The Scorching

by William W. Johnstone, J.A. Johnstone

Genres: Thrillers

Synopsis

A nation in flames. Freedom under fire. A call to all heroes to stand up, fight back, or die. From the bestselling authors of Black Friday, Home Invasion, and Knockdown . . .



AMERICA IS BURNING.



It begins in the Pacific Northwest. A deadly wave of massive wildfires are raging out of control, killing hundreds in their path, and showing no sign of stopping. This time, the fires are man-made.



FEAR IS SPREADING.



In Portland, Oregon, a sleeper cell of terrorists have recruited a disgruntled Forest Service smokejumper to train their army. To spread the fear coast to coast. To make America burn.



HEROES ARE RISING.



Those who flee the hot flames are gunned down in cold blood. But one man—Forestry Service smokejumper Cory Cantwell—is fighting back. Leading a team of elite firefighters, he is determined to stop the destruction. Not with water. With Glock 19s. With real firepower. And with no mercy.

Release date: August 24, 2021

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 384

Sample

CHAPTER 1

Indian Wells, Oregon

 

Big Mike Norris’s smoke jumper crew parachuted onto the Indian Wells fire zone without a detailed map of the area. But they’d been told a crack crew was already in place, local hotshot firefighters who knew the terrain and probably had the blaze well in hand.

“It will be a piece of cake, Mike,” Norris’s base manager had told him. “A walk in the piney woods.”

But when they landed on a windswept clearing on top of a high bluff, there was no one in sight. After he dropped his chute harness and most of his hundred pounds of gear, Norris looked around, cursed under his breath and then said, “What the hell? Where is everybody?”

His was a short crew, only fifteen members instead of the usual twenty, but this was supposed to be a mop-up. The heavy smell of woodsmoke in the air put the lie to that claim.

Cory Cantwell, the only squad leader present, stepped beside his crew superintendent boss. “They must have seen us make the drop, Mike,” he said. “You’d think somebody would stop by and say hi.”

“Seems like,” Norris said. He looked hard at Cantwell. “How’s the shoulder?”

“Bad,” the younger man said. “But it will stand up just fine.”

“What did the doc say?”

“He told me it’s arthritis. I said I was only thirty and how the hell could I have arthritis. He said anybody at any age can have arthritis.”

“So what did he give you?”

“Nothing. Told me to quit the weight training. I told him that ain’t gonna happen. Maybe I’d get flabby after a while. Well, he shook his head and said that every firefighter he ever met wants to be Arnold Schwarzenegger, and that includes the women. Finally, since he knew I was making this jump in an hour, he shot cortisone into the shoulder, though he warned me that since medical school he wasn’t very good with a needle.”

“And was he?”

“No. He was a butcher with a horse needle. It hurt like hell.”

Norris smiled and said, “Come over here. What do you make of this?”

He walked to the edge of the plateau and nodded in the direction of a saddle-backed hill that loomed to one side of the rise, the dark evergreens at its base obscured by a gray haze of smoke.

“We got to get down there, Cory,” Norris said. “I have no idea where the hell that other crew is. They ain’t fighting fires, that’s for damn sure.”

Cantwell examined the terrain. A dry, steady wind blew from the heights of the Cascade Mountains to the desert lowlands below. To the east rose the rocky hills of the high desert, covered with bunch grass and cheatgrass with a few ponderosa pines, that descended to sagebrush-covered flatlands. To the west the foothills of the mountains had a dense cover of Douglas fir.

Just before the team had left base, a Red Flag Watch had been issued, which meant high winds, lightning, and no rain. So far, the smoky fire wasn’t crowning, but a sudden gust of wind could whip it into flame.

“Cory, the wind is blowing in the opposite direction from what they told us,” Mike said. “They should have dropped us on the flat.”

“The fire is in the gulch, so how do we get down there?” Cantwell said.

“I’m not happy being on grass above a fire,” Norris said. He removed his scarred white helmet, wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. “We have to get down into the gulch somehow.”

“We could call it off, make another jump onto the flat,” Cantwell said. He knew Norris would nix that idea, but he felt it was his duty to mention it.

“It’s a thought, but it would take too long,” Norris said. “The fire could spread a considerable distance by then.”

