“You’re welcome. I wish we could have done more.” Julian turned and walked around the passenger side of the vehicle, got in, and buckled up, the two men’s joy at being reunited with their pets taking some of the pain out of his burns.
Hunter climbed into the driver’s seat beside him and wiped his eyes. “Smoke.”
“Yeah.” Julian sniffed. “Me, too.”
Hawke walked down the line,his crew working hard, charred fuels crunching beneath blackened boots. They’d burned out a good hundred yards now, stretching from one drainage to the other. It was the biggest backburn he’d ever set.
Would it be enough?
He’d made a half dozen calls to NIFC and the Rocky Mountain Control Center, demanding air assets. He’d been approved for a Type 1 crew, a couple of SEATs, and a Skycrane helicopter for water drops, but the pilots had to refuel and fly up from Manitou Springs.
Yeah, any damned minute now would be great.
Several homes had already been lost, their demise hidden behind smoke and flame. Marc Hunter and his buddy Julian Darcangelo had been lucky to get out of there alive. They didn’t have radios, so Hawke had no idea why they’d gone in. Someone must have been trapped. If so, it had been a close call.
Hawke hoped the people of Scarlet Springs were paying attention. Residents had fought him and the county every time they’d tried to thin the fuels around town. He loved the forest as much as any of them, but he understood something they didn’t.
Forests burned.
Fire was part of the natural cycle of life up here. For the better part of a century, people had been suppressing all fires. Now, the forests were unnaturally dense, the fuel load critically high. And after a dry summer like this one…
Shit.
Why couldn’t they understand that by opposing fire mitigation they were endangering their own lives and property and putting firefighters at risk?
A call came over his radio. “Scarlet Command, eight sixty-five.”
Deputy Marcs.
Hawke reached for his hand mic to answer her. “Scarlet Command. Go ahead.”
“The phone lines at Camp Mato Sapa are down. They didnotget the evacuation order. Break.”
Hawke’s heart gave a hard knock. “Eight sixty-five, I’m listening.”
“There are forty-three children and perhaps twenty adults still at the camp. They have no idea there’s a fire coming their way. I’m heading there now.”
Fucking hell.
Though he couldn’t see the camp from here, he knew the fire had to be close.
“I’m about to lose radio… I don’t think … hear me once … in the canyon.” A burst of static ended contact.
Son of a bitch!
Forty-three kids and twenty adults were trapped in a canyon in a fast-moving crown fire.
How thehellhad this happened?
Eric would have ordered Dispatch to call for a Chinook helicopter, but there was no way it would arrive on time. To assemble a crew, do pre-flight checks, get airborne, and fly to the camp would take an hour, if not two. Everyone there would be dead of smoke inhalation or thermal injuries long before then.
Hawke had one option. “Scarlet Command to Dispatch. Tone out the Team, emergent. Tell them to take every vehicle they have and head up to Camp Mato Sapa to evacuate sixty-three people. Make sure they know the fire is moving fast. Theycannotdelay or linger.”
Would Megs and the Team make it? Were they already too late? If they made it to the camp, would the road burn over, entrapping them all on the way out?
The thought dropped like lead into Hawke’s stomach.
It washisjob to keep people safe,hisjob to make sure no lives were lost to fire. Had he failed already?