Season of the Harvest

by Michael R. Hicks

  The four men followed him with their eyes, but said nothing.

  The loadmaster suddenly grabbed Mikhailov’s arm and shoved an intercom headset into his hand. Putting the earphone to his ear, Mikhailov said into the microphone, “What is it?”

  “There’s another aircraft inbound to Svalbard,” the pilot told him tensely. “It’s a Norwegian Air Force plane. The tower told them of our approach, and they are warning us off.”

  “A fighter?” Mikhailov asked him, adrenaline suddenly shooting through his veins. The Norwegian Air Force was small, but potent: they had seventy-two American-designed F-16 fighters, which would make short work of the defenseless Il-76 if the Norwegians got trigger-happy. He suddenly, desperately, wanted to be on the ground.

  “No,” the pilot reassured him. “They identified themselves as a C-130 carrying troops. They must be right behind us, I’m guessing maybe five or ten minutes.”

  “Tell them we are here to provide counter-terrorist security and have no hostile intent toward them,” Mikhailov told him. “We would welcome a joint operation with their ground troops.”

  “Nyet,” another voice suddenly interjected.

  Mikhailov turned around to find one of the Spetsnaz men standing close behind him, wearing the loadmaster’s headset. The loadmaster stood there, quietly fuming.

  “Only Russian military forces will be allowed on the island,” the nameless Spetsnaz soldier went on. “You will not permit the Norwegians to land.”

  “Why?” Mikhailov asked hotly. “It’s their territory!”

  The Spetsnaz man stared at him, his eyes cold and hard. After a long pause, he said, “The Norwegian military has been infiltrated by the terrorists who conducted the earlier attacks. That aircraft may have agents aboard. You will not allow them to land.”

  With that, the man took off the headset and callously tossed it at the loadmaster as he headed back to rejoin his three companions.

  Mikhailov was furious, but he wasn’t about to disobey. He outranked the Spetsnaz soldiers, but he had no doubt who held higher authority.

  Instead, he focused on the here and now. The Norwegians were right behind them, and he had to figure out a way to avoid a military confrontation. He was confident his company could win any battle with their Scandinavian cousins should things get out of hand, but if a battle broke out, it would be an international disaster. He knew they wouldn’t turn around simply because he asked them to – it was their territory, after all – he had to find another way.

  “Once we’re on the ground,” he told the pilot after a moment, “use the plane to block the runway.” The Svalbard airport only had a single runway, without even an adjacent taxiway, and with the Il-76 sitting in the middle of it, the Norwegians wouldn’t be able to land. “If they can’t get on the ground, they can’t cause us any trouble.”

  “Understood,” the pilot said, although the tone of his voice made it clear he wasn’t happy with the idea of using his billion-ruble aircraft as a runway barrier. “One minute.”

  Mikhailov held on tight as the big plane sharpened its already sickening descent, the pilot taking them in for a combat landing.

  ***

  “Faen!” the pilot of the Royal Norwegian Air Force C-130J, named Idunn, cursed. “The tower says the bastards have blocked the runway!”

  Kaptein Terje Halvorsen, with two platoons of his rifle company, KP1 of the Hans Majestet Kongens Garde (His Majesty the King’s Guard) Battalion aboard the plane, frowned but said nothing for a moment as he stared out the front of the C-130’s bulbous nose at the rapidly approaching Svalbard airport. The Russians had beaten them by only a few minutes, and he silently cursed the luck that had delayed the C-130’s arrival here. The flight from Oslo had been horrible because of the storm, and the pilot had been forced to detour to the west much farther than he’d expected to try and get around it.

  On reflection, Halvorsen had been surprised at how quickly the prime minister had made the decision to send a military protective force to Spitsbergen, and even more surprised that he had not backed down from the bitter Russian diplomatic response after he had informed them that Norway was sending a small contingent of troops to the island. There were already reports coming in from the intelligence services before Idunn even took off from Gardermoen Air Station, north of Oslo, that Russian troops were being put on alert in response to Norway’s “intransigence.” In turn, the Norwegian military had also been put on alert. It was a bad situation that Halvorsen knew could easily spiral out of control, with worldwide tensions at an all-time high after the terrorist attacks that had swept across the globe.

