Reaping The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 3) (34 page)

Boisson reached over and touched his arm. “Wait!” She pointed off to the right. “Look!”

He stopped the Humvee and looked where she was pointing. “Son of a bitch,” he whispered.
 

A KC-135 was sitting off by itself on a much smaller auxiliary apron north of the main facility. The plane was facing toward the main runway, its tail not much more than a stone’s throw from the road that ran along the passenger terminal on the far side.
 

“I’m not sure, but it looks like the tires are intact,” Boisson said carefully.

“Don’t jinx us, woman.” Ferris spun the wheel and took the Humvee onto the asphalt access between the taxiway they’d been on and the apron where the KC-135 was parked.
 

“I’m sure it has tires,” she said.
 

Ferris had to work hard to keep his eyes on the asphalt ahead of him to watch for harvesters and not pin his gaze on the plane. “Come on, gorgeous,” he said. “Stay beautiful for old Al.”

Boisson glanced at him. “Ferris, you have some serious female issues.”

“Why the hell do you think I’m single?”

Ferris brought the Humvee to a halt just short of the aircraft’s nose. Taking a deep breath, he said, “Let’s check her out.”

He, Boisson, and three of the agents got out, while the fourth remained on the .50 caliber machine gun. Once on the ground, Ferris led the others, ever watchful for larvae, on a clockwise circuit around the plane. “Landing gear looks good, all the tires and hydraulic lines seem to be intact.” He scanned every inch of the plane that he could see from the ground, looking for any telltale signs of problems. As he rounded the port side main gear and headed back toward the nose, he said, “I don’t see any damage on her belly, and nothing’s leaking that I can see.” Next to the plane was a big box on wheels with an electrical cable snaking across the asphalt to where it plugged into the plane. “We’ve even got an APU, assuming it still works.”

“Ferris,” Boisson said, “I hate to ask this, but let’s assume this plane is operable. Can you even fly it?”

He turned and gaped at her. “Lady, I can fly just about any goddamn thing with wings, with or without engines.” He stomped over to the crew hatch, which was on the lower side of the nose on the port side. “Can I fly it? Jesus.”

The hatch was closed, which didn’t surprise him. What did come as a surprise was that the ladder that provided access to the main deck was on the ground.
 

“I take it the ladder shouldn’t be there,” Boisson said.
 

“No.” He shrugged. “Whatever. Let’s see what we’ve got.” He opened the hatch slowly, peering into the darkness beyond. “Don’t see anything.”
 

Grabbing the ladder off the ground, he stuck the hooked end up into the plane and secured it. As he began to climp up, he felt Boisson’s hand on his shoulder.
 

“No you don’t, flyboy,” she said. “I’ll go first, then Willis. We’ll make sure the coast is clear first.”

“Right,” Ferris said, disappointed. “Sure.”

He stepped away from the ladder to make way for Boisson and Willis, who went up fast, pistols in hand.

A few moments later he heard Boisson’s voice calling from above. “It’s clear. Come on up.”

Relieved, he climbed up the ladder. Shaking off the helping hands offered by Boisson and Willis, he got to his feet. He was standing in the cockpit, just behind the seats for the pilot and copilot and across from the navigator’s station. After quickly scanning the instrument panels, which were festooned with dials, gauges, buttons, and switches, he said, “Nothing looks like anybody’s taken a hammer to it or blasted it with a gun. Past that we’ll have to see what happens when we start throwing switches.” To Boisson, he said, “Did you see anything wrong in back?”

“No, but we were only looking for things that might eat you. You’re the one who knows planes.”

“Yeah, I vaguely recall saying something to that effect.” Ferris reached over and flipped some switches that brought up the overhead lights. Then he headed aft through the door in the bulkhead that separated the cockpit from the cargo area. All but four of the dozen or so passenger seats, which were nothing more than red nylon webbing over a light metal frame, on each side of the compartment were folded up and stowed against the fuselage. Several pallets, mostly laden with cardboard boxes, were secured with heavy duty nylon tie-downs in the center.
 

Ferris made his way through the cavernous hold past the pallets and the two auxiliary power units before he came to the boom operator’s station near the rear of the plane.
 

“Hold up,” Boisson said, her voice sharp.
 

Ferris turned around. “What is it?”

