Wildfire on the Skagit (Firehawks Book 9) (7 page)

A fragility that was all too familiar and he looked away quickly.

Reena with the thick Mexican dark curls was another athlete—Ash’s dark twin. They clearly hung together.

He could already see the groupings, but they were more bonded as a whole than he expected. No queen bee bent on controlling and manipulating those around her which surprised him.

“So, what’s the common theme here?” the words were out before he realized that maybe showing his ignorance this early on wasn’t the best idea.

“We’re all amazing, Rook!” Callie called out. “Is that really your name?”

“Means ‘rookie,’ space case. He’s a newbie,” a black girl tagged as Nikkya responded.

Evan couldn’t even find the voice to protest as the other girls laughed and joined in. The dynamics in his high school had been harsh and intensely cliquish. You were either in or out; and if you were “out,” like his sister Francine, the gods themselves couldn’t help you.

We’re all amazing?
Did they have any idea how…amazing that simple statement made them? He actually hoped not. Wouldn’t it be incredible if they went out into the world actually believing that about themselves?
Look out, boys,
he mentally warned his younger gender mates.

“Outdoors Club,” Ash said matter-of-factly. She’d had nothing to repack, had brought exactly what was on the list. So while the others fussed, she’d been doing leg stretches with her heel propped up on one of the picnic tables. Reena joined her, doing the same.

“What do you guys do when you aren’t hanging out with smokejumpers?” That earned him a couple of appraising looks. His time in bars had taught him plenty about the power that the word “smokejumper” had over women, but it was weird to see it already manifested in several of the young girls. He made a mental note to stick close to Krista for self-defense.

“Trail runs,” Callie pointed toward Ash and Reena and groaned as did several others in the group. “They’re the queens of cross-country and keep trying to get us to go along. So not.”

“Hey, Lee goes with us.”

“I do, but I’d rather ride a bicycle any day,” a tall girl with black hair down her back said. Her powerful legs displayed by her tight leggings said that cycling was indeed her sport.

“Windsurf,” Meaghan piped up, a lively redhead. That received near universal smiles of acknowledgement from the others. Evan suspected that she was notoriously rabid about her preferred sport.

They continued around and Evan could start to see the pattern. They were the outdoorsy set from their school, but they approached it as if it was foreign land. They did things outdoors, but none of them had ever camped further out than a state park. Definitely none had loaded up a pack and gone tramping out into the wild with a bivy bag and a week’s supply of food.

He’d done that all the time as a kid. He’d never really thought about why, it was simply where he was most comfortable. Why? Now that he thought about it, it was totally obvious: to get as far away from his dysfunctional, alcoholic, back-biting parents as possible.

He had incorporated wilderness survival techniques deep into his skill set long before the Green Berets had started filling in the blanks. He hadn’t ever hunted with bow and arrow like Krista, but he’d been a dead shot with his .30-30 Winchester 94 with a peep sight by freshman year of high school. Mostly target shooting, but he’d often lived wild for weeks at a time with little more than a tarp and his beloved rifle. When the Special Forces had given him a telescopic sight, he’d become one of the top shooters in his whole company.

None of these girls had done that. He wanted to take them out and show them. Teach them that there was more to the outdoors than mandated sports. You could live quite comfortably out there if you needed to, even in modern times.

Krista knew that.

Maybe he was beginning to understand what she was trying to do here…but he’d still rather have gotten her off alone somewhere.

Not gonna happen, Ev, so dig in.

He gathered up a stack of hardhats and plopped one down on Callie’s head.

“Hey!”

“Branch!” He called, then smacked her hat hard with another of the hats. The loud
Klonk!
grabbed everyone’s attention. “Hurt much?” Evan did his best to make it a sneer as if she’d be a weakling to admit anything.

“Only my ears,” Callie grinned up at him from under the brim.

“Someone yells
branch,
don’t look up or you’ll get it in the face,” he nodded to her that she’d done good. “Fit the straps. The forehead band should be just snug enough that it doesn’t come off if you’re nodding in answer to a question. The chin strap loose enough that you can shout without choking yourself. Once you have it adjusted, you can tie it to the outside of your pack for later.” And he began handing them out to the rest of the girls.

