Reaping The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 3) (12 page)

A quartet of Apaches lifted off and hammered east, their stub wings loaded with rocket pods and Hellfire missiles. As they cleared the firebase perimeter, a battery of M109A6 Paladin howitzers, deployed in an open field just east of the airfield, fired a salvo of 155mm rounds, tongues of flame and smoke jetting into the air.
 

Alexander let out a startled cry at the sharp boom made by the guns. Jack had to shift his grip on the soft-sided carrier as the big cat tried to scrunch his twenty pound bulk as far away as he could from the zippered front opening.
 

“I’m sorry, buddy,” he said, trying to sooth the cat and his own sense of guilt for bringing him. “I’ll make it up to you with some fresh salmon.”

“This looks like Bagram in Afghanistan.” Terje, standing beside him, shook his head in astonishment.
 

“Look.” Jack pointed as the other four men on the team, including Craig Hathcock, the sniper who’d fought alongside Jack on Spitsbergen, followed them off the plane. “That must be Colonel Ford.”
 

A tall woman in her early forties wearing combat fatigues, escorted by two heavily armed soldiers, was striding toward them. Jack and Terje came to attention and saluted.

“Major,” she said crisply, returning the salute. Eyeing Terje, she inclined her head. “Captain. I wish I could say I was happy to see you, but I’m not. Every chopper we divert from delivering relief supplies or ferrying civilians out means more people left behind in the hot zone.”

“I understand that, ma’am,” Jack told her as she turned and led him and the others at a brisk pace across the tarmac. “But…” The Paladins fired off another salvo, the thunder from the guns echoing between the hangars. “…the girl we’re trying to find could be critical to the war effort. We made every attempt to find out if she had already been evacuated, but there’s no record of her leaving the university hospital. We’ve got to go in and try to find her. There’s no other way.”

“I’m not arguing with my orders, major,” she said, her voice conveying a sense of bone-weary exhaustion. Her eyes were bloodshot and had dark rings below them. “I’m just not happy about them, especially the part about dedicating a Black Hawk and a pair of Apaches so you can go sightseeing. I really don’t think you appreciate how precious those assets are.” She glanced at Hathcock and the other members of the team, who were a mix of former EDS gunslingers and FBI agents. “I also don’t particularly care to be ferrying civilians in when we’re desperately trying to get thousands of others out.”

“I don’t plan on screwing around, colonel. We’ll get your birds back to you as soon as we possibly can.”
 

“You do that, major.” She pointed to one of several Black Hawks on the apron, its rotors already spun up. “There’s your ride. Bring it back to me in one piece, if you don’t mind. The Apaches will join up with you en route before you head into hostile territory.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Jack saluted, then led the team at a trot to the waiting Black Hawk, where they took seats in the cargo area. Jack put on the headset offered by the crew chief, and as soon as his men gave him a thumbs up, told the pilot, “Let’s do it.”

“Roger.”
 

A moment later they were airborne, the pilot joining a formation of seven other Black Hawks that were heading east toward the city.
 

Terje nudged Jack and pointed out the left side door. About a mile away was I-88. Instead of being packed with cars, it was nearly empty, the cars having been driven, pushed, or bulldozed aside to make room for a steady stream of military vehicles that rumbled east. A solid mass of civilians on foot, crammed into a single lane, shuffled westward.
 

“We’ve set up a defensive line along the Fox River,” the crew chief said, following their eyes. “We’re trying to get as many people out as we can before the engineers blow the bridges.”

“What happens then?” Terje asked.

The crew chief shrugged. “Lots of napalm, I guess. And they’re planning to dump a bunch of gas into the river and light it on fire as a barrier. The bugs don’t like fire.”

“No, they don’t,” Jack said absently as he stared at the scene.

Many of the residential neighborhoods in the suburbs were nothing more than stretches of charred and smoking ruins. Others looked untouched. People flowed west like drops of water in the mountains, starting as individuals or families, then joining other small groups, until finally they formed the great river of the mass exodus along the Interstate. Anxious faces turned up to look at the Black Hawk as it flew past. Some people waved their arms or jumped up and down to try and draw the pilot’s attention, but most had accepted the grim reality that the Black Hawk had not come for them.
 

