Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (31 page)

“Fuel-air explosive,” Jack muttered.
“Jesus.” No one in the building could possibly have survived, he
knew, and the body count in the surrounding buildings, packed with
students and visitors here for the championship, would be
horrific.

The camera panned to where Tracy
knelt on the ground, screaming. The young athlete stood up and
started moving into the smoke that now engulfed the field when he
was hit in the head by a falling brick and went down, unconscious
or dead. The cameraman grabbed Tracy and hauled her to her feet as
more bricks, chunks of concrete, javelins of steel rebar, and other
remnants of the building slammed to the ground in a deadly hail
around them. Tracy looked up and was hit in the chin by a shard of
concrete, and the cameraman grunted and momentarily stumbled as
something slammed into him from behind. He got back to his feet and
ran on, mercilessly dragging Tracy along. The camera was running
all the while, capturing the horror.

“I can’t believe they’re airing
this,” someone muttered into the stunned silence in the command
center. “The networks almost never show footage that’s this
graphic.”

“Quiet,” Naomi snapped.

Connie the anchorwoman reappeared,
long streaks of mascara running down her face from the tears she
had been unable to hold back. “I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen,”
she apologized as she dabbed a handkerchief at her face. “We now
have confirmed reports from the other countries I mentioned earlier
– England, Russia, China, India, and Turkey – that similar attacks
were carried out against major seed storage facilities, with major
loss of life...”

“Turn it down,” Naomi said quietly,
her face ghostly pale. The audio was suddenly muted, but the
horrific images continued, and a list of the targets that had been
attacked scrolled along the ticker at the bottom of the
screen.

“My God,” Chidambaram, said, tears
glimmering in his eyes. “We not only have lost the world’s largest
genebank, in Colorado, but the others, as well.” He read aloud the
names of the facilities as they marched across the ticker at the
bottom of the screen. “The Millenium Seed Bank Project at Kew in
England. The Vavilov Institute in Russia. The National Genebank in
China. The genebank in Ankara, Turkey. And the one in Chang La in
northern India. All gone, and hundreds if not thousands of people
killed...” He fell silent as a video image of the smoking ruin of
the Vavilov Institute in Saint Petersburg played across the screen,
with dozens of scorched bodies in the foreground.

“Renee,” Naomi said suddenly,
“unmute the video.”

The scene on the news channel had
shifted to the White House press room, and the President had just
taken the podium. Beside him stood the directors of Homeland
Security and National Intelligence.

President Benjamin Fowler, who was
normally quick to flash a photogenic smile, was
uncharacteristically grim, and his skin was pallid under the harsh
glare of the lights.

“My fellow Americans,” he began
without preamble, his deep voice rumbling into the microphone, “as
you have just witnessed on the news, our nation has again been the
victim of a vicious terrorist attack that has taken lives measured
in the hundreds. This atrocity has been multiplied several times
over in other nations around the globe, including some of our
closest allies and largest trading partners. The directors of
National Intelligence and of Homeland Security have received direct
and damning evidence from the terrorist organization responsible,
evidence that we have provided to the nation’s news services to air
as they deem fit.”

“Jesus,” someone whispered. “Why
would they do that? They’ve never done that before.”

“Look who just came in,” Renee
muttered. “That should answer your question.”

Jack saw Vice President Norman
Curtis glide into place at the President’s left side. He wondered
at the vitriol in Renee’s voice until he remembered that Curtis was
one of those “owned” by New Horizons. He was either under the
harvesters’ influence, or was one himself.

“The organization
that has claimed responsibility is known as the Earth Defense
Society,” the President went on. “We believe this organization is
also responsible for the murder of several agents of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, the kidnapping of another FBI agent, and
the bombing of the FBI laboratory at Quantico and the resulting
casualties there.” He looked squarely at the camera, and there was
no mistaking the suppressed rage in his voice. “I want anyone and
everyone who has ever been associated with this organization to
know that I will use every ounce of my energy, power, and authority
to bring you to justice for what you have done. This nation will
not stop, ever, until you answer for this wanton slaughter, and for
destroying a completely benign treasure of all nations of the world
in the form of these genebanks. We
will
find you.”

And with that, the President turned
and stepped off the podium, followed quickly by the vice president
and the others on the stage.

The president’s press secretary
quickly stepped up to the microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she
said, “as you can imagine, the president has a great deal to do.
For now, let’s please roll the video that was received by Homeland
Security just minutes before the bombs went off.”

The scene cut to a close-up head
shot of a man everyone in the command center instantly
recognized.

“Oh, my God,” Naomi gasped, her eyes
wide.

Jack, disbelieving, felt a trickle
of ice run through his veins.

It was Dr. Gregg
Thornton.

“To those receiving this,” the image
of Thornton said in a calm and measured voice, “know that what we
do today is simply the opening salvo in a war to preserve our world
from the plans of international government agencies that threaten
all humanity.

“The genebanks that were destroyed
today,” he continued, “were not innocent storehouses of pure,
native seeds as has been claimed, but were repositories of
insidious, monstrous mutations, biological weapons that were
intended to wreak devastation on our biosphere, to kill millions,
particularly among the poor nations of the world that rely on the
largess of the United States and other countries for their food. We
of the Earth Defense Society could not allow this to happen.” He
looked reflective for a moment, as if pondering his sins. “We tried
to warn you, the public, but no one would listen, and so we took
action ourselves. We were able to destroy the largest of these
so-called genebanks, but there are many more, my friends, that
contain the seeds of our world’s undoing. We cannot destroy them
all on our own. We need your help.

