Endangered Species by Nevada Barr

interdiction plane that was buzzing around?"
    Impatience hardened into annoyance ." How the hell should I know?"
    Anna pointed to the damaged tree, the bit of painted metal.
    "Shit," Rick said ." That would do it."
    Understanding pulled the scales from Anna's eyes and suddenly she saw
    the myriad clues her busy brain had overlooked.  The tops of the bushes
    were broken in places.  A section of cable her mind had written off as
    litter, a scar in the tree beyond where the blue flagged the path.  As
    these pieces fell into place she became aware of a faint roaring, a hum
    like that of a vacuum cleaner in another room: palmetto burning hot.
    Twenty yards further on, heat hit them in a shimmering curtain .
    With it came the muted crackle of fire snapping the bones of the
    undergrowth.  A wall of bushes six feet high and alive with flame
    blocked their way.  Beyond the burning thicket, Anna could see the top
    of a small pine beginning to sprout blossoms of fire.  Except for that,
    the trees had not yet caught.
    She trotted parallel to the burn.  Customarily she and Rick would have
    made a quick assessment and begun scraping line in the duff, clearing
    away the combustible fuels to stop the fire spreading, at least along
    the ground.  With the plane crash, human life was factored in and the
    saving of property became secondary.
    Anna talked on the radio as she ran, telling Guy of the new twist. After
    she'd signed off she heard him radioing headquarters .
    There was no reply.  Next he tried Lynette.  As the interpreter took
    over dispatching duties, Anna tuned their chatter out and turned all of
    her attention to breaching the flames separating them from the downed
    plane.
    In less than a minute she was around the screen of palmetto and into a
    clearing scattered with young pines.  The aircraft, a twinengine prop
    plane, had rolled over onto its back and nosed into the ground.  the
    belly of the airplane was painted white and looked vulnerable, like the
    underside of a landed fish.  Wheels, popped loose from their housing,
    pawed at the air.  Part of the left wing was crumpled beneath the
    fuselage, the metal curled and wrinkling .
    That was where the fire burned hottest and Anna guessed an inboard fuel
    tank had exploded on impact or shortly thereafter.  Half of the right
    wing was sheared off, the engine thrust skyward in an angry metal fist.
    Left behind in the rush to demolition, the severed tips of the wings lay
    a distance from the aircraft.  A stump of the tail remained, elevators
    hanging from torn cables.
    From what Anna could see beneath and beyond the wings, the cabin was
    partially crushed, shards of Plexiglas squeezed out from the metal
    frames in the cockpit.  It looked as if the airplane had cut through the
    canopy at an angle, left wing pointed toward the earth.
    When it struck, the force had driven the cabin into the ground,
    shattering the windows and smashing in the roof.
    Fire poured from the lower engine and was taken up by the palmetto.
    Orange claws curved around the cabin, bubbling the paint and melting the
    broken windows.
    The intensity of the heat and the knowledge that the plane's second fuel
    tank had yet to explode paralyzed Anna.  In her mind, as it had a year
    ago below Banyon Ridge, the fire mushroomed out from the trees in a
    storm of destruction.  Terror roared through her insides, wiping her
    clean of morality, ethics, courage, and thought .
    Dropping the Pulaski, she turned to run.
    Rick had come up behind her.  Blindly, she smacked into him and lost her
    balance.
    "Watch where you're going," he growled, knocking her unceremoniously
    back onto her feet.
    The jolt snatched her back from the coniferous forests of northern
    California and the nightmare that only nine of them had survived. Breath
    was coming fast and her knees were shaking so bad she couldn't move, but
    the cowardly retreat had been aborted; honor and face were intact.
    Though she'd never tell him, Rick had done