Chapter 20
Colton
As a predawn blue softened the edges of Bowman Airfield, the Pintlers stood as shadowy sentinels to the west. Smoke lingered, pooling in drainages and the valley, passively waiting for wind.
Colton leaned on the tanker’s wing strut, thermos in one hand, phone in the other, trying to decide if it was too early to call his father.
He rang him anyway. The old man would be up. Ranchers and roosters kept the same hours.
Two rings. “You in trouble?” The line carried his father’s gravel-in-a-coffee-grinder rasp. Never a greeting. Hank Davis didn’t waste words on pleasantries any more than he wasted hay for his horses.
“Not the kind you think.” Colton sipped his coffee and made a face. The coffee tasted like Harvey had brewed it with engine parts. “I need to run a thing or two by you.”
His father let out a what-is-it-this-time sigh. “Yeah?”
“There’s this woman.”
“Oh, boy, this is how it always starts. Lemme guess, that cute heroic smokejumper Ace told me about when he called from the hospital. Said she rescued him from the cockpit when he crashed.”
“That’s the one. Yes, she’s heroic, but cute isn’t how I’d describe her. More like hot and beautiful.”
“Ah. So, what’s the deal?” His dad’s usual gruff cut through.
“Some have told me to stay away from Deanna. Reeva called her dangerous, and a smokejumper told me she nearly destroyed relationships on assignment in Alaska. But she also saved that same smokejumper’s life from a burning tree on the Copper Creek Fire.”
“So. You have an ex with a grudge, a smokejumper’s hearsay, and a gossip mill,” his dad summed up. “What’s your opinion?”
“I don’t see the person they say she is.” The certainty in his words caught him off guard. “She opened up because I asked her to. Admitted to a couple of things others had accused her of. She expected me to walk away.”
“Did you?”
“No. It took guts on her part to tell me those things.”
“Then you’ve made your decision.” Hank Davis paused. “Sounds to me like she wants you to think of her in a good light. She must like you.”
Colton laughed despite himself. His dad ran short on conversation but long on figuring out what made people tick.
“She doesn’t try to impress me, like other women try to do. Deanna shows up covered with ash and tells me I look like hell. She argues with me about flight protocols. She doesn’t pretend to be anything she isn’t.”
“Sounds like your mother.”
Colton nodded. The idea hadn’t occurred to him, but Dad was right.
His mother had been a woman who wore ranch boots to church and told his father he was wrong about cattle prices in front of the entire Montana Livestock Association.
She’d died at the worst possible time when Colton was a high school sophomore who needed her to help him navigate women.
“I’m telling you what I know.” Hank’s voice dropped half a register. “You can’t fly a tanker by looking in the rearview mirror, son. Either trust your instruments or don’t take off.”
“Thanks, Dad. Hey, thanks for taking care of my livestock.”
“Feed Athena the good oats when you come home,” said Hank. “She’s ornery as hell with those cheap ones.” The call ended, and Colton pocketed the phone.
He brushed his fingers along Dash’s fuselage.
In two hours, he’d be at eight thousand feet, flying through a smoke column thick enough to blot the sun, dropping on a fire intent on gobbling what it could.
And somewhere on the ground, a woman he’d given his heart to would fight the same fire, trusting him to stay safe in the air.
Everything he’d heard about Deanna Brooks said she was trouble. Reeva’s gossip, Ryan’s one-sided opinion, and the fire base rumor mill. But nothing he’d seen matched those warnings.
Yep, Dad is right. I’m sick and tired of looking in the rearview mirror.
Harvey pulled up to the hangar and climbed out of the truck, hustling over to Colton with two coffee cups and a paper bag of gas station donuts. “You’re here early.”
“Couldn’t sleep.”
His mechanic adjusted his baseball cap. “Woman trouble?”
“The opposite, actually.”
Harvey squinted at him, shoving a donut in his direction. “Eat. You’ve got a long day ahead.”
“MORNING, SKY KING.” Pointer streamed through Colton’s headset a few hours later, as Colton ascended into the air traffic. “Circling the fire, reporting conditions to the IC. Coffee tastes better up here. Ready when you are.”
“Time to slay the red dragon,” replied Colton, now that he’d hit his altitude.
From eight thousand feet, the Copper Creek Fire resembled a living, breathing monster. Not the crawl of a ground fire eating through duff, but a ravenous creature with purpose, speed, and the strength to decimate everything in its path.
Crown runs swept through the lodgepole canopy in fiery waves, each tree igniting the next, erasing a hundred yards in seconds. Spot fires bloomed a quarter mile ahead of the main front, thrown by firebrands lofted on the convection column and dropped like incendiary bombs into dried fuels.
