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upbeat, maybe some of his mom’s rock and roll. Music was her main career; he’d grown up sitting on his dad’s knee watching her play at dances, in bars, and at small concert halls around the Northwest.
    But the Firehawk called for something more serious and substantial, like Gregorian chants maybe. Except he didn’t know any, and MCH didn’t feel right, so he switched to Little Big Town because, damn, those women could sing even better than they looked. “Pontoon” was instantly stuck in his head in a way that he knew he’d be screwed for the next several hours, if not days.
    He shut down the pumps and began winding in the siphon as he headed back to the fire—“on the pontoon.” Crap!
    At least he was getting the hang of doing two things at once. He could feel himself shaving precious seconds off the process with each pass. Yesterday Emily and Jeannie had outrun him by almost twenty percent for number of loads, and it had stumped him. Today he was running only about ten percent behind and he was starting to understand why. Yes, they were damned good, but so was he. What they had that he didn’t was practice in doing three things at once in the Firehawk.
    But there was more cheering him up than achieving a higher drop-per-hour tally than yesterday.
    For one thing, he’d seen how Denise had fine-tooth combed his chopper and how personally she took the hose failure from yesterday. It gave him a confidence in the Firehawk that he’d lost at the failure. Actually, he felt safer now than he had before. The woman was meticulous to the point of being compulsive, something he really appreciated in his mechanic.
    â€œHey, Mark.” He keyed the ICA frequency. “Where away?”
    â€œWe’re sounding way too cheerful, aren’t we?” Mark’s voice was backed by a girlish giggle coming from his two-year-old daughter who often rode copilot in his command plane circling high and safe above the fire. “Remember, there is a wildland fire down there burning things.” Mark tried to sound serious, but Tessa belied that with another giggle.
    Vern leaned forward to look up through the windscreen toward the ICA’s Beech King Air circling high overhead. He caught a flash of sunlight reflecting off some part of it. “Just glad to be flying and beating down the flame. Can’t that make a man happy?”
    Mark snorted. “Drop on the inside of Emily’s line. She’s got the north end of it stopped for the moment; now I want you to kill it.”
    â€œConsider it dead, boss.”
    Okay, maybe he was feeling excessively cheerful. He spotted Emily’s Firehawk pulling off the leading edge of the fire. Any question that it might be Jeannie was removed by the transponder code showing up on his radar sweep and the large “01” painted on the side of the chopper. He turned to head toward it.
    Ten thousand acres of scrubland had been scorched black by the fast-moving fire. Yesterday had been mostly about steering the flames away from homes and farmland. Today was about killing it before it hit the fuel-rich rugged hills of the Ochoco National Forest.
    Mark and Carly had decided that water and foam were needed at the moment rather than retardant. That decision was their job.
    It was Vern’s job to bring it, hard.
    The flames had scorched most of the fuel out of the black. The fire looked like a fat, orange snake sliding sideways across the landscape: achingly dry dun-colored grass and brush to the left side, black sear to the right. The evil serpent spat a dark sheet of smoke aloft as it ate.
    Vern approached over the black, away from the smoke. The black wasn’t uniform. There were patches of green that the fire had left untouched and others that still burned orange where it had struck some fuel-rich pocket. Even as he spotted one, Vanessa—the newest MHA pilot—flew at it in Vern’s old MD500. She doused the