Chapter 9 #4
"Fourteen men behind wire, four of them trained, with a shop and cover and two on a roof with elevation."
Burner shook his head slowly. "Seven of us, in the open, at a hundred yards. That's not a fight, that's a way of dying in a field. If we go through that gate this morning we lose all seven and the shed stays shut."
"So we walk away."
"I didn't say that."
He put the glasses back up, and this time he did not look at the men.
He looked at the fuel stands.
Three tanks, on steel legs, eleven feet off the concrete, in the southwest corner of the yard about sixty feet from the shop building. Two empty. One with a few hundred gallons in it, filtered and hoarded and the only thing in this country that made three trucks anything other than steel.
He looked at the ground between the fence and the tanks.
Then he looked at the slope below the knob, the long fall of dry cheatgrass and bitterbrush running eight hundred yards down to the road and the fence line, brown and stiff and untouched by rain since the first week of August.
"Otway," he said.
The firefighter crawled up beside him.
"Look at that slope and tell me what you see."
Otway looked for a long time.
"I see about four hundred acres of flashy fuel with a six percent grade and a morning wind that'll swing upslope in about two hours and then swing back down at dusk," he said.
"Is the wind reliable?"
"Around here? Down-canyon at night, up-canyon by ten, every day, till the weather breaks." Otway's mouth had gone dry, Burner could hear it. "That's why you brought me."
"That's why I brought you."
"You want to burn their yard."
"I want to burn everything around their yard," Burner said. "I want their fence line and their fuel stands and their shop and their three trucks sitting in the middle of four hundred acres of fire at two in the afternoon."
"There's twelve people in a shed in the middle of it."
"Yes," Burner said. "That's the entire problem and I want everybody here to understand it before another word gets said."
He put the glasses down and turned around so he could see all of them.
"If we light that slope, and we do nothing else, we kill twelve people in a wooden shed," he said. "Including two children. That is not a risk, that is what happens. So nobody lights anything until that shed is open and those people are north of the road."
"Then we're back to fourteen men," Sable said.
"We're back to fourteen men."
"And we can't take fourteen men."
"We can't take fourteen men in daylight through a gate," Burner said. "That's the sentence. It's got about four qualifiers in it and every one of them is a door."
He looked up the slope at Sparrow.
"You've been listening."
"I have."
"Come down here."
Sparrow came down over the rocks slowly with his hands visible the whole way and lay down in the line with six people who all had their rifles more or less on him, and said nothing about it.
"Answer me straight," Burner said. "The shed. What's it made of?"
"Plank walls, tin roof, concrete floor. It was a salt store."
"Door?"
"Sliding steel, on a track, with a hasp and a padlock."
"Who's got the key?"
"There's two. Halstead's got one and the other hangs on a nail inside the shop door, because a padlock they can't open in a fire is a padlock that costs them twelve workers." Sparrow glanced at him. "He thought about that. He thinks about everything."
"Windows?"
"One, high, at the east end. Eight inches by three feet. It was a vent."
"Guarded at night?"
"One man on the shed after dark, yes. He sits on a barrel and he's the most bored man in North America."
Burner looked at the sky. It was getting light fast now.
"And in the daytime?"
"In the daytime they're out working. The shed's empty from seven in the morning till dark."
Everything stopped.
"Say that again," Burner said.
Sparrow blinked at him.
"They work," he said. "That's the whole point of them. They're not in the shed during the day, they're digging the new cellar on the north side and hauling water and stripping the fourth truck for parts. They're in the yard, in the open, with two men watching them."
"Two."
"Two. Because where's anybody going to run to?"
Burner sat there in the rocks and felt the entire thing turn over in his hands and come out a different shape.
"Sable," he said. "Sixteen days. Confirm it."
"It's right." She was already nodding, fast. "I've watched them every day. They come out at seven. There's usually two men on them and sometimes one. They dig, they haul, they go back in at dark."
"Where's the cellar they're digging?"
"North side. Outside the block building, inside the fence."
"How far from the north fence?"
Sable stopped.
"Thirty feet," she said. "Maybe less."
Nobody breathed.
"And the north fence," Burner said, "is the one that runs along the bottom of that slope."
