Disclaimer: Still don't own planes. This chapter was looked over for my great beta Theolaterose99. Any errors remaining are mine and mine alone. There is an OC in the chapter who kind of escaped from the pages of Warplanes (the next long form story I will be posting), he is insisting on playing a minor role in the rest of the story. Lastly, this chapter cliff hangers. You have been warned.

Chapter 6- Shivering Against The Storm

On third night of what the media insisted on dubbing 'The Great Piston Peak Fire' the weather finally started to work in their favor. A series of cold fronts came through bringing a line of thunderstorms. While the high winds and lightning had grounded all the Air Attack teams and forced several of the ground teams to fall back, it had also brought a deep soaking rain that was beginning to slow the fire's progress significantly.

Still, at the moment Cabbie couldn't help but loath Mother Nature for sending this storm their way. He was currently trapped on the shoulder of the tarmac between planning section headquarters and the Red Cross Headquarters seemingly forgotten unless they needed to use him for equipment storage. The chocks on his wheels where preventing him from turning either his tale or his nose into the wind. The tarps had been thrown over the leading edge of his wings was doing little to keep the water out of his exposed engine parts. The feeling made him desperately crave his dry cozy hanger.

It wasn't like the C-119 wasn't use to sleeping outside. Hanger space was a low priority during war time, and what space there was usually reserved for the fighter planes. Cargo and bombers slept outside regardless of the weather. In Korea there had even been nights when they great planes had had to keep their engines running during the long dark to keep their engines from freezing and their oil from turning solid. He had lost friends a few of those nights. But even when things got really bad, there was always someone right next to going through the exact same thing.

Okay, technically Caddie wasn't the only one stuck out in the storm at this airport. There was no shelter for any of the big planes. A small fleet of C-130s and P3 Orions were huddling together on the far side of the tarmac, but they were sheltering in each other wings and taking turns blocking the wind with their fuselages. Cabbie looked at his fellow heavies with a bit of jealous. If he wasn't chocked in place he knew that he would he would have take shelter from the storm by staying in the middle of the group.

By about 2 am in the morning, Cabbie had determined that he wasn't going to get more than a few minutes of sleep, and resigned himself the discomfort of sucking rain without out the protection of intake filters. Maru was going to have a field day with his engines when he got home, but it was best not to dwell on that right now.

Cabbie was trying to focus on exactly what he was going to say in his TMST reports when he heard crunch of tarmac beneath tire and track. He blinked the rain from his eyes to see five sets of exhausted eyes looking up at him. Well, it looked like the Piston Peak's Smokejumper team had finally been pulled from the fire line.

The little, at least from Cabbie's perspective, earth movers were a mess. Their paint was streaked with ashes and mud. There were little blistered pockmarks on their bumpers indicating their proximity to embers and Drip was moving oddly, like something was caught in his undercarriage and rubbing uncomfortably.

"You do know that you can probably find a place to sleep in one of the buildings, right?" Cabbie nodded hoarsely towards one of the hangers that had been claimed by the smaller vehicles as a rest station. His little smokejumpers just looked up at him with tired eyes and shrugged.

Avalanche leveled a look which said, of course we do, but where would that leave you? The dozer then settled on the snuggly against Cabbies fuselage on the wind side of his body. The old plane tried to protest, but Avalanche had already turned off his running lights and was allowing his engine to whine down. Cabbie wouldn't be surprised if the kid was already half asleep, and long experience had told him that you didn't wake Avalanche up when he was dreaming unless you wanted to wake the rest of the base up with him.

The other four jumpers at least had the common sense to park themselves on the leeward side of the aircraft. Dynamite was nestled directly against the old bird's skin. Her engine was warm and purred gently as she waited for Drip, Blackout, and Pinecone to resecure the tarps that had been draped over Cabbies wings.

Once they were tied back in place and Cabbie had stop breathing in so much rain water, the little dirt beasts had crawled under the great wings of the injured cargo plane and fell promptly asleep. Comforted by the residual heat of the jump team's engines and the knowledge that his team was safely sheltered beneath him Cabbie soon joined the jumpers in dreams.

On the other side of the park Blade sneezed…which knocked off all of the water that had collected on his blades. The big helicopter sighed. He knew that a night on the rocks was not going to hurt him, but it still didn't mean that he would not have preferred to be safely tucked on his sleeping mat. That said, even if Dusty had made it back to the base safely, Blade doubted if he would have been able to sleep through this storm. Not while the ground team was still facing down the blaze and Cabbie was grounded at the Piston Flats. Blade by nature was a worrier, and that was one of the reasons he had been chosen for command.

Blade blinked the rain from his eyes, and tried to will himself for a nap. Even a few minutes of sleep would provide a few moment of rest bit from his discomfort. The helicopter almost managed to doze, when he heard a sound. A painfully haunting sound that was faintly carried on the winds. Dusty was crying out.

