The Big Burn

“Actually, it’s a CIA mission. And I’m pretty sure you’ll want to go sign on. In fact, I’m positive.”

Anna stared at Brock. Eight years ago, her father had disappeared in Southeast Asia on a secret mission with the CIA. He was one of a long line of smoke jumpers who’d been recruited over the years. They were once called “cargo kickers” and worked for the CIA’s Air America, dropping supplies to pro-American guerrilla forces. Smoke jumpers were used extensively in the secret war in Tibet in the early 60’s and the practice never really stopped. Since her father’s disappearance, Anna had become an outspoken opponent of the relationship between the CIA and civilian smoke jumpers recruited into its ranks for special missions.

For a long time Anna had hated the secrecy that kept the truth from her and her mother. Though her mother and father had been divorced for several years before he vanished, they’d remained friends. Her mother was as upset over the lack of information as Anna. Divorce was hard enough, but his disappearance almost more than Anna could take.

The CIA had continually refused to tell her what exactly had happened to her father. The only official information she’d ever been able to get was that he’d disappeared on a mission.

“I want to know what happened to my father,” she said to Brock.

“I’m going to tell you…on the way.”

“To Miramar?”

“No. Guam.”

Her throat tightened. She drank more water, staring over the bottom of the upturned bottle at Brock. The man never flinched. A real poker face if ever there was one.

She was unbelievably calm. Must be the exhaustion, she thought. Anna finished the bottle. “Why Guam? You said he was in Malaysia?”

“Guam’s the jumping-off point. We’ve got a camp there. What we call an isolation camp, or IC. You’ll be trained there.”

A sardonic smile broke across her face. This whole thing was beginning to reek, and she wasn’t in the mood for it.

“Trained for what?”

“Again, I’ll tell you about it on the way. We don’t have much time.”

Until she knew more, Anna refused to succumb to his time schedule.

“All this robotic dialogue isn’t going to work on me. Just tell me now, or you can get into your unmarked chopper and fly back to wherever you came from.”

“Your father’s situation is grave. We need to get to him. He’s requesting you to help us.”

“Why would he do that when he has the military at his beck and call?”

“We don’t know why, exactly.”

“You mean you won’t tell me why.”

“If I knew the answer, I’d tell you. We don’t know why he’s asking for you. We can only assume it’s because he’s trapped on a burning island and probably thinks you’re the world’s greatest smoke jumper. Personally, I don’t buy it. We have the best jumpers on earth working for us and he knows that.”

Anna hadn’t had decent sleep in weeks. She was tired and dirty. That she was standing in a foot of ash in a burned-out ravine listening to this guy tell her not only that her father was alive, but he was trapped on some burning island and requesting her to jump in and get him out sounded, quite frankly, preposterous.

But if this guy was lying, why make up a lie so outrageous?

Unfortunately, he had the hook in her now and she desperately wanted to know the truth.

“I’ll go to Miramar with you, but that’s as far as I go without a better explanation.”

“All right.”

They both turned to wave at the rescue chopper as it began its assent. Anna watched it slant off into the sky carrying four very grateful people back home and wished she was inside that chopper with them.

Anna followed Brock and the marine lieutenant to the unmarked chopper, its rotors swirling languidly. The pilot turned toward them, the dark sun shield of his face helmet giving him a Star Wars look.

The flight to Miramar was a quick twenty-minute hop and Anna dozed for most of it. They landed and got out next to a C-17 transport plane parked just across from a squadron of jet fighters.

“This way.” Brock motioned toward the C-17 as he walked. She followed close behind.

“Isn’t there an office we can go to?”

“Not enough time. You’ll be briefed on the plane.”

“What if I don’t like the story?”

“You can leave anytime you want.”

She stopped on the tarmac. “Why do I have the feeling if I get on board that plane, I won’t be able to get back off?”

He turned to her and pushed his sunglasses up on his head. “You saved four lives today at the risk of your own. That was no accident. I’ve read your file. When I tell you what’s going on, you won’t even think about getting off that plane.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Because there aren’t just four lives at stake here, more like forty thousand lives. Including your father.”

What? She couldn’t think straight. Between the intense fatigue setting in and all the water she’d drunk, her bladder felt as if it was going to explode.

“I just really need a bathroom right now.”

