Bitter Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 2) (47 page)

“Yes, sir,” the colonel agreed. “Of course, that leaves the Russians with a problem. While the Russian ships so far have been steaming toward their own coast, the Russians don’t have port facilities available for all those ships in their own territory. At some point soon, we’re probably looking at a large-scale deployment of surface and submarine combatants into the Mediterranean. And that’s assuming that the Russians and Ukrainians don’t start a shooting war over this.”

Cranston shook his head. “Vice Admiral Lafferty in Sixth Fleet must be going ballistic.”
 

“To say the least. Whatever this contagion is could blow up into World War Three.” Selig turned to his senior staff officers, all of whom were sitting around the table. “Make sure we’re tied in tight with Lafferty’s people. If things get out of hand, I want contingency plans in place so we can cover Sixth Fleet. The same goes for our NATO partners up north in case the Northern Fleet goes looking for trouble.” He considered his next words for a moment. “We haven’t received orders yet to do so, but I want the command pushed up to maximum combat readiness. Quietly.” He looked at his operations officer. “I want as much AWACS coverage as we can get, looking as deep as possible into Russian airspace without getting under their skin. Get a basic weapons load on our fighters and strike aircraft, but otherwise keep things low key. Keep the training tempo as it is; if we increase our training activity now, it’s going to worry them, and if we do a stand down, it’ll be worse. So far this is an internal problem for them. If it becomes something more, I want to be ready, but I don’t want our contingency preparations to inadvertently push them over the edge.” To the personnel officer, he said, “I’m not going to recall folks from leave yet, but as of now I’m curtailing everything but emergency leave. Our folks are going to have their hands full.”

Heads nodded and a murmur of “Yes, sir” went around the room.

Selig nodded for the colonel to continue.

“Sir, the last thing I have on the European theater is about a group of eight MiG-29 Fulcrums out of Lipetsk in the Moscow Military District.” The map changed again, zooming in on western Russia, with Moscow in the middle of the view. Lipetsk Air Base, more than two hundred kilometers south of Moscow, was highlighted. “One of the analysts in the 707
th
ISR Group somehow pulled this out of the clutter of all the other military aircraft movements that are taking place.” The 707
th
ISR, or Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Group, was headquartered at the National Security Agency at Fort George G. Meade in Maryland. One of the group’s many jobs was to serve as the lead for the Global Air Analysis SIGINT mission, providing analysis and reporting on high-interest aerial activity. What was happening in Russia now definitely fell into that category.

The display showed a series of undulating tracks that began just south of Lipetsk. The aircraft the tracks represented were making long east-west sweeps, with the westerly legs taking them right up to the border with Ukraine, then Belarus, and then east as far as the Volga River, with the aircraft gradually moving north.

“What’s really interesting is this.” The colonel pointed to two aircraft icons that were different from those representing the fighters. “It looks like they’ve dedicated two Il-78M tankers out of Dyagilevo to keep these Fulcrums in the air. Just as a side note, those are the only tankers not supporting the barrier operation in the south.”

Selig, along with everyone else in the room, stared at the image, perplexed. The fighters doing sweeps like that was odd enough. That the Russians had dedicated two of their precious tankers to them was the real kicker. “What the devil are they up to?”

The colonel glanced at the map behind him, then turned back to Selig. “We think they’re looking for something.”

* * *

“Do you think they’re looking for us?” Jack stared out the windscreen, helping Khatuna and Mikhailov watch for other planes. They’d seen quite a few, far above their own tree-skimming altitude.

“Probably, but stop worrying,” Mikhailov advised. “The first we will know if they have found us is a warning over the radio, if they choose to give one. Otherwise, it will be cannon shells or a missile. Then, pfft!” He looked outside at the endless white expanse, his expression turning serious. “The FSB will likely determine that it was we who stole the petrol in Zadonsk, and from that they will know the type of aircraft we are flying, and some fool at the petrol station probably took down the plane’s number. But they cannot know our destination, at least not for certain.”

“Sure they can. Where are we going to go with this thing loaded with fuel drums? Siberia?”

“Maybe we should. They would never think to look for us there.”

“Do you have wife?” Khatuna suddenly asked, looking at Mikhailov.

