He bore down on the toggles, saw and accepted he’d miss the jump spot, adjusted again.
He winged through the birch, cursing. He didn’t land in the water, but it was a near thing as his momentum on landing nearly sent him rolling into it anyway.
Mildly annoyed, he gathered his chute as Rowan and Yangtree came running.
“I thought for sure you’d be in the drink.”
“Hit some bad air.”
“Me too. I nearly got frogged. Be grateful you’re not wet or limping.”
“Tore up my canopy some.”
“I bet.” Then she grinned as she had before jumping into space. “What a ride!”
Once all jumpers were on the ground, Yangtree called a briefing with Rowan and Gibbons while the others dealt with the paracargo.
“They thought they could catch it, had forty jumpers on it, and for the first two days, it looked like they had it. Then it turned on them. A series of blowups, some equipment problems, a couple injuries.”
“The usual clusterfuck,” Gibbons suggested.
“You got it. I’ll be coordinating with the Alaska division boss, the BLM and USFS guys. I’m going to take me a copter ride, get a better look at things, but for right now.”
He picked up a stick, drew a rough map in the dirt. “Gibbons, take a crew and start working the left flank. They’ve got a Cat line across here. That’s where you’ll tie in with the Alaska crew. You’ve got a water source here for the pumpers. Swede, you take the right, work it up, burn it out, drown it.”
“Take it by the tail,” she said, following his dirt map. “Starve the belly.”
“Show’em what Zulies can do. We catch her good, shake her by the tail and push up to the head.” He checked the time. “Should reach the head in fifteen, sixteen hours if we haul our asses.”
They discussed strategy, details, directions, crouched in the stand of birch, while on the jump site the crew unpacked chain saws, boxes of fusees, pumpers and hose.
Gibbons leaped up, waved his Pulaski toward the sky. “Let’s do it!” he shouted.
“Ten men each.” Yangtree clapped his hands together like a team captain before the big game. “Get humping, Zulies.”
They got humping.
As planned, Rowan and her team used fusees to set burnouts between the raging right flank and the service road, sawing snags and widening the scratch line as they moved north from the jump spot.
If the dragon tried to swing east to cross the roads, move on to homesteads and cabins, she’d go hungry before she got there. They worked through what was left of the night, into the day with the flank crackling and snarling, vomiting out firebrands the wind took in arches to the dry tundra.
“Chow time,” she announced. “I’m going to scout through the burn, see if I can find how close Gibbons’s crew is.”
Dobie pulled a smashed sandwich out of his bag, looked up at the towering columns of smoke and flame. “Biggest I’ve ever seen.”
“She’s a romper,” Rowan agreed, “but you know what they say about Alaska. Everything’s bigger. Fuel up. We’ve got a long way to go.”
She couldn’t give them long to rest, she thought as she headed out. Timing and momentum were as vital tools as Pulaski and saw because Dobie hadn’t been wrong. This was one big mother, bigger, she’d concluded, than anticipated and, she’d already estimated by the staggered formation of her own line, wider in the body.
Pine tar and pitch tanged in the air, soured by the stench of smoke that rose like gray ribbons from the peat floor of the once, she imagined, pristine forest. Now mangled, blackened trees lay like fallen soldiers on a lost battlefield.
She could hear no sound of saw, no shout of man through the voice of the fire. Gibbons wasn’t as close as she’d hoped, and she couldn’t afford to scout farther.
She ate a banana and an energy bar on the quickstep hike back to her men. Gull gulped down Gatorade as he walked to her.
“What’s the word, boss?”
“We’re shaking her tail, as ordered, but she’s got a damn long one. We’ll be hard-pressed to meet Yangtree’s ETA. We’ve got a water source coming up. It should be about a hundred yards, and a little to the west. We’ll put the baby hoses on her, pump it up and douse her like Dorothy doused the Wicked Witch.”
She took his Gatorade, chugged some down. “She’s burning hot, Gull. Some desk jockey waited too long to call in more troops, and now she’s riding this wind. If she rides it hard enough, she can get behind us. We’ve got to bust our humps, get to the water, hose her down and back.”
“Busting humps is what we do.”
Still, it took brutal, backbreaking time to reach the rushing mountain stream, while the fire fought to advance, while it threw brands like a school-yard bully throws rocks, its roar a constant barrage of taunts and threats.
“Dobie, Chainsaw, beat out those spots! Libby, Trigger, Southern, snags and brush. The rest of you, get those pumps set up, lay the hose.”
She grabbed one of the pumps, connected the fuel can line to the pump, vented it. Moving fast, sweat dripping, she attached the foot valve, checked the gasket, tightened it with a spanner wrench from her tool bag.
Beat it back here, she thought, had to, or they’d be forced to backtrack and round east, giving up hundreds of acres, risk letting the fire snake behind them and drive them farther away from the head, from Gibbons. From victory.
She set the wye valve on the discharge side of the pump, began to hand-tighten it. And found it simply circled like a drain.
“Come on, come on.” She fixed it on again, blaming her rush, but when she got the same result, examined the valve closely.
“Jesus Christ. Jesus, it’s stripped. The wye valve’s threads are stripped on this pump.”
Gull looked over from where he worked. “I’ve got the same deal here.”
“I’m good,” Janis called out on the third pump. “It’s priming.”
“Get it warmed up, get it going.”
But one pump wouldn’t do the job, she thought. Might as well try a goddamn piss bag.
“We’re screwed.” She slapped a fist on the useless pump.
Gull caught her eye. “No way two stripped valves end up on the pumps by accident.”
“Can’t worry about that now. We’ll hold her with one as long as we can, use the time to saw and dig a line. We’ll double back to that old Cat line we crossed, then retreat east. Goddamn it, give up all that ground. There’s no time to get more pumps or manpower in here. Maybe if I had some damn duct tape we could jerry-rig them.”
“Duct tape. Hold on.” He straightened, ran to where Dobie shoveled dirt over a dying spot fire.
Rowan watched in amazement as he ran back with a roll of duct tape. “For Dobie it’s like his Tabasco. He doesn’t leave home without it.”
“It could work, or work long enough.”
They worked together, placing the faulty valve, wrapping it tight and snug to the discharge. She added another insurance layer, continued the setup.
“Fingers crossed,” she said to Gull, and began to stroke the primer. “She’s priming,” she mumbled as water squirted out of the holes. “Come on, keep going. Duct tape heals all wounds. Keep those fingers crossed.”
She closed the valve to the primer, opened it to the collapsible hose.
“It’s going to work.”
“It
“Not two of them,” Gull repeated while they worked.
“No, not two of them. Somebody majorly fucked up or—”
“Deliberately.”
She let the word hang when she met his eyes. “Let’s get it running. We’ll deal with that when we get out of this mess.”
