Season of the Harvest

by Michael R. Hicks

  “Strike package A?” Jack asked, surprised.

  Naomi nodded. “We’ve been prepared for this for a long time, Jack,” she told him. “We knew that the fight would come out in the open at some point, but we had no idea how it would present itself. So Tan and the others on our security team came up with a series of different options to cover most contingencies, then we pre-packaged as much as we could so we could move quickly. Package A is our ‘armed to the teeth’ option for a full twelve-person team.” She locked gazes with him. “We can’t fight a full-out war, Jack, but we’ll have enough firepower to make them take notice.”

  “How long will it take the jet to get here?”

  “Two hours, give or take,” Renee told him, looking at Naomi. “We keep the plane at Oakland Metro in ‘Frisco. The flight up here won’t take long, but they have to load the equipment, fuel up, and do all the flight planning crap. Which brings us to the next item: Ferris needs to have a cover story to file the flight plan. We’re going to have to fly through Canadian airspace, if nothing else, and we’ll need clearance to get through or they’re going to think we’re up to no good.”

  “Norway,” Jack said. “Set us up for a business charter flight to Norway, just pick an airfield that has a long enough runway and serves a major city that’s on a close track with Spitsbergen.”

  “Then we could just declare an in-flight emergency and land there,” Naomi said, nodding in approval, “with nobody being the wiser.”

  “And what’s your purpose for visiting the fair and freezing country of Norway, Mr. Dawson?” Renee asked in her best customs official voice. “Business, or pleasure?”

  “Business,” he told her with a predatory smile. “Definitely business.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  In the biosafety containment chamber, the rhesus monkey squirmed and whimpered. It was acutely uncomfortable, its body sending mixed signals of aching mingled with an odd sensation of numbness. The sounds through the speakers of its small prison that echoed the noises of its fellow monkeys in their distant cages, an attempt by its human keepers to provide their small captive with some sensory input, were now muted and dull as the monkey’s hearing ability faded away.

  Holding its hands up before its eyes, the monkey could see with its rapidly fading vision that its fur had been absorbed into its flesh, and that its skin had taken on a strange bruised look. Two of the monkey’s left fingers had fused together, and the right hand had bent forward and was now stuck to the underside of its forearm, as if the bones of the wrist had gone soft and the skin had flowed together. It brought its left hand to its mouth, touching its lip with a finger, and was surprised when the flesh stuck together. When it pulled the finger away, it left behind nearly half its length, stuck to the monkey’s lower lip. There was no pain or blood, no bone, just the strange-looking mottled flesh that now covered its entire body. The monkey sucked in its lips and was again surprised when they stuck to the inside of its mouth, parting around the still-hard teeth.

  The monkey closed its eyes and curled up on the floor of the chamber. The discomfort gradually disappeared, to be replaced by a pleasant numbness.

  As time passed, during which its human keepers did not make their normally appointed rounds, it was aware of only one thing. It was hungry. So very, very hungry.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  For the first time since Jack had come to the base, he was heading toward the surface. He, Naomi, and four others had passed through the massive blast doors into the portal itself, a massive silo-like structure that Naomi had told him was thirty feet in diameter and seventy feet from the bottom of the shaft to the massive doors, which were over three feet thick, at the top. Looking through the wire mesh that encircled the elevator shaft framing, he could see the personnel stairs that wound their way around the inside of the huge shaft. He joined the others as they stepped onto the ten foot-wide elevator, which began to slowly take them to the surface.

  They carried fake identification and passports, although they didn’t expect to have to use them. Other than that, Naomi had instructed them to leave behind anything that could identify them. All of the weapons and gear they would need would be in the strike package that had been loaded onto the Falcon jet. Jack had expressed his concern about needing to check the equipment and make sure that everything they would need would be there. But after Naomi showed him the manifest of what this “package” contained, he couldn’t help but be impressed. Tan and the others who had put the equipment together knew what they had been doing, and if the men with him were half as competent as he suspected Tan had been, their small team would be a force to be reckoned with.

  He heard a loud whine and looked up to see the two leaves of the surface blast doors being pushed open by huge hydraulic rams.

  “And this is the only way in or out?” Jack asked Naomi.

  “Yes,” she told him, “except for the auxiliary entrance at the antenna terminal. But the doors there are just as thick.”

  “Better hope those hydraulics never go out,” Jack told her.

  “We keep the doors very well-maintained, believe me,” she said as the elevator came to a very gentle stop. “We filled in the old personnel entrance here at the portal with concrete. It would have been a lot more convenient, but it was far too vulnerable to a determined ground assault. With these,” she nodded at the reinforced, steel-lined doors that were three and a half feet thick, “they’ll have to knock a little bit harder if they want to get in.”

  The elevator rose into a large white room, brightly lit by overhead fluorescent tubes, that was large enough to accommodate the surface portal, along with a concrete apron leading up to the elevator. At the end of the apron was a set of vehicle doors that could easily accommodate a large delivery truck, but was currently occupied by a black limousine with dark tinted windows.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jack muttered.

