Firestorm Read online

  CHAPTER

  Eleven

  ANNA WOKE FROM a nightmare and tried to sit up. Metal held her flat. Dream became reality. She was suffocating, life was being crushed out of her. Desperately, she began fighting for space and air.

  “You’re okay. You’re okay. You’re under a truck. I’m here. God damn it, Anna, cut it out!”

  Stephen Lindstrom tweaked her ear hard and she began to put two and two together. The sum was not much more comforting than the nightmare had been. But there was light at long last and where there was light there was hope.

  Faint gray pushed in around the sides of the truck’s undercarriage but there was nothing to see: no stumps or ash, burned rubber; nothing but blank even-toned gray-white with light behind it.

  “Snow?” she croaked through dry lips.

  “Not much. I poked my fingers out. Maybe six inches or so. It kept us snug as the proverbial rug bugs.”

  Anna realized she wasn’t terribly cold. The earth and the metal chassis had retained some heat from the fire. Snow had held it close overnight. “Probably the only reason we woke up at all,” she said. Freezing to death in a fire would have been just the touch of irony the gods delighted in.

  “I’ve got to get out of here.” Long hours—even those free from consciousness—of suppressing the claustrophobia were over. Now that she could escape, it became imperative that she do so. Working through the shooting pains in her hips and shoulders, she forced the joints through their first movement in God knew how long, crabbing her way from under the truck.

  Snow broke free, fell in clumps down the collar of her brush jacket, jammed up under the edge of her gloves. The bite of cold brought Black Elk and Boggins to mind. Their burns would weep, robbing their bodies of fluid, of heat, opening the door to shock and hypothermia.

  Nothing she could do about it at the moment.

  She took a mouthful of snow and held it on her tongue, letting the melt wet her parched throat and lips. Shuffling her feet and swinging her arms to pump life back into them, she watched Lindstrom crawl painfully from beneath the truck, his left glove clutched in his bare hand. Elbows out, body flattened, he put her in mind of a giant insect in a Jules Verne novel, something trapped in lava, released by the fires.

  Oddly, it made her nervous and she looked away.

  The world was much changed from when they’d gone under the truck. Like Rip Van Winkle, it seemed as if she must have slept for a hundred years. What had been a world of black was now so white it was hard to distinguish between hill and hollow. A white sky, sifting fine flakes of snow through utterly still air, pressed down on snow-shrouded ground. Here and there the black skeletal arm of a tree thrust up, often capped with a rakish point of snow. Tree trunks, ten, twenty, a hundred feet long, were scattered like jackstraws, crisscrossing each other in ragged confusion.

  Nowhere was there any color; not a scrap of green or yellow or brown or blue. Even the red-orange of stray embers was quenched, replaced by steam as colorless as everything else. What had once been a living forest, a kaleidoscope of life and color, now resembled a Chinese brush painting. Black ink on white rice paper; starkly beautiful but without welcome.

  Lindstrom pushed himself to his hands and knees and Anna grabbed an arm to help him to his feet. “Did we die?” he asked, yanking his glove on with jerky irritated movements. “I’m pretty sure we did. God, but I feel hung over. What a bender we must have been on.” He began to imitate Anna’s shuffling dance, moving with the clumsy inexperience of a new-made Frankenstein’s monster. “Not dead,” he said after a moment. “Got to pee. Ghosts moan and rattle chains but I’ve never heard of one taking a piss. My, but this is good news.”

  Anna obligingly turned her back. It was the one instance in life where she credited Freud’s much-touted theory of penis envy. With the snow and the cold she didn’t relish the dropping of drawers that was becoming more necessary with each passing minute.

  “Bet you wish you had a handy-dandy picnic device,” Stephen said.

  Anna heard the workings of a zipper and turned back. “My wish list is longer than Santa’s at the moment. A bath, breakfast, pancakes, coffee—”

  “Cut that out.”

  “Right.” Anna pulled the radio from her belt and turned it on. Handhelds worked on clamshell batteries. They weren’t meant to run indefinitely. When it came down to it, she could cannibalize the batteries from her headlamp but she doubted they had much more juice in them than those in the radio.

  Static pulsed as she monkeyed with the volume and the squelch. “Damn.”

