Wildfire (16 page)

"All right, before you all go, would you please give Renie whatever data you have on the locations of these signs," Wildman said, gesturing with her head over to one of the computer programmers. "I want to look into this a little further."

"Want one of them signs for proof?" the maintenance man asked.

"Did you save it?" Wildman's head came back around quickly.

"Not exactly. We just cut under it, split away the wood, and then tossed the whole mess in one of the dumpsters when we came back in. I woulda just taken the sign, but I couldn't figure out how to back them damn bolts out. Oughta still be there. Be glad to go get it for you if you want."

"Yes, please." Wildman nodded. "And you're right, it
is
foolish to place these signs where they can't be seen. I'm going to call the Forest service right now, to see if I can find out what's going on, before somebody
does
get hurt."

At quarter after seven that Wednesday morning, just as the still irritated park maintenance man was climbing into one of the big trash dumpsters to retrieve the discarded sign, a pair of overnight campers finished cleaning up their breakfast cooking gear at a stream about twenty yards from their campsite.

"You know," one of the campers said, "I really feel kind of guilty about using an open fire like that, but there just isn't anything that tastes better on a camping trip than biscuits and coffee slow-cooked over coals."

"Hey, we made a fire ring." The second hiker shrugged. "What the hell do they expect us to do, eat cold cereal every morning?"

"Well, sort of a fire ring, anyway."

"Kind of hard to make anything other than a square out of four rocks," the second hiker chuckled. "But hey, we kept the fire small. We cleaned up the site, buried the coals, and put the rocks back where we found them. No harm, no foul, right?"

"Sounds good to me."

"Okay then, let's get going. Got some miles to go today," the second hiker said enthusiastically, leaving it unclear as to who had actually buried the coals.

As it turned out, each of them had assumed that the other had done the job.

At seven-fifty-five that morning, Dr. Kimberly Wildman hung up the phone feeling even more annoyed and puzzled than before.

She had just finished making the last of seven phone calls—to every federal agency she could think of that might have some reason to attach blank green aluminum markers to trees in the northwest Wyoming quadrant—and had come up with a complete blank.

If she saw any humor in that situation, it certainly wasn't obvious from her facial expression.

She stared for a moment at the green etched sign and the pair of steel lag bolts that the park maintenance man had just leaned against her desk, amazed at the size of the eighteen-by-three-quarter-inch lag bolts, and wondering what kind of tool could have possibly been used to drive such a huge bolt. Then she stood up and walked into the adjoining room.

"Well, Renie, how many signs did we end up with?"

The youthful computer programmer looked up from her computer.

"Seventeen, so far."

"What!" Dr. Kimberly Wildman blinked in astonishment. "Are you serious?"

"I'm afraid so."

"But why didn't they say something at the meeting?"

"Probably because most of them were too embarrassed to admit that they didn't document the locations." The shy programmer shrugged. "They told me they were going to go back and get GPS readings."

"You mean to say there are
more
than seventeen out there?"

"Apparently a lot more." The young woman nodded. "We've got global position data on nine, rough estimates on eight more, and wild guesses on the rest. They're going to go back out and try to find them again, and then call in the data."

"Have you plotted it out?"

"Just the seventeen so far."

"What's it look like?"

"All over the quadrant, for the most part, but I want to show you something."

Wildman stood behind her chair as the young programmer called a graphics program up on the screen.

"I was looking for correlations," Renie explained as a map of northwest Wyoming area appeared on the screen. "I started with all seventeen points and basically got a random pattern."

Seventeen small purple circles suddenly appeared on the screen, spaced in a seemingly random order throughout the electronically drawn quadrant map.

"Then I separated it out into the GPS points and the rough guesses . . ."

The seventeen purple circles were suddenly replaced by eight bright red triangles and nine open green boxes.

". . . and again, basically got garbage."

Dr. Kimberly Wildman stared at the screen and agreed that she couldn't see any obvious pattern either.