Boisson held up a dark brown wrapper of an MRE meal packet. It was open, with the end of the spoon sticking out. “Mediterranean Chicken,” she read from the side of the packet. “And it’s warm.” She smelled it, then stuck her finger in it and gave it a taste. “Still good and fresh.” Setting the packet back down where she’d found it near the forward APU, she brought up her rifle. “We’re not alone in here.”

Ferris drew his Desert Eagle and turned back toward the boom operator’s station, which was a recessed cubby below the main deck, partly hidden by two stacked rows of large orange oxygen tanks. “Look,” he called out, “we know you’re in here. We’re friendlies. Just come on out so we can talk. We don’t want anybody to get hurt.”

All he got in return was silence. But it wasn’t the silence of a completely empty plane.
Someone
was here. He could feel it.
 

“Please,” he tried again. “Come out. We’re not harvesters, if that’s what you’re worried about. My name is Al Ferris, and I work for, ah, the government. I’m a contractor, sort of, and a pilot. The folks with me are FBI agents. They’ll come dig you out if they have to, but I’d like to avoid that, and I think you probably would, too. These people don’t screw around. What do you say?”

For a moment, there was only more silence. Then a young woman’s voice said from the darkness of the boom operator’s pit, “What do you want?”

“We need this plane,” Al said, “if it’ll fly.”

“I think Colonel Cox will have something to say about that,” the voice said from the darkness, “when she and the others get back.”

Ferris glanced at Boisson, who was slowly moving toward the dark recess in the deck where the woman was hiding. He shook his head, and Boisson stopped. “How long has your colonel been gone?”

A long pause. “Two days. She and the others went out to get some spare parts. She told me to guard the plane. She’ll be back. I know she will.”

Ferris shook his head. “What’s your name, kid?”

“I’m Staff Sergeant Kurnow,” she shot back. “And I’m no kid.”

He laughed. “When you get to be as old as me, Kurnow, everybody’s a damn kid.” Then, serious again, he said, “If your Colonel Cox has been gone two days, she’s not coming back. You know there was a hell of a battle here, right? You probably watched the fireworks through the windows.”

“Yeah, I saw.”

There was no easy way for Ferris to say what had to be said. “It was a slaughterhouse, Kurnow. There weren’t any survivors. And the hangars and other stuff for your squadron were pretty well toasted, too.”

“The 155
^th
isn’t…wasn’t my squadron,” Kurnow said, finally emerging onto the main deck. She was petite, Ferris saw, maybe five foot four and probably weighed all of a hundred pounds soaking wet. Her short cut blond hair was a greasy mess, and she looked like she hadn’t slept in a week. She was also holding a 9mm pistol pointed at his chest, and he noticed that her hand wasn’t shaking at all. “We’re from the 171
^st
Air Refueling Squadron out of Selfridge Air National Guard Base in Michigan. We were on a mission to refuel some B-52s and had to divert here after we had problems with the cabin pressurization. The ground crew had just finished testing the repairs when…when…” She bit her lip.

“When your colonel saw that things were going to shit out there and wanted to try and salvage what she could before the base was lost,” Ferris finished for her.

Kurnow nodded. “She left me here to watch the plane. They were only supposed to be gone thirty minutes, maybe an hour.”

“Now it’s time to make sure she’s not one of
them
.” Boisson’s voice was quiet, but her tone made it clear that it wasn’t a negotiable issue. She withdrew a lighter from her pocket.

“Uh, that’s not such a good idea,” Ferris told her. “Remember, this plane is a huge flying gas tank. If it’s fully loaded, we’re sitting on around a hundred tons of fuel.” He wished they had thermal imagers, but there hadn’t been enough to go around and they were stuck with the regular night vision goggles.

“Then what do you suggest? We don’t have a cat, and we’re sure as hell not trusting her on word alone.”

“Boisson!” The agent she’d left outside had climbed into the plane and was calling from the cockpit.

“What is it?”

“We’ve got movement out here. Looks like harvesters moving up from the main hangar area.”

“It’s the lights,” Kurnow said. “They’re drawn to them at night.”

“Shit,” Ferris breathed as he dashed toward the cockpit and hit the switches, throwing the plane into darkness.

