Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (33 page)

He followed Naomi up the steps that
had extended from the aircraft, noting that there were already
another six men aboard, making up the rest of his twelve-person
team.

“Girl, are you sure you want to do
this?”

Jack looked beyond Naomi to see the
pilot, a grizzled-looking bear of a man who must have been in his
mid-fifties, with close-cropped gray hair and extraordinarily
bright blue eyes.

“We have to, Al,” she said firmly.
“Gregg is gone. The harvesters have him, and things are
accelerating faster than we’d anticipated. If we don’t act...” She
shook her head. “I can’t live with that.”

He raised his eyebrows, then turned
his attention to Jack. “Don’t believe we’ve met,” he said,
extending a paw of a hand. “Al Ferris.”

“Jack Dawson.” He shook Ferris’s
hand, noting that the other man’s grip was firm without any attempt
at a macho knuckle-crushing competition.

“Okay,” Ferris said, raising his
voice so the others could hear, “sit down and get strapped in. Once
we get airborne, you can start unpacking your stuff.”

As Jack sat down next to Naomi in a
pair of seats facing a small table, he saw that there were packs
and weapon cases arranged around the cabin, one for each
passenger.

It wasn’t long before the three
engines on the jet, a Dassault Falcon 7X, had spun up and the
aircraft began taxiing to the active runway.

Unable to help himself, Jack
suddenly laughed.

“What’s so funny?” Naomi
asked.

“I always wondered what it’d be like
to ride in a corporate jet,” he told her. “All this had to happen
just for me to get this stupid airplane ride.”

She smiled and shook her head as
Ferris smoothly pivoted the Falcon onto Oroville’s runway 19 and
pushed the throttles to the stops. The plane accelerated quickly,
even with such a full load, and was airborne a few moments later.
After clearing the local airspace, Ferris turned the plane north
and climbed to its cruising altitude, heading for the distant
Arctic.

CHAPTER
TWENTY

“Thank God, this
damned storm is moving past,” muttered Russian Army
Kapitan
Sergei Mikhailov
as he stared out the windscreen of the Il-76 military transport,
cursing the roiling storm clouds that had been responsible for an
endless, bone-jarring ride.

The big four-engine jet transport
had taken off from Pskov in northern Russia eight hours earlier,
carrying Mikhailov’s company of the 23rd Guards Airborne Regiment
of the 76th Guards Airborne Division. The mission had come down
directly from the prime minister in Moscow: secure the Svalbard
airport and the nearby seed vault, both on the Norwegian island of
Spitsbergen, from any possible terrorist threat. Mikhailov had been
chosen to lead the mission because he had lived for three years at
the Russian coal mining settlement at Barentsburg on the island,
about fifty kilometers from the airport. Desperate for work, his
father had taken a contract with the mining company there when
Mikhailov had been a boy, and the two of them had gone there to
live. Mikhailov had hated every minute of it: the company that ran
the coal mine often didn’t pay the workers, the settlement
sometimes ran out of supplies and had to beg care packages from the
Norwegians at Longyearbyen, and Barentsburg was so isolated that he
had often felt he was at the very end of the world. He had never
been so happy as when his father had earned enough money that they
could finally return home to Saint Petersburg.

When Mikhailov was
of age, most of the available career opportunities held no appeal
for him, so he joined the Army as an officer cadet. He had quickly
taken to what the Army had to offer, and had volunteered for
the
Vozdushno-Desantnye
Voiska
, the Airborne Troops, following in
the footsteps of his great grandfather, who had become a Hero of
the Soviet Union while serving in the 4th Airborne Corps at Vyazma
during the Great Patriotic War.

Over the next
several years, he had risen to the rank of
kapitan
, leading a company of
airborne soldiers. He had never seen combat himself, but several of
his non-commissioned officers had fought in Chechnya, and he had
taken the opportunity to learn from them all that he could. Many of
the lessons they had brought back with them from that bitter
conflict, he had discovered, had been unpleasant,
indeed.

When the division commander had
personally tasked him to carry out the prime minister’s orders, he
had been eager to take on the mission, his first operational
assignment beyond the routine exercises his unit engaged in. He
knew that Russia and Norway had signed a treaty forbidding any
military forces on Spitsbergen, but what could the puny Norwegian
military do? Politely ask him and his men to go home? He had almost
smiled at the thought while his division commander was talking, but
assumed that the man would have misunderstood the
expression.

“Yes, but they still refuse to give
us clearance to land,” the pilot answered as the big plane jolted
upward, bringing Mikhailov back to the present as he was nearly
driven to his knees. The flight from Pskov should have taken about
five hours, but the storm had forced them to loiter for another
three hours in buffeting winds before the airport was clear enough
to attempt a landing. Mikhailov had considered making a combat jump
until he and the pilot consulted the latest weather reports issued
by the Svalbard airport: the wind gusts at low altitude were still
brutal. The massive Il-76 could handle them, although it would be a
hard landing, but the paratroops would have been swept away like
dandelions in a tornado.

“We don’t need any clearance,”
Mikhailov told him. “Just get my men on the ground.”

The pilot grunted acknowledgement,
and with the rest of the flight crew began to work through the
landing checklists, while Mikhailov returned to the cavernous hold.
He knew that his troops, some of whom were desperately ill from the
hours-long roller-coaster ride, were eager to get out of this
flying death trap and onto the ground.

The aircraft’s loadmaster tapped him
on the arm. His helmet had an intercom and he’d just received word
from the pilot. “Five minutes!” he said, gesturing at the cargo
ramp at the rear of the aircraft.

