Season of the Harvest

by Michael R. Hicks

  Behind her, the others opened fire, shooting blindly into the smoke that concealed both the access road and the entrance to the vault.

  “Dammit!” Jack cursed. “How the hell did they beat us?”

  “They can move fast, remember?” Naomi reminded him as she snapped off a few shots in the direction of the vault. She had only caught a quick glimpse of one of the things before it had tried to shoot Jack. The vision had been macabre: human-looking arms held the Russian assault rifle, but the rest of the thing was in the harvester’s native form. “They’ve got the high ground and can keep us pinned down here!”

  “The hell they can,” Jack told her fiercely. “Chalmers! Gomez!” he called to two of the other men on the team. “Lay down some Willie Pete – two o’clock!”

  A few seconds later, a pair of white cylindrical grenades sailed off into the smoke in the direction of the seed vault. Dull whumps sounded as the grenades exploded, sending up a brilliant fireworks display.

  Unlike regular grenades, whose destructive capability was mostly in their shrapnel, Willie Petes were incendiary weapons that hurled burning bits of white phosphorus when they exploded. The white phosphorus would stick to whatever it touched, and would burn until it was totally consumed or was deprived of oxygen. It had often been used in past wars against troops in bunkers or other positions that were difficult to get at with more traditional weapons. Its effects on human beings were horrific.

  On the harvesters, the results were spectacular. The one that had fired at Jack shrieked as a brightly burning glob of white phosphorus stuck to its exoskeleton and malleable flesh like white-hot molasses. It hurled itself into the snow as its flesh ignited, but its efforts were in vain: the snow couldn’t dampen the burning particles, and the creature turned into a gyrating torch. It soon lay still, its body crackling like frying bacon as its flesh was consumed by fire. A few seconds later a second one rose from the cover of the snow, screeching as it burned.

  “Two down,” Jack muttered. Turning to the others, he shouted, “Make for the access road, and be damned careful you don’t touch any of that stuff!” The biggest problem with using such weapons in a situation like this was that it was indiscriminate, and would burn his people, even through the soles of their boots, with the same zeal as it had the harvester.

  Jack led them up onto the snow-covered road, Naomi right behind him, through the still-burning maze left by the white phosphorus. The entrance to the vault loomed through the smoke ahead: a slab-sided concrete monolith about eight feet wide and twenty feet tall that disappeared into the snow-covered plateau. A set of amazingly ordinary metal double doors marked the entrance.

  Jack pulled off his gloves and quickly stuffed them into his parka. “Grenade,” he snapped, holding out his hand. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t have used this approach because there would have been civilians here. But with two harvesters on the loose inside, the chance of any of the workers here still being alive was remote, at best.

  Naomi slapped a grenade into his palm, then moved over to the door while the rest of the team covered the entrance with their rifles. Jack pulled the pin and nodded. Naomi opened the door a few inches, just enough for Jack to toss the grenade down the entrance tunnel, before slamming the door shut again.

  The doors shuddered with the explosion of the grenade, the doors reverberating with the pings of shrapnel.

  “Go!” Jack shouted. Naomi pulled open one of the doors while another team member yanked open the other, and Jack and the others charged inside, weapons at the ready.

  “They already hit the power,” Jack said into his microphone, seeing that the overhead lights were out. “Switch to thermal.” He flipped down the T14 thermal imager that was strapped to a mount that fit over his head and flicked it on. It was a monocular device that now allowed his right eye to see the darkened corridor in shades of artificially enhanced gray. The walls of the tunnel, which was kept at zero degrees Fahrenheit, showed as a ghostly white, with warmer objects showing as various shades of gray. Hot spots caused by the grenade’s explosion and shrapnel showed up as black. Jack normally would have preferred one of the more typical night vision devices for a situation like this, but they couldn’t distinguish between a human and a harvester. The thermal sight could, because their malleable tissue showed up as being “cold” compared to a human’s signature.

  The team moved swiftly but cautiously down the tunnel, half of them hugging the right wall, the others the left, to prevent them from bunching up and making one big target.

