Bitter Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 2) (8 page)

“The bee and worm guy? What did he say?”

“That’s the problem. He didn’t say anything. When I answered the call, I heard, I don’t know, like a big boom and maybe a scream on his end. It was really distorted and I’m not really sure. What bothers me is that I’ve tried to call him back several times, and I’ve only gotten an out of service recording. I haven’t been able to track down his family on the web, and I want you to check on him for me, if you could. I want to make sure he’s all right.”
 

While SEAL was being shut down, Jack still had all his security clearances and access to nearly every system in the intelligence community. He likely wouldn’t have to dig very deep to find Vijay, but he still had the resources to dig as far as he needed, at least for the next few days.
 

“You’ve got it. Anything else for your pleasure, ma’am?”

“You’ll find out when you get here,” she purred. “That, I can promise.”

CHAPTER SIX

“Lights.” Mikhailov’s quiet order echoed through the eerie darkness that filled the lobby of the lab building. Aside from the glass door, there were no windows, and the lights were off. He stood behind the men of the first squad, who had spread out across the lobby, covering the reception desk and the three closed doors behind it.

One of the men reached for the bank of light switches near the entry door and switched them on.

Nothing.

“Tactical lights.”

His men turned on the small but intense flashlights attached to their weapons.
 

“
Bozhe moi
,” someone whispered.

In the harsh beams, Mikhailov could see that this part of the building had been reduced to a shambles. The reception area was also likely the lab’s administration office, for he saw desks, file cabinets, and computers. Or what was left of them.

The place looked like a tornado had whipped through it. Or a battle had been fought.
 

Moving forward slowly until he could see behind the counter that ran from one side of the room to the other, Mikhailov could see that the big metal filing cabinets had been upended, and one of them had been crushed in the middle and was covered with dried blood and flecks of gore. Papers were spread everywhere, crumpled and torn, many of them stained with spatters of crimson. The white tile of the floor was splashed with stains of dark brown. Blood.

Of the computers, one looked as if it were half melted. Of the others, all that was left was metal and silicon. Everything that had been made of plastic or rubber was gone. Mikhailov saw a pile of electronic components that he suddenly realized had once been a telephone, now without its plastic skeleton.

Rudenko pointed to the door on the right, and Mikhailov nodded. While one soldier yanked the door open, two more moved through and cleared the room beyond. The pair of desks inside were upended, their blood-splashed white laminate tops facing the doorway. The tops had also been slashed and scored, and the end of one had been lopped off. There were also a half dozen holes in each desk in various places, about as big around as his little finger. At first he thought they were bullet holes, but they didn’t have the paint splintering around the edge that he would have expected to see. These looked more like sharp spikes had been driven into them. A dark viscous substance, still glistening, oozed from them.

One of his men leaned forward, extending a finger to touch the liquid.

“Touch nothing,” Mikhailov ordered. He had not only seen harvesters himself, he had also read the reports Naomi and Jack had sent him by encrypted email, and he knew they had stingers that could produce this sort of damage. “It is deadly poison.”

The man recoiled and took two steps back. The others looked nervously at the desks, then at Mikhailov.

Mikhailov knew then that if they found anything alive in this place, it would not be human. He turned to Rudenko.

“
Da, kapitan?
”

“I have reconsidered my earlier orders. I believe that anyone we may find in here will be like our
Spetsnaz
friends on Spitsbergen.” During the ill-fated mission to Spitsbergen the year before to secure the Svalbard “Doomsday” seed vault from terrorists, four
Spetsnaz
— special forces — soldiers had been attached to Mikhailov’s company. They had all been harvesters, and had managed to kill most of Mikhailov’s men. “The men are to consider anyone they encounter to be hostile, even if they appear to be a civilian.”

“Understood, sir.”

“And warn them not to touch anything like that liquid. They must take great care.”

“Sir.” Rudenko moved out of the office and repeated Mikhailov’s orders to the men outside, his voice calm and just loud enough to carry so that all could hear. Each soldier nodded his understanding.