“No, I do not.”

“If you did, she would hit you.”

“I think that means she is interested in the job,” Mikhailov said to Jack, with a wink to Khatuna.

Exasperated, she rolled her eyes and focused her attention on keeping the badly overloaded biplane in the air.

Mikhailov looked again at the map, on which he’d penciled in their course. From Zadonsk, he’d had Khatuna fly northwest for an hour, which took them nearly two hundred kilometers to Oryol. The next leg, the one they were on now, took them north-northwest for more than seven hundred kilometers, and was probably the most dangerous part of their long journey. Moscow, two hundred kilometers off their starboard wing now, was ringed with Air Force bases, with more spread throughout the rest of the military district around them. “I think we will be able to avoid most of the fighter bases,” Mikhailov said as his finger traced their course. He had marked the bases he knew about, and had Khatuna take the plane lower, sometimes down to less than thirty meters, when they came within fifty kilometers of any of them. It was terribly dangerous, because the plane, which normally was almost impossible to send into a stall, was so heavy that it seemed to want to fall from the sky with only the slightest provocation.

But they had no choice.

Mikhailov craned his neck to the left, looking out Khatuna’s side. Vyazma Air Base was close, only twenty kilometers away. If he remembered correctly, only rotary wing aircraft were stationed there. Of course, helicopters could carry weapons, and a Mi-24 attack helicopter could easily catch the laboring An-2.

“So if we make it past Moscow, then what?”

Looking back at the map, Mikhailov pointed. “Once we reach Lake Ilmen, here,” his finger rested on a large lake almost two hundred kilometers south of Saint Petersburg, “we turn north to fly over Lake Ladoga, which will still probably be mostly frozen over, and keep going until we reach Norway.”

“Nice. All we need now is in-flight service.”

Khatuna huffed. One of the things they hadn’t found in the plane had been food, nor was there anything to drink other than a half-empty (“Or half-full,” as Mikhailov happily pointed out) bottle of vodka behind the copilot’s seat. If they were lucky and made it to Norway, they’d be in the air at least ten hours. It was going to be a hungry and thirsty flight. Jack mentally kicked himself for not thinking of raiding the truck stop for whatever munchies they might have had.

“Look at it this way,” Mikhailov said, glancing down at his lap and the fading stain there from when he’d wet himself, “without food and water, we will not have to worry so much about the lack of a toilet.”

Khatuna fixed him with a hard gaze that she couldn’t hold. Her scowl dissolved into a grin.

Mikhailov told Jack, making sure Khatuna could hear, “I think she likes me.” He chuckled at her scandalized expression.

Then he began to cough up blood. Lots of it.

“What has happened?” Khatuna stared at Mikhailov, and Jack could tell what she was thinking.

“No, he’s not infected! He has a shattered rib that punctured his lung, and it’s finally collapsed.” From the amount of blood Mikhailov was coughing up, he clearly had other internal injuries. That didn’t surprise Jack at all, considering the shape Mikhailov had been in before the harvester had tried to kill him in the hospital in Stavropol, and everything that had happened since. “Damn it!”

“What can we do?”

The large veins in Mikhailov’s neck were standing out, and his skin was starting to turn blue as he desperately gasped for air.
 

Jack had seen this once before, in Afghanistan after one of his soldiers had taken a bullet to the chest. He’d been there when the medic had treated the young man by sticking a needle into his chest to relieve the built-up pressure in the chest cavity, allowing the lung to reinflate. Jack couldn’t remember the details, but he remembered that much.

“Is there a first aid kit in here?”

“
Da
, there is one here, next to me.” Keeping one hand on the control yoke, she leaned over and pulled out the kit, handing it to Jack.

He pulled it open and cursed. There were bandaids, gauze, tape, and a few other odds and ends that were of absolutely no use to him. “Shit! I need a needle, a big needle. Or maybe a pen.” He checked his own pockets, but came up empty. He hadn’t had any need for pens, or time to grab any, before they’d jumped into Ulan-Erg.

“Here!” Khatuna snatched up a cheap ballpoint pen in a pocket beside her. It was the same kind as the one Mikhailov had used to draw their course on the map, but that one had gone clattering to the floor when he began to thrash around.