  “This is Norwegian territory,” Halvorsen had tried to explain to the Russian aircraft, “and we have sovereignty here.” After considering a moment, he had added, “We would welcome your support and would be happy to work together with you, but you cannot and will not refuse our landing.”

  Yet, they had. According to the tower controller, after a hundred or so Russian troops poured from the aft ramp of the Il-76, it had taxied to the middle of the runway’s two thousand three hundred meter length and parked. A few minutes later, the airport’s controllers had frantically reported that Russian troops had entered the control tower. After that message, the tower had gone ominously silent.

  Now the Norwegians were close enough in their approach to see the big Russian plane squatting on the runway.

  “Can you get us in there?” Halvorsen asked the pilot.

  The pilot glanced up at him. “We can try,” he said uncertainly. “We need a thousand meters to make a max effort combat landing. But if that fucker is more than a hundred meters closer to us than he looks, the people in Longyearbyen are going to be in for the fireworks show of the century.”

  “Do it,” Halvorsen said. Both he and the pilot had seen combat, Halvorsen having served in the Norwegian mechanized company that had been deployed to Kabul in Afghanistan, and the pilot having done an exchange tour flying on American C-130s running support flights throughout that embattled country. Both of them had been in a few tight spots and were aware of the risks. Halvorsen didn’t want a violent confrontation, but he was damned if he was going to let the Russians force them to go home with their tails between their legs. “And make sure Oslo gets a full report of what’s happening here.”

  “Better get strapped in,” the pilot said grimly. He had done several short field combat landings using what the Americans called a max effort approach. They were hairy under the best of circumstances, and with the winds still gusting near the ground, the chances of encountering low-level wind shear that could send the plane tumbling to the ground would make this approach even more exciting than usual. “This is going to be rough.”

  ***

  “What the hell is going on down there?” Ferris asked, astonished. He had called Naomi and Jack up to the cockpit to listen in on the chatter between the Russians and Norwegians in what was shaping up to be a shooting match on Spitsbergen. “I can’t believe the Norwegians are gonna go for it. They’ve either got huge brass balls or shit for brains. Maybe both.”

  “They don’t have a choice,” Jack said. “If it was us, we’d do the same thing.”

  Ferris snorted. “Not if I was the goddamn pilot.”

  Jack suppressed a smile. Naomi had told him a little about their curmudgeonly pilot on the long flight over the Arctic. He’d flown Combat Search and Rescue missions in both Iraq wars, earning a Silver Star and an Air Force Cross, plus two Purple Hearts. From that alone, Jack knew that Ferris had done more than his fair share of ballsy or shit-for-brains stunts. And had lived to tell about it.

  “What about us?” Naomi asked.

  “What do you mean, ‘What about us?’” Ferris snapped, turning to stare at her. “You’re not thinking of dropping into the middle of that mess? Listen, girl, faking we have an in-flight emergency and dropping in to fight off a harvester or two was one thing. Sticking our noses into an international war zone is something else entirely.”

&nb
sp; “But, Al, we can’t just–”

  That was when they heard the Norwegian C-130’s frantic mayday call, booming over the cockpit speakers.

  ***

  Mikhailov was proud of his men. They had quickly and efficiently taken control of the airport without anyone being harmed. They had rounded up the airport personnel and the other civilians, a couple dozen tourists waiting for their airliner to be fueled for the flight back to the mainland, and confined them to the airport lounge. Speaking in broken Norwegian, which he had learned during the years he had lived on Spitsbergen, Mikhailov explained that he and his troops had absolutely no quarrel with Norway and its citizens, but had come to provide security for the Svalbard seed vault and the airport against a possible terrorist threat. He assured them that as soon as his men were in place and the area secured, he would see to it that they were sent safely on their way. And he meant every word of it.

  That was when his men in the tower informed him over the radio that the Norwegian C-130 was continuing its approach.

  “They’re bluffing,” Mikhailov said.

