Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (34 page)

“This is Norwegian
territory,” Halvorsen had tried to explain to the Russian aircraft,
“and we have sovereignty here.” After considering a moment, he had
added, “We would welcome your support and would be happy to work
together with you, but you cannot and
will
not
refuse our landing.”

Yet, they had. According to the
tower controller, after a hundred or so Russian troops poured from
the aft ramp of the Il-76, it had taxied to the middle of the
runway’s two thousand three hundred meter length and parked. A few
minutes later, the airport’s controllers had frantically reported
that Russian troops had entered the control tower. After that
message, the tower had gone ominously silent.

Now the Norwegians were close enough
in their approach to see the big Russian plane squatting on the
runway.

“Can you get us in there?” Halvorsen
asked the pilot.

The pilot glanced up at him. “We can
try,” he said uncertainly. “We need a thousand meters to make a max
effort combat landing. But if that fucker is more than a hundred
meters closer to us than he looks, the people in Longyearbyen are
going to be in for the fireworks show of the century.”

“Do it,” Halvorsen said. Both he and
the pilot had seen combat, Halvorsen having served in the Norwegian
mechanized company that had been deployed to Kabul in Afghanistan,
and the pilot having done an exchange tour flying on American
C-130s running support flights throughout that embattled country.
Both of them had been in a few tight spots and were aware of the
risks. Halvorsen didn’t want a violent confrontation, but he was
damned if he was going to let the Russians force them to go home
with their tails between their legs. “And make sure Oslo gets a
full report of what’s happening here.”

“Better get strapped in,” the pilot
said grimly. He had done several short field combat landings using
what the Americans called a max effort approach. They were hairy
under the best of circumstances, and with the winds still gusting
near the ground, the chances of encountering low-level wind shear
that could send the plane tumbling to the ground would make this
approach even more exciting than usual. “This is going to be
rough.”

***

“What the hell is going on down
there?” Ferris asked, astonished. He had called Naomi and Jack up
to the cockpit to listen in on the chatter between the Russians and
Norwegians in what was shaping up to be a shooting match on
Spitsbergen. “I can’t believe the Norwegians are gonna go for it.
They’ve either got huge brass balls or shit for brains. Maybe
both.”

“They don’t have a choice,” Jack
said. “If it was us, we’d do the same thing.”

Ferris snorted. “Not if I was the
goddamn pilot.”

Jack suppressed a smile. Naomi had
told him a little about their curmudgeonly pilot on the long flight
over the Arctic. He’d flown Combat Search and Rescue missions in
both Iraq wars, earning a Silver Star and an Air Force Cross, plus
two Purple Hearts. From that alone, Jack knew that Ferris had done
more than his fair share of ballsy or shit-for-brains stunts. And
had lived to tell about it.

“What about us?” Naomi
asked.

“What do you mean, ‘What about us?’”
Ferris snapped, turning to stare at her. “You’re not thinking of
dropping into the middle of that mess? Listen, girl, faking we have
an in-flight emergency and dropping in to fight off a harvester or
two was one thing. Sticking our noses into an international war
zone is something else entirely.”

“But, Al, we can’t just–”

That was when they heard the
Norwegian C-130’s frantic mayday call, booming over the cockpit
speakers.

***

Mikhailov was proud of his men. They
had quickly and efficiently taken control of the airport without
anyone being harmed. They had rounded up the airport personnel and
the other civilians, a couple dozen tourists waiting for their
airliner to be fueled for the flight back to the mainland, and
confined them to the airport lounge. Speaking in broken Norwegian,
which he had learned during the years he had lived on Spitsbergen,
Mikhailov explained that he and his troops had absolutely no
quarrel with Norway and its citizens, but had come to provide
security for the Svalbard seed vault and the airport against a
possible terrorist threat. He assured them that as soon as his men
were in place and the area secured, he would see to it that they
were sent safely on their way. And he meant every word of
it.

That was when his men in the tower
informed him over the radio that the Norwegian C-130 was continuing
its approach.

“They’re bluffing,” Mikhailov
said.

“Not according to our pilot,” his
executive officer told him. He had communications with the Il-76
from his position in the tower. “He says he has seen skilled pilots
land and take off in these planes, C-130s, from very short
runways.”

“Do they have enough room to do
this?” Mikhailov asked as he hurried out of the lounge and onto the
tarmac. Looking down the runway, he could see the distant
silhouette of the approaching Norwegian plane and the bulk of the
Il-76 sitting in the middle of the runway. “Tell the pilot to move
his plane to wherever he thinks it best to deter the Norwegians. I
do not want them to land!”

“He knows
this,
kapitan
,”
his executive officer said, “but–”

Whatever he was going to say died on
his lips as he saw a small plume of smoke from the far side of the
Il-76. Mikhailov watched in horror as a shoulder-fired
surface-to-air missile, a SAM, arced upward, straight at the
approaching C-130.

***

“
Chto za huy!
” the loadmaster shouted as one of the
Spetsnaz
soldiers who had been
assembling an SA-18 SAM stood up, perched it on his shoulder, and
walked down the Il-76’s cargo ramp onto the runway. Moving to a
spot just forward of the port wing, he aimed it at the Norwegian
transport, and fired. “Are you
insane?
” the loadmaster screamed at
him.

The
Spetsnaz
soldier dropped
the spent SA-18, turned around, and shot the loadmaster in the head
with a short-barreled assault rifle.

A second
Spetsnaz
man emerged
from the cargo hold, nodded to the first, and together they ran
down the runway toward the terminal building.

They had gone a hundred meters when
the Il-76 exploded.

***

“SAM!
SAM!
” the copilot aboard
the C-130 shouted. “Twelve o’clock low! Flares
away!”

