Around me, one by one, other parachutes opened, and with expert aim, they all floated down toward the target. A second plane moved overhead and another team jumped out.
I came down within feet of my target, the chute pulling as I ran to a stop. As others dropped around me, I gathered my chute and put it back into its case. I’d repack it later when I had room to do it right. The box with our supplies, chainsaws and all, floated down on a separate chute, and the designated guys caught it and got it to the right spot.
Spreading out in a line across the mountain with our chainsaws and Pulaskis, we began clearing brush and cutting down trees so the fire would die a natural death before it ever threatened the town below. The noise was deafening, with the buzz of saws all around me and the waffling sound of the flames moving across the landscape. I glanced up the mountain and saw the yellow-orange glow of flames creeping toward us. At its current rate, and if nothing went wrong, the fire would take hours to reach where my team and I worked.
But in a matter of minutes, the wind changed direction, billowing through the trees we were targeting for our fire line. Fed by the new blast of wind, the fire exploded as if a bomb had been dropped into the center of it. Flames shot out over us and behind us, spreading wildly with unbridled fury.
“I need help!” Bull yelled a few yards above me.
Saws dropped and tools were abandoned as my teammates closest to Bull tried to get him out of the flames caging him in.
“Take cover, Cap!” Hill shouted to me. Adrenaline pumped through me as I pulled out my survival shelter, a thin cover I could throw over myself if I couldn’t get out. I saw a dozen or more men trying to outrun the blaze below me, and I shouted for those above me to follow. Wrapping the shelter around myself like a blanket, I tried to make it down the hill, out of the reach of the fire.
The team that had come in before us was already down there and had started digging a trench to be used to set the controlled backfires that would consume everything between the firebreak and the rushing conflagration. But these backfires would threaten the men now left behind.
“There’s no more time!” T-Bird, the captain for the backfire team, shouted. “We have to set it. It’s our only hope.”
“Not until all my men are out!” I shouted back.
“There’s a town down there, and I’m not gonna be responsible for letting it go up in flames!” He turned back and gave the order, and my stomach sank as they started the controlled fire that had trouble catching because of the direction of the wind.
I stood still, straining to see the rest of my men on the other side, then frantically I turned around and tried to count the ones who’d made it. Half of them were still in there. Wiping my perspiring brow with the back of my sleeve, I bolted toward them.
I was almost to the fire line, but T-bird grabbed me and wrestled me back. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“To get my team!” I shouted and jerked free. Darting through a narrow space between the flames, I headed toward the eastern side of the fire, dodging the small circles of flames spreading around me.
I waved off the flames with my metallic cover and saw that my men had found a clearing and were frantically digging another fire line perpendicular to the one already set. “Are you guys crazy?” I yelled over the sounds of burning brush. “Get out of here!”
“There’s a house, Cap!” Gator yelled back to me, his face glowing in the firelight. He kept digging urgently. “I saw a light! There are people inside!”
I strained to see past the men and made out the house about a thousand yards up through the trees, visible only because of a dim light in one of the upstairs windows. I turned back to evaluate the fire, which was moving swiftly closer, and finally shouted, “I’m going in! You men get out of here! Now! That’s an order!” The flames grew closer, drenching me in sweat as I ran uphill, my hundred pounds of gear feeling like five hundred. By the time I reached the house, I was gasping for breath and my spine shot with pain, but I pushed on, through the pines surrounding the house, pines that would explode with flames when the fire reached them. I banged on the door, then used the ax tucked into my belt to beat it in.
I broke through the door and stumbled in. “Fire!” I hollered, bolting toward the stairs. “Everybody out!”
I took the stairs in a few steps and yelled for everyone to wake up. I turned into the bedroom with the light on and saw two children crying. I had scared them to death. “Come on, guys,” I shouted. “There’s a fire outside, and we have to get out of here. Let’s go!”
One of them screamed, but I grabbed up both of them, took the corner of a blanket and dragged it off the bed to throw over them, then headed back out.
“Daddeeeee!” one of the kids screamed as we got to the door.
The two adults in the house ran out of their room on the downstairs level.
“Fire! Evacuate now!” I yelled. “Come on! Follow me.”
A dog started barking. The woman saw the flames through the door and screamed, “Why didn’t they tell us before?”
“Stay together!” I yelled, tossing them my survival shelter. “Put this over you and follow me.”
The dad grabbed the dog, and I led them outside. The fire had reached the first pine, and flames shot up like rockets. “This way!” I led them toward the least dangerous part of the fire.
“There’s no way out!” the man cried.
I found a breach and kept moving toward it. “Just follow me.” I led them through the break in the fire, down the slope toward the haphazard ditch my men were digging.
“Run that way!” I shouted. I handed one of the children to his dad, and he let the dog down and grabbed his child, while the mother grabbed the other child.
They started down the slope, but the flames were already speeding across the mountain as fast as they sped down. They halted, confused. I looked around, seeking an escape, but it seemed they were boxed in. I thought of throwing them all facedown on the small charred places on the ground, hoping the fire would pass right around them as it sped by, but there was no telling how long they’d have to lie there, surrounded by flames, with nothing but smoke to breathe . . . and there was no guarantee the foil blankets would keep their clothes and flesh from igniting as the flames flapped past.
I heard voices to my left and guessed I was close to the fire line where the backfires had been started. Heat baked through my gear and made my skin slick with sweat.
“We have to get through there,” I yelled to the father. “The fire line is thin here. If we run through it, we might suffer a few burns, but at least we’ll have a chance.”
The mother screamed again as flames danced closer. I grabbed the aluminized cover out of her hands and threw it over her head, wrapping it around the child. She screamed because she couldn’t see, but I ran her through the flames.
One leg of my pants caught fire, but I got the mother and child to the other side and let them go, then turned back to her husband. He was mimicking what we had done with the blanket from the kids’ bed and was pushing through the flames like we had. I hit the ground and rolled to put out the flames on my leg. By the time I got back to my feet, my men were rushing up to us. “Take care of them!” I shouted.
One of the men handed me another survival blanket, and wrapping it around myself, I went back into the inferno and picked up the barking dog. “Come on, dude, it’s you and me now.”