  “Not according to our pilot,” his executive officer told him. He had communications with the Il-76 from his position in the tower. “He says he has seen skilled pilots land and take off in these planes, C-130s, from very short runways.”

  “Do they have enough room to do this?” Mikhailov asked as he hurried out of the lounge and onto the tarmac. Looking down the runway, he could see the distant silhouette of the approaching Norwegian plane and the bulk of the Il-76 sitting in the middle of the runway. “Tell the pilot to move his plane to wherever he thinks it best to deter the Norwegians. I do not want them to land!”

  “He knows this, kapitan,” his executive officer said, “but–”

  Whatever he was going to say died on his lips as he saw a small plume of smoke from the far side of the Il-76. Mikhailov watched in horror as a shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile, a SAM, arced upward, straight at the approaching C-130.

  ***

  “Chto za huy!” the loadmaster shouted as one of the Spetsnaz soldiers who had been assembling an SA-18 SAM stood up, perched it on his shoulder, and walked down the Il-76’s cargo ramp onto the runway. Moving to a spot just forward of the port wing, he aimed it at the Norwegian transport, and fired. “Are you insane?” the loadmaster screamed at him.

  The Spetsnaz soldier dropped the spent SA-18, turned around, and shot the loadmaster in the head with a short-barreled assault rifle.

  A second Spetsnaz man emerged from the cargo hold, nodded to the first, and together they ran down the runway toward the terminal building.

  They had gone a hundred meters when the Il-76 exploded.

  ***

  “SAM! SAM!” the copilot aboard the C-130 shouted. “Twelve o’clock low! Flares away!”

  Idunn’s pilot didn’t need anyone shouting in his ear: he could clearly see the pinpoint of bright flame heading straight at him as his copilot made a desperate mayday call, declaring an in-flight emergency.

  At the rear of the aircraft, the flare dispenser pumped out a series of flares to try and deceive the incoming missile, but there was little hope. The SA-18 was resistant to such countermeasures, and the missile’s super-cooled seeker stayed firmly locked onto its target: the inboard starboard engine.

  “Get the gear up!” the pilot snapped as he jammed the throttles forward. He knew it would be an act of God for the missile not to hit them, but the C-130 was a tough aircraft. The small warhead carried by a shoulder-fired SAM was unlikely to bring them down right away unless it killed the flight crew or just got lucky. Had they been making a standard approach, he might have tried to continue his landing. Even if the missile took out an engine, he would have stood a better than even chance of getting the plane down in one piece.

  But they were making a max effort combat landing, which was an altogether different situation. The C-130 was descending at nearly fifteen hundred feet per minute, far more rapidly than for a normal approach, on a steep glide slope toward the very end of the runway. The thrust of the howling engines was precariously balanced against the drag and lift of full flaps. It was one of the most difficult maneuvers a C-130 pilot could perform, with no margin for error. The pilot knew that if they lost an engine now, they’d be dead. Trying to gain airspeed and altitude was the only option he had.

  Idunn began to slowly accelerate as the gear came up and the copilot began to retract the flaps.

  The smoke plume of the approaching SAM grew larger and larger, until suddenly it blossomed into an explosion that consumed the inboard starboard engine and sent a torrent of hot shrapnel slashing through the cockpit, instantly killing the copilot. The pilot suffered half a dozen minor flesh wounds, but his hands never left the controls.

  The big plane staggered in the air, but had gained just enough airspeed that the remaining three engines were able to keep it from plowing into the rapidly approaching runway.

  The pilot alternately fought and nursed the controls, finally managing to level out near mid-field. He pulled Idunn’s nose up bare meters above the Il-76 that had blocked the runway.

  He was thinking they just might make it when the Russian plane blew up right under them.

  ***

  Mikhailov stared in horror as the missile punched into one of the C-130’s engines, blowing it completely off the wing. Miraculously, the plane managed to claw its way out of its steep descent, and he felt a huge wave of relief that it wouldn’t crash.

  His relief was short-lived, however: the Norwegian plane was just passing over the parked Il-76 when the Russian plane suddenly exploded, sending a huge gout of flame and debris skyward and gutting the already wounded C-130.