Mikhailov nodded and then began
barking orders to his junior officers, who made the final checks of
the men. It was more a formality at this point, because they had
already checked their weapons and gear several times, but one more
time never hurt.

“The men are ready, sir,” his
executive officer reported after making a personal inspection of
every soldier.

“Very well,”
Mikhailov told him, moving down the aisle toward the cargo ramp. On
the way, he stopped before a team of men who had come aboard at the
last minute by order of the division commander. They were
Spetsnaz
, special forces
soldiers. Mikhailov had worked with
Spetsnaz
troops several times in the
past, but these were unusually aloof. When he had asked the
division commander why they were coming aboard, he had only shaken
his head.

“They have their orders, Mikhailov,”
he had said quietly. “And so do you. Just stay out of their way and
don’t interfere.”

Mikhailov stood
there a moment, looking at the four
Spetsnaz
men, all non-coms, who
looked back at him with hooded eyes and bland expressions. None of
them had said a word to anyone since coming aboard. The special
forces soldiers he had worked with before had not been like this,
and it bothered him. Unfortunately, he had no real authority over
them, and if they hadn’t opened up to any of the other men, it was
unlikely they would do so with an officer.

He finally decided not to bother
saying anything to them and moved on toward the rear of the
aircraft, clinging to safety stays to keep himself on his feet as
the big plane was shoved around by the winds.

The four men followed him with their
eyes, but said nothing.

The loadmaster suddenly grabbed
Mikhailov’s arm and shoved an intercom headset into his hand.
Putting the earphone to his ear, Mikhailov said into the
microphone, “What is it?”

“There’s another aircraft inbound to
Svalbard,” the pilot told him tensely. “It’s a Norwegian Air Force
plane. The tower told them of our approach, and they are warning us
off.”

“A fighter?” Mikhailov asked him,
adrenaline suddenly shooting through his veins. The Norwegian Air
Force was small, but potent: they had seventy-two American-designed
F-16 fighters, which would make short work of the defenseless Il-76
if the Norwegians got trigger-happy. He suddenly, desperately,
wanted to be on the ground.

“No,” the pilot reassured him. “They
identified themselves as a C-130 carrying troops. They must be
right behind us, I’m guessing maybe five or ten
minutes.”

“Tell them we are here to provide
counter-terrorist security and have no hostile intent toward them,”
Mikhailov told him. “We would welcome a joint operation with their
ground troops.”

“
Nyet
,”
another voice suddenly interjected.

Mikhailov turned
around to find one of the
Spetsnaz
men standing close behind him, wearing the
loadmaster’s headset. The loadmaster stood there, quietly
fuming.

“
Only
Russian
military forces will be allowed on the island,”
the nameless
Spetsnaz
soldier went on. “You will not permit the Norwegians to
land.”

“Why?” Mikhailov asked hotly. “It’s
their territory!”

The
Spetsnaz
man stared at
him, his eyes cold and hard. After a long pause, he said, “The
Norwegian military has been infiltrated by the terrorists who
conducted the earlier attacks. That aircraft may have agents
aboard. You will not allow them to land.”

With that, the man took off the
headset and callously tossed it at the loadmaster as he headed back
to rejoin his three companions.

Mikhailov was
furious, but he wasn’t about to disobey. He outranked the
Spetsnaz
soldiers, but
he had no doubt who held higher authority.

Instead, he focused on the here and
now. The Norwegians were right behind them, and he had to figure
out a way to avoid a military confrontation. He was confident his
company could win any battle with their Scandinavian cousins should
things get out of hand, but if a battle broke out, it would be an
international disaster. He knew they wouldn’t turn around simply
because he asked them to – it was their territory, after all – he
had to find another way.

“Once we’re on the ground,” he told
the pilot after a moment, “use the plane to block the runway.” The
Svalbard airport only had a single runway, without even an adjacent
taxiway, and with the Il-76 sitting in the middle of it, the
Norwegians wouldn’t be able to land. “If they can’t get on the
ground, they can’t cause us any trouble.”

“Understood,” the pilot said,
although the tone of his voice made it clear he wasn’t happy with
the idea of using his billion-ruble aircraft as a runway barrier.
“One minute.”

Mikhailov held on tight as the big
plane sharpened its already sickening descent, the pilot taking
them in for a combat landing.

***

“
Faen!
” the
pilot of the Royal Norwegian Air Force C-130J, named
Idunn
, cursed. “The
tower says the bastards have blocked the runway!”

Kaptein
Terje Halvorsen, with two platoons of his rifle
company, KP1 of the
Hans Majestet Kongens
Garde
(His Majesty the King’s Guard)
Battalion aboard the plane, frowned but said nothing for a moment
as he stared out the front of the C-130’s bulbous nose at the
rapidly approaching Svalbard airport. The Russians had beaten them
by only a few minutes, and he silently cursed the luck that had
delayed the C-130’s arrival here. The flight from Oslo had been
horrible because of the storm, and the pilot had been forced to
detour to the west much farther than he’d expected to try and get
around it.

On reflection,
Halvorsen had been surprised at how quickly the prime minister had
made the decision to send a military protective force to
Spitsbergen, and even more surprised that he had not backed down
from the bitter Russian diplomatic response after he had informed
them that Norway was sending a small contingent of troops to the
island. There were already reports coming in from the intelligence
services before
Idunn
even took off from Gardermoen Air Station, north of Oslo,
that Russian troops were being put on alert in response to Norway’s
“intransigence.” In turn, the Norwegian military had also been put
on alert. It was a bad situation that Halvorsen knew could easily
spiral out of control, with worldwide tensions at an all-time high
after the terrorist attacks that had swept across the
globe.