Page 5 of Burnin' For You

The price of living in a wildland firefighting town—you grew up with and knew the people who put their lives on the line. Friends who died gruesome, horrific deaths when the flames trapped them.

She might not be a smokejumper, but it didn’t mean she wasn’t down there with her team. She’d dropped them off—and she planned on getting them all back in one piece.

“Stop and think for a second before you get us killed!” Jared snarled, finally fighting on her team to control the plane as it bucked and kicked its way into the canyon. “What are you trying to prove?”

That was a question for a different day. But even if she hadn’t made it as a jumper, she did possess one talent that might keep her friends alive.

She wasn’t afraid to fly into what felt like hell to save the people she loved.

“I’m going to bring us along the edge, then bank right, use the left rudder and slide slip down into the canyon. That way we’ll avoid the gusts coming from the center of the fire. Then I’ll bank hard again and release the load, roll right, and we’ll fly out back over the ridge. Okay?”

She didn’t look at Jared, her gaze instead on the fifty-plus-foot trees near the summit of the ridge. They crowned with brilliant red flame, the fire most definitely having jumped the service road.

Heat enveloped the plane, the smoke black, blinding. The controls of the old Russian tanker shimmied in her grip as she forced the plane through the ridgeline updrafts. Jared’s words flashed in her brain. She’d seen bombers—especially the old DC-6s—come apart under the violent gusts of a fire, and Jared was right. The forty-year-old plane had seen better years.

The world’s largest single-engine biplane, the Annie was made to survive in the Siberian wilderness. But it was all they had, and frankly, she would have flapped her arms carrying a bucket of water if it meant saving lives.

“Gilly, clearly you’re not listening.” Beck snapped over the radio. “But you’re flying blind up there. Let me help you—I’ll tell you when to release.”

She found his little lead plane, an OV-10 Bronco, off her right side. She could nearly make him out in the observation canopy, probably glaring at her.

“Roger, but we need it right in the pocket, Beck.”

She glanced at her airspeed—one hundred forty-five knots. Slow enough to spread out her drop, make it effective enough for Reuben and the team to escape, but hopefully fast enough for the kinetic energy to affect her lift and bank.

But it wouldn’t work at all, however, if she lost a wing.

Please, God.

She wasn’t ashamed to pray for help, especially when it meant saving others.

“Ready, Jared?” He’d better have his hand on the red release button.

She spotted the road, downslope three hundred yards ahead. Flames engulfed it, and a fist hit her gut as she nudged the rudder left. The plane slid down the ridgeline—too fast, perhaps—but she suddenly leveled out and aimed for the road.

A washboard of air currents jolted hard, ramming them against their restraints, tightened down so hard she might have the seat folds imprinted in her bones.

Her stomach rose to her throat, filled it with bile.C’mon, Annie, hold together. The air inside the cockpit reeked of campfire, burning resin, and oils.

From the air, the breadth of the fire could turn her weak. As she flew along the edge of the ridge, flame and ash, gray and black smoke billowed into the blue sky now bruised with the fading sun. Below in the canyon, a pit of ashes glowed red, as if the land had been raked by the breath of a dragon. It cast an eerie aura into the twilight.

And into that furnace ran her people.

Gilly glanced at her instruments.

“You’re nearly there, Five-Three—” Beck’s voice, steady in her ear.

“Ten seconds, Jared,” she said, her eyes on the road, the finest parting of forest before smoke obscured it.

Please, God, let me hit this right.

She counted down, then, “Now!”

Her words echoed Beck’s, and Jared thumbed the drop switch.

The AN-2 released her load onto the forest. A plume of white smoke rose, engulfing them, and the windscreen turned white.

Jared let out a word, that yes, put a fine point on the fact they could be aiming straight for a mountain ridge and not know it.

---