“You stay here,” Boisson told him as she slid past and took hold of the ladder, her night vision goggles once again in place. She pulled a Taser from the holster on her belt and handed it to him. “This is the only other way we have to test for harvesters if we can’t use a lighter.” If Kurnow was a harvester, she’d revert to her natural form after being shocked by the weapon. “The electrodes shouldn’t arc and light off any fuel fumes if they’re buried in her skin. If I’m wrong, I guess we won’t be around long enough to worry about it.” She stared at him, and he felt like he was looking into the face of an alien. “And don’t you dare be a sentimental sap and not do what needs to be done or I’ll fucking shoot you.”

Then she was gone, sliding down the ladder.
 

“God, what a hardass,” Kurnow whispered.

“You don’t know the half of it.” Dropping his own night vision goggles into place, he turned to find Kurnow standing just a few feet away, looking at him, her gun lowered by her side. With a sigh, he raised the Taser and took aim at her chest. “Sorry, kid,” he said softly as he squeezed the trigger.

THE HITCHHIKER

Jack and Melissa looked everywhere for Koshka. Jack crawled on his hands and knees under the LAV, walked the perimeter out to the wire, searched through the bushes and shrubs around the lab building, and asked every Marine he came across if he or she had seen Naomi’s white cat.

No one had.
 

“Naomi’s going to have your head, Dawson,” Carl told him after Jack had returned empty-handed. Jack set Alexander down. He’d had to carry him most of the time during their search.

Melissa’s cheeks were wet with tears. “It’s my fault,” she said in a hoarse voice. “I was supposed to watch after her.”

“Koshka can’t have just disappeared into thin air,” Jack insisted.

“That doesn’t leave us with very many possibilities,” Lowmack, who’d been talking with Carl about the progress on their defenses, pointed out.
 

Carl’s expression hardened. “What if someone took her?”

Jack shook his head. “Who would do that? Everyone in the convoy knows how important she and Alexander are now, especially since all the other cats are gone.”

“It wasn’t one of my Marines,” Lowmack said. “I can guarantee you that. Even the ones who normally hate cats would never let one come to harm or let someone other than Jack or Naomi walk off with her.”

“What if there’s a harvester with us,” Melissa said, “one that we don’t know about?”

“I don’t think that’s one of our worries, young lady,” Lowmack told her with a smile.

Jack was about to open his mouth to agree, then snapped it shut.
 

Carl stared at him. “What’s the matter, Dawson?”

“I don’t like to admit the thought,” Jack said, glancing at Melissa, “but maybe we shouldn’t dismiss that possibility so quickly.”

“How would that even be possible?” Lowmack asked. “Except for the seven lab rats, everyone in the convoy was human when we left SEAL-2, and we didn’t stop to pick up any hitchhikers.”

Carl and Jack exchanged a look. “We didn’t verify everyone’s identity before we left,” Carl said. “We were in too much of a rush and just went on the belief that there were enough of us with eyes on the others that we maintained continuity on our identities. And any reaction from the cats was already messed up because of Naomi’s pets. But that’s not the real problem, is it?”

“No,” Jack agreed. “When the crew of that Humvee was rescued on the way here, we might have picked up a hitchhiker or an impostor.”

“Bull.” Lowmack shook his head. “There’s no way.”

Jack gave him a hard look. “How many people were in that Humvee when we left?”

“Three. The driver, a rifleman riding shotgun, and the machine gunner.”

“And how many were in the Humvee that picked them up?”

“There should have been four in that one.”

Carl said, “And how many people got out of that Humvee when we got here? You did the head count on every vehicle, right?”

“There were seven…no, eight. Shit.” He looked sick. “But even if I fucked up on the count, the other Marines would have known they had someone who didn’t belong.”

“During that mess of a firefight, in the dark?” Jack shook his head. “For all we know, a harvester could have claimed it was a survivor from the other Humvee or the truck that we lost during the same battle, and could have been masquerading as one of the dead crewmen. We weren’t able to stop and count up the bodies, and all they would’ve had to do is act panicked like everyone else trying to pile into that Humvee. Nobody would have even thought of leaving someone behind.”

“And the thermal imagers might not have been much help with all the gunfire and the flames in the background,” Lowmack finished, a note of anger creeping into his voice.” He looked down at Melissa. “Maybe we need to put you in charge, kid. You’re sure as hell smarter than we are.”