White Heat Read online

  The air was laced with the burning heat of the flames, with the putrid smoke, tasting thick and acrid in his mouth, stinging his eyes. Just like old times.

  Wanting to curse his brother, wanting to curse Lyndie, wanting to curse every damn thing, Griffin got out, too. He reached into the back of the Jeep for his gear, and then with one deep breath full of smoke and remembered horrors, he followed her, right into hell.

  5

  As Lyndie walked toward the waiting men, she wondered what Griffin would do. Would he freeze again? She hoped not, as she really had no idea what to do with that.

  But his long legs quickly caught up with her much shorter ones, striding along at her side. When they reached the men again, he dropped his pack, put his hands on his hips, and drew a deep, ragged breath. “Okay.”

  God, it looked sober from here. The charred ranch house, the fields and mountains ablaze…terrifying. But Griffin stood there, tall and strong, thankfully, and she had the urge to put her hand on his big, tough shoulder. Since that made no sense, she gave him a long, even look. “What’s first?”

  He gave her the long, even look right back. “Ask them what the coverage is, and how many people they have?”

  Turning, she translated his questions, and the laborers’ subsequent answers, which were simple. Incident base had been forced westward, past the ranch’s boundaries. Everything else…they didn’t know.

  The knowledge, or lack of it, didn’t hearten Griffin, by the look of him. He dropped to his knees and started pulling things out of his bag. Hard hat, canteen, fire shelter, headlight for the hard hat, radio, extra batteries. He handed her up a radio. “My King,” he said. “It’s the common name of our standard issue radio. Do they have these?”

  She turned to ask, but the men were nodding. They gave her the frequency, and she went to hand it back to Griffin but he shook his head. “You keep it. You’ll be the one talking into it.” He pulled out a compass, and a…

  “Weather kit,” he said. He lifted what looked like a torch next, silently questioning the men.

  They both nodded. “Si, si.”

  “Okay, they either already have these fuses to help burn lines or they know what it is,” he muttered. “That’s something.”

  In return, the men showed them a piece of equipment they had, an agave stalk topped with strips of rubber from inner tubes.

  “Fire swatter,” Griffin said, nodding. “Good. Are they clearing, too?”

  Jose told her people were clearing, but there didn’t seem to be much in the way of organization. Lyndie looked at Griffin, silently willing him to fix that.

  “Map,” Griffin said. “We need to start with a map. I need to drive around as much of the perimeter of the fire as I can to see what we’re dealing with.” He shouldered his pack and started walking back toward the Jeep. “Keys?”

  Apparently, he’d not only found his sea legs, but was as naturally bossy as…well, as herself.

  His shoulders were stiff with impatience, his body long and lean in his dark green regulation firefighter pants that seemed made for him, moving with quick determination.

  So he’d put away whatever his problems were in order to deal with this situation the way it needed to be dealt with. She was glad of that, and for a moment she just watched him, because damn, there was something incredibly sexy about a man in his element, especially when that element was saving something important, like this land. It left her unsettled, and a little confused.

  “Let’s go.” Griffin opened the driver’s side door of the Jeep, wriggling his fingers for the keys.

  She liked to drive, and debated arguing with him, but he stood there so unexpectedly authoritative, she actually dropped the keys into his hand and stalked around to the other side. “If you damage it, you tell Tom.”

  “Damage it?” He eyed the beat-up old Jeep. “You’ve got to be kidding me. A bomb couldn’t damage this heap.” He hopped in, shot her a long look. “You’re coming?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then hang on.” His smile was bleak but resolute. “It’s going to be a bumpy ride.”

  He wasn’t kidding. Face intent, his hands handling the Jeep in a sure, confident way up the narrow trail in the lowest gear it had, he handled the northbound road better than she could have.

  Not that she’d admit it.

  The trees were tight together now, the growth beneath thick and dry. A tinderbox. In the open Jeep she felt like a sitting duck.

  The wind whipped their faces hard, and a flying ember landed at her feet. “Stomp on it,” he demanded, reaching out to air-swat away another flying ember from near her face. “Damn it, you’re not dressed for this!”

  In the air she’d been in her element. Not here, not now, and she hugged herself, looking over when he touched her shoulder. “I’m okay.”

  “Stay that way,” he said, and in less than two minutes they came to the end of the road. It was another clearing, with two old military trucks, each with a large tank in the back. Beyond them, beyond the clearing, the low bush surrounding the area was completely ablaze. The flames seemed small and manageable, but she knew that it was deceiving, especially since the flames danced in the trees just beyond the bush, vanishing over the top of the hill.

  There were men here, working at the two trucks, laying out hoses and creating firebreaks with rakes, machetes, their bare hands…whatever they had. Lyndie translated the introductions, and here they found Sergio, a local rancher with limited fire experience. He was running the show the best he could, though he seemed a little baffled by the whole thing, and the fact that a slash-and-burn ranch fire had grown so out of control.

  In rapid-fire Spanish, along with lots of hand gestures, Sergio told them they had six men on the two fire trucks. They had about thirty more clearing fire lines at various points on the perimeter, but the fire just kept jumping them. They’d lost three ranches to date, and were about to abandon this clearing for fear of being surrounded by the flames.

  Sergio didn’t know what more to do, and couldn’t hand this over to Griffin fast enough.

  On all of their faces was worry and fear. These strong, resilient people didn’t fear often, but they were afraid now, afraid for their homeland.

  It seeped into Lyndie’s bones, as well. Homeland. Not a term she personally grasped, not with the nomadic way she’d grown up, changing addresses like others changed hats. In her own travels, and even before that with her grandfather, she’d seen just about every corner of the planet. In all that time, she’d loved many, many places, but had always been fine leaving them when the time came. She was good at leaving, real good. Almost as good as how she never attached to anything.

  Other than her plane, that is. Now, that beautiful hunk of steel, she was quite attached to.

  Maybe that’s why this place scared her to the bone. Like San Diego—a place that had a part of her heart only because she felt close to her parents there, this place felt like a good fit.

  Even if she didn’t know what to do with that fit.

  “Ask him if he has a map,” Griffin said.

  She turned to Sergio. “Tienes una mapa?”

  He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket, smoothing it out, revealing a crude drawing of the landscape, and a line of fire, which even Lyndie could see had been drawn before the flames had moved to nearly on top of them.

  “Christ.” Griffin took a deep breath and looked at the men working hard to clear a fire path. “It’s not wide enough.” He shook his head. “And there’s not enough of them.” He took in the mountain above them, thick with dried out vegetation, then went through his pack and pulled out a palm held digital unit.

  “What do we do?” Lyndie asked.

  He looked up. “We?”

  “I’m your translator, remember?”

  “The reluctant translator.”

  “But I’m here.”

  He eyed her with an expression that might have been admiration. “Okay, we then. Without air support, and without a