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

Brigade Nord,
the only combat brigade in the Norwegian Army, had deployed its light armored battalion, both mechanized battalions with their tanks and infantry combat vehicles, and the sole artillery battalion to the north, opposite the Russian border.
 

Jack turned to Terje. “Worried about the Russians?”

“Yes. This must look much like our deployments did during the Cold War, although now for different reasons. We are not worried that the Russian government will order an attack against us, but we cannot afford a flood of refugees streaming across the border. So we’ve put most of our combat strength there to help the Border Guard.”

“What about the border with Finland and Sweden?”

“We have helicopters with thermal imagers searching along the border, and we have created a volunteer force of hunters and alpinists to set up warning pickets, but…” He shrugged. “There is just too much territory to cover. We would all need to form a line and hold hands to catch them coming through the forests.”

“Make sure your people look for any signs of deforestation,” Jack said. “Patches or swatches of missing trees might be a giveaway that larval forms are in the area.”

They looked up as Morgensen gestured for the two of them to join the group at the front of the ops center.
 

“Jack,” Morgensen said, turning to the four-star general, “this is our Chief of Defense, General Jonas Nesvold.”

“Mr. Dawson.” Nesvold’s big hand enfolded Jack’s as they shook.

“An honor, sir,” Jack said, “although I wish it were under better circumstances.”

“So do we all, Mr. Dawson.” Gesturing to the screen, he asked, “What is your assessment of the situation in Russia?”

“Sir, what I know is from nearly a week ago, and…”
 

Nesvold waved away Jack’s concerns. “I understand that. But you were there, you witnessed things first-hand. We have had little in the way of direct intelligence reporting on what is taking place there. Please indulge me.”

Jack looked at the screen, his eyes tracing the path he had taken across Russia only five days ago. “It’s a disaster, sir. They had a lab in their grain belt that must have somehow obtained samples of the grain infected with the harvester genes, virus, whatever you want to call it. The things got loose, and…” He had to stop for a moment. His pulse was hammering in his head and he felt short of breath. His vision began to turn gray.
 

He felt a hand on his shoulder.

“You need rest,” Terje said.

“No.” Jack shook his friend’s hand away. “There’s no time for that.” Looking back at Nesvold, Jack went on, “General, there’s no silver lining to what’s happening. The larval forms and the adult harvesters in their natural form are bad enough. Harvesters posing as impostors might be even worse. I saw with my own eyes one of the damn things masquerading as a Russian officer, a major, right in one of their garrisons. If the harvesters infiltrate one of their Strategic Rocket Forces units or, God forbid, their senior command staff…”

“But surely the Russians have taken steps as we have to improve their security?” Morgensen protested.

“I don’t know,” Jack said. “I hope they did, but I can’t tell you more than that.”

Nesvold’s frown deepened. “Well, we are doing what we can. We can only hope that it is enough.”

Before Jack could reply, he caught sight of a young soldier at one of the workstations, gesturing for him to come over.

“She’s trying to connect you to Naomi Perrault,” Nesvold said with a gentle smile.

“Ma’am, general, if you’d excuse me for a moment?” He didn’t wait for a reply before he quickly stepped over to the soldier, who handed him a headset with a boom mic.
 

With an indignant meow, Lurva trotted along behind him, her leash still in Jack’s hand.

“We have a secure connection, sir,” the soldier said.

“Thank you.” Jack gave her a quick smile of gratitude.

“Excuse me, but this has to be a private conversation!” Cullen whined from behind him. Lowering his voice, he added, “You can’t talk to Naomi in the middle of a room of uncleared people!”

“Listen,” Jack turned on him, “I don’t want to talk to her about anything that’s classified. I just want to know that she’s okay and tell her that I’m alive. If you don’t like it, Mr. Cullen, you can kindly go fuck yourself!”

“Jack?” He heard a familiar voice as he slipped on the headset. “Jack, hon, please say that was you telling someone to go fuck himself!”

“Yeah, Renee, it’s me,” he said, relieved to hear her voice. Renee Vintner was one of his closest friends.
 

