Bitter Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 2) (46 page)

“Fuck it!” He remembered cursing as he reached into the freezer and took one of the sample containers in his bare, still damp hands. The freezer was an industrial model that kept the temperature at minus 180 degrees fahrenheit.
 

He hadn’t realized the severity of his mistake until he’d pulled out the metal sample container. Holding it with one hand, he opened the lid with the other, only to discover that the skin of both hands was now stuck to the frozen metal.

Feeling foolish, embarrassment mingling with rage, he remembered trying to pull his fingers away from the lid, and how much pain that had instantly caused.
 

It was then, he knew. It was in that one moment of sheer stupidity that some of the corn had spilled out onto the floor. Not much, but he knew now that even a single kernel would have been too much.
 

After managing to separate his skin from the container under cold water from the kitchen faucet, he swept up the kernels from the floor. But he’d been in a rush. He hadn’t checked under the freezer or any of the other nooks and crannies where small things can hide. He’d only been concerned with people discovering his treasure.
 

If what Naomi had told the Beta-Three team about the New Horizons corn was true, and he had no reason to doubt it, any creature could act as a host organism to the transgenic weapon of the harvesters. He’d seen mouse droppings in the safe house, but hadn’t cared about them. He wasn’t living there, after all, and they could hardly get into the freezers. But they could get under the freezers, or along the baseboards. And even had it not been a mouse, even if an industrious ant, which he’d also found in the house on occasion, had taken an interest in one of the kernels and hauled it back to the nest, the effect would be the same. Once consumed, the host organism’s DNA would be reshaped. Even so tiny a thing as an ant could be transformed into a monster.

Or a race of monsters. Naomi and Harmony thought the harvesters could now reproduce. As he watched the television, Kelso knew that they had been right.

The scene shifted to the Santa Anita mall, and the people around him who were watching recoiled in horror at the footage from the news helicopters covering the massacre.
 

Rooted to the floor, the drink still in his hand, forgotten, he watched in a daze as the battle raged across the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The police, trying to defend civilians but ill-equipped to face the harvesters, had largely been wiped out. The same was true for the firemen and other rescue workers who had gone into the burning areas of the city, never to return. People had taken loved ones, stricken with malignant, terrible growths on their bodies, to hospitals, unwittingly turning those places of hoped-for refuge into abattoirs.
 

He wasn’t sure how much time had passed before the coverage shifted back to the Santa Anita mall, where a team of black-clad FBI agents was making a futile stand against a tidal wave of the monsters coming out of the racetrack stables. His companions in the lounge goggled in disbelief at the nightmarish things that oozed across the parking lot toward the doomed agents, whose escape was cut off by the adult harvesters. But they also cheered the agents on as they set fire to the things that came closest to them, forming a burning moat that warded off the other creatures. The view briefly shifted to a pair of Marine helicopter gunships that began pouring fire into the monsters, and his fellows cheered some more.

But then, all too soon, the helicopters left. Out of ammunition, the voice of the newscaster speculated. The camera zoomed in on the team, who had lost several of its members in the battle, and was now surrounded by an army of nightmares. The people with Kelso were silent, knowing that the FBI agents were doomed.

The image steadied on one of the team, and Kelso blinked.
 

“What are those things?” One of the others stepped closer to the screen and pointed at a dark, furry lump on the agent’s shoulder, and another, whitish lump on the agent’s back.

“They’re cats.” Kelso heard his voice, but didn’t realize that he’d actually spoken. He knew in that moment who the “agent” was. It was Naomi Perrault and her two cats, clinging to her.

That’s when the nausea hit him. While he had been angry, furious, when Morgan hired Perrault, and had been desperate enough to conspire to have Kline killed, he had never in his wildest imagination thought that something like this would happen. According to the news, hundreds, and possibly thousands of people were believed to have been killed already, just in the hours since the first reports of these creatures had surfaced.
 

