The Scorching Read online

  Mike Norris shook his head. Who the hell made this youth a sawyer? He should have been in the digger crew, or at best, a swamper, carrying away the brush. Norris called out, “Hey, Brad, take a rest. I’ll carry the saw for a while.”

  To his surprise, the kid stepped off the trail and turned, frowning. “I’ve got it, sir,” he said. “It ain’t heavy.”

  “Okay, carry on,” Mike said. Then, to make the youngster feel better. “You’re doing good.”

  Five minutes later the line of firefighters suddenly came to a dead stop, and Norris brushed past the others and joined Cantwell at the point.

  The problem was immediately obvious. The smoke had thickened, and the game trail ahead was lost in a gray and black murk. There was a grass fire in the gulch . . . but how widespread was it?“What do you think, Mike?” Cantwell asked. “Head back up the trail?”

  “No,” Mike said. “I want to get down to the fire and fight it on the flat.”

  Then the east wind picked up again, and Norris felt a sudden spike of dread deep in his belly. At that moment, the radio squawked. “Boss,” Conner said, trying to sound calm, “are you receiving me?”

  Norris unclipped the mike from his shoulder harness. “Loud and clear, Joe.”

  “What end of the gulley are you on?”

  “The wrong end,” Norris said.

  “I’ll come down,” Conner said.

  “No, you won’t. Stay the hell where you’re at. Keep us posted.”

  Norris heard the lookout gasp. And then he saw what Conner saw.

  The fire had leapfrogged the gulley and ignited in the thick grass and brush below and to the east of them. Driven by an out-of-control wind, a towering tsunami of fire hurtled toward the crew at terrifying speed.

  Cory Cantwell yelled, “Everybody! Get the hell out of here! Back up the trail!”

  Then he turned and stared with remarkable intensity into the gulch.

  Norris saw Cantwell standing in the smoke, watching something . . . and then the man was gone, vanished into the inferno.

  Oh, my God!

  The fire now burned along the entire length of the gully and was rapidly scaling the hill. What had once been a ferny glen where mint-green frogs plopped into dark rock pools was now a blazing annex of hell . . . and people were already dying.

  A grass fire is fast. Dreadfully, horrifically fast. It spreads like lightning and often makes a pincer movement. It traps the unwary inside its grasping arms and then scorches them to death, and so far at that dreadful moment in time it had killed most of the jump crew. It had taken only a few minutes.

  Norris looked downhill and saw the fire advance on him, roaring now, closing for the kill. His face wild, he turned and ran for the plateau above, fear spiking at his belly. Pyrophobia, the fear of fire, stems from an ancient and primal dread, and few people are immune to it, including firefighters. Norris scrambled up the slope of the game trail and felt heat on his back, as though the devil himself was on his heels. Panicking, he gasped for breath, his mouth wide open in a silent scream. Above the snarl of the fire, he heard shrieks as men and women died in mortal agony. At that moment, Mike Norris, overtaken by a disaster, was not entirely sane.

  The sight of Cory Cantwell saved him.

  The tall man emerged from the smoke, his face blackened, his fire-retardant shirt tattered and charred on his back and shoulders. He’d escaped the worst of the flames and somehow had managed to regain the game trail.

  “Cory!” Norris yelled.

  Cantwell turned and looked in his direction.

  “Where are they?” Norris said. “Where is my crew?”

  Cantwell shook his head. “I don’t know. Somewhere in the gulch. I think they’re all dead.” It was only then Norris saw, hanging by his side, the Glock 19 in Cantwell’s hand. The fire was very close, the flames shooting high in the air, the heat blistering. Norris battled to hold on to his shredded nerves. “What happened?” he yelled.

  “There were two of them,” Cory called back. He continued his trudge toward the plateau. “I killed them both.”

  “Who? Who did you kill?” Norris almost screamed the words. Then again, “Damn you, where is my crew?”

  Cantwell waved the Glock. “I told you, back yonder in the gulch. They’re all dead, I could do nothing for them.”