  About thirty meters in, they passed from the concrete entrance structure into a larger rock-walled tunnel about five meters wide that had been carved from the plateau that rose above them.

  “Hathcock, Claret,” Jack called to the sniper team. “Hold here and watch our backs. Check your targets before you shoot, as there might be civilians coming up to check on the vault, but if you’re not sure...”

  “Blow the fuckers away,” Hathcock finished for him.

  “Right,” Jack replied grimly. “The rest of you, let’s go.”

  Hathcock quickly extended the bipod legs of the Barrett rifle, then dropped prone to the freezing floor behind it, snugging the stock up to his shoulder as he sighted on the door they’d just come through. Claret knelt near the tunnel wall, covering the door with his G36C rifle.

  Behind them, the rest of the team moved on through the dead-quiet tunnel, deeper into the vault.

  Another sixty meters brought them to a set of doorways on the right side of the tunnel.

  “I think that’s the refrigeration room,” Naomi said, tucking in behind Jack along the wall near the doors. Gomez and two of the others stood farther back, their rifle muzzles covering the three doors.

  Jack looked at her, nearly smacking her head with the thermal sight that stuck out several inches from his face. “A refrigeration room?” he asked. “In here?”

  “The colder the seeds can be kept, the longer they’ll last,” she explained quickly. “The permafrost will keep the vault cold even if the power fails, but not cold enough to keep the seeds from deteriorating over time.”

  The old joke about selling refrigerators to Eskimos came unbidden to Jack’s mind. “What about those?” he asked, pointing down the tunnel to a set of double doors in a bulkhead that formed the end of the tunnel about ten meters from where they stood now.

  “Those doors lead to the vault,” she said. “The harvesters must be in there already.”

  Jack was tempted to forget the doors here along the tunnel wall that included the refrigeration room. But if he had learned anything in Afghanistan, it was to never leave a place behind you where your enemy could hide.

  “Clear the rooms here,” he ordered, “then we’ll do the vault.”

  One of Jack’s men yanked open the first single door, revealing a small room that contained equipment, but nothing more threatening. The second door led to a larger room at the end of a short hallway that, again, held nothing more than equipment and electrical boxes.

  They moved on to the double doors further along the wall, closer to the doors that led to the vault proper.

  “Go,” Jack ordered tensely.

  Two men pulled them wide as everyone tensed on their triggers.

  Nothing. It was a larger room that held the cooling equipment, which was now silent with the loss of power. But it was large enough that someone could hide, so they had to go in and make sure it was clear.

  The lead man into the room, Gomez, didn’t see or feel the thin filament that was strung across the entryway as he passed through the doorway.

  The filament was connected to an OZM-4 antipersonnel mine, a Russian version of what was once called a “bouncing Betty.” Jack happened to be looking right at it when it went off, the small propellant charge that popped the mine up from the floor about two feet appearing as a malignant dark blot in his thermal imager. Without thinking, he slammed Naomi to the floor as the mine exploded, sending fragments slicing through the air into the corrid
or about waist high.

  The men who had gone into the room didn’t stand a chance. They were within a few feet of the mine when it went off. While their body armor protected their torsos and the helmets protected their heads, their lower bodies were lethally exposed. They fell to the floor, their legs and lower abdomens shredded.

  “Goddammit,” Jack hissed savagely as he ran forward, but was suddenly held back by Naomi’s restraining hand.

  “No!” she cried. “Let the others do it, Jack,” she told him. “There might be another trap.”

  “I don’t care,” he said, angrily shrugging off her hand. We should have been more careful, he berated himself, ignoring the other voice in his head that told him they had no time. There was no telling what the harvesters were doing.

  “They’re gone,” one of the other men said after checking the bodies. He himself had taken several pieces of shrapnel in his upper right arm as he’d dived to the floor, and was now awkwardly carrying his weapon in his left hand.

  Jack stared helplessly at the men who lay dead in the room, their bodies already beginning to fade from dark to light gray in the thermal imager as their bodies cooled in the freezing air.

