Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (56 page)

“Flight profile?” Harris
called.

“Low-high-low,” the navigator
responded. That would bring the plane in at a low-altitude run
toward the target. Then they would pop up in a rapid climb to
release altitude to drop the bomb. As the bomb fell to earth,
slowed by a parachute that would deploy after it was dropped,
Harris and her crew would dive for the deck and get the hell out of
the area so they wouldn’t be obliterated by the simulated nuclear
explosion. “Turn to course two-eight-one,” the navigator called,
and the indicator on Harris’s navigation display moved to the
right, settling on the new course. “Recommend an altitude setting
of five hundred feet in terrain following mode.”

Harris smiled behind her oxygen mask
as she hauled the B-52’s nose around to the west and started the
descent into the mountains that separated her plane from the
target. She was looking forward to the reaction from the 9th
Operations Group weenies at Beale as her BUFF, the acronym for the
B-52’s unofficial nickname of Big Ugly Fat Fucker, suddenly roared
overhead.

Maybe this mission
won’t be such a dog after all
, she told
herself.

***

Monica Ridley’s eyes fluttered open.
She was still in the conference room. It took a moment for her to
understand that it wasn’t all a nightmare, that what had happened
with the Clement-thing, The Other, had been real.

With adrenaline
flooding into her system, she tried to stand up, but instead
collapsed to the floor in a heap of unresponsive limbs. She
whimpered at the pain that suddenly shot through her abdomen, and
looked down to see a spot of blood that had welled up from where
the
thing
had
jabbed her with something, like some sort of
needle.

It must have
injected me with something
, she
thought,
something that’s bringing back
the disease
.

“Oh, God,” she
cried softly, biting down on the fear that threatened to overwhelm
her.
You’ve got to do
something
, she told herself
sternly.
You’re not just going to lie here
and whimper
. No one had come for her yet,
which gave her an opening.

She looked up at the wall behind the
chair where she had been sitting. There was a secure phone in a
recess in the wall. She just needed to reach it.

It took five minutes of agonizing
effort to push and pull herself back into the chair, fighting
against her increasingly useless limbs. She felt as if her body was
decaying, withering away with each second.

At last, panting with exertion, she
managed to knock the phone off its cradle and into her lap. Then,
with painstaking care, for she knew she had little time left, she
punched in the numbers for the secure line to the FBI’s watch
center.

The call was picked up after the
first ring. “Watch center, Special Agent Ramirez,” came the sharp,
no-nonsense voice of the woman who answered.

“This is...” Ridley began, shocked
at the sound of her voice. It sounded like it was coming from a
wheezing child. Forcing a deep breath into her lungs, she tried
again. “This is Director Ridley,” she said, her voice sounding like
it had some authority now.

“Ma’am,” Ramirez asked, “are you all
right? Are you ill?”

“No, I’m fine,” Ridley lied, her
growing fury battling against her body’s increasing helplessness.
“I need you to patch me through direct to the SAC for the Sutter
Buttes operation. Now.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Ramirez replied.
“Stand by.”

If only I
could
, the FBI’s Director thought bitterly
as she looked at the useless legs that would never stand or walk
again. As the seconds ticked past, she prayed she could get through
to her people in time.

CHAPTER
THIRTY-TWO

A low boom echoed through the
complex, the only outward sign of the explosion that had thrown
Jack and the others to the ground on the surface above.

“No,” Naomi whispered as the video
feed showed him flying through the air to land hard on the concrete
where the truck repair shop had been. He lay very still. “Please,
God...”

Then the full
significance of the explosion hit her.
The
blast valves in the air intake complex
.
They were the only thing keeping the harvester, or whatever it was,
from getting out. “Renee,” she called, “is the air intake complex
still secure?”

After a moment, Renee said, “The
indicators are showing that the valves are all closed,” she said,
then quickly added, “but I’m getting a warning light on valve
three.”

“Will it come open?” Naomi asked,
trying not to give all her attention to the screen showing the
topside video feed, where a stunned Richards was up now and
stumbling-crawling toward where Jack lay.

“It won’t open,” Renee told her,
“but it may not completely seal against any more
blasts.”

“I don’t think we have to worry
about that,” Naomi said, “at least for a while. They took enough of
a beating. What else–”

An alarm suddenly began to
whoop.

“External power is down!” the woman
at the power systems station called out, shutting off the alarm.
“We’re on battery power now.”

“Go into power conservation mode,”
Naomi ordered. The woman nodded and turned back to her console.
Throughout the complex, lights and other electronic equipment that
weren’t essential were shut off.

“Come on, Jack,” Naomi whispered,
clutching the edge of her workstation as she watched Richards kneel
down next to him. “Come on...”

“What the hell?” Renee blurted as
something suddenly dropped down from the top of the view in the
video feed. It was a helicopter, a Blackhawk. As everyone in the
control center watched, eyes wide, it landed hard, slamming onto
the concrete apron around the ruined air intake vent right next to
where Richards was trying to revive Jack.

Amid more exclamations of surprise,
the Blackhawk’s crew leaped out, hands in the air. One of them,
from the troop compartment, rushed over to Richards, who pointed a
pistol in the man’s face.

***

“Special Agent Richards?” the
black-clad special agent shouted above the dying roar of the
Blackhawk’s slowing rotor blades as the pilot made a hasty
shutdown.

“That’s right,”
Richards snapped back, barely hearing the man but able to read his
lips. His ears were still ringing from the blast of the satchel
charges. But his aim was steady enough.
If
this guy so much as sneezes
, he thought
coldly,
I’ll blow his brains
out
. “What do you clowns think you’re
doing?”

