Bitter Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 2) (11 page)

“Understood.”

Propping his shotgun against the wall so the light reflected from the ceiling, Rudenko pulled out a white phosphorous grenade and some fishing line. He tied the grenade in place against the lowest hinge of one of the double doors. Then he tied the filament to the hinge of the opposite door, and then to the pin of the grenade.
 

“A little surprise for any of those
svolochi
who might try to run this way,” he muttered to himself. He knew that Mikhailov could have put a squad on this side of the complex to block anything that might come out of the corn fields when they burned, but he didn’t want to split up his men. A squad, not truly knowing what they were up against, might be quickly overwhelmed.

Grabbing his shotgun, he tapped Sleptsev on the shoulder. “Come on, let’s go.”

The two crossed the walkway, making their way toward where Mikhailov had gathered the rest of the platoon.

“Ready,
kapitan
.” Rudenko was secretly happy to be back with the rest of the men. He had felt uncomfortably exposed while he and Sleptsev had been on the far side of the field. Rudenko could swear that there were eyes in the corn, watching them. Waiting. Before Spitsbergen, he would have told himself that he was just being an old woman. Now he told himself that he was just being prudent.

Three men stood on either side of Mikhailov and Rudenko. The rest of the men were in the connector, some guarding the doors to the last building of this nightmare complex, the rest watching for the fireworks about to erupt here and ready to act as a reserve in case of the unexpected.

“White phosphorous grenades.” Mikhailov’s order was followed by the rustling of web gear as the men extracted the special grenades. They normally did not carry so many, but it had been another modification Mikhailov had made to their weapons loadout before the deployment. “Now.”

There were seven
pings
as the pins were pulled and the safety handles flew from seven grenades, six from the soldiers and one from Rudenko, as they sailed into the darkness of the greenhouse building.

A few seconds later, Rudenko and the others were rewarded with muffled
whumps
followed by a spectacular fireworks display as the grenades exploded, sending burning fragments of white phosphorous soaring in graceful arcs over the dark corn stalks.
 

The response was instantaneous. A series of piercing, unearthly shrieks echoed through the building as the fragments of white phosphorous, burning at nearly three thousand degrees Celsius, transformed the corn field into a raging inferno. While the harvesters were extremely tough, with a skeletal structure formed of a natural carbon composite, their Achilles heel was fire. The parts of their bodies that they could morph to make them look human caught fire as easily as kerosene.

“Steady!” Rudenko bellowed to be heard above the din, sensing the fear of the soldiers around him. He tightened his grip on his KS-K shotgun, his right eye glued to the sight.
 

There was a sudden bloom of light on the far side of the walkway at the entrance to the connector to the lab building as the booby trap Rudenko had set went off. There were more shrieks, and he could see three apparitions, wreathed in the glare of the white phosphorous that covered them, performing a dance of death. He saw two other shadows dart toward the connector, then retreat: the grenade had covered the walls, floor, and ceiling with white hot flame, an impenetrable barrier to creatures whose bodies were inherently flammable.

The shadows disappeared behind the corn on the far side, no doubt trying to make their way to this side through the few patches of stalks not yet ablaze.

“
Contact right!
” Mikhailov’s warning was followed by a volley of Dragon’s Breath shells from the soldiers on that side who were armed with shotguns, punctuated with the staccato firing of an assault rifle. Someone screamed.

One of the soldiers on Rudenko’s side turned to look.

“Watch your sector, you idiot!”
 

As the man’s head snapped back to watch the left side, something leaped at him from the corn.

Rudenko had seen a harvester in its original form once before, on Spitsbergen, but its appearance was still a bone-chilling shock. While he knew that they were totally alien in appearance, his mind was actually expecting them to look human, just as they had on Spitsbergen when they had assumed the form of the
Spetsnaz
soldiers who had murdered most of his company.
 

The dark shape that lunged at them now wasn’t remotely human. It was insectile, the dark skeleton exposed and glistening in the light. Multi-jointed arms with rapier claws at the end reached out for the soldier in the middle, the one whom Rudenko had warned. Parts of the thing were covered in doughy tissue, and there was some sort of pod attached to its thorax, from which a whiplike stinger had emerged to stab the soldier in the eye.