“Oh, God, Jack.” She said through her snuffling and sobbing. “We thought you were dead, you idiot! Naomi’s going to kill you.”

Jack chuckled, then said, “I know I’m in for it. Listen, is she there?”

“Yeah, she’s on her way. I had to call her up from the lab. You know I can’t tell you where, right?”

Glancing over his shoulder at Cullen, who stood fuming behind him, Jack said, “Yeah, I got the full lecture on that score.”

“Where the hell are you?”

“I’m at the Norwegian Joint Forces Command headquarters, in an underground bunker near Bodø. Hey, is Naomi okay?”
 

“Yes, I’m fine, thanks for asking,” Renee quipped. “So is Carl, for that matter, although he’d be losing more hair if he had any left.” There was a pause. “And no, Naomi hasn’t been all right, you big oaf. She died inside when the President told her your plane was shot down. God, I want to knock you in the head for being such a moron, but I’ll have to wait my turn. And how the devil did you make it out of that one with your hide in one piece?”

“I’ll tell you later.” He took a deep breath. “Just get Naomi on the phone.”

***

At the center of two hundred acres of flat, barren ground squatted the hastily erected fortress known as SEAL-2. Originally intended as a special research lab for Morgan Pharmaceuticals, it had been given over by its billionaire owner, Howard Morgan, to the government to aid in the fight against the harvesters.
 

The main building stood two stories above ground, but would have been barely recognizable to those who built it. The sleek exterior of white walls and glass, designed to be both attractive and energy efficient, had disappeared behind bolt-on steel armor. The roof had also been reinforced, and had sprouted a forest of communications antennas and weapons emplacements.
 

On one side of the lab building, a pair of two story dormitories were being erected to house the small army of scientists and security personnel who had been brought in, and who were now living in tents arrayed in neat rows on the opposite side of the lab building until their permanent quarters were finished. A helipad and a maintenance hangar had been built in the open area in front of the lab, with fuel storage and a motor pool behind.

The entire facility was ringed with a moat that could be filled with fuel to form a protective fire ring, backed up with a ten foot high metal wall with guard towers set at intervals along its length. From the wall to the double fence around the main buildings was a two hundred meter deep no-man’s land filled with mines and sensors that could detect harvester larvae.

But the heart of the base, the reason for its existence, was buried beneath the lab building. That is where the research on harvesters and how to destroy them was being carried out.

At a workstation in the second sub-basement, thirty feet below the surface, Naomi Perrault stared at her computer screen. Five hundred and seventy three new emails crowded her in box, all of them flagged as immediate priority. Many of them would be congratulations on mapping the harvester genome. Her team had just finished mapping the eight hundred billion base pairs of harvester DNA, the culmination of the work begun by the Earth Defense Society over two years before. It was a feat she should have been proud of, considering that it had taken the Human Genome Project ten years to map the three billion base pairs in humans DNA.
 

She sat back for a moment and rubbed her eyes, which felt like they were full of sand. The elation she should have felt had been overwhelmed by the reality that mapping the genome was only the first step. Her team could analyze the terrain of the harvesters’ genetic structure, but still had no idea which parts of it were important, which parts could be turned against them. As her scientists explored this new world, more and more questions arose, but precious few answers.
 

Blinking her burning, bloodshot eyes, she put her hands back to the keyboard and began to hammer out a response to one of the emails, the daily query from the president’s scientific advisor on her team’s progress.

Nothing to report.

The phone trilled.

She glared at the phone, but stifled her curse when she saw on the caller ID display that it was Renee.

Tapping a button on the phone, she spoke into her headset as she continued typing. “What is it?”

“Hon, get up here right now.” Renee was breathless with excitement.

Naomi frowned. “What is it? Can’t you route the call to me here?”

“No, it’s on one of the secure lines. And no, I can’t say what it is on the internal phone. Just get your ass up here!”

“Okay, okay.” With a weary sigh, she hit the send button on the email to the White House. “I’ll be right there.”

***

“Hang on, kid,” Renee said, and Jack’s pulse quickened.

“Jack?” Naomi said a moment later in a soft, husky voice.
 

