“She said something like that last night when she was overboosting the band’s microphone at the Coachman.”

  “Judy told me about that. But Misty said a lot of other stuff later on, when she was with us. You…have any idea why she’d be talking about the Caribbean? You know how Jeff hated the Caribbean.”

  “Not a clue. Did you ask her about it after she sobered up?”

  Bill smiled. “I will, but the sobering’s gonna take a while. She was still in a Jack Daniel’s coma when I left this morning.”

  Clark had been moving slowly toward a less-crowded corner of the room with Bill following. He turned now to look the big pilot in the eye.

  “When we both get back this evening? Maybe the two of us should have a quiet talk with her.”

  “Good,” Bill replied. “I was kind of hoping you’d suggest that.”

  Clark cocked his head slightly.

  “Why?”

  “Well, I tend to look on the bright side of things and figure that Jerry’s going to treat his fleet with loving care during the winter, but truthfully, we seasonal pilots don’t really know where the planes have been each winter. Jerry does, I’m sure, and Jerry’s always looking to turn a buck. And what’s more, we know from experience that some of the operators have some pretty close ties with the CIA, and guess what Misty goes and talks about. Jerry being with the CIA, or dealing with them, or whatever she said.”

  “That’s pretty far out, Bill.”

  “Is it? I don’t know. But I do know that when a DC-6B comes apart in the air, that raises some really tough questions in my mind about where these old girls go in the winter and if they’re being flown, how they’re being flown. And then here comes Misty making some very worrisome comments about where Jeff and his airplane might have been.”

  “But, Bill, the flight time he’d logged seems right.”

  “You looked at the logs?”

  “Well, in part.”

  “So, what’s real, Clark? Can we trust what Jerry says and the times in the logbooks? Or is someone running the airplanes off the books during the winter? Did Jeff go fly one somewhere? Was someone else flying the fleet not using logbooks? I had to hold Chuck Hines back today on all the conspiracy theories.”

  “Your copilot’s a conspiracy theorist?”

  “Yeah, but he’s made some good points. So, as I say, what’s real?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well,” Bill replied, keeping his voice low. “You made quite a case for being suspicious in that article you wrote last year.”

  Clark’s eyebrows shot up in surprise before he winced.

  “You, too? How could you possibly know I wrote that article? Did Rusty tell you?”

  “No.” Bill smiled, doing his own quick scan of the room for overinterested ears. “No, it just sounded like you.”

  Clark was shaking his head and looking down. “Am I the only one on the planet who thought I was anonymous?”

  “Oh, most of the guys probably haven’t figured it out yet.”

  “How about Jerry?”

  Bill shrugged. “Well, you’re working here, aren’t you? However, you know Jerry. He could already be aware that you’re the one who launched that missile, but he might not want you to know he knows until he can use it as leverage. Or, he could have completely slept through that part of the show. Either way, you were absolutely right in the points you made, and someone needed to have the guts to speak up.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “Now,” Bill continued. “Maybe Misty was delusional last night, and maybe on the other hand she knows something very worrisome about Jeff’s activities. But you can be sure that if she knows something that might cast a shadow on Jeff’s posthumous image, it’ll take a crowbar to get it out of her.”

  A surge of voices approached, and two crews passed by engaged in animated conversation.

  Clark pointed toward the ramp, asking Bill’s P-3 lineup position.

  “We’re number three, just before you. Which would theoretically mean that you’re number four on the launch schedule. I see they’ve got you back in your favorite flying machine, old T-Eighty-eight.”

  “Yep.” Clark smiled. “I have her figured out. You get up enough speed and pull and the houses get smaller.”

  Bill shook his head. “Yeah, yeah…push and the houses get larger. Rusty flying with you?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “And you two…haven’t been briefed yet?”

  “No. Just came in.”

  “Okay. This’ll be a tough day, Clark. You’ll hear in the briefing. We’re going to be working north of where we were yesterday and trying to catch a blaze that’s already grown large enough to scare everyone.”

  Clark nodded. “Everything we did yesterday failed. Every time we tried to contain it, the damned winds pushed it past our lines and over the next ridge.”

  “I know. Boise’s ordered more tankers from California. And it’s hit the national news. Peter Jennings was talking about it last night on ABC, and the other networks have picked it up, too. They’re talking about what happened in Yellowstone in 1988. When things get that loud and public, I’m not optimistic, because it means the Beltway spin doctors are already trying to cover their posteriors by letting everyone know how overgrown and dangerous these forests are.”

  Clark spotted Rusty waving to him across the room. He glanced at Bill and arced a thumb in his copilot’s direction.

  “We’ll hook up as soon as I get back on the ground this afternoon, Bill, okay?”

  “You bet.”

