Terry Watkins - The Big Burn

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, the strike-team boss ordered an abort. She disobeyed a direct order and went ahead and jumped.”

Brock nodded. That was consistent with the file they had on her. He swore softly to himself and continued to try to see something on the ground.

He said to the pilot, “Can you get this thing down there?”

“I can get it down. Getting it back out is the problem. Those Santa Ana winds are running sixty miles an hour down there. With low visibility and high winds the chances won’t be good.”

“I need that damn woman alive.”

“Sorry, sir,” the pilot said. “What you need is a miracle. The best I can do is to keep circling until the winds die down.”

Brock stared in frustration at the gathering firestorm. He knew the pilot was right, that they’d have virtually no chance of getting to her and then getting out again.

The marine lieutenant said, “That’s got to be the worst way to die.”

Angry as he was at the woman’s defiant jump, Brock couldn’t help but admire her courage. As an operator with Delta Force, Brock had gone into his share of extreme-risk situations and he knew the kind of mind-set that it took. She had to know something about the conditions, something no one else was taking into account. Either that or she was suicidal. He hoped for the former. He hadn’t come all this way for a charred corpse.

All attempts by Anna to keep her direction, to lock in the topography, had been blown away, and now she was in the hands of the wind. A vicious gust spun her around and she had to fight the near collapse of her chute.

It was now a desperate battle to get it under control. She was using every bit of her upper-body strength to keep the chute oriented.

When Anna found a break in the smoke, she saw the fantastic spectacle of fire crowning the treetops at unbelievable speeds.

The superheated winds buffeted her. She was engulfed in smoke, and for the moment, completely lost sight of the ground.

When the smoke cleared enough for her to see, it was too late. She sailed into a hundred-foot-high tree snag, her feet smashing through the top branches. Anna stopped with a violent jerk. The pads and Kevlar were all that saved her from being impaled. She still wore deep scars on her body from one such landing and was happy to have the new, stronger protective gear.

Anna looked up. Her chute was caught precariously. She looked down. It was an eighty-foot drop. Just great. She pulled out her drop-rope and hooked it up, released herself from the harness and began to rappel, trying desperately to get down before the chute gave way and dropped her like a stone.