“For what?”

  “Sammy’s putting us in a holding pattern. So if you want to go jog around back there or sleep awhile, we’ve got time now.”

  “And leave you up here alone to play with the switches?” Clark joked. “I don’t think so.” He handed Rusty the Diet Coke he had grabbed from the cooler. “You ever wonder how many people flew in this old bird, Rusty? All the human stories, the pathos, the emotional anguish as people flew away from loved ones, the drama when they were flying to someone, or something? For instance, did you ever wonder how many people were flown in this airplane in handcuffs on their way to a prison?”

  Rusty was staring at him with an amused expression. “And this would be, what, your Andy Rooney impression?”

  “No, I just…just wonder sometimes, about the rich human history of an old airliner. You know. What if she could talk? Make a great movie.”

  “This old tub? Tanker Eighty-eight?”

  “Hey, don’t call this old lady a tub.”

  “Sorry.”

  “She’d probably cuss you out for that insulting reference.”

  “If she could talk, Clark, she’d be begging us to stop trying to barbeque her belly with these cockamamie fires we keep buzzing.”

  “Not a romantic bone in your body, is there, Rusty?”

  “Nope. I believe in practicality, straightforward communication, and not wasting time.”

  “In other words, you get slapped a lot on dates and no surprise you’re still single.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “We romantics can tell.” Clark gestured to the plumes of smoke that were ahead, filling the sky to the south and southeast. “Not looking good, is it?”

  The copilot shook his head without comment.

  “Check in with Sam and put us in orbit, Rusty.” Clark picked up the newspaper. On the front page was a photo of a soccer match somewhere in South America. Other lengthy tables of names and numbers—presumably scores—adorned various little boxes on the same page.

  Rusty’s voice crackled through his headset.

  “Lead Four-Two, this is Tanker Eighty-eight orbiting southwest at thirteen thousand.”

  Clark heard Sam acknowledge between calls to the other tankers, one of whom was departing after his drop. The only other tanker ahead of them now was Bill Deason’s P-3. Deason, also known as Tanker Ten, was lining up behind the lead plane for his first run at the fire.

  Rusty pulled the power back to slow to 190 as Clark casually scanned the front of the old newspaper.

  He ran his eyes toward the dateline.

  February 10, he read, reexamining the last four digits to make sure he’d read them correctly. Two thousand and three? No. What would a current newspaper from Colombia be doing aboard this…

  Clark felt a substantial chill spread through his bloodstream, and he fought the urge to jump to conclusions. A Colombian newspaper section could have come aboard in a thousand ways from a thousand innocent sources. Maybe it had been insulating material in some package, or perhaps some recent immigrant crawled aboard during the winter when the plane was parked down south.

  Andy had said the DC-6 fleet had been gone all winter, and the inspection shop in Florida confirmed they had left their airfield in October. So where were they in the meantime, and doing what?

  The sports section from Cali offered another explanation Clark was reluctant to consider.

  He reached around behind the seat where the maintenance log was kept and pulled out the metal binder, ignoring Rusty’s puzzled glances as he rifled through the entries from the Fort Lauderdale inspection work and repairs all the way up to last night when Tanker 88 had rolled out of the hangar. There was virtually nothing to indicate the aircraft had ever been serviced, inspected, refueled, or even landed in South America.

  “Here we go, Clark.”

  “Sorry?”

  “He just cleared us in for our first pass. Tanker Ten is on pullout.”

  Clark nodded and replaced the log, stuffing the newspaper at the same time into his brain bag. After all, even if Tanker 88 and all her companions had flown to Colombia, they might not have needed fuel, and there wouldn’t necessarily be an entry in the log.

  “Okay, I’ve got her.”

  “You okay?”

  “You keep asking that, Rusty. Yes, I’m okay.”

  “It’s just that you really look spooked.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  Clark adjusted his seat forward a notch and tried to smile. “Well, that’s because I had a life-changing personal revelation back there.”

  “Really?” Rusty asked with complete sincerity.

  “Yep. I discovered that I’m scared of forest fires.”

  WEST YELLOWSTONE AIRPORT, MONTANA

  Jerry Stein called from his house and ordered the main doors of Hangar One opened so he could drive his new Hummer inside. He sailed in under the wing of a DC-6 and squealed to a halt a few feet from the stairs to his office. As planned, Trent Jones was waiting for him as he got out.

  “Where is he?” Jerry asked.

  “Over at Forest Service Operations right now,” Trent said, tilting his head toward the last place the field investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board had been seen. “He asked that I call him when you got here.”

  Jerry brushed past his chief of maintenance with the key in his hand and gestured Trent inside.

