Hot Point (9 page)

“Wait! What? When did they replace Oh-Two?” The chopper had flown in some direction different from the rest of MHA in Australia, but Oh-Two had come back with them.

“The chopper I sent was not the one that came back. The service on it was meticulous, but it wasn't the same bird. I know when a repair is mine and when it's someone else's.”

* * *

Denise waited for it. Waited for Vern to deliver that off-the-cuff denial or dismissal. “Oh you're just being paranoid.” “Don't worry your little head about it.” Had she actually put up with such language from Jasper? She had, and it was embarrassing. Even shaming.

“But—”

Here it came.

“Jeannie would have to know. And anything she knows, Cal knows. And that means… But then all of them are in on it? Whatever it is?”

Bless Vern. She could really go weak in the knees over this man. He was gorgeous, funny, and not only did he listen to her, but he believed her. It made her feel at least six feet tall. Well, maybe five feet ten.

“Do you have any idea what ‘it' is?”

“No!” And Denise could taste the bitter memory. She recounted her inquiries into what had happened.

“Total loss, nonmechanical failure” was the only answer she'd ever been given. Mark had informed her it was strictly “need to know” and then had done that arms-crossed thing with the neutral gaze from behind his ever-present mirrored shades. It was hard to argue with him when she didn't even reach his shoulder and was about as big around as one of his legs.

Jeannie had simply blanched pale when Denise had asked about it, then shook her head, refusing to speak. Even MHA's chief pilot, Emily, had stonewalled her.

“Mark told me it was a security-level matter, and I could be fired for discussing it with anyone. Or worse. And he left that dangling.” Mark had left a chill in her that day, and six months later it still hadn't gone totally away. When he was a military commander, he must have been truly terrifying.

It was a huge relief to share her fears with someone. She loved doing the work at MHA, but it had begun to feel creepy and she'd thought it was all just her.

Vern told her about the strangeness of the Honduras conversation.

They chased it around right through the second hour of the flight but didn't make any headway about what was going on at MHA. There was obviously something, but it was extremely well hidden. They were both long-term employees and all they had were a second drone, a switched-out helicopter, and a conversation that could have been about a Latin American beach holiday.

They fell into an easy silence. In addition to the relief of finally talking to someone about it, she felt much closer to Vern because of the conversation. He was sharp and thoughtful. He'd suggested many ideas that were unlikely in the extreme. Some serious, some having to do with the secret hideout for the X-Men.

He'd made a space where it was safe for her to voice ideas at well. When he laughed at some of them, she could see that they were indeed funny. She'd almost never experienced that level of comfort in a conversation. With anyone.

“We're passing over into Idaho. We're just over Moscow.”

Denise looked around out the windshield but didn't see it.

Vern took his hand off the collective for a moment and touched her lightly on the arm, then pointed down.

The touch tingled even as she looked straight down. The city was painted across the inside of her helmet's visor. It lay directly below in a thousand shades of green. Perhaps twenty blocks square, the city ended abruptly in black.

“Farmland,” Vern informed her when she asked. “Not a lot of variation thermally, so most of it just looks black at this time of morning. Sunrise is still an hour off.”

She could see the occasional cars, but nothing else was moving. She'd never been there, but it looked sleepy and pleasant from above. Denise was aware that she'd grown used to the odd view and wasn't freaking out over watching the world pass by from her bird's-eye view.

“What's Jasper up to?”

She bit off a sharp breath. Suddenly she felt like really freaking out.

* * *

Vern couldn't believe he'd asked that. In the interminable silence that stretched farther ahead of him than the rest of the night passage to Montana, he considered releasing the controls so that he could strip off his helmet and box his own ears.

Of all the tactless, clumsy, awkward…

“I wouldn't know.” Denise's voice was soft over the intercom. Her boom mic captured a definite note of distress and fed it straight into his helmet's sound-insulating headphones.

“Wait. What?” He hadn't meant to say that aloud, but he'd been so startled that his brain was being very slow about catching up with the conversation.

“We broke up a month ago. It actually ended way before that, but neither of us even noticed. At least I didn't.” She sounded on the verge of tears.

“Hey, none of that. Women's tears are strictly forbidden on my helicopter. Tears of joy, sure. Anytime. But no weeping women.” Could he sound like more of a jerk? “On the ground, okay. But not aloft. We clear on that?” He did his best to make it funny, but it didn't work even to his ear.