“Yeah, baby, it’s me. Listen, I’m sorry about what happened…”

“Just shut up, you idiot,” she told him, half laughing, half crying. “When the President told us you’d been killed…that nearly killed me, too. Oh, God, Jack. Don’t you ever do something that stupid again.”

“Well, you weren’t exactly just sitting on your tuffet in Los Angeles, if I remember right,” he told her, grinning from ear to ear. “The last word I’d had from Carl when we were trying to get out of Russia was that you were trapped there. So you can’t give me too hard of a time, you know?”

“I’ll give you the hardest time of your life the instant I get my hands on you,” she promised. “But you’re okay, you’re not hurt?”

“I was a little banged up, but not too bad.” He paused, the smile evaporating. “It was a tough mission. Mikhailov and Rudenko didn’t make it.”

“God, I’m so sorry. It looks like Vijay Chidambaram and his cousin Kiran didn’t make it, either.”

“Why, what happened?” India had been the first stop on Jack’s long, ill-fated journey to see what had happened to Dr. Vijay Chidambaram, a former colleague from the EDS. Vijay had discovered that harvesters had been unleashed in India, and Jack and Vijay’s cousin Kiran, an officer of the Indian Army, had barely survived an encounter with the monsters in a remote Indian village.
 

“The Indian government was flying them over to us on one of their Air Force transport planes, but it disappeared three days ago. The Indians think it went down over Iran or Turkey, but no one has reported finding it.”

“Shit.” Jack lifted his eyes to the ceiling. “Naomi…”

One of the soldiers on the communications team stiffened, then stood and shouted something in Norwegian. Morgensen, Nesvold, and the other senior officers whirled around, expressions of total disbelief on their faces. The quiet buzz in the ops center died. Nesvold barked a command, and the map display shifted, zooming out to show the northern hemisphere from Norway east to the Sea of Okhotsk. Red rings appeared around four locations deep in Siberia.

A klaxon blared, shattering the silence as red arcs began to rise from each of the rings. All at once, the soldiers at the workstations were talking in urgent tones into their headsets or were typing madly at their consoles. One of the watch officers shouted something, and a moment later Jack sensed a slight change of pressure in his ears.
 

They’ve closed the blast doors
, he thought, a cold trickle of fear running down the back of his neck. “Hang on,” he told Naomi. “Something’s happening.”

CLEANSING FIRE

General-Polkovnik
Nikolai Krylov stood at a special console at the center of the operations center that was the heart of the massive complex buried deep beneath Mount Yamantau in the Ural Mountains some thirteen hundred kilometers east of Moscow. All eyes were fixed on the main map display’s depiction of the harvester infestations that had consumed southern Russia and had swept into southeastern Ukraine. Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan were also afflicted, but Krylov knew that few of the handful of men gathered around the console, the
vlasti
who held the power in Russia, gave much thought to the fate of those nations. They were intent on trying to save what they could of their own.

Krylov had devoted his life to the service of his country. True, such service had paid off with its own rewards over time (
perks
, as the Americans might say), but he had not spent thirty years working his way up through the ranks to command the Strategic Rocket Forces for nice living quarters and a Mercedes SUV. He had done it because he was a patriot whose grandfather had perished in the Battle of Kursk at the hands of the Germans, and whose father had lived in fear and distrust of the West during the Cold War. Defending his country, defending Russia, was in his blood. And now his blood ran cold at what he must do to save the Motherland.
 

“All regiments report full readiness,
general-polkovnik
.” He nodded at his second in command, who verbalized for the sake of posterity what Krylov could see on the status board to the right of the map display.
 

They had evacuated what military forces they could from the Southern Military District after a series of desperate and utterly disastrous attempts to regain control of the major cities in the south. The 49
^th
and 58
^th
Armies had been annihilated at Krasnodar and Stavropol. The 7
^th
Air Assault Division had not had to deploy to find the enemy. The unit’s garrison at Stavropol, from where the initial ill-fated mission by the airborne troops against Ulan-Erg nearly a week before had been launched, had been overrun that same day, with the garrison at Novorossiysk falling two days later.