Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (36 page)

“Now that’s something new,” Rudenko
muttered. He had seen men killed by heavy machine guns and sniper
rifles, but had never witnessed anything so gruesomely
spectacular.

“Indeed,” Mikhailov agreed. “It
appears that the new arrivals aren’t civilians after all.” He
turned to Rudenko. “I just hope we can get on their good side and
they aren’t simply shooting Russians on sight.”

The three
surviving
Spetsnaz
men sprinted into the curtain of smoke streaming from the two
burning planes and the shattered airport.

***

Jack had spent a good deal of the
flight getting to know the other members of his combat team, and
the one he had been most impressed by was Craig Hathcock, the
team’s sniper. A fellow veteran of Afghanistan, Hathcock had served
in the Canadian Army, and had sent more than his fair share of
Taliban fighters to Paradise. In two cases he had done so at ranges
of over a mile in gusty winds.

As soon as the Falcon came to a stop
and Ferris opened the door with its embedded steps so they could
get out, Jack led the team out onto the runway, where they formed a
protective ring around the plane.

Hathcock had already been eyeing
possible firing positions from his seat in the plane. He and his
spotter, another former Canadian soldier, dashed to the south edge
of the runway, taking cover behind some of the rocky outcroppings
that protruded from the snow. Hathcock carried his favorite weapon,
a massive Barrett Model 82A1 with a Unertl telescopic sight. The
rifle fired the same size rounds as the vehicle-mounted .50 caliber
M2 machine gun. The weapon’s magazine was loaded with the standard
rounds used by snipers who favored the Barrett, and which Hathcock
hoped would be a very unpleasant surprise for the harvesters. It
was the Raufoss Mk.211, which was named, somewhat ironically given
the current situation, after the Norwegian town where it was
manufactured. It boasted a nasty combination of armor piercing,
high explosive, and incendiary capabilities. He had never had a
chance to actually fight the harvesters, and he was eager to get a
shot at them.

The smoke from the burning planes
and airport terminal was streaming to the south, obscuring the
slope where the seed vault was located. The only view he had was
along the south edge of the runway. The hot smoke rose in the cold
air just enough to make a “tunnel” that was relatively clear before
being carried away by the wind toward the slope where the seed
vault was located. Since there was nowhere else to aim, he pointed
the Barrett along the runway’s edge and put his eye to the
ten-power Unertl scope.

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered. Then,
loud enough to key his voice-activated microphone, he said, “I’ve
got four soldiers, Russians, I think, on snowmobiles heading for
the road that leads up the slope to the vault.”

Without hesitation, Jack said, “Take
them out.” There was no question that the Russians had started this
fight by taking out the Norwegian C-130 with a SAM. The last they
had seen of it, the C-130 had disappeared over the top of the
plateau just as the Falcon was coming in for its hair-raising
landing. Even through the smoke obscuring the area around the
runway, Jack could clearly see another thick plume of smoke rising
from somewhere on the plateau. The C-130 hadn’t made it very far.
He didn’t know why the Russian plane had blown up, but suspected
that those four men on the snowmobiles somehow had a hand in this
disaster.

“Roger,” Hathcock replied.
“Targeting the lead rider,” he said to his spotter.

“Got him,” his partner, George
Claret, replied quietly. He was looking through a spotting scope,
tracking the snowmobiles as they raced up along the snow on either
side of the road that led to the seed vault.

Hathcock focused his concentration
on the lead rider, who would be lost in the smoke in a few scant
seconds. Holding his breath, his right index finger pulled back
smoothly on the Barrett’s trigger.

The weapon slammed against his
shoulder, sending the index-finger size bullet downrange at over
two thousand meters per second. He lost sight of the target in his
scope as the weapon recoiled: keeping track of where his shots fell
was one of the key duties of his spotter.

“Hit,” Claret reported over the
radio. Then, more softly to Hathcock, he said, “Blew the fucker
into burning bacon bits, you did.”

Hathcock got his
sights back onto the three remaining targets, and decided that he
didn’t have time for finesse. Instead of aiming for the rider of
the next snowmobile, he aimed for the machine itself. Again he
stroked the trigger, and again the big rifle slammed back against
his shoulder with an ear-shattering
crack
.

“Hit,” Claret reported again as he
saw the round strike the steering column of the lead snowmobile,
the impact sending the machine spinning out of control. It careened
into the other two snowmobiles and tossed its rider high over the
small windshield, while dumping the other two Russians into the
snow as they lost control of their own machines. “You earned some
extra points with that one, mate. You pitched all three of the
bastards into the snow with one shot.”

Laying the gun’s sights on where the
snowmobiles lay wrecked, he cursed as the three white-clad soldiers
disappeared into the curtain of smoke. “Shit.”

“Damn good shooting,” Jack said from
behind him as he and the others moved up. The only one who would be
staying behind was Ferris, who was busy turning the plane around
and moving it farther away from the fires on the runway. “Let’s get
going. The vault is almost due south, just a kilometer away up that
slope. We’ve got a chance to beat them, but we’ve got to move fast.
You two,” he said to Hathcock and Claret, “bring up the rear and
cover our asses. Let’s move.”

Taking the lead, Naomi right behind
him, Jack took his team single file through the snow toward the
vault, their white winter uniforms quickly disappearing into the
acrid black smoke.

***

The fifteen
hundred meters from where
Idunn
still burned to the SvalSat facility was the
longest march of Halvorsen’s life. The snow that the storm had left
behind was deep, and his men struggled to make their way forward as
they dragged the wounded in makeshift stretchers.