“We’re surrendering,” the man told
him, ignoring the gun. He gestured for two of the helo’s crewmen to
help with Jack, and they immediately knelt down, gently picking him
up. “I’m Special Agent Franzman, the SAC. I have new orders
straight from Director Ridley.”

Richards suddenly caught sight of
the other FBI agents who’d survived the initial massacre but who
hadn’t come along in the attempt to use the satchel charges. They
were carrying their wounded comrades and moving as fast as they
could toward the portal. None were armed, and all had confused and
frightened looks on their faces.

“What in blazes is going on?”
Richards demanded.

“We’re about to get nuked,” Franzman
said, deadpan. He clearly didn’t believe it, but like Richards, he
was a professional who followed orders, especially if they came
straight from the director herself. His expression made it clear
that he expected Richards to laugh or reassure him that the
director had gone mental. Having to suddenly turn himself and his
agents over to two men, Richards and Dawson, who moments before had
been the FBI’s two most wanted criminals, was causing him some
serious indigestion.

Instead of laughing, Richards
grabbed Franzman’s arm and ran as fast as he could toward the
portal. “How long?” he shouted as he ran.

“She didn’t know,” Franzman told
him. “She just said we were in ‘imminent danger.’”

“God,” Richards moaned as he dashed
the last few meters, passing by the men laboring with Jack’s
unconscious weight. Richards stopped at the first of his team
members he came to, snatching off the man’s headset. His own had
been blown off by the blast.

“Naomi!” he shouted into the
microphone. “Open the portal! They’re going to nuke us!” To the
rest of his team, who had their weapons aimed at the other FBI
agents approaching from the direction of the main gate, he yelled,
“Drop your weapons. They’re friendlies now. We’ve got to get back
inside!”

Impatiently, they all gathered
around the thick blast doors, waiting for them to open.

***

They’re going to
nuke us
. Richards’ words hit Naomi and the
others like a punch in the gut. Had it been anywhere else or any
other time, she would have laughed at the bad joke.
Now...

“Naomi!” Richards shouted
again.

“Stand by,” she told him. “We’ve
lost utility power and we can’t open any of the blast doors on
batteries alone – the hydraulic rams for the doors need too much
power.” Turning to Renee, she said, “Start the backup generators.”
They were the only thing that could provide enough electricity to
drive the hydraulic actuators.

Renee stared at her. “We can’t,” she
said. “The intake tunnel is blocked by the steel plating we welded
on to hold in the...the thing!

Naomi sat back, her warning to Jack
about welding the intake tunnel shut echoing in her mind, but there
had been no other choice.

Just as there was no other choice
now. “Open all the internal blast doors,” she ordered, “then start
the generators. That should give the diesels enough air from inside
the complex for the time it’ll take to get the portal open and
closed again.”

“
All
the
blast doors?” Renee said. “Even the antenna complex?” The harvester
they had captured from Spitsbergen was contained there in one of
the cells. It had been dormant since they’d returned, and there had
been no time since then for anyone to do more than make sure it
didn’t get into trouble.

“Yes,” Naomi said. “We’ve only got
one shot at this, and we can’t afford to run out of air or we’re
dead. We should get most of our air back once there’s a clear
airway up through the portal when the surface blast doors are
open.”

“You’re the boss,” Renee said
quietly as she began to open all the blast doors, a shiver going up
her spine as she hit the control to open the one to the antenna
complex. “You’re clear, power!” she called to the woman in charge
of the complex’s power systems.

“Starting the generators now,” the
woman said uncertainly.

Even here, upstairs in the command
dome, they could hear the deep roar of the two massive diesel
generators in the lab dome as they coughed into life.

Naomi had to pop her ears right away
as the big engines began to suck in hundreds of cubic feet per
second of the complex’s air. Huge as the base was, the air wouldn’t
last long at all.

They had to endure an agonizing wait
while the voltage on the generators stabilized before the woman at
the power console shouted, “The generators are on line! We’ve got
power!”

“Naomi!” Richards called again.
“Open the goddamn door!”

“Open the portal
doors and get everyone below,
now!
” Naomi
shouted.

***

“Christ,” Jack gasped, blinking his
eyes as he finally came to. He slowly sat up, holding his arms
across his chest where the Kevlar vest had stopped the slugs that
otherwise would have killed him. It gave him a chill, how closely
the shots matched the rounds he’d taken in Afghanistan years ago.
Fortunately, the FBI agents had been shooting 9mm weapons that
couldn’t penetrate his vest. But it still felt like someone had hit
him in the sternum with a sledgehammer. “That hurts.”

“Nice of you to join us,” Richards
snapped, kneeling down to make sure Jack was okay. “I guess you’ll
live, at least for the next minute or so.”

“What the hell’s going on?” Jack
asked, looking with bewilderment at the gaggle of FBI agents
standing around them and the Blackhawk helicopter sitting
nearby.

“Nothing good,” Richards told him
tersely as he helped Jack to his feet. “Naomi!” Richards shouted
angrily. “Open the goddamn door!”

As if on cue, the huge concrete and
metal doors of the portal began to open, the two leaves slowly
rising upward. There was a curious sucking noise as the doors
opened that Richards didn’t remember it making when they’d come up
to the surface.

Once the doors reached their fully
open position, the elevator appeared, and Richards ushered everyone
on.

“Can I ask what the rush is?” Jack
said as he stood on the concrete lip of the portal, not wanting to
step onto the elevator. As large and strong as it was, it was
clearly overloaded, and he didn’t relish plunging the seven stories
to the bottom.