  “It was those Spetsnaz fuckers!” spat Starshiy Serzhant Pavel Rudenko, the company’s senior enlisted man and a veteran of Chechnya. “Look at them!”

  Seeing the two special forces men running toward them, silhouetted by the flames of the Il-76, Mikhailov drew his pistol and was about to order Rudenko’s squad, which had followed him out of the terminal, to open fire on them when Rudenko suddenly grabbed him and threw him to the tarmac.

  Mikhailov’s indignant protest was drowned out by a series of thunderous explosions that ripped through the terminal building behind them, killing everyone inside.

  ***

  “Oh, shit,” Ferris hissed as they watched the Svalbard airport turn into an inferno. He couldn’t yet make out much detail, but it was easy to see that things there had gone to hell. The Il-76 was a flaming wreck of melting aluminum, the terminal building and tower had been blown to bits, and the C-130, its radio silent now, was streaming smoke and flame from its belly and starboard wing as the pilot fought to keep the doomed plane in the air.

  “Get us down there, Al,” Naomi ordered. “This wasn’t an accident or misunderstanding. The harvesters arranged this, not just to destroy the seed vault, but to start a campaign of international tensions that will help mask their overall plan. We only have a dozen people, but now we might really make a difference here.”

  “Yeah,” Ferris said sarcastically, “if we all don’t wind up in a corporate jet flambé. And just where the hell am I supposed to land? In case you didn’t notice, there’s a big flaming pile of shit in the middle of the runway! And you realize, if we do manage to get down in one piece, we won’t be able to take off in the amount of runway that’s left.”

  “You’ll find a way,” she told him. “You always do. Come on, Jack, let’s get strapped in.”

  Muttering a non-stop stream of expletives, Ferris started going through the landing checklist, wondering how in the hell he was going to pull this one off.

  ***

  The Norwegian pilot’s desperate efforts to keep Idunn in the air were interrupted by Halvorsen, who suddenly appeared next to him. The Norwegian captain had a gash down the left side of his face in front of his ear that had left a trail of blood down under the collar of his uniform.

  “Help me!” the pilot cried, nodding to wher
e the copilot’s torn body still sat strapped into the right-hand seat.

  Halvorsen hit the release on the seat restraints and hauled the copilot out of the seat, laying him on the blood and debris-covered flight deck. The wind roared in through the smashed sections of the windscreen, and he could clearly see the flames licking the starboard wing. Now there was only a mass of twisted wreckage where the inboard engine had been.

  “Press down on the rudder pedal,” the pilot shouted over the shrieking wind. The pilot had all three remaining engines at full thrust, but the drag and loss of thrust from the engine they’d lost was yawing the plane to the right. “Use your left foot. I can’t hold her much longer. Shrapnel in my left leg!”

  “Understood!” Halvorsen shouted back, pressing down hard with his left foot on the pedal until the pilot nodded. “We’ve got fire on this wing,” Halvorsen said, “and a lot of damage to the bottom of the plane in the cargo hold.” He didn’t mention that he’d lost seven men and had another dozen wounded by the second explosion that had wracked the plane. He had assumed they’d been hit by another SAM.

  “I know,” the pilot said as he grappled with the wheel. “I’m going to try and get her up there,” he nodded to the plateau off to their right. “It’s flat and snow-covered. We might stand a chance. There’s nowhere else to land.”

  Halvorsen looked at the plateau off the starboard wing. He knew it was only a few dozen meters above their current altitude, and he didn’t hold out much hope that they’d make it. But if the pilot could get them there, at least it would put them in a good tactical position against the Russians: they would hold the high ground above the seed vault. If they survived the crash.

  “Here we go!” the pilot cried. He knew he was racing against time as the flames began to spread on the wing: when the engine nacelle had been blown off, its fire suppression system had gone with it. Idunn was also losing hydraulic pressure, fast, from all the damage she’d taken. He only had a few more seconds during which he’d be able to control the plane. After that, simple physics would take over, and everyone on board would be dead. “Let up on the rudder!”