  In the plush leather chair behind the desk, Jerry folded his hands over his stomach. “I was going to come out and stand by to fly a mission anyway, so I didn’t mind racing out here, but tell me again precisely what he said.”

  Trent was holding a cloth shopping bag, and Jerry nodded to it.

  “What’s that, by the way?”

  “The logbooks—all of them—on Tanker Eighty-six. The NTSB asked for them.”

  “Are they copied? Every damn page?”

  “Of course.”

  “So what does he want?”

  “He said there’s been a tip, or report, about the crash.”

  Jerry’s brows almost came together, punctuating the severity of his frown. He leaned forward and shoved an expensive desk model of the DC-7C aside for an unobstructed view of Trent’s face, which was dead serious and somewhat flushed.

  “What the hell does that mean? What kind of tip?”

  The fact that Trent Jones licked his lips while studying the wall had already alerted Jerry it was going to be bad news.

  “Jerry, someone’s called NTSB headquarters claiming that Jeff’s airplane was brought down by sabotage.”

  “WHAT?”

  “The caller claimed that the wing was taken off by some sophisticated method the NTSB will have trouble finding.”

  “Bull!”

  “I’m just—”

  “Yeah, okay.” Jerry was on his feet. “Who’s the investigator?”

  “Steve Zale is his name.”

  “How experienced is he?”

  “Not very, at least at NTSB. Three months with the board, and before that, I don’t know.”

  “Oh, jeez! In other words we didn’t kill enough people for Washington to send someone competent, right?”

  “That’s…probably not fair. He does have an A&P license.”

  “Has he been to the crash site?”

  “Yes, he has.”

  “Has he inspected the wreckage and the wing attach points?”

  “I think so.”

  “Then he’s got to know the allegation is so much bullshit.”

  Trent was staring silently at him, and Jerry’s anger began rising.

  “What?” Jerry snapped.

  “I’m just…nothing.”

  “What do you know that I don’t?” Jerry said, coming from behind his desk.

  “Well…you say it’s BS, Jerry, but we don’t have any idea what happened, do we? I mean, there wasn’t supposed to be anything wrong with those wings, according to the inspections. So if they didn’t miss anything when they tore into the wing box and the attach fittings and the pins and everything in Florida, why would we…or you…suddenly think that sabotage wasn’t a possibility? I mean, Jeff had a lot of enemies, some of them angry husbands. And apparently they found something very suspicious in the wreckage, and they’re sending parts in for chemical analysis.”

  “What do you mean, suspicious? What parts?”

  “Jerry, let me call the man, and you can ask him rather than have me give you secondhand information.”

  Jerry sat down again in dark agitation and nodded, while Trent used the desk set to call the NTSB investigator’s cell phone.

  Within five minutes Steve Zale appeared in the maw of the open hangar headed for the office, and Jerry pointed to him.

  “Trent, you haven’t said anything to him about Jeff leaving a long trail of angry husbands and creditors, have you?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Good. Don’t. This had nothing to do with the crew.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t frigging well have to understand. Just keep quiet.”

  Chapter 15

  IN FLIGHT, EAST OF JACKSON HOLE, WYOMING

  “We’re losing it, guys,” Sam Littlefox was saying on frequency as Clark stabilized the DC-6B on a high downwind again after his first of two runs over the fire.

  Rusty started to respond, but Clark motioned to him and punched the transmit button.

  “Four-Two, did we miss the target line back there?”

  “Negative, Tanker Eighty-eight. You did great. Everyone’s done great getting the target, but…I’m talking to the division supervisor and the fire’s already crowning and moving so fast, even if we can put enough retardant on it before it reaches the shoulder of that pass, it’s probably going to jump the line, just like yesterday. It’s the winds that are killing us.”

  “Okay, Lead, we have one more set of gates available, and you’ve got two more tankers inbound, so let’s just roll in right now and see if we can accelerate the time line.”

  “Eighty-eight, I’m getting worried about safety down there. You felt that wind. The downdrafts are just about out of limits.”

  “Let’s drop one more, Lead. Come on, Sammy. Start your roll in. We’re on your tiny little Beechcraft tail.”

  There was a hesitation, then a laugh and assent from the lead-plane pilot; Clark watched him roll into a steep left bank and prepared to do the same. Within three minutes the light twin was lining up for the last drop with the churning might of Tanker 88’s four engines booming through the smoke behind him, less than a half mile in trail.

  “Eighty-eight, I’m bringing you in the same as before, into the wind, which I’m computing at around forty-five now, and a hundred feet over the ridge. We need to soak that line of lodgepole pine just over the top. That’s where the fire’s going to jump. Can you see it?”

  “Negative, Four-Two. Too much smoke,” Rusty replied.

  Clark raised a finger and turned to Rusty. “Tell him to give us a mark the second he comes over the ridge. I’ll figure it out from there.”

