A mass of tumbling, burning branches blasted towards them.
They turned and hared back the way they’d come. It was uphill, and strenuous going in the strong mid-afternoon heat. Ben could feel the smoke in his throat. It was hard to get his breath but adrenaline gave him a burst of speed.
Kelly looked back. From the vantage point of the brow of the hill, she saw a wall of flame stretching right across the vineyard. The wind was fanning it towards them.
‘The whole place is on fire!’ she yelled. ‘We can’t outrun it!’
They turned the corner by the signpost and saw the microlight a little further up, that funny glass-pod body with a white fabric wing on top and a tricycle underneath. It looked flimsy, but with flames raging at gale-speed through the tinder-dry vegetation, their only chance was to get airborne.
A flaming branch whirled past Ben’s ear. It landed in the vines. He heard the crackle as the dry leaves started to smoulder.
He reached the plane before Kelly and tried to undo the catch on the door one-handed, his other arm up, shielding his face from more burning debris.
Kelly got her door open, but then another gust of wind brought hot stinging sparks.
She screamed and climbed up onto the wing.
Ben hoisted himself up on the other side to see what was wrong and saw that the wing was covered in debris, glowing like hot coals.
Kelly grabbed a blackened branch as big as a butcher’s bone and hurled it away. ‘Get them off! They’ll burn a hole and then the plane’s useless!’
Ben pulled his sleeve down over his arm and swept it over the wing. The embers left sooty marks on the stiff white material, but luckily there were no burn holes. Kelly cleared the other side.
They got down and scrambled into the plane.
The engine spluttered into life. To their right, the vines were starting to burn. Ben could feel the heat through the back of the cockpit. Kelly increased the revs and took the plane jolting up the path. Her headset was still around her neck — there wasn’t a second to waste. Ben was sorry he’d made jokes about not being able to take off in that wind. Would they manage it now?
They started to lift off the ground, but the wind blew them sideways and Ben felt the vines swish along the undercarriage like a row of hands trying to grab the wheels. Kelly had the throttle all the way forwards but the microlight was still trying to go sideways. Then suddenly it soared upwards and they were leaving the vegetation behind.
Ben breathed a silent prayer of relief.
They climbed up into the sky. Clouds of smoke turned the windscreen black, filling their mouths with a gritty, pungent taste. Glowing embers like red fire-flies whirled past them. Then the black clouds were behind them and they were flying into sunlight again.
Down below, smoke was billowing up out of the vineyard.
The plane suddenly dropped like a stone.
‘A thermal!’ Kelly screamed. ‘You have control! More throttle! More throttle now!’
Ben felt beside him. His fingers grasped the handle and he pulled it upwards. The engine grew louder. He didn’t even have time to question why she wanted him to take control now, of all times.
‘Grab the stick! Get the nose up!’ called Kelly.
Ben pulled the stick back. He felt the pedals moving beside his feet as Kelly operated them. The microlight stopped plummeting and started to climb. There was another moment of dark smoke clouds, then bright sunshine.
Ben suddenly realized there was rather a lot of blue sky on his side of the plane, while through Kelly’s window there was a dramatic view of the ground.
Kelly whacked the stick with her left forearm. The view out of the windows evened out, with a proper amount of sky on each side.
‘Level out! Let the stick go!’ She was still shouting — she hadn’t yet put her headset on. It was still around her neck. Then Ben noticed she was holding her hands oddly, like she was trying to avoid touching the palms to anything.
And why was she making him do the flying at such a crucial stage?
He reached across and placed her headset over her ears so that he could talk to her.
‘Kelly, why am I in control?’
Kelly looked down at the palms of her hands. Ben reached over to see what was wrong but she flinched and pulled them away before he’d even touched her.
‘You’ve burned your hands.’
Kelly nodded. ‘You’re going to have to go from basic training to graduation in one lesson. I’ll tell you what to do — but you’ve got to fly this thing home.’
The hills around Adelaide were covered in vineyards. Nobody knew which one started burning first, and how exactly the fire had begun. But once it took hold it roared easily through the endless lines of parched, dry plants in a matter of minutes. Even where the leaves were not in direct contact with flames, the surrounding heat scorched them. This made the vegetation give off gases, which, because of the heat, started to burn spontaneously. The blazing hills created their own weather system, sucking in air to feed the flames, like a fire drawing air from a chimney. The fire gobbled up acre after acre until it reached the red, dusty outback.
And as well as travelling outwards, the fire also swept inwards. The first places it reached were Adelaide’s many parks and green spaces on the out-skirts of the town.
Victoria Shilton stood in the circle of emerald-green grass. Her eyes were on only one thing: the little dimpled ball in front of her feet, just metres away from the seventeenth hole. On the fairways, the grass of the golf course was parched to the colour of straw, but around the holes it had been watered to keep the surface perfect.
A gust of wind tugged at Victoria’s hat, sending the brim flopping down over one eye. The wind had been getting more and more erratic since they’d set off from the clubhouse after lunch, but they were nearly at the end of the course and Victoria was determined to finish. She had noticed a scent of smoke and heard the distant wail of sirens, but she was a dedicated sports-woman and had learned to let nothing distract her. She pushed the hat back off her brow to concentrate better, and the wind snatched it right off her head.
She didn’t see where it went; she would get it in a minute. Right now, she was in the zone, a state of perfect concentration. Just a gentle tap and the ball should roll into the hole. Victoria breathed in, ready to play the stroke.
A voice suddenly ruined her concentration. ‘Strewth!’ It was her opponent, a Thai restaurateur who she knew only by the name Troy. Victoria whirled round, ready to give him some choice words for spoiling her shot.
Troy was pointing at the rough — the woodland around the seventeenth hole. Flames were crackling through the trees, sending smoke rolling towards them.
Victoria was so startled she dropped her club. ‘Oh my God.’
They stood, stunned, as they watched the orange flames licking through the wood, catching anything they touched and sending it luminous with flame. In no more than thirty seconds the entire wood was on fire, all the way back down the edge of the fairway. The wind was whipping it up into an inferno.
Troy slid his iron back into his trolley. ‘We’d better get the groundsman.’ He turned and set off down the green.
Victoria grabbed her trolley and hurried after him.
Then something very strange happened. The wind snatched up some burning branches, carried them over Victoria’s head and dashed them against the trees on the other side of the fairway, several metres away.
Like a spark jumping a gap, the fire was leaping through the crowns of the trees.
On both sides of them, the woods were on fire.
Victoria and Troy forgot about their trolleys. They ran for their lives.
The golf course backed onto the racecourse. So far, two races had been run since the wind started to pick up, but things were getting worse.