She opened her eyes to look at him. "It's beautiful. The snow that never melts off those huge peaks, the lakes and rivers, the glow of the midnight sun.

They've also got mosquitoes the size of your fist and bears big as an armored truck. But in the fire, it's pretty much the same. Kill the b.i.t.c.h; stay alive.

Everybody comes back."

She closed her eyes. "Get some sleep. You're going to need it."

She slept like a rock; woke stiff as a board. And grateful they put down at Fairbanks, giving the crew time to loosen up, fuel up, and the bosses time to cement a strategy.

With nearly four hundred acres involved, and the wind kicking flareups, they'd need solid communication with the Alaskan team. She managed to scrounge up a cold soda, preserving the two in her bag, before they performed a last buddy check and loaded.

"You're right," Gull said when they flew southwest out of Fairbanks. "It's beautiful. Not far off midnight, either, local time, and bright as afternoon."

"Don't get enchanted. You'll lose focus. And she'll eat you alive."

He had to change his angle to get his first glimpse of the fire, shift his balance as the plane hit turbulence and began to buck. "Just another maw of h.e.l.l. I'm focused," he added when she sent him a hard look.

He saw the white peaks of the mountain through the billows of smoke. Denali, the sacred, with the wild to her north and east burning bright. He continued to study and absorb as she moved to the rear to confer with Yangtree, and with Cards, who worked as spotter. Others lined the windows now, looking down on what they'd come to fight.

"We're going to try for a clearing in some birch, east side. The Alaska crew used it for their jump spot. Cards is going to throw some streamers, see how they fly."

"Jesus, did you see that?" somebody asked. "Looks like a blowup," Gull said.

"It's well west of the target jump spot. Everybody stay chilly," she called out.

"Settle in, settle down. Stay in your heads." "Guard your reserves!" Cards pulled in the door.

Gull watched the streamers fly, adjusted with the bank and bounce of the plane. The wind dragged the stench and haze of smoke inside, a small taste of what would come.

Rowan got in the door, shot him a last grin. She propelled herself out, with Stovic seconds behind her.

When it came his turn, he evened his breathing, listened to Cards tell him about the drag. He fixed the clearing in his head and, at the slap on his shoulder, flew.

Gorgeous. He could think it while the wind whipped him. The staggering white peaks, the impossibly deep blue in glints and curls of water, the high green of summer, and all of it in sharp contrast with the wicked blacks, reds, oranges of the fire. His chute ballooned open, turning fall into glide, and he shot Gibbons, his jump partner, a thumbs-up.

He caught some hard air that tried to push him south, and he fought it, pushing back through the smoke that rolled over him. It caught him again, gave him a good, hard tug. Again he saw that deep dreamy blue through the haze. And he thought no way, G.o.dd.a.m.n it, no way he'd end up hitting the water after Rowan had warned him.

He bore down on the toggles, saw and accepted he'd miss the jump spot, adjusted again.

He winged through the birch, cursing. He didn't land in the water, but it was a near thing as his momentum on landing nearly sent him rolling into it anyway.

Mildly annoyed, he gathered his chute as Rowan and Yangtree came running.

"I thought for sure you'd be in the drink."

"Hit some bad air."

"Me too. I nearly got frogged. Be grateful you're not wet or limping." "Tore up my canopy some."

"I bet." Then she grinned as she had before jumping into s.p.a.ce. "What a ride!"

Once all jumpers were on the ground, Yangtree called a briefing with Rowan and Gibbons while the others dealt with the paracargo.

"They thought they could catch it, had forty jumpers on it, and for the first two days, it looked like they had it. Then it turned on them. A series of blowups, some equipment problems, a couple injuries."

"The usual cl.u.s.terf.u.c.k," Gibbons suggested.

"You got it. I'll be coordinating with the Alaska division boss, the BLM and USFS guys. I'm going to take me a copter ride, get a better look at things, but for right now." He picked up a stick, drew a rough map in the dirt. "Gibbons, take a crew and start working the left flank. They've got a Cat line across here. That's where you'll tie in with the Alaska crew. You've got a water source here for the pumpers. Swede, you take the right, work it up, burn it out, drown it."

"Take it by the tail," she said, following his dirt map. "Starve the belly."

"Show'em what Zulies can do. We catch her good, shake her by the tail and push up to the head." He checked the time. "Should reach the head in fifteen, sixteen hours if we haul our a.s.ses."

They discussed strategy, details, directions, crouched in the stand of birch, while on the jump site the crew unpacked chain saws, boxes of fusees, pumpers and hose.

Gibbons leaped up, waved his Pulaski toward the sky. "Let's do it!" he shouted.

