA's mobile service shop. With the tools and spares she had stocked inside, she could service almost anything on any MHA aircraft.

Malcolm then climbed atop the van and slapped the head loop of the steel long-line into the cargo hook on the bottom of the Firehawk. The cargo-hook indicator light went on briefly, indicating the hook was down and open. Then the light blinked out again as the jaw closed over the wire loop.

Once Malcolm was clear, Vern hit the arming switch on the emergency load-hook release. Then he went straight up, hesitated at the moment the line came under tension at a hundred feet up, then continued aloft in a clean motion lifting the three-ton steel container off the back of the truck so gently that a stray screw might well remain in place on the workbench inside the shop-box.

And just that fast, they were in darkness. She leaned her head into the rounded window built into the door. The laminated glass bulged out far enough that she could lean into it and see straight down past the structure of the helicopter. She shifted until her helmet bumped the window and got only the briefest glimpse of the lit MHA airfield as it disappeared astern.

After that, there was no real sense of motion without the visual aids of the helmet display. She knew in her brain that the helicopter was now tipped nose down as it raced toward the Montana fire. She could see the readout on the inside of her visor that showed they'd rapidly climbed until they were moving at 150 knots.

“This feels wrong.”

“It does, doesn't it?” Vern was absolutely calm.

She'd never flown with him before, not in the MD500 and not the Firehawk. She felt absolutely safe…and had nothing to base that feeling on. When she flew with Emily, she felt secure enough, but with Vern she didn't feel any underlying tension that something she'd overlooked might break. Somehow Vern calmed the part of her brain that worried for a living.

The helmet projected information onto the inside of her visor, but most of it was meaningless. She knew enough to understand the helmet was working properly. But more than half of the information conveyed nothing to her. Attitude to the horizon, air speed, heading—those were obvious. The navigation codes, not so much. She was a Visual-Flight-Rules pilot. Under her VFR license, she could bop around an airfield to make sure everything was working properly, but she did little more.

She reached out and tentatively tapped the Heads-Up Display toggle switch on the front of the cyclic, doing her best not to jar the joystick control. A vast array of engine information flashed across the visor. At least this she understood. Everything looked well within operational ranges including a solid green “HUMS” in the corner of her display. The chopper's health management system wasn't seeing any problems either.

Another tap of the HUD button and the world jumped into sharp relief, forcing her to gasp in surprise. A thousand shades of green painted the landscape roaring by below them. She could see the terrain's shape as ridges rose to greet them, then were left below and behind. Her vision was narrow, limited to thirty degrees ahead, which made her feel as if she were roaring down a tunnel at ten times normal speed.

“Found it, did you?” Vern chuckled. “Turn your head side to side, or it gets nauseating.”

She did and was able to see in any direction she looked. Always the same width, but a sweeping view. It was as if she had her hands cupped to either side of her eyes.

But she could see…right through the console as if it weren't there.

As if her legs, her seat, even the floor weren't there.

She was sitting in the air with nothing holding her up.

As if she was going to fall and fall and never land until—

“Look back up!” Vern order was sharp and she did.

The world slowly made sense again. Though her heart still pounded.

“It takes some practice. The cameras are on the outside of the bird, so they don't see the dashboard or the hull and it feels—”

“Incredibly scary.”

“Right. Like last night when you were driving back up the mountain.”

God, but he made her laugh.

* * *

Vern wanted to take Denise's laugh and wrap it around himself. He wanted to wrap himself around Denise. He wanted…

No! What he
needed
was a distraction.

“You know”—which had to about the lamest conversation opener ever discovered by man—“there's something weird going on.”

“You mean other than the two of us flying across three states in the middle of the night?”

He really liked the way “the two of us” sounded. “Yeah, even stranger than that.” Vern double-checked their course off the Columbia Gorge VOR radio beacon. It matched his GPS position neatly. “Do you know anything about Steve having a second kind of drone? I thought he just flew the same thing every time.”

“Maybe.” She didn't sound very sure about it.

“Maybe?”

“I'm thinking.”

Vern kept his mouth shut. Using the infrared image projected on the inside of his helmet, he looked down toward his belly. Locators inside the cockpit noticed the movement of his helmet's position. Outside, on the nose of the chopper, the infrared camera shifted to look down and a little back to offer the view below.

Denise's shop-box was visible. It hung smoothly at the end of the long-line, dragging through the air a hundred feet down and twenty back. All looked good. He looked forward again.

“Last year…” Denise began. “You remember the New Tillamook Burn?”

“Not really. It was only three weeks of hell to kill the worst Oregon wildfire in half a century.”

“Sorry.” She went all meek.

“Denise, stop apologizing. I was teasing. I know about it because you kept my chopper in the sky for three straight weeks without a single fault when everything else in the world was going wrong.”

“Sorr—that's a hard rule to follow.”

He could hear the lightness return to her voice. What in the world was in her past to make her apologize for everything? And just how completely was that none of his goddamn business?

“Do you—” She cut herself off and started again. “You remember that Jeannie's chopper went down after a tree exploded and took out her rear rotor?”

Back then Jeannie had been an MD500 pilot just as he had. One moment they'd been aloft fighting spot fires, and the next she'd been spinning down toward the fire mostly out of control. He shuddered. Jeannie had, by some miracle of piloting, gotten down in one piece, but it had been awful to witness. “Yeah.” He remembered.

“Well, when I was over servicing her bird that night, they were meeting around a picnic table. Very serious. They seemed to be talking about a special drone, but I couldn't quite hear them and I had enough troubles rebuilding that chopper's tail section. Forgot about it until you asked.”

“Who was there?” A sleeping Pasco slipped by below, then Walla Walla slid by beneath them with no one the wiser.

“Mark and Emily. Steve and Carly. Jeannie. And some woman I've never seen before or since. An Asian woman with a really serious body.”

Damn it! Now he was thinking of Denise's body. While not built with a “really serious body,” she possessed a body that was plenty serious enough to satisfy him. She had—

“You know, that's the same group that left us in Australia, although Cal had joined them by that time. That's when they replaced Firehawk Oh-Two.”

“Huh.” Vern picked up the signals at Spokane and Coeur D'Alene, Idaho. He ran the vectors to keep his hands busy. After this many years aloft, he could do the work of double-verifying their position without bothering his thinking processes.

That group had been pretty tight. When he was named to Firehawk Oh-Three, he'd thought he'd be welcomed into that inner circle of Type I heli-pilot camaraderie. Not so much. Civil, friendly, but there was no inner sanctum. Yet the people Denise had just named felt like a team that he still stood on the outside of. They had some common—