  “Losing it?”

  She nodded and placed a call to Base. Nothing came back but static. “What time is it?” she asked.

  “Just before six.”

  “They’re up. We’ll try again when the weather lifts or maybe with another radio.”

  “Anna.” Her radio crackled the name in LeFleur’s voice.

  “We’re still alive,” she told the crew boss. “Howard? Paula?”

  “Everybody made it down here. Lawrence and Joseph kept the home fires burning. They’re beat.” Anna could hear the pride in his voice. “I heard your call to Base. Any response?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Sounds like your battery is going. Save it when you can. What kind of shape are you two in?”

  Anna looked to Lindstrom and he shrugged. “Good. We’re in good shape.”

  “Could you check on Newt? It’s a long shot, but if…”

  “I’d forgotten all about Newt,” Stephen said in a stricken whisper.

  So had Anna.

  “Will do,” she replied. If Hamlin had survived the fire only to die of exposure because of their neglect it would be unconscionable. There were enough bad dreams to go around as it was.

  HAMLIN WASN’T ONLY merely dead, but, as Anna couldn’t help parroting Munchkinlike in her mind, really most sincerely dead.

  They brushed off enough of the snow to determine that the lump beneath was indeed a human form. During the firestorm his shelter had blown off. The body was burned till it was unrecognizable.

  Fire had robbed the corpse of all the trappings of life: hair and flesh and eyes. There was no odor but the clean, slightly acrid scent of dust and Anna didn’t find the body as upsetting as she’d feared she might. In fact, she was strangely untouched by it personally, feeling rather a generic sadness for those left living who had loved the boy.

  Mostly, as she and Lindstrom slogged back up through the snow, climbing over downed snags heaped together like pickup sticks, Anna’s strongest feeling was of hunger. Life asserting its dominion. After a grilled cheese, fries and a vanilla shake she would be better fortified to contemplate the great beyond.

  From the ridge she radioed John and told him the news. It was expected. “Thanks” was all he said, and: “Had to make sure. Try Base again,” he told her. “Meanwhile, I’ll get another radio up to you. Pepperdine needs airing off anyway.”

  Anna called Incident Base again. The Motorola bleated static and she was surprised to hear Gene Burwell’s voice rasp back.

  His words were hard to understand and harder still to accept. Winds had felled snags across the logging road. How many miles he didn’t know, but estimated the burn had covered at least four. The ground rescue unit had been recalled. Crews were already clearing away the deadfall but trees had come down by the hundreds. Weighted by six inches of new wet snow, more were falling all the time. Conditions were hazardous and the going slow. A helicopter was on standby. As soon as there was a break in the weather it would be dispatched. Till then the crews would keep on working but rescue by road wouldn’t be that day. Possibly the next.

  Disappointment, as strong and petulant as that of a child, swelled in Anna’s chest and she had to keep her mouth shut to avoid saying something snippy.

  “The weather will lift before then,” Burwell promised.

  “Does he think he’s Willard Fucking Scott?” Lindstrom hissed.

  Stephen’s pique helped Ann
a rise above her own. “We’re fairly stable up here, considering,” she shouted into the radio as if volume could cut through the interference. “Hungry mostly.”

  “Stand by.”

  A long silence followed and Anna felt herself irrationally wishing for a reprieve.

  “Maybe the cavalry arrived,” Stephen said hopefully, and Anna laughed.

  “My thoughts exactly. Not bloody likely. The cavalry’s out clearing deadfall.”

  “Spoilsport.”

  The radio came to life again in a series of squawks and hisses. “Anna, this is Frederick, Frederick Stanton of the FBI.”

  If Anna had believed in prayers and believed they got answered she would have had to admit that at least this once the answer had been “yes.” A hundred questions came to mind. The need to bawl and babble like a child threatened to overwhelm. Frederick Stanton.

  Anna’s throat closed and her eyes filled with tears.

  When she’d been in second grade, she’d broken her leg in a sledding accident at school. Brave and jaunty, she’d allowed herself to be towed in from the playground and carried to Mr. White’s big oak desk. Then, when her mother arrived, she’d dissolved in tears. Because she could afford to.

  “Ten-four,” she said idiotically.

  “Are you clear to copy?”