Idunn’s
pilot didn’t need anyone shouting in his ear: he
could clearly see the pinpoint of bright flame heading straight at
him as his copilot made a desperate mayday call, declaring an
in-flight emergency.

At the rear of the aircraft, the
flare dispenser pumped out a series of flares to try and deceive
the incoming missile, but there was little hope. The SA-18 was
resistant to such countermeasures, and the missile’s super-cooled
seeker stayed firmly locked onto its target: the inboard starboard
engine.

“Get the gear up!” the pilot snapped
as he jammed the throttles forward. He knew it would be an act of
God for the missile not to hit them, but the C-130 was a tough
aircraft. The small warhead carried by a shoulder-fired SAM was
unlikely to bring them down right away unless it killed the flight
crew or just got lucky. Had they been making a standard approach,
he might have tried to continue his landing. Even if the missile
took out an engine, he would have stood a better than even chance
of getting the plane down in one piece.

But they were making a max effort
combat landing, which was an altogether different situation. The
C-130 was descending at nearly fifteen hundred feet per minute, far
more rapidly than for a normal approach, on a steep glide slope
toward the very end of the runway. The thrust of the howling
engines was precariously balanced against the drag and lift of full
flaps. It was one of the most difficult maneuvers a C-130 pilot
could perform, with no margin for error. The pilot knew that if
they lost an engine now, they’d be dead. Trying to gain airspeed
and altitude was the only option he had.

Idunn
began to slowly accelerate as the gear came up
and the copilot began to retract the flaps.

The smoke plume of the approaching
SAM grew larger and larger, until suddenly it blossomed into an
explosion that consumed the inboard starboard engine and sent a
torrent of hot shrapnel slashing through the cockpit, instantly
killing the copilot. The pilot suffered half a dozen minor flesh
wounds, but his hands never left the controls.

The big plane staggered in the air,
but had gained just enough airspeed that the remaining three
engines were able to keep it from plowing into the rapidly
approaching runway.

The pilot
alternately fought and nursed the controls, finally managing to
level out near mid-field. He pulled
Idunn’s
nose up bare meters above
the Il-76 that had blocked the runway.

He was thinking they just might make
it when the Russian plane blew up right under them.

***

Mikhailov stared in horror as the
missile punched into one of the C-130’s engines, blowing it
completely off the wing. Miraculously, the plane managed to claw
its way out of its steep descent, and he felt a huge wave of relief
that it wouldn’t crash.

His relief was short-lived, however:
the Norwegian plane was just passing over the parked Il-76 when the
Russian plane suddenly exploded, sending a huge gout of flame and
debris skyward and gutting the already wounded C-130.

“It was
those
Spetsnaz
fuckers!” spat
Starshiy
Serzhant
Pavel Rudenko, the company’s
senior enlisted man and a veteran of Chechnya. “Look at
them!”

Seeing the two special forces men
running toward them, silhouetted by the flames of the Il-76,
Mikhailov drew his pistol and was about to order Rudenko’s squad,
which had followed him out of the terminal, to open fire on them
when Rudenko suddenly grabbed him and threw him to the
tarmac.

Mikhailov’s indignant protest was
drowned out by a series of thunderous explosions that ripped
through the terminal building behind them, killing everyone
inside.

***

“Oh, shit,” Ferris hissed as they
watched the Svalbard airport turn into an inferno. He couldn’t yet
make out much detail, but it was easy to see that things there had
gone to hell. The Il-76 was a flaming wreck of melting aluminum,
the terminal building and tower had been blown to bits, and the
C-130, its radio silent now, was streaming smoke and flame from its
belly and starboard wing as the pilot fought to keep the doomed
plane in the air.

“Get us down there, Al,” Naomi
ordered. “This wasn’t an accident or misunderstanding. The
harvesters arranged this, not just to destroy the seed vault, but
to start a campaign of international tensions that will help mask
their overall plan. We only have a dozen people, but now we might
really make a difference here.”

“Yeah,” Ferris said sarcastically,
“if we all don’t wind up in a corporate jet flambé. And just where
the hell am I supposed to land? In case you didn’t notice, there’s
a big flaming pile of shit in the middle of the runway! And you
realize, if we do manage to get down in one piece, we won’t be able
to take off in the amount of runway that’s left.”

“You’ll find a way,” she told him.
“You always do. Come on, Jack, let’s get strapped in.”

Muttering a non-stop stream of
expletives, Ferris started going through the landing checklist,
wondering how in the hell he was going to pull this one
off.

***

The Norwegian
pilot’s desperate efforts to keep
Idunn
in the air were interrupted by
Halvorsen, who suddenly appeared next to him. The Norwegian captain
had a gash down the left side of his face in front of his ear that
had left a trail of blood down under the collar of his
uniform.

“Help me!” the pilot cried, nodding
to where the copilot’s torn body still sat strapped into the
right-hand seat.

Halvorsen hit the release on the
seat restraints and hauled the copilot out of the seat, laying him
on the blood and debris-covered flight deck. The wind roared in
through the smashed sections of the windscreen, and he could
clearly see the flames licking the starboard wing. Now there was
only a mass of twisted wreckage where the inboard engine had
been.

“Press down on the rudder pedal,”
the pilot shouted over the shrieking wind. The pilot had all three
remaining engines at full thrust, but the drag and loss of thrust
from the engine they’d lost was yawing the plane to the right. “Use
your left foot. I can’t hold her much longer. Shrapnel in my left
leg!”

“Understood!” Halvorsen shouted
back, pressing down hard with his left foot on the pedal until the
pilot nodded. “We’ve got fire on this wing,” Halvorsen said, “and a
lot of damage to the bottom of the plane in the cargo hold.” He
didn’t mention that he’d lost seven men and had another dozen
wounded by the second explosion that had wracked the plane. He had
assumed they’d been hit by another SAM.