Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (32 page)

“If I’m reading this right,” Renee
said, “it looks like maybe ten to twelve hours before they expect
the airport to open again.”

“How far is Spitsbergen from
here?”

“Mmmm...” Renee did some
calculations on her maps, “about thirty-five hundred nautical
miles.”

“So about a seven hour flight in the
Falcon,” Naomi murmured as she stared at the screen, her eyes
narrowed slightly.

“Wait a minute,” Jack said. “You’re
not thinking what I think you’re thinking, are you?”

Naomi shot him a puzzled expression
and Renee snorted.

“Listen,” Jack cautioned, “that’s a
damn long flight, even in a military aircraft. And in case nobody
noticed, there’s nothing around Spitsbergen for a good five hundred
miles but the Arctic Ocean. There aren’t any alternate airfields if
we run into trouble or run low on fuel.”

“I know, Jack,” Naomi said. “We have
a Dassault Falcon 7X that has the range and speed to get a team of
us there. We can’t just sit here and do nothing. You know we can’t
warn anyone: no one listened to us before the harvesters’ trick
mimicking Gregg, and they certainly won’t listen to us now. If the
harvesters don’t have an attack force on the way to Svalbard now,
they will as soon as they think they can get in to land.” Her
expression hardened. “They’ll be able to walk right into the vault
and blow it up if we don’t get there first and stop
them!”

Jack opened his
mouth to argue with her, then shut it.
She’s right
, he thought.
Set your personal feelings aside for a minute and
look at it from a military perspective. The harvesters have the
initiative, and we’ve got to take it from them. We can’t win just
by playing defense.
He was objective and
honest enough with himself to realize that while there were
certainly valid tactical concerns about mounting a quasi-military
operation a few thousand miles away in the arctic, his real fear
was that Naomi could be hurt or killed.
That could happen here just as easily
, he told himself,
and almost has a
few times now. Her best chance of survival – and yours – is to wipe
these fuckers out, and you can’t do that by sitting down here in
this hole while the harvesters can act at will.

“Okay,” he said finally. “What’s the
plan?”

“That would have been Tan’s job,”
Naomi told him. “Now it’s yours.” Jack nodded. He’d been expecting
that. “We’ve got a plane that can take a strike team of a dozen
people to Spitsbergen with plenty of fuel to spare for a long
loiter time if we have to wait out the storm, or fly round-trip
without refueling.” Turning to Renee, she said, “Alert Ferris and
tell him to get the Falcon to Oroville Municipal airport. Tell him
we’ll have a full team aboard, and to get strike package A with the
cold weather options loaded, along with max fuel.”

“Strike package A?” Jack asked,
surprised.

Naomi nodded. “We’ve been prepared
for this for a long time, Jack,” she told him. “We knew that the
fight would come out in the open at some point, but we had no idea
how it would present itself. So Tan and the others on our security
team came up with a series of different options to cover most
contingencies, then we pre-packaged as much as we could so we could
move quickly. Package A is our ‘armed to the teeth’ option for a
full twelve-person team.” She locked gazes with him. “We can’t
fight a full-out war, Jack, but we’ll have enough firepower to make
them take notice.”

“How long will it take the jet to
get here?”

“Two hours, give or take,” Renee
told him, looking at Naomi. “We keep the plane at Oakland Metro in
‘Frisco. The flight up here won’t take long, but they have to load
the equipment, fuel up, and do all the flight planning crap. Which
brings us to the next item: Ferris needs to have a cover story to
file the flight plan. We’re going to have to fly through Canadian
airspace, if nothing else, and we’ll need clearance to get through
or they’re going to think we’re up to no good.”

“Norway,” Jack said. “Set us up for
a business charter flight to Norway, just pick an airfield that has
a long enough runway and serves a major city that’s on a close
track with Spitsbergen.”

“Then we could just declare an
in-flight emergency and land there,” Naomi said, nodding in
approval, “with nobody being the wiser.”

