Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (42 page)

CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR

Jack’s satellite phone chimed as
they all stood near the hangar, watching the industrious Rudenko
use a bulldozer to scrape away the last bits of the smoldering
Il-76 from the runway so the Falcon could take off.

“Shit,” Jack muttered as he took the
phone out of his parka and looked at the calling number in the
display, one of the numbers they used through one of the front
companies that masked the call’s true origins. “It’s Renee.” He had
meant to call her earlier, but he had completely forgotten in their
headlong rush to get back to the airport and clear the runway so
they could leave before any other military forces showed
up.

Jack turned away from the noise of
Rudenko’s bulldozing so he could hear what Renee was trying to tell
him.

Watching Jack for his reactions,
Naomi continued her conversation with Mikhailov and Halvorsen. She
had been trying to convince them to come with her. “If you stay,”
she said, “the harvesters won’t let you live. We don’t believe
there are very many of them, and for them to have sent so many of
their kind here was an indicator of just how important this place
was to their plans. There may be more of them among the relief
forces that are coming.”

“Perhaps,” Mikhailov told her. “But
if we leave, who will explain what happened here?”

“More importantly, perhaps,”
Halvorsen said, “who will explain what did not happen.” He glanced
at Mikhailov. “Russian troops did not shoot down our plane, nor did
they kill my men.”

“And the Norwegians were not
responsible for the deaths of my men, or the destruction of our
transport,” Mikhailov added. “But other troops and aircraft that
come will not know this. If we leave, more good men will die,
fighting over a lie. It is worth risking our own lives to save
theirs.”

Naomi couldn’t argue with their
logic, or their courage. “I understand,” she said. “I had to
ask.”

“You will take the live creature
back, then?” Halvorsen asked, nodding toward the tightly wrapped
man-sized bundle that Naomi’s surviving team members were shoving
into the Falcon’s small baggage hold. “You should leave it here.
Let the world see it and know them for what they are.”

“They’d only see
the lie,” Naomi told him. “Just like I did the first time. Even if
you see it transform before your eyes, the first time you simply
can’t believe it’s possible. And on television? No one would
believe it was anything but a hoax using special effects.” She
shook her head. “They’re too dangerous to place in the hands of
anyone who doesn’t really know them.”
We’ve had to learn that lesson ourselves the hard
way
, she thought
bitterly.

“And they will believe a dead one?”
Halvorsen asked without sarcasm. They had brought back what was
left of the thing that had impersonated Solheim to show the
incoming troops. “Some fools will claim these creatures washed up
from the depths of the arctic sea.”

“I know,” Naomi answered. “No one
will believe it at first. But if enough people see it, a few
reputable scientists might come forward to challenge what they’ll
think is a fake. You’ve just got to do whatever you can to get it
in front of the media. And keep yourselves alive.”

Mikhailov snorted. “The first should
not be difficult. I am not so certain about the second.”

“At least this one won’t kill anyone
else,” Halvorsen said quietly, looking at the
Solheim-thing.

“Listen,” Naomi told them as Ferris
gestured impatiently from the door of the Falcon. The plane’s
engines were already spun up, and he was impatient to leave. “If
you ever need to contact us, you can reach us through these email
addresses and telephone numbers.” She handed both men small slips
of paper with the information written in her neat script. “Just
dial the number, leave your name, then hang up, or send an email
with just your name. We’ll find you.”

Halvorsen accepted the piece of
paper gratefully. The future, not just for himself, but for his
country and perhaps the world, had suddenly become very uncertain,
and he was happy to have any allies he could.

By contrast, Mikhailov took his with
obvious skepticism. “How will you find me in Russia?” he asked, as
if his country were in fact on a different planet.

Naomi smiled. “We have people there,
too,” she said as Jack finally rejoined them, his face locked in a
neutral expression that worried her. Holding out her hand, she
shook Mikhailov’s hand, then Halvorsen’s. “Good luck to you and
your people.”

Jack shook their hands as well.
“Watch your backs, guys,” he told them. The two soldiers both
nodded gravely in return.

Rudenko strode up to the two
captains as Jack and Naomi boarded the plane and turned to wave.
The three soldiers waved back, then watched as the two Americans
disappeared inside the jet and the door retracted closed behind
them. A few moments later, the sleek Falcon roared down the runway,
then gracefully lifted into the sky.

It wasn’t long after the Falcon,
flying low over the ocean, faded from view that they heard the
sound of jet engines overhead.

“Fighters,”
Halvorsen sighed, knowing the sound well from his time in
Afghanistan. He had been hoping that transports would get here
first and put troops on the ground, someone they might be able to
talk to face to face and show the other form of sentient life that
they now knew inhabited the Earth. That hope had been incredibly
naïve, of course: both Russia and Norway knew that
something
had happened
here, something that had caused the C-130 to send out a mayday and
the Russian transport to stop responding. The gunslingers would be
sent in to investigate first, not more defenseless troop
transports.

“
Da
,”
Mikhailov said, looking up as two Norwegian F-16 fighters streaked
low over the airport, pumping out flares and chaff behind them to
help draw away any SAMs that might be fired at them. Much higher in
the sky, he could see the contrails of six more F-16s. Their
Russian counterparts, he was certain, would not be far
behind.

He handed the portable radio Naomi
had given them to Halvorsen. It was a stroke of genius on the
Americans’ part that they had brought it, for all the
communications equipment at the airport had been destroyed. He and
Halvorsen would have had no way to try and talk sense into their
comrades in the air. “I hope you are very convincing, my friend,”
Mikhailov said as he watched the F-16s bank sharply around the side
of the plateau, disappearing from view. “For all our
sakes.”

“Me, too,” Halvorsen muttered as he
keyed the microphone, hoping his words could avert war in the
Arctic.

