Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (52 page)

Even though the main view showed
Curtis continuing to speak, his words were overridden by a news
anchor who suddenly interrupted the broadcast from the White
House.

“Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen,”
the man said, “we seem to have...wait a moment.” He put his hand to
his ear as if unable to believe what he was hearing.

Then a new video flashed up, this
time taking up the entire screen: it was the New Horizons plant.
Or, more accurately, what was left of it. The view on the
television suddenly split, showing the massive conflagration that
had consumed the plant on one side, and the White House press room
on the other.

Curtis paused in his introduction of
Steinbecke as an aide rushed up and whispered in his ear. The
President’s smile faltered, then was quickly replaced by shock as
he audibly asked the aide to repeat his message. The man did, and
Curtis turned back toward the hushed audience, his face a mask of
undiluted rage.

“My fellow Americans,” he said in a
voice that was so quiet that it was little more than a whisper. But
it made up in anger what it lacked in volume. “Once again, we have
been attacked. Many of those watching this broadcast must have
witnessed what we here have not yet seen for ourselves: the
destruction of the New Horizons plant, just a moment
ago.”

Another aide, holding out a smart
phone of some kind, rushed up to Curtis’s side. Curtis watched it
for a moment, seeing the miniaturized broadcast of the plant
exploding in a massive fireball, before gesturing for the man to
move away.

“As of this moment, my friends,” he
continued to the stunned audience in the press room and millions of
television and Internet watchers across the nation and the world,
including Jack, Naomi, and the others at the EDS base, “we are at
war. This is no longer terrorism as we’ve known it in the past.
Those who are committing these atrocities, who I believe are
members of the so-called Earth Defense Society, or EDS, aren’t
fighting for a political or religious ideal. They’re trying to
destroy humanity’s future, and this is the last time they’ll
strike, here in America or anywhere else.” Curtis stared into the
camera, and Jack felt a chill run down his spine at the President’s
expression. “We’ll find you,” Curtis promised. “And when we do,
you’ll be shown no mercy.”

With that, he turned and stormed out
of the press room without another word.

CHAPTER
THIRTY

“We found them,” Ridley announced as
she strode into the emergency meeting of the National Security
Council in the White House Situation Room. President Curtis had
called the meeting after she had informed him that there had been a
major break in the pursuit of the EDS.

Ray Clement followed her in and sat
in a seat along the wall behind Ridley as she took a seat at the
table.

“My God, Monica,” Jeffrey Komick,
the Secretary for Homeland Security, gasped as he saw the bandages
covering Ridley’s forehead and the right side of her face. Like the
others in the room, he’d heard that she’d been injured in a
shootout, but he hadn’t realized that it had been that
close.

She spared him a glance, but nothing
more. “As we suspected,” she went on, “they’re in California, in
the Sutter Buttes area, not far from Beale Air Force
Base.”

That sent a stir through the group
that was silenced by an impatient wave of the President’s
hand.

“We were able to make the connection
between the plane and a series of service contracts and companies,
even a local wind farm, that seemed to have a common controlling
interest,” she said, giving a broad overview of what the hundreds
of special agents who’d been scouring the area and every database
and information source that the Bureau, Intelligence Community, and
Homeland Security agencies could access, had managed to finally
piece together through thousands of man-hours of investigation and
analysis. “My agents finally pinned down the physical location of
the EDS hideout by piecing together leads from truckers who’d seen
some unusual things going on at a repair facility located in
central California.”

Clement handed out photographs from
a folder that had been tucked under his arm. The satellite images
showed a very busy truck repair and trailer storage business. Semis
and trailers were parked all over the compound.

“They’re in here?” Curtis asked,
bewildered.

“More precisely,” Ridley told him,
“they’re beneath it. That’s the site of an old Cold War ICBM base.
They must have made it at least partly habitable, and used the
truck repair company as a front.”

“Maybe the trucking guys didn’t even
know,” Komick murmured. He glanced up to find everyone looking at
him. “Stranger things have happened, you know.”

“Actually,” Ridley said, “you’re
probably right. The truck business is completely legitimate. That’s
part of the reason it took so long to track them down. But once we
had several leads pointing us at the trucking business, we
interviewed everyone we could who’d had anything to do with it. We
also had the lucky break from the Russians about the plane, without
which we would never have gotten this far.” She shook her head in
grudging admiration. “They didn’t make it easy to find
them.”

“Did you find the plane?” the
Director of National Intelligence asked.

“No. It had taken off earlier on
what we know now was a bogus flight plan. We’re not sure where it
is, but we’ll find it.”

“To hell with the plane,” Curtis
spat, holding the satellite image in shaking hands. “What are we
going to do about this?”

“We’ve already got an assault team
ready to go in,” Ridley told him. “All they need is your
go-ahead.”

“A team?” Curtis said angrily. “A
team? I want bloody overwhelming, irresistible force!”

“A hundred and fifty heavily armed
FBI agents is ‘bloody overwhelming, irresistible force,’ Mr.
President,” she replied evenly. “And remember, sir, that those men
and women are very...motivated, shall we say. After the bombing of
the FBI lab, not to mention the betrayals by Dawson and Richards,
they want payback.”

“
Payback?” Komick asked
quietly. “What about justice?”

“Is there a difference, Jeff?”
Curtis asked caustically. “What justice did the hundreds killed in
Colorado have? Or the workers in the New Horizons plant? Or any of
the other people who’ve been blown up lately? Not to mention all
the people who may die of disease in the time it takes New Horizons
to rebuild that plant and get production of those seeds going
again.” He glared at Komick. “They poured everything they had into
that plant and had everyone who’d been involved in the project
there to make sure there weren’t any screwups.” He shook his head
in disgust. “It was a disaster for which there can never be any
justice.”

