Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (38 page)

***

By Jack’s estimation, they had made
good time, and he was sure they must have beaten the three Russians
to the vault.

He was wrong.

“Down!” Naomi cried as she grabbed
Jack by his web belt and hurled him into the snow just as an
assault rifle sent a spray of bullets right where Jack would have
been.

Behind her, the others opened fire,
shooting blindly into the smoke that concealed both the access road
and the entrance to the vault.

“Dammit!” Jack cursed. “How the hell
did they beat us?”

“They can move fast, remember?”
Naomi reminded him as she snapped off a few shots in the direction
of the vault. She had only caught a quick glimpse of one of the
things before it had tried to shoot Jack. The vision had been
macabre: human-looking arms held the Russian assault rifle, but the
rest of the thing was in the harvester’s native form. “They’ve got
the high ground and can keep us pinned down here!”

“The hell they can,” Jack told her
fiercely. “Chalmers! Gomez!” he called to two of the other men on
the team. “Lay down some Willie Pete – two o’clock!”

A few seconds later, a pair of white
cylindrical grenades sailed off into the smoke in the direction of
the seed vault. Dull whumps sounded as the grenades exploded,
sending up a brilliant fireworks display.

Unlike regular grenades, whose
destructive capability was mostly in their shrapnel, Willie Petes
were incendiary weapons that hurled burning bits of white
phosphorus when they exploded. The white phosphorus would stick to
whatever it touched, and would burn until it was totally consumed
or was deprived of oxygen. It had often been used in past wars
against troops in bunkers or other positions that were difficult to
get at with more traditional weapons. Its effects on human beings
were horrific.

On the harvesters, the results were
spectacular. The one that had fired at Jack shrieked as a brightly
burning glob of white phosphorus stuck to its exoskeleton and
malleable flesh like white-hot molasses. It hurled itself into the
snow as its flesh ignited, but its efforts were in vain: the snow
couldn’t dampen the burning particles, and the creature turned into
a gyrating torch. It soon lay still, its body crackling like frying
bacon as its flesh was consumed by fire. A few seconds later a
second one rose from the cover of the snow, screeching as it
burned.

“Two down,” Jack muttered. Turning
to the others, he shouted, “Make for the access road, and be damned
careful you don’t touch any of that stuff!” The biggest problem
with using such weapons in a situation like this was that it was
indiscriminate, and would burn his people, even through the soles
of their boots, with the same zeal as it had the
harvester.

Jack led them up onto the
snow-covered road, Naomi right behind him, through the
still-burning maze left by the white phosphorus. The entrance to
the vault loomed through the smoke ahead: a slab-sided concrete
monolith about eight feet wide and twenty feet tall that
disappeared into the snow-covered plateau. A set of amazingly
ordinary metal double doors marked the entrance.

Jack pulled off his gloves and
quickly stuffed them into his parka. “Grenade,” he snapped, holding
out his hand. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t have used this approach
because there would have been civilians here. But with two
harvesters on the loose inside, the chance of any of the workers
here still being alive was remote, at best.

Naomi slapped a grenade into his
palm, then moved over to the door while the rest of the team
covered the entrance with their rifles. Jack pulled the pin and
nodded. Naomi opened the door a few inches, just enough for Jack to
toss the grenade down the entrance tunnel, before slamming the door
shut again.

The doors shuddered with the
explosion of the grenade, the doors reverberating with the pings of
shrapnel.

“
Go!
” Jack
shouted. Naomi pulled open one of the doors while another team
member yanked open the other, and Jack and the others charged
inside, weapons at the ready.

“They already hit the power,” Jack
said into his microphone, seeing that the overhead lights were out.
“Switch to thermal.” He flipped down the T14 thermal imager that
was strapped to a mount that fit over his head and flicked it on.
It was a monocular device that now allowed his right eye to see the
darkened corridor in shades of artificially enhanced gray. The
walls of the tunnel, which was kept at zero degrees Fahrenheit,
showed as a ghostly white, with warmer objects showing as various
shades of gray. Hot spots caused by the grenade’s explosion and
shrapnel showed up as black. Jack normally would have preferred one
of the more typical night vision devices for a situation like this,
but they couldn’t distinguish between a human and a harvester. The
thermal sight could, because their malleable tissue showed up as
being “cold” compared to a human’s signature.

The team moved swiftly but
cautiously down the tunnel, half of them hugging the right wall,
the others the left, to prevent them from bunching up and making
one big target.

About thirty meters in, they passed
from the concrete entrance structure into a larger rock-walled
tunnel about five meters wide that had been carved from the plateau
that rose above them.

“Hathcock, Claret,” Jack called to
the sniper team. “Hold here and watch our backs. Check your targets
before you shoot, as there might be civilians coming up to check on
the vault, but if you’re not sure...”

“Blow the fuckers away,” Hathcock
finished for him.

“Right,” Jack replied grimly. “The
rest of you, let’s go.”

Hathcock quickly extended the bipod
legs of the Barrett rifle, then dropped prone to the freezing floor
behind it, snugging the stock up to his shoulder as he sighted on
the door they’d just come through. Claret knelt near the tunnel
wall, covering the door with his G36C rifle.

Behind them, the rest of the team
moved on through the dead-quiet tunnel, deeper into the
vault.

Another sixty meters brought them to
a set of doorways on the right side of the tunnel.

“I think that’s the refrigeration
room,” Naomi said, tucking in behind Jack along the wall near the
doors. Gomez and two of the others stood farther back, their rifle
muzzles covering the three doors.

