The Big Burn. Terry Watkins

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      She pulled directly into the wind as tongues of fire leaped up at her. Her gut tightened, her nerves stretched taut. The full fury of the firestorm mocked her descent toward the dragon’s fiery mouth. It was starved for fuel, waiting to be fed.

      At three hundred feet, she set up the brakes with the toggles halfway down, easing to her right, then left, reefing down on the toggles, maneuvering, deeper into the brakes, then full brakes as she zeroed in on her landing zone, a flat piece of ground.

      Then, without notice, a sneaky backwind shooting up the canyon grabbed her.

      She was in trouble.

      Two thousand feet above the wildly gyrating smoke jumper, in an unmarked, Sikorsky SH-60 B Seahawk naval antiship chopper, John Brock held on to the frame of the open door with one hand. With the other he held binoculars, tracking the jumper’s descent through the smoke as he held on against the violent rocking and rolling.

      He watched in dismay as the winds grabbed Anna Quick’s chute and drove her horizontally at great speed toward the slope and a stand of trees.

      Behind Brock, a marine lieutenant was yelling on his satellite phone at some assistant to the director of Emergency Services at the California Emergency Control Center.

      Through his headset Brock heard his chopper pilot declare, “That’s suicide.”

      Brock had traveled twelve thousand miles to recruit Anna Quick. Wasted miles. He watched her vanish into the smoke. She was supposed to be on her way back to her base camp. Instead she was jumping into an inferno.

      “She have any chance at all?” he asked.

      The pilot said, “That’s up to Big Ernie.”

      “Who the hell’s Big Ernie?”

      “He’s the smoke jumper’s god of fire. You gotta play the cards he deals. And he’s a jokester.”

      Brock wasn’t amused.

      The marine lieutenant finished his conversation and moved over in the doorway next to Brock. Brock pulled back his headgear so he could hear the lieutenant.

      “Sir, the strike-team boss ordered an abort. She disobeyed a direct order and went ahead and jumped.”

      Brock nodded. That was consistent with the file they had on her. He swore softly to himself and continued to try to see something on the ground.

      He said to the pilot, “Can you get this thing down there?”

      “I can get it down. Getting it back out is the problem. Those Santa Ana winds are running sixty miles an hour down there. With low visibility and high winds the chances won’t be good.”

      “I need that damn woman alive.”

      “Sorry, sir,” the pilot said. “What you need is a miracle. The best I can do is to keep circling until the winds die down.”

      Brock stared in frustration at the gathering firestorm. He knew the pilot was right, that they’d have virtually no chance of getting to her and then getting out again.

      The marine lieutenant said, “That’s got to be the worst way to die.”

      Angry as he was at the woman’s defiant jump, Brock couldn’t help but admire her courage. As an operator with Delta Force, Brock had gone into his share of extreme-risk situations and he knew the kind of mind-set that it took. She had to know something about the conditions, something no one else was taking into account. Either that or she was suicidal. He hoped for the former. He hadn’t come all this way for a charred corpse.

      All attempts by Anna to keep her direction, to lock in the topography, had been blown away, and now she was in the hands of the wind. A vicious gust spun her around and she had to fight the near collapse of her chute.

      It was now a desperate battle to get it under control. She was using every bit of her upper-body strength to keep the chute oriented.

      When Anna found a break in the smoke, she saw the fantastic spectacle of fire crowning the treetops at unbelievable speeds.

      The superheated winds buffeted her. She was engulfed in smoke, and for the moment, completely lost sight of the ground.

      When the smoke cleared enough for her to see, it was too late. She sailed into a hundred-foot-high tree snag, her feet smashing through the top branches. Anna stopped with a violent jerk. The pads and Kevlar were all that saved her from being impaled. She still wore deep scars on her body from one such landing and was happy to have the new, stronger protective gear.

      Anna looked up. Her chute was caught precariously. She looked down. It was an eighty-foot drop. Just great. She pulled out her drop-rope and hooked it up, released herself from the harness and began to rappel, trying desperately to get down before the chute gave way and dropped her like a stone.

      She was about twenty feet above ground when the chute broke free. She plunged. Instinctively Anna pulled her legs together and angled them to the side in the standard parachute landing fall.

      She hit hard.

      Dazed, she rolled over and pushed herself up. The great fear of such falls was to have a sprained ankle or something broken. Anna made a quick survey of her body parts.

      Everything seemed intact—until she rose to her feet. Her left ankle was weak. She skipped on it a couple times and decided it wasn’t a disaster as she headed down into the deepest gut of the ravine. She picked up her walkie-talkie to let Carter know she was down. “Do you still have communication with the hikers? Over.”

      “Roger that. They saw you. They should be just up the ravine a few hundred yards.”

      “Ten-four. I’m on my way.”

      “Anna, I can’t believe you just did that! The fire’s coming over the ridge. Moving fast. You can’t outrun it.”

      “I know, but I couldn’t leave them down here.”

      Anna reached into one of the inner pockets of her jumpsuit and took out a small pair of binoculars. She tracked along the ridgeline, acknowledging the treacherous beauty of the snaking line of fire, then she tracked down the hills into the gorge. How a fire feeds depended on where the fuel load was the heaviest, plus how the winds were directed by the lay of the mountains, and where inversion would multiply velocity.

      What she was looking for was an area where the fuel load would be the least, the topography the easiest for the fire to quickly burn over.

      When she turned and looked up the canyon, she saw the students running toward her. Stumbling, falling, getting up. Panic-stricken.

      John Brock watched the rolling fires converge and explode down the gorge in a swirling avalanche of flame.

      He had the marine pilot circle for nearly an hour before the wall of flame had moved on and the winds relaxed enough for them to hazard a landing. The firestorm had left behind smoldering brush, burning trees and blackened ground.

      “Nobody’s surviving that for long,” the pilot said as they made their СКАЧАТЬ