***

“What is it?” Naomi asked Jack as
soon as they were strapped in. Ferris was already accelerating down
the runway, loudly complaining to himself about fools and idiots.
“What did Renee tell you?”

“She figured out
the pass phrase to Sheldon’s file,” he told her as they were
pressed back into their seats as the Falcon left the ground. Jack
expected Ferris to climb, but he didn’t: he gained enough altitude
to bring up the gear and then flew straight out over the waves
beyond the runway. They were flying so close to the ocean that Jack
could swear some of the wind-whipped whitecaps almost reached his
window in the fuselage. The ride with the winds still trailing the
storm was rougher than the worst rutted road Jack had ever driven
on, and it was difficult to speak without cracking his teeth
together as the plane battered its way through the rough air.
“Jesus!” he exclaimed as the plane suddenly dropped what must have
been a dozen feet and everyone cried out. “
Ferris!
” he shouted to the pilot.
“What the hell are you doing?”

“Trying to keep us from getting shot
down,” Ferris growled over the intercom as he wrestled with the
plane’s controls, keeping it as low as he dared. Unlike many modern
military aircraft, the Falcon wasn’t equipped or designed for low
altitude flight at high speed, and he had forgotten how physically
and mentally taxing it was to fly low and fast in a stock civilian
aircraft. “If the Norwegians or Russians are sending fighters to
Spitsbergen, the only thing that might save us is to fly low and
stay in the ground clutter. Otherwise we’ll stand out like a sore
thumb and get our asses blown off. So shut up and let me
fly.”

“God,” Jack hissed as the plane
lurched again. Turning back to Naomi, he continued his tale from
Renee. “So, there’s good news and bad news.”

“Just spill it, Jack,” she said.
“I’m a big girl, I can handle it.”

Jack smiled and said, “I know.
That’s one of the things I like about you.”

She grinned back, reflecting his own
happiness at simply being alive after what they’d gone through.
Both of them keenly felt the losses they’d suffered during the
battle, and they both knew it had been a victory for the
harvesters. But they had managed to kill six of the creatures,
which had to be a devastating blow in return.

“There’s a list of names,” he
explained, “just like Ellen Bienkowski said there would be. All the
people who have connections to New Horizons that you told me about,
from the Vice President on down, are on there, along with a lot
more, in the U.S. and other countries. New Horizons was just the
tip of the iceberg.”

“We suspected that,” she told him.
“But aside from trying to track senior executives in the GMO
industry moving into key government positions, it wasn’t much more
than guesswork.”

“Well, you don’t have to guess
anymore: there are three hundred and twenty-seven names on that
list, minus Ellen. Renee checked the names against EDS personnel:
Ellen was the only one. So it looks like we don’t have any more
traitors in our midst. For the moment, at least.”

Naomi breathed a sigh of relief.
That’s what she’d been most afraid of.

“There’s also
another list,” he told her, leaning forward, and Naomi looked at
him expectantly. “Rachel Kempf and Lynette Sansone were on it,
along with Martin Kilburn, who worked at the FBI lab and was
probably the one who blew it up.”
I’m
going to find you, Kilburn
, Jack promised
himself,
and I’m going to roast your
smashed-cockroach body for what you did to Jerri and the
others
.

Naomi gasped as
another gust of wind slammed into the plane, knocking them all
sideways. “There’s a list of the
harvesters?
” she said, incredulous.
“But why would they keep a list of themselves?” Naomi wondered.
“That would...”

“...leave them potentially
vulnerable to what we’re going to do to them,” Jack finished for
her as the Falcon at last began to climb. The other members of the
team cheered Ferris, who grumbled back at them. “It makes sense, in
a way,” he went on. “How the hell are they supposed to know who’s a
harvester and who’s not except when they can physically meet? There
have to be times when they communicate remotely. And if they change
identities, they have to let all the other bugs know, and that’s
not a who’s-who list that you want to make a mistake with.” He
shrugged.

“What sort of people were on it?”
Naomi asked. “Did she have time to say?”

“No details, really, aside from
those few that we recognized. What they don’t seem to do is
masquerade as people with a lot of public visibility. They let
their human lapdogs do that.”

“How many?” Naomi asked, afraid of
what the answer might be. “How many are left?”

“If that list is all of them, there
are thirteen more, including the one we’re bringing back with us,
whichever one that is.”

“My God,” Naomi breathed. “We’re
that close. Thirteen away from wiping them off the planet.” She
looked at him, her eyes narrowing. “You said there was good news
and bad news. I take it that was all the good news, such as it is.
What’s the bad?”

Jack’s expression turned grim. “The
corn samples that Sheldon found were prototypes, all right, but
they weren’t the only ones,” he told her. “Kempf was a busy bug
after you left: she perfected strains for rice, wheat, and soy, as
well.”

“But with the LRU lab under
quarantine by the FBI, they won’t be able to put the prototypes
into the field,” she said.

He shook his head slowly. “They
never quarantined it. Once they gathered the crime scene data, the
FBI was ordered out and the lab was reopened for business. Renee
found out from digging through the FDA’s network that they quietly
cleared the new grains for production and sale yesterday. New
Horizons is gearing up for production on a massive scale, and all
the international distributors are companies with a lot of people
on the list of humans in the harvesters’ employ.”

“Sweet Jesus,” Naomi whispered as
she turned to look out the window at the bright green of the Arctic
Ocean, far below. She felt as if she were in a movie, watching
herself and those around her from afar. It was a strange,
uncomfortable feeling, her inner self seemingly detached from her
body. She and Gregg had hoped beyond hope that they might be able
to catch the genie before he escaped from the bottle. But there
wasn’t just a single genie: there were millions, if not billions of
them in the form of every single grain New Horizons would be
shipping.