They flew over a school that still had dozens of kids in a central courtyard, shepherded by a handful of teachers. As one, they jumped up and down and waved.

Jack keyed his mic. “Can’t you get some birds in here to get those kids out?”
 

“Negative, sir,” the pilot said. “I wish we could, but we’ve got very strict orders not to land except in a secured area. No exceptions.”

“Why?”

“Because we lost three birds and their crews to panicked civilians, and two more to harvesters masquerading as civvies. Sorry, sir, but I wouldn’t land there if you held a gun to my head.”

“Christ,” Jack said quietly.
 

“There’s our escorts.” The crew chief pointed to a pair of slender shapes in the sky coming toward them. The two Apaches banked around, revealing their angular profiles as they took up station on either side of the Black Hawk.
 

“Now that’s something we don’t see every day,” the pilot said. “You must be pulling a lot of weight to get us escorts, major. I’ll take you flying anytime.”

Jack snorted. “Be careful what you wish for.”

The pilot took them right down 47
^th
Street, heading due east over more residential neighborhoods. The devastation here was universal. Only glowing coals remained, and the air in the helicopter was thick with the smell of smoke.

“Why has everything been burned?” Terje asked.

“Scorched earth policy,” the pilot answered. “Areas that are declared as either overrun or clear of civilians are being torched. Most of it’s with napalm dropped by the Air Force, but those artillery yokels back at the firebase are sending out white phosphorous rounds.”

Terje grimaced.
 

“That’s The Wall,” the pilot said as they crossed over I-294, which ran in a north-south direction. “In our sector, it runs from the junction with I-80, about twenty miles southeast of here, up north to I-290, where the line bends around to the west. We’re trying to keep the harvesters contained in the metro area and keep them from breaking out to the west.”

The eastern side of I-294 that faced toward Chicago had been barricaded with jersey barriers, abandoned cars, and sandbags. Thousands of bright pyres burned where harvesters had been hit with incendiary ammunition or flamethrowers, and more exploded into flame as he watched groups of them charge the defenders.
 

But harvesters weren’t the only casualties. Thousands of charred and mutilated human bodies littered the scorched landscape leading up to The Wall.
 

“People can pass through at a handful of checkpoints,” the crew chief said, following Jack’s gaze. “Anyone who approaches anywhere else is considered hostile. They try to warn them away, but…”

“But what can they do when harvesters are chasing them,” Jack finished, forcing down the bile rising in his throat.
 

Jack’s felt an unpleasant flurry of butterflies in his stomach as they flew east, deeper into the hot zone. The other men, except for Hathcock, went through the comforting ritual of checking their weapons again. The sniper only stared out into the devastation below.

“I thought there would be more harvesters,” Terje said. “The reporting I’ve read makes it sound like every street should be packed with them, even with all the napalm and artillery fire, but I see nothing moving.”

“The bastards are smart,” the pilot answered. “They use the sewers, and the ones above ground know to hide when they hear our rotor blades or jet engines. Most of the kills we’re making in the hot zone now are from artillery and smart bombs dropped from high altitude, guided in by Predator drones. The things can’t see or hear the drones and think it’s safe, then we zap ‘em.”

“They aren’t so smart along the defensive lines,” Jack observed.
 

The pilot laughed, a bitter, frightened sound. “Those have just been probes, major. And yeah, those are the dumb ones that we’re weeding out, leaving the smart ones behind. But I’ve seen the thermal and motion sensor data the corps G-2 has been putting together. I wasn’t supposed to, but I have a friend in the intel section. You know how that works.” He shook his head. “Believe me, when those fuckers get in their bug heads to break out, they’re going to go through our lines like shit through a goose.”

“Why haven’t they already?” Terje asked.

“Who knows? I think it’s because they’re preoccupied with trying to wipe out the survivors in the safe zone where we’re going. There’s nothing left in the scorched areas for them to eat except each other, except for the ones that have made it to Lake Michigan. They can swim and kill like sharks.”

