Bitter Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 2) (20 page)

Extending an arm, the limb stretching beyond what a human could manage, it propped open the small window near the ceiling that looked out upon the dark alley outside. Then it shoved Putin’s body through, ignoring the wet splat it made in the rain-drenched garbage.

Checking its appearance in the mirror, the thing pulled open the door and headed back into the club. The humans there turned to see it emerge, shuffling slightly, perfectly mimicking its drunken prey. It made what it knew the humans would consider a crude gesture and shouted. “
Poshyol ty’
, you whores and sons of whores!”

As if letting out a pent-up breath, the club-goers hooted and jeered, happy to see that Putin was in one piece after the earlier altercation with the druggies, who had been none too gently shown to the door.

While the thing had slipped into the role of its most recent victim, it had no intention of dallying here. It had come here based on Sleptsev’s memories. He had been to this place before, a place frequented by army men, human predators that the thing might be able to manipulate to its own ends. Putin had simply been a convenient victim.

No, it could not stay here to reinforce its new persona. It had unfinished business to attend to at the military hospital.

* * *

After arriving in Moscow, Jack called Rudenko on his cell phone. None of the calls Jack, Naomi, and Renee had made from the States, or the calls Jack had made from India, had gone through. After arriving in-country, Jack had first tried to reach Mikhailov again, but had only gotten what he assumed must have been an out of service message spoken in Russian by a sultry female voice.
 

When he’d called Rudenko again, the NCO had answered the phone right away.
 

“We were not expecting you, my friend, but both the
kapitan
and I are very glad you are here. You, I suspect, will not be so happy after we talk.”

“And talk we must, Pavel. The question is how can I get to you? There aren’t any flights to Stavropol until tomorrow, and it’s too far to drive.” Stavropol was over seven hundred miles from Moscow.

“Stay there. I will arrange things.”

Not fifteen minutes later, a heavily-tattooed young man who looked like he might be at home in a movie about the Russian mafia appeared. After introducing himself only as Drago, he led Jack through the airport to the cargo terminal. After Drago said a few whispered words to the airport security personnel, Jack was ushered outside, where a twin turboprop aircraft that Jack recognized as an An-32 stood waiting. An aircraft widely used in both military and civilian service, this one, bearing civilian markings, looked like it had been through World War Three.
 

Setting aside the fear that gripped him at the sight of the flying death trap, Jack reluctantly followed the young man up the rear cargo ramp and strapped himself in.

The trip south was a surprisingly smooth flight, but it ended with a white knuckle night landing in heavy rain, and Jack couldn’t get off the plane fast enough.
 

Waiting for him was Rudenko, sitting behind the wheel of a
Tigr
four-wheeled tactical vehicle that was the Russian Army’s equivalent of the Hummer. Two other soldiers sat in the rear, and all three men were heavily armed.
 

“It is good to see you, Jack.” Rudenko extended a bandaged paw, and Jack hesitated. “I am fine. No worse than sunburn.” He grabbed Jack’s hand and shook it in a crushing grip.

“And you, Pavel.” He winced as Rudenko let go his hand, then pressed something large and heavy into his palm. “What’s this?”

“It is the pistol you sent me as a gift, the .50 caliber Desert Eagle. Strictly illegal, as you know, and even more illegal for a foreigner to possess. But necessary now, I fear.”
 

Jack glanced at the two men in the back seat, who gave him respectful nods. He noticed that both had shotguns, and they quickly turned their attention back to the rain beyond the windows, their eyes scanning the darkness.

“They see and hear nothing of this, my friend. They were with us on Spitsbergen and know what we face.”

Jack nodded, satisfied. The last thing he wanted was to land in hot water with the Russian authorities. It would be a bit difficult, even for Rudenko, to explain why Jack was carrying an illegal weapon on a Russian Army base.

Jack turned back to Rudenko. “How’s
Kapitan
Mikhailov doing?”