On some level hearing the little SEAT's panicked calls was a welcome relief because it meant that Dusty was still alive down there. On the other hand, the sound felt like it was tearing the helicopter apart. A member of his team was hurting, and there was absolutely nothing that Blade could do to help him.

Not knowing what else to do, Blade once again started to tell stories. Happy stores that had taken place under the bright California sunshine. He had no clue if Dusty could hear him and the helicopter was pretty sure that Dusty was the only aircraft anywhere close enough to hear him speaking on the radio. Eventually Dusty's cries quieted to a whimper that was drowned out by the howl of the wind, the echo of thunder, and the pounding of the relentless rain. Still, Blade spoke to the dark, hoping that on some level he was able to provide a lifeline to his downed teammate.

At the Piston Peak Air Attack Base Maru couldn't catch a wink of sleep. The mechanic tried. He really did, but every time that he started to get comfortable and started to drift off a clap of thunder would shatter his relaxation or a fleeting thought about something else he should pack in his mechanic's bag popped into his head. Then the notion of sleep would be chanced away for at least the next 30 minutes. In the end all Maru could do was tried to reach a meditative state. One where he emptied his mind as he watched lightning splash shadows across his hangers walls.

Maru worked at his meditation exercise for at least the next two hours, trying to chase the imagines of a smashed trainee SEAT and a leaking helicopter from his mind. He failed. The only thing that mechanic managed to do that night was learn that he sucked at meditation.

The sky was starting turn from the black of night, to the pale gray of a stormy morning. The Smokejumpers snapped awake to a sound that would stop the engines of most vehicles. It was the gurgling, choking coughs of their jump plane struggling to breathe. While the entire crew had extensive first aid training, Maru had seen to that, the mechanic had focused on teaching them how to deal with the types of injuries that you would expect to see on the fire line so none of the ground pounders had any idea what was going on. All they knew was Cabbie should never shutter this bad, ever.

"Drip, Avalanche, Blackout. Go find help now!" Dynamite barked and the male members of the ground team instantly split up heading in different directions to increase their chances of finding someone who would have any clue how to help their 'Uncle.'

In the mean time, Dynamite and Pinecone worked to remove the tarps covering the leading edge of Cabbie's wings in hope that exposing his air intakes would help relieve some of the big planes discomfort. It didn't. He still gasped as though he couldn't actually get air into his intake systems. Cabbie was also clearly awake through all of this, though his eyes were squeezed shut in pain. Though the ATV doubted that the plane had enough breath to tell them what in the world was going wrong with him.

Slag, Dynamite thought as she leaned herself against the C119's cheek and used the soothing voice that she usually used to talk down panicking ground team trainees. "Come on Cabbie, breathe for me. I know you can do it."

Dusty had quieted down at some point during the night, leaving Blade sitting perched on a ledge talking to himself…again. The first line of storms had past and with it the lightning and thunder. It was now replaced dark low hanging clouds that were producing a perpetual drizzle. Oh, and the temperature had dropped significantly. It wasn't cold enough to be dangerous, but the still raw burns on his skin made the helicopter more susceptible for to a chill.

Blade had been shivering bad enough that he took him a long while to realize that there were new noises in the forests. The deep thrumming noise of heavy equipment winding their way up the mountain roads should have stuck out in National Park that had been fully evacuated. Still, Blade didn't notice that he had company until a member of the road crew called him over the radio.

"Good morning Chief." A disembodied voice crackled over the air to ground band.

"What are you doing down there?" Blade didn't even bother wasting time on pleasantries this part of the park supposed to be closed. Technically he wasn't even supposed to be there.

"What does it look like we are doing?" The vehicle on the other side of the radio gave the low purring chuckle that only a heavy dozer or perhaps a track loader could manage. "We are building a road."

Sure enough, on the far side of the wooded expanse in front of him Blade could spot a cluster of heavy equipment sporting the park service road crew's green and white livery. Moments later he heard the first tree of the park's newest road falling to the ground. The race to rescue Dusty had truly begun.

"PICKLES WE NEED YOUR HELP!"

Many of the cargo planes and tankers groaned and a few bothered to open their eyes to glare at the little dozer. One green and red marked cargo plane did move to extract himself from clump of aircraft though.

"Congratulations Avalanche. I think you just managed to wake up the entire airstrip." The large cargo plane yawned as he ducked his wing under the last obstacle and rolled onto an open space on the apron. "What do you need?"

"SOMETHINGS WRONG WITH CABBIE."

"And you are getting me why?" He asked still blinking sleep from his eyes.

"BECAUSE YOU WERE THE ONLY PERSON HERE THAT WE COULD THINK OF."