"Ten men each." Yangtree clapped his hands together like a team captain before the big game. "Get humping, Zulies." They got humping.

As planned, Rowan and her team used fusees to set burnouts between the raging right flank and the service road, sawing snags and widening the scratch line as they moved north from the jump spot.

If the dragon tried to swing east to cross the roads, move on to homesteads and cabins, she'd go hungry before she got there. They worked through what was left of the night, into the day with the flank crackling and snarling, vomiting out firebrands the wind took in arches to the dry tundra.

"Chow time," she announced. "I'm going to scout through the burn, see if I can find how close Gibbons's crew is."

Dobie pulled a smashed sandwich out of his bag, looked up at the towering columns of smoke and flame. "Biggest I've ever seen." "She's a romper," Rowan agreed, "but you know what they say about Alaska. Everything's bigger. Fuel up. We've got a long way to go."

She couldn't give them long to rest, she thought as she headed out. Timing and momentum were as vital tools as Pulaski and saw because Dobie hadn't been wrong. This was one big mother, bigger, she'd concluded, than antic.i.p.ated and, she'd already estimated by the staggered formation of her own line, wider in the body.

Pine tar and pitch tanged in the air, soured by the stench of smoke that rose like gray ribbons from the peat floor of the once, she imagined, pristine forest. Now mangled, blackened trees lay like fallen soldiers on a lost battlefield.

She could hear no sound of saw, no shout of man through the voice of the fire.

Gibbons wasn't as close as she'd hoped, and she couldn't afford to scout farther.

She ate a banana and an energy bar on the quickstep hike back to her men.

Gull gulped down Gatorade as he walked to her. "What's the word, boss?"

"We're shaking her tail, as ordered, but she's got a d.a.m.n long one. We'll be hard-pressed to meet Yangtree's ETA. We've got a water source coming up.

It should be about a hundred yards, and a little to the west. We'll put the baby hoses on her, pump it up and douse her like Dorothy doused the Wicked Witch."

She took his Gatorade, chugged some down. "She's burning hot, Gull. Some desk jockey waited too long to call in more troops, and now she's riding this wind. If she rides it hard enough, she can get behind us. We've got to bust our humps, get to the water, hose her down and back."

"Busting humps is what we do." Still, it took brutal, backbreaking time to reach the rushing mountain stream, while the fire fought to advance, while it threw brands like a school- yard bully throws rocks, its roar a constant barrage of taunts and threats.

"Dobie, Chainsaw, beat out those spots! Libby, Trigger, Southern, snags and brush. The rest of you, get those pumps set up, lay the hose." She grabbed one of the pumps, connected the fuel can line to the pump, vented it. Moving fast, sweat dripping, she attached the foot valve, checked the gasket, tightened it with a spanner wrench from her tool bag.

Beat it back here, she thought, had to, or they'd be forced to backtrack and round east, giving up hundreds of acres, risk letting the fire snake behind them and drive them farther away from the head, from Gibbons. From victory.

She set the wye valve on the discharge side of the pump, began to hand- tighten it. And found it simply circled like a drain. "Come on, come on." She fixed it on again, blaming her rush, but when she got the same result, examined the valve closely. "Jesus Christ. Jesus, it's stripped. The wye valve's threads are stripped on this pump."

Gull looked over from where he worked. "I've got the same deal here." "I'm good," Janis called out on the third pump. "It's priming."

"Get it warmed up, get it going."

But one pump wouldn't do the job, she thought. Might as well try a G.o.dd.a.m.n p.i.s.s bag. "We're screwed." She slapped a fist on the useless pump.

Gull caught her eye. "No way two stripped valves end up on the pumps by accident."

"Can't worry about that now. We'll hold her with one as long as we can, use the time to saw and dig a line. We'll double back to that old Cat line we crossed, then retreat east. G.o.dd.a.m.n it, give up all that ground. There's no time to get more pumps or manpower in here. Maybe if I had some d.a.m.n duct tape we could jerry-rig them."

"Duct tape. Hold on." He straightened, ran to where Dobie shoveled dirt over a dying spot fire.

Rowan watched in amazement as he ran back with a roll of duct tape. "For Dobie it's like his Tabasco. He doesn't leave home without it." "It could work, or work long enough."

They worked together, placing the faulty valve, wrapping it tight and snug to the discharge. She added another insurance layer, continued the setup.

"Fingers crossed," she said to Gull, and began to stroke the primer. "She's priming," she mumbled as water squirted out of the holes. "Come on, keep going. Duct tape heals all wounds. Keep those fingers crossed."

