Bitter Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 2) (10 page)

“Would I ever do that?” Renee snorted. “I was trying to figure out what common denominator these whacko places that I can’t pronounce might have. It took me a while, but get this: the places in China and Brazil were right in the middle of prime corn growing regions, and those two countries are the second and third largest producers of corn in the world behind the U.S. of A. That place in Russia is right smack in the middle of their corn belt, too.” She paused. “So was where Vijay’s car got creamed over in India. Only Brazil and India have harvest seasons this early in the year, but I’m sure the other countries have greenhouses for playing around with stuff off-season. Call me a skeptic, but I’m having a hard time swallowing this particular cornbread.”

Jack snapped forward in his seat. “Holy shit. But you said that the events in China and Brazil were hoaxes?”

“That’s what the local governments trotted out after a few hysterical news reports about mass disappearances. But both China and Brazil sent in police or army units to check things out, and found everybody where they were supposed to be. Mostly.”

“What do you mean by
mostly?
”

“They found the adults and older teens. The younger kids all seemed to be off at grandma’s house in the next village. There also weren’t any dogs or other smaller animals around, and the same with big animals like horses and cows. They must all have been off visiting grandma, too.”

The queasy feeling in Jack’s stomach had congealed into a cold metal ball. “The harvesters can’t mimic things that are much smaller or larger than their natural form,” he recalled aloud. “So they couldn’t mimic anything that wasn’t roughly adult human in size.”

“That’s what I was thinking. No specific mention was made about cats, but I’m sure there weren’t any of those around, either.”
 

“Did you tell Carl?”

“What do you take me for, a dumb-ass? Of course I did. And the poor dear went straight to the new director. The stupid asshole tossed Carl out and swore he’d take Carl’s badge and gun if he ever came to him with such ‘patent nonsense’ again.”

“Crap.” Jack paused a moment, thinking. “Okay, let me ask you something. Are we just jumping to conclusions here, reading too much into all this?”
 

“Sure we are, Jack. This stuff I’m seeing could be pure crapola and might have nothing more malignant behind it than my Aunt Bernice.” Her voice lowered. “But we’ve both seen the boogeyman, and we know he’s real. And I think where we’re going to find him, if he’s still really out there somewhere, is in junk like this that otherwise we’d just laugh at in the grocery store checkout line. These news tidbits are potential indicators, but if someone who didn’t know about the harvesters checks them out…”

“They’d just think it was a hoax,” Jack finished for her.

“Bingo. If this pans out, Jack, we could have an epidemic on our hands.”

“I know.” Jack had a hard time imagining the implications. Two dozen harvesters had nearly had the world in their chitinous claws. Granted, they had been here who knows how long and had time to infiltrate key areas of the government, military, and industrial infrastructure in various countries around the world. But if humanity ever faced hundreds or thousands of the things, there was no telling what hell might be unleashed. “If these incidents represent harvester infestations, they could only have originated with The Bag, right?”

“As far as we know, yes, but that’s still an assumption. We don’t have any way to know what else the harvesters might have been up to.”

“Okay, I’ll grant that. But let’s start with The Bag, and for the moment let’s say that some of these incidents are what we think they are. How could we have multiple outbreaks so far apart, and in a window of only a few weeks? What’s the link, besides them being located in corn-producing regions?”

“I don’t know, Jack. If we look at it as an epidemic, there has to be a vector, right? A delivery agent, like fleas carrying the plague. I guess we should think of the New Horizons plant as the index case, since that’s really ground zero for The Bag. Assuming, of course, that we’re not just making this up out of paranoia.”

Jack stared at the wall across the room, his eyes unfocused and mind spinning through possibilities. “It’s the timing. If there’s a vector, let’s assume it’s someone from the facility, someone we missed somehow. He or she must have stayed out of sight for a while after the New Horizons facility was destroyed.”

“Maybe they weren’t lying low, Jack,” Renee mused. “If I remember correctly, Naomi said that this corn variant was fast growing, taking about sixty days from planting to harvest. So if the corn’s ready for harvest now in late January, it must have been planted sometime in late November or early December, right?”

