Endangered Species (8 page)

Anna talked on the radio as she ran, telling Guy of the new twist. After

she'd signed off she heard him radioing headquarters .

There was no reply.  Next he tried Lynette.  As the interpreter took

over dispatching duties, Anna tuned their chatter out and turned all of

her attention to breaching the flames separating them from the downed

plane.

In less than a minute she was around the screen of palmetto and into a

clearing scattered with young pines.  The aircraft, a twinengine prop

plane, had rolled over onto its back and nosed into the ground.  the

belly of the airplane was painted white and looked vulnerable, like the

underside of a landed fish.  Wheels, popped loose from their housing,

pawed at the air.  Part of the left wing was crumpled beneath the

fuselage, the metal curled and wrinkling .

That was where the fire burned hottest and Anna guessed an inboard fuel

tank had exploded on impact or shortly thereafter.  Half of the right

wing was sheared off, the engine thrust skyward in an angry metal fist.

Left behind in the rush to demolition, the severed tips of the wings lay

a distance from the aircraft.  A stump of the tail remained, elevators

hanging from torn cables.

From what Anna could see beneath and beyond the wings, the cabin was

partially crushed, shards of Plexiglas squeezed out from the metal

frames in the cockpit.  It looked as if the airplane had cut through the

canopy at an angle, left wing pointed toward the earth.

When it struck, the force had driven the cabin into the ground,

shattering the windows and smashing in the roof.

Fire poured from the lower engine and was taken up by the palmetto.

Orange claws curved around the cabin, bubbling the paint and melting the

broken windows.

The intensity of the heat and the knowledge that the plane's second fuel

tank had yet to explode paralyzed Anna.  In her mind, as it had a year

ago below Banyon Ridge, the fire mushroomed out from the trees in a

storm of destruction.  Terror roared through her insides, wiping her

clean of morality, ethics, courage, and thought .

Dropping the Pulaski, she turned to run.

Rick had come up behind her.  Blindly, she smacked into him and lost her

balance.

"Watch where you're going," he growled, knocking her unceremoniously

back onto her feet.

The jolt snatched her back from the coniferous forests of northern

California and the nightmare that only nine of them had survived. Breath

was coming fast and her knees were shaking so bad she couldn't move, but

the cowardly retreat had been aborted; honor and face were intact.

Though she'd never tell him, Rick had done her a great service.

Fighting to retain her equilibrium, she retrieved her Pulaski .

"Okay, okay," she said, as much to herself as to him.  Somebody needed

to take charge but Anna still had the shakes.  She'd locked her knees

but her insides twanged like cheap guitar strings.  It was all she could

do to tic one thought to another.

"Piss pump to the passenger side.  The right," Rick said, filling the

void ." Maybe somebody's alive.  The fire's circling back through the

brush.  You take it."

Relieved, Anna nodded but didn't move ." Cut the fuels away before the

fire gets to the plane," Rick spelled out for her, and gave her the

shove she needed.  Her first steps were stumbling, her legs still

wanting to run.  Movement burned away the residual fear and she began to

function.

Lest panic again blindside her, Anna attacked the flames with a fury

that, once the adrenaline subsided, would leave her with a strained back

and a hyperextended elbow.  Sweat fell like salt rain to turn to vapor

on the superheated ground.  Escaping from her hard hat, tendrils of hair

singed and curled.

Ignited by the explosion, fire had burned out from the downed aircraft,

cutting an angry swathe through the palmetto.  Like a ravening beast,

appetite unslaked, it doubled back from the point of origin and ran

greedily toward the unburned tail of the aircraft.

In a dead-heat race with the flames, Anna chopped line, clearing to bare

soil a path a yard and a half wide between the burn and the plane.

In the cabin were the dead or the dying.  She suppressed that knowledge

in her need to complete the physical task at hand .

Dimly, she was aware of paint crackling, the groan of metal shifting and

the snap of rubber and plastics, but her world had narrowed to the one

tentacle of the dragon she had been sent to hack off.  The writhing of

the rest could be dealt with later.

The thicket wasn't more than fifteen feet wide at the point where the

plane had nosed in.  Unless the shrubs ignited the live oaks, the fire

would slow to a creep when it hit the duff beyond the underbrush.  It

wasn't long before Anna succeeded in separating the plane from the fire.

With her primary task accomplished, the scope of her world opened

somewhat and she turned back to the mangled aircraft.

On the passenger side of the inverted fuselage, Rick stood in the angle

where the wing stub met the cabin, squirting water on the metal.  Not

six inches from his fanny was a fuel tank, the only one remaining

attached to the main part of the wreckage that had yet to explode.

A thin line of smoke, rising straight up in the still air, caught Anna's

eye.  Beneath the duff, creeping almost unseen, fire from the palmetto

was crawling through the leaf litter toward the fuel tank .

Anna abandoned the secured left flank of the plane and, in a controlled

frenzy of hosing, began clearing away burning debris.  Acrid smoke was

sucked through the bandanna tied across the lower half of her face.