  “This is the secure room inside the truck repair shop,” Naomi explained. “Nobody comes in here unless they’re fully cleared.”

  “Isn’t it sort of obvious if you just drive in or out of here?” Jack asked as he slid into the rear of the limo with two of the other men, while the remaining pair sat up front in the driver and passenger seats.

  “Normally we don’t,” she told him as she strapped in beside him. “We usually bring people in by ones and twos, or we’ll bring in several at night after the shop here is closed. But sometimes, like now, we have to take a risk.”

  The doors in front of the limo opened, revealing an expansive garage area that was occupied by several other similar limos and some SUVs.

  “This is what we call the airlock,” she told him as the limo quietly wheeled toward another set of doors. Behind them, the doors to the portal room closed, bearing a man-sized yellow sign that said “Danger! Extremely Hazardous Waste: Do Not Enter!” in heavy black letters with a skull and crossbones at each end. “We have another front company that runs a small limo service from here. All the limo drivers are fully cleared, so the only thing we really have to worry about is making sure the outer doors are closed any time the doors to the portal are opened. We use the SUVs for regular cargo and supplies. Anything larger than that, we usually haul in at night from one of the tractor trailer rigs in the truck shop next door.” She pointed to yet another set of large doors in the opposite wall from where the portal was, with a sign overhead that read “Big Rigs ONLY.”

  “Then you can just drive right in or out, with passengers in the back behind tinted glass, and nobody’s the wiser,” Jack said, shaking his head. “Everybody’ll just think it’s another limo run. Slick.”

  “Glad you think so,” she told him, smiling.

  Looking out the window as they left the limo garage, he could see that the truck shop that occupied the rest of the building had four drive-through bays, each of which could accommodate a tractor and trailer rig with plenty of room to spare.

  “The building covers up the most vulnerable points of the bas
e from any direct observation,” she said. “The portal and the intake and exhaust vents for the diesel backup generators. The vents have heavy blast valves up to four feet in diameter down below, but they’d be fairly vulnerable to a ground attack if someone could get into the shafts.”

  Jack watched as the limo wended its way through the orderly rows of trailers and rigs that were parked on the expansive property that had once been a Titan I missile base, here in the foothills of Sutter Buttes in California. He had never been here before, but wished he had some time to explore the area: the buttes looked like some beautiful country. Unfortunately, he could probably never again show his face outside of the Earth Defense Society without fear that he’d be turned in and arrested for crimes he never committed.

  The limo glided past acres of orchards and farmland on its way to the Oroville Airport, about an hour’s drive northeast of the base. He and the others spoke little on the way.

  About halfway there, Jack was surprised to find Naomi’s head resting against his shoulder: she was fast asleep. He breathed in the lavender scent that had come to be such a part of her in his mind. He envied her, because he knew he could use some rest, too, but was too keyed up about the mission.

  At last, the limo arrived at the airport and came to a gentle stop on the tarmac just off Chuck Yeager Way, parking right next to a sleek business jet with three engines near the tail.

  “Hey, Sleeping Beauty,” he said quietly, “time to wake up.”

  Naomi snapped awake, sitting bolt upright. “God, did I fall asleep?”

  “Only for a few minutes,” Jack lied as he opened the door and got out. He and the others wasted no time in boarding: they didn’t want to be seen. It was just after four in the afternoon and there weren’t many people around, but they didn’t want to push their luck. If they’d had a choice, they would have waited until nightfall, but they needed to get to Spitsbergen and the Svalbard seed vault as quickly as possible. Jack had been concerned about whether they would be arriving in daylight or darkness, but at this time of year the sun never really set in the arctic: no matter what the hour, they would land in daylight, assuming the storm had passed.

  He followed Naomi up the steps that had extended from the aircraft, noting that there were already another six men aboard, making up the rest of his twelve-person team.

  “Girl, are you sure you want to do this?”

  Jack looked beyond Naomi to see the pilot, a grizzled-looking bear of a man who must have been in his mid-fifties, with close-cropped gray hair and extraordinarily bright blue eyes.

  “We have to, Al,” she said firmly. “Gregg is gone. The harvesters have him, and things are accelerating faster than we’d anticipated. If we don’t act...” She shook her head. “I can’t live with that.”

  He raised his eyebrows, then turned his attention to Jack. “Don’t believe we’ve met,” he said, extending a paw of a hand. “Al Ferris.”

  “Jack Dawson.” He shook Ferris’s hand, noting that the other man’s grip was firm without any attempt at a macho knuckle-crushing competition.

  “Okay,” Ferris said, raising his voice so the others could hear, “sit down and get strapped in. Once we get airborne, you can start unpacking your stuff.”

  As Jack sat down next to Naomi in a pair of seats facing a small table, he saw that there were packs and weapon cases arranged around the cabin, one for each passenger.

  It wasn’t long before the three engines on the jet, a Dassault Falcon 7X, had spun up and the aircraft began taxiing to the active runway.

  Unable to help himself, Jack suddenly laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” Naomi asked.

  “I always wondered what it’d be like to ride in a corporate jet,” he told her. “All this had to happen just for me to get this stupid airplane ride.”