He had heard the two reports of a
large-caliber gun, which puzzled him: it had the distinctive sound
of the heavy sniper rifles the Americans and some of the other
allied forces in Afghanistan had used against the Taliban, but that
made no sense. The Russians didn’t use those.

It doesn’t
matter
, he told himself grimly,
as long as they’re not shooting at
us
.

Finally, they made it to the control
building, which sat roughly in the middle of the array of large
“golf balls”, the spherical environmental enclosures that protected
the antennas, that together made up the SvalSat facility. The
control building was two stories tall, with two deep blue garage
doors on the front of the building, next to the personnel entrance.
Nearby was the helicopter that was used to ferry the SvalSat crews
to and from the station at every shift change. Halvorsen thought
that was odd, because he knew that the scheduled shift change
wasn’t for at least another three hours, and the helicopter should
have been at the airport.

Frowning, he tried the building’s
front door: locked. He hammered on the glass of the door, but
wasn’t about to waste time if no one answered
immediately.

No one did.

With a nod to one of his men,
Halvorsen stepped back as the soldier smashed the upper pane of
glass in the door with the butt of his rifle, then reached in and
unlocked the door. He pulled it open and Halvorsen stepped inside,
followed by his men. They all held their weapons at the ready: he
wasn’t taking any chances, not after what had happened so far on
this disastrous expedition.

“
Hallo?
” he
called as he moved through the hallway toward the main control
room, from where the satellite operations were managed. “Is anyone
here?”

There was no answer but the moaning
of the wind outside, and Halvorsen could feel the hair on the back
of his neck stand on end.

“
Kaptein!
”
one of his men called softly from up ahead, in what looked like the
station’s cafeteria.

Halvorsen quickly joined him, and
visibly recoiled from what his soldier had found.

“What happened to him?” the soldier
asked, his eyes wide as he stared down at one of the six people who
normally manned the station during each shift.

The body, still in its clothing,
looked like it had been bruised over every square centimeter of
skin, which had then begun to...rot away. He had seen bodies in
Afghanistan, some of which had been exposed to the elements for a
time and had begun to decompose. But this wasn’t like that. There
was no bloating, and the tissue from the skin down to the bone
seemed to be disintegrating.

“Could it be a virus?” the pilot,
who’d hobbled in with Halvorsen, whispered.

“If it is,” Halvorsen told him,
“it’s a bit late for us. We’ve already inhaled the air, and we
don’t have NBC suits.” NBC was short for Nuclear, Biological, and
Chemical, and the suits were designed to protect soldiers from
coming in contact with or inhaling anything that could harm them.
Unfortunately, they were bulky and heavy, and there had been no
reason to expect to have to use them on a mission like this. Of
course, there had never before been a mission like this, Halvorsen
thought bleakly.

“Look,
kaptein
,” another
soldier said, pointing to the table. Food and coffee had been laid
out at three places. Halvorsen took off one of his heavy gloves and
felt one of the coffee mugs. It was still warm.

“There’s no sign of a struggle,” he
murmured. “What the devil could have happened to him?”

“There’s a body in
here, too,
kaptein
,” a soldier called quietly from the women’s bathroom farther
down the hall before he turned away and retched onto the
floor.

Halvorsen checked on the woman who
lay dead in the bathroom, and saw that she was in the same
condition as the first body. “That’s two,” he said grimly. “There
should be six people here, plus the helicopter pilot. Let’s find
the rest.” He turned to his senior surviving NCO, who was next in
the chain of command. “Get some men upstairs and check things out.
Remember that these are our countrymen. Check your
targets.”

The man nodded sharply before
leading six soldiers up the stairway to the second story, their
boots thumping quietly on the floor in the otherwise silent control
building.

Halvorsen was faced with a difficult
decision: the rest of his men, including the wounded, were still
outside in the wind and cold. He wanted to get them into the
shelter of the building, but the gruesome discovery of the bodies
gave him pause.

You don’t have a
choice
, he realized. Help would have to
come from the town of Longyearbyen, which was only six kilometers
away as the crow flies. Unfortunately, there was only one road
leading up to SvalSat, and it was impassable from the snow left by
the storm. Plus, he thought grimly, the Russians no doubt had
control of the road where it branched off near the airport. The
only other ground access was by snowmobile, and there was no way of
telling how long it might be before help might arrive, assuming
anyone from town could slip past the Russians. No, he thought.
Regardless of what had happened here at the station, he had to get
his men inside before they began to suffer from
hypothermia.

Turning to one of
the other soldiers, a
korporal
, he said, “Find something
to wrap the bodies in and put them in the garage, then get the rest
of the men inside and make them as comfortable as you can. You
three,” he said to the soldiers behind the
korporal
, “check out the garage. The
rest of you, follow me to the control room.”

Upstairs,
Sersjant
Lars Solheim
uneasily led his men along the corridor of the second story of the
control building. The sound of the wind was louder here, and the
footfalls of his men, careful as they were trying to be, seemed
deafening in the otherwise silent building. He was relieved when he
heard the
kaptein
order the rest of the men brought inside: if the company
commander had thought there was any serious threat here, he would
never have done that.

They carefully checked the few
rooms, which were mostly used for storage, on this level, until
they came to the last one at the end of the hall. It looked like a
utility closet. Solheim and the others covered the door with their
rifles. One of the men gripped the doorknob gently, then suddenly
twisted it and kicked in the door, ducking out of the line of
fire.

As the door flew open, Solheim was
presented with the totally unexpected scene of a young blond woman,
staring up at them with terrified eyes from behind stacked-up boxes
of bathroom supplies.