Chasing Fire

I’ll get locations and come back. If you’ve got to move, move.”
    “Goddamn it, goddamn it. Stovic, get those snags. If she crowns, we’re screwed.” As water arced and sizzled, she looked over at Gull. “We can’t hold her for thirty without more hands.”
    Something stirred in his gut. “Rowan, Cards and Matt should’ve gotten through by now. Radio her, get her location.”
    “Gibbons is—”
    “Radio her, Janis,” he interrupted. “This has been going south since the jump.”
    And maybe it wasn’t just nature they fought.
    He listened to her try to raise Rowan once, twice, a third time. And with each nonresponse his blood ran colder.
    She tried Matt, then Cards, then answered swiftly when Gibbons hailed her.
    “I can’t reach any of them on the radio,” Gibbons told her. “I’m going to send somebody in to their last known location.”
    But Janis had her eye on Gull. “Negative. Gull’s going. He’s the fastest we’ve got. Send me somebody. We’re going to try to hold it.”
    “Libby’s heading up now. I’ll get more mud, call in another Cat. If you have to retreat, head southwest.”
    “Copy that. Find her,” she said to Gull.
    “Count on it.” He turned to Dobie. “Hold it as long as you can.”
    “As long as you need,” Dobie vowed, and took the hose.
    He ran, using his compass and the map in his head to gauge direction. She’d been forced west, then south before she’d angled toward the left flank. He tried to judge her speed, her most probable route before she’d reversed to head east again to assist the right flank.
    She’d have met up with Matt and Cards if possible, he calculated, but she wouldn’t have wasted time waiting for them or changing from the best route back, not when her team needed help.
    A spot burst to his left, flames snaking from ground to tree. He ignored the instinct to deal with it, kept running.
    But she wouldn’t have, he thought. She’d have fought the fire as she went, and doing so shifted her direction at any time.
    And if another enemy had crossed her path, she wouldn’t have recognized him. She would see a fellow soldier, a friend. Someone trusted, even loved.
    He jumped a narrow stream, pushing himself through the heat and smoke and growing fear.
    She was smart, and strong, and canny. She’d fight, he reminded himself—maybe more fiercely when the enemy had disguised himself as friend.
    He forced himself to stop, check his compass, reorient. And to listen, listen, for another under the growling voice of the fire.
    North, he decided. Northeast from here, and prayed he was right. A tree crashed, spewing out a whirlwind of sparks that stung his exposed skin like bees.
    The next sound he heard came sharper, more deadly. He raced toward the echo of the gunshot, even as his heart leaped as if struck by the bullet.

30
     
    W hen she could, Rowan moved at a steady jog. She’d bruised her hip avoiding the widowmaker, but the pain barely registered—just a dull, distant ache.
    They were losing the war, she thought, had been losing it since Yangtree’s chute failed to open.
    Everything felt off, felt wrong, felt out of balance.
    The wind continued to rise, to shift and stir, adding to the fire’s speed and potency. Here and there, small, sly dust devils danced on it. The air remained dry enough to crack like a twig.
    She’d never made it to Trigger’s crew to judge the progress or lack of it for herself, to check that flank, sense just what the fire was thinking, plotting. No, she thought now, not when she’d heard the urgency in Gibbons’s voice. No choice but to reverse.
    She’d cut north, through the fire, to carve off a little distance, and calculating her path might cross with Matt and Cards.
    Spots sprang up so fast and often, she began to feel like she was playing a deadly game of Whac-A-Mole.
    She gulped down water on the run, splashed more on her sweaty face. And resisted the constant urge to call into base, again, for a report on Yangtree.
    Better to believe he was alive and fighting. To believe it and make it true.
    Under that remained the nagging fear that it hadn’t been an accident but sabotage.
    How many others harbored that same fear? she wondered. How did they bear down and focus with that clawing at the mind? How could she when she kept going over every minute and move in the ready room, on the flight, on the jump sequence?
    Had something been off even then? Should she have seen it?
    Later, she ordered herself,