Chapter 8
Colton
The storm lied.
Instead of drowning the fires, it had birthed new ones. Lightning ignited dozens of starts across the entire Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest. This morning’s situation board at the ICC looked like a war map with red pins spread across it.
Colton arrived at Bowman Airfield, humming with the reload crew’s rhythm, the pit boss working the slurry lines, ramp staff turning aircraft as fast as the pumps allowed. Air Ops dispatch coordinated the entire airfield by radio.
Beneath Dash’s port wing, a stocky, bald man in oil-stained coveralls had both arms buried in the number two engine nacelle.
Harvey Boone. Precision Aviation’s chief maintenance officer was here from Helena to service the tankers.
Late fifties, former Air Force mechanic, built like a fire hydrant and practically as charming.
Harv talked to aircraft the way other men talked to horses.
Colton had worked with him for six years and trusted his competence.
“Morning, kid.” Harvey withdrew his head and wiped his fingers on a rag that hadn’t seen soap since Lincoln was a toddler. At the base of the wing rested his coffee mug, emblazoned with the phrase “I’d Rather Be Flying!” This was a running joke, since Harvey had never piloted a plane.
“Got here at 0400. Wanted to go through things myself after yesterday’s fuel readings. Both engines are purrin’ like kittens now.”
“The fuel?”
“New supplier, new truck, new driver. I oversaw each gallon they pumped myself.” Harvey adjusted his grease-worn baseball cap. “Sugar contamination bothers the hell out of me. Marsh’s people took the samples, but nobody’s telling me anything. Got a sneaking suspicion they’re looking at us.”
Colton let out a sigh. “They’re looking at everyone. It’s their job.”
“Yeah, well.” Harvey tossed the rag over his shoulder. “I’ve been turnin’ wrenches on fire planes for thirty years. Never lost one to a maintenance failure.” He gave Colton a pointed look. “Bring her back in one piece, and I’ll have her ready for tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir, will do.”
“Ace said the same thing that day,” Harvey mumbled. He grabbed his coffee mug and headed toward the hangar, muttering about the fuel system’s tolerances and the incompetence of contractor mechanics.
COLTON HOISTED HIMSELF into the cockpit and slid into the seat that fit him like a second skin. Preflight checklist: instruments, fuel gauges, hydraulics, radio frequencies, slurry gates. He fired the engines and the resulting vibration climbed through the airframe and into his bones.
Once airborne, he eased in behind Bird Dog. Pointer’s King Air banked through the smoke ahead of him, reporting conditions. “One-Eight-Two, come to heading two-one-zero, descend to twenty-two hundred. Target is the head of the fire, wind from the west at eight knots. You’re clear to drop.”
Colton followed Pointer’s smoke trail the way he’d done countless times.
He liked the steady rhythm of aerial firefighting: Bird Dog threading the needle; the tanker following with the payload.
The sky was his office, the glorious Rocky Mountain Range his backdrop.
As he soared over those peaks, the sense of freedom energized him and lifted his spirit.
Fifteen minutes later, he banked the tanker hard left, lining up for a second half-load drop on a spot fire threatening a subdivision east of Anaconda. Smoke had thickened into a gray-brown wall, leaving only fleeting glimpses of the ground below.
The tanker bucked as it punched through a thermal column rising off the ridgeline.
Twenty-five hundred gallons of slurry sloshed in the tanks, and the weight redistribution tugged the nose left.
He stomped the right rudder, the resistance biting into his calves.
A fully loaded air tanker handled like a school bus on glacial ice.
Nose-heavy and unforgiving if he let his airspeed fall below one-forty.
Smoke filled the windshield, a brown-gray barrier blotting the horizon. His instrument panel served as his only reliable reference: his altimeter, airspeed indicator, and the GPS fix on his target.
He found a seam in the smoke, a ragged gap where the wind tore the column apart for a few seconds. Long enough. The subdivision came into view: rooftops, a gravel road, backyard trampolines that might be ash if the fire jumped the road.
Bird Dog led Colton in, and he punched the gate release on Pointer’s mark. The tanker lurched upward as twelve tons of red cascaded like a wide crimson fan. A pink mist drifted back over the fuselage, blurring his windshield.
Colton growled. Blowback that thick could gum up his engines. He hauled back on the yoke, G-forces sending him deep into the seat.
“Nice one,” radioed Pointer. “Be on my six for the second drop.”
“Copy,” said Colton. “Coming around.”