  Rusty repeated the message on the frequency.

  “Roger, Eighty-eight, standby,” Lead Four-Two replied. “I’ll be over the ridge and over the target coming up now on my mark, three…two…one…mark!”

  Rusty glanced at Clark and saw his lips moving silently, the words “one thousand” clearly formed in front of each number. They had the flaps at twenty degrees and airspeed at 130 knots with a groundspeed of 85 knots, and he’d calculated exactly how many seconds ahead Lead Four-Two had been. Clark’s thumb was once again poised over the release button on the control yoke as he watched Sam’s Beech Baron suddenly become visible through the smoke, his wings wobbling left and right as the light twin’s pilot fought to stay upright and begin the pullout.

  Rusty’s eyes shifted from trees to the Baron at the same moment Clark did the reverse, his eyes on the approaching ridgeline with less than two seconds remaining in his count. The rumble of the DC-6B’s engines began to combine with the slap of the propellers biting large side gusts and the impact of the roiled wind currents on the big airplane.

  “Jesus CHRIST!” Rusty yelped, yanking Clark’s attention from the drop for a split second.

  “What?”

  “He…GOD! His left wing is failing!”

  They slammed through the same jarring impacts of updrafts and mixed-up downdrafts as Clark caught sight of the Baron for a fleeting second, then forced his attention back to the ridgeline. He mashed the release button and held the DC-6B as steady as possible while his mind processed the image he’d just seen.

  The left wing of the Baron was tilted up where it joined the outboard side of the left engine, not vertically, but at an angle the manufacturer had never contemplated.

  With the last of their fire retardant streaming out of the belly, Clark looked back toward the last location of the Baron through the smoke and haze and could see nothing.

  “My God…is he down?”

  “I don’t know!” Rusty said. “His left wing was folding…or failing…canted up, y’know? He’s gotta be down!”

  Clark rolled the DC-6B as steeply as he dared to the left, searching the burning forest below for any sign of a Baron or a fresh impact or anything that might reveal the fate of Sam Littlefox. At the same moment, an incoherent jumble of words an octave above normal range came through their headsets, followed by silence.

  “What was that?” Clark asked.

  “I think it was Sam.”

  A quarter mile ahead of the DC-6B Sam Littlefox felt the blood rushing to his head and the seat belt and shoulder straps cutting into him as he pushed harder on the yoke and goosed the throttles, somehow simultaneously aware that his airplane was now flying inverted and that he had no other choice.

  The horrific groaning of the metallic structure of his left wing as it had partially failed and started bending upward had riveted his attention to a lesser degree than the sudden roll to the left as the tilting wing gave up some of its lift. The next few seconds were too bizarre to believe, but they were replaying in his head even now, as he struggled to make sense of an impossible situation, trees and smoke and ridgelines all appearing in the top of his windscreen with blue sky in the bottom as he hung upside down and pushed the inverted nose even higher to avoid the next ridgeline and get enough support from wings that were not designed to create downward lift.

  He recalled rolling almost uncontrollably to the left.

  And there had been the other sound, a horrendous metallic clang as the left wing—suddenly pushed downward by the relative wind of an inverted airplane—had snapped back into position.

  There had been no time for anything but instinct. The Baron was inverted, the left wing was where it should be for the moment and apparently holding. Those realities flashed through Sam’s mind in a microsecond, his aviating instinct dictating he stay that way.

  What was getting tougher was the dyslexic feel of trying to decide how to turn left or right while upside down and disoriented. The pain from the shoulder harness and the seat belt he could ignore. But to avoid a mountain peak that was really to the left of his flight path and now in the right side of his inverted windscreen, he had to appear to bank toward it in order to turn in the opposite direction, all the while keeping forward pressure on the yoke.

  A hundred questions seemed to cascade through his mind at once, as if he were mentally multitasking at warp speed. He could almost count the passage of the propeller blades, even though the engines were driving them at nearly two thousand revolutions per minute.

  The fact that he was probably going to die in seconds became merely an observation. But the fact that some metallurgical fluke was permitting the left wing to stay on when upside down, but not when right side up, was some sort of bizarre celestial joke that seemed to hold out salvation when none was possible. He couldn’t land successfully upside down. There would inevitably be a crash at the end of this tunnel, Sam knew. So should he prolong the flight as long as possible?

  On another detached plane of thinking, it had even become intriguing, an opportunity to demonstrate his aeronautical prowess. His airmanship.

  Okay…the wings will produce lift upside down as long as I keep a steep enough angle and enough power. Why is that wing holding? Who cares…it is for now. Okay, okay…to turn left, bank right…no, roll right slightly, gently…keep pushing. Steady out.