Page 105 of Into the Fire

“I know,” I said. “I read it.”

Dante moved to where he could see our route and stayed there, watching the fire and listening.

“The tower,” I said.

“The call was mine. Prentiss’s office at twelve-forty, the callback at one-fifty—I organized it. I’d already—” He stopped and then started again. “I couldn’t watch Dante get on it. I was taking him off, but then Nash said he’d do it. I had no way to stop him that didn’t—” His voice softened to a whisper. “I didn’t mean for Nash. You have to know that. Nash, of all the—”

“The chute failure.”

“Dante had a reserve. I told myself that. He’d get hurt, or he’d get scared, or the base would finally believe he was—” He didn’t finish the thought.

Dante left the edge and crouched in front of him, level with his eyes.

“Who did I see on Carson Ridge five years ago?”

“I don’t know.”

“Marty.”

“I don’t know,” he repeated. “I was at the base. I don’t know who you saw, and I don’t know what the ribbons marked. Curt knew they mattered, and that’s all I knew about them. I typed what I was asked to type.” He looked from Dante to me and back. “That’s all there is.”

Down the slope, a burned-through limb the size of a fence rail tore out of a spruce and dropped into the duff fire.

“We’re done here,” Dante said. He was up, reading the rock above us. “We’ll go over the top. Same spine we came down, then east.”

Marty looked at the easy break falling away below, the one he’d tried for twice.

“Down there’s—”

“Burning,” Dante said. “Or it will be before you’re halfway.”

I shortened the rope between us, took three wraps around my fist, and left the loop on Marty. It wasn’t to restrain him. We were going over bad ground, and I didn’t trust him to walk it without support.

“You go where Dante goes,” I said. “You step where he steps.”

We climbed. Dante set a line over rock that Marty hated. He breathed hard and cursed. We came out on the spine above the smoke with the crest ahead of us against a brown sky.

Hollis had the crew moving along the top toward the saddle, right where I’d told him to take them if anything went sideways. He saw the three of us come up out of the fork.

I keyed the radio. “Air attack, Silvertip. Six plus one, on the crest, moving east to the saddle. The individual is in custody.”

We came together on the burned ground below the notch. My crew stood there, filthy and breathing and whole, looking at Marty Keene tethered to me with rope.

It took us four hours to get off the mountain. The fire belonged to a ground crew by then, a hotshot crew that hiked in off Carson Creek while we came down. A helicopter lifted Kincaid and the jump gear off the Park before dark.

The rest of us walked out the way the escape route had always been planned, down the fork to the creek, wide of the burned benches, with Marty in the middle of the line. He didn’t talk on the descent.

Hanson’s truck sat at the road end with its lights on. He took custody with about as much ceremony as a fuel delivery—a hand on Marty’s elbow. By morning, Vasquez had him in Missoula.

***

Days of paperwork followed. Vasquez walked Carson Ridge himself as soon as the ground crew would let him. He carried prints of my photographs in a binder. His crew mapped the tags, stakes, and the strip of ribbon that outlived two fires.

They officially reopened the Carson Ridge investigation. They had Curt Wray’s name, but nobody could tell us where that led.

The woman from the Missoulian called the day the arrest went public. I took the call myself. She asked the question she’d asked Marty back in August, whether anybody from the base had ever disagreed with the original findings.

“Yes,” I said. “One man. From the start.”