In his peripheral vision, he saw her nod by the movement of her helmet shifting up and down. When he looked sidelong at her a moment later through the terrain topography projected on the inside of his visor, he could see her raise her own visor and wipe at her eyes.

“Sorry,” he apologized. “None of that came out right. I didn't know. You look pretty broken up about it.” Good, Vern. Real frickin' smooth. A part of him was thrilled that she was no longer with Jasper because—

“Go ahead and say it.” Her voice was steadier, and he returned his attention to the images of the two choppers flying ahead of him over the ghostly green terrain.

Emily's was marked by the launching trailer for the surveillance drone dangling far below. Jeannie's was apparent by the large pallet of gear for the smokies, also dangling two hundred feet below her chopper. With the short container of Denise's workshop hanging from his own machine, they made quite the picturesque flight.

“Go on,” Denise prompted him again.

Vern knew he should keep his mouth shut. Never criticize a woman on her choice of men.

“Say it, Vern.” Denise didn't use her chief mechanic voice designed to daunt assistants and totally cow mere pilots. Instead, she sounded tired.

“I always thought you were too good for him.” Damn it! He really shouldn't have said it out loud.

“That wasn't quite what I was expecting.”

Vern flicked through the modes on the HUD and saw that everything mechanical was fine. He had enough fuel to make the crossing with no stops. No weather ahead. The only bad storm was a firestorm, and that wasn't his problem for another hour. That and being a certifiable idiot.

“No one at MHA seemed to like Jasper much.” Her voice was soft, and he wished he could reach out a comforting hand.

I
don't.
Vern kept that statement to himself. Finally learning from his own maddening stupidity.

“I guess that should have told me something.” Her voice didn't sound upset, just sad. And the tears appeared to be gone as quickly as the storm had threatened—except for the occasional sniffle.

“Then why the tears earlier?”

Denise was silent a long time before she spoke. They'd flown over the Saint Joe National Forest, the trackless Idaho wilderness. He climbed an extra five thousand feet to clear any of the peaks.

They had traveled from darkness into pending sunrise as they raced across the landscape at two hundred miles per hour. The sky offered a soft pink, followed by a warm glow and then a bright one. They were high above the sharp-edged Clearwater Mountains of the Bitterroot Range, with the sun cracking the horizon and stabbing at them, before she spoke again.

“They were for myself.” Her voice was little more than a whisper. “That I'd think so poorly of myself that I thought Jasper was worth staying with.”

“Don't you have any damned idea how amazing you are?”
Shit!
How could he put his foot so deep in his mouth when it was resting on a rudder pedal?

Her silence, even deeper this time, lasted until Missoula was in sight. As they descended after clearing the Bitterroot, the sunlight ducked out of sight again behind the Rattlesnake Mountains. The higher peaks were already white with early snow. They continued to shine like beacons once he was down in the valley's shadows.

Jeannie peeled off to deliver the supplies to the waiting smokejumpers. The tall plume of smoke above the Lolo wilderness was clearly visible, though they passed twenty miles to the south.

He followed Emily in. The Zulies usually didn't need much help; other than MHA, they were probably the best smokies in the business. So, he wasn't particularly familiar with their site at the Aerial Fire Depot off in a corner of Missoula International. He followed Emily's lead. Thankfully she'd called them into the control tower as a tandem flight so he cruised by the four-story tower, which looked as if they'd killed a whole lot of trees to side it, and slipped up to the Smokejumper Center at the north end of the field.

There was room for four planes to park in front of the low white-and-wood buildings. And two large pads of white concrete stained red with the inevitable spills of retardant that always happened in loading areas. The red of the retardant would clearly mark which trees they'd hit and treated, and which still needed fire protection.

“Where do you want your shop-box?” He held back while Emily lowered the drone-launch trailer onto the grass verge beside the parking lot.

Denise, who still hadn't spoken, pointed to an empty parking space close beside the hangar.

He brought it in. He leaned his head into the bulbous window of his helicopter door so that he could stare straight down. He had shoved the data-projecting visor out of the way just before sunrise. Not nearly as useful in broad daylight and he'd always found it restricting—even back in the Coast Guard days.

Twisting slowly above the parking space, he rotated the container so that the big double door would be facing toward the aircraft and not out toward the car parking lot. He dropped it as cleanly as he'd picked it up. Rather hoping Denise might notice.

Once he had it down on the ground, he hit the cargo-hook release and was an instant too late to stop his mistake.