The soldier went down, screaming, as the thing snatched at him.
 

Rudenko had the impression that it wasn’t trying to attack the man so much as get him out of the way so it could escape.

That, however, it would never do. Two shotguns and an assault rifle fired simultaneously at point blank range. Both the beast and the writhing soldier disappeared in a flare of Dragon’s Breath and a hail of bullets.
 

“What was that?” One of the men turned a fearful face toward Rudenko.

“Terrorists!” Rudenko would have laughed at his own lie had the situation been any less serious.

“They have advanced body armor!” Mikhailov added to the lie. It was far more palatable than the truth.

That seemed to calm the men somewhat as the inferno grew in front of them. The heat was becoming too much to bear, but Mikhailov had them hold fast.
 

Two more shapes burst from the corn down the walkway on Rudenko’s side. One of them was a spinning pyre, its form masked by the flames.
 

The other was that of a young woman. Naked, with claw marks on her flesh, she stumbled toward Rudenko and his men, holding an arm up to her face to ward off the heat and flames.

“Fire!”

For once, the men hesitated.

“Fire, damn you to hell!” Rudenko pulled the trigger on his shotgun, sending a torrent of Dragon’s Breath that enveloped the girl.

Her nude body exploded into flame. The flesh oozed and melted, falling in burning gobbets to the walkway. An insectoid head emerged as the face dissolved, the chitinous jaws opening to let loose a shriek.
 

The two soldiers with Rudenko fired. The girl-thing disappeared behind a wall of fireworks from the Dragon’s Breath shells. The screeching stopped, and the twitching corpse fell to the hot concrete, the soft flesh still burning, popping and spattering like grease in a pan.

“Pull back!”
 

Rudenko felt a hand on his shoulder. Mikhailov.

“Pull back now!”

Grabbing the two soldiers with him, Rudenko pushed them back toward the connector, covering them as they withdrew. His hands and face were blistering from the heat now, and he would not be surprised if he suffered second degree burns.
 

Before him, the flames from the corn rose all the way to the ceiling of the building, and the place was rapidly filling with thick smoke.
 

The screeching, at least, had stopped. Any of the things that had been in here were now dead.

Now all that remained was to clear the animal husbandry building and then manage to leave the facility alive.

* * *

Mikhailov led the platoon down the connector to the entrance to the last of the large buildings, where the livestock had been kept. The connector was filled with smoke, and most of the men, including himself, were coughing.
 

Taking up position right behind the four soldiers who stood at the doors, Mikhailov ordered, “Go!”

Just as they had before, the men flung the doors open and charged inside, the rest of the platoon moving in right behind them. A pair of men pulled the connector door closed behind them, both to shut out as much of the smoke as they could, and to protect the platoon from being surprised by anything that might have survived the inferno in the building behind them.

Unlike the other buildings, there was some light in this one, shining through the smashed wall panels at the rear. Mikhailov could see animal pens, food and water bins, tools, and a variety of other things as he quickly took in his surroundings.

As the damage on the exterior suggested, this building, too, was a shambles. Everything firmly attached to the walls or sunk into the concrete floor had been dislodged, mangled, or otherwise destroyed. Some of the animal pens, where he assumed cows had been kept, had been knocked over, the metal rails bent outward. He could hardly imagine the panic such placid animals must have experienced to cause them to do such damage.
 

“Rudenko!”

“Sir!”

“Once we are finished, we will level this place.” Mikhailov prodded a crushed metal bucket that, in the beam of his weapon’s flashlight, sparkled in the light, as if it had been newly made. “I don’t want anything bigger than my thumb to remain intact. Take the men with RPOs and have them stand guard outside until we are finished. I’ll contact the helicopter and let them know we’re almost ready for extraction.”

“Understood, sir.” Turning, he bellowed, “Ryzhik! Alexandrov! Lesokhin! Sleptsev! Take up positions outside and cover our asses until we blow this place to hell!”