Mikhailov looked again at the remains of the computers. “Pull the hard drives and whatever remains of any thumb drives or disks.” Even if the plastic had vanished, the data on the drives would still be intact, and might be able to tell the story of what had happened here.

Under Rudenko’s watchful eye, a pair of men quickly gutted the remains of the computers and handed the hard drives to Mikhailov. Another man produced a handful of USB drives, which now looked like the innards of electronic beetles bereft of their plastic exoskeletons. Mikhailov placed them in his cargo pockets.

Catching Rudenko’s eye, Mikhailov gave him the hand signal to proceed.

There were two other doors in the reception area. One was a bathroom. Empty, except for more bloodstains on the floor and mirror.
 

The final door opened onto the main hallway that ran the length of the building. Like the office and reception area, it was pitch black except for the soldiers’ flashlights.

As they slowly moved down the hall, they passed another set of bathrooms — empty — and several storage and utility closets, also empty. There were more signs of struggle, but only a few traces of blood could be seen. The same was true of the cafeteria. The tables and chairs had been knocked over, and there were more spatters of blood, but not many.

Then they found the labs. There were two, in large rooms on either side of the central hallway that occupied the bulk of the building’s first floor.

“You lead third and fourth squads to check the left side,” Mikhailov said to Rudenko. “I will take the first and second into the right.”

“Sir.”

“Slow and quiet,” Mikhailov ordered the men behind him as he led them into the right-side lab. His whispered voice sounded like a shout in the unnerving silence that surrounded them. Even the buzz of the helicopter was barely discernible through the building’s thick walls. “Spread out and check
everywhere
.”

The men moved a pace at a time as if they were walking on explosive eggshells, holding the stocks of their weapons tucked tight into their shoulders, fingers on the triggers as they swept the labs with the beams of their flashlights.

Much like the administrative area, the labs were a scene of utter devastation. What Mikhailov guessed must have been millions of rubles of delicate equipment had been toppled over, thrown, or smashed. Freezers the size of small cars had been knocked to the floor, their thick stainless steel dented, punctured, and even torn. One bore gouges all the way through the metal. The gouges looked like claw marks.

The men who saw that glanced nervously at one another, but they maintained their silence.

Mikhailov was suddenly aware of the vast darkness above them. “Check the ceiling.”
 

Instantly, half a dozen lights pointed upward. Most of the tiles in the drop-down ceiling had been knocked out. Beyond that, there was nothing but the concrete forming the floor of the second level, along with pipes, and conduits.

“
Kapitan
.”

Mikhailov moved forward to where a pair of soldiers were crouched near one of the big freezers.
 

“Sir, look at this.”

Kneeling down, Mikhailov shone his light over a pool of viscous, foul-smelling amber liquid at least two meters across. As disgusting as it was, it clearly was not the same as the poison residue they had seen on the desks in the administrative office. There was a stain across the floor suggesting the pool of liquid here had originally been considerably larger, but had evaporated. Bits and pieces of things glinted under the glare of the lights. Some looked like electronic components. Others he couldn’t identify.

“What is that?” He pointed to a pair of shiny nuggets near the edge of the reeking mass. One of the soldiers drew his combat knife and dragged the things out of the ooze so they could get a better look.

It took Mikhailov a moment of staring at them to realize what they were: gold crowns that had once been on someone’s teeth. Glancing at the two men, Mikhailov suspected that neither recognized what they were looking at. It was too macabre a thought.

The soldier was about to wipe the blade of his knife on his pants to clean it off before returning it to its scabbard.

“No,” Mikhailov told him. “Don’t contaminate your clothing. Leave the knife here.” The man reluctantly set the knife down on the floor. Mikhailov drew his own and handed it to him. “Here. Take mine.” It was a mental placebo, Mikhailov knew, for whatever ghastly abomination had caused the destruction here would certainly not be killed by a simple knife.

“
Spasibo, kapitan
.” The soldier gratefully slid his captain’s knife into the scabbard before standing up and backing away. The other soldier joined him, clearly relieved to distance himself from the foul-smelling pool.