“There’s a state-of-the-art bathroom on the plane.”

She hesitated, looking around for an alternative, but the nearest building must have been a quarter mile away. She made the decision to go for the plane.

There were several men on board the almost barren C-17, hovering around a few laptops. She realized that the seats were all backward. Brock told her that in the event of a crash passenger survivability would be greater.

“Has that been proven or is that some military theory?”

“That’s just what they tell me.”

She ignored him and the men and went straight to where Brock told her the bathroom was located. She found the privacy she was looking for, shut the door and struggled to get her fire suit down.

The state-of-the-art bathroom was a hard, cold stainless-steel ordinary toilet, much worse than she’d find on a commercial airliner. But she didn’t care. When she was finished she leaned against the metal wall, just to rest for a second—and fell instantly asleep.

She was jolted awake by movement.

Anna jumped up, struggled to get her fire suit on, fell back, but caught herself by grabbing hold of the sink.

Then, with her suit still around her ankles, there was a knock on the door. “We’re going to be airborne in a couple minutes. You okay in there?” Brock said.

“Yes, I’m fine. But this wasn’t part of our deal. I don’t want to go—”

“You need to get out here and get a seat belt on.”

Shit!

She pulled her suit up, then caught a look at her face in the tiny aluminum mirror. Somebody’s face anyway. It was more like a clown’s face with all the dirt and ash on it. She quickly washed as the plane rocked her back and forth. She wished she could strip off her grimy clothes and jump into a shower. Then when she was all clean again, she’d towel off and climb between silky cool sheets and sleep for a week. But she knew that vision wouldn’t be happening for a very long time thanks to John Brock.

Her father’s face flashed in her mind. She couldn’t quite believe that he was alive. It made her delirious, angry, excited and confused—all at once.

When she finally emerged, Brock told her to take one of the empty seats.

“I’m not going until you explain everything.”

“You have no choice. Make yourself comfortable.”

“No beds?” she said sarcastically.

“Sorry, no beds.”

He went and sat with the other men in the back of the plane.

Anna was furious. How dare they kidnap her like this? As the plane taxied up the runway, she realized there were no windows. It was a weird sensation sitting facing the tail of the plane as it taxied, and she didn’t like having no way to see out. It gave her a claustrophobic feeling. This was all too much.

But she was just too tired for panic. After two weeks of riding in planes to jump fires, she told herself this was just another ride. And just another opportunity to catch a few minutes of sleep. As soon as they’d landed, she’d make them take her home.

Yawning, she grabbed a small pillow from the seat next to her, stretched out and fell dead asleep even before the plane was airborne.

Chapter 3

Anna woke to the steady hum of the plane’s engines, the occasional murmuring of voices, but didn’t bother to open her eyes. They felt as if they were glued shut and she didn’t have the will or strength to force them open before they were ready.

Instead, she replayed the fire jump: cutting herself free, finding the students, calming their fears, getting them to trust her, the desperate digging, the waiting to see if they would survive as the fire blew over them, sucking out their oxygen and laying down intense heat.

They had been lucky.

“Hey, sleepyhead.”

Now she opened her eyes as Brock dropped into a seat across the aisle from her. He handed her an open box containing a sandwich, a package of Oreos, coffee, creamer and sugar packets.

“It’s not much, but it’s all we have.”

She accepted the offering, and dug right in. The hot black coffee tasted especially good. “Thanks,” she said in between bites of cookie. “But this in no way changes the fact that I’m being hijacked.”

“You boarded voluntarily.”

“I had to go to the bathroom.”

“Blame it all on your father.”

She bit into a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It was the first time in forever she’d eaten white bread and it tasted great. The whole meal was just what she needed to get her blood sugar going again. Straight to the sugar high, no stops for nutrition, then slow it down with the peanut butter. Get herself back on cruise control.

She was glad he’d left the aisle between them. Maybe he couldn’t smell her sweat-laden body odor the way she could.

“I’m going to tell you far more than I normally would, or should,” he said. “That’s because of the abnormal circumstances involved. Your need to know, because of what you have to do, is high.”

“Are you trying to recruit me, or scare me off?”

“Maybe both. Your father has been working clandestinely with the CIA for the past eight years. He converted to Islam over a decade ago and married a Malaysian woman not long after he divorced your mother.”