“He is recovering rapidly.” Rudenko put the
Tigr
into gear and headed toward the airport exit. “But he is in a great deal of trouble. Those things killed everyone else, all the men who accompanied us to that facility. He will likely face a military tribunal.”

“A court-martial?”

Rudenko nodded, the instrument lights illuminating his grim expression. “He has led men into battle twice, and both times his unit was destroyed under uncertain circumstances.”

“And no one believes what really happened?”

“I do not know for certain, but suspect not.” He glanced at Jack. “Who could believe the things we have seen?”

Jack tensed as they reached the gate to the base that served as the headquarters for the 247
th
Airborne Regiment. The two guards approached the
Tigr
and peered inside. Rudenko nodded to the one who looked in on his side. The man returned the gesture, and together the two soldiers retreated back out of the rain into the guard post. A moment later the gate was opened, and Rudenko proceeded inside.

A few minutes later, he pulled into a spot at the military hospital.
 

“Come. Let us go see the good
kapitan
.”

* * *

Nearly three hours later, well past midnight, Jack sat back, stunned. “My God, Sergei.” Sitting in Mikhailov’s room in the hospital, he not only felt as if he’d fallen down the rabbit hole, but had been accelerated to the speed of light into a horrible alternate universe as he listened to the Russian captain and Rudenko relate what had happened at the enigmatic facility near Elista.
 

“God had nothing to do with it, my friend.” Sergei’s eyes were clear, but he wore a haunted expression that Jack knew all too well.

“And there’s no telling how many of those things may have been spawned?”

Mikhailov shook his head. “No. There is no way of knowing that. But if these larval forms you described consumed the car tires and other missing plastic and rubber parts, all the animals, the non-infected corn plots, and the people at the lab and those who came after, there surely must be dozens of them. Certainly the ones that we killed were not all there had been, and we know for certain that one capable of mimicking a human escaped.”

“Sleptsev, I am sure of it. He was the only one who was alone long enough in the building with the corn to have been taken.” Rudenko spat. “He was shaping into a good soldier.”

“They were all good soldiers, Rudenko.”

With a solemn nod, Rudenko handed around a small silver flask. Jack took a quick swig, holding back a cough as the fiery vodka blasted down his throat, before passing it to Mikhailov.

After clearing his throat, Jack said, “There’s more that you need to know. Naomi’s been researching the genetics of these things, and she’s found differences between the original harvesters, like the ones we fought on Spitsbergen, and these new ones.”

The two Russians looked at him expectantly.

“From what she understands, the original harvesters couldn’t reproduce on their own, or they were sterile. That’s one reason there were so few of them. But these new ones, the ones being spawned by the infected corn, apparently have the ability to reproduce asexually, meaning it would only take one of them, not two.”

“How?” Mikhailov exchanged a horrified look with Rudenko.

“She’s not sure exactly, but the genes that are involved appear to be similar to those of an amoeba.”

“Like the microbes that cause dysentery?”
 

Jack nodded. “Right. She thinks they may reproduce by something like cellular fission, where one cell divides and becomes two, then four, then sixteen, and so on.”

Rudenko gave him a blank look and turned to Mikhailov, who spoke to him in Russian for a moment with what Jack assumed was a brief explanation.
 

“
Chyort voz’mi
,” Rudenko whispered. “How quickly? How fast?”

Jack shook his head. “She doesn’t know yet. We might never know, unless we can set up some contained experiments where we can observe the things without them getting loose.” Jack didn’t like the idea, remembering how the last experiments had gone involving captured harvesters. Unfortunately, they might not have any other choice. “On the bright side, at least your people are still out there looking around the facility. They might get lucky and bag one or two of these things, which would validate your story and give us a specimen to study.”

“They are not properly equipped. They do not have thermal imagers, nor do they have cats, of course. And while the Russian Army does not have a reputation for gentle interrogation techniques, the third field expedient, of trying to set suspected harvesters on fire, was not adopted, for obvious reasons. Nor are the men out there armed with proper weapons.”

Rudenko hefted his KS-K shotgun. “Those
svolochi
definitely do not like the Dragon’s Breath.”
 

