Bitter Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 2) (34 page)

Miller frowned. “I can’t say as I blame them. I still don’t believe this myself. I keep expecting to wake up, that this will all have been a nightmare.” Shaking his head, he told her, “Keep sending whatever information we can provide them, and let them know that the door is open for any dialogue or support we can give. And maybe have someone put together a briefing package for them using what we’re getting out of Los Angeles. We’ve got to convince the other governments of how much of a threat this is, and give them any help we can on how to fight these things.”
 

Turning to the Director of National Intelligence, Miller asked, “Has there been any significant change overseas?”

“Just more of the same, sir, and all of it bad. China’s committed three additional divisions, and we’ve started getting indications that the cities of Chengdu and Chongqing in southern China may have harvester infestations.” He glanced at the television, then back to Miller. “We weren’t really sure what to make of the information we were getting until we saw the coverage of Los Angeles, but from the reporting we’ve seen thus far, the situation there is worse. A lot worse.”

“Go on.”

“As for Brazil, the southern part of the country is in complete disarray, with several areas completely cut off by the military. The government’s instituted a blackout on all news out of the south, and we’re working on getting some assets in place that can provide us some reliable information. But for now, I think it’s safe to assume that they’ve got some serious problems on their hands.
 

“The same is true for India. Mass panic has set in among the rural areas east of Hyderabad in the south-central part of the country, and the Indians are deploying at least two infantry divisions, along with their independent airborne brigade, to help contain the outbreak there.”

“And France?”

The DNI frowned. “That’s the odd one of the bunch. There was clearly an outbreak in Bordeaux,” he nodded to Richards, who’d tipped the intelligence community to the fact, “but either the French have contained it or they’re remaining amazingly quiet.”

Miller turned to Richards and Harmon. “Do you have anything?”

Harmon looked at Richards, who shook his head. “No, sir, nothing so far. We tipped the French National Police to suspicious activity in Bordeaux, but our legats haven’t received any feedback on the operation, despite repeated requests.”

“Damn French,” Miller sighed.

“With all due respect, sir, at least with the investigation that we’ve been collaborating on, the French have been very helpful.” Richards shook his head. “This makes me wonder if something else isn’t going on. It’s possible that the French government has already been penetrated by the harvesters.”

“Fine,” Miller said, raising his hands in supplication. “My apologies to our French Allies. So I guess we’re saving the best for last: what about Russia?”

The DNI looked grim. “Not surprisingly, there’s a lot of confusion in the Russian government. But what we do know for certain is that they put their conventional forces on full military alert a few hours ago, about the same time that one of their airborne units was wiped out in southern Russia.”
 

President Miller looked again at Richards. “Wasn’t that where your guy, Jack Dawson, was headed from India?”

“Yes, sir,” Richards answered softly.

“Any word from him?”

“No, Mr. President. Not since yesterday.”

Miller pursed his lips. “He wouldn’t have been directly involved in any of their operations. I’m sure he’s okay.”

“Yes, sir, I’m sure he is.”

In his gut, Richards wasn’t quite so sure.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The concussion from the RPG rocket exploding and the violent yaw that followed nearly sent Jack and Mikhailov tumbling out the still-open ramp of the helicopter. Jack scrabbled along the deck, trying to dig his bare fingers into the metal with one hand while he held onto Mikhailov’s combat harness with the other. The Russian captain’s legs were dangling over the side of the ramp. Jack cried out with the strain as he grabbed a nylon cargo strap, secured to the side of the fuselage and whipping about in the cabin.

Coughing from the smoke that poured from the destroyed starboard engine, Jack caught a glimpse of the pilots, struggling to keep the stricken Mi-17 in the air. Near the gaping hole that had been blasted in the right side of the craft, Jack saw that the crew chief was dead. There was nothing left of him above the waist.

The port engine was still running, but sounded like a garbage disposal that had been fed a handful of metal knives. A torrent of fluid poured from the top of the cabin from the ruptured hydraulic and fuel lines.

Jack was surprised, and not just a bit relieved, that they hadn’t caught fire. Yet.

As he held Mikhailov, who had come to, but wasn’t strong enough yet to hold on by himself, Jack tried to count off the seconds they stayed in the air. Every one of those precious increments of time would take them farther from Ulan-Erg and the dreadful horrors there.

In the dark, he had no idea where the pilots were headed. All he knew was that it was roughly fifty kilometers to the town of Elista, and over two hundred and fifty back to Stavropol. He’d settle for Elista, but doubted they’d get that far.
 

Then he happened to look down, behind them. The roiling flames of the burning harvesters had long since receded into the distance and the drizzling rain. Now he could see pairs of lights, moving in straight lines. Vehicles. Cars. Not many, but enough to make him realize that the pilots must be following the main road, A154 if he remembered correctly from the map Kuybishev had shown him, that had been the phase line for the attack on Ulan-Erg.
 