  ***

  Kapitan Mikhailov held on grimly as Rudenko expertly guided the fuel truck up the winding mountain road toward where the vault’s entrance lay. They had passed by the wreckage of the snowmobiles taken by the Spetsnaz men they were pursuing, but hadn’t caught sight of them.

  “I used to drive a logging truck in Siberia before I joined the Army,” Rudenko explained as he spun the wheel with one hand and smoothly down-shifted with the other, taking a particularly tight hairpin turn to the left that had Mikhailov looking out over a field of snow-covered rocks far below. “Trust me, kapitan, this is nothing!”

  Five hundred meters and three turns later, the concrete entrance to the vault flickered in and out of sight through the smoke.

  “Huy!” Rudenko cried as the windshield suddenly shattered, bullets slamming into the dash and the seat cushions. He spun the wheel to the left, away from the drop-off, and jammed on the brakes. The big truck lost traction on the snow and skidded to the side, coming to a jarring stop just off the road.

  “Everyone off!” Mikhailov shouted, following the other soldier who had been riding in the cab out onto the ground. “Get away from the truck!”

  “Whoever’s shooting isn’t one of ours,” Rudenko told him as they dashed for a small rock outcropping. “It sounds like a NATO weapon, not an AK. Good thing they’re not using incendiary rounds.” To the other men, he called, “Does anyone see them?”

  A chorus of tense nyets answered his question.

  One of the men made a dash forward up the road to get to better cover. A shot rang out, and he dropped to the ground, clutching his leg. Then more shots spanged into the fuel truck.

  “I saw his muzzle flashes,” Mikhailov said, pointing. “Look, just above the road right across from where the vault entrance goes into the mountain.”

  “I don’t...” Rudenko began, then stopped. He saw something through the intermittent smoke, but it didn’t look like a man. He wasn’t sure what it was. The only thing he could tell for certain was that it wasn’t one of the Spetsnaz men. Shrugging, he raised his rifle to his shoulder. His weapon was tailored more for close-in combat and was unlikely to hit the target at this range, but...

  “Hold your fire, Rudenko,” Mikhailov said.

  “What? Sir?” Rudenko looked at him, bewildered.

  “It’s got to be one of the Norwegians from the plane that crashed,” he told him. “We’re not going to shoot him.”

  Rudenko looked at the wounded man still writhing in the road, then back at Mikhailov, wondering if the young captain had lost his mind. “Then what would you suggest, kapitan?”

  “Let him reach the vault,” Mikhailov explained. “Maybe he can help us deal with our Spetsnaz friends.” He didn’t like the idea of letting the Norwegian soldier fall into a trap, but there was no way to communicate with him and not get shot. Mikhailov only wished he could warn the man that there were others already lying in wait for him.

  None of them noticed the white-clad figure following about a hundred meters behind the first.

  ***

  Jack had expected another booby-trap at the double door through the bulkhead that separated the main tunnel from the vault area, but there was nothing.

  Well, there was something, Jack grimly acknowledged: four bodies, some of the civilians who’d worked here at the vault. All of them were riddled with bullets.

  “Keep moving,” he ordered, and the surviving team members, minus Hathcock and his spotter who had been left behind to cover the entrance, carefully moved forward along the remaining fifteen meters of the main tunnel before reaching a T-junction.

  “Which way,” he softly asked Naomi.

  “There are three vaults,” she whispered. “Vaults One and Two are there,” she pointed down the tunnel toward the left. “That one,” she pointed to the right, where about ten meters away was a bulkhead and double door, “is Vault Three.”

  “We’ll take number three first,” Jack said.

  Quickly moving down the tunnel toward Vault Three, Higgins and Preston gripped the door handles, while Jack and Naomi held their rifles ready.

  “Now!” Jack said.

  They flung the doors open. There was nothing but a space like an airlock, about two meters long, leading to a set of inner doors.

  “Shit,” Jack muttered. “Let’s do it again.”