The heavy four-point lifting harness, a hundred feet of thick wire cable, and the top loop were dropped all at once. They landed atop Denise's service box with a crash. Definitely scraped paint, probably some dents as well. He should have descended another seventy-five feet before he let the harness go.

He focused on getting the bird down on the tarmac. He'd need fuel and retardant and to drop off Denise.

He'd cycled down the engines as they each climbed out of the cockpit and tested sore bodies against hard tarmac. The fuel truck was rolling up as Denise came around the chopper and stopped so close that he could smell her. That warm woman mechanic filled his lungs.

She rested her hand on his arm for a moment. “To answer your question…”

His question? “Oh, the one about how incredible you are?”

Denise nodded. Didn't blush, only nodded.

He liked that about her. She wasn't embarrassed by who she was, but rather accepting of herself. A lesson he could definitely learn.

“My answer is no.”

“No?”

“No. I can't imagine myself as being incredible, but, and this does surprise me, I find that I rather enjoy that you see me that way.” Then she flashed one of those stellar smiles at him before turning to inspect her shop container. She managed a dozen steps before his wits gathered enough to shout to her.

“Hey, Wrench?”

She turned and looked at him. The sun had cleared the horizon of mountains and now shone full upon her, lighting her hair up in blond glory.

“Start imagining it. Because you are beyond incredible. Get that straight in your brain. You hear me?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Pilot, sir!” She snapped a salute, pretending—as he had—to knock herself silly, then sashayed off to get to work.

He heard the clunk of the fuel nozzle as the serviceman behind him began reloading his bird. The bite of Jet A fuel on the air did nothing to diminish the sweetness of the morning.

Denise hid in her shop container for a few minutes, trying to gather her composure and wrap it around herself.

“Incredible?” She said it softly, but it rang off the steel walls of the box as if her echo was mocking her. She had nice hair. Men had a weakness for her hair, but then so did she. It was the only thing about her that was feminine other than her body shape. She often reeked of sweat, oil, and grease. For a living she wore a tool belt and jeans. She talked about machines. She was about as alluring as an anvil with a nice wig.

By some autonomic reflex, her hands—with their short-cut yet still-ragged nails—began the task of inspecting the container's contents. MHA had given her a free hand in making sure it had everything she needed. With the contents of the container, which was twenty feet long and eight wide, she could almost do anything to a helicopter.

Down the left-hand side ran a deep bench. Above it were racked tools; below, the heavy parts in case something serious broke. Almost the entire right-hand side was filled with drawers. Everything she needed was here—from screws small enough to secure console instruments to spare hydraulic hoses, air filters, and drive belts. A small section by the door had welding tools, the specialized high-temperature hydraulic fluids, and a small service cart. She'd need to borrow a crane if she had to dismount and rebuild an engine or a rotor shaft. Otherwise, short of a new rotor blade, she had it covered and in stock.

And Vern had delivered it so delicately that nothing was out of place. It felt like a steel cocoon wrapped about her, a safe haven from the rest of the world.

She looked up at the new dent in the very center of the ceiling, where the outline of the cargo line's Flemish eye splice was vaguely recognizable. It had surprised her, but when she'd turned to see the deep chagrin on his face, he looked like he'd killed her cat, not dented a steel box. It had taken all of her control not to laugh.

She knew he'd been bothered when she'd laughed at him about not being able to drive her car. He'd get it next time; it just took a bit of practice. Even though he'd been good humored about it, she'd try not to laugh
at
him again.

Everything here was in order. Only yesterday she'd reviewed the stock list, so she couldn't use that to distract her.

If she was so incredible, why did her shop suddenly feel so confining? She wanted to be out where she could breathe.

But stepping outside the container was no better. The fire's smoke had begun to settle over Missoula in a thickening smog, trapped in the narrow valley. The fire was up in the Lolo forest to the west, and the prevailing winds were blowing right toward town. The morning sky was a light brown rather than a bright blue. The taste of smoke tickled her nose and made her want to sneeze. It was only going to get thicker until they beat this fire.

The Zulies' smokejumper buildings were ranged around them. Some admin and clerks had come out to greet them. Handing out paper sacks of food and fresh water bottles.

The resident ground crew had snapped to life with the arrival of the Firehawks. Even the Zulies didn't have these beautiful birds. They descended to fuel and gawk. The roar of the fuel-truck pumps blocked all other sounds except for the basso roar of a jet taking off from the Missoula airport in the background.

