Pure Heat by M. L. Buchman

pulling it on, probably the easiest way to keep it safe in the helicopter’s cargo bay where he’d dropped it. But that she kept wearing it? He really didn’t know what to make of that.
    â€œYou get that much resolution?”
    He circled the bird overhead again, this time rolling in the 36x zoom on their location. It was tricky. At that level of zoom, the field of view was so much narrower that it was hard to manually aim at exactly the right spot at ninety miles per hour.
    A quick glance at the readout for the truck, and he keyed in the exact GPS coordinates for the truck. The camera focused tightly on the antenna. He offset the view about fifteen feet to the west and was rewarded with a fine view of Carly’s backside. The sunlight playing shadows down her back and over her hips. Her hair a golden flash down past her shoulders. The deep red “MHA Goonies” lettering easily readable across the back of the shirt.
    â€œDamn,” was Carly’s only low-voiced comment. He set the bird to circle and the camera to auto-track.
    Carly’s sunlit back remained screen center, slowly rotating as the drone circled. Her face showed on the screen as she turned to look up into the sky.
    â€œThat’s creepy.”
    He could almost see enough detail to watch her lips move as she spoke. A little too far aloft for that. But he noted the time mark on the recording so he could come back to the moment when she stared up into the sky, his hat shielding her eyes from the sun that now lit her so brilliantly from the front. That upturned face surrounded by the glow of bright hair, as near a real angel as he’d ever seen.
    Voyeur. Okay, maybe a bit.
    He heard a bark of laughter as a figure on crutches came up in front of Carly on the screen. TJ. On screen, Steve could see that TJ wasn’t looking at Carly, but rather into the truck. At Steve’s console image of Carly’s face searching the sky.
    Steve released the lock on the drone’s camera and zoomed back to view the whole helibase. All of the choppers were on the ground, and the planes too. The base had three small lead-spotter planes and the bigger jump plane for the smokies.
    And he very carefully didn’t look over his shoulder at TJ.
    â€œCan we see the fire from yesterday?” By the tone of her voice, Carly hadn’t seen his screen capture of her, which was a damn good thing.
    It only took about ten minutes to fly there; the first real fire of the season had been unusually close. One of the reasons they’d been able to respond and douse it so quickly.
    The other reason they’d been called was how remote it had been from any reasonable fire road. It had taken the ground assets hours to get in there. Fires had a bad habit of forming at the most awkward and distant of places.
    And half the time all of the country’s limited air assets were tied up somewhere else. The United States had about three hundred smokies and roughly sixty thousand wildfires a year. Most of them were too small or were readily accessible from the ground, making the high cost of smokies and air attack uncalled for. But the remote and the big Type I fires were still a hard squeeze to staff.
    The black came as a shock on the console’s screens. The view had been of the undulating green of the Mount Hood National Forest. The burnout zone looked as if someone had taken scissors and clipped away all of the color from a whole section of mountainside, leaving behind only smoky grays and blacks.
    Steve flipped to infrared. A dozen dots appeared along the edges of the black. He sure could have used this yesterday when they were trying to find TJ. The dots were the heat signatures of a red-card crew working to douse any smolders. All of the Type I crews had been pulled already, the smokies last night and the hotshots this morning. Now it was up to the Type II crews to spend another day or so mopping up and making sure the fire was truly dead.
    He