The Big Burn

“I can’t wait.”

He smiled, finally, a warm, charming smile, and she began to warm up to this strait-laced soldier until he said, “Neither can we.”

Chapter 4

Anna dreamed that she was naked and clean, lost between creamy white sheets, ecstatic with their cool embrace, but angry at the mattress for being so uncomfortable.

When she woke a second time she still didn’t open her eyes. Instead, she listened to the steady drone of the plane’s engines, considered getting up, but the thought took too much effort. Weeks of constant grind had taken their toll. It would take a week to recover. Every part of her body ached. She realized she hadn’t moved for hours. Her muscles had locked up and she had to work to get them unwound, get some circulation. She stretched one arm, then the other. She finally opened her eyes when a smell wafted to her that she responded to with enthusiasm.

Her body felt like a piece of lead as she undid her seat belt and pulled herself up. The five men on the plane were up front talking and drinking coffee. Three sitting, two standing.

She got up and went forward.

“Coffee’s fresh,” one of the men said. Brock was talking on a satellite phone.

She accepted the offer of coffee. She smelled of fire and sweat and tried to keep some distance between her smelly self and the men.

After he hung up, Brock brought her a blueberry bagel with cream cheese and another cup of coffee. She was starving again. Then he showed her the island on the computer screen.

They huddled shoulder to shoulder around a laptop and discussed the latest satellite images of the Malaysian and Indonesian fires. The images, acquired by the Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite, showed a thick soup of smoke.

The island was virtually invisible, covered by a massive cloud of dense smoke.

“Where are the winds?” she asked no one in particular.

“There’s no wind. It’s dead calm.”

Using a new technology she’d never heard of, the images were run though some kind of color spectrometer, and visual penetration became possible. She could see the heat pattern from the fires.

Brock pointed to an area. “This is where we’re getting our periodic beeps from. It’s the densest and hilliest part of the island. Jason was moving north, but apparently he can’t get over those mountains. He’s trapped about here,” he told her, gesturing to an area.

“How are we getting him out once we get to him?”

“We’re hoping to find a burned-over area and bring a chopper in. But the fires are now so big it’s getting hard to tell where to land. That’s going to be up to you.”

She studied the fire pattern, and the distance to the ocean. There were several lagoons, but they had limited information on the island’s trees.

“We were thinking of here,” Brock said, pointing to a spot. “It’s the closest point. The fires aren’t joined and that leaves something of an alley.”

“No. Too hot.” She explained the coloring of the fires. “Whatever the fuel load is in here, it’s very hot-burning. Unless you think walking through two thousand degrees won’t turn you into a puddle of glue. The best approach is from here.” She made a line from one of the lagoons inland. “These must be groves of old hardwood. The fires will be mostly crowning and high. There’s a river to the north we can escape to, if things get bad.” She pointed to the river. “Once we get to him, I’ll find a pickup zone and you can call your guys for a chopper.”

While Brock went over plans with his men, she closed her eyes and visualized the jump, the descent, the lagoon where she wanted to go in. Without wind, she’d be able to control the descent, though having to worry about Brock’s descent only made hers more risky.

Jumping into a fire from a high altitude at night and into a tropic combat zone was going to be something new. She wasn’t at all sure what would happen.

All she wanted to do was just get Brock to the ground and let him take it from there. He’s a leader with the most elite commando force on earth, she thought. He should know what he’s doing. Just get him in, and he’ll get us out.

That’s what she hoped for, anyway.

“We’ll refuel in the air, put down in Guam in about five hours. If you need more sleep, now’s the time.”

She walked back to her seat, thinking she might have trouble sleeping again. She cuddled up on her pillow, shut her eyes and immediately floated off into a deep sleep.

Pouco Vulcao Island

Jason Quick came out of a shaking sweat and forced himself to get up. He tried to focus so he could check his symptoms. He feared he was going into some kind of toxic shock syndrome. Septic shock was marked by fever. He had that. Malaise, he had that. Chills and nausea, check. Damn, he was four for four.

He pulled the bandages back and looked at his wound. It was nasty. He cursed bitterly. He had to get the hell off this island and into a hospital, soon.

Jason took a drink from a water bottle, then opened the laptop. He had only two, maybe three hours of battery power left. He closed the computer. He’d been able to translate enough of the text to know what he had, and it was critical he get it out as soon as possible.

Somewhere between Jakarta and Europe a cargo ship had three marine cargo containers with machine tools on board. Inside those machine tools, virtually undetectable by current methods, was enough uranium to make a dozen dirty bombs.

Jason had alerted his handler to the situation a week ago when the containers were first being loaded. It had cost him his cover and the life of his primary agent, a man deep in the terrorist network of Jemaah Islamiyah.

So far nothing had been done to find and stop that ship. But Jason now had a laptop with the information that would identify not only the ship, but where the deadly material was headed. What Jason didn’t have was the program that could break the code and get into the specific data on the laptop.

It was his opinion that the cargo was headed for a port in Europe, before heading elsewhere—most likely the States.

He made his way slowly and painfully to the front of the cave. He pushed aside the blanket and stuck his head outside. At times the smoke so completely blocked the sun he couldn’t tell if it was day or night but for his watch. The front of the narrow entrance was covered by thick vines and wide lantana fronds. He’d found the cave by accident as he’d fled the men hunting him.

He didn’t want to waste the satellite phone’s batteries, but he had to make contact. He was getting sicker and weaker by the day. His spells of fever getting worse.

He wouldn’t last much longer.

Guam

Anna sensed an absence of movement. They were on the ground.

The door of the transport plane was open, and opening her eyes, she appeared to be alone. They had brought her all the way out to Guam and abandoned her in the plane.

A fine set of circumstances. Her anger and frustration was rising again.

Brock and his associates had, indeed, deplaned without her. No one was on board but her.

She could see the jungle beyond the plane framed in the open door.

Anna unfastened her seat belt, got up and stretched. The heat and light poured in through the open doors with a nasty vengeance.

She deplaned, squinting, and began to sweat almost instantly. It was like walking into a sauna. The sun beat down on her neck and face, the humidity sucked the sweat right up out of her pores onto her skin where it heated up but couldn’t evaporate because the air was already saturated. She’d rather be surrounded by fire.

Right across the road from where she stood there was a big sign above the feeder road into the camp: Welcome to Camp Nowhere.

The camp sprawled along the road on the far side of the airfield. No colorful tents like the ones she saw in firefighting camps. This one consisted of a half-dozen Quonset huts with semicircular, corrugated roofs, the structures bolted to large concrete slabs. Behind the Quonset huts stood several smaller stucco buildings and in the distance, across from what looked like a rice paddy, Anna saw several concrete outbuildings.

The sprawling base seemed empty. She had a weird feeling about it, as if she’d stepped into a horror thriller, or one of those great old Twilight Zone episodes.

She walked away from the C-17 and then stopped and stood staring across the dirt road at the camp. There was a small road sign: Harm’s Way. Hanging from that sign by one arm was a small skeleton of a man that had been fashioned out of wire.