She stopped in midbite, eyes wide, giving Brock her full attention.

“His wife worked with an import-export company out of Kuala Lumpur, while he wrote inflammatory articles for local papers under an assumed name. He condemned American policies in the Islamic world. His wife had relatives very deep in the radical al-Qaeda sister organization Jemaah Islamiyah.”

“Terrorists?”

“To the core. Your father, through one of his wife’s cousins, was able to penetrate deeper into this organization than any other agent has in the past. I won’t go into details beyond that. All you need to know is that he has in his possession something we desperately need.”

It was like being broadsided by hard wind. She had to recover. When she found speech, she asked, for want of a better question while she tried to process the rest of it, “What does he have that’s so important?”

“A laptop. It belonged to one of the leaders of Jamaal Islamiyah. We have reason to believe there is information on that laptop of an imminent terrorist mission.”

“And he can’t get it out?”

“No, he’s hurt—”

“How badly?” she asked, interrupting. Panic filled her.

“He was shot in the leg. We don’t know more than that.”

Her father was hurt. He needed her. Decision made. She’d do whatever she had to, to help her dad.

“Tell me the rest, Brock,” she said, leaning back in her seat.

“Most of his network has been killed. He’s in hiding on a small island off the coast of Malaysia. He made an attempt to escape, but couldn’t make it. There are thousands of tiny islands, some so insignificant they don’t even have names. He’s on one of them. There are fires on the island and it’s under a huge plume of smoke. It’s also in the middle of a dangerous area. You’ll get a full briefing from CIA when we get to the IC.”

“You said that would happen at Miramar. Why should I believe you now that we’re on our way to Guam?”

“Sorry about that, but those were my orders. I can tell you this much. An extraction requires a HALO jump into extremely bad conditions on an island controlled at the moment by pirates patrolling the waters and terrorists searching for your father.”

A high-altitude, low-opening jump. “And this is something my father thinks only I can do?”

“Apparently that’s the case. Yes.”

She knew about the incredible fires that were almost yearly events in that part of the world. Thousands of hectares of jungle in the heart of the Malay peninsula, peat-soil fires similar to the fires in Indonesia. The pollutant haze and smoke spread across the entire region all the way to Hong Kong. Most of them were started in land-clearing operations by farmers. They got out of control in the heat of a dry season and just kept burning. Jungle fires have been known to burn for months and months.

She knew that right now over a thousand fires were burning in East Kalimantan province of Indonesia alone. It seemed they would never get a handle on the fires if they couldn’t stop farmers from clearing bush for crops and companies from burning forests and jungles after logging to make way for new palm oil plantations. Between the two, the fires came every year. And now, more than a year after the horrible tsunami, and the endless battles with radical guerrilla groups, the fires were burning again.

“You’re going to be jumping at night. The fire there is really bad because of all the debris left from last year’s tsunami.”

“You said I was going to be trained. Trained for what? Jumping I already know.”

“Small-arms combat.”

He said it as if he was certain she would accept the pronouncement without hesitation. As if packing a gun and having to shoot somebody was just the course of nature…his nature, perhaps, but certainly not hers.

“I’d rather not.”

“You can’t go into a bad place without some preparation.”

“You think you’re going to make a soldier out of me overnight?”

“You’d be surprised what I can do with you in a short period of time.”

He said it with a blank face, but she peered into those pale green eyes of his and wondered if he was fooling around with a double entendre. She decided he wasn’t the type. But then, given her condition, she doubted he was seeing anything to invite double entendres.

“If you can stay awake, I’d like you to practice with a video game.” He pulled a laptop from a black case on the floor, opened it and started some sort of combat game. “It’s designed to teach the use of small arms in combat situations. You need this training and we don’t have a lot of time. You’ll need to play various levels of this video game until we get to Guam. Then I’ll put you through an intense course until we embark on the mission. It’s just a precaution. If things go right, we’ll never run into an unfriendly.”

“You’re jumping in with me?”

“Yes. You can’t go in alone. It’s too dangerous.”

“You’re one of those guys.”

“What guys?”

“What are they called? Commandos? Special Ops? What are they…oh, right, Delta Force.”

Brock concentrated on the video game, not looking at her. Immediately, she knew she’d struck a nerve. Delta Force flew under the radar screen and liked to keep it that way.

