Pure Heat Read Online Free PDF Page B

outer ring was gone. The edges of the inner ring were starting to burn and smolder despite the heavy coating.
    Steve had forgotten how damn loud fire was, especially when it was pissed at being denied its prey. It roared at them louder than a whole stadium of Giants’ fans after a bad ump call. It spat embers that died in the red soil and clawed up every little branch. The flames towered above them to all sides except upslope. With TJ’s ankle, that wasn’t going to happen.
    The heat pounded against him, Steve’s cotton shirt and denim jeans offering no protection against the scorching breath of the fire though it still lay twenty feet away. For half an instant he wondered what the ignition temperature was on the two materials and which part of him would burst into flame first.
    â€œHell, we need to get me out of here, too.” Preferably before he answered the question about the flammability of his clothes.
    He and TJ both looked down at the pouch on TJ’s hip. Inside lay a foil fire shelter designed for one. They both knew the statistics—one in five wildland firefighters died when the fire overran them. A foil shelter theoretically made a burnover survivable, but probably not with two inside if they even fit.
    As Steve looked back up, a movement caught his eye. A line from the sky. No, two of them.
    Two ropes from the helicopter. Both with clips on them. Somebody up above was thinking. He double-checked the knots, done right.
    The two men exchanged glances. They were both clearly thankful that they wouldn’t be spending their last moments breathing each other’s air. They snapped in and flagged the chopper upward with a hand signal.
    In moments they were drawn upward until they floated above the fire, which now screamed in frustration below them as it closed too late over the small circle they had so recently occupied. They were climbing through the smoke with the chopper a hundred feet above and the fire now twice that below. Dangling like puppets on a shoestring.
    Steve had clipped his line to a ceiling D ring, not the winch, so they’d have no way to reel him back up.
    TJ floated along as well, eight feet over and about ten feet up. He hung from a slightly shorter line tied off from the other side of the chopper.
    Neither had a radio. Steve never had one, and TJ held out his with a look of disgust. The radio was saturated with bright red goo. Steve made sure his sunglasses were well seated and then gave the okay signal to the copilot he could see hanging out the door and looking down at them.
    No good place to land them and climb aboard. And if somewhere under that red goo, TJ was bleeding, then time was of the essence.
    The three smaller choppers showed up to attack the fire even as the Firehawk pilot turned for base. All Steve and TJ could do was hang from their ropes and enjoy the ride back, dangling from MHA’s newest chopper like a pair of live rats no one wanted to touch. Five hundred feet below, the edges of the fire gave way to towering trees as they floated back toward base.

Chapter 3
    The pilot set them down sweet as could be right by the retardant tanks.
    Steve managed not to collapse to the grass when he landed too much on his overworked left knee. By grabbing out to steady TJ, they managed to hang on to each other well enough to remain upright.
    He and TJ took a deep breath in unison when they had their balance and their eyes were no longer crossed with the pain. A shared nod with a grimace said more than enough about that.
    Then Steve called out, “Whoop! Now that’s what I call flying!” Though his body was buzzing from the pounding of his shirt flapping against him in the rushing wind, he felt high as a kite and well on the way to drunk.
    Dangling under a helicopter was absolutely the most beautiful way he’d ever found to fly, aside from dangling beneath a parachute. Yet another thing the docs had forbidden. They enjoyed doing that far too