Page 100 of Into the Fire

But I knew what was happening now. A person was setting Carson Ridge on fire.

Chapter twenty-five

Boone

The last stretch out of the fork was steep enough that we needed our hands. We hauled ourselves over rock and root as smoke poured downhill past us. As I climbed, I counted the men ahead of us on the rib—Shep first, then Teller and Ramirez. Hollis was already on the high ground where I’d sent him.

We came out of the forest onto a shoulder where the rib flattened into the crest. Dante stopped so suddenly I nearly walked into him.

He stood looking down into the fork with his hands loose at his sides. “This is where I was.”

I stepped up beside him. For five years, I’d tried to put the view together from the incident map and Dante’s statement. Neither had shown me what I could see.

The whole drainage lay open below us. The benches stepped down through the timber, ledges in near-perfect order. Across the draw, maybe four hundred yards out, a bench ran along the far slope, flat and clean. A man walking that bench would come out of the trees, cross an open stretch, and go back into the trees. He’d disappear and reappear. Anyone standing here could see him.

Dante had tried to describe this while lying on a cot with a concussion, and I had asked him whether he was sure.

“You could see all of it,” I said.

“Dutch put me here.”

I set my hand flat against his back. He didn’t turn, and he didn’t step away from it.

The crew filed off the rib behind us. The old Carson Ridge burn lay just over the crest behind us—blackened ground, nothing left in it to burn, thirty seconds away if the day went bad. It was our route out.

“Ramirez, eyes on the main fire,” I said. “If it moves, I want to hear about it.” Shep dropped onto a rock beside me, breathing hard.

Hollis stared out at the view. “This holds,” he said. “Fire’s got to climb at us through thin fuel, and we’ve got the black at our backs.”

“That’s how I read it.”

Air attack passed over high, and I gave them our position. Kincaid checked in from the Park. The meadow was quiet, and the gear was where we’d left it.

I looked for Dante. He hadn’t sat down. He stood at the edge of the shoulder where the ground broke toward the fork, and he was looking back and forth between the fire below us and upslope, where nothing was burning.

Nash had told us the wind moved into the fork earlier than the forecast would predict.

Dante was watching the ground above the fire.

Ramirez called to me. “Main fire’s still backing downhill. Same as it’s been.”

Flame showed on a bench below us and to the west, working along it in a line. I checked the wind, the slope, and the time. The wind was over the crest and pouring down. The slope fell away from the crest. Nothing about that bench should have been burning yet. The fuel between it and the nearest run hadn’t been touched.

“Hollis.” Dante didn’t raise his voice. “The green above the neck. What do you have?”

Hollis brought the binoculars up and held them for a long time. “Smoke,” he said. “Thin. In the timber on this side of the rock.” He kept the binoculars up as he looked down the slope and back. “I can’t find what’s making it. There’s nothing under it to feed it.”

“What are you thinking?” I asked Dante.

“That bench run had no way to start on its own. The main fire’s an hour from reaching it.” He turned and looked at the eighty yards of green between us and the black. “This position works if the fire comes from below. That’s the only direction it works from. If that run keeps crossing and the smoke above us turns into a fire, they meet, and this shoulder becomes an island.”

He looked at me. “We need to go.”

Everybody heard him. Shep stood. Teller stopped drinking from a water bottle. They didn’t look at Dante. They turned toward me.

There was a case for staying. We had rock underfoot with little fire fuel and a route out for now. The bench run might stall. Air attack hadn’t called anything.

“Which way?” I asked Dante.