  “Yes,” Anna said, wanting his voice to go on.

  By the time it dawned on her that “Are you clear to copy?” was NPS code for “Is the bad guy standing there ready to clobber you the moment his cover is blown?” the damage had been done.

  CHAPTER

  Twelve

  STANTON FINISHED RELAYING the criminal histories from Timmy Spinks’s background checks.

  “Anything more to transmit?” Anna asked politely. Receiving a negative, she made arrangements to call in every three hours and turned off her radio to preserve what was left of the battery. Depression settled over her in a palpable cloud, filling her lungs as surely as the smoke had. Safety, home, was held only by a tenuous channel forged through unstable air by a wave it took faith to believe existed. Withdrawal, Anna thought: the high, the crash. Hope and cocaine.

  Any comfort she’d gotten from the first strains of Frederick Stanton’s voice was blasted away. Suddenly, irrationally, she was angry at the man. Trundling through the friendly skies with hot and cold running stewardi, warm dry clothes and food, to broadcast criminal histories up to her private patch of purgatory.

  Trapped on a ridge in the Cascades, one did not wish to know one’s fellows that well. Untold secrets were the safest. Anna would keep her eyes open, learn what she could. None but a lunatic, armed with only a Swiss Army knife, her backup a grieving seasonal and a pudgy neophyte, would go hammer and tongs after a murderer.

  Knowing would be dangerous.

  Not knowing would be worse.

  Stephen was standing close, shoulders hunched, his hands deep in his pockets, looking as forlorn as Anna was feeling. “I really, truly, deeply, honestly want to get the fuck out of here,” he said morosely. “I promised God I’d never put my peas on my brother’s plate and tell Mom I’d eaten mine if He’d just get me an Egg McMuffin this one time.”

  Anna laughed. “Obstructing traffic? I can’t remember if that’s a venial or a mortal sin. We’re probably all being punished for your transgressions.”

  “He didn’t mention indecent exposure, did he?”

  Anna shook her head.

  “They must have dropped that charge.”

  “I wish I’d seen the booking photos.”

  For a moment they stood staring at their feet. Soot-covered boots had trampled the snow into a gritty pack. Anna’s toes were growing cold and the heat she’d generated on the expedition to find Hamlin had turned to a fine sheen of sweat rapidly chilling her skin. Without food it would become increasingly difficult to stay warm. A furnace had to have fuel to burn.

  “Damn it.” She kicked a grubby clod of snow.

  “Fuck,” Lindstrom said, and kicked it a second time. “Validating your feelings.”

  Anna nodded absently.

  “Things are looking pretty grim for our intrepid band of adventurers, are they not?”

  “Fair to middlin’ grim,” Anna agreed. “It sounds like we may be stuck here at least another twenty-four hours, maybe more.”

  “Unless I’m given absolution for obstructing.”

  “And flaunting. So long as the snow lasts water is not a problem. No food, fear, cold, Dr. Death sleazing around in everybody’s mind.”

  “Exposure,” Lindstrom said. “Shock.”

  “Pudding, Barnaby, pudding!”

  Lindstrom looked alarmed, then concerned as he studied Anna for incipient signs of insanity.

  It annoyed her. “The Matchmaker,” she snapped. “Hello Dolly. ‘Pudding’ was the code word agreed upon so the boy from Yonkers would know when he was having a bona fide adventure. This is an adventure.”

  “What tipped you off?”

  “Extreme discomfort.” Anna shook free of self-pity, a physical act marked by a shrug and a shudder. “We’re going to be fine. We focus on keeping everybody warm, hydrated and calm. That’s all we’ve got to do.”

  “I’ve got a barn! We could turn it into a burn ward!” Lindstrom said in such a wonderful imitation of Andy Hardy Anna felt an uncharacteristic surge of optimism.

  “Hey! Hey, you guys! I’ve been trying to reach you on the radio for five minutes.” Hugh Pepperdine lumbered through the snow, his face red and gleaming with sweat. On his back was his yellow pack.

  “What do you bet he’s got food in it?” Lindstrom said.

  “Failing that we could always eat him,” Anna replied.

  Gasping for air, Pepperdine came up beside them. “You gotta monitor your radio.” He cocked a finger pistol-like at Anna. “You ought to know that.”