A thirty-thousand-foot roaring tower of smoke and super-heated air punched into the atmosphere with enough force to generate its own weather.
An anvil-shaped pyro-cumulus cloud scudded over the muted landscape, its purple underside flickering with lightning aching to seed new fires on ridgetops.
Whenever Colton had seen pyro-cumulus clouds, the fires beneath them had doubled in size faster than a hotshot could drain a can of Copenhagen.
The fire sucked air from all directions to feed itself like an insatiable dragon, creating gusts that bent mature timber and hurled burning debris sideways. A spot fire a half mile east of the main perimeter exploded into a three-acre blaze in the time it took him to complete one pass.
The ground crews would retreat to their safety zones. Even the best hotshot crews couldn’t hold a line in a column-driven fire. The only viable strategy was to drop slurry on the flanks and wait for the column to collapse.
Bird Dog flew ahead of him, marking the target with a smoke trail.
“Tanker One-Eight-Two, you’re cleared for your drop.” Pointer came over his headset. “Wind’s picking up from the northwest at fifteen knots.”
“Copy that. Descending.” Colton throttled back, one eye on his airspeed.
He banked the tanker harder than necessary, lining up his drop, and released the slurry in a long crimson streak, eyeing his monitor to make sure it cascaded onto the ridgeline.
The fire would hit his red line within minutes.
With luck, it would slow the advance enough for ground crews to establish a fire break.
“Good drop, One-Eight-Two,” said Pointer. “Return for reload.”
After finishing his drops, several thoughts nagged Colton as he returned to Bowman Airfield.
The kidnapper had known about insurance money Precision Aviation kept in escrow.
They’d known when Kylie would be alone. Hell, they’d probably known his flight patterns too, when he’d be in the air and unable to help with the search.
Whoever hid behind this understood aerial firefighting: flight schedules, maintenance windows, fuel cycles, even the insurance structure. That narrowed the suspect pool considerably.
How many people had this level of cross-functional knowledge?
Reeva understood the business side, but the technical aspects of aviation lay outside her expertise. Someone else had a hand in this. Someone with ground access who understood how fire camps operated from the inside.
Harvey had mentioned a guy, Zeb Rader. A seasonal firefighter who’d hung around the hangar, asking questions about flight schedules and maintenance he had no business asking.
Colton recalled Harv also saying Zeb’s brother Ed was a helicopter pilot, and their older brother had died in a tanker crash.
Possibly the crash that triggered the insurance settlement the kidnapper must have known about. It didn’t add up to coincidence.
Colton wondered if anyone on the ground had made any headway finding Kylie. Forty-eight hours had become less than twenty-four and they were no closer to finding her.
He landed heavily on the airfield. The tanker bounced once before settling onto the runway. As he taxied toward the loading area, the ground crew met him to service the aircraft and prep Dash for tomorrow’s drops.
The sun shone like a red ball in the smoke-filled haze as Colton completed shutdown procedures, then climbed down from the cockpit, his legs stiff from hours in the air. He did his post-flight inspection, looking for damage or signs of tampering. Couldn’t afford to take chances.
As Colton finished securing the aircraft, a truck rolled up. Deanna stepped out, and the truck drove off. She approached from across the tarmac. Even covered in ash and dirt from searching mountain roads all day, she moved with athletic grace.
She strode straight into his arms. “Welcome back to terra firma, Sky King.”
“Good to see you. Any word?”
“Nothing yet. The county officers are all over the mountains, but there are cabins scattered all around Georgetown Lake.”
“Deanna.” He stepped back and grasped her hands. “I figured out who’s behind this. Worked it through at eight thousand feet. Tom Rader, the pilot who died in that tanker crash a couple of years back? He has two surviving brothers. Ed and Zeb.”
Deanna’s brows jumped up. “Zeb? The name in Kylie’s notebook.”
“And the same guy Harv noticed at the hangar now and then.”
“Oh, my God.” She squeezed his hand. “Colton, this is so not a coincidence.”
“There’s more, but I’ll explain it on the way and then to Westlake. Thanks to your demobe idea, we should check those crew rosters ASAP.” They hurried toward his truck.
THE FIRE CAMP HUMMED with activity, with crews preparing for night duty, helicopters being serviced, the endless logistics of fighting a fire determined to burn every mountain within reach.
Colton and Deanna found Westlake in the command center, hunched over maps with Sergeant Mills from county law enforcement. Ace stood with them, his face drawn with exhaustion and worry.