Jack looked at
her, nearly smacking her head with the thermal sight that stuck out
several inches from his face. “A refrigeration room?” he asked.
“In
here?
”

“The colder the seeds can be kept,
the longer they’ll last,” she explained quickly. “The permafrost
will keep the vault cold even if the power fails, but not cold
enough to keep the seeds from deteriorating over time.”

The old joke about selling
refrigerators to Eskimos came unbidden to Jack’s mind. “What about
those?” he asked, pointing down the tunnel to a set of double doors
in a bulkhead that formed the end of the tunnel about ten meters
from where they stood now.

“Those doors lead to the vault,” she
said. “The harvesters must be in there already.”

Jack was tempted to forget the doors
here along the tunnel wall that included the refrigeration room.
But if he had learned anything in Afghanistan, it was to never
leave a place behind you where your enemy could hide.

“Clear the rooms here,” he ordered,
“then we’ll do the vault.”

One of Jack’s men yanked open the
first single door, revealing a small room that contained equipment,
but nothing more threatening. The second door led to a larger room
at the end of a short hallway that, again, held nothing more than
equipment and electrical boxes.

They moved on to the double doors
further along the wall, closer to the doors that led to the vault
proper.

“Go,” Jack ordered
tensely.

Two men pulled them wide as everyone
tensed on their triggers.

Nothing. It was a larger room that
held the cooling equipment, which was now silent with the loss of
power. But it was large enough that someone could hide, so they had
to go in and make sure it was clear.

The lead man into the room, Gomez,
didn’t see or feel the thin filament that was strung across the
entryway as he passed through the doorway.

The filament was connected to an
OZM-4 antipersonnel mine, a Russian version of what was once called
a “bouncing Betty.” Jack happened to be looking right at it when it
went off, the small propellant charge that popped the mine up from
the floor about two feet appearing as a malignant dark blot in his
thermal imager. Without thinking, he slammed Naomi to the floor as
the mine exploded, sending fragments slicing through the air into
the corridor about waist high.

The men who had gone into the room
didn’t stand a chance. They were within a few feet of the mine when
it went off. While their body armor protected their torsos and the
helmets protected their heads, their lower bodies were lethally
exposed. They fell to the floor, their legs and lower abdomens
shredded.

“Goddammit,” Jack hissed savagely as
he ran forward, but was suddenly held back by Naomi’s restraining
hand.

“No!” she cried. “Let the others do
it, Jack,” she told him. “There might be another trap.”

“I don’t care,” he
said, angrily shrugging off her hand.
We
should have been more careful
, he berated
himself, ignoring the other voice in his head that told him they
had no time. There was no telling what the harvesters were
doing.

“They’re gone,” one of the other men
said after checking the bodies. He himself had taken several pieces
of shrapnel in his upper right arm as he’d dived to the floor, and
was now awkwardly carrying his weapon in his left hand.

Jack stared helplessly at the men
who lay dead in the room, their bodies already beginning to fade
from dark to light gray in the thermal imager as their bodies
cooled in the freezing air.

***

Kapitan
Mikhailov held on grimly as Rudenko expertly
guided the fuel truck up the winding mountain road toward where the
vault’s entrance lay. They had passed by the wreckage of the
snowmobiles taken by the
Spetsnaz
men they were pursuing, but hadn’t caught sight
of them.

“I used to drive a
logging truck in Siberia before I joined the Army,” Rudenko
explained as he spun the wheel with one hand and smoothly
down-shifted with the other, taking a particularly tight hairpin
turn to the left that had Mikhailov looking out over a field of
snow-covered rocks far below. “Trust me,
kapitan
, this is
nothing!”

Five hundred meters and three turns
later, the concrete entrance to the vault flickered in and out of
sight through the smoke.

“
Huy!
”
Rudenko cried as the windshield suddenly shattered, bullets
slamming into the dash and the seat cushions. He spun the wheel to
the left, away from the drop-off, and jammed on the brakes. The big
truck lost traction on the snow and skidded to the side, coming to
a jarring stop just off the road.

“Everyone off!” Mikhailov shouted,
following the other soldier who had been riding in the cab out onto
the ground. “Get away from the truck!”

“Whoever’s shooting isn’t one of
ours,” Rudenko told him as they dashed for a small rock
outcropping. “It sounds like a NATO weapon, not an AK. Good thing
they’re not using incendiary rounds.” To the other men, he called,
“Does anyone see them?”

A chorus of
tense
nyets
answered his question.

One of the men made a dash forward
up the road to get to better cover. A shot rang out, and he dropped
to the ground, clutching his leg. Then more shots spanged into the
fuel truck.

“I saw his muzzle flashes,”
Mikhailov said, pointing. “Look, just above the road right across
from where the vault entrance goes into the mountain.”

“I don’t...”
Rudenko began, then stopped. He saw something through the
intermittent smoke, but it didn’t look like a man. He wasn’t sure
what it was. The only thing he could tell for certain was that it
wasn’t one of the
Spetsnaz
men. Shrugging, he raised his rifle to his
shoulder. His weapon was tailored more for close-in combat and was
unlikely to hit the target at this range, but...

“Hold your fire, Rudenko,” Mikhailov
said.

“What? Sir?” Rudenko looked at him,
bewildered.

“It’s got to be one of the
Norwegians from the plane that crashed,” he told him. “We’re not
going to shoot him.”

Rudenko looked at
the wounded man still writhing in the road, then back at Mikhailov,
wondering if the young captain had lost his mind. “Then what would
you suggest,
kapitan?
”

“Let him reach the
vault,” Mikhailov explained. “Maybe he can help us deal with
our
Spetsnaz
friends.” He didn’t like the idea of letting the Norwegian
soldier fall into a trap, but there was no way to communicate with
him and not get shot. Mikhailov only wished he could warn the man
that there were others already lying in wait for
him.