  They did, and when the doors opened, Jack and Naomi quickly moved inside, followed by the other two men.

  They were in a massive ice-rimmed cavern that had been carved from the rock, nearly ten meters across and almost the same high, and roughly thirty meters long. Before them stood large, extremely sturdy open-frame metal shelves, more like what one might expect to find in a warehouse for heavy equipment than a place where seeds would be stored. And on the shelves were hundreds, thousands, of equally sturdy-looking boxes of various sizes.

  Good news and bad news, Jack thought. The bad news was that the vault was a maze that gave their enemy plenty of hiding spots. The good news was that the harvesters would stand out like a sore thumb in the thermal imager. He switched the imager’s polarity, so that instead of being darker, warmer objects would appear lighter in his display. A human being or a harvester would show as nearly white.

  “Spread out,” Jack ordered, “but stay abreast of one another as we move down the aisles. I don’t want them slipping by us.”

  They were halfway through when Naomi suddenly said, “Stop!”

  “What is it?” Jack said, dropping to one knee and aiming in her direction across the tops of the boxes on the lowest shelf.

  “Just a minute,” she whispered. He heard her scoop up something from the floor. “They look sort of like shell casings, but they’re not. They look familiar, but I can’t see well enough with the thermal imager.”

  “Let’s finish clearing the room, then,” he told her.

  A few moments later, the four of them emerged at the back of the vault.

  “Nobody here,” one of the others said.

  “One down,” Jack said. “Let’s hit number two.”

  They went back out and quickly moved down the tunnel to the second vault.

  Things went fine until they opened the inner door. A flurry of automatic weapons fire erupted from near the back of the vault, the shots appearing as brief white streaks in Jack’s imager as the bullets slammed into the rock walls near the door.

  Jack’s team returned fire, driving the harvester behind one of the shelves.

  “Go!” Jack shouted as he dashed down the center aisle. Naomi moved down the one to his left, while the two other men took two of the other aisles.

  “Taser it if you can!” Naomi shouted back at him.

  Jack snorted. That would be a mean trick while the harvester was armed with a rifle.

  A man-sized white blob s
uddenly darted out in front of him, and his finger was already pulling the trigger of his G36C, sending a stream of 5.56 millimeter rounds slamming into the creature. While every member of the team carried extra magazines with incendiary ammunition, none of them was using it: they were hoping to capture at least one of the harvesters alive.

  “Taser out!” Naomi cried as she fired at the harvester, which had been driven back against the rear wall by Jack’s bullets.

  He saw the thing tense into paralysis and then fall, rigid, to the floor. Higgins was instantly astride it, driving a huge hypodermic into its thorax.

  “Behind you!” Preston cried, firing at another harvester in an adjacent aisle. His bullets went over Naomi’s head as she dove to the floor.

  Jack instinctively fired in the same direction as he moved to cover Naomi, blasting seed-filled boxes from the heavy shelves and scattering their contents across the floor. The two streams of bullets converged on the wildly dodging creature, which shrieked in rage and pain.

  “Taser out!” Higgins shouted. He was on the far side of the creature from where Jack and Preston were firing.

  Unfortunately, he was also within striking range of the harvester’s stinger, and he went down with a gurgling cry as it rammed the spike into his chest, pumping the deadly venom into his heart.

  “Fuck this,” Jack muttered. He hit the magazine release on his weapon, then slammed one of the magazines loaded with incendiary bullets home. He caught sight of the harvester darting further down the aisle and fired.

  The thing burst into flame, burning so hot that his thermal imager was rendered useless. But his left eye, staring out into what had been darkness, could see just fine in the shimmering light of the creature’s burning flesh. He pumped some more rounds into it, just for good measure.

  Finally, satisfied that it was dead, he knelt beside Higgins to check on him, but he was gone. With a weary sigh, Jack made his way back to Naomi and Preston.

  “At least we have something to show for our troubles,” Preston said as he knelt beside the harvester while it shuddered under the influence of the formaldehyde he had injected into its system.