“Thanks for the uplifting news,” Jack told him.

“Well, there is a bright side, you know,” the pilot said.

“What’s that?”

“The slimy bastards don’t have SAMs.”

“Do yourself a favor and don’t ever take that for granted,” Jack told him. “You know they can perfectly mimic us, right?”

“Yeah, don’t remind me.”

“How are you dealing with the larval forms?” Terje asked.

“What, those little slimy things?”

“Yes.”

The pilot shook his head. “We don’t bother with the little ones much because they’re so hard to see, only as big as your fist, and there are so damn many of them. You can’t see it from here, but the ground down there is swarming with the little bastards, eating all the charred wood and stuff. You could drop a Willie Pete out the door and watch them go off like firecrackers. If a Predator sees a bunch of them together or finds a big one, which happens sometimes, we’ll light them up. But we just don’t have the ordnance to cover every square foot to get them all.” He paused. “There’s what’s left of Midway Airport.”

Jack craned his neck out the door. Below him, the square-shaped airport slid past the Black Hawk on the starboard side. There were a dozen airliners, perhaps more, that were nothing more than plane-shaped cinders on the tarmac. The terminal buildings were still burning furiously, and a blanket of fire bathed the entire northern end of the airport and the buildings around it from the fuel storage tanks, which sat like three eviscerated volcanoes along West 54
^th
Street.

“Midway was taken two nights ago,” the pilot said. “The Air Force was pulling people out until the last minute, but word has it the last C-17 had some uninvited guests aboard.”

A mass of twisted metal and debris lay just beyond the end of the longest runway where the C-17 had crashed into a parking lot. The wreckage was still smoking.
 

Aside from the fires and billowing smoke, nothing moved on the ground below. It was like they were flying over a ghost town that had been set afire.

The next few minutes passed in silence as the Black Hawk and its Apache escorts continued toward their objective. Below, the neighborhoods of Chicago Lawn, Gage Park, and West Englewood were nothing more than blackened ruins.
 

Something about the scene didn’t add up, and it took Jack a moment to realize what it was. “I don’t see many bodies.”

“Correction,” Terje said, “you don’t see
any
bodies. Some people must have died here. What happened to them?”

“A lot of people have died down there,” the pilot said, his voice grim. “The city had a population of something like almost three million people. Intel figures that maybe a million got out, but I think we lost a lot more.”

“Then what happened to them?” Jack wanted to know.
 

“The harvesters ate them.”

“Christ.”

“I think He was on the last train for the coast, major,” the pilot said. “God’s abandoned this place.”

Two huge explosions ripped through a railway yard a couple miles to the north.
 

“Probably JDAMs dropped by F-22s,” the pilot said. “A Predator must have seen some of the things massing there. Dunkirk’s just ahead.”

“Dunkirk?” Jack asked.

“Yeah, that’s what they’re calling it. Once we get past the smoke and you can really see the lake you’ll see why. It’s the last safe zone in the metro area. The Army’s holding along a wedge of shoreline behind I-94, dead ahead, and I-90, which angles off to the southeast. There’s probably half a million people crammed in there, hoping to get out before the dam breaks. You’re just lucky the university is in the protected zone, or this trip would’ve been for nothing.”

There was a steady stream of helicopters, both military and civilian, flying in and out of Dunkirk, ferrying people out.

As they passed over I-94, which was even more heavily fortified than I-294 had been, they emerged from the smoke over a relatively undamaged portion of the city. A few structures had burned or partially collapsed, but otherwise the area looked normal, except for thousands of people crowding the streets.
 

Lined up along the shoreline were hundreds of boats, great and small. From twelve footers that could only carry a handful of people all the way up to multi-million dollar yachts, the shoreline was packed with them, ferrying people from the safe zone to larger ships standing off from shore. People were even using jet skis to help get people from the beach to larger boats or the Navy ships standing off in deeper water.

“I sure as hell hope this girl we’re after is at the hospital,” Hathcock said. Those were the first words he had spoken since they’d stepped off the Gulfstream jet back at Aurora. “If she’s not, we’re fucked.”