MacIntyre couldn't see a thing. He heard and felt plenty, the heat, his screaming engine, the multiple warning buzzers, and the awful rattling that made him think the ship might shake apart. All that, he could handle. All that, he was used to. But he would have given a month's pay not to be so completely blind.

The Huey barreled over a dense canopy of what had been forest a few days earlier. Now it amounted to hundred-foot torches and fields of white-orange flame so bright he had to squint to keep from burning his retinas. And wherever the flames didn't reach, night filled that space with ink. All he saw was blackness inside fields of painful light, no landscape to give it context.

Another gut-churning punch from below, a columnar thermal from some hotspot or other. Mac didn't worry about it; his respirator, partly fogged by breath and sweat, made it hard to read anything, instruments or satlinked tablet. That was Bird's job.

"Hey, Dougie Mac!" the copilot yelled from the second seat once the ship returned to its normal level of agonized convulsions. "I almost lost my gear that time!"

"Told you to strap it down."

"It's awkward that way. You know what a snowflake I am."

"All right, Frosty, I'll try to go easy. What's that toy of yours say, anyhow? We still on the beam? I can't see jack."

Bird leaned his masked face close to the tablet in his hands. "We're good, we're good. A little cooked, but good."

"Ha and ha."

Bird might have answered that quip; he was big on quips when in the furnace room of hell. But he didn't get a chance to speak. The radio beat him to it.

"Air Four, Air Four, this is Arrowhead Command, come back."

"Air Four go," Mac answered.

"Air Four, abort. Repeat, abort. Return to base, over."

Mac and Bird glanced at each other across the hot cockpit.

"You're command pilot." Bird went back to his tablet.

With hell blazing ahead and beneath him, Mac keyed the radio. "Ahh, Command, Air Four. Roger your trans. Who's taking our pickup, over?"

"Air Four, no pickup. Acknowledge return to base."

Mac let that sit there. No pickup? Seventeen firefighters waited for him. Had they been reassigned? Had to bug out? Maybe in the continuous confusion of fighting a major wildfire, Mac had been vectored miles from where they worked. Or…

"Air Four, acknowledge," the radio demanded.

"Jimmy," Mac called to Bird over the intercom. "Put us on the firefighters'  freq, the one for this sector."

"Way ahead of you, buddy. We got your squawk right … here."

"--dig in, shelter in place. No extraction, repeat, no extraction."

"We can't dig in! It's all rock here! We need that chopper and we need it right now!"

"Conditions are not conducive--"

Mac cursed like a sailor. "We got a GPS on that?"

Bird leaned close to his tablet screen. "I have 'em at the edge of a bluff. It's good to ten meters. Just beyond that ridge coming up."

That ridge. The blazing yellow-white wall no one in their right mind would think of going near.

"We're that close?" Mac asked.

"Satlink's drawing heavy thermals below the bluff and all along the high ground. Blew up not ten minutes ago, moving too fast for real-time, man."

"They're just over that ridge and Command won't let us even try?"

"Partner, I can't give a 'for sure' about what's over that ridge. Could be the mouth of hell. You hear that foreman's voice?"

"He's desperate, man."

"He's scared to death."

"Air Four, Command. Acknowledge return to--"

"Screw it, we're going." Mac poured on power, leaning toward the flaming ridgeline.

Bird slid his tablet into the console sleeve. "Well, I guess if you're going, I'm going, too. Here. I'll sweet talk Command. I'm putting you on that fire gang's freq."

The towering wall of hell rushed toward them. Mac wished for his sunglasses, but they didn't fit inside the mask. He took in a deep, uncomfortable breath of super-heated air, let it out, and flexed his fingers on his controls.

"Team Twenty-three, Team Twenty-three, this is Air Four, coming in," he called into his pickup.

"Air Four? They said--"

"Drop your gear and get to the cliff. Don't worry about what they said."

"How long--"

"You'll see us in a second."

"We can't see anything. It's black out here."

The ridge came up. Mac pulled the collective and sent his Huey soaring. Up, she raced, pressed toward the heavens by the rush of heat beneath her.

"Hold on to your socks!" he shouted to Bird, then the ship wrenched, shuddered, and screamed at them through red, piercing alarms.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" Bird grasped the overhead handholds and gritted his teeth against violent jostling. The thermals from the ridge, disordered, hungry. Then the aircraft was through it and descending toward a black barrier of roiling smoke lit from below by the pine-fueled furnace.

"Holy Moley," Bird breathed.

Mac stole a glance at his partner. "You know, we're only rated for ten passengers."

"Or," Bird offered, releasing his harness and twisting out of his seat, "looked at another way, 4,400 pounds cargo."

"You think those guys down there weigh in at less than 4,400?"

"I hope they didn't eat no burritos before their shift." Bird worked his way to the rear to help those guys aboard.

Right. This would be close. "Team Twenty-three, Air Four, we are on point. Be ready."

"There's seventeen of us!"

"All aboard, one go. Drop all your gear. Drop it all."

The Huey hit the smoke.

Heat. If it hadn't been baking before, it broiled now. Mac coughed. Particulates pressed in past the seal of his respirator. His eyes felt as if ants swarmed them. He could barely see at all.

A shadow ahead, blacker than the smoke. The cliff at the edge of the bluff. He turned the ship flank-on to the rock and, breathing hard, like freaking Darth Vader, he sidled the helicopter toward the cliff edge.

More shadows. Men.

Mac heard Bird badgering them aboard.

Mac fought the firm press of hot winds pushing the chopper from the cliff. He struggled with hammering updrafts. The ship yawed away from the cliff; Mac forced it back. His arms, on the cyclic and collective, threatened to cramp from the strain.

Something exploded, a red blossom through the black smoke. Another explosion, yellow and columnar. Flaming wood rattled against the hull, scraping the windscreen.

My God, that last wasn't fifty feet away.

"We got 'em! Go!" erupted in his intercom, and Mac wrenched the aircraft away from the charging line of fire.

 

NEXT: Scorched Bird

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