“And what’s your purpose for
visiting the fair and freezing country of Norway, Mr. Dawson?”
Renee asked in her best customs official voice. “Business, or
pleasure?”

“Business,” he told her with a
predatory smile. “Definitely business.”

CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN

In the biosafety containment
chamber, the rhesus monkey squirmed and whimpered. It was acutely
uncomfortable, its body sending mixed signals of aching mingled
with an odd sensation of numbness. The sounds through the speakers
of its small prison that echoed the noises of its fellow monkeys in
their distant cages, an attempt by its human keepers to provide
their small captive with some sensory input, were now muted and
dull as the monkey’s hearing ability faded away.

Holding its hands up before its
eyes, the monkey could see with its rapidly fading vision that its
fur had been absorbed into its flesh, and that its skin had taken
on a strange bruised look. Two of the monkey’s left fingers had
fused together, and the right hand had bent forward and was now
stuck to the underside of its forearm, as if the bones of the wrist
had gone soft and the skin had flowed together. It brought its left
hand to its mouth, touching its lip with a finger, and was
surprised when the flesh stuck together. When it pulled the finger
away, it left behind nearly half its length, stuck to the monkey’s
lower lip. There was no pain or blood, no bone, just the
strange-looking mottled flesh that now covered its entire body. The
monkey sucked in its lips and was again surprised when they stuck
to the inside of its mouth, parting around the still-hard
teeth.

The monkey closed its eyes and
curled up on the floor of the chamber. The discomfort gradually
disappeared, to be replaced by a pleasant numbness.

As time passed, during which its
human keepers did not make their normally appointed rounds, it was
aware of only one thing. It was hungry. So very, very
hungry.

CHAPTER
NINETEEN

For the first time since Jack had
come to the base, he was heading toward the surface. He, Naomi, and
four others had passed through the massive blast doors into the
portal itself, a massive silo-like structure that Naomi had told
him was thirty feet in diameter and seventy feet from the bottom of
the shaft to the massive doors, which were over three feet thick,
at the top. Looking through the wire mesh that encircled the
elevator shaft framing, he could see the personnel stairs that
wound their way around the inside of the huge shaft. He joined the
others as they stepped onto the ten foot-wide elevator, which began
to slowly take them to the surface.

They carried fake identification and
passports, although they didn’t expect to have to use them. Other
than that, Naomi had instructed them to leave behind anything that
could identify them. All of the weapons and gear they would need
would be in the strike package that had been loaded onto the Falcon
jet. Jack had expressed his concern about needing to check the
equipment and make sure that everything they would need would be
there. But after Naomi showed him the manifest of what this
“package” contained, he couldn’t help but be impressed. Tan and the
others who had put the equipment together knew what they had been
doing, and if the men with him were half as competent as he
suspected Tan had been, their small team would be a force to be
reckoned with.

He heard a loud whine and looked up
to see the two leaves of the surface blast doors being pushed open
by huge hydraulic rams.

“And this is the only way in or
out?” Jack asked Naomi.

“Yes,” she told him, “except for the
auxiliary entrance at the antenna terminal. But the doors there are
just as thick.”

“Better hope those hydraulics never
go out,” Jack told her.

“We keep the doors very
well-maintained, believe me,” she said as the elevator came to a
very gentle stop. “We filled in the old personnel entrance here at
the portal with concrete. It would have been a lot more convenient,
but it was far too vulnerable to a determined ground assault. With
these,” she nodded at the reinforced, steel-lined doors that were
three and a half feet thick, “they’ll have to knock a little bit
harder if they want to get in.”

The elevator rose into a large white
room, brightly lit by overhead fluorescent tubes, that was large
enough to accommodate the surface portal, along with a concrete
apron leading up to the elevator. At the end of the apron was a set
of vehicle doors that could easily accommodate a large delivery
truck, but was currently occupied by a black limousine with dark
tinted windows.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jack
muttered.