Well, Pickles couldn't fault the dozer's logic, even when the C-130 wished that the logic hadn't dragged him out of some of the few moments of sleep he had gotten during the storm. Perhaps after he went and solved whatever the problem was he could get a big mug of coffee. The coffee might help him feel like he was in the correct time zone.

With coffee on the brain Pickles looked down at Avalanche. "Lead on Macduff."

Maru was on his 9th cup of coffee by the time that Windlifter started stirring in his own hanger. The tug had packed and repacked his mechanic's bag a half dozen times and probably would have paced a hole in the pavement if the Skycrane would have taken too much longer.

"Are you ready?" Windlifter yawned as he liberated a large mug of coffee from the main hanger and started to stretch his rotors.

"Will I ever ready to do this?" Then when Windlifter opened his mouth to speak, Maru snapped. "Don't answer the question's rhetorical."

Windlifter, always the stoic on the team simply shrugged as he went and fetched the small vehicle harness. Maru helped the big chopper get all of the straps secured to the hook in points along his frame giving each one a good tug to make sure they were snug. While the mechanic was normally sure of his strap work, he was particularly precise today. Something to do with the fact that Maru was a bit of a nervous flyer under the best of circumstances and hanging suspended under the belly of a Skycrane could never be considered to be the ideal, no matter what Drips opinion on the matter was.

The harness in place, Maru double checked to make sure that all of his equipment and satchel were secured. While there shouldn't be any tourist left in the park to drop anything on, that didn't mean that he couldn't accidently drop a drill on some unsuspecting fire apparatus's hood. Plus Maru kind of doubted that after the laundry list of repairs he was going to be completing on the various members of the Air Attack Team he was going to have any budget left to replace tools that he had carelessly dropped.

If any of them still had a job at the end of this fiasco was a nagging thought that tugged at the back of his mind, but Maru did his best to shove it back into a corner where he could continue to ignore it. Convinced that he was a satisfied as he was going to get with the strapping job, Maru allowed Windlifter to pull him into the sky.

As soon as the Maru's wheels left the tarmac he was determined to give Blade an earful about making the mechanic make a field call.

Cabbie slowly awoke to the sound of a verbal warzone, which was doing nothing to alleviate his pounding headache.

"Stop yelling, please." Cabbie hissed through gritted teeth, but instantly regretted speaking. It made his intake's burn sending him into a painful coughing fit. The old plane's vision grayed out. He could tell that the people around him were trying to communicate with him. There was the pleasant hum of an engine where one of smokejumpers pressed against his starboard side and change of air current that only came when a much larger plane took you under its wing.

Knowing he was safe Cabbie decided that at the moment his best option was to close his eyes and let the darkness pull him under. Maybe when he woke up next he could finally breathe and his head wouldn't hurt so much. If he still felt like crap when he next opened his eyes, well, he could try to find some solutions then. For right now Cabbie trusted the Smokejumpers to protect him, which allowed him to peacefully pass out on the tarmac.

Aerospace Note: First yes I know that I have let you with a bit of a dosey of a cliffhanger. To beg your forgiveness, I am running a bit of a competition. Your job is to try to diagnose what is wrong with Cabbie before the the rest of the characters figure it out. I had a pilot friend of my read it over to make sure that I dropped enough hits to make it possible and while the problem is obscure with a little research he was able to come up with the correct diagnose in about 45 minutes so I have faith in you guys. In order to make it a true competition there will be a prize for the first who figures it out and either posts it their theory in the reviews section or pm's me. The prize is a story written from the prompt of your choice...as long as the prompt isn't smut...Good Luck!

On to our regularly schedule random aerospace factoids. Not all patches of air are created equal. Airspace is divided into a number of classes. We will be covering the standard A through F classes today and we will dive into the specifics of special use airspaces in the next post.

Class A= Anything between 18,000 feet and 60,000 feet sea level. Class A is the area of airspace that is dominated large aircraft traffic and requires you to be under the guidance of a ATC (Advanced Transport Controller). Any aircraft flying at that height are also flying under instruments conditions.

Class B= Is the area around a major airport. If you want to enter a Class B airspace you must request the permission of ATC and you can be denied access. While in class be airspace you are given explicit instructions to make sure that you don't run into anyone else who is trying to take off or land.

Class C= Is the area around a smaller tower controlled airport. You need to have two way communication with ATC before entering, but don't necessary need explicitly permission or instructions to enter the air space.

Class D= An area around minor airport with tower the primary services small aircraft. Propwash Junction is probably Class D.

Class E=Any controlled airspace that is not designated as Class A, B, C, or D. My be used for a towerless airport. Also used for National Parks, so Piston Peak is Class E airspace.

Class F= Not used in the US, but used in other countries to indicate airspace with a special use.

Class G= Pretty much every where else.

Well I hope that you enjoyed this little lesson about airspace classes. I hope you will join me next week when we cover types of special airspace designations.