The Scorching Read online

  Look for these heart-pounding thrillers

  by William W. Johnstone,

  writing with J. A. Johnstone,

  available wherever books are sold

  BLACK FRIDAY

  TYRANNY

  STAND YOUR GROUND

  SUICIDE MISSION

  THE BLEEDING EDGE

  THE BLOOD OF PATRIOTS

  HOME INVASION

  JACKKNIFE

  REMEMBER THE ALAMD

  INVASION USA

  INVASION USA: BORDER WAR

  VENGEANCE IS MINE

  PHOENIX RISING

  PHOENIX RISING: FIREBASE FREEDOM

  PHOENIX RISING: DAY OF JUDGMENT

  THE SCORCHING

  WILLIAM W. JOHNSTONE AND J. A. JOHNSTONE

  PINNACLE BOOKS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  Teaser chapter

  PINNACLE BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2021 J. A. Johnstone

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  Following the death of William W. Johnstone, the Johnstone family is working with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Mr. Johnstone’s outlines and many unfinished manuscripts to create additional novels in all of his series like The Last Gunfighter, Mountain Man, and Eagles, among others. This novel was inspired by Mr. Johnstone’s superb storytelling.

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  PINNACLE BOOKS, the Pinnacle logo, and the WWJ steer head logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  ISBN: 978-0-7860-4300-2

  Electronic edition:

  ISBN: 978-0-7860-4301-9 (e-book)

  This work is dedicated to the real-life heroes

  who walk through fire

  to serve and protect their communities.

  Thank you.

  Tillamook State Forest, Oregon

  There was an intruder in the woods, and the gray squirrel had never seen its like. From its lofty perch on a pine branch the little rodent’s black, almond-shaped eyes fixed on the strange creature, assessing its potential as an enemy. The squirrel had no way of knowing that the invader was a man . . . the most dangerous predator on earth.

  * * *

  He had walked far, the last mile on a badly twisted ankle. The Jeep Wrangler he’d driven was hidden in ferns off a hiking trail. After today, he would have no further need for it. Around him the forest was silent in the afternoon heat, and dusty shafts of light filtered through the tree canopy as hushed and hallowed as sunbeams through a stained-glass window. In the distance a couple of scrub jays disturbed the peace as they fussed and quarreled in the bushes.

  The sweet, acrid stench of gasoline suddenly spiked into the path of a rising south wind as the man sloshed the gas from a five-gallon plastic can, showering as much of the drought-stricken undergrowth as he could. When that was done, he thumbed a Zippo into flame and set the accelerant alight. The fire took, flared and spread rapidly, burning pine needles, leaves, and grass, gorging on fuel and oxygen. The blaze fed hungrily and with mindless ferocity. Now intensely hot, the flames grew in height, the pines became their food source, and within minutes the entire forest around the man was ablaze.

  He screamed in delight. He’d played his part well, and from coast to coast soon all of America would burn to ashes. Only now did the man consider himself a martyr.

  The south wind fanned the flames around the man, a roaring, red and yellow wall of fire that closed in on him. With terrible intensity, the heat scorched the skin of his face and hands, he found it hard to breathe, and suddenly he was afraid. The fire burned out his throat and lungs, and he could not even scream.

  He had hoped to perish like a martyr, but he died hard, and badly, in terrible pain.

  CHAPTER 1

  Indian Wells, Oregon

  Big Mike Norris’s smoke jumper crew parachuted onto the Indian Wells fire zone without a detailed map of the area. But they’d been told a crack crew was already in place, local hotshot firefighters who knew the terrain and probably had the blaze well in hand.

  “It will be a piece of cake, Mike,” Norris’s base manager had told him. “A walk in the piney woods.”

  But when they landed on a windswept clearing on top of a high bluff, there was no one in sight. After he dropped his chute harness and most of his hundred pounds of gear, Norris looked around, cursed under his breath and then said, “What the hell? Where is everybody?”

  His was a short crew, only fifteen members instead of the usual twenty, but this was supposed to be a mop-up. The heavy smell of woodsmoke in the air put the lie to that claim.

  Cory Cantwell, the only squad leader present, stepped beside his crew superintendent boss. “They must have seen us make the drop, Mike,” he said. “You’d think somebody would stop by and say hi.”

  “Seems like,” Norris said. He looked hard at Cantwell. “How’s the shoulder?”