“Then we make our way downhill,” Cantwell said.

“Damn, it’s going to be rough heading down the slope,” Norris said. “Broken leg central, huh?”

“Maybe broken neck central,” Cantwell said.

“Yeah, why not look on the bright side?” Norris said.

“Mike!”

A young dark-haired man with wide shoulders and earnest brown eyes stood at the edge of the rise and pointed down into the gulch, where smoke curled like a great, gray serpent. “Lookee there. I think I found a game trail.”

“Going down?” Norris said.

The young man grinned. “It’s going both ways, Mike, up and down.”

“Smartass,” Norris said. “All right, make like Dan’l Boone and go check it out, Wilson. And be careful.”

“Sure thing,” Bob Wilson said. He disappeared over the rim of the plateau.

“Good kid that,” Norris said. “Needs some weight on him though.”

“A few years eating National Wildfire Service grub will bulk him up,” Cantwell said.

“Meat loaf.”

“Beef stew.”

“Plenty of protein.”

“And cake and Cool Whip for dessert. Plenty of carbs.”

“Sounds good,” Norris said. “I’m making myself hungry.”

When young Wilson returned five tense minutes later, he stepped beside Norris and said, “It’s a game trail all right, probably deer, and I think it goes all the way into the gorge.”

“Cory, what do you think?” Norris said. “Should we take a shot at it?”

“Where a deer can go, so we can we,” Cantwell answered. “Nothing else is presenting itself, so it’s sure worth a try.”

Norris nodded. “Right, let’s get it done. We got a fire to fight.” He looked around, and his gaze fell on a man with a goatee beard and overlong hair. “Connors . . . you’re lookout. Stay here until we’re safely down and then follow. Okay?”

The man called Connors nodded. “I got it, boss.”

“Mike, do you see that?”

This from Cheryl Anderson, at twenty-one the youngest member of his crew. A tall, pretty girl on her first drop, like the rest she’d shucked her heavy jumpsuit and stripped down to boots, a yellow shirt, and olive-green pants. She filled out both shirt and pants beautifully. Her hair was chopped short, a bob that looked like a glossy bronze helmet. The woman pointed to the top of the butte, where stood an abandoned lookout tower, rickety and half-hidden behind a growth of vegetation. Once it had hosted a park ranger, now it was the haunt of owls.

“Yeah, now I see it, Cheryl,” Norris said. “That shining example of the National Wildfire Service’s folly could be useful as a landmark.” He pulled out his cell phone. “Google maps to the rescue.”

There was no reception.

Norris cursed under his breath. One more goddamned techno failure. At thirty-five he was old enough to remember when the firefighters relied on human observations, and old enough to be nostalgic about it. If he’d had some good old-fashioned maps, he’d know exactly where he was, the names, the topography, the contours and elevations. Even better, if the lookout tower had been manned, the ranger probably could have put out the aborning fire—which wasn’t that big even now.

Instead, a satellite picked up the blaze. A computer produced the weather forecasts given to him. Norris had been handed the printouts before they left the airbase, and it was all supposedly very up-to-date.

And already he could see they were wrong.

For one thing, the satellite had apparently spotted a larger fire than actually existed. Because of that, fifteen volunteers had been drawn from the several crews that were lounging around the Redmond Airport near the end of the season, hoping for some action. It was a far larger team than necessary. Norris thought about sending some of them back but decided whomever he chose would be pissed. By this late in the season, the overtime wages were welcomed.

It was all pretty messed up. At the very least, they should have been dropped farther down, closer to the fire. Well, now Norris had the game trail. While such trails are predominately used by grazing animals, humans have always found them handy. Lost hikers will follow a well-marked game trail to a waterway that could eventually lead to civilization . . . and they provide a stable path through otherwise impassible terrain.

Norris called his people together and ordered them to pick up their gear and head for the trail, except for Joe Connors, who would remain on the butte as lookout and stay in radio contact.

“Cory Cantwell will take the point, and I’ll bring up the rear,” he said. Norris waited for comments, and when none came, he said. “All right, we got it to do.”

“Break a leg, folks,” Cantwell said, grinning.

“That,” Mike Norris said, “is not funny.”