“Be advised, Firebird. Onsite landing is a no go. I repeat. There is no place to land at the rescue site. Proceed with extreme caution.”
“Understood, base. I am proceeding to the rescue site now.”
As I approached the site, I wondered if I was already too late. The sky was filled with thick black smoke, and I struggled to make out anything on the ground as I circled above. After a number of passes, I was starting to run low on fuel. I needed to find this guy soon if we had any chance of making it back to base.
Suddenly, through the darkness, I saw a faint flash of white light coming from down on the forest floor. I flew in a little closer and could clearly see it was blinking. This was an emergency beacon. The kind worn by every firefighter.
I lowered the chopper directly over the beacon and could now see the trapped firefighter waving his arms wildly. Mere minutes away from being completely engulfed in flames
I flew low enough to set the bucket on the ground next to him and he wasted no time crawling inside. Once I was sure he was safely inside I climbed above the tree line and headed for a safe place to land. My heart raced as I flew my precious cargo over the fire zone, searching for anyplace that wasn’t on fire.
That’s when a violent gust of wind caused by the thermal updraft of the fires slammed into the helicopter, and I struggled to maintain control as we went into a flat spin. The chopper pitched and yawed wildly as my attitude and altitude alarms buzzed. If I couldn’t regain control quickly, this was going to be one short rescue mission.
I grabbed for the radio. “Mayday, mayday. This is Firebird Helo Bravo Zero Niner Delta. I am in distress. Location somewhere east of zone five.”
The chopper continued to spin.
“Come on, you piece of shit,” I groaned, pulling on the stick as we plummeted towards the ground. I thought of my poor passenger hitting the ground a second before me and the helo landing on top of him. However shitty my death was about to be, his was gonna be worse. Then, I thought of Tate, and how pissed off at me she was going to be for dying. I imagined her at my funeral, standing over my open casket, slapping my big dumb face over and over.
I slowed my breathing, focused on the controls, and with the ground merely one hundred feet away, finally pulled out of the spin and regained control of the aircraft... just in time to see the power lines.
I didn’t have enough time to climb above the power lines without slamming my passenger directly into them. My only choice was to fly under them and pray my rotors cleared them without flying too low and dragging the firefighter along the ground inside the bucket. Without a split second to spare I dove, holding my breath and bracing for the worst, barely managing to clear the lines.
I found a safe spot to land in a cow pasture and set the bucket down before releasing the line. I then set the helo down about fifty yards away and checked on the firefighter. He was suffering from smoke inhalation, dehydration, and was dizzier than hell, but he was alive and grateful.
My chopper was another story. The tail rotor was bent, and half of the instruments were dead including the radio due to what appeared to be an electrical short. There was no cell service in the area, so we grabbed all the water that was in the chopper and started walking towards the nearest highway.
Tate
Monday morning, I dragged myself into work, my stomach roiling from something I’d eaten the day before. At least, I think that’s what it was. I’d been feeling a little off for a couple of days, so I chalked it up to all the crap I’d been shoving down my gullet since Flash left.
“Hey, Tate,” Mack greeted as I sat down at my desk.
“Good morning.”
“You okay?”