She closed the valve to the primer, opened it to the collapsible hose. "It's going to work."

"It is working," she corrected, and flicked the switch to start and warm the engine. "Trigger, on the pump! Let's get the other one going," she said to Gull.

"Not two of them," Gull repeated while they worked.

"No, not two of them. Somebody majorly f.u.c.ked up or-" "Deliberately."

She let the word hang when she met his eyes. "Let's get it running. We'll deal with that when we get out of this mess."

They beat it back, held the ground, laying a wet line with hoses, hot shoveling embers right back in the fire's gullet. But Rowan's satisfaction was tempered with a simmering rage. Accident or deliberate, carelessness or sabotage, she'd put her crew at risk because she'd trusted the equipment. When they reached Yangtree's proposed rendezvous time, they were still over a half mile south of the head with fourteen hours' bitter labor on their backs.

She deployed most of the crew north, sending two back to check the burnout, and once again cut across the burn.

She took the time to calm, to radio back to Ops with a report of the faulty equipment and the progress. But this time when she crossed the dead land, she heard the buzz of saws.

Encouraged, she followed the sound until she came to Gibbons's line.

"Did I call this a cl.u.s.terf.u.c.k?" He paused long enough to swipe his forearm over his brow. "What's the next step up from that?" "Whatever this is. We've run into everything but Bigfoot on this. I had two pumps with stripped wye valves."

"I had three messed-up chain saws. Two with dead spark plugs, one with a frayed starter cord that snapped first pull. We had to-" He stopped, and his face reflected the shock and suspicion in hers. "What the f.u.c.k, Ro?"

"We need to brief on this, but I've got to get back to my crew. We'll be lucky to make the head in another three hours the way it's going." "How far east are you now?"

"A little more than a third of a mile. We're tightening her up. We'll talk about this when we camp. We may catch her tonight, but we're not going to kill her."

"The crew's going to need rest. We'll see how it goes. Check back in-if we don't tie up before-around ten, let's say." "You'll hear from me."

She caught up with her men, following the sound of saws as she had with Gibbons, found them sawing line through black spruce. They'd been actively fighting for nearly eighteen hours. She could see the exhaustion, the hollow eyes, slack jaws. She laid a hand on Libby's arm, waited until the woman took out her earplugs.

"Extended break. An hour. Nappie time. Pa.s.s it up the line." "Praise Jesus."

"I'm going to recon toward the head, see what we have in store for us."

"Whatever it is, I'll kick its a.s.s, if I have my nappie time."

She signaled to Gull. "I'm going to recon the head. You could come with me, but you'd miss an hour's downtime." "I'd rather walk through the wilderness with my woman."

"Then let's go."

They walked through the spruce while around them jumpers dumped their tools, dropped down on the ground or sprawled on rocks. "Gibbons had three defective chain saws-two dead spark plugs, one bad starter cord."

"I'd say that makes it officially sabotage."

"That's unofficial until the review, but, yeah, that's what it was." "Cards was spotter. That puts him as loadmaster."

"Load being the operative word," she reminded him. "He wouldn't check every valve and spark plug. He just makes sure everything gets loaded on, and loaded right."

"Yeah, that's true enough. Look, I like Cards. I don't want to point fingers at anybody, but this kind of thing? It has to be one of us."

She didn't want to hear it. "A lot of people could get to the equipment.

Support staff, mechanics, pilots, cleaning crews. It's not just who the h.e.l.l- it's why the h.e.l.l." "Another good point."

Because she felt shaky, she took out one of her precious c.o.kes for a shot of caffeine and sugar, and used it to make yet another energy bar more palatable. "We wouldn't have been trapped," she added. "We had time to take an escape route, get to a safe zone. If we hadn't fixed the hoses and held that line, we'd have gotten out okay."

"But," he prompted.

"Yeah, but if the situation had been different, if we'd gotten in a fix and needed the hoses to get out, some of us could've been hurt, or worse." "So the why could be one, wanting to screw around, cause trouble. Two, wanting to give fire an advantage. Or three, wanting somebody to get hurt or worse."

"I don't like any of those options." Each one of them made her sick. "But the way this summer's been going, I'm afraid it might be three. L.B.'s ordering a full inspection of all equipment, right down to boot snaps." She pulled off her gloves to rub her tired eyes.

"I don't want to waste the energy being p.i.s.sed about it," she told him, "not until we demob anyway. G.o.d, Gull. Look at her burn." They stopped a moment, stood staring at the searing wall.

She'd fought fire on more than one front before. She knew how. But she'd never fought two enemies in the same war.

CHAPTER 26