Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (37 page)

Blowing out his pent-up breath in
relief, Solheim lowered his weapon, gesturing for his men to do the
same. “Miss,” he called. “It’s all right. We’re here to protect
you. You can come out of there now. Please.” He shouldered his
rifle and extended a hand toward her.

“Are you all there are?” she said
quietly as she stood up, her terrified demeanor fading away. She
was completely nude and quite generously endowed, and the seven
soldiers gawked.

“No, miss,” Solheim managed, trying
to keep his gaze fixed on her deep brown eyes, “there are more of
our men downstairs.”

“Good,” she said. She stepped around
the boxes, her hips swaying suggestively. “I was hoping you’d say
that.”

Solheim was
thinking of how to respond when he saw the flesh of her stomach
ripple as
something
emerged, rapidly snaking out of her abdomen. Too late, he
recognized what it was just before it struck him in the throat: a
stinger.

Downstairs, Halvorsen and his men
had swept the control room and found four more bodies. Three of
them were in similar condition to the two others they’d
found.

The fourth was different. In
addition to the awful appearance of the others, its left leg was
gone. It hadn’t been amputated, but had been dissolved below the
hip joint.

“Good God,” he murmured. To his men,
he said, “Cover them up and put them with the others in the
garage.”

All hell suddenly broke loose on the
second floor above, with men shouting and a flurry of shots being
fired. There were muffled screams, several heavy thumps, and then
silence.

“Upstairs,
now!
” Halvorsen ordered
as he led his men back down the main corridor, carefully jumping
over the wounded who were crammed everywhere on the first
floor.

He had just run up the first half
dozen steps to the second floor when he came face to face with
Solheim, his face a mask of terror.

“Get out!” he screamed. “It’s a
trap! One of the rooms was booby-trapped – there’s a
bomb!”

“What–” Halvorsen
began, and then froze. He suddenly smelled the tell-tale odor of
gas. The facility used propane for heating, and if the lines had
been severed to let the gas into the air-filled spaces of the
control building, even the smallest spark would blow the building
and everyone in it to pieces. “Get the men out!” He shouted as he
turned and ran back down the stairs, past the pilot, who flattened
himself against the wall to stay out of the way.
“
Now!
”

While his heart was hammering with
fright, both for himself and his men, Halvorsen couldn’t help but
be proud as he watched his soldiers grab their wounded comrades and
drag or carry them out, even as the stench of the gas grew
stronger. Unless the enemy – it had to be the Russians, he thought
bitterly – had badly miscalculated, only a few would get out before
the building exploded. He had already given himself up for dead: he
would not leave before the last of his men was out.

He didn’t notice that the pilot, a
frown on his face, had hobbled up the stairs, ignoring the offers
of assistance from one of the soldiers to help get him out of the
building.

Solheim, Halvorsen saw, had already
made it outside, and was dragging two of the wounded to safety in
the snow. He was glad: Solheim was a happily married man with three
children, and had always been a fine soldier. If any of them
deserved to live through this, he did.

The pilot suddenly rushed down the
stairs, ignoring his injured leg. Without a word, he charged
directly at Halvorsen, driving him backwards through one of the
large glass windows along the west side of the building.

The last thing Halvorsen remembered
was the sound of shattering glass and the disorienting sense of
falling, weightless, to the snow-covered ground before the world
exploded around him.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO

Jack heard the thunder of an
explosion somewhere on the plateau above them, but he couldn’t see
anything. He paused for a moment, giving the others a chance to
catch their breath. The climb up the slope toward the vault hadn’t
looked very daunting from the airport. They had made good progress
for the first two hundred meters, even slogging through the
snow.

Beyond that, the incline had
steepened and the snow had given way to ice-covered rocks that were
torturous to climb.

“Jack,” Naomi choked. The smoke from
the fires at the airport was noxious, and made their struggle that
much more difficult.

He turned to face her, relieved to
have even a momentary break himself. He had set a brutal pace, but
there was no choice: the Russians had farther to go, but only had
to deal with the snow on the road that would take them straight to
the vault. “What is it?”

“We need to go
left,” she told him. “There’s a cut through the rocks there,” she
pointed to a barely-visible cleft at Jack’s ten o’clock position
that looked like nothing more than snow, probably covering some
ice. “That should take us up.” She shook her head. “We can’t keep
climbing like this...or we’ll be exhausted.”
Or fall
, she didn’t
add.

“Okay,” he told her. “Come on.” He
changed course, stomping through the snow into the cut. The going
was still difficult, but not as treacherous as on the
rocks.

“I knew...” he heard Naomi mutter
behind him, “I should have...done more...aerobics...”

Jack grinned, then coughed. His
throat was raw and his eyes were burning from the smoke, and he
knew it could be an ugly, close-quarters fight at the top, with
visibility under a few dozen yards, if that. Assuming they could
beat the Russians, who were no doubt double-timing it up the
road.

Sucking in another lungful of smoky
air, he pressed forward, hoping they could make it in
time.

***

“Are you crazy?” Mikhailov asked. He
was gaping at Rudenko, who sat in the driver’s seat of a fuel truck
that had been parked behind the airport’s hangar building. The
hangar itself hadn’t been damaged, and the truck had miraculously
escaped the earlier fireworks that had destroyed the rest of the
airport. “Haven’t we had enough burning things to deal
with?”

“
Moi kapitan
,” the NCO told him, “it has the keys in it, it runs, it will
carry all of us, and it’s big enough to get through the snow on
that road. Unless you want to chase those
Spetsnaz
fuckers on foot, this is
the best way to go.”