“Tanker One-Eight-Two, this is Jump Squad 19. Do you copy?” Deanna’s voice streamed through his headset, controlled but urgent. “The fire crowned through the timber and cut off our safety route. I think there’s a drainage to our east where the fuel thins out. Can you confirm from the air?”
Smart. She’d read the terrain from ground level and found what she could with zero visibility. He gained altitude to see over the smoke column. Below, yellow Nomex flickered through the haze. The fire made a run straight at them, pushed by afternoon thermals.
The drainage she’d found opened into a clearing at two o’clock, about three hundred yards out. From her angle, only the rocky wash showed. From his, the meadow opened beyond it.
“Jump 19, your read is solid. Follow that drainage east. It opens into a clearing at your two o’clock. Move fast, the fire’s making a run from the west.”
“Copy. Moving to—” Her transmission cut to static, then filtered back. “Kylie’s down! Ankle injury. I have to help her. Wait a sec.” Deanna kept her radio keyed while she instructed her jump squad. “Get to the clearing at our two o’clock. Go!”
Six yellow-clad figures burst from the timber.
Three led the way. Behind them, two more supported a limping jumper between them, and the gap between the group and the flames shrank with every stride.
Fire crowned through the towering lodgepoles at their backs, hurling embers ahead of itself like artillery.
“Jump 19, get a move on before you get cut off.”
“Working on it.” Strain pushed through Deanna’s words. “Dropped everything but our shelters to make better time.”
“Thirty yards to the black.”
The lead jumpers hit the burned-over ground, and the last three staggered in behind them as flames swallowed the tree line they’d cleared seconds earlier.
From above, Colton read the problem in one pass.
The scar was shallow, fifty yards at its deepest, pocked with unburned islands of brush and juvenile pine.
Not enough distance from a crowning front.
Embers rained down, and one island caught, then another, orange flames shrinking the refuge from its edges.
“Black’s too shallow.” Static chewed at Deanna’s transmission. “No separation from the head. Deploying shelters.”
The words dropped through him like ice. He watched the tiny figures scrape at the smoking ground with their boots, clearing deployment spots down to bare soil.
Shelters were a jumper’s last resort, the aluminum-and-fiberglass tents everyone called shake-n-bake, and he’d seen the training videos of a burnover from inside one.
Hell on earth.
A shudder rolled through him.
“Copy that. Turn your radio up full volume and keep talking to me, Jump 19.”
Colton circled, fixing their position through the smoke, and entered the coordinates into the plane’s computer.
He keyed his radio. “Bird Dog, aborting the second targeted drop to help jumpers in a tight spot.”
Pointer came back. “Yeah, I heard. Want me to lead?”
“Nope, I have this one handled. They’re deploying shelters, so I’m laying down a buffer.”
“Copy that,” replied Pointer.
The regs dictated protocol: let Bird Dog lead.
But protocol hadn’t saved Mack McKinney on that ridge near Bozeman.
Despite Colton following every procedure in the book that day, his co-pilot died in the seat beside him.
Four years of flying since, and every emergency boiled down to the same brutal arithmetic: act now or bury someone later.
If that made him skip standard protocol, so be it.
Deanna returned to the aviation frequency, breathing hard. “Shelters deployed. All six jumpers are inside.”
“Stay on the frequency. Dropping mud to help you out.” The thought of six firefighters anchored to the ground while flames rolled through squeezed his chest.
And Deanna was one of the six.
Colton set the GPS target and planned his line: the mud would go down between the head and the clearing, a wall across the fire’s path.
Never on the shelters. A full load from two hundred feet could crush a person flat.
And it wouldn’t stop the fire’s head. Nothing stopped a crown run.
But it would knock the fire down where it crossed, steal its heat in the seconds it swept the clearing.
Seconds were what shelters were built for.
“Jump 19, brace for a drop upwind of your position,” relayed Colton.
Deanna’s voice came back. “Can you see us?”
“I marked your location before the smoke closed in. Hold tight, here she comes.”
Colton dove the tanker, flying instruments down to the clearing. A gap in the smoke opened, and he hit the gate release, the load cascading in a long red curtain across the fire’s path.
From altitude, Colton noted the proof. Where the retardant had striped the ground, hundred-foot flame lengths collapsed to thirty. Fire was still coming, but cooler and not as aggressive.
“It’s working, Jump 19,” reported Colton. “Front will pass over you, but it’s knocked-down considerably. Stay buttoned up no matter what.”