Bitter Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 2) (4 page)

Naomi’s phone rang. “Excuse me,” she said as she pulled it from her purse. She was about to hit the ignore button when she saw who it was from.

Howard Morgan.

She recognized the name, as Morgan Pharmaceuticals was one of the companies that had tried to recruit her before she accepted the position with New Horizons. Morgan himself had interviewed her, and she had been extremely impressed with him. But New Horizons had offered her nearly twice as much money. In that phase of her life, money had meant far more than anything else, and she had taken the job with New Horizons, working for Rachel Kempf. Or what had masqueraded as Kempf.

With a tingle of excitement, she touched the answer button. “Dr. Perrault.”

“Dr. Perrault, this is Howard Morgan. Let me first say that I was extremely relieved to learn you were alive. I was also wondering if I might be able to entice you to work for me.”

CHAPTER THREE

Kapitan
Sergei Mikhailov stared out the window of the Mi-17 helicopter as it swept low over the endless hectares of fallow farmland of southern Russia. He tried to ignore the knot in his stomach that seemed to tighten with every kilometer that passed on the way to their objective, an agricultural research facility outside the town of Elista in the Republic of Kalmykia.
 

He glanced up at
Starshiy Serzhant
Pavel Rudenko, who sat in the seat across from him. Rudenko bobbed his head and attempted a smile, but it came out as a grimace. Even Rudenko, a veteran of the savage fighting in Chechnya years before and one of the toughest men Mikhailov had ever known, was worried.

Mikhailov keyed his microphone to talk to the pilots. “How long until we reach the target?”

“Ten minutes.”

Holding up both hands for Rudenko, Mikhailov extended all ten fingers. With a quick nod, the big NCO released his harness and began a final check of the other twenty-three men, a platoon of Mikhailov’s company, in the helicopter. The rest of the company had been left on standby back at Novorossiysk.
 

While Rudenko checked that the men were ready, Mikhailov pulled a battered canvas map case from one of his uniform’s cargo pockets and took a final look at the operations map, reviewing the situation in his head.

His company was part of the 23
rd
Airborne Regiment of the 76
th
Airborne Division at Pskov, in northern Russia. Under normal circumstances, the 7
th
Airborne Division, headquartered at Novorossiysk, would have handled any operations this far south.
 

But, as Mikhailov had learned the previous afternoon when his unit had been deployed, the circumstances were far from normal. Three days ago, all the researchers at an agricultural research facility about thirty kilometers east of Elista had disappeared. Fifty-three men and women had simply vanished into thin air overnight. After a round of frantic calls from their families to the authorities, police units were dispatched to the remote facility. They, too, disappeared. The senior police officer had reported arriving at the facility, but that was all. There had been no calls for help from anyone.

Family members had then gone to the facility. They had seen many cars, including those of the police, parked at the facility, but there had been no sign of anyone. Those who had gone through the gates, which were normally guarded day and night, and entered the building had disappeared. Others, fearful of entering, had returned home and contacted the police.

The surviving family members finally raised enough of an uproar that the local authorities were able to get the Army involved. A squad from the 247
th
Airborne Regiment of the 7
th
Airborne Division had been sent in to investigate. The helicopter carrying them had landed outside the facility gates. Once the paratroopers were on the ground, the helo took off and circled the facility, the pilots watching as the men below entered the complex of buildings.

The paratroopers never came out. The pilots circled as long as they could, trying to regain contact with the ground team, but they were gone. Vanished. Shaken and deeply disturbed, the helicopter crew returned to Novorossiysk, where they reported what had happened.