  “Who did you kill? Damn it, man, answer me.”

  But Cory Cantwell ignored that and stumbled forward, staring straight ahead of him like a zombie lurching its way through a bad B horror movie.

  Norris fought his fear and regained his self-control. Had Cantwell killed two crew members? Had he put them out of their misery? Crazed questions without answers.

  He scrambled onto a nearby outcropping of lava rock and scanned the lower slopes, frantically searching through smoke and fire for signs of life as he battled to hold on to his flagging courage. Then he saw them. Barely in sight, Marie Lambeau and Katy Peters were engulfed in fire and smoke. One of the women was kneeling, her head bent as the other tried to lift her to her feet.

  Norris cast caution to the wind. He ran to the women, took the burns from the flames without faltering, and, a big man and strong, he grabbed them, one under each arm, and carried them all the way up the hill to the safety of the rock plateau.

  Below him the fire burned and ravenously fed on the bodies of the dead.

  CHAPTER 3

  “Mike, you should get a medal for saving the lives of the two women,” Cory Cantwell said. “You’re lucky to be alive.”

  His face and hands heavily bandaged, Mike Norris sat up in his bed in Good Samaritan Hospital in Portland and glanced out the window where a cobalt-blue sky filled the panes. “They don’t give medals to screwups, Cory,” he said. “I lost twelve of my people.” Then, a yelp of pain, but not from his burns . . . from the depths of his tormented soul. “I should’ve died with my crew. As God is my witness, as long as I live, I’ll never lead another.”

  The room had a hospital smell, iodoform antiseptic and the ethyl alcohol gel dispensers that were everywhere. A cart of some kind rattled past the closed door as though it carried a cargo of cheap tin trays.

  “You’ll feel differently once you’re out of the hospital,” Cantwell said. He smiled. “The Forest Service can’t do without an old fire-eater like you.”

  “The service can do without me. It won’t even notice that I’ve gone.”

  “They’ll want you back, I guarantee it,” Cantwell said.

  “I saw on the TV news that an entire crew was killed in an Austrian forest fire,” Norris said. “Did you see that?”

  “Yeah, I did,” Cantwell said. “Pyroterrorism, and it happened so fast they didn’t stand a chance.”

  Norris shook his head. “Oh my God,” he said. “Terrorists in Austria. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Terrorist attacks on forests can happen in any country,” Cantwell said. “Hell, they can happen in all fifty of our states.”

  “You’re a mine of information, ain’t you?” Norris said. “Tell me something I don’t already know.” Then, looking at the paper sack in Cantwell’s arm, “Did you bring it?”

  The younger man managed a smile. “Yes, Mike, against my better judgment and against doctor’s orders.” He took a gallon jug of orange juice from the sack and shook it. “There’s a bottle of Smirnoff in there, just as you wanted.”

  Norris said, “There’s a plastic cup on the table. Fill it for me, please. Half and half.”

  Cantwell did as he was told and passed the brimming cup to Norris, who drained it in a couple of gulps.

  “So how was the screwdriver?” Cantwell said. “Now that I’m your bartender, I’m looking for some praise here. Even just an attaboy.”

  Norris ignored that and said, his voice flat, “Who did you kill?”

  “Mike, I didn’t . . .”

  “Who did you kill, Cory? You said you’d shot two people.”

  “They were not firefighters.”

  Wrapped like a mummy
, only Norris’s surprised blue eyes were visible.

  “Then who?” he said. Suddenly he wanted a cigarette.

  Cantwell took a long time to answer that question, and when he did his handsome face seemed troubled. “The fire at Indian Wells was started by three men with gasoline. That’s why the blaze spread so rapidly. I killed two of them and the third threw himself into the flames and died a martyr.”

  “A martyr for what cause?” Norris said.

  “For the cause of Islamic terrorism.” Cantwell said. “Unless they were homegrown, pick any country in the Middle East, and they probably came from there.” He nodded to the TV suspended in a corner of the room. “You’ve seen the news, Mike. California is burning.”

  “Are you telling me my crew was killed by terrorists?” Norris said.