“The presidential election,” Jack mused. “Curtis’s policies on exporting or smuggling any genetic material or technology out of the country without authorization were as tough as the terrorism laws, but Miller had made a campaign promise to open up the floodgates again. So maybe our vector was waiting for a better time. Curtis was a lame duck, Congress hated those policies because they put a huge stick up corporate America’s ass, and the incoming President made it clear he was going to tear down that particular wall.”

“So if our little thief holding The Bag,” Renee snorted at her own pun, “had been busy lining up buyers, he — or she — would have been ready to do a little kettle corn carpetbagging.”

“And any of those countries, and more, would have paid a small fortune for the technology in the New Horizons seed.”

“It’s ridiculous, Jack. Wild speculation.”

“I know. Totally preposterous.”

“Shit.” Renee blew out a breath, and it sounded like a tiny hurricane on Jack’s end. “What do you want me to do?”

Jack thought a moment, trying to get past the feeling of being caged. Right when he most needed the authority and resources he’d had at SEAL, he was losing them, becoming Joe Civilian again. “I doubt there’s any way we’d be able to pin down buyers coming to meet our hypothetical grain salesman here in the U.S. There are just too many variables. So let’s assume for the sake of argument that he did most or all of the traveling, at least to deliver the seeds.” Jack had a hard time imagining that getting the seeds out of the country would be difficult. The vector could have sewn a few in the liner of his jacket, or just dropped some in a plastic bag and stuffed it in his pocket. That was the biggest weakness in his little election day trigger theory: getting the seeds through customs wouldn’t have been hard, so whoever it was must have been sufficiently worried about the steep penalties of the GMO tech transfer policies that they hadn’t dared to take anything out before Miller opened the floodgates again. “Let’s run with that. Make a list of anyone who traveled between the last week of October and mid-December, for starters, to all the countries with potential events. Then see if you can cross-index any matches with phone records or any other personal data for people affiliated with bio-tech companies or government organizations. If we don’t find anything juicy, we can expand the date range of the search.”

“I like how you said
we
, Jack, considering that you’re going to have your ass on the beach in LA in a few days, watching girls in skimpy bikinis while I do all your dirty work. Which, I might add, I can’t legally tell you about after Friday.”

“Yeah,” Jack replied, a trace of bitterness in his voice, “there’s always that.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll figure out some way to let you know what I find without getting our asses thrown in jail. What about potential buyers for that technology here at home?”

“I don’t even want to think about that Renee.” But her logic was irrefutable. The most logical market the buyer would sell to first was right here in the States. “And there’s something you’re wrong about.”

“Oh, do tell.”

“I won’t be laying on a beach in LA working on my tan. After I get this mess cleaned up and hook up with Naomi, I’ll be on the first flight out to India. If Vijay discovered something, I want to find out what it was. Assuming that he lives long enough to tell about it.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

As Mikhailov stood there, staring at the stalks of corn that were clearly ripe for harvest, he was struck with indecision. The last thing he wanted to do was to send his men through it, as their visibility would be reduced to arm’s length, even with the flashlights. If anything was hiding in this forest of malevolent-looking stalks, his men wouldn’t stand a chance. If he had thought there was the slightest chance that anyone was left alive in this place, anyone human, he would have ordered his men in without a second thought. Going in harm’s way was what soldiers did. But he had no intention of mindlessly sending them into a potential slaughter for nothing.

There was something else that puzzled him. “Why is this even here?” He turned to Rudenko. “Why is this corn not all gone like whatever had been planted in the other building?”

“Perhaps it — they? — were sated?”

“I do not believe so. The lab building was devastated. The greenhouse behind us was cleared out. While we have not yet seen inside, we know the animal husbandry building that lies before us suffered damage.” He looked around. “But in here, in between, all appears normal. None of these plants have been touched. Why?”

Rudenko shook his head. “Perhaps they had no taste for this kind?”