Jack grabbed it and shoved it in a pocket for the moment. “Hang on, buddy,” he said to Mikhailov. “Sorry, but I’m going to have to pull you out of here.”

Unbuckling Mikhailov’s harness, Jack awkwardly hauled him out of the copilot’s seat. Mikhailov’s eyes bulged and he gasped in agony, more blood streaming from the corner of his mouth.
 

As gently as he could, Jack laid him on top of the nearest barrels in the cargo hold. He ripped open Mikhailov’s tunic, then slit his shirt open with his knife to expose the Russian’s battered chest. The lower left side was badly bruised, and Jack assumed that’s where the lung had been punctured.

Jack couldn’t remember exactly where the medic had inserted the needle back in Afghanistan, but seemed to recall it was in the upper part of the chest. Taking the pen, he placed the tip between two of Mikhailov’s upper ribs on the left side. “Sorry, Sergei, but this is going to hurt like hell.”
 

Then Jack shoved the pen into Mikhailov’s chest.

Mikhailov opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out. He clenched his hands at his sides and banged his feet against the top of one of the drums.

Had the pen been a needle, Jack remembered that he would have left it in. But the pen wouldn’t let any air into the chest cavity, which was the whole point.
 

Gritting his teeth, he pulled it back out again.

Mikhailov moved his right hand over the wound, covering it. Jack tried to get him to move it away, but Mikhailov shook his head as he inhaled. Miraculously, he was able to take a partial breath. As he exhaled, he lifted his hand from the wound, then covered it again when he took his next breath. He was able to breathe more deeply, and as Jack watched, Mikhailov’s color began to return to normal.
 

Jack leaned back against the bulkhead to the cockpit, relief flooding through him.

“Rudenko taught me about this,” Mikhailov said as Jack wiped the blood from his friend’s mouth.

“The old bastard probably operated on himself.” Jack smiled, thinking of what a character Rudenko had been. It seemed like a lifetime since his death.

“Thank you, my friend.”

Jack nodded, but didn’t smile. “You’re still bleeding inside, you know.”

“About that, there is nothing we can do. I will settle for being able to breathe again.”

“What is happening?” Khatuna’s shout caught them both by surprise.

“He’s okay,” Jack told her. “He’s going to be okay.”

“You might have wasted your time,” she called back. “I think the Air Force has found us.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

When Morgan revealed the destination of the Boeing 727, Hathcock, the sniper, was less than enthused.

“Grand Island, Nebraska?” He turned to Naomi, a grimace on his face. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Is there something about the good state of Nebraska that you don’t like, Mr. Hathcock?” Morgan favored the sniper with a quizzical look over steepled fingers as he sat at the main conference table with Naomi, Hathcock, Boisson, and Harmony.

“It’s where this whole story began,” Naomi told him. “This new generation of harvesters was born in the research labs at Lincoln Research University, which was really nothing more than a New Horizons front operation to lure in geneticists like me. Before the Sutter Buttes incident when the Earth Defense Society was branded a terrorist organization, we recruited an FBI agent, Sheldon Crane, to help us get into the lab to find out exactly what the harvesters were up to. He found what we needed, the first samples of what you know as the Beta-Three corn, but it cost him his life.” She looked up at Morgan. “They vivisected him, cut him apart, looking for the corn, while he was still alive.”

“Then there was our little op at the New Horizons production plant.” Hathcock took a sip of coffee. “That was here, too.”

“So that really was you.” Morgan raised his eyebrows. “You don’t believe in half measures, do you. Harvesters weren’t the only living beings you killed.”

“We had no choice.” Hathcock’s voice, like his eyes, turned hard. “As it was, one of the damned things nearly got away.” He could still picture the harvester in the sights of his rifle, running on all fours to safety before he blew it to flaming bits.

Morgan held up his hands in mock surrender. Naomi could see that the gesture made Hathcock angry, and she shook her head slightly.
Now’s not the time
.

Hathcock got the message and clamped his mouth shut.

“Why Grand Island?” Naomi cocked her head. “And why in the world would anyone give a name like that to a town in Nebraska?”