Steve and Carly were setting up the drone trailer.

Denise considered going over and offering her help, but she could see she'd be in the way. They had it down to a science. Every move orchestrated, no motion wasted. In moments the trailer's front end had been jacked up to steepen the launch rail. The tall, articulated arm held the landing rope aloft—the drone landed by flying into the rope and snagging it on a wing. They'd have it aloft before the big choppers.

Then they'd be in their normal positions, Carly riding copilot to Emily so that she'd have the best view for analyzing the fire's behavior. And Steve seated right behind his wife at the drone's control console mounted in Firehawk Oh-One.

As soon as Firehawk Oh-Two had finished delivering the supplies to the smokies, Jeannie would be in here for the same treatment. Then she and Cal would take to the skies. His photography from the copilot's seat had already graced newspapers and magazine covers from
Time
to
National
Geographic
.

As soon as the fuel truck moved aside, a couple of the Zulies ran retardant hoses to each of the Firehawks, pumping their belly tanks full with the thick, red goo so essential to fighting forest fires. They'd be airborne in minutes. Aloft and racing to the fire.

Vern and Firehawk Oh-Three would be aloft and she'd be…

Useless. Sitting here on her backside. The three big choppers would be preoccupied with the fire, and the four smaller craft would only be leaving MHA's airfield about now. They were easily four hours away.

Four hours. What in the heck was someone who was supposed to be incredible going to do for four hours?

Her feet were in motion before she even thought it through.

The APU on Vern's bird and then on Emily's screamed to life. In moments, the massive four-blade rotors began to spin, sluggishly at first, but then picking up speed as the Auxiliary Power Unit shut down and the twin GE T700 turbines took over the job with their deep-throated roar.

The climbing pitch as the engines gained RPMs sent her scurrying the last few yards to grab Vern's door before he pulled it shut.

“Want company?” She felt breathless, light-headed. In her year and a half with MHA, she'd never flown to a fire.

“Sure. There's extra gear in back. Climb aboard and you can get dressed on the way. We're going right now.”

She looked at Vern. He now wore full firefighter's gear. Black fire-resistant cargo pants and a yellow Nomex jacket with a safety harness across his chest. A big work knife at his hip, a fire-shelter bag stuffed into the door pocket beside him. He looked so damned handsome and manly sitting at the controls of his big helicopter that she couldn't stand it.

Without thinking, she grabbed the big D-ring on the front of his harness that would be used to lift him out if there was a crash. She pulled him toward her and did what she'd spent most of last night's dinner thinking about. What she had found herself having to resist doing on their flight this morning.

His surprise at her kiss froze him for a moment. He didn't move. His hands remained on the cyclic and collective.

Then he snapped out of his momentary paralysis, and she wondered just what she'd unleashed.

Her idle whim in a moment of excitement took more than a second—but less than two—to morph into an enthusiastic kiss that seared her with its heat. Her heart rate raced upward as rapidly as the turbines continued to climb toward full RPMs.

Vern's kiss didn't caress; it took. He kissed her with such sudden hunger that she really could believe—in that moment—that she was incredible.

He pulled back abruptly. His eyes were wide. He opened his mouth. She could see the apology coming.

“One word of that,” Denise cut him off, “and I really will whack you with my wrench.”

He nodded once. Then nodded again a couple of times.

After that kiss, would she feel awkward spending the rest of the morning aboard with him? Maybe she shouldn't go. Maybe she should politely back away and—

“That thing I said earlier about no women's tears in the helicopter?”

She nodded, confused.

Then his infinitely reassuring smile broke out. “No kissing the pilot once we're aloft either. A kiss like that could make a guy faint with sheer joy. Very dangerous there, Wrench.
Incredibly
dangerous. So are you coming or not?”

The turbines were up to speed. She could tell by the note of their roar that the temperature was up to spec and the chopper was ready to fly.

On the other side of his Firehawk, Emily's rotors shifted and dug at the air to drag the retardant-laden bird aloft.

Denise took one look at Vern's smile and matched it with her own. She slammed his door shut and grinned at him again through the pilot's window. Moving a few steps aft, she slid open the chopper's big cargo-bay door, climbed inside, and then slid it shut behind her.

“Get us out of here!” she shouted at him. Then she began pulling on one of the sets of fire gear stowed in the back of the cargo bay.

She braced herself as the deck tilted forward, then banked when they climbed and headed toward the fire. She overlapped the coat's lapels as well as she could, but the gear swam on her small frame.