That had taken place yesterday morning. Before noon, Mikhailov was in front of his division and regimental commanders, receiving his deployment orders. He was disturbed not so much by the nature of the deployment, but by the revelation from the division commander that the former President of the Republic of Kalmykia had very publicly claimed to have been contacted by aliens in 1997. The general had not mentioned it as a joke. While most had dismissed the claim as the raving of a rich and eccentric man, others had expressed more concern over the possibility that the republic’s former president had revealed state secrets to the alleged aliens. The general had thought the detail was relevant, considering the strange nature of the situation for which the airborne troops had been called in. And Mikhailov had been the clear choice to lead the mission in light of his experience on the island of Spitsbergen the year before.

If Mikhailov’s suspicions were correct and Kalmykia’s eccentric former president had been contacted by harvesters as far back as 1997, there seemed only one likely scenario for what was now happening at the research facility outside Elista. The researchers had likely been trying to duplicate the work there that Jack Dawson and Naomi Perrault had told him had happened in the United States. The major difference was that Jack and Naomi could combat the harvesters there. Here in Russia, where the Earth Defense Society had no resources, the harvesters could have gotten away with anything.
 

This facility was a case in point. It was not a government operation. It was privately owned, but it was not clear by whom. It had no name. To those who worked there, their families, and people from the nearest villages, it was simply known as “The Facility.” It was an enigma, and a very dangerous one.

Staring at the operations map on the wall of the briefing room as the general had given him his instructions while his regimental commander sat in silence, Mikhailov had felt a cold stab of fear lance through his chest.

By afternoon, he and his men were on an Il-76 transport aircraft, flying south to Stavropol, the headquarters of the 247
th
Airborne Regiment. And at the crack of dawn this morning, he and his men were on an Mi-17 helicopter, flying the two hundred and fifty kilometers from there to the research facility. The pilots who had delivered the ground team yesterday were flying Mikhailov in. He prayed that he and his men would have better luck than their previous passengers.
 

Rudenko returned to his seat, giving Mikhailov a thumbs-up. He did not have a headset, and there was no point in trying to talk above the roar of the engines and rotors. Rudenko made his own last minute check, pulling a massive pistol from a holster under his left arm. It was a Desert Eagle chambered for .50 Action Express rounds, and was a twin to the one Mikhailov carried. Three months after the atomic bomb had been dropped on California, killing Jack, Naomi, and the others of the Earth Defense Society, an unmarked box had mysteriously appeared in Mikhailov’s apartment, sitting on the kitchen table. The box contained the two handguns, two spare magazines each, and two hundred rounds of ammunition.
 

When he saw the two handguns, the same as Jack carried when they had all met on Spitsbergen during the battle for the Svalbard seed vault, Mikhailov knew that Jack and Naomi must still be alive. The guns were a message, and a gift for him and Rudenko. The older NCO, upon receiving one of the weapons, had been mightily impressed. No stranger to the workings of the black market and smuggling in general, Rudenko could only shake his head in admiration, both at the weapon itself and what it must have taken to get them to Mikhailov.

Checking back through the small box in which he kept those things most important to him, Mikhailov found the small slip of paper Naomi had given him on Spitsbergen. On it was a phone number and a nondescript email address. With a tingle of excitement, he sent an email to the address with only his name, as Naomi had instructed. Fifteen minutes later, he had his answer: they were alive, as were most others from the EDS, although that was to be kept secret. Mikhailov had breathed a huge sigh of relief: he had been greatly saddened at the news that Jack and Naomi had been killed.

After that, he had received a great deal of information from his “dead” American friends on the harvesters. He had not been able to share it with anyone but Rudenko, who did not profess to understand much of it, but it had helped Mikhailov to better come to grips with what had happened on Spitsbergen, and proved that he hadn’t imagined it all as some claimed he had.

Since then, except for some training on the firing range when it was deserted, he and Rudenko had kept the Desert Eagles out of sight, for he didn’t want his superiors to ask inconvenient questions.
 

Mikhailov had hoped to never have occasion to use the huge handgun, but was now comforted by the weapon’s bulk. Rudenko dropped out the magazine and checked that it was fully loaded before slamming it back into the big pistol’s grip. Then he pulled the slide partway back to make sure there was a round in the chamber. Satisfied, he slid it back into the holster.

