Wildfire at Dawn Read Online Free PDF Page A

looks.
    “Okay, fine. But don’t tell the others.” The half dozen other horses were still snoozing down by the water trough. She dug out another chunk of carrot and laughed as Mister Ed’s soft muzzle tickled her open palm.
    Then she dug out her phone and sent a text.
    # # #
    “One minute out,” the pilot announced. Akbar and Tim moved to the back of the DC-3 to pull open the rear jump door. He’d woken everyone five minutes earlier and they’d all started selecting which gear the plane’s paracargo boss should shove out behind them.
    Akbar’s phone buzzed.
    He dug it out of his pocket. Didn’t have time for it, but it might be some last minute instruction from Mark. Wouldn’t he be on the radio?
    He didn’t recognize the number.
    Tim popped the rear door and swung it inward. The wind’s roar grew tenfold. They were high over steeply rolling green forest.
    Akbar hit View and glanced at the message. How about a run in the morning? –Space Girl .
    Shit! He didn’t even have time to be pleased, never mind answer. He stuffed it back in his pocket and hurried down the aisle. Space Girl? No, she was too much of a woman for that. Space Woman sounded like she was an evil creature from outer space in a 1950s movie. He’d think of something…when he wasn’t supposed to be thinking about fire. He knelt beside Tim and looked out the open door.
    The fire might have been fifty acres when it was called in, but it was thinking hard about how to reach a hundred. The tinder dry forest was catching fire brutally fast. Flames were crawling up the trees; continuous flame height was around fifty feet. Not enough heat for a running crown fire yet, fire jumping along the treetops, but that wasn’t far in the future either.
    As soon as the choppers arrived, they’d be kept busy knocking the fire back out of the treetops down to the forest floor where Akbar and his team could fight it.
    He grabbed the headset by the door that would connect him to the pilot.
    “Talk to me, DC.” The pilot’s initials were the same as the DC-3 aircraft he flew, so no one used his real name. Akbar wasn’t even sure he knew the man’s real name though they’d flown together for several years.
    “Wind’s out of the west at ten to fifteen. NOAA says they’re not expecting any major change for the next forty-eight hours. Not seeing a good spot to set you down.”
    Tim pointed at a couple of possibilities. Damn. Both of them would be tight. Real squeakers. The question was would it be better than a treejump, purposely snagging themselves in the canopy and then lowering to the ground by rope.
    The fire was climbing gullies, creating separate flanking heads, so they didn’t dare go down into those inviting gaps between the fires—in case the gap was suddenly engulfed. But if they ignored the fire for the moment, and the winds did hold steady as predicted, maybe they could get to the northwest-running ridge in time. A firebreak along the backside, might mean they could stop this fire cold.
    “DC take us down over the ridge at two o’clock low.” Tim handed him a couple rolls of drift streamer. He tossed the rolls of crepe paper out the plane’s door, spaced along the ridgeline as the plane passed several hundred feet above the treetops. Every smokie twisted in their seats to watch the streamers flutter and catch in the air currents stirred up by the fire.
    The brightly colored foot-wide strips kicked and swirled in the air currents like a Chinese dragon on hallucinogens, but there was no windsuck toward the approaching fire…yet.
    “Not too bad,” Tim said. The ridgeline was far enough ahead of the fire that there weren’t a lot of nasty downdrafts developing yet, just the normal mountain madness of winds over ridges.
    “There, that’s our anchor point.” Akbar pointed and Tim nodded his agreement. “DC, set us up for three drops over that bluff you overflew.”
    He turned to brief the crew, “Three drops. Drop one stick first