Endangered Species by Nevada Barr Page A

her a great service.
    Fighting to retain her equilibrium, she retrieved her Pulaski .
    "Okay, okay," she said, as much to herself as to him.  Somebody needed
    to take charge but Anna still had the shakes.  She'd locked her knees
    but her insides twanged like cheap guitar strings.  It was all she could
    do to tic one thought to another.
    "Piss pump to the passenger side.  The right," Rick said, filling the
    void ." Maybe somebody's alive.  The fire's circling back through the
    brush.  You take it."
    Relieved, Anna nodded but didn't move ." Cut the fuels away before the
    fire gets to the plane," Rick spelled out for her, and gave her the
    shove she needed.  Her first steps were stumbling, her legs still
    wanting to run.  Movement burned away the residual fear and she began to
    function.
    Lest panic again blindside her, Anna attacked the flames with a fury
    that, once the adrenaline subsided, would leave her with a strained back
    and a hyperextended elbow.  Sweat fell like salt rain to turn to vapor
    on the superheated ground.  Escaping from her hard hat, tendrils of hair
    singed and curled.
    Ignited by the explosion, fire had burned out from the downed aircraft,
    cutting an angry swathe through the palmetto.  Like a ravening beast,
    appetite unslaked, it doubled back from the point of origin and ran
    greedily toward the unburned tail of the aircraft.
    In a dead-heat race with the flames, Anna chopped line, clearing to bare
    soil a path a yard and a half wide between the burn and the plane.
    In the cabin were the dead or the dying.  She suppressed that knowledge
    in her need to complete the physical task at hand .
    Dimly, she was aware of paint crackling, the groan of metal shifting and
    the snap of rubber and plastics, but her world had narrowed to the one
    tentacle of the dragon she had been sent to hack off.  The writhing of
    the rest could be dealt with later.
    The thicket wasn't more than fifteen feet wide at the point where the
    plane had nosed in.  Unless the shrubs ignited the live oaks, the fire
    would slow to a creep when it hit the duff beyond the underbrush.  It
    wasn't long before Anna succeeded in separating the plane from the fire.
    With her primary task accomplished, the scope of her world opened
    somewhat and she turned back to the mangled aircraft.
    On the passenger side of the inverted fuselage, Rick stood in the angle
    where the wing stub met the cabin, squirting water on the metal.  Not
    six inches from his fanny was a fuel tank, the only one remaining
    attached to the main part of the wreckage that had yet to explode.
    A thin line of smoke, rising straight up in the still air, caught Anna's
    eye.  Beneath the duff, creeping almost unseen, fire from the palmetto
    was crawling through the leaf litter toward the fuel tank .
    Anna abandoned the secured left flank of the plane and, in a controlled
    frenzy of hosing, began clearing away burning debris.  Acrid smoke was
    sucked through the bandanna tied across the lower half of her face.
    Mucus ran from her nose and she breathed as sparingly as exertion would
    allow.
    A shovel appeared in her peripheral vision.  Dijon and A] had arrived.
    Dijon joined Anna and began throwing dirt on the trail of flame, broken
    free of the litter now and snaking toward the wing.  AI manned a second
    piss pump, aiming his stream onto the metal cowling of the engine
    itself.  Guy Marshall must have arrived at roughly the same time as the
    other two.  When Anna looked past AI, he was there, Pulaski in hand.
    It was good to be among friends.
    Through the bite of the smoke Anna became aware of the odor of gasoline.
    At that moment she lieard Guy shouting "Fall back!  Fall back!"
    Fire had circled around Dijon and met up with a trickle of high octane
    fuel soaking through the mat of needles and leaves that had yet to be
    scraped away.  Flame burned narrow and high with the intensity of a lit
    fuse.
    " Fall back!" Guy shouted again.
    Dijon threw a spadeful of dirt