Mikhailov would
have agreed to all of Rudenko’s claims except that the truck would
carry them all: the cab would fit three, but the remaining men
would have to cling to the vehicle’s exterior.
Then again
, he told himself,
it wasn’t that far different from riding on the
back of an infantry combat vehicle
. And
those, too, were highly flammable.

“
Bozhe moi
,” he muttered as he climbed into the cab next to Rudenko,
who seemed to be enjoying himself tremendously. Another soldier got
in next to Mikhailov, and the rest of the squad clambered onto the
rear and held on as best they could.

“Here we go!”
Rudenko cried as he put the truck into gear and pulled away from
the hangar. Once clear of the debris of the airport terminal and
the destroyed airliner, he floored the accelerator and raced across
the runway toward the road the
Spetsnaz
men had taken up the slope
toward the seed vault.

Beside him, with nothing to hold
onto but the dashboard, Mikhailov gritted his teeth, praying that
no one would shoot at them.

“Look at it this
way,
kapitan
,”
Rudenko told him, reading his mind. “If we get hit now, we’ll
probably never even feel it when this big bastard
explodes.”

“Thanks for the reassurance,”
Mikhailov replied sarcastically. He grimaced as the truck bounced
and jolted over the snow as Rudenko turned onto the Vei 600 road
that would take them to the access road leading to the
vault.

Beside Mikhailov,
the
starshiy serzhant
smiled. But his mind was on the
Spetsnaz
soldiers somewhere up
ahead, and the pleasure he would take in blowing their fucking
heads off for what they’d done.

***

Halvorsen snapped awake to the sound
of flames crackling nearby and the stench of smoke. He sat up, and
saw the pilot lying next to him. Halvorsen thought he was dead, but
the man’s eyes suddenly flickered open. His lips moved, but
Halvorsen couldn’t hear what he was trying to say. He leaned
closer, bringing his ear to the man’s lips.

“Not...Solheim,” the pilot
rasped.

“What?” Halvorsen said, confused.
Pulling away for a moment, he took a closer look at the pilot, and
his heart sank. A bright crimson stain was spreading rapidly
through the snow beneath him: he was losing blood, and fast. “Be
still, let me see if I can–”

“No...time!” the pilot said, weakly
batting Halvorsen’s hands away. “It wasn’t Solheim,” he repeated.
“The man who came down the stairs was...an imposter. Found Solheim
and the others...dead upstairs. Torn apart.”

Halvorsen shook his head, sure the
pilot was hallucinating. “You’re imagining things, my
friend.”

“Solheim had a long gash down the
back...of his left leg,” the pilot wheezed. “Saw it when he went up
the stairs. Man who came back down...didn’t.” He gulped for air.
“That’s why...I went up. To see. Made no sense.”

And it still
doesn’t
, Halvorsen told himself, but what
the pilot was saying began to churn around in his mind. He had seen
Solheim dragging two of the other men to safety, but couldn’t
remember the details. He’d been a bit worried about other things at
the time.

“Come on,” Halvorsen said, getting
unsteadily to his knees. He and the pilot had fallen into the snow
that lay alongside the control building, escaping the worst of the
blast that had swept over them. The building itself was little more
than smoking wreckage, with debris blown as far away as the big
antenna domes a hundred and fifty meters away. “I’ve got to get you
out of here.

“Too late,” the pilot whispered,
shaking his head. “Watch...your back.”

The man’s eyes turned away to stare
into the sky. He was gone.

Halvorsen looked at the name tag on
the pilot’s uniform. BREKK, it read. After their brief introduction
when Halvorsen had boarded the plane, he had forgotten the pilot’s
name. “Thank you for saving my life,” he whispered as he took his
glove off and closed Brekk’s eyes.

Getting to his feet, Halvorsen waded
through the snow and debris to what used to be the front of the
building. The bodies of his men were strewn everywhere like burned
and bloody rag dolls. A fierce rage was growing in him as he
reached down and picked up a rifle that one of his soldiers no
longer needed. He looked to the northeast, in the direction of the
seed vault, and saw a figure moving through the snow. He couldn’t
make out any details, but he knew it must be Solheim. He was
alone.

Halvorsen found proof of what the
pilot had told him as he followed Solheim’s trail: eight soldiers
lay dead in the snow, several of them starting to show the same
rotting skin condition as the bodies they’d found in the control
station.

“This is impossible,” he whispered.
Whatever the hell was going on, Solheim – or someone masquerading
as Solheim – was right in the middle of it.

Putting the rifle, a Heckler &
Koch HK416, to his shoulder, he centered the gun’s red-dot sight on
the imposter.

He didn’t pull the
trigger, because even without the magnification of a telescopic
sight he could tell that it clearly
wasn’t
Solheim. It didn’t even look
human.

Halvorsen lowered the rifle, sure
that he was hallucinating. He rubbed his eyes, then squinted
against the glare of the snow at the figure roughly two hundred
meters away.

His eyes weren’t deceiving him.
Whoever, or whatever, it was, it clearly wasn’t human. It was too
far away to make out details, but whatever it was moved on more
than two legs, low to the ground, much as an insect might. A huge
insect.

Halvorsen was tempted for a moment
to try and take a shot from this range, but didn’t. The men around
him had fired their weapons before they died: he could see a few of
the expended cartridge cases where they had sunk into the snow.
They could not all have missed at what must have been point blank
range. Whatever it was that had killed them was either
extraordinarily resilient or heavily armored. Plucking a pair of
grenades from the web belt of one of the soldiers and attaching
them to his own, he decided that he would have to get closer. Much
closer.

Absolutely sure that he had lost his
mind, Halvorsen gripped the rifle tightly and set off as fast as he
could after the thing.