Page 19 of Light My Fire

Archer took off his helmet, lifted his face to the sky and dribbled water on it, then shook his head. “I don’t know. He came in about a month ago. Got into a fight in the chow hall yesterday and spent last night in solitary.” He wiped his face with the arm of his shirt, glanced at Rio. “Perkins isn’t lenient about fighting, so I’m not sure how he got this gig.”

Tucker glanced at Archer.

“Don’t worry, kid. I’m watching him.”

Again with a nickname, and Tucker placed it. The guy reminded him of his racing coach. Confident, easygoing, but a driver. The kind of man you could depend on.

As if to prove it, Archer capped his canteen. “Okay, boys, back to work!”

What couldhebe in the joint for?

They reassembled and kept digging. The late afternoon was punctuated by grunts, the clang of metal against rock, the redolence of fresh, overturned earth mixed with the pungent odor of burning resin, smoke, and the occasional spray of embers where the line sparked and chewed at the boreal forest, some five hundred yards away.

In the thick of it, flames climbed up black spruce and shot fire into the sky. Over it all bloomed a cloud of lethal smoke drifting down into the valley. The haze of the fire watered Tucker’s eyes, and he pulled up his bandanna to filter it away from his lungs.

But the fire had slowed to a crawl, and with the long hours of daylight, they had plenty of time to put this baby to bed.

He spent the next hour walking up and down the line, fielding updates from Skye, whose patience had stretched to a tight, resounding string after sitting lookout all day, given her terse, “Nothing’s changed, boss. Same wind speed, same humidity. Flame lengths short and tight.”

“Just a bit longer, then I’ll get Romeo to spell you,” he said.

“Whatever,” she responded, and clearly she’d fallen into a snit.

Yeah, well, maybe he couldn’t quite get her scream out of his head, the way she’d frozen when her torch erupted. Skye normally knew how to keep her head.

Something didn’t seem right in Skyeville, and he didn’t want that thing spilling over into his fire.

The afternoon sun fell slowly, still above the claw of the mountains when he decided to hike up to the top of the ridge to get a good look at the progress along the right flank.

The fire had chewed the growth slowly, but the layer of moss, pine, and resin conspired to turn the landscape into an oven, the resin acting as napalm, burning deep into the earth. It had latched onto a stand of spruce and lit it like a firebomb, the cinders blowing in the wind.

He could almost feel it under his skin, and the air was beginning to tremble as the afternoon winds started to kick up.

Even from two hundred feet away, the fire roared, crackled, hissed at him. Angry.

Now. He needed to start the burn now, before the fire rounded up a head of steam and plowed them over.

He got on the radio. “Riley, you get down the ridge and start the burn. Seth, you and Hanes and Eric, watch the flanks. Romeo—you spell Skye on watch. I’ll call in the drop to Barry.”

Riley affirmed, and Tucker watched through his glasses as Riley trekked the hundred or so yards down the ridge to the fire line of the hand crew. He fired a torch and set the blaze, yelling at the men to watch for spot fires.

The blaze caught, started a sweep toward the ridge.

“Air Attack, Tucker, come in.”

Barry’s voice hopped on the line. “I’ve got a bucket on the chopper. It’s the best we could do.”

“Bring it in along the right flank and drop it near the head.”

He turned, trying to spot the chopper. Burnt orange bathed the valley below him in the burnished light of late afternoon, and in the far distance, he made out a blue-gray lake. From it came the low whump-whump of a chopper swinging a bucket.

Behind him, the brush fire chewed its way to the ridge, protected from the winds that might push it back.

“Tucker, if that’s you I see, get out of there. You’re standing between the two fires.”

Indeed. Embers started to drop around him, starting spot fires. He made his way along the flank and into a bald, unburnable area of rock and scree. “Drop it, Barry!”

The water came down in a tsunami, and he ducked behind a tumble of boulders to avoid the splash. Barry dumped it right along the edge of the flames, cordoning off the flank, a perfect drop, just lipping the fire line. Tucker emerged from his hiding spot to watch the steam rise. He climbed back up to the top of the ridge.

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