“Let me also say that I deeply
regret the loss of every innocent life that was taken today,” he
said, “and will not offer any platitudes that it was a necessary
sacrifice. It was simply unavoidable, just as it was tragic, and I
will carry to the grave the stains of their innocent
blood.

“But now it is up to you, my
friends. We have done our part. The governments of the world will
try to convince you that we are your enemies, but we are not. Those
who make and keep secrets are the true enemies in this war, and it
is those you must rise up and fight before the ‘haves’ of our world
leave nothing but a barren wasteland for the ‘have-nots.’
Godspeed.”

The video then went back to the
White House press room, which had erupted in a near-hysterical
outburst of questions from the press.

“Screw this,” Renee hissed before
shutting off the news feed altogether.

“The best lies have a kernel of
truth,” Chidambaram murmured. “They blame everything on us, and in
the same breath plant the idea in people’s heads that it’s a
government cover-up.”

“Just tell me that wasn’t really
Gregg,” Jack said.

“The harvesters must have him,”
Vlad, who had slipped in during the broadcast, said in his thick
Russian accent. “The replication was too detailed for anything but
direct genetic sampling.”

“I take that as a ‘no,’” Jack said,
turning to Vlad, “but what do you mean?”

“Harvesters can mimic any biologic
form of similar mass from visual input, like photo or video, or
direct observation” the young biologist explained. “But to
replicate details accurately, from surface of skin to hair and
color of eyes, it must have direct contact, be able to...take
biopsy of human tissue, extrapolate map of DNA to be replicated.”
He nodded at the video screen. “Details on video extremely good,
completely life-like. It was harvester.”

“So, is Gregg dead?” Jack
asked.

“Almost certainly,” Naomi answered
bitterly. “The harvesters don’t have to kill us to replicate us,
just make physical contact. But Gregg wouldn’t have let himself be
taken alive.”

“I hate to say this,” Jack told her,
“but he might not have had a choice. Remember how you guys took
down Sansone in my house. They could’ve surprised him and then
interrogated him before they put on their little puppet show. They
could be on their way here now.”

Naomi shook her head. “Gregg had a
suicide pill,” she explained. “He had a false molar on the right
side of his jaw.” Renee and the others looked shocked. “I’m sorry.
He made me promise not to tell anyone.”

“You’d better promise me right now,”
Jack said, staring at her, “that you don’t have one of those
things.”

“I don’t,” she whispered. “But I
probably should.”

Jack was about to tell her exactly
what he thought of that idea when Chidambaram suddenly whispered,
“Svalbard...”

Naomi’s head snapped around to look
at him. “What?”

“Svalbard!” he shouted. “They
haven’t gotten the seed vault at Svalbard, or they would have
reported it!”

“Damn,” Renee said, “he’s right!”
She started tapping frantically at her keyboard, searching through
international video feeds.

“What the hell is Svalbard?” Jack
asked, confused.

“It’s what some call the ‘doomsday
seed vault,’” Naomi explained excitedly. “The other facilities the
harvesters destroyed were genebanks, which are what you might
consider regular conservatories for seeds. The facility at Svalbard
is sort of like what we have here in the converted missile silos:
it’s a backup for the genebanks in case they somehow fail or are
destroyed, or if there was a catastrophe that wiped out vital
species in the biosphere that couldn’t be restored from what was in
the genebanks. The Norwegian government built it on the island of
Spitsbergen in the Svalbard archipelago, in the Arctic Ocean about
five hundred miles north of Norway. Even if the power there failed,
most of the seeds would remain viable in the cold vaults for
dozens, if not hundreds of years, and even longer for some
species.”

“But why wouldn’t the harvesters
have hit that, too?” Jack asked. “That would have been an obvious
target along with the others, maybe even the most important one.
Surely they didn’t miss it?”

“There’s why,” Renee told him, and
everyone crowded around her workstation. “Look at that
monster.”

On the screen was a weather map that
showed an angry swirling storm that extended from the eastern
shores of Greenland to Novaya Zemlya in Russia.

“Nobody’s going to be flying in that
mess,” she said, quickly pulling up the international weather
advisories from the Federal Aviation Administration. “Svalbard
airport is socked in with winds gusting up to eighty knots and
heavy snow. According to this, storms like this are fairly unusual
this time of year, and this thing apparently blew in awfully
quick.”

“Thank God for climate change,”
someone muttered.

“So, if we rule out an attack by
air, what about by sea?” Naomi asked.

“I’m not seeing anything that’ll
help answer that question,” Renee told her as she continued to poke
around on the web, looking for more information.

“I was on a fishing boat out in the
Atlantic for a summer when I was in school,” Jack told them. “We
got caught in a storm that was probably a lot less powerful than
this one, and if the sea right now around Spitsbergen is anything
close to what I remember, any ship or boat that tries to put in to
shore is going to be smashed to pieces, and there’s no way they
could get small boats in.” He shook his head as he looked at the
zoomed-in image of Svalbard on Renee’s display. “If I was planning
an op, I’d use aircraft. See, the seed vault is only about a
kilometer from the Svalbard airport runway, up this slope that
overlooks the airport and the bay. Land, secure the airfield, then
take a little stroll up to the seed vault and blow the hell out of
it. If you tried an assault from the water, you’d have to try and
scale the side of the plateau that’s at the top of that slope. That
looks pretty damn steep, and even in good weather would probably be
a bitch. The only real alternatives would be to either land
somewhere along the coast near the airport, or farther into the bay
at the town of Longyearbyen. That would probably draw a bit of
unwanted attention, and it’s four klicks away.”

“Renee,” Naomi asked, “how long do
they think it’ll be until the storm clears off of
Svalbard?”