Chasing Fire

brush. The rest of you, get those pumps set up, lay the hose.”
    She grabbed one of the pumps, connected the fuel can line to the pump, vented it. Moving fast, sweat dripping, she attached the foot valve, checked the gasket, tightened it with a spanner wrench from her tool bag.
    Beat it back here, she thought, had to, or they’d be forced to backtrack and round east, giving up hundreds of acres, risk letting the fire snake behind them and drive them farther away from the head, from Gibbons. From victory.
    She set the wye valve on the discharge side of the pump, began to hand-tighten it. And found it simply circled like a drain.
    “Come on, come on.” She fixed it on again, blaming her rush, but when she got the same result, examined the valve closely.
    “Jesus Christ. Jesus, it’s stripped. The wye valve’s threads are stripped on this pump.”
    Gull looked over from where he worked. “I’ve got the same deal here.”
    “I’m good,” Janis called out on the third pump. “It’s priming.”
    “Get it warmed up, get it going.”
    But one pump wouldn’t do the job, she thought. Might as well try a goddamn piss bag.
    “We’re screwed.” She slapped a fist on the useless pump.
    Gull caught her eye. “No way two stripped valves end up on the pumps by accident.”
    “Can’t worry about that now. We’ll hold her with one as long as we can, use the time to saw and dig a line. We’ll double back to that old Cat line we crossed, then retreat east. Goddamn it, give up all that ground. There’s no time to get more pumps or manpower in here. Maybe if I had some damn duct tape we could jerry-rig them.”
    “Duct tape. Hold on.” He straightened, ran to where Dobie shoveled dirt over a dying spot fire.
    Rowan watched in amazement as he ran back with a roll of duct tape. “For Dobie it’s like his Tabasco. He doesn’t leave home without it.”
    “It could work, or work long enough.”
    They worked together, placing the faulty valve, wrapping it tight and snug to the discharge. She added another insurance layer, continued the setup.
    “Fingers crossed,” she said to Gull, and began to stroke the primer. “She’s priming,” she mumbled as water squirted out of the holes. “Come on, keep going. Duct tape heals all wounds. Keep those fingers crossed.”
    She closed the valve to the primer, opened it to the collapsible hose.
    “It’s going to work.”
    “It is working,” she corrected, and flicked the switch to start and warm the engine. “Trigger, on the pump! Let’s get the other one going,” she said to Gull.
    “Not two of them,” Gull repeated while they worked.
    “No, not two of them. Somebody majorly fucked up or—”
    “Deliberately.”
    She let the word hang when she met his eyes. “Let’s get it running. We’ll deal with that when we get out of this mess.”
    They beat it back, held the ground, laying a wet line with hoses, hot shoveling embers right back in the fire’s gullet. But Rowan’s satisfaction was tempered with a simmering rage. Accident or deliberate, carelessness or sabotage, she’d put her crew at risk because she’d trusted the equipment.
    When they reached Yangtree’s proposed rendezvous time, they were still over a half mile south of the head with fourteen hours’ bitter labor on their backs. She deployed most of the crew north, sending two back to check the burnout, and once again cut across the burn.
    She took the time to calm, to radio back to Ops with a report of the faulty equipment and the progress. But this time when she crossed the dead land, she heard the buzz of saws.
    Encouraged, she followed the sound until she came to Gibbons’s line.
    “Did I call this a clusterfuck?” He paused long enough to swipe his forearm over his brow. “What’s the next step up from that?”
    “Whatever this is. We’ve run into everything but Bigfoot on this. I had two pumps with stripped wye valves.”
    “I had three messed-up chain saws. Two with dead spark plugs, one with a frayed starter cord that snapped first pull. We had to—” He stopped, and his face reflected the shock and suspicion in hers. “What the fuck, Ro?”
    “We need to brief on this, but I’ve got to get back to my crew. We’ll be lucky to make the head in another three hours the way it’s going.”
    “How far east are you now?”
    “A little more than a third of a mile. We’re tightening her up. We’ll talk about this when we camp. We may catch her tonight, but we’re not going