Chapter 10
They had six hours to wait and no good way to spend them.
They pulled back off the crest into the slot below it and lay up in the shade of the rocks, and Burner made them eat and drink, which nobody wanted to do and which he insisted on because a person who has not eaten makes bad decisions at exactly the wrong moment.
Priest slept. Burner envied him for it.
Around nine, Sable crawled over and lay down beside him.
"Ask it," Burner said.
"How do you know I've got something to ask?"
"Because you've been looking at me for twenty minutes and not at the yard."
She was quiet a second.
"You're going to go get her," she said.
Burner watched a hawk work the thermal coming off the slope.
"No," he said.
"You're lying."
"I'm not. That's the problem." He rolled his head to look at her.
"If I thought I could, I would, and I'd probably get everybody killed doing it, and I've been lying here for three hours trying to find a way and there isn't one. She's in a concrete building on the south side with fourteen men between us and her. That's not courage. That's geography."
Sable did not say anything.
"You've got the same question about your brother," Burner said.
"He's on the work detail. Sparrow says there's a man with a splinted leg who digs sitting down."
"Then he'll be thirty feet from the fence at one o'clock."
"Yes."
"Then you've got it better than I do," Burner said, "and I'd like you to hold onto that instead of feeling bad about it, because feeling bad about it won't help either of us at one o'clock."
She lay there a while.
"When the flank comes around," she said. "How long has that building got?"
"Concrete block, steel door, tin roof." Burner had already worked it. "The building won't burn. The roof might. The smoke will come in under the door and through every window."
"So she suffocates."
"Or she doesn't, because somebody opens the door," Burner said.
"Halstead's got fourteen men in that yard and nine of them are going to be inside that building when the flank comes through, because it's the only thing there that isn't made of wood or full of fuel.
She'll be in a concrete box with fourteen men and no air and they will all be in exactly the same trouble, which means they'll be doing something about it."
"That's thin."
"It's the thinnest thing I've ever let myself believe," Burner said, "and I'm going to go on believing it until one o'clock because the alternative is that I don't light the fire, and if I don't light the fire your brother spends the winter digging a cellar."
Sable put her face down on her forearm.
"I hate every part of this," she said.
"Good."
"Why good?"
"Because the day you don't," Burner said, "you're Halstead."
Sparrow lay a little apart from all of them and nobody had said he could and nobody had said he couldn't.
At ten Burner went and sat next to him.
"Talk," Burner said.
"About what?"
"About what you're going to do at one o'clock."
Sparrow looked at him.
"I assumed I'd be lying in a ditch with a rifle somebody handed me," he said. "Or lying in the rocks with a rifle on me. I'd guessed the second."
"Neither."
"Then what?"
Burner had been putting it together since dawn.
"You're going to walk in through the gate," he said.
Sparrow went very still.
"At about half past twelve," Burner said. "On foot, from the south, where you've been all week doing a fuel count at the crossing. Your face is known, the gate's expecting you sooner or later, and Rowe's on it and Rowe doesn't stop you."
"And then?"
"And then you're a man in that yard when a mountain catches fire," Burner said. "And every single person down there is going to look uphill, and there's going to be four minutes where nobody's in charge of anything, and one of them is going to be a man who already knows what's coming."
Sparrow said nothing for a long moment.
"The key," he said.
"There's a key on a nail inside the shop door," Burner said.
"I don't need it for the shed, because the shed's empty at one o'clock. I need it because I want you standing in that shop at the moment the smoke comes over, and the shop is sixty feet from the fuel stands, and the shop is where the mechanic keeps his parts."
"You want me to wreck the trucks."
"I want the distributor caps off two of them and the third one's fuel line cut," Burner said. "Four minutes. It's a two minute job for a man who's not in a hurry and you'll be in a hurry."
"And if the fire doesn't reach the trucks?"
"That's exactly why," Burner said. "The fire's a maybe. I've got a firefighter who says the flank comes around in forty minutes and I believe him, and I've also seen four plans fail this month. The trucks are the one thing I cannot leave to weather."
Sparrow rubbed his face with both hands.
"You understand what you're asking."
"Yes."
"If one man sees me at that hood, I'm finished. Not shot. Halstead doesn't shoot people."
"I know."