The two adults had hung in the background watching the goings on. He almost handed a bag of sunglasses to the woman to distribute—petite enough that she was definitely Ox’s type. Catching himself on the verge of reinforcing stereotypes that he guessed Krista was fighting against, he handed them to the guy, Mac by his nametag, who looked like a gym teacher. “English lit,” he introduced himself with a good strong handshake which Evan returned.

“These have laminate lenses,” Evan announced loudly enough for all to hear. “Normal sunglasses can shatter if hit wrong, these won’t. Civilian sunglasses go into your leave-behind bags.”

Zelda, who introduced herself as “wife of the professor and cross-country coach,”—
the pixie was the athlete; so much for stereotypes—
he pointed toward the stack of Pulaski fire axes. “Each person gets one. You too.” She laughed and headed to the stack of well-used tools and began handing them out.

Krista had been flipping through the paperwork on each girl, “Three vegetarians. Does raw elk meat count as vegetarian?”

It earned her a chorus of “Ewws.”

Krista began handing around MREs to add to their packs.

“Now that’s just plain cruel,” he whispered when she passed close enough to smell her. He tried to turn off his nose, but it had clearly decided that Krista and heaven smelled much the same.

“How little you know me, Rook,” and she moved on before he could think up a decent reply. She was right, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. It had been a lack of time and the start of a bad fire season.

He handed out hunting knives with appropriate warnings about how to handle a long blade and instruction on how to strap the sheath to their thighs. Krista demonstrated how to open an MRE and how the heater worked to cook a meal in the outdoors. By the time she’d talked them through electrolytes and staying hydrated, Evan’s stomach was getting up to a decent grumble.

He could see a couple of the thinner girls were already suffering from fading attention due to blood sugar crash.

He started to ask Krista about breaking for lunch when he noticed something was wrong. The girls were covering their ears though he didn’t hear a thing over their talk back and forth. He only had a moment to register that Krista was smiling and looking just over his shoulder—

An air horn unleashed its unholy howl about two steps behind him.

Evan yelped in surprise and dove aside, sending bursts of laughter through the assembly. Everyone else had seen what he hadn’t, Betsy coming up close behind him to announce lunch. Usually she just used an old fire engine bell mounted on the doorframe of the kitchen, but when the wind was high or the field was busy, she used an air horn so that anyone still in the bunks, working in the parachute loft, or across the field by the aircraft would know it was mealtime. Not close enough to hurt his ears, but more than enough to scare the crap out of him.

“Nice,” he looked up at her from where he’d taken cover under one of the tables close by Mac’s feet.

“Don’t you be busting down my door anymore, Rook,” and she stalked away but couldn’t quite hide the smile. He guessed they were even now. He hoped to god they were.

Krista offered him a hand up, “Never mess with a Mount Hood Aviation woman, Rook.”

“Yes, ma’am, Queen Smokie,” he regained his feet and saluted.

But even as he said it, he knew that one wouldn’t stick either.

# # #

Krista hadn’t much chance to see Evan function in the wild, except on a fire. But she couldn’t help but be impressed from the first moment. He wasn’t merely at ease in the instructor position, he was skilled enough that those around him were at ease as well.

After lunch he took the back-of-the-group position, usually the most dreaded. There were always a couple of the kids who were simply overwhelmed by the true forest, and it would be up to the tail-man to keep them moving along. That took a special understanding right there.

Krista hiked across the airfield, past the two jump planes, Mark’s Incident Command twin-prop Beechcraft, and aimed for the trailhead behind the row of the six helicopters.

“Hey, can’t we go in one of those?” “That would be so cool.”

“We are not that lazy,” Krista told them.

“I am!” Callie raised her hand.

“Me too!” several of the others joined in. There had been a lot of surprise when they’d hauled on their packs, each weighing twenty-five pounds. Then Evan had told them that a smokie often carried sixty. With that deep voice and powerful demeanor of his, the girls had quieted much faster than normal. He’d already done better than any of the other smokies and they’d barely started. She and Evan carried significantly more gear, medical gear and radios, but their packs were still lighter than they usually carried to the line.

