Page 10 of The Heat is On

But it was simply the usual rush of adrenaline. The heat before the fire.

“Your spot is about three hundred yards southwest of the fire. You should be able to pick your approach quartering in. If you overshoot, head south.” This from their spotter, Larke Kingston. She’d thrown out at least three streamers to gauge the wind, giving them the right directions for their landing.

No one wanted to end up in the middle of the furnace.

Tucker had turned to Skye right before the jump, his gaze running over her, checking her rip cord accessibility. And sure, that was part of the final check, but it still made her feel like a second grader.

Although, indeed, maybe he’d listened to his instincts because things almost went terribly wrong.

Her jump started with the ecstatic, freeing thrill of flying above the glorious mountainscape of Denali park. She’d deployed her chute, no tangles, and rode the currents easily, following Tucker as he sailed over the southern flank of the fire. The fire roared beneath her, ash and cinders blowing up around her as gusts tried to catch her chute.

Then, just like that, the winds changed, down drafted, and her chute flattened out.

She was falling—and she hadn’t yet cleared the fire. Tongues of flames from an inferno of black spruce licked at her, sucking her in. But she kept her head and reefed hard on her toggles, giving them everything she had to inflate the canopy.

It worked. She lifted her feet as she floated past the hungry flames, the fury of the fire so close it filled her chest, her ears.

But she hadn’t frozen. She’d reacted, kept calm, and stayed alive. Landed—okay, tripped—over some strewn logs, but still unhurt.

Alive.

She was pulling herself out of the tangle when Tucker ran over, grabbed her by her shoulder straps. “You okay?”

She had to make a joke out of it, so, “You wouldn’t pass me for that.” She added a weak laugh.

“You’re alive. You pass,” he said and helped her up and out of her gear. Babysitting.

Thankfully, he’d let her pack up her own gear while the other sticks came down. He ordered Riley to supervise the retrieval of the cargo drop and went to survey the fire.

From her vantage point in the sky, it had looked bigger than what they alone could handle. The last fire had taken ten days, two jump teams, and a Type 1 crew to put it out, including all the resources of the BLM—bomber planes for chemical and water drops and a couple helicopters with buckets.

This fire was still in its infant stage, the black smoke evidence of heat, but not deep smoldering in the soil. It had started from a lightning strike, spotted by some bush pilot hours ago. Slow moving, given the humidity in the air and the scant winds, and that worked to their favor. Still, even as she’d helped Riley and the guys unpack the cargo drop, pulling out fuel, chain saws, drip torches, and a cubinator of water, Skye could make out spot fires bulleting out from the main body, moving south and west. If they didn’t get a move on, it would overtake their position.

Below the fire, past a ridge, a low meadow relatively free of fuels just might make a decent place to cut a line and stage a burnout between the fire and the line. Then they’d just need to stop it on the western flank while the bombers came in and put it down to the east.

Nothing but boulders and safety zone to the north, so…yeah. They had this. Especially if they got reinforcements.

Which Tucker had lined up on his call into BLM HQ after running his own assessment of the fire.

When he marched back to them, his already sooty face bore a grim expression. He spread out a map on the ground. The wind grabbed it, but she and others put their feet on the edges. A gust caught up cinders and sprinkled them onto the map, landing like bites on her skin. She wore her hair in a braid, a bandanna around her neck and pulled it up over her nose.

He’d traced his finger along the far western edge of the meadow, right where she’d imagined a cut line. “We’re going to box the fire in and drive it east, try and burn out the fuels. I want you to scratch out a line along the western flank of the fire down to this point here.”

She squinted through the haze and found the rocky outcropping at the southern point of the ridge that would serve as the anchor for both the western and southern lines.

“I’ll work with the crew coming in, and we’ll cut the southern line and meet you there.”

So he had gotten a crew from the BLM. Good. Hopefully a Type 1 team—those guys knew how to work.

“Our goal is to corral the fire enough for Kingston to get some water on it and take it down.”

The guys hooyahed, and she grabbed her Pulaski, reached for her pack.

And that’s when the babysitting really kicked in.

Tucker already had a hand on her gear. “You’re with me.”

What—?