Getting to his feet, Mikhailov eyed the refrigerators. There were three of them. Two lay on their sides, the doors open and the contents, hundreds of vials and dishes, spread across the floor. The third had fallen front side down, with the door still shut. “Turn it over. Check inside.”

Four men, grunting with effort, managed to heave the heavy unit on its side with a loud boom that echoed through the building.

Mikhailov’s radio suddenly came to life. Rudenko. “
Kapitan?
We heard something.”

“It was just us. We had to move something heavy. How goes your search?”

“We have cleared most of the lab area here. No contacts. Everything in here has been torn apart, as if by a pack of enraged bears. And it is much the same as with the cars: anything made of plastic or rubber is gone. Only metal and things like stone or ceramic remain. But there is hardly any blood. No bodies, no parts of bodies, either.”

“It is much the same here, although there are things made of plastic that yet remain. Proceed with your search. We will link up with you near the rear doors.”

“Understood, sir. Rudenko, out.”

Three soldiers now held their weapons pointed at the freezer door, which had remained firmly closed.

“Open it.”

A fourth man clambered onto the side of the freezer that now faced the ceiling and reached down to grasp the heavy duty handle.
 

Mikhailov aimed his own shotgun at the freezer door. “Now!”

The soldier on the freezer yanked on the handle, then leaped back out of the way to get clear of the line of fire.
 

As if in slow motion, fixed in the beams of half a dozen flashlights, the door fell open, banging heavily onto the floor.

Something leaped out, screeching.
 

Mikhailov and the others opened fire.

The results were spectacular. Mikhailov and the three soldiers who had been covering the freezer door were armed with shotguns, but the rounds with which they were loaded did not contain slugs or buckshot. Instead, they were loaded with a special military version of zirconium-based shotgun shells often known as Dragon’s Breath. After studying the reports Jack and Naomi had sent him, he thought these might be an excellent weapon to combat any harvesters, which were extremely vulnerable to flame. Like the big Desert Eagle pistol, he had never expected to have to use them. The ordinary Dragon’s Breath shells could not be fired from semi-automatic shotguns such as the KS-K, but Rudenko had managed to have a batch modified so they would. The Dragon’s Breath spewed a torrent of incendiary particles, burning at roughly three thousand degrees Celsius, to a range of fifteen or more meters, and were the next best thing to an old-style flamethrower. They could not take down targets at any significant range, but Mikhailov had never expected them to.

Three massive gouts of flame erupted from the muzzles of the shotguns as the soldiers fired, engulfing the freezer and the lab area behind it in a blinding pyrotechnic display. The fireworks were punctuated with the bark of assault rifles firing on full automatic.

The rat that had somehow been trapped inside the freezer, and had dashed out when the door had been opened, was incinerated by the Dragon’s Breath and chopped to pieces by the assault rifles.

“
Cease fire!
” Mikhailov lowered his weapon, his ears ringing from the shots. He blinked his eyes, trying to clear the blinding after-images left by the Dragon’s Breath shells.
 

Every flashlight and weapon was focused on the smoldering remains of the rat. Stepping forward, Mikhailov prodded it with the end of his weapon. Satisfied that it was nothing other than what it appeared to be, he breathed a sigh of relief, coughing in the swirling smoke of the gunpowder and zirconium that now enveloped the lab.

He turned as Rudenko burst into the room, half a dozen men behind him, weapons at the ready.

“
Kapitan?
” The NCO stopped beside his company commander and looked at the rat. He grinned. “A shame that we could not have interrogated it.”

“It is cooked and ready to eat if you are hungry, my friend.” Mikhailov clapped the older man on the shoulder. He didn’t show it, but his insides were quivering like jelly.

“You know that I prefer them raw, sir.” He trained his weapon around the lab, taking in the destruction that appeared in the beam of his light. “Aside from this rat, sir, this place is empty. The other side is clear.”

Mikhailov nodded. “I agree. Let us move on to the greenhouse buildings.” He paused, looking at the rat again. “If anything is in there, it certainly knows now that we are here.”