“Or perhaps they do not care to eat their children.” Mikhailov moved closer to the nearest stalk, looking carefully behind it with the aid of the light attached to his shotgun. The eerie shadows cast by the plant sent a shiver up his spine. He turned to Rudenko, whose eyes shone like curved glass in the glare of reflected light. “Move the men along the central walkway here to the other side of the building. Then burn everything to ashes.”

With obvious relief, Rudenko turned and quickly relayed Mikhailov’s orders. The men of the platoon began to move quickly along the central walkway, keeping their eyes and weapons trained on the corn stalks and whatever might be lurking behind them.

* * *

Ryadavoy
Pavel Ivanovich Sleptsev heaved a sigh of relief as he heard the whispered orders for the platoon to move forward into the next building and get out of this accursed place. The corn stalks, standing twice his own height, their shadows dancing in the moving beams of the flashlights, made his skin crawl. A native of Saint Petersburg, a city boy, this was as close as he had ever come to being on a farm. He did not consider himself a coward and would never admit it to anyone but his closest friends, but his stomach was bound in a tight knot of fear. While he had no better explanation, it was clear to his young eyes that whatever happened here had not been a terrorist act.
 

“Come on.” The man next to him, Kamensky, headed toward the central walkway.

Sleptsev turned to follow him.

“
Help me
.”

He stopped at the whispered words, his head whipping around. The voice had come from behind him. From somewhere in the corn.

“Help me, please! I’m hurt.” It was a young woman’s voice, now barely above a whisper. She was obviously in pain. “I can’t move.”

“Kamensky!” The other soldier didn’t hear, and Sleptsev dared not raise his voice any more or Rudenko would cut his balls off for violating tactical discipline.
 

Kamensky’s silhouette disappeared into the darkness.

Sleptsev was alone.

Turning in the direction of the woman’s voice, he pointed the light of his weapon into the corn, careful to keep his finger off the trigger so he didn’t accidentally shoot her.
 

“Listen,” he said urgently. “I’m going to get you some help. I’ll be right back.”

“No, please!” She sobbed. “Don’t leave me! Everyone else left me. I’ve been here all alone. If you leave me, you’ll never come back!”

“Yes, I will! I promise. It’ll just take a moment.”

“Please, just take me with you. I can’t stand it here.”
 

He tensed as he heard a rustle of movement. A hand emerged from the corn. An arm, then a face as the woman, barely more than a girl, dragged herself toward him, panting with exertion. Her face was dirty and caked with blood, her blond hair matted. She looked at him, a desperate expression on her face, with one bright blue eye; the other was swollen shut by an ugly blue-black bruise that ran from her forehead to her cheek.

That clinched it. He couldn’t just leave her here in the dark. “Okay,” he told her, slinging his weapon over his back. “You’re going to be fine. Give me your hand, I’ll carry you.”

A stinger as long as his hand whipped out of the corn and plunged into his upper neck, just above the collar of his uniform.
 

Eyes wide with shock and surprise, Sleptsev tried to raise his arms to pull the thing out, but couldn’t. His arms were useless, paralyzed, as a wave of burning agony swept through him. He collapsed to his knees, then slumped forward, his last breath gurgling out of his ruptured trachea as the scrotum-like base of the stinger continued to pump poison into his body.

The stinger pulled away, and he heard a sickly, wet sucking sound in the darkness above. Someone knelt beside him, and for a moment he dared to hope it was Kamensky. Then he felt his rifle and the RPO-M rocket being unslung from his back, and his clothes quickly being stripped off. The flashlight was again flicked on, and in its reflected glow the last thing he saw was the image of his own face as his body was dragged into the rows of corn.

* * *

“Sleptsev,” Rudenko called as the young soldier passed by, the last one of the platoon to file by, “what the devil took you so long?”

“I am sorry,
starshiy serzhant
. I thought I heard something in the corn, but I was imagining things.” He paused. More quietly, almost embarrassed, he added, “I do not like this place.”

Rudenko grunted agreement. “Come on. Cover me. I have a little job to do.”

Sleptsev nodded, then followed Rudenko into the connector that led to the lab building.
 

“Watch the corn,” Rudenko ordered. “If anything moves, don’t hesitate. Shoot.”