Didn't matter. The pounding of her heart would fill the extra space.

* * *

Denise's emotions had been through a lot of changes this morning. Flying to a forest fire in a Firehawk helicopter was both exciting and horrifying.

As they approached the fire, the hazy air become thicker and thicker beyond the windscreen. Even the few minutes to get dressed, double-back for the water bottle, foil shelter, and hard hat that Vern required, and then clamber into the copilot's seat without stepping on a radio in the center console had been long enough for a significant drop in visibility. The air quality was even worse by the time she was buckled in and had the headset positioned.

“I really only use the helmet for night flying. Or hot-spot work for the infrared feed. For the main fire, I still like directly seeing what I'm doing.”

She preferred the headset too. She liked being able to see his profile, see his smile when he glanced over to check her harness.

The visibility at Missoula had spanned the valley, barely. Ten miles from the airport to the rise of the high peaks along the southern edge of town. Now, as they neared the fire, the view was under a thousand yards.

“Oh, man, this is gonna suck.” Vern didn't sound put out or worried, rather a bit disgusted. So she would trust him to keep them safe.

A helicopter came out of the smoke headed almost right toward them. It flashed by so fast she barely had time to spot the large “02” that identified Jeannie's Firehawk. Denise almost gave herself whiplash trying to follow it.

A glance down at the instruments and she saw they were traveling at 150 knots, 173 miles per hour. With Jeannie going the other way, the choppers had passed at almost four hundred miles per hour—well, 345.2, but for once that felt too fussy even for her. Denise herself only occasionally crossed fifty knots during integrity tests lapping around the airport.

“How close were we?”

“What? Oh, to Jeannie?” Vern shrugged as if the close call was of no interest. “Three or four rotors.”

“Rotors?”

“Sure.” He descended to stay below the smoke. The high, sharp ridges of the Bitterroot Mountains rose to meet them. It was a narrow space to fly in.

She wanted to pick up her feet to keep them clear of the treetops.

“‘Rotors' is the best way to think about distance between helicopters. At three rotor diameters out, fifty-four feet times three, there is no way our rotor blades can collide. No real turbulence either. No hassle.” He pointed with his left finger at one of the screens on the console without removing his hand from the collective. “You can see the other choppers on that screen there.”

The screen, about as big as a laptop's, was a cluster of symbols. She was working on how to straighten them out when the radio sounded loud in her ear.

“We've got the smokies in deep,” Mark Henderson, the Incident Commander—Air, called down from his King Air. “Be cautious, everyone. We're in high and rough country. You clip a tree on a ridgeline, and your body is going to wind up two thousand feet down in the valley before you stop tumbling.”

“Really?” Denise felt her voice choke in her throat, and her response came out as no more than a squeak. She was glad they were only on intercom; she was only embarrassing herself in front of Vern and not her boss as well.

Mark continued with a wry tone as if he had indeed heard the squeak and began giving them vectors for their first attack. All gobbledygook to her ears, but Vern seemed to be taking it in.

When Mark finished, Vern transmitted an acknowledgment before glancing in her direction and remarking over the intercom. “Look out the window.” He was so casual that he sounded practically blasé, whereas her nerves were wondering why she'd ever left her nice, safe steel shop-box in the first place.

Denise did look out…and down. Way down. One moment the forest was close below them, the ridge stretching side to side as they crossed above it. Then it dropped away with an alarming abruptness, so sudden it gave her vertigo.

When she thought she might actually be ill, the tree-covered slope rocketed back up until she thought they would run square into the cliff face. After the third ridge and valley passed safely below the chopper, she decided that looking downward was a really stupid idea. At their current speed, a half-mile-deep valley slipped beneath their feet every thirty seconds.

“Oh man, those things are steep.” She lay back against her seat and closed her eyes.
Incredible
women
do
not
barf
on
helicopter
consoles.
She repeated that several times, focusing on the steady sound of the rotors and the smooth flight of the Firehawk.

Then the chopper dropped from under her and for a moment she floated off her seat, held in place only by her harness before she slammed back onto her seat.

Her eyes snapped open and she saw the fire now close before them.

This had been a really bad idea.

“Vern…” She managed to keep the panic out of her voice, mostly.

“We have to keep it from rounding the south end of the ridgeline,” Mark's voice continued, passing on instructions. “The smokies are atop the ridge, so it's up to you guys to hold the lower slopes. Lay the retardant from the top down.”