Turning back to Ridley, he said
simply, “Go.”

***

“My God!” Richards cried over the
intercom as the Hughes MD520N helicopter dodged through the ravines
along the northeast edge of Sutter Buttes, the landing skids
occasionally thwacking against a tree branch. He had always hated
helicopters, and he hated flying low even more. And Ferris was
flying really, really low. “You’re going to get us
killed!”

“Shut up,” Ferris snapped as he
pulled the nimble helicopter up and to the left, rolling into the
next ravine. He had seen over a dozen helicopters approaching the
Buttes behind them, no doubt from Beale Air Force Base to the east.
They had the unmistakable sleek profile of military UH-60
Blackhawks, and Ferris had a good idea where they were going. The
Blackhawks had a speed advantage, but if they were laden with
troops, which he knew they must be, they wouldn’t catch him with
the head start he had on them.

After dropping off Hathcock’s strike
team in Nebraska, Ferris had landed the Falcon at Sutter County
Airport in Yuba City, about fifteen miles southeast of the EDS
base. He had landed there after Naomi had called to warn him that
the FBI had issued an alert to local law enforcement agencies about
the Falcon, and that Oroville airport was probably swarming with
police and FBI agents. Renee had a helicopter chartered and waiting
for him, and Richards was there, too. Ferris almost cried when he
looked at the Falcon one last time as he took off in the
helicopter: he had come to love that plane, but knew he would never
fly it again.

And Richards...if Naomi hadn’t
ordered him to pick up the obnoxious FBI man and Jack hadn’t
vouched for him having saved all their asses when they’d returned
from Spitsbergen, Ferris would have kicked him out of the chopper.
He’d done nothing but moan and complain about Ferris’s flying, but
Ferris was too much of a professional to fly even lower and faster
just to piss off Richards even more.

Well, mostly, Ferris thought to
himself as he yanked the helicopter almost vertical out of the last
ravine before making a beeline for the old Titan base.

“Renee,” he called over their secure
radio, “we’re coming in! But be advised: we’ve got some unwelcome
guests hot on our asses. I’m guessing a hundred plus troops, maybe
five minutes behind us.”

“Roger,” Renee replied instantly.
“We’ll be ready.”

With another glance over his
shoulder to check the position of the approaching Blackhawks,
Ferris angled the Hughes in for a hard landing just outside the
base’s fence line, as the inner compound was too crowded with
trucks and trailers to land.

“Come on!” he shouted to Richards as
he quickly undid his safety harness and hopped out. He sprinted for
the repair building, not even bothering to shut down the
chopper.

***

“Is everyone topside away?” Naomi
asked.

The man in the video screen nodded,
just as he was joined by a panting Ferris and a clearly disoriented
Richards. “I sent all the uncleared workers home,” the man said.
“The rest of us are ready to come below.”

“Stand by,” Naomi said. “The portal
is opening now.”

Behind the small group of men and
women who stood around the man in the video, the cadre who worked
in the truck repair shop and who knew its true nature, the door to
the secret room where the portal entrance lay slid open. They all
went through it, and as it closed behind them, the massive blast
doors of the portal elevator shaft opened.

Naomi watched on the security
console as everyone piled into the big elevator, then she hit the
control to bring down the elevator and close the portal’s blast
doors above them.

A few minutes later, Ferris and
Richards entered the conference room.

“You’re all crazy,” Richards
blurted.

“You tried a little face off with
the Director of the FBI in some kind of macho stunt, and you have
the balls to call us crazy?” Naomi shot back.

“That’s not what I mean,” Richards
told her. “This place is a death trap!” He looked at Jack. “There’s
no other way out of here, is there?”

Jack shook his head.

“If you thought that,” Naomi
snapped, coming over to face him, “why did you bother to come
here?”

“Excuse me, kids,” Renee cut in
sarcastically, noting that Jack hadn’t dived into the verbal
slugfest, but had his attention riveted to the wall displays
showing maps and video images of the surface level compound, “but I
think we’ve got bigger problems than your hormone
levels.”

“Here they come,” Jack said grimly
as dozens of troops in black uniforms slid to the ground from ropes
tossed out the doors of the Blackhawks that now hovered above the
maze of trucks and trailers. They landed in a ring around the outer
part of the truck parking area, then began to move inward toward
the repair building.

“Oh, no,” Richards muttered as he
got a better look at some of them when they passed by one of the
hidden cameras. They had “FBI” stenciled in large letters on the
back of their uniforms, with smaller stencils on the front. He and
Jack exchanged a sick look.

“Don’t worry,” Naomi reassured them.
“They’re not going to have an easy time getting to us.”

“They’ll never reach the portal,”
Renee said, but her voice held nothing but dismay and
regret.

“I’m not worried about them reaching
us,” Jack told them. “It’s just...”

“The idea of killing fellow agents
isn’t exactly appealing,” Richards finished for him
quietly.

“I’m sorry,” Naomi told them,
putting a hand on Jack’s shoulder. Looking at the map of the
compound and the red dots that represented the approaching agents,
she picked up a headset and handed it to Richards. “You can try to
warn them off.”

From the tone of her voice, Richards
knew that she didn’t expect him to have much luck. He shook his
head, but reached for the headset anyway. He slipped it over his
head, putting the microphone close to his lips. Naomi hit a control
and gave him a thumbs up. “Agents of the FBI,” he said firmly. The
men and women moving through the compound paused as the public
address system in the repair shop boomed out over the compound.
“This is Special Agent Carl Richards. This facility is heavily
defended and you will not succeed in breaching it. I know...I know
what you’re feeling. I know you have a job to do. But if you come
any closer, many of you may die. And it will be for absolutely
nothing. Just...just quarantine this facility. Cordon off the
perimeter...”