"But then," Renie said, making no attempt to hide her excitement, "I decided to limit the analysis to all points within fifty miles of the Yellowstone headquarters building, and look what I got."

Dr. Wildman's eyebrows furrowed in surprise. "An arc?"

"I think so." The young programmer nodded excitedly. "But there are only three GPS points and two estimates within the fifty-mile radius, so it isn't all that much to go on. Especially since Mike said that one of his rough estimates is really a rough guess."

"That one here?" Wildman asked, pointing to one of the squares that was the farthest out from the thin yellow arc that the computer had drawn through the five designated points in a "closest fit" pattern. "Right."

"How strange," the group leader whispered to herself.

"That's what I thought too," Renie said. And then after a moment: "You know, it's getting pretty windy out there already. Maybe you should stay here today, you know, wait to see what else we get for data."

"That's a good idea." Dr. Kimberly Wildman nodded, seemingly preoccupied. "We need to get that sign wrapped up anyway."

"What are you going to do, send it in to headquarters?"

"No." The group leader shook her head. "I'm sending it to the Fish and Wildlife Service's forensic lab in Ashland, Oregon. Maybe they can make some sense out of all this."

At nine-fifteen that morning Dr. Kimberly Wildman, her field technician, and one of her clerks had just finished filling out all the submission paperwork and wrapping up the sign in protective layers of cardboard and nylon tape when the phone rang.

"Dr. Wildman?"

"Yes."

"This is the dispatcher. One of the forest ranger stations has reported a fire in the northeast comer of the park. Because of the wind situation, the superintendent is afraid that it's going to get out of control, so he's asking all fire-trained personnel to respond to the area immediately with their line gear."

"We're on our way," Wildman acknowledged. "I've got a couple of teams near that area right now. Can you notify them too?"

"Right away," the dispatcher acknowledged.

"Thanks."

"What's up?" the field technician asked.

"Grab your fire gear, buddy," Wildman said. "We've got a hot spot up in the northeast corner." She repeated the dispatcher's description of the situation.

"Oh, God!" The field technician rolled his eyes and then ran for the door.

Dr. Kimberly Wildman was heading toward the door herself when her clerk called out:

"Dr. Wildman, do you want me to send this out Federal Express?"

Thoroughly distracted by at least a dozen things that were running through her mind, Dr. Kimberly Wildman made a snap decision that would have far-reaching consequences.

"Yes," she said, "you might as well."

Chapter Ten

By three-thirty that Wednesday afternoon, thanks to the sharp eyes of a resident forest ranger and the speedy response of the Yellowstone fire crews, the rapidly spreading blaze was brought under control.

But, as always, there had been a price.

Seven members of the fire crews were taken to the hospital with injuries ranging from minor burns and smoke inhalation to a broken leg suffered when a tree being cut for a fire break dropped the wrong way and rolled. More than a hundred acres of prime park land had been turned into charred trees, blackened ground, and white ash. And thousands of the park's natural residents had either been killed outright or driven from their homes in a panic to places where their chances of survival were significantly reduced.

The fire crews had managed to stop the fire in time, before it was able to take hold and cause far more extensive damage, but even so, very few of the men and women who had worked the fire lines felt that they had much to cheer about.

Dr. Kimberly Wildman staggered back into her headquarters office, covered with soot, soaked in sweat, and physically exhausted. But a long shower and a clean set of clothes quickly revived her spirits.

When she finally returned to the survey workroom, she found her computer programming assistant smiling cheerfully.

"Look at this," Renie said. "We've got GPS data now for seven of the eight rough guesses, and they found twelve more signs, for a total of twenty-nine fixed data points."

"So what does that give us—more accurate confusion?" The group leader smiled tiredly.

"I don't know, I was just about to run the correlation program," the young computer specialist said seriously. "I'm going to check the fifty-mile radius first, see if we get a better fit on that arc." Humming to herself, she hit a series of keys, and then waited as the powerful computer took a couple of million microseconds to churn through the data. Then a multicolored graphic image popped up on the screen.