He had only wanted to be rich, and to put Howard Morgan in his place. Kline had hardly been an innocent, and Kelso refused to shed any tears for him, or feel guilty for his role in Kline’s demise.
 

But the others, all those innocent people, their blood was on his hands. And Naomi, while he had seethed with professional jealousy when she had been hired, was now about to be another victim. He didn’t hate her, only what she represented in his own twisted relationship with Howard Morgan.

She didn’t deserve to die.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
 

“Excuse me?” The older gentleman beside him turned and looked at him curiously. “You don’t look so well, my friend. Are you all right?”

Kelso ignored him as the scene on the television changed and he listened to the newscaster as she reported that all the airports in the Los Angeles area, including LAX, were being shut down, and that the entire area was being quarantined.

He was trapped here in the hell that he himself had created.

“No,” Kelso said in a weak voice amidst the shocked exclamations of the other passengers in the lounge. “No, I don’t think I am.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

“The air activity over Russia, particularly in the southern part of the country, is unprecedented, sir.”

U.S. Air Force General Matt Selig, Commander, U.S. Air Forces in Europe (USAFE), nodded for the colonel to continue. This wasn’t the regularly scheduled daily intelligence briefing, but an ad-hoc presentation that Selig had ordered after things had suddenly gone crazy around the world. While he was peripherally interested in all of it, he was specifically interested in what was happening with the Russians. Even though the Cold War had been over for years, their air force was still the greatest potential threat his airmen might have to face.

The front wall of the conference room was a rear-projection display that showed a map of the southern half of Russia, with icons indicating the location of their air force bases, coded to indicate which type of aircraft were normally based there.

“Let’s have it,” Selig ordered.

“General, intelligence that’s been corroborated by DIA, CIA, and NSA indicates that the Russians have established a quarantine line along the Don and Volga rivers.” A red line appeared on the map, following the trace of the rivers between the Sea of Azov and the Caspian Sea. “They’ve backed it up with very aggressive enforcement by no fewer than six fighter squadrons that have orders to turn away any aircraft flying out of the Caucasus region or, if they refuse, shoot them down.” He hit a button on the podium, and a swarm of aircraft icons appeared along the quarantine line, extending along the adjoining border with Ukraine in the west, Kazakhstan to the east, and over the coasts of the Black and Caspian Seas. He hit the button again, and more aircraft icons appeared. “As you can see in this view, Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan have put up barrier patrols along their borders with Russia, and are refusing any aircraft passage across the border. The Finns have their F-18s up, and the Norwegians have F-16s on orbit opposite the Kola Peninsula.” By now, the colonel wore a distinctly unhappy expression. “In fact,” he went on as the borders between Russia and all of its neighbors, including China, turned red on the screen, “every neighboring country has closed their borders with Russia. They’re effectively isolated.”

Selig grimaced. “Just what we need, to make the Russians feel like they’re cut off. They’re paranoid as it is.”

Major General Sean Cranston, the USAFE Vice Commander, frowned. “What’s the status of their nuclear forces?”

“So far, sir, we haven’t seen any changes in readiness, and there haven’t been any incidents reported at any of their strategic sites.”

“Keep a close eye on that. The last thing we need is for any nukes to get loose in this mess.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What about the military aircraft in the south?” Selig asked, getting things focused back on the air situation. “They’ve got a lot of assets in the Caucasus Military District.”

“Yes, sir, they do. We haven’t received corroboration on this yet, but it looks like all their fighter and bomber aircraft in the Caucasus have been ordered to fly to six of the nearest airfields in the Volga-Ural Military District.” The airfields blinked on the map.

“Just their fighters and bombers?” Selig frowned. “What about the transports and helicopters?”

“They’re destroying them on the ground, sir.”