"Do you?"
"I've been told about the shed and the row along the fence," Burner said. "I can fill in the rest."
Sparrow looked down the slope at the yard.
"I told you I wanted out," he said.
"You did."
"And you've decided the price is that I walk into the middle of it."
"The price is that you do one thing that can't be done by anyone else alive," Burner said. "That's not a punishment. That's what everybody down in that ditch is doing too."
"And after? If I get out?"
Burner thought about forty-nine people in a long hall voting on whether a woman could stay the night.
"After, you walk north with us," he said, "and you stand in front of fifty people and you tell them what you've done for two years in your own words, and they'll vote. And I'll speak for you and my word's worth something now and I don't know if it'll be enough."
"That's an honest answer."
"It's the only one I've got."
Sparrow was quiet for a while.
"Ollie Crane was twenty-two," he said. "The boy who died at your camp on Tuesday. I've mentioned him twice now and both times it was to make a point, and I'd like to say his name once without doing that."
Burner did not answer.
"He was a bad man," Sparrow said. "Do you know what I mean? He was twenty-two and he'd been in that yard since he was twenty and he'd become a bad man, and there's no version where he wasn't, and I taught him how to talk to people at a gate."
He looked up.
"I'll do the trucks," he said.
They came down off the knob at half past eleven, in two groups, using the east draw.
It took an hour and it was the worst hour Burner had had since the clearing, because it was daylight and they were six people moving on a hillside above a manned yard, and every eleven minutes a man on a roof swept the slope,
and every eleven minutes six people stopped dead wherever they were and became rocks.
At half past twelve they slid into the wash.
Sable had been right. It was chest deep for the last three hundred yards, an old erosion cut with a skin of muddy water in the bottom and cutbanks of gravel on both sides, and it ran down to the road ditch forty yards from the northeast corner of the fence.
They lay in it with the water coming through their clothes.
Delacroix. Sable. Teague. Priest. Burner.
He put his eye to a gap in the cutbank grass and looked at the yard from a hundred and ten yards out.
The work detail was there.
Twelve of them, in the raw dirt of the cellar cut, thirty feet inside the north fence. Nine were digging with shovels and picks. One was carrying buckets. One was sitting on an upturned crate sorting stone out of a spoil pile with a splinted leg stuck straight out in front of him.
Sable made a sound in her throat.
"Don't," Burner said.
"I'm not."
"Don't look at him. Look at the guards."
There were two. One leaning against the fence with a rifle over his shoulder, which was a stupid way to carry a rifle and told Burner everything. The other was walking a slow circuit and smoking, and he had his weapon slung across his front, which told Burner something else.
And the children.
Two of them, both about nine, hauling stone in a plastic tub with a handle on each side.
Burner looked at them for a long moment.
Get those two first. Before anything else.
"Twelve fifty," Delacroix breathed.
At one o'clock, four hundred yards up the slope and eight hundred yards east, a man who had fought wildfire for twenty-two years lit a drip torch he had built out of a lantern and a length of copper pipe and walked a hundred and twenty feet across the grade, dragging fire behind him.
Burner did not see him light it.
He saw the smoke.
It came up out of the cheatgrass in a dirty gray ribbon that widened as he watched, and for about ninety seconds it looked like nothing at all, like a man burning brush, and Burner lay in the water with his heart going and thought, it's not going to work, it's too small.
Then the head came together and the column went up.
It went up the way water goes down a drain, all at once, black and boiling, and the sound arrived a few seconds behind it, a low rushing that was not like anything else on earth.
Somebody in the yard shouted.
Burner watched fourteen men discover it.
It went exactly the way Otway had said. Every face turned uphill. Men came out of the block building at a run and stopped in the middle of the concrete and stood there looking. A man on the roof was standing straight up on the peak with his rifle hanging forgotten in one hand.
The two guards on the work detail turned around.
"Wait," Burner said.
The fire ran uphill. The column bent east and then, as the slope's own heat began to pull the air, the base of the smoke rolled downhill toward the fence in a low dirty wave.
"Wait."
The wave hit the north fence.
It came over the chain link and across the cellar cut and the whole north side of the yard went from daylight to a brown twilight in about four seconds, and then to something worse.
"Now," Burner said.
They came up out of the wash.