Radclyffe - Firestorm

Grabbing her shower gear, she headed for the ladder at the far end of her sleeping loft over the hangar deck that housed the twin-engine C-23 Sherpa jump ship. The minute she climbed down, the colder air in the cavernous space practically frosted her lungs. Probably in the thirties outside. The Montana mountains were still snow-covered in early May. Her breath hung in clouds as she hustled across the gravel yard toward the standby shack, a low-slung, metal-sided building with haphazardly arranged extensions that housed the sleeping quarters, mess hall, equipment and locker rooms. No one stirred around the barracks. Guys were still sleeping. Oh joy.

“Mallory,” a gruff male voice called. “Hey, Ice! See you a minute?”

So much for the leisurely shower. Mallory hadn’t counted on Sully being up so early, but she should have. He was as much a workaholic as she was—although she preferred to think of her work ethic as thorough, rather than obsessed.

“Yo, Sully. On my way.” Abandoning her visions of hot steam and suds, Mallory reversed course back to the ops room next to the hangar and stopped in the doorway. Her immediate superior, Chuck Sullivan, was bent over the desk in his cramped one-window office, his arms braced on either side of a haphazard pile of papers and file folders. A huge bulletin board covered with aerial and terrain maps occupied the far wall. A rickety stand in one corner held a Pyrex coffeepot in a dingy white coffeemaker. The room smelled of burnt coffee. He’d been there a while.

Mallory suppressed a twinge of guilt. She knew what this was about—she’d been dragging her feet sorting through all the paperwork that went along with her new job as ops manager of the Yellowrock interagency smokejumping unit. It wasn’t like she hadn’t told Sully she was terrible at desk work when he asked her to take the position suddenly vacated when Tom Reynolds couldn’t jump anymore. A bad landing had ended Tom up in the hospital with a crushed lumbar disc. She had seniority after eight years spending May through November fighting wildfires with the USFS, and she had plenty of experience directing activities as incident commander in the field, but ask her to fill out a timesheet—she’d rather spend two weeks sleeping on the ground during the height of mosquito season. “Look, Sully, if this is about filling that last position, I read through the applications last night. I think there are a couple of good candidates—”

“Yeah, about that,” Sully said, looking up. His smoke-gray eyes were hooded, the furrows extending out from the corners paler than the rest of his tanned skin, even though summer was still more than a month away. Something in his look made her stomach tighten.

“What?” Mallory said, leaning her shoulder against the doorjamb.

“The last position has been filled.”

“That’s interesting. How come I don’t know about it? I thought the training manager chose the crew.” Mallory clamped a lid on her temper. Something was off, but whatever it was, Sully wasn’t likely to be responsible, so venting at him wasn’t going to help. Sully had been supervisor at the Yellowrock station for fifteen years, and they got along well. Never had any problem communicating. Now he was uneasy and had made a decision that directly affected her for the next half a year without consulting her. She didn’t like surprises. Anticipation was her holy grail—she planned, studied, considered contingencies. Orderly, well-thought-out plans brought the team home whole. Fire was unpredictable. Fickle and frivolous. She couldn’t afford to be. Not when lives were at stake. “What’s going on, Sully?”

“We’ve been assigned a transfer from Grangeville to fill that vacancy.”

“A hotshot?” Mallory tried not to grind her teeth. Hotshots usually worked as part of wildland fire suppression teams on large, long-term fires. They were used to performing as units and often had difficulty making the transition from field-based firefighting to the rapid deployment into remote areas that was the daily fare of smokejumpers. “Geez, Sully. How come I’m just hearing about this?”

Sully straightened and jammed his hands in the pockets of his khaki work pants. His jaw worked like he was still chewing the tobacco he’d given up the year before. Yeah, he was definitely unhappy. “Because I’m just hearing about it myself. I got a call from regional headquarters informing me of the posting. The whole thing was handled a couple levels above my pay grade.”

“I’ve never heard of the higher-ups getting involved in something as basic as hiring a crew member.”

“Well, she’s not just any crew member.”

“She?” Mallory raised an eyebrow.

Sully laughed. “What? You think you and Sarah are the only women capable of doing the job?”

“I know we’re not. Except I know all the other female jumpers, and most of the women on the field crews too. None of them said anything to me about wanting to come on board. What’s her name?”

“Jac Russo.”

Mallory frowned. “Why do I know that name?”

“Maybe because her father is Franklin Russo?”

Mallory stiffened. “Oh, you gotta be kidding me. The right-wing senator from Idaho? The right-to-life, anti-gay, anti-affirmative-everything guy?”

“That’s the one. The rumor mill says he’s going to give Powell a run for his money for the White House come election time next year.”

“Just gets better and better,” Mallory said.

Sully smiled a little grimly. “Never knew you were political.”

“I’m not. Usually.” Mallory shook her head. Sully knew she was a lesbian—so did everybody else she worked with. She didn’t make an issue of it, she didn’t hide it. She was who she was. In the air, in the wilderness digging a line or setting a burnout, no one cared who you slept with. All they cared about was how well you did your job and looked after your buddies. Most of the time she was too busy working to think about what bureaucrats were doing, but she couldn’t turn on the television or pick up a magazine or read the news without hearing something about Russo and his campaign to turn the country back to a time when straight white men held all the power. And his vitriol turned her stomach. “This posting is politics, right? Somebody owes somebody a favor and we get to pick up the tab?” She raked her hand through her hair. Her too-damn-long hair. “Does she even know anything about firefighting? This is crazy. I don’t want some pampered politician’s daughter, who probably thinks spending six months in the mountains with a bunch of men will be fun and look good on her résumé, on my team. Hell, if she doesn’t get herself killed, she’ll get one of us killed.”

“Slow down, Ice. She’s not a rookie. Not quite. She worked part of a season with a Bureau of Land Management hotshot team in Idaho.” He fished around on his desk and came up with a dog-eared file folder. He flipped it open, turned it around, and held it out to her. “Besides, real-life experience is an acceptable substitute for the usual field training, and she’s got that covered.”

“She’s still a rookie as far as I’m concerned.” Mallory regarded the folder as if it were a rattler coiled in the brush trailside, waiting to strike. There couldn’t be anything good inside that file. Smokejumpers returned year after year to the same crew; vacancies were few, and the waiting list long. She hadn’t seen Russo’s name on any applications, but somehow, Russo had managed to leapfrog to the head of the list, and that could only mean someone had pulled strings. Anyone qualified for the job didn’t need to do that. “Come on, Sully. You know this doesn’t make any sense. If she’s already on a crew, why move her over to ours? We’ll have to train her to jump—”