“I’m just a soldier on a mission.”

Bullshit, she thought. This guy runs around with no uniform, no name tag. Marines are flying him in choppers, then he commands a huge cargo plane with all those other commando-looking guys. Yeah, right, he’s just your average soldier. “And I’m a ground-pounding firefighter.”

Brock ignored her comment and concentrated on setting up the game.

She asked, “Is this a commercial game?”

“Not quite. This is mine.”

“You wrote it?”

“Yes. Military is doing a lot of their own now. It started with the release of America’s Army in 2002. That was mostly an interactive army-recruitment ad downloaded by millions of gamers. Since then, they’ve gotten even more sophisticated.”

For once he showed some emotion, some enthusiasm. The guy was human after all.

“This makes better soldiers?”

“Absolutely. Proficiency with the games increases reflex speed to situations, and eliminates thought pauses. Reaction time is everything. The percentage of targets hit has been increasing dramatically per round fired.”

“How did you get involved in this? Were you a big game player growing up?”

“Isn’t every kid? I was involved for a while in the Army Government Applications office in Cary, North Carolina, with a team of video-game creators and simulation specialists. I worked with guys from Red Storm Entertainment, Interactive Magic, and Timeline. Then I joined another group. This video game isn’t for public preview.”

“And that’s what this is?”

Brock looked as if he was going to smile, like this whole thing turned him on, and he couldn’t talk about it enough. She liked him much better like this, but it still didn’t mean she trusted the guy.

“Yes. What you’ll be dealing with you won’t find in your local toy store or video store. This is a big inside industry now. We have a lot of support in the field from several D.C. agencies, West Point and the Special Ops center in Florida where most of the simulation and training technologies are located. They’re all heavily involved in the military-video business.”

“They produced this game?”

“It was created by six people. I led the project. You’re going to learn everything you need to know about operating and firing certain weapons under stress. Plus escape and evasion tactics in jungle conditions. We have games to fit just about every condition, but you’ll only need this one. What’s good about this system is I’ll coach and instruct and rerun scenarios until you get them right. It can condition your reflexes in a few hours of this kind of prep. Then some fieldwork and in about the tenth of the time that it used to take, we can have you online and operational.”

He was so convincing that Anna decided to give the training tool a try, not that she was ready to jump into a Malaysian warzone, but the game looked interesting enough.

Anna played war with Brock for six straight hours. She killed hundreds of people. Some of them over and over and over until she got it right. He was a very soft-spoken instructor, nothing like she expected from his demeanor.

The only weapons Anna had ever fired before were a shotgun and a hunting rifle. Her mother, an outfitter in Colorado, was a skeet shooter and a meat hunter. Neither of those weapons was involved.

At one point when Anna was growing tired of all the action, she asked, “Do rookie soldiers really learn how to kill another person by playing these video games?”

“This just helps train reflexes. Gets the brain pathways set. The training’s progressive. You’ll go out and fire live ammo at shifting targets next. Each step will be faster and closer to the real thing.”

She looked at him, trying to get a sense of reality out of him. “You really think you can teach me how to kill someone in a day? Seriously?”

“I can get you close enough that, in a bad situation, you might just react to survive. But it’s not a given. Movies and TV shows aside, it’s very difficult to turn a civilian into someone who can kill at close range.”

“That’s comforting.”

“Actually, it’s true. In fact, studies have shown that soldiers have done all kinds of things to avoid just that. Most ground-combat units in World War I rarely fired their weapons. When they did, they rarely fired to kill. They fired high. Some of them died because they couldn’t make themselves kill. Most killing was done from long range. Mortars, bombs, cannon and machine guns. But we’ve discovered advancements that overcome most of the natural resistance.”

“You consider this an advancement?”

“In combat, yes. Not in civilization. I’m not in the business of advancing civilization. I’m in the business of trying to protect it.”

“By uncivilized means.”

“By any means necessary.”

His apparent honesty was about the only thing she liked about him at the moment. “I’m exhausted,” she told him after a long yawn. “I’ve suddenly developed a loathing for this video game and I really don’t think you’re going to make much of a killer out of me in a hundred days, let alone one. I’d just like to take a nap. There’s no shower on this plane, is there?”

“No. You can shower when we get to Guam.”

“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.”