  “Bad,” the younger man said. “But it will stand up just fine.”
>
  “What did the doc say?”

  “He told me it’s arthritis. I said I was only thirty and how the hell could I have arthritis. He said anybody at any age can have arthritis.”

  “So what did he give you?”

  “Nothing. Told me to quit the weight training. I told him that ain’t gonna happen. Maybe I’d get flabby after a while. Well, he shook his head and said that every firefighter he ever met wants to be Arnold Schwarzenegger, and that includes the women. Finally, since he knew I was making this jump in an hour, he shot cortisone into the shoulder, though he warned me that since medical school he wasn’t very good with a needle.”

  “And was he?”

  “No. He was a butcher with a horse needle. It hurt like hell.”

  Norris smiled and said, “Come over here. What do you make of this?”

  He walked to the edge of the plateau and nodded in the direction of a saddle-backed hill that loomed to one side of the rise, the dark evergreens at its base obscured by a gray haze of smoke.

  “We got to get down there, Cory,” Norris said. “I have no idea where the hell that other crew is. They ain’t fighting fires, that’s for damn sure.”

  Cantwell examined the terrain. A dry, steady wind blew from the heights of the Cascade Mountains to the desert lowlands below. To the east rose the rocky hills of the high desert, covered with bunch grass and cheatgrass with a few ponderosa pines, that descended to sagebrush-covered flatlands. To the west the foothills of the mountains had a dense cover of Douglas fir.

  Just before the team had left base, a Red Flag Watch had been issued, which meant high winds, lightning, and no rain. So far, the smoky fire wasn’t crowning, but a sudden gust of wind could whip it into flame.

  “Cory, the wind is blowing in the opposite direction from what they told us,” Mike said. “They should have dropped us on the flat.”

  “The fire is in the gulch, so how do we get down there?” Cantwell said.

  “I’m not happy being on grass above a fire,” Norris said. He removed his scarred white helmet, wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. “We have to get down into the gulch somehow.”

  “We could call it off, make another jump onto the flat,” Cantwell said. He knew Norris would nix that idea, but he felt it was his duty to mention it.

  “It’s a thought, but it would take too long,” Norris said. “The fire could spread a considerable distance by then.”

  “Then we make our way downhill,” Cantwell said.

  “Damn, it’s going to be rough heading down the slope,” Norris said. “Broken leg central, huh?”

  “Maybe broken neck central,” Cantwell said.

  “Yeah, why not look on the bright side?” Norris said.

  “Mike!”

  A young dark-haired man with wide shoulders and earnest brown eyes stood at the edge of the rise and pointed down into the gulch, where smoke curled like a great, gray serpent. “Lookee there. I think I found a game trail.”

  “Going down?” Norris said.

  The young man grinned. “It’s going both ways, Mike, up and down.”

  “Smartass,” Norris said. “All right, make like Dan’l Boone and go check it out, Wilson. And be careful.”

  “Sure thing,” Bob Wilson said. He disappeared over the rim of the plateau.

  “Good kid that,” Norris said. “Needs some weight on him though.”

  “A few years eating National Wildfire Service grub will bulk him up,” Cantwell said.

  “Meat loaf.”

  “Beef stew.”

  “Plenty of protein.”

  “And cake and Cool Whip for dessert. Plenty of carbs.”

  “Sounds good,” Norris said. “I’m making myself hungry.”

  When young Wilson returned five tense minutes later, he stepped beside Norris and said, “It’s a game trail all right, probably deer, and I think it goes all the way into the gorge.”

  “Cory, what do you think?” Norris said. “Should we take a shot at it?”

  “Where a deer can go, so we can we,” Cantwell answered. “Nothing else is presenting itself, so it’s sure worth a try.”

  Norris nodded. “Right, let’s get it done. We got a fire to fight.” He looked around, and his gaze fell on a man with a goatee beard and overlong hair. “Connors . . . you’re lookout. Stay here until we’re safely down and then follow. Okay?”

  The man called Connors nodded. “I got it, boss.”

  “Mike, do you see that?”