* * *

Mladshiy Serzhant
Isaak Moseevich Ryzhik had never been so relieved as when he stepped out into the sunlight through the hole in the back of the animal husbandry building. He had never seen combat, but had been in enough serious fights in sleazy bars in Moscow to not be easily frightened. But in that accursed building full of corn, he had been terrified. Whatever those things were that had come out of the flames at them, they had not been terrorists. Ryzhik did not consider himself a genius, but he knew that much.

He waved at the Mi-17, which was in the process of setting down about a hundred meters away. The crew chief, who was standing in the open side door, tossed him a salute.

“Over here.” He led the three other men to a position about forty meters from the building. “This should be a good spot for the fireworks.” He unslung the RPO-M rocket from his back, and the other men followed suit. It was a camouflaged tube about a meter long with a rounded black front cap, a removable trigger grip near the front, and a stepladder sight. Ryzhik flipped up the sight, then set the tube on his right shoulder, holding the trigger grip with his right hand and the foregrip with his left.
 

Sleptsev imitated what Ryzhik had done, pointing the weapon in the same direction, at the facility.

“Right.” Ryzhik set down his rocket. “Now keep your eyes on the building and wait for the captain’s orders. Sleptsev!
Sleptsev!
”

Beside him, Sleptsev had smoothly pivoted, pointing the RPO-M behind them before squeezing the trigger.
 

With a boom and a cloud of smoke, the rocket shot from the tube, the back-blast knocking Ryzhik to the ground. The projectile didn’t stream flame or smoke as it flew toward its target, but it was clearly visible as it sailed right through the side passenger door of the Mi-17 and into the rear of the helicopter.

The crew chief had seen it coming and had leaped clear, but that didn’t save him. The helicopter vanished in a huge fireball, sending chunks of the still-spinning rotor blades, metal from the fuselage, and other bits and pieces flying to a radius of more than a hundred meters.

Ryzhik had recovered his wits enough to grab his assault rifle. A curse on his lips, he aimed at Sleptsev, who was turning back toward him, and fired.

The bullets slammed into Sleptsev, but they had no effect. Ryzhik’s eyes widened as he saw some flying out the other soldier’s back.

But there was no blood, no sign of pain on Sleptsev’s face as he raised his own weapon and fired a dozen rounds into Ryzhik before turning on the other two men, who were still standing there, staring in shock.

After gunning them down, he tossed his rifle to the ground and retrieved Ryzhik’s RPO. Taking a knee, he flipped up the sight and took aim at the hole in the wall of the animal husbandry building through which he had escaped to freedom.

* * *

“
Chyort voz'mi!
” Mikhailov’s curse at the sound of gunfire outside was drowned out by the roar of an explosion. The comforting
whump-whump-whump
of the Mi-17’s spinning rotors had disappeared. “The helicopter’s down!”

There was more gunfire outside.

“
Kapitan!
” Rudenko took him by the shoulder. “If whoever’s out there gets the RPOs, we’re in trouble.”

Mikhailov had a sudden sensation of
déjà vu
, recalling the airport terminal on Spitsbergen as it exploded, destroyed by the harvesters masquerading as
Spetsnaz
, killing most of his men. Behind them was the inferno of the greenhouse building containing the corn. The walls to either side were intact, with no doors to the outside. The ceiling was too high to reach. And beyond the rear wall lay an unknown threat that had destroyed their helicopter, and probably killed the men he had sent out there.

Rudenko reacted first. Pulling Mikhailov along, he shouted at the top of his lungs, “Follow me!”

Dashing toward the right side of the building, which happened to be the closest to where they’d been standing, Rudenko yanked two high explosive grenades from his combat harness. “Grenades to the wall!”

Snapping back to reality, Mikhailov snatched a pair of grenades from his own vest and pulled the pins. Two other men did the same. “Now!” Mikhailov rolled them toward the base of the wall, and the other men followed suit.

They dropped to the ground, and a few seconds later eight grenades went off, blowing a gaping hole to the outside.
 

“Go, go, go!” Mikhailov was on his feet, shoving the other men toward the breach. He had no idea how much time they had, if they had any at all. “Come on!
Move!
”