Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (57 page)

From the east there came the faint
sound of a large jet, and everyone turned to look. The aircraft was
barely visible, trailed by black sooty exhaust. It was making a
steep climb, and if it kept on its current course, it would fly
right over the base.

“That!” Richards
shouted as he shoved Jack onto the elevator. “Naomi,” he said
through the microphone. “Get us down! Now, now,
now!
”

“Oh, shit,” Jack whispered to
himself as he finally put together the things that Richards hadn’t
had time to tell him. He recognized the plane, even though it was
difficult to make out any details at this distance. He had seen
B-52s in action in Afghanistan, and once you’d seen one and what it
could do, you never forgot.

Slowly, so slowly, the portal
elevator began to descend.

“Yeah,” Richards told him, his eyes
riveted on the plane as it ballooned skyward, still heading right
toward them. “That about sums it up.”

At last, after what seemed a
lifetime, the massive portal doors began to close over them, and
that’s when Jack made out the roar of engines somewhere in the
complex. The diesels, he knew. They had to start the backup
generators. The air...

The last thing he glimpsed before
the doors sealed shut was a tiny speck falling away from the
B-52.

***

“Bomb away!” the bombardier cried.
“If that isn’t right in the bullseye, I’ll eat the pilot’s
undies.”

“You wish,” Harris quipped back as
she hauled the big plane around in a diving left turn. This course
would put the buttes between the plane and the bomb when it ‘went
off,’ and might also give her a legitimate reason to do a flyby
over Beale. The air traffic controllers in the area were having a
complete cow, but if her orders were to simulate a bombing of
Sutter Buttes, she was going to do it right: they’d just have to
clear any traffic out of her way.

“Get your blast curtain closed!” she
snapped at her copilot. The cockpit had thick curtains that were
pulled shut to prevent the crew from being blinded by a nuclear
blast.

“Major,” he snapped, “you can’t be
serious! We’re at five hundred feet flying at almost five hundred
knots, with air traffic all over the place out there!”

“Close them!”
Harris shouted.
As soon as we get back to
base
, she vowed,
I’m going to kick your ass off my crew
.

Muttering under his breath, the
copilot did as he was told, yanking the heavy curtain
closed.

“Time to detonation?” Harris
asked.

“Fifteen seconds,” the bombardier
said, estimating the time until the bomb would reach the proper
altitude above the target before it electrically simulated
detonation. But there wouldn’t be so much as a puff of smoke, he
lamented as the timer wound down. “Ten... nine...
eight...”

***

“Shut down!” Naomi cried as soon as
the elevator reached its stops at the bottom of the portal
shaft.

The woman at the power console hit
the kill switch, and the droning of the big engines suddenly
ceased.

“Get the surface sensor array down!”
Naomi remembered that the array would be blown away if it was still
protruding above the ground.

“Already done,” Renee said as the
screen at the front of the room faded to black.

Naomi didn’t hear her. She was
dashing down the steps to the lower level. “Jack!” she cried.
“Jack! Everyone get in here, fast!”

Jack followed the others out of the
portal into the main junction, pausing just long enough to slap the
button that would close the portal blast door before running
headlong into the command dome and into Naomi’s waiting
arms.

The portal door closed and locked
just as the bomb detonated.

CHAPTER
THIRTY-THREE

What had been an intact B83
thermonuclear bomb microseconds before was transformed into a tiny
sun shining above the scrub-covered base of the Sutter Buttes,
briefly reaching a temperature of nearly ten million degrees at its
core.

Set for a yield that was equivalent
to three hundred thousand tons of TNT, the explosion obliterated
everything to a distance of two miles north of the buttes. The
crops and orchards were set alight by the thermal radiation, and
then ripped from the earth by the blast wave that followed. Homes
and buildings half a mile past North Butte Road, nearly two miles
from ground zero, were first ignited by the thermal radiation, then
crushed by the blast wave. At a distance of nearly five miles from
ground zero, people, animals and birds were killed or injured
throughout the Gray Lodge Waterfowl Management Area. The town of
Live Oak, nine miles to the west, suffered minor damage, with
several hundred people temporarily blinded by the flash. The areas
to the south, as the Clement-thing had predicted, were largely
shielded from the blast by the intervening buttes.

After the flash heralding the bomb’s
detonation, everyone in a radius of nearly twenty miles was treated
to the chilling sight of a mushroom cloud rising over the buttes,
which themselves had been scoured clean of life.

***

The old Titan complex had been built
to withstand the blast and overpressure of near-misses by the
megaton-range warheads developed early in the Cold War. But a three
hundred kiloton blast five hundred meters directly above the entry
portal would not so easily be shrugged off by any structure ever
built by the hands of Man.

In the fraction of a second that the
blast wave took to reach the ground, the huge blast valves in the
exhaust complex, still open from when the generators were being
run, snapped shut, holding back the enormous
overpressure.

The valves in the intake complex
were already closed, but one of them had suffered minor damage from
the satchel charges used by the FBI agents. A small gouge in the
edge of the lowest blast valve, no wider than a dime, allowed
enough of the blast overpressure through to blow open the door at
the rear of the filtration area and tear off one of the steel
plates that had been welded to the intake tunnel
entrance.

The young harvester in the air
intake complex, just recovering from being stunned by the earlier
explosion of the satchel charges, was hurled to the rear of the air
intake complex, where it lay still.

***

Jack felt as if a god from Greek
mythology had taken the entire world and given it a vicious shake.
He held on tightly to Naomi as the walls of the command dome rang
like a huge bell, the concrete vibrating and warping. They were
tossed around on the floor, but the base designers had been careful
to mechanically insulate the floors: that was the purpose of the
huge gaskets around the edges of the floors and walls.