  She smiled and shook her head as Ferris smoothly pivoted the Falcon onto Oroville’s runway 19 and pushed the throttles to the stops. The plane accelerated quickly, even with such a full load, and was airborne a few moments later. After clearing the local airspace, Ferris turned the plane north and climbed to its cruising altitude, heading for the distant Arctic.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “Thank God, this damned storm is moving past,” muttered Russian Army Kapitan Sergei Mikhailov as he stared out the windscreen of the Il-76 military transport, cursing the roiling storm clouds that had been responsible for an endless, bone-jarring ride.

  The big four-engine jet transport had taken off from Pskov in northern Russia eight hours earlier, carrying Mikhailov’s company of the 23rd Guards Airborne Regiment of the 76th Guards Airborne Division. The mission had come down directly from the prime minister in Moscow: secure the Svalbard airport and the nearby seed vault, both on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, from any possible terrorist threat. Mikhailov had been chosen to lead the mission because he had lived for three years at the Russian coal mining settlement at Barentsburg on the island, about fifty kilometers from the airport. Desperate for work, his father had taken a contract with the mining company there when Mikhailov had been a boy, and the two of them had gone there to live. Mikhailov had hated every minute of it: the company that ran the coal mine often didn’t pay the workers, the settlement sometimes ran out of supplies and had to beg care packages from the Norwegians at Longyearbyen, and Barentsburg was so isolated that he had often felt he was at the very end of the world. He had never been so happy as when his father had earned enough money that they could finally return home to Saint Petersburg.

  When Mikhailov was of age, most of the available career opportunities held no appeal for him, so he joined the Army as an officer cadet. He had quickly taken to what the Army had to offer, and had volunteered for the Vozdushno-Desantnye Voiska, the Airborne Troops, following in the footsteps of his great grandfather, who had become a Hero of the Soviet Union while serving in the 4th Airborne Corps at Vyazma during the Great Patriotic War.

  Over the next several years, he had risen to the rank of kapitan, leading a company of airborne soldiers. He had never seen combat himself, but several of his non-commissioned officers had fought in Chechnya, and he had taken the opportunity to learn from them all that he could. Many of the lessons they had brought back with them from that bitter conflict, he had discovered, had been unpleasant, indeed.

  When the division commander had personally tasked him to carry out the prime minister’s orders, he had been eager to take on the mission, his first operational assignment beyond the routine exercises his unit engaged in. He knew that Russia and Norway had signed a treaty forbidding any military forces on Spitsbergen, but what could the puny Norwegian military do? Politely ask him and his men to go home? He had almost smiled at the thought while his division commander was talking, but assumed that the man would have misunderstood the expression.

  “Yes, but they still refuse to give us clearance to land,” the pilot answered as the big plane jolted upward, bringing Mikhailov back to the present as he was nearly driven to his knees. The flight from Pskov should have taken about five hours, but the storm had forced them to loiter for another three hours in buffeting winds before the airport was clear enough to attempt a landing. Mikhailov had considered making a combat jump until he and the pilot consulted the latest weather reports issued by the Svalbard airport: the wind gusts at low altitude were still brutal. The massive Il-76 could handle them, although it would be a hard landing, but the paratroops would have been swept away like dandelions in a tornado.

  “We don’t need any clearance,” Mikhailov told him. “Just get my men on the ground.”

  The pilot grunted acknowledgement, and with the rest of the flight crew began to work through the landing checklists, while Mikhailov returned to the cavernous hold. He knew that his troops, some of whom were desperately ill from the hours-long roller-coaster ride, were eager to get out of this flying death trap and onto the ground.

  The aircraft’s loadmaster tapped him on the arm. His helmet had an intercom and he’d just received word f
rom the pilot. “Five minutes!” he said, gesturing at the cargo ramp at the rear of the aircraft.

  Mikhailov nodded and then began barking orders to his junior officers, who made the final checks of the men. It was more a formality at this point, because they had already checked their weapons and gear several times, but one more time never hurt.

  “The men are ready, sir,” his executive officer reported after making a personal inspection of every soldier.

  “Very well,” Mikhailov told him, moving down the aisle toward the cargo ramp. On the way, he stopped before a team of men who had come aboard at the last minute by order of the division commander. They were Spetsnaz, special forces soldiers. Mikhailov had worked with Spetsnaz troops several times in the past, but these were unusually aloof. When he had asked the division commander why they were coming aboard, he had only shaken his head.

  “They have their orders, Mikhailov,” he had said quietly. “And so do you. Just stay out of their way and don’t interfere.”

  Mikhailov stood there a moment, looking at the four Spetsnaz men, all non-coms, who looked back at him with hooded eyes and bland expressions. None of them had said a word to anyone since coming aboard. The special forces soldiers he had worked with before had not been like this, and it bothered him. Unfortunately, he had no real authority over them, and if they hadn’t opened up to any of the other men, it was unlikely they would do so with an officer.

  He finally decided not to bother saying anything to them and moved on toward the rear of the aircraft, clinging to safety stays to keep himself on his feet as the big plane was shoved around by the winds.