He picked up the glasses again and looked down at a chain link fence at the bottom of eight hundred yards of cured cheatgrass, and the whole thing assembled itself in his head in about four seconds, clean, the way a thing does when it is right.
"Otway," he said. "How fast does that slope run?"
"With the upslope wind? Eight, ten miles an hour at the head. It'd be at that fence in six or seven minutes from a light halfway down."
"How much smoke?"
Otway laughed, one syllable, with no humor in it.
"You'd have a column you could see from Idaho," he said. "Cheatgrass smokes filthy. And with an upslope wind, the smoke runs ahead of the fire and lays right over that yard about two minutes before anything burns."
"Two minutes of blind."
"More like four. Two before, two of pure black."
Burner turned to all of them.
"Here's what we do," he said. "And I want every one of you to hear the part where it can kill twelve people, because I am not going to pretend it can't."
They listened.
"At one o'clock this afternoon there will be twelve people in the open on the north side of that yard digging a cellar thirty feet from a fence, with two men watching them," he said.
"Not in the shed. In the open. That is the only moment in the entire day that those people are not behind a locked steel door, and it happens every day, and it's happening today."
"And we're upslope of them," Delacroix said.
"We're upslope of them with four hundred acres of cured grass in between."
Sable's voice was very careful.
"You want to put a fire between us and the people we came for."
"I want to put a fire between them and the fourteen men," Burner said.
"Look at the ground. The cellar is on the north side. The block building, the shop, the fuel stands and every one of those men is on the south side. When that smoke comes over the fence, the thing standing between twelve people and the north fence is thirty feet of dirt and two guards,
and the thing standing between them and the fourteen is a building."
"And the fire?"
"The fire comes up behind us as we go down."
Otway shook his head.
"No it doesn't," he said. "That's exactly what it doesn't do, and that's the part I need all of you to understand or somebody's going to panic and run the wrong way."
He drew in the frost on the rock with one finger.
"You light a line across the slope. It runs uphill, away from the yard. That's what fire does, it runs up. The only thing that goes down toward that fence is smoke, and it goes down because of the way the morning column pulls air, not because of wind at ground level."
"So the fire doesn't reach the yard," Teague said.
"Not right away." Otway's face was grim.
"It reaches it about forty minutes later when the flank rolls around the east end and comes back at it on the down-canyon shift. That's your fuel stands. But the first thing that gets there is four minutes of black smoke and every man in that yard looking uphill at a wall of fire,
which is a thing I have seen do very strange things to very brave men."
"So we've got four minutes," Burner said.
"You've got four minutes of smoke and about thirty of everyone in that yard thinking about one thing."
Burner nodded slowly.
"Then that's the plan," he said. "Otway lights the line at one o'clock from four hundred yards up, on the east end, where the grade steepens. Brill goes with him and they both come down the east draw and nobody, and I mean nobody, ends up above that fire."
"And us?"
"We'll already be at the north fence." Burner pointed. "There's a wash that comes down off the east end and dumps into the ditch forty yards from the north corner. Sable, you've seen it. Is it deep enough?"
"Chest deep for the last three hundred yards."
"That's where we'll be. Five of us, in that ditch, lying in water, twenty minutes before he lights it. And when the smoke rolls over, we come up through the fence with bolt cutters and we take two guards and we put twelve people in that wash and we go north."
"And the fourteen?" Delacroix said.
"Will be running toward a fuel dump under a smoke column with their backs to us."
"And after?"
Burner looked down at the yard one more time.
"After, the flank comes around and takes the fuel stands and the shop and three trucks," he said, "and then there's fourteen men standing in a burned field eleven miles from a canyon they can't get back to before dark, with no vehicles and no fuel and no winter."
Nobody spoke for a while.
"There's one more thing," Sparrow said quietly.
"Say it."
"The woman. Neve." He was looking at the block building. "She's not in the shed and she's not on the work detail. She's inside."
Burner did not answer.
"She won't be in that wash," Sparrow said. "She'll be in a concrete building on the south side of the yard when the flank comes around."
The sun came over the ridge behind them and threw all eight of their shadows long across the rocks, down toward the fence, toward eight hundred yards of dry cheatgrass that was already beginning to steam.
"I know," Burner said.