A small crack suddenly zipped along
a section of the dome wall, but the old structure held
together.

Deafened by a roar from a hundred
freight trains, Jack’s ears popped as the pressure spiked, and he
saw in the flickering light that the dome’s blast door hadn’t fully
closed behind them. The temperature, too, suddenly shot up, and he
caught the scent of something burning. He hoped that they weren’t
about to be seared by superheated air.

The main lights flickered out, to be
replaced by emergency lighting along the ceiling of the command
dome’s lower level. The intense beams provided a surreal shadow
theater of dust, smoke, and bits of debris from the ceiling that
had been shaken loose to rain down on Jack and the
others.

As he lay on the floor, Naomi
pressed tight against him, he realized that the roar was gradually
fading.

“Naomi,” he said, his voice sounding
distant, muted. “Naomi!”

“I’m okay,” she said, pulling away
from him slightly, blinking some of the dust from her eyes. “My
God, I can’t believe they...that they did this!”

“I can’t believe we’re still alive,”
Jack said, giving silent thanks to God that he was still capable of
thinking or believing anything.

“We may not be around for long if we
don’t get power back and find whatever’s burning and put it out,”
Naomi said, shakily getting to her feet. There was a thickening
layer of smoke drifting through the door from somewhere out in the
main junction. Jack joined her, and they began to help the others
up.

“You know, Dawson,” Richards told
him, “I think right now I’d rather be outside thinking you were
still a bad guy, rather than in here waiting to be slow
cooked.”

“I love you, too,” Jack said,
clapping Richards on the back.

“Renee!” Naomi called, carefully
moving up the stairs.

“We’re here,” Renee called down,
“but I think we’re back to using slide-rules for a
while.”

“We just have to get the power back
on,” Naomi said. “The main breakers must’ve tripped.”

Renee, her hair covered with white
dust, shook her head. “It’s not just main power. The command
systems all have uninterruptible power supplies, so the computers
are still up, but they don’t have anything to talk to beyond the
command dome. I think the network fiber must’ve been severed
somewhere.” She spat out a mix of spit and dust, then waved her
hand in front of her face to ward off the thickening smoke. “We’ll
have to get into the lab dome. All the power systems are there, and
I should be able to get control through one of the workstations,
assuming there’s not too much damage, and track down where the
network cabling’s severed. And we need to get the air handlers
going to bring in some outside air and pull out the
smoke.”

“Have you people ever heard the term
‘fallout?’” Richards chimed in. “We’re right under a mushroom
cloud, in case you hadn’t noticed. Sucking in a bunch of that nice
radioactive air may not be such a bright idea.”

Renee looked at him as if he were a
turd stuck to the bottom of her shoe. “We have NBC filters, you
moron,” she snapped. “That would be nuclear with an ‘N’, biological
with a ‘B’, and chemical with a ‘C.’ Think your pea brain can
handle all that?” As she pushed by a gaping Richards, she turned to
Jack and said, “Find somebody smarter the next time you need a
sidekick, will you?” With a last glance at Richards, she added,
“And get somebody better-looking, too. With hair.”

Jack shared a grin with Naomi at
Richards’ expense before catching up to Renee. “No you don’t,” he
told her as she made to squeeze through the blast door, frozen
partway open, to the junction. Except for the portal door, the
other inside blast doors hadn’t fully closed before the main power
had gone out when the bomb detonated. “You wait until we give the
all-clear. You’re the only one who can get all this stuff running
again, and we can’t afford to let anything happen to
you.”

“I’m touched,” she said
sarcastically, just before she bent over and vomited on the floor.
“Fucking nerves,” she whispered, angrily wiping her mouth with the
back of her sleeve as she stood up, still unsteady. Looking up at
Jack, she said, “I’m fine. Let’s get this over with.”

Jack exchanged a glance with Naomi
before he squeezed through the blast door. Naomi and Renee followed
behind.

In the main junction, the emergency
lighting was on, but the junction remained dim: the lights were
near the ceiling, and much of the light was being swallowed by the
smoke.

“The smoke’s coming from the lab
dome,” Jack said over his shoulder as he carefully crossed through
the junction.

“We need to go make sure the others
are okay,” Naomi told him, referring to the complex’s other
personnel who’d been in the apartments next to the three missile
silos. “I’ve also got to check on the silos. If they’re not
intact...” She shook her head. “All this could be for
nothing.”

Jack wasn’t happy with her making
the trek down the long tunnel to the silos, even in company with
other armed men and women.

“I’ll take her,” Richards told him
quietly.

“We’ll help,” Franzman, the FBI
agent who’d formerly been in charge of the assault on the base
said.

Jack nodded gratefully. “Keep her
safe,” he said. To Naomi, he said, “Be damn careful. We should have
the power back on soon so you can get through the blast locks. And
watch out for any metal that might’ve been connected or exposed to
anything on the surface. The heat...”

“I know,” Naomi told him with a wan
smile. Then she turned and headed off down the dim tunnel. Richards
took the lead, with Franzman and nine other agents forming a
protective circle around her.

“Come on, Romeo,” Renee told him.
“Let’s see what the damage is in here.”

Jack and two agents who had come
with Franzman squeezed through the open blast door into the lab
dome, not sure what they’d find.

Behind them, the remainder of the
command center crew returned to their stations, hoping that soon
they’d be able to bring the base back to life.

***

“Criminy, what a mess!” Renee
exclaimed after she’d managed to finally squeeze her way through
the door to the lab dome.