“This is the secure room inside the
truck repair shop,” Naomi explained. “Nobody comes in here unless
they’re fully cleared.”

“Isn’t it sort of obvious if you
just drive in or out of here?” Jack asked as he slid into the rear
of the limo with two of the other men, while the remaining pair sat
up front in the driver and passenger seats.

“Normally we don’t,” she told him as
she strapped in beside him. “We usually bring people in by ones and
twos, or we’ll bring in several at night after the shop here is
closed. But sometimes, like now, we have to take a
risk.”

The doors in front of the limo
opened, revealing an expansive garage area that was occupied by
several other similar limos and some SUVs.

“This is what we call the airlock,”
she told him as the limo quietly wheeled toward another set of
doors. Behind them, the doors to the portal room closed, bearing a
man-sized yellow sign that said “Danger! Extremely Hazardous Waste:
Do Not Enter!” in heavy black letters with a skull and crossbones
at each end. “We have another front company that runs a small limo
service from here. All the limo drivers are fully cleared, so the
only thing we really have to worry about is making sure the outer
doors are closed any time the doors to the portal are opened. We
use the SUVs for regular cargo and supplies. Anything larger than
that, we usually haul in at night from one of the tractor trailer
rigs in the truck shop next door.” She pointed to yet another set
of large doors in the opposite wall from where the portal was, with
a sign overhead that read “Big Rigs ONLY.”

“Then you can just drive right in or
out, with passengers in the back behind tinted glass, and nobody’s
the wiser,” Jack said, shaking his head. “Everybody’ll just think
it’s another limo run. Slick.”

“Glad you think so,” she told him,
smiling.

Looking out the window as they left
the limo garage, he could see that the truck shop that occupied the
rest of the building had four drive-through bays, each of which
could accommodate a tractor and trailer rig with plenty of room to
spare.

“The building covers up the most
vulnerable points of the base from any direct observation,” she
said. “The portal and the intake and exhaust vents for the diesel
backup generators. The vents have heavy blast valves up to four
feet in diameter down below, but they’d be fairly vulnerable to a
ground attack if someone could get into the shafts.”

Jack watched as the limo wended its
way through the orderly rows of trailers and rigs that were parked
on the expansive property that had once been a Titan I missile
base, here in the foothills of Sutter Buttes in California. He had
never been here before, but wished he had some time to explore the
area: the buttes looked like some beautiful country. Unfortunately,
he could probably never again show his face outside of the Earth
Defense Society without fear that he’d be turned in and arrested
for crimes he never committed.

The limo glided past acres of
orchards and farmland on its way to the Oroville Airport, about an
hour’s drive northeast of the base. He and the others spoke little
on the way.

About halfway there, Jack was
surprised to find Naomi’s head resting against his shoulder: she
was fast asleep. He breathed in the lavender scent that had come to
be such a part of her in his mind. He envied her, because he knew
he could use some rest, too, but was too keyed up about the
mission.

At last, the limo arrived at the
airport and came to a gentle stop on the tarmac just off Chuck
Yeager Way, parking right next to a sleek business jet with three
engines near the tail.

“Hey, Sleeping Beauty,” he said
quietly, “time to wake up.”

Naomi snapped awake, sitting bolt
upright. “God, did I fall asleep?”

“Only for a few minutes,” Jack lied
as he opened the door and got out. He and the others wasted no time
in boarding: they didn’t want to be seen. It was just after four in
the afternoon and there weren’t many people around, but they didn’t
want to push their luck. If they’d had a choice, they would have
waited until nightfall, but they needed to get to Spitsbergen and
the Svalbard seed vault as quickly as possible. Jack had been
concerned about whether they would be arriving in daylight or
darkness, but at this time of year the sun never really set in the
arctic: no matter what the hour, they would land in daylight,
assuming the storm had passed.