Jack nodded, impressed at what Rudenko had told him about the special shotgun shells. “Those rounds are something I already texted Naomi about. She’ll pass the word to others. I have a feeling we’re going to need a lot of those by the time all is said and done. But that brings us to the next question, the big one: what do we do now?”

The two Russians exchanged an unhappy look. “There is not much more we can do,” Mikhailov said. “No one will listen to me, any more or less than they already have through the reports I have given, because I am considered incompetent, a madman, or both. No one will listen to Rudenko, because he is only a NCO and has an impressive list of past offenses, and he is guilty by association.”

“So we do nothing?” Jack felt his hands begin to clench with frustration.

“I’m open to suggestions, my friend. You are faring better with this matter in America?”
 

Jack had no trouble discerning the sarcasm that crept into Mikhailov’s voice. “No. Goddammit, no we’re not. None of the things are loose there yet, as far as we know, but nobody’s taking it seriously, either.” He rubbed his eyes, then looked back at Mikhailov. “I’m sorry. I just feel like we’re riding on an out of control train that’s about to run off a cliff.”

Outside the room, they heard the sound of boots coming down the hall, the guards snapping to attention.

Someone was coming.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“If you keep doing that to yourself, you’re going to wind up as bald as I am.”

Renee shot Carl a venomous look. “Hey, I’d still be better looking, Mr. G-Man.” She rubbed her eyes before turning back to the computer monitors.
 

“And smarter, too.” Carl pulled up a chair and sat down next to her. “But if you were smarter than me, you wouldn’t be working yourself to death. Even I know when to take a break. Sometimes.”

“I can’t, Carl. I’m
this
close.” She held up a hand, the index finger and thumb spread just a hair. “This goddamn close!”

Violating his self-imposed workplace standards of decorum, Carl gently put a hand on her shoulder and said in a quiet voice, “You’ll figure it out. But as exhausted as you are right now, you could miss something as obvious as a dump truck in a swimming pool.”

“That’s what scares me. But we don’t have time to screw around. Every minute counts.”

“Yeah, I know.” Carl gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze, then let go so she could try to focus on the image-matching algorithm. After several false starts in tying all the necessary programs together, it was running the way she wanted. The first few tries had resulted in so many false matches that the results were useless. Much of it was because the images she was using from the passport database were of terrible quality to begin with, and she’d muttered a long stream of curses at the makers of passport cameras and those who used them. After a lot of testing and tweaking, she’d gotten it to find a high percentage of correct matches while generating few false matches.
 

While the resulting process worked better than she’d initially expected, it wasn’t perfect. Some potential matches were bound to be lost, although she’d still set the match threshold fairly low. But the biggest problem was that it was taking forever to run. She didn’t have the computing resources available here that she’d had when she’d been with the Earth Defense Society.
 

On top of the mountain of frustration the image matching system had caused, the news she and Carl had received from Naomi and Jack had been chilling, to say the least. Naomi’s revelation about the possibility that the harvesters might be able to reproduce on their own, no longer having to rely solely on the transgenic weapon of the New Horizons corn, was particularly frightening.
 

Worse, there were more reports cropping up in the news about events that fit Renee’s search criteria for possible harvester-related incidents. The majority continued to be focused in Brazil, China, and India, but new reports had come in that morning from France and Italy, the leading corn producers in Europe.
 

“Whoever this asshole is, he’s certainly gotten around. Check this out.” She pulled up a French web site and hit the translate button. “This was posted just a few hours ago. It’s sort of an alternate news site, and the post is about a mass disappearance in a little town south of Bordeaux, France.”
 

Looking over her shoulder, Carl read a few bits of the text. “Over two hundred people disappeared…suspected alien abduction…police not available for comment…”

“It hasn’t been picked up by any of the real news services. That’s the way things have been with most of these reports, with the newsies just writing all this off as hoaxes or mass hysteria. Let’s check this out.” There was an image below the text summary that linked to a video. Renee clicked on it, and it began to play.