Mucus ran from her nose and she breathed as sparingly as exertion would

allow.

A shovel appeared in her peripheral vision.  Dijon and A] had arrived.

Dijon joined Anna and began throwing dirt on the trail of flame, broken

free of the litter now and snaking toward the wing.  AI manned a second

piss pump, aiming his stream onto the metal cowling of the engine

itself.  Guy Marshall must have arrived at roughly the same time as the

other two.  When Anna looked past AI, he was there, Pulaski in hand.

It was good to be among friends.

Through the bite of the smoke Anna became aware of the odor of gasoline.

At that moment she lieard Guy shouting "Fall back!  Fall back!"

Fire had circled around Dijon and met up with a trickle of high octane

fuel soaking through the mat of needles and leaves that had yet to be

scraped away.  Flame burned narrow and high with the intensity of a lit

fuse.

" Fall back!" Guy shouted again.

Dijon threw a spadeful of dirt at the back of Rick's legs to get his

attention ." Back," he and Anna yelled in unison; then they turned and

ran.

HE EXPLOSION, when it came, was not so much heard as felt.  A lheavy and

unseen hand slammed into Anna's back, lifting her off her feet. 'Fime

slowed, a break in the space-time continuum, and, for that instant, it

was as if she hung suspended in the air.  To her right she could see

Dijon, hands outstretched like a young black Superman, hanging in space.

His face was set, determined, as if he flew toward a brick wall

intending to smash through.

Anna noticed her left hand stretched in front of her clutching the

Pulaski.  Afraid she'd fall on one of the blades, she let it go .

There was time, in that stopwatch moment, to see her fingers ullcurl

from the handle and the two-edged tool fall away.

lime caught up with itself.  Dijon, the trees blurred and Anna hurtled

to the ground.  the forest floor scraped the goggles from her face,

shoved prickling needles down the collar of her shirt and dust up her

nose.  Something plowed into her booted feet and she thought a chunk of

burning metal had crippled her till it began clawing its way up and she

knew it was Rick.

"Everybody okay?  Are you okay, Anna?" An obnoxious finger rapped

against the plastic of her hard hat.  She rolled one eye clear of the

dirt to see Guy standing over her.

" I'm not done falling," she complained.

"Learn to bounce," he said unsympathetically.  He was on to Rick and

Dijon as Anna pushed herself warily to her knees, not yet sure

everything still worked.

" Up and at 'em," Marshall said.

Dijon, disgustingly young and resilient, was already on his feet and

running back toward the plane.  Rick had made it to his knees .

Lest she be last, Anna dragged herself up before AI Magnus cleared the

ground, and followed Guy and the others back toward the line.

The explosion had extinguished more fire than it set.  Within minutes

Rick and Dijon had the flames contained.  Though it still burned it was

no longer in danger of spreading.

The task of salvaging what they could from the plane's cabin fell to

Anna and Guy.  The blast had torn most of the remaining stub off the

right wing, leaving a black stain on the side of the aircraft just

below, or-as the fuselage was inverted-now above where the passenger

sat.  Anna crouched down to assess the best way of getting at the

cockpit.  Behind her she could hear Guy on the radio.

The downed plane was a twin-engine Beechcraft owned and operated by a

man named Slattery Hammond.  Hammond worked as a freelance drug

interdiction and/or resource management plane, hiring his services out

to various government agencies.  Cumberland Island National Seashore was

sharing him with the United States Forest Service in an effort to curb

the marijuana-growing industry along the coast.

Hammond had flown off the island that morning to make a lowlevel sweep

of St.  Simons, jekyll Island, and Cumberland, looking for contraband

crops.  Norman Hull, Cumberland's chief ranger, was slated to accompany

him.

Lynette's voice, deepened now by professional responsibility, came on to

say a medevac helicopter had been requested from jacksonville, Florida.

Lynette was attempting to contact the district ranger, Todd Belfore, to

meet the medevac unit and lead them to the burn as soon as she had an

estimated time of arrival.

Wheels were turning, the Incident Command System was gearing up.  Soon

Anna, Guy, Dijon, AI, and Rick would settle back into their relatively

insignificant cog roles as the Interagency Incident Command machine took

over.  There was great comfort in that .

Nothing, not even the U.S.  military, could mobilize as quickly and

efficiently.

After this last transmission Guy replaced his radio on his belt .

"The pilot wasn't alone.  Chief Ranger Hull was with him.  There'll be

two .  .  .  ah .  .  .  men in there , he said.  The hesitation tool,

place as he stopped himself from saying "bodies." The explosion of the

gas tank destroyed any shred of hope they might have had that anyone in

the airplane still lived, but they had to operate as if lives could be

salvaged.  The concept of giving up too soon was abhorrent.

What was left of the wing and the fuselage formed a smoldering and

unstable tent of ruined metal.  Leaf litter smoked beneath the wreckage.