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m telling you,” Cantwell said. “They call themselves Fire Warriors, and they aim to set the whole country ablaze and kill as many Americans as they can.”

  “How many of these people have been caught?” Norris said. “In California, I mean.”

  “California is a people’s republic, and it’s hard to tell. If any were arrested, chances are they got a slap on the wrist, were told they’re the innocent victims of white oppression, and sent to a sanctuary city, where they got a rent-free house, a car, and welfare while they plotted more fires.”

  “And if you arrest them, Cory. What then?”

  “Places like California is why we don’t arrest pyroterrorists, Mike. We kill them”

  “For God’s sake, who the hell is ‘we’?” Norris said.

  “I still work for the National Wildfire Service,” Cantwell said.

  “I know that, but you said, ‘We kill them.’ You still haven’t told me who we is?”

  “Maybe we should wait until you’re out of the hospital before I get into all that,” Cantwell said.

  “To hell with that. I want to know now. You’re such a damned Boy Scout.”

  “All right, but it will probably bore the ass off you. As far as I know, there’s supposed to be a number of us armed volunteers attached to smoke jumper bases around the country,” Cantwell said. “But by this time next year that number should increase to at least a hundred, depending on the government’s willingness to provide funding. But I don’t know if all that’s true or not.”

  Norris sounded incredulous. “And the Wildfire Service okayed this crap?”

  “The Department of Homeland Security together with the CIA is said to run the program, so yeah, the new National Wildfire Service must have given it a thumbs-up,” Cantwell said. “Probably they weren’t given any other choice.”

  “What the hell do they call you?” Norris said, irritated, “Double-O something, licensed to kill?”

  Cantwell smiled and shook his head. “Mike, you’ll get a kick out this. Some dude at the CIA with a passion for comic books and a sense of humor christened us the Punishers.”

  “Comic books . . . I don’t get it,” Norris said. “And what the hell is a Punisher?”

  “There’s a comic book about a superhero called the Punisher who metes out pretty violent justice to the bad guys,” Cantwell said. “And there were a couple of Punisher movies, as I recall.”

  “I don’t read comic books, and I don’t watch movies,” Norris said. “So you’re a Punisher now? And all this time I took you for a smoke jumper.”

  “I’m still a smoke jumper, Mike. I just have an extra duty.”

  “It’s a load of crap,” Norris said. “Wild West stuff.”

  “Pyroterrorism is no joke, Mike. It’s a real and growing danger to the entire country.”

  “Yeah, you must tell me about it some time,” Norris said with an air of finality, as though he was all through talking.

  Cantwell glanced at the clock on the wall. “I got to be going, Mike, let you rest,” he said. “I’ll stop by tomorrow. Can I bring you anything?”

  “Yeah, bring me my crew back,” Norris said, closing his eyes.

  “I wish I could, Mike,” Cantwell said. He moved to the door and stopped and smiled. “I’ll see you tomorrow, same time, same place, huh?”

  Norris didn’t open his eyes. “No, don’t visit me tomorrow, or any other day. You might as well know this . . . I got no love for the National Wildfire Service or for two-bit comic book heroes either.”

  Cantwell tried to come up with a response and could find none. He opened the door and stepped into the hospital corridor. A young Asian woman in a white coat and a name tag on her lapel smiled at him as she passed.

  “Cory!” Norris yelled at Cantwell’s back. “Losing my crew was none of my doing. The Wildfire Service can’t blame me for its own criminal stupidity when they scrapped the lookout towers.”

  Cantwell stepped back into the room. “Mike, nobody is blaming you for what happened.”

  “Oh, but they will,” the man in the bed said. “Believe me, the sons of bitches will.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Three months after Mike Norris left the hospital, the National Wildfire Service, on the first day in September, retired the last lookout tower in Oregon. The day was unseasonably warm, the noon sky the color of washed-out denim.

  The fire season was officially over, but that didn’t fool anyone, least of all those firefighters whose responsibility it was to watch over the forests. It was still hot and dry. It was the eighth year of a severe drought, and the El Niño of a few years prior had only made it worse, turning the fresh grasses tinder dry.

