Wildfire on the Skagit (Firehawks Book 9) Read Online Free PDF Page A

dozen feet so that they didn’t catch any embers. The underground organics she cleared from a yard-wide swath. Even a small gap of exposed mineral soils could stop a ground fire that was creeping through the duff.
    Krista wasn’t much of a one for deep thinking, but she did wonder why she’d decided she should keep a close eye on the rookie and then sent him downslope just moments later. The first decision was a safety issue—Evan Greene was still an untested quantity. Sending him down the line was something else.
    Instead of thinking about her team moving close above her or Akbar’s team on the other flank or what the goddamn fire might be planning next, her thoughts were with a tall handsome rookie who kept saluting her like it meant something.
    Not good.
    She firmly turned her attention to the soil.
    # # #
    Evan cruised down the slope. At first he was glad of the chance to stretch out his legs after the first two hours of bent-over work.
    He stopped only twice to shovel more soil over small flareups. The line was holding clean. He’d have made it wider, but Krista had called it dead on. She’d read the tail of the fire at some level he couldn’t see, understood what it could and couldn’t do with a master tactician’s expertise.
    Nick the Greek and Ant-man were working a pair of one-and-a-half inch hose lines along the tail. They had it doused hard and were now working up both sides at once.
    “You guys going back to hotshotting?” Normally an Interagency Hotshot Crew would be here by now to do the lower-end handwork.
    “Mount Hood Aviation is a full service firefighting outfit,” Nick announced. Then grumbled, “Hell of a way to spend your first fire of the season. The access road washed out last winter. It was patched, but not well enough for any service vehicles, so the IHCs are hiking in. Still a couple hours out.”
    “I think Krista hates us,” Ant-man had shut off his hose and come over when he saw Evan arrive.
    “No, man,” Nick sounded gleeful at the fresh opening. “She hates you for flying into a tree and I’m stuck suffering along with your sorry ass.”
    “Then she must hate me even worse,” Evan drew some of the fire to spare Ant-man who was getting irritable, “for landing in the fire.”
    “How you figure that?”
    “I’ve been sent down to check on you guys.”
    Ant-man looked at him strangely, “Her radio broken?”
    “Nope,” Evan did his best to sound cheerful, but he felt a little like a Private First Class who’d just been bucked back down to Private.
    “Well, you gotta get her back, Man,” Nick insisted. “Or you ain’t no man.”
    Twenty minutes and a five hundred foot vertical climb later, Evan was wondering just who had been gotten back in this deal. Both of his arms were screaming: one from carrying five gallons of water, the other from hauling another five-gallon jerry can of chainsaw fuel. He’d stopped to switch off pretty often, not that it made any difference; they were both over forty pounds of goddamn heavy.
    The guys had painted a picture of him striding back onto the line with the extra supplies and being welcomed like a returning hero. Instead he felt like a returning wet rag. The sun had cracked into the valley and on the occasions when it found a hole through the smoke, it cooked him in his gear. Nomex didn’t burn easily, it also didn’t breathe for shit. Give him some desert camos, a forty-pound ruck, and a combat rifle any day.
    Well, at least a fire didn’t shoot back much, but still.
    Evan dug in and tried to find an easy-going stride as he crested the last rise into where they’d stopped for a break.
    Effort wasted. No one there.
    He’d been gone thirty, maybe forty minutes, and the fire team was nowhere in sight. It might have been an elaborate dodge-the-rookie trick if it weren’t for the fresh-cut fireline ranging up the slope ahead of him.
    A slice had been made alongside the fire, a wide slice. To one side unburned forest so thick he