  Hugh was having way too much fun handing out advice and it crossed Anna’s mind to snub him but she didn’t. She was too hungry, too tired and too cranky. A snub might set off a chain reaction she’d regret. “Saving batteries,” she said pleasantly.

  Hugh pulled a radio from the pocket of his brush jacket. “Confiscated this from Howard. He’s not law enforcement. I heard Base,” he puffed. “I was about halfway up the hill. You should have waited till I got here. Didn’t you hear him ask if you were clear to copy?” Pepperdine elaborately avoided looking at Lindstrom. This was secret cop stuff.

  Anna was irritated on two counts: one, he was right, and two, he was Pepperdine. “What makes you think I’d’ve been clear to copy with you listening?”

  Hugh ignored that. “What are we going to do about Gonzales? I’ve had my eye on him. I knew something was hinky. Assault on a federal officer. I go to the mat for my people.”

  Hot air pumped Pepperdine’s ego with each word. He literally puffed up, the chest going out, the belly in.

  “Nothing,” Anna said flatly. She waited a moment for that to soak in. When Pepperdine opened his mouth to argue, she said again: “Nothing. We are not going to do anything. We are going to stay warm and dry and calm. We will be polite and helpful and when we get out of here Lawrence Gonzales will be the county sheriff’s problem.”

  Hugh looked appalled. “He assaults a federal officer, murders Len and we’re supposed to look the other way. That’s pretty shoddy police work, Anna. Gonzales could just walk out of here anytime.”

  “That’s right. And we don’t know if he had anything to do with Nims.” Anna was trying to drill some kind of sense into Hugh Pepperdine but had the feeling she was making no headway. Armed with a little information against his fellows and a little authority from the badge at home on his dresser, Pepperdine was learning that power corrupts.

  “I think we ought to arrest the dude.”

  Dude. Anna doubted Hugh had ever used the word before in his life. He seemed fairly pleased with the effect until Lindstrom echoed “Dooo-oowd” in diphthong-laden valley speak.

  “Arrest him with what?” Anna asked reasonably.
“And do what with him? Tie him to a snag with our belts? Lawrence may not want to be arrested. Have you got some sort of black-belt, kung-fu training I don’t know about? We’ve been working, sleeping and eating with the guy for two weeks. Nobody seems to have suffered overmuch.”

  “Nims,” Pepperdine said.

  “We don’t know that. Leave sleeping dogs lie. And give Howard his radio back.”

  Pepperdine hugged the Motorola protectively against his chest. “Howard’s not law enforcement. It’s just you and me.”

  “Jennifer’s law enforcement,” Lindstrom pointed out.

  “She hasn’t been to FLETC,” Hugh snapped.

  FLETC was the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia where all permanent law enforcement rangers with the National Park Service went for training. Pepperdine was so fresh from its hallowed halls he was going to be a major pain in the ass. Anna suppressed a sigh.

  “We’ll work things out,” she said. “You want a radio? Take mine.”

  Forgetting his trek up the hill had been to replace the radio with the dying battery, he snatched it eagerly, as if it was somehow invested with special authority. Immediately he switched it on and stowed it in his pocket. Anna clicked off the one she’d traded for, saving the battery.

  When the three of them reached the wash, Anna told Stephen and Hugh to inform the others of the rescue efforts, cautioned Hugh to keep his mouth shut about the background checks and excused herself to do “girl things.”

  She wanted another look at the body.

  ANNA ROCKED BACK on her heels and sat quietly in the snow. Flakes, fine as silt, continued to drift from the air, more as if they were formed from the matrix of fog than falling from a distant cloud. Light was evenly spread, air and snow uniformly glowing. There were no shadows.

  The shelter they’d used to cover Leonard Nims’s body had been disturbed, the snow shaken off when the aluminum cloth had been peeled back. Someone had been messing with the corpse.

  Anna surmised someone rather than something not because all animals had perished in the fire—many would have survived—but because there were heavy, human, fire-booted tracks. They neatly skirted a car-sized boulder in the stream bed as if this obvious sidetrack could obscure their origin. The trail came from the bivouac, stomped around the body and returned the way it had come.