Cal spotted the brief pinch across her features. He doubted anyone else would see it, but he already knew her expressions so well that they were like a storybook for him. She’d lost her home? Seemed likely. More than four thousand buildings had gone up, along with a million acres of grasslands, as four hundred separate fires burned on that dark February day.
“It will behave like a denser American forest. We can’t slow it down so that it loses momentum and peters out like most bushfires this deep in the Outback. Instead we’ll have to kill it absolutely dead. And anything that gets ahead of us will start fanning back out. The material is dense enough to reach sideways to start new fires as well as expanding downwind.”
“Any suggestions on how we do that?” one of the other pilots asked.
Cal
