Wildfire on the Skagit (Firehawks Book 9) Read Free

bother.
    “Besides,” Ox sneered at him, “You’re a rookie. We’ve got a rule against taking rookie money…except at poker.”
    “Don’t play,” Evan did, but not well enough to take on a table of smokejumpers. “You play pool and you’re on.”
    “Done!” Ox agreed as the line shuffled forward.
    Evan had bought his first car by pool sharking in Boise. He’d show Ox a thing or two for calling him rookie. Even if it was pretty standard hazing for the “new guy,” after five years jumping fire, it got under his skin a bit.
    They were sixth and last stick, placing Evan at the very tail of the line. He tried not to take it personally, but he did. He’d always been in the first few sticks with the Zulies, often jumping lead on secondary fires. Was it because he was once again a rookie after five years of jumping that he was at the back or was it really just the chance of the rotation after the first stick, as the MHA jumpers insisted?
    As the plane circled around to drop the next stick, Evan delayed long enough to get a good look out the window at Akbar and Krista circling down into the hole in the trees. Akbar made it down, stalling his chute hard and doing a roll between two trees at the edge of the small clearing. Clean jump.
    Krista had done his initial interview and been his test-jump partner when he’d come down to Mount Hood Aviation’s base camp just south of Hood River, Oregon.
    He’d remembered the feeling as she yanked on his gear during the buddy check, making sure everything was in place and properly attached. She’d given tips that he hadn’t learned in five years of jumping with the Zulies—little things, so small they barely mattered—which told him more about MHA than anything else had. Even the tiniest bit safer mattered deeply to these people.
    Evan had been terribly self-conscious as he’d checked Krista’s gear. Female smokejumpers were rare, it was just too hard physically. IHCs, sure. More and more women were fighting fire from the ground crews. Tough hikes, long days, and hard work, it’s what the Interagency Hotshot Crews were good at and some of the women did great.
    Smokies didn’t fight fire, they battled it. It was the Special Forces posting of the civilian world. That’s why he gravitated to jumping fire after six years in the Green Berets—a past he did not advertise. And before that there was the past he did his best to forget. Better everyone though he’d been hatched out as a smokejumper from the first day.
    When women did make the jump lineup—and the Zulies had a couple—they were about as sexy as battering rams. All grit and determination and in your face about it. Like they were trying to be more macho than the guys and always being aware that they were the outsider long after the guys had forgotten about it.
    The next two sticks jumped and the ride down was a wild one, but he watched them to the ground trying to map the shifting of the unseen winds in his head to plan his own route down.
    Krista Thorson was something else, first stick of jumpers at an outfit like MHA said that it wasn’t honorary either. There were women trying to make Special Forces, but they just didn’t have the upper body strength to qualify no matter how driven they were.
    Krista would have had no problems there. She was built on a grand scale. Tall enough to look him square in the eye, broad of frame, big chested, and sassy as hell. Her powerful shoulders emphasized by the brush of light-blond hair—a smooth fall that set off a great face and the bluest eyes he’d ever seen.
    She had a fast wit, a mouth that was always on the verge of a laugh, and she moved like a Master Sergeant—with the casual power of someone who knew that the battle wouldn’t even begin without her there. Master Sergeants were called the backbone of the military for a reason and Krista was clearly the Number Two smokie for the same one.
    He checked his gear for about the tenth time. He was always a little