"Wow, look at that, right on the money!" she exclaimed, pointing to the yellow arc that now cut through the exact centers of five tiny red triangles.

"Wait a minute, what's that?" Dr. Kimberly Wildman asked, pointing to a yellow line segment that formed the hypotenuse of a small right triangle in the far upper right corner of the screen.

"I don't know. It looks like . . ."

"Expand it out to the full quadrant," Wildman directed, but Renie's fingers were already flying across the keys.

"Oh, wow," the youthful assistant whispered as the new graphic popped into view.

"They're not arcs, they're partial circles," Dr. Kimberly Wildman said, shaking her head slowly in amazement. The screen was now displaying three almost perfectly curved yellow lines that swept through the centers of twenty-nine small scattered red triangles to form circular arcs from the left side of the screen to the bottom.

"And you know what," the young computer programmer said, talking mostly to herself as her hands flew across the keys again, "it looks like . . . yes!"

"Well, I'll be damned," Dr. Kimberly Wildman said as she stared at the five blue lines that cut through the centers of two or three of the triangles from a different direction now, forming four spokes of a wheel. Or actually three increasingly bigger wheels, she realized.

"I
thought
it looked like some of them lined up, but I couldn't tell for sure, because all the points are scattered, and the circles were too far apart," the young woman said, her eyes flashing with excitement. "But look there, I bet that every place where the blue and yellow lines intersect, there's actually a sign out there, right at that spot. We just haven't found it yet."

"And those triangles where there isn't any blue line intersects—"

"It's probably because only one of the three signs on that 'spoke' have been found. You need at least two points for the program to draw the straight lines."

"Except now that you have a center point, you can . . . hey, wait a minute, what about that center point? Go back to the close-up view."

In a matter of seconds the young programmer had the screen displaying the intercept point of the five blue lines.

"Whitehorse Cabin?" Dr. Kimberly Wildman blinked in confusion, knowing that name meant something to her for some reason that she couldn't quite remember.

"Isn't that where the Fish and Wildlife Service had that raid?"

"That's right, it is. Wildman nodded, feeling an odd sense of being let down by the discovery. "Which means those signs are probably some sort of crime scene markers."

"Oh." Like her boss, the young computer programmer seemed disappointed that the solution was so—what?—mundane? Trivial?

"You think we ought to let them know that one of their markers almost got somebody hurt?" she asked after a moment.

"Yes, we should," Wildman answered, starting to feel the fatigue creeping back into her body, now that they had the problem solved.

"Want me to see if I can find out who the investigator was on that case, and send him an E-mail message, asking him to contact you?"

"That would be a wonderful idea, but let's do it tomorrow," the group leader said, smiling tiredly. "It's been a very long day."

At six-thirty that Wednesday evening exhausted fire crews were still wandering through the burn area, making sure that all the smoldering areas were safely contained and simply consuming the remainder of their fuel. As they did so, one of the men called out:

"Hey, Chief, come here, look what I found!"

Moments later the fire crew chief stood there and stared for a long moment before he whispered: "What the
hell?"

As the other crew members gathered around, one of them turned to the others and said: 'You know, something tells me it's a good thing tomorrow's our day off."

Chapter Eleven

"Would you state your name please, and spell it for the record?"

"Henry Lightstone. L-I-G-H-T-S-T-O-N-E."

"And by whom are you employed, Mr. Lightstone?"

"The Division of Law Enforcement, United States Fish and Wildlife Service."

"And during the following time periods"—Deputy United States Attorney Theresa Fletcher looked down at a list she held in her hand, and then read off a series of "from-to" dates—"in what manner were you employed with the Division of Law Enforcement?"

"As a special agent assigned to Bravo Team, Special Operations Branch."

"Basically as what you would term an undercover agent or undercover operator?"