  Clark moved quickly to the crew desk, where Rusty was waiting with an irritatingly broad grin, his maps and papers spread out on the counter.

  “Okay, what’s so funny?”

  “Sorry?”

  “This is a serious fire, Rusty, following a terrible tragedy yesterday.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about the fire or the crash. I just couldn’t wait to compliment my leader on the fine job he apparently did of beating up our director of maintenance, the man who keeps us all safe.”

  Clark rolled his eyes. “Where’d you hear that drivel? Jones just shoved me a bit, and I threatened to hit him if he did it again, that’s all. He backed off with a few growls. I’ve seen bigger battles in church.”

  “Uh-huh. To hear those two over by the coffeepot tell it, Trent Jones came staggering out of that bar looking like he’d been dancing with a grizzly.”

  Clark glanced around toward the coffee bar, finally spotting the pilot Rusty had indicated. He turned back to Rusty Davis with a scowl.

  “That’s Butler, for crying out loud! Haven’t you learned yet that Joel Butler is the biggest BS artist in here?”

  “Maybe. But he said you came to the rescue of Trent’s wife, who got banged up a bit. According to Captain Butler, it was a real furball for a few minutes.”

  “No one got banged up.”

  “Really? Not in the bar?”

  “No. Why?”

  Rusty’s expression turned serious, the smile evaporating. “Ah, Clark—”

  “What?”

  “I was at the hotel a while ago, and Jones’s wife…Karen, is it?”

  “Yes?”

  “She was at the front desk when I was heading for breakfast, and it sure looked like she had some bruises on her face. I was pretty taken aback until I talked to Butler.”

  “What?”

  “Well…you know. Black eye, maybe. She was wearing dark glasses, but they weren’t covering everything. From what Butler said, I thought it had happened last night in the bar.”

  Clark glanced around for a clock, then at his watch, which was beneath the cuff of his jacket as he struggled to free it.

  “You’re sure it was Karen?”

  “Cute little blond smokejumper? Yeah. She had on a leather jacket with the Missoula jumpers’ logo and her name. It was her.”

  “What time do you have?” Clark asked quickly, his voice sharp and urgent.

  “Uh, seven-eleven. We have a wheels up of seven-forty.”

  “Run the checklists and get her started. I’ll see you out there.”

  “What? Clark, we—”

  But Clark had already raced away and pushed through the door to sprint to his truck, where he fired off the engine and raced back to the hotel. He braked to a halt in front of the entrance six minutes later and ran inside to the front desk.

  “Has Karen Jones checked out?”

  The desk clerk looked at him with an uncomprehending expression.

  “Sorry?”

  He repeated the question, glancing around the lobby while the man pecked at his computer.

  “No. She’s still registered.”

  “What room?”

  The hawk-faced young man snorted. “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Okay, then, where’s the house phone? I need to call that room.”

  The clerk shrugged and picked up a phone behind the desk, dialing in several digits and handing the receiver to Clark, who listened as the line rang and shifted to voice mail. He turned his back to the clerk, speaking in a low voice.

  “Karen…this is Clark. I’ve got to go fly in a few minutes, but my copilot saw you this morning and said it looked like you’d been beaten up, and I’m absolutely flabbergasted and very upset if it’s true. Did that…did Trent come after you last night after we left? I’m worried about this. I’ll be back on the ground to reload about nine or so. Could you please leave me a message at Operations and tell me where I can find you? I just…I’m just very worried. The last thing I want to do is cause you any trouble.”

  He handed the receiver back with a mumbled thanks and dashed back to his truck, unsuccessfully scouring the hotel parking spaces around back for her Suburban before glancing at his watch and heading back to the field, his stomach thoroughly roiled.

  If Trent Jones had physically attacked his wife, he had to have either followed her upstairs to her room or enticed her downstairs—or perhaps he’d bribed the night clerk.

  Who else could have hurt her? he thought. The memory was all too clear of how infuriated Jones had been to find him with Karen.

  A flicker of concern that he was reacting like a protective lover flashed across his conscious mind as he locked his truck and broke into a dead run toward Tanker 88, which already had engines three and four running.

  Rusty would brief him on the mission after takeoff, he calculated, even though he knew he should have gone through the formal briefing and predeparture sequence in Operations and personally checked the weather and the notices to airmen they called NOTAMS. But the thought of Karen’s beautiful face being bruised by a jealous husband was leading to darker thoughts about what else he might try to do to her, blowing away both restraint and reason and even eclipsing the mission. He knew he was preoccupied, but he couldn’t help it. The next few hours were going to pass in tortuous slow motion, and he would be counting every minute until he could get back and find out exactly what had happened.

  Clark realized he’d automatically climbed into his DC-6 and strapped in by rote. He hadn’t given a thought yet to actually running checklists or flying the airplane, and he could see Rusty was clearly alarmed.