The two men also carried KS-K semi-automatic shotguns, as did half the men in the company. The rest carried the standard assault rifles used by the airborne troops. It was an unusual mix of weapons, but his division commander had authorized it without argument. He had read Mikhailov’s report of the action on Spitsbergen, and was a firm believer that more firepower was always better. Mikhailov would have liked to get flamethrowers such as those used during the Great Patriotic War, but they were no longer in service. Instead, two men in each squad were carrying RPO-M thermobaric rockets. They were extremely powerful weapons that could level a small building, but couldn’t be used in tight quarters. They would be his last resort.
 

His reverie was interrupted by a call from the pilot. “There it is.”
 

Mikhailov looked out the window. Two hundred feet below them was the facility, which had four buildings. One, the lab building, was roughly thirty meters by sixty. Behind it were three much larger rectangular buildings, identical in appearance and more than a hundred meters long. Two of the larger ones were where test crops were grown under controlled conditions. While they technically weren’t greenhouses, that’s how Mikhailov thought of them. The third large building was for livestock, and next to it was a feed silo and a large water tank. All of the buildings were joined by enclosed connectors so the researchers could move between them regardless of the weather.
 

Around the facility were several fallow fields. The facility specialized in developing hybrid strains of corn, but the growing season was months away yet.
 

Except in the greenhouse buildings. There, under artificial light and heat, corn and other plants could be grown year round.

“Take us around the facility,” Mikhailov ordered. He looked up as Rudenko leaned against the side of the fuselage next to him, looking out the window. The older man’s face bore a stony expression.
 

“Understood.” The Mi-17 began a slow circle of the facility.
 

The parking lot in front of the two lab buildings was full of cars. Nearly two dozen more, including the police vehicles, were parked along the entrance road. Another half dozen were parked outside the gate.
 

There was no one moving about, or visible in the small windows of the lab building. There were no bodies or signs of violence. It was as if the buildings of the complex had simply consumed everyone.

The thought sent a shiver down his spine.

As the Mi-17 continued its circuit, the rear of the animal husbandry building came into view.

“
Chto za huy
!”
 

Even above the clamor of the engines, Mikhailov heard Rudenko’s curse.

The rear wall of the animal husbandry building where cows, horses, goats, and other livestock were kept as guinea pigs for the crops the facility developed looked like it had been beaten from within by a giant hammer. The metal siding bulged outward at irregular intervals and in odd shapes. Mikhailov could swear that one of the bulges formed the near perfect outline of a cow. Seen on a television show it would have been comical. Here, it was terrifying.
 

Several sections had also been knocked out, the metal and insulation of the walls bent outward as if something had burst from within the building.
 

Whatever had been inside had clearly gotten out.

Mikhailov momentarily considered changing his plan. He had intended to land his platoon at the front of the complex and sweep through the buildings with what he hoped would be overwhelming force if they met any resistance. Now, he wondered if he should not drop a squad at the rear of the complex as a blocking force in case whatever was inside, if anyone or anything indeed remained, tried to escape.
 

“Let the helicopter be our eyes to watch the rear,” Rudenko suggested, reading his mind. “It has teeth in case anything tries to escape.”
 

Outside the window, Mikhailov could see the rocket pod hanging from the helicopter’s weapons pylon. A matching one hung on the other side.

The burly NCO leaned closer. “Best we keep the men together when we go inside. I do not like the looks of this,
kapitan
.”

Accepting Rudenko’s suggestion as the hard-earned wisdom that it was, Mikhailov nodded his agreement and keyed his microphone. “Pilot, let’s finish circling the complex, then set down outside the main gate.”

The Mi-17 began to move forward again. The other parts of the facility appeared to be undamaged, and in two minutes the helicopter had set down.

Mikhailov had moved to the rear and was the first on the ground as the cargo ramp extended.