The Big Burn

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Part Five: Operation Blowback

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Prologue

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Jason Quick pulled the laptop from the bloody hand of the dead Malaysian, then rifled through the man’s pockets until he found the keys. They were in the right-hand pocket of his jacket. The key ring held the JumpDrive memory stick Jason was hoping for. A backup for the laptop. He quickly yanked it off the ring and started down the alley where a car waited.

The nervous-looking Malaysian standing beside the car yelled at him in Malay, urging him to hurry. Another man, sitting behind the wheel, also insisted that he hurry.

Jason was about ten yards away from the car when he heard shouts behind him. He turned just as a man came after him, firing his weapon.

Jason felt the searing pain of the bullet as it went through the inside of his left thigh.

He spun, dropped to one knee and fired three rounds.

His pursuer went down—only to be replaced at the mouth of the alley by two more men trying to stop him.

More gunfire erupted.

The Malaysian waiting for him at the car returned the gunfire, while Jason rose and limped toward him. Bullets screamed both ways, pieces of stucco flew from the walls, men yelled obscenities in Manglish, the Malay’s version of English, and a perfect description of the mangled combination.

The passenger car door opened and Jason dived inside.

His Malaysian partner, now hunkered down on the ground beside the passenger door, was hit twice. As Jason tried to get him inside, the car lurched forward and the man slipped from his grip.

He had no choice but to leave him.

“Get the hell out of here! Go! Go! Move it!” Jason yelled while turning to look behind them as their car blasted out of the alley and then swerved through the clogged streets of Kuala Lumpur. He could see the great towers behind him, tallest buildings in the world. And he could see a black car, a Mercedes, battling traffic to catch up.

He had to get to the dock. The speedboat was waiting. There was no chance of making contact now, of delivering the laptop to the right people. He’d have to get to the island and wait there until someone could manage to extract him.

Every terrorist in Jemaah Islamiyah would be after him. And every pirate looking to cash in. And the vast, well-organized crime syndicates working the Strait of Malacca, with its seventeen thousand islands in the waters of this, the most important oil and goods shipping route on earth, would be looking for him.

He held the coveted laptop against his chest with the protectiveness of a man who thought he was holding the living heart of Western civilization.

“We need to find my daughter,” Jason said as the driver swerved to avoid crashing into an oncoming car, then straightened out and raced down the street.

Part One

Chapter 1

Southern California

Anna Quick felt a rude jolt when turbulence from an eighty-mile-per-hour gust of superheated air slammed violently into the jump plane. Her breathing was shallow from the tight constraint of the chest strap on the jump harness as she stared out the open door, the plane orbiting drunkenly over the raging inferno below.

A voice behind her said, “They’re somewhere in that gorge, but there’s no way out. Fires are moving in on both ends. It’s going to blow up.”

“How many people?”

“Four. College students on a backpacking trip. Two girls, two guys.”

Anna nodded. They would be scared out of their minds, desperately searching for a way out. Then they’d face the realization they weren’t getting out. Four college kids unequipped, unprepared. They would die the most horrible of deaths, screaming, choking, burning…

In the distance, two massive smoke columns broke through the inversion layer and shot hundreds of feet into the air. Tongues of fire snapped across the ridges and raced into the heavy brush and trees on the southern edge of the canyon.

The jump plane bucked again, with increased violence. The plane lurched sideways as updrafts of the ferocious, high-octane Santa Ana winds knocked them around as if they were a toy boat on a raging sea.

Anna’s face and nostrils and eyes were dry and tight. The roar of the wind blasting from the gorges grew thunderous as the gusts hurled smoke and flames across the horizon. She studied the orange tidal wave as it swept up the slope of the mountain to the south, ten miles from the mountain community of Big Bear. She noted the axiom that every twenty degrees in hill slope doubled the rate of speed the fire spread. The vicious whirlwinds and updrafts were being created by the fire itself.

Anna processed the variables that produced this disaster: fuel loading, clear-cutting, weather, topography. In a decade of firefighting she’d never seen anything to match this. Her boss said it was becoming another Yellowstone disaster.

“Not going to happen, Anna. Back away from the door. This is a no-go,” Carter yelled over the roar. “You can’t risk it. I won’t let you. There’s no way out of that canyon now.”

There’s always a way out, Anna thought. The fire would burn over this canyon very quickly and the worst of it would stay up on the ridges.

“I’m going in,” Anna insisted as she tightened her leg straps.

“The hell you are.”

Another huge fire swept down from the north, threatening to marry with the one below, forging a giant tsunami of flame. Smaller fires snaked aggressively along the ridges, and out as far as she could see more flare-ups triggered by flying embers burst across the hills.

Anna Quick’s team had been jumping small outback fires for twelve days. She was exhausted from slogging equipment up and down hills, digging, cutting, torching backfires. Behind her on the jump plane’s nylon seats sat her seven teammates, tired, dirty and in a stupor only firefighters know. All they wanted to do was go back to base camp and collapse.

Anna, a lifelong mountain climber and college soccer star, had formidable reserves that gave her, at the most competitive level, more endurance than any other male or female on the strike team, but this time even she’d overdrawn her account. She was functioning on nothing now but sheer willpower.

“Dammit, Anna,” Carter persisted, leaning in close over the roar of the engine, both of them holding on to the door frame for support against the slipstream and turbulence. “It’s a no-go.”

She ignored him as she pulled on her helmet, snapped the chin strap, dropped the heavy wire-mesh mask over her face and pulled on her Nomex gloves.