Krista let them stop and gather round her. She patted the nose of
Firehawk 03,
one of the three big converted Black Hawk helicopters, gloss black with a racing-car-flame paint job. They were amazing warhorses that had deeply changed the raw power MHA could bring to the fight.

“I’ll tell you a secret though,” Krista lowered her voice to entice them closer.

All of the girls leaned forward in anticipation.

“Our senior pilot, two others, and both of our mechanics are women.”

“Whoa!” That woke a real buzz among them.

“I should point out,” Evan raised his voice to cut through the excitement. “Three of the pilots, both of the jump plane pilots, and our Incident Commander are all guys.”

“Pure luck,” Krista raised her voice.

“Yeah!” “Pipe down in the cheap seats back there.”

By Evan’s easy smile, she could see that he too appreciated their responses as if she needed another reason to like him. They’d barely started and already the world of possibilities were opening up before these girls.

Her only problem with Evan had been that they weren’t getting any of the alone time that her body was craving.

But
now
she was starting to wonder if that was the least of her problems.

She was also discovering the man behind the body and liking everything she found there…really liking it, which wasn’t any version of Krista that she was familiar with.

She turned and led the girls off the far end of the airfield and into the Mount Hood National Forest along an old fireroad, leaving Evan to bring up the rear.

# # #

The first hour went pretty smoothly. These girls were tough and Evan was impressed.

Ash and Reena were real standouts, as he’d expect from their cross-country background, but most of the others were pushing right along with them.

Krista started teaching them wildlife: black squirrels, Steller’s jays, a turkey vulture who inspected them from high above a small clearing, as well as how to tell the tree species apart. They were eating that up too.

He intentionally lagged behind so that the girls didn’t feel pressured. If it had been his ODA out on a run or a fire team of actual rookies in testing, he’d be hounding their heels, pushing them to keep up. He wanted these girls to enjoy the experience. By moving a little slower, he gave them permission to move at a more sedate pace than the one Krista set.

He wasn’t too surprised when Mallory ended up at the back of the pack. He cast a glance forward just to make sure one of the chaperones was in easy range, just in case the group’s beauty queen had something on her mind that he didn’t want to deal with.

But still he wasn’t ready for the question when it came.

“Are you a soldier?”

Mallory’s beauty pageant face didn’t have the prerequisite smile anywhere to be seen. Instead, he was facing the frail girl he’d spotted behind the studied veneer.

“I was. I guess it still shows.”

She nodded, “I recognized the training when you were fooling around with Krista.”

“Do you have someone who’s in?”

She folded her arms tightly as they walked as if she was chilled rather than sweating on the warm summer day. She finally managed a tight nod and a whisper soft, “I did.”

Oh crap!

There was all sorts of counseling for vets having a hard time—even the ones like him who didn’t want it. But so little for their families.

He was trying to think of how to ask the next question, when redheaded Meaghan—who’d been at the tail end of the main group—dropped to one knee and studied something alongside the trail.

He and Mallory caught up to her quickly.

“What’s that?” Meaghan was at the side of the trail by a spot that hadn’t been trampled by the other’s passage.

“Deer scat,” Evan picked up branch to flick aside a few of the leaves that partially covered the pile; glad for the subject change.

Chicken? Beautiful girl with hard questions. Damn straight he was chicken!

“Small brown pellet poop from such a big animal always seemed weird to me.”

Out of the corner of his eye he tried to gauge Mallory’s condition. She looked okay, just…hard.

“It’s only about twice the size of what a rabbit leaves behind. But bunny poop is always round. Deer, elk, and moose are oblong with no pinch off. At least three days old by the color.” He poked a couple with his stick and they powdered. “More like a week by how dry they are.”

“You know a lot about poop,” Meaghan eyed him with amusement. But there was something else going on there that he wasn’t sure how to read. She’d already known it was deer scat, but he played along.