  This from Cheryl Anderson, at twenty-one the youngest member of his crew. A tall, pretty girl on her first drop, like the rest she’d shucked her heavy jumpsuit and stripped down to boots, a yellow shirt, and olive-green pants. She filled out both shirt and pants beautifully. Her hair was chopped short, a bob that looked like a glossy bronze helmet. The woman pointed to the top of the butte, where stood an abandoned lookout tower, rickety and half-hidden behind a growth of vegetation. Once it had hosted a park ranger, now it was the haunt of owls.

  “Yeah, now I see it, Cheryl,” Norris said. “That shining example of the National Wildfire Service’s folly could be useful as a landmark.” He pulled out his cell phone. “Google maps to the rescue.”

  There was no reception.

  Norris cursed under his breath. One more goddamned techno failure. At thirty-five he was old enough to remember when the firefighters relied on human observations, and old enough to be nostalgic about it. If he’d had some good old-fashioned maps, he’d know exactly where he was, the names, the topography, the contours and elevations. Even better, if the lookout tower had been manned, the ranger probably could have put out the aborning fire—which wasn’t that big even now.

  Instead, a satellite picked up the blaze. A computer produced the weather forecasts given to him. Norris had been handed the printouts before they left the airbase, and it was all supposedly very up-to-date.

  And already he could see they were wrong.

  For one thing, the satellite had apparently spotted a larger fire than actually existed. Because of that, fifteen volunteers had been drawn from the several crews that were lounging around the Redmond Airport near the end of the season, hoping for some action. It was a far larger team than necessary. Norris thought about sending some of them back but decided whomever he chose would be pissed. By this late in the season, the overtime wages were welcomed.

  It was all pretty messed up. At the very least, they should have been dropped farther down, closer to the fire. Well, now Norris had the game trail. While such trails are predominately used by grazing animals, humans have always found them handy. Lost hikers will follow a well-marked game trail to a waterway that could eventually lead to civilization . . . and they provide a stable path through otherwise impassible terrain.

  Norris called his people together and ordered them to pick up their gear and head for the trail, except for Joe Connors, who would remain on the butte as lookout and stay in radio contact.

  “Cory Cantwell will take the point, and I’ll bring up the rear,” he said. Norris waited for comments, and when none came, he said. “All right, we got it to do.”

  “Break a leg, folks,” Cantwell said, grinning.

  “That,” Mike Norris said, “is not funny.”

  CHAPTER 2

  A hot gust of wind blew ash into Mike Norris’s face, and he stopped in his tracks, his expression concerned. What the hell? The satellite weather report had said a weak low-pressure system would produce a west wind of four to seven miles per hour. But the wind was blowing from the east, in his direction, and it was stronger, slapping at him a little as a warning.... It could be dangerous.

  They were only partway down the game trail that had proved to be more difficult than it looked at first glance. If the growing breeze fanned the smoking embers in the gully into life, they’d be trapped like flies on flypaper above the flames.

  For a brief moment, Norris thought about calling the whole thing off. The possible danger was right there at the center of h
is inner alarm system. Safety had been drilled into him, but so had the gung-ho, get-’er-done ethos of the hotshots. Ahead of him the crew had stopped again, another damned obstacle in the way.

  Norris had to make a decision . . . now.

  Then that responsibility was taken away from him. Suddenly the wind battered at him, cartwheeling every which way before it dropped as quickly as it had started. A cloud of gray ash hung in the still air for a few moments and then settled around Norris’s feet. He breathed a sigh of relief. It had been a dust devil. That was all . . . just a dust devil.

  Wary now, for a few moments Norris stood and tested the wind. The day remained still, the air heavy with smoke, but the breeze had died. He scolded himself for being like the old maid who hears a rustle in every bush, and he stepped back onto the game trail and continued his descent.

  Ahead of Norris was Jon Martinson and in front of him brunette Marie Lambeau and blonde Katy Peters giggled at one of their private jokes, probably about Marie’s fi-ancée, an accountant and something of a stuffed shirt. Norris had four women on the team, an unusual number since usually there was only one woman on each jump. He was proud of himself for not taking their gender into consideration when he picked the crew, his experience being that the women were every bit as strong, smart, attentive, and brave as the men

  Stumbling a little and just visible in the smoke was a stocky young man with the face of a choirboy who didn’t look old enough to be a smoke jumper. But then, they all looked like kids these days. Norris didn’t know this firefighter very well. Brad . . . somebody. The kid struggled with the massive chainsaw he carried, and his breathing was labored.