The Big Burn. Terry Watkins
Chapter 1
Southern California
Anna Quick felt a rude jolt when turbulence from an eighty-mile-per-hour gust of superheated air slammed violently into the jump plane. Her breathing was shallow from the tight constraint of the chest strap on the jump harness as she stared out the open door, the plane orbiting drunkenly over the raging inferno below.
A voice behind her said, “They’re somewhere in that gorge, but there’s no way out. Fires are moving in on both ends. It’s going to blow up.”
“How many people?”
“Four. College students on a backpacking trip. Two girls, two guys.”
Anna nodded. They would be scared out of their minds, desperately searching for a way out. Then they’d face the realization they weren’t getting out. Four college kids unequipped, unprepared. They would die the most horrible of deaths, screaming, choking, burning…
In the distance, two massive smoke columns broke through the inversion layer and shot hundreds of feet into the air. Tongues of fire snapped across the ridges and raced into the heavy brush and trees on the southern edge of the canyon.
The jump plane bucked again, with increased violence. The plane lurched sideways as updrafts of the ferocious, high-octane Santa Ana winds knocked them around as if they were a toy boat on a raging sea.
Anna’s face and nostrils and eyes were dry and tight. The roar of the wind blasting from the gorges grew thunderous as the gusts hurled smoke and flames across the horizon. She studied the orange tidal wave as it swept up the slope of the mountain to the south, ten miles from the mountain community of Big Bear. She noted the axiom that every twenty degrees in hill slope doubled the rate of speed the fire spread. The vicious whirlwinds and updrafts were being created by the fire itself.
Anna processed the variables that produced this disaster: fuel loading, clear-cutting, weather, topography. In a decade of firefighting she’d never seen anything to match this. Her boss said it was becoming another Yellowstone disaster.
“Not going to happen, Anna. Back away from the door. This is a no-go,” Carter yelled over the roar. “You can’t risk it. I won’t let you. There’s no way out of that canyon now.”
There’s always a way out, Anna thought. The fire would burn over this canyon very quickly and the worst of it would stay up on the ridges.
“I’m going in,” Anna insisted as she tightened her leg straps.
“The hell you are.”
Another huge fire swept down from the north, threatening to marry with the one below, forging a giant tsunami of flame. Smaller fires snaked aggressively along the ridges, and out as far as she could see more flare-ups triggered by flying embers burst across the hills.
Anna Quick’s team had been jumping small outback fires for twelve days. She was exhausted from slogging equipment up and down hills, digging, cutting, torching backfires. Behind her on the jump plane’s nylon seats sat her seven teammates, tired, dirty and in a stupor only firefighters know. All they wanted to do was go back to base camp and collapse.
Anna, a lifelong mountain climber and college soccer star, had formidable reserves that gave her, at the most competitive level, more endurance than any other male or female on the strike team, but this time even she’d overdrawn her account. She was functioning on nothing now but sheer willpower.
“Dammit, Anna,” Carter persisted, leaning in close over the roar of the engine, both of them holding on to the door frame for support against the slipstream and turbulence. “It’s a no-go.”
She ignored him as she pulled on her helmet, snapped the chin strap, dropped the heavy wire-mesh mask over her face and pulled on her Nomex gloves.
Carter grabbed her shoulder. “Abort now! That’s an order!”
She stepped closer to the door, dropping into a sitting position with her legs out. She was going in light. She’d dumped all but the necessities into her PG bag and snapped it under the reserve chute on her belly. She had extra lightweight fire shields jammed into the nylon webbing of her Kevlar fire suit.
In the distance a superscooper dumped “mud” on the southern wall of fire. A futile gesture. Above the scooper she spotted a hovering chopper. Probably getting news footage, though it didn’t have the coloring of one of the news birds. It looked military.
Her eyes focused on the horizon, searching for markers. The backpackers, communicating by cell phone, were last reported to be in the narrow gorge below, hiding in a dry creek bed. The fire would overtake them in a half hour or less. The heat and smoke would kill them sooner.
“Anna!”
She broke free of Carter’s grip, pulled her legs up, got her feet under her and launched herself before he could stop her. She rolled out into the dark, choking sky, hearing nothing now but her own jump count:
Jump-thousand.
…now feeling the adrenal rush of the tumble into space, feet up, body twisting as she plunged.
Look-thousand.
…seeing now the earth and sky somersaulting over one another, the plane slipping past like a quick hawk, then seeing the fire.
Reach-thousand.
She grabbed the green rip cord. Windblown embers exploded against her mask.
Pull-thousand.
Her hand ripped across her chest.
The quick drop, then the tug of the blossoming round of orange and white canopy was always a beautiful sight to a jumper. There were no tension knots at the corners, and the steering toggles were okay.
She pulled directly into the wind as tongues of fire leaped up at her. Her gut tightened, her nerves stretched taut. The full fury of the firestorm mocked her descent toward the dragon’s fiery mouth. It was starved for fuel, waiting to be fed.
At three hundred feet, she set up the brakes with the toggles halfway down, easing to her right, then left, reefing down on the toggles, maneuvering, deeper into the brakes, then full brakes as she zeroed in on her landing zone, a flat piece of ground.
Then, without notice, a sneaky backwind shooting up the canyon grabbed her.
She was in trouble.
Two thousand feet above the wildly gyrating smoke jumper, in an unmarked, Sikorsky SH-60 B Seahawk naval antiship chopper, John Brock held on to the frame of the open door with one hand. With the other he held binoculars, tracking the jumper’s descent through the smoke as he held on against the violent rocking and rolling.
He watched in dismay as the winds grabbed Anna Quick’s chute and drove her horizontally at great speed toward the slope and a stand of trees.
Behind Brock, a marine lieutenant was yelling on his satellite phone at some assistant to the director of Emergency Services at the California Emergency Control Center.
Through his headset Brock heard his chopper pilot declare, “That’s suicide.”
Brock had traveled twelve thousand miles to recruit Anna Quick. Wasted miles. He watched her vanish into the smoke. She was supposed to be on her way back to her base camp. Instead she was jumping into an inferno.
“She have any chance at all?” he asked.
The pilot said, “That’s up to Big Ernie.”
“Who the hell’s Big Ernie?”
“He’s the smoke jumper’s god of fire. You gotta play the cards he deals. And he’s a jokester.”
Brock wasn’t amused.
The marine lieutenant finished his conversation and moved over in the doorway next to Brock. Brock pulled back his headgear so he could hear the lieutenant.
“Sir,