  The lookout tower was near the town of Bend, on top of a perfectly round cinder cone called Lava Butte. The tower had once been a showcase, state of the art, outfitted with all the new gadgets the Forest Service could provide before that beleaguered agency was wrapped into the larger National Wildfire Service. Unlike most lookouts, located in out-of-the-way places, there was even a gravel road up the butte to reach it.

  Mike Norris attended the ceremonial closing as just another tourist. He knew and had worked with most of the people on the speakers’ platform. He’d let his hair and beard grow out and wore a Stetson and sunglasses. He couldn’t disguise his six-foot-six height, but they wouldn’t be expecting him, so he thought he might make it through the day without being recognized. People smelled the booze on him, and he soon became an island in the crowd as others gave him space.

  Norris was aware that there was a drone flying overhead, and that it would be transmitting images to some nameless tall building where nameless men and women in cubicles monitored face-recognition software. Ever since last year’s Christmas Eve terrorist attack in Washington, DC, there was rarely a public ceremony held without drone protection.

  Norris was glad of the beard and the Stetson’s wide, face-shielding brim. He wasn’t exactly his former employer’s favorite person. He’d put up quite a fight trying to save this Oregon tower, blaming the government’s reliance on satellite technology for the deaths of his jump crew. A man in a watchtower would have spotted the fire—and the terrorists—and raised the alarm. The satellite had failed, and his people had died horribly, and that was a thing Mike Norris would never forgive or forget

  To his surprise, Cory Cantwell was the featured speaker.

  Cantwell rarely put himself front and center—no doubt, the brass had twisted his arm. But Norris had to admit that the man was good at public speaking. He was charming and funny, and he had a gravitas that made people listen.

  After Cory Cantwell told a few well-worn firefighter jokes, he got serious.

  “I started my career on this very lookout, back when I worked for that quaint little organization called the Forest Service,” he said. “It was a wonderful summer, and I was both disappointed and gratified that no big fires occurred during my residence. I managed to read all of Moby-Dick, that’s how isolated I was. It was during those few short months that I learned who I was and what I wanted to do with my life. After all, 360-degree views and total seclusion tend to make any young man think.”

  Cantwell sm
iled his genuine smile, and the crowd was instantly won over. If it had been anyone else, Norris probably would have forgotten his vow to remain inconspicuous and heckled the speaker. But Cantwell had once been a friend. “Today marks the end of an era. Much as I wish other young men and women could have the same experience I had, we are only human, and we can’t always be vigilant. We sleep, we eat . . . we look at the clouds . . . and inevitably we miss things.

  “The cameras and the satellites will see so much more, and at a much lower cost. So as much as I loved the romance of it all, I believe this changeover will be a good thing. For me, it isn’t about the cost savings, but because the resources freed up will allow us to broaden our scope, to be in so many more places at the same time.

  “We sorely need that, in the light of recent terrorist attacks on our forests.

  “So it is with a bittersweet feeling that I say goodbye to this grand old structure and embrace the future of firefighting.”

  Cantwell sat down to loud and enthusiastic applause.

  After that, some of the higher-ups in the National Wildfire Service took the stage, but Norris was uninterested in what they had to say. The bureaucrats had always had their sights set on eliminating the human element in firefighting. It was the Cory Cantwells of the world—who knew better—who were the true traitors.

  It was nauseating. Norris reached for the flask in his back pocket, then realized he’d left it in the pickup. The flask had been almost drained anyway before he screwed up his courage to join the crowd.

  They finished the ceremony by releasing biodegradable balloons, because nothing says fighting fires like balloons. Mike Norris snorted and turned away. There were a few half-hearted cheers, mostly from the children in the audience.

  What they should have done was set off some fireworks. In fact, Norris was a little put out that he hadn’t thought of that. Maybe he could have sparked a few nice fires, engulfed this butte, and burned these idiots to a crisp. Maybe then they’d wake up.