The response from both Selig and Cranston was simultaneous. “
What?
”

“That’s correct, sir. Imagery has confirmed that transport and rotary wing aircraft are being destroyed, and not just at the air bases or other military installations where intelligence has reported ongoing combat against…” The colonel ran out of words. They’d received an update from the Pentagon on what was happening in Los Angeles, and had been told that the same “biological agent” was at work in Russia, China, India, and elsewhere. But none of them could truly believe what they’d read in the report. “Regardless,” he went on, “it looks like they’re destroying everything beyond fighters and bomber aircraft.”

“The crews can’t be happy,” Selig said. “How are they supposed to get out?”

“They’re not, sir,” the colonel told him. “We’ve already received some reports of transports trying to leave that have been shot down, and FSB teams have been tasked with securing the airfields that haven’t already been compromised.”

“In God’s name, why?” Cranston was shocked. “Not only are they torching billions of rubles in assets, but they’re condemning invaluable aircrews! That’s insane!”

“We’re trying to get more details, sir, but right now our assessment is they don’t want to risk any possible contagion from those aircraft. For the aircraft that are being sent out, it looks like the crews are going to be quarantined and the aircraft sterilized. CIA reported that the FSB has sent special detachments to those six receiving airfields, along with Army decontamination units.”

“FSB?” Selig asked. “Not military police or GRU?” GRU, or
Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye
, the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, was the rough Russian equivalent of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA.
 

“No, sir, CIA was firm that they’re FSB, operating under direct orders from the prime minister. As for the aircraft, they’re being escorted by fighters outside the quarantine zone. Once they get to the receiving bases, from what we’ve seen so far they’re just packing the aircraft in as tight as they can.”
 

He pressed the button to move to the next graphic, which showed a satellite image of one of the air bases. “This is Sennoy Air Base, taken forty-five minutes ago. As you can see, it’s not a large facility, and only has a single runway. It typically hosts a small number of transport aircraft and helicopters. But here,” he pointed with a laser pointer at the eastern end of the apron, where fourteen aircraft were haphazardly clustered, “you can see a squadron of Su-27 Flankers that just arrived, along with what we believe are decontamination vehicles.” Eight military-style trucks with large liquid storage tanks were parked in a ring around the aircraft.
 

Selig shook his head. “They pushed those planes off into the grass?”

“Yes, sir. And here,” he moved the pointer to a spot about a hundred meters north of the main apron, “you can see portable shelters. We believe this is where they’re processing the flight crews, presumably to make sure they’re not, um, infected.”

Cranston pursed his lips. “I also see, what, a company of infantry combat vehicles around the shelters?”

“Correct, sir. And there are two tank platoons over here.” The pointer moved another hundred meters beyond the temporary shelters to where six brooding shapes sat, their barrels pointing in the direction of the shelters. “The other five quarantine airfields have similar heavy security for the new arrivals.”

“Okay,” Selig said, trying to force himself to fast forward into the surreal nightmare that reality had suddenly become, “what else.”

“In the European theater, the ground forces are on alert, but the only movements have been internal, mainly deploying units along the quarantine line.”
 

The colonel pressed another button, and a larger scale map appeared, showing all of western Russia and Europe as far as Germany.
 

Selig scowled at the clusters of red icons in the Black Sea, in the Gulf of Finland off Saint Petersburg, and in the Barents Sea outside of Severomorsk, where the Northern Fleet had its headquarters. “It looks like everything they have that can float has put to sea.”

“In a nutshell, general, that’s exactly what’s happened, but we believe for different reasons. We have information indicating that the Northern Fleet units put to sea as part of the general Russian military alert. But in the Black Sea, we believe the ships that have deployed, mostly out of Sevastopol and Odessa, are Russian ships forced to leave by the Ukrainians.” After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Ukraine wound up with the main Soviet Black Sea Fleet ports. After a great deal of political wrangling between the two new nations, Russia and Ukraine agreed to partition the fleet, with Russia leasing port facilities for their vessels from the Ukrainians. But Ukraine had never been terribly happy with the situation.

“Oh, shit,” Cranston said. “The Ukrainians got their wish: an excuse to kick the Russian Fleet out of the Crimea.”