  “May I ask what that was all about, skipper?”

  “Too complicated. I’ll tell you later.”

  “Hookay.”

  The before-taxi checklist was on the copilot’s lap, and he picked it up and waved it like a fan, trying to catch Clark’s attention, without success. He cleared his throat, adjusted the microphone on his headset, and tapped the mouthpiece.

  “Hello? Anyone out there?” he said over the interphone.

  At last Clark looked around at him with a blank expression.

  “Sorry?”

  “I said, would you like me to run the before-taxi checklist now?”

  “Oh, sure. Before taxi, please.”

  “I’m…not flying this one solo, am I?” Rusty asked.

  Clark chuckled in response. “No, of course not. I was just a bit preoccupied there for a minute, but I’m fully back in service now.”

  They ran the checklist items, and Clark gave the taxi hand signal to the ground crew and pushed up the throttles, holding the nose steering wheel with his left hand as he tried to coax the aircraft into moving. The sound of the big engines revving up was accompanied by the DC-6 rocking forward slightly on the nose gear piston, but nothing more.

  Puzzled, Clark pushed the throttles up even more as he cast worried glances left and right and tried to figure out what was wrong.

  “What on earth…” Clark muttered.

  “Captain?”

  “Yeah?”

  “May I make an observation?”

  “Of course.”

  “Typically, the DC-6B’s ability to roll forward is greatly enhanced when the parking brake is off.”

  Clark glanced at the parking brake and groaned. He pulled the throttles back and released the brake as he glanced at Rusty.

  “Smart ass.”

  “Captain! I’m truly wounded!” Rusty said in mock alarm.

  Clark worked the nose steering wheel as the four-engine Douglas began moving smoothly out of the blocks.

  “You may be wounded,” he chuckled, “but you’re still a smart ass.”

  Chapter 13

  LEAD PLANE FOUR-TWO, IN FLIGHT,

  EAST OF JACKSON HOLE, WYOMING

  Sam Littlefox reached for the thermos of coffee again, this time snagging the handle with his fingertips just before it rolled off the right side of the empty copilot’s seat. He carefully opened the top and braved taking the coffee straight as he banked the aircraft to the left and continued trying to decide how to array the inbound tankers for the first round of attacks.

  Three separate spot fires topped his new target list, and the first one already had a hand crew of firefighters in place on the slope below the blaze, which was steadily chewing its way through the forest on the north side of a low ridge. He’d talked to the leader on the ground and flown over it twice now to figure out the best alignment for the tankers, but the approach still didn’t feel right, and he decided to try to cut in closer to a saddle in the ridgeline and descend down the north slope.

  The pall of smoke spreading from the growing conflagration of fires east of Jackson Hole appeared majestic at first, especially in the morning when a combination of calmer winds and an inversion layer kept the strata of smoke below the mountaintops. But the wind was coming back up rapidly and mixing the evidence of a disaster in progress. There were blue skies above and the majesty of the Tetons just to the west, but the south wind was making a bad situation worse. It is tough to appreciate the beauty, he thought, when confronted with such a beast.

  The air-to-air frequency came alive with the second inbound call as Tanker Eighteen checked in. Sam gave the crew the coordinates and assigned holding, double-checking his kneeboard to make sure he hadn’t placed two aircraft at the same altitude. Tanker Forty-four was already in a temporary holding pattern, and he would lead that ship in first, after determining the best flight path.

  Once more he flew past the burning ridge and throttled back the Baron’s engines as he rolled into a steep left descending bank and set up an east-west run along the north side of the ridge. The winds were howling over the top and creating heavy chop, but his plan was to slip in just below the worst of it and bring the tankers down over the fire line about two hundred feet below the ridge.

  One hundred ten knots, he thought to himself, checking the airspeed and dropping below the ridgeline as he bounced his way along. There were a few wisps of disturbed vapor just ahead, and he thought he could see them roiling, but he was wholly unprepared for the sudden wall of turbulence that rattled his eyeballs at the same moment it flipped the Baron almost on her back, ripping the headset from his ears.

  Sam instinctively firewalled the throttles and rolled the light twin back left, pulling hard on the yoke as soon as he had more sky than mountain above him.

  The horrifying sight of burning trees rushing at him, completely filling his windscreen, dominated the world for a split second before a major plume of smoke consumed the entire airplane, plunging him into zero visibility. The intense heat kicked the aircraft around as if it were blazing across potholes on a country road at ninety. He could almost make out the wildly vibrating attitude indicator on the panel ahead of him as he tried to make sure he was still upright and pulled, hoping he was going up instead of down. His jaw was clenched in determination and fear until the altimeter ever so slowly began climbing again, bringing a rush of relief.