Page 94 of Into the Fire

Dante

Iheard the Otter before I cleared the gate.

It wasn’t the cough and mutter of a maintenance run. It was both engines up to power and holding, the sound that meant the base was about to put jumpers in the air.

I’d driven forty minutes from the county building with two hours of Vasquez’s questions behind me, and somewhere around the second cattle guard I’d stopped rehearsing what I was going to say to Boone and started admitting I didn’t know. I’d told him I’d be back at noon. That was as far as I’d gotten.

The gate stood open with nobody on it.

Ramirez’s cousin was in the Operations doorway with a handset, and men were crossing the yard in multiple directions. Nobody was running.

Teller was half into his jumpsuit. Kincaid hauled a cargo box onto the Otter. Fellhauer was at the loft door with Nash beside him in the walking boot, handing out gear.

Fire call.

I parked the truck next to Shep’s. He walked past me with a streamer bag over each shoulder, helmet hanging off one hand, and gave me the news.

“Smoke report came in an hour ago. Big column already.” He was moving the whole time, walking backward to keep talking to me. “Carson Ridge. The North Fork.”

He turned and kept going toward the plane. I stood next to my truck, trying to decide what to do next.

The Otter waited with its door off and props turning. I looked toward Operations.

Boone closed the door behind him and walked toward me, geared to the waist. He didn’t look surprised to see me.

We met halfway. “What’s happening?” I asked.

“Fire call. Carson Ridge, North Fork. Aerial detection, confirmed column, jumpers requested for initial attack.”

“Lightning?”

“No.”

“Where’s Marty?”

A chill ran through me as I looked at Boone’s face. “Gone,” he said. “He set a nine o’clock meeting with Hanson to sign for the file copies and never showed up. His phone’s going to voicemail. His desk is in order, and his glasses are gone, and it’s eleven-thirty in the morning.” He kept the explanation short. “I spent the morning unpacking the sabotage. Nash showed me how the bag gets opened—ten minutes, inside an ordinary errand. Then I ran everyone through it. Nash can’t have done it. Shep can’t. Fellhauer, Ramirez, Teller—every one of them failed somewhere. One way or the other, it didn’t work.”

“But Marty worked.”

“Yes. I cleared him myself on the tower day. Operations, the phones, no view of the yard—I wrote it down and moved on, because Marty’s the man you ask to confirm everybody else. Nobody checks him.”

I liked Marty. I tried to make it not fit.

He was at the gate the morning I came back. He cleaned out locker forty-one the night before because he figured I’d want it. Marty caught the per diem error, walked my extension through Helena, and told the Missoulian the findings were the findings.

Then I remembered.

“He took my statement,” I said. “Five years ago. It went through him before anybody official ever knew what I said.”

“Yes.”

“He had the records. He knew the day we pulled the box, and he knew when we went to the cabin. Is the spare key still in Operations?”

“No, and he made the phone call happen that took you off the tower,” Boone said. “Prentiss’s office rang at twelve-forty to say she’d call back. The call that pulled you came at one-fifty. Marty managed both of those to the minute because managing calls was his job.”

The Otter changed pitch behind me, and I looked at the mountain forty air miles in the distance. “No lightning,” I said.

“Nothing to start the fire.”