Nodding to himself, Jack gave a small whisper of thanks to the pilots. At least if they went down, someone would find them. But this close to Ulan-Erg and the mysterious facility, anyone in the cars below could be a harvester.

Jack had no words for how much he wished Alexander was with him now. He knew the cat would have been petrified, but at least he could have told Jack friend from foe.

Mikhailov, recovered somewhat from the ordeal, managed to claw his way alongside him to grab onto another cargo strap. “Rudenko?”

“He didn’t make it,” Jack told him. “I’m sorry, Sergei.”

In the dim light of the cargo hold, Jack couldn’t see Mikhailov’s expression, but he did see Mikhailov lower his forehead to the floor. His lips moved in what Jack guessed was a quiet prayer for his friend.
 

They both looked up as something in the grinding machinery of the surviving engine gave way. Spinning chunks of sharp metal, accompanied by a gout of flame, raked the cargo area. Something else broke almost directly above them, somewhere in the base of the tail boom, and the helicopter went into a spin as it lost altitude.

“We lost the tail rotor! Hold on!” Jack looked out the back to see the horizon, blackness riding upon darkness, punctuated with a few lights along the road, whirling.
 

Before he looked away, he caught sight of something else: a town in flames.

Still spinning, the helicopter hit, its right main gear slamming into the ground. The nose rose into the air and the tail boom smashed into the ground, shattering the tail rotor.

Then he was falling through the open maw of the cargo ramp, straight into the whirling wreckage of the tail rotor.
 

Mikhailov tried to grab him, but only succeeded in losing his own grip.

Jack screamed and closed his eyes, but in the time it took him to fall, the helicopter continued to spin, and the lethal egg beater of the tail rotor was gone by the time he hit the ground. He landed hard on his side, knocking the wind out of him. His head slammed into the wet muck, and he lay there, dazed.
 

Beside him, only a few feet away, Mikhailov crumpled to the ground like a big rag doll.

Above them, the helicopter spun around three more times before it tipped over. The rotor blades, still driven by what was left of the port engine, tore themselves to pieces against the ground, sending fragments through the fuselage and for a hundred yards in every direction, and what was left of the tail rotor flew apart as the boom collapsed. The stubs of the rotor blades pushed the helicopter around in a full circle before there was nothing left but the rotor hub, still whirring around above the mud.

Getting to his feet, Jack staggered toward the wreckage, intending to help the pilots, when the fuel that had sprayed everywhere caught with a surprisingly soft
whump
. Raising his arms to cover his face, he moved toward the cargo ramp, which was the only part of the Mi-17 not wreathed in flame.

“No, Jack!” A hand fell on Jack’s shoulder, pulling him back from the intense heat. “They are gone!”

Jack resisted for just a moment, then gave in. The front of the helicopter was covered in burning fuel. He only hoped the pilots had been killed or rendered unconscious in the crash.
 

Letting Mikhailov lead him away to a safe distance, they collapsed to their knees and watched the helicopter burn. Beyond the flames, what must be only a few kilometers to the east, they could see smoke billowing up from the town that Jack had caught sight of before the crash.

“Is that Elista?”
 

“
Da
,” Mikhailov answered wearily. “That does not look so good, does it?”

“Sure as hell doesn’t. But I wonder who set it on fire? Surely not the harvesters.”

“Haven’t you ever seen the movies with villagers chasing monsters with torches and pitchforks?” Mikhailov managed a humorless chuckle. “In chaos, Jack, there is always fire. Perhaps someone even discovered that it will kill the beasts.”

“We can always hope. But that means we can’t go there. What now?”

“We have to get back to Stavropol, or at least call the regimental headquarters and let them know what has happened.” He narrowed his eyes as he saw a pair of cars pull up on the road, which was maybe fifty meters away. “But I am hesitant to get in a car here with a stranger.”

“Yeah.” Jack got a queasy sensation as he watched four people, two from each car, get out and stand there, staring into the flames. None of them spoke. Instinctively, he lowered himself into a prone position, and Mikhailov followed suit. “Do you still have your sidearm?”
 

“Yes, and two magazines. That, my knife, and my wits are my only remaining weapons.”

“Two out of three isn’t bad.” Jack grinned as Mikhailov snorted.
 

“Here, take these.” Mikhailov handed him the gun and spare magazines. “You can hold it and shoot. I cannot. Not now.”

Jack took the weapon and shoved it in his empty holster, then put the magazines in a pouch. “So what’s the plan?”

Mikhailov pondered for a moment as they watched the “people” near the cars. Apparently content that there were no survivors, and clearly not wanting to venture closer to the flaming wreckage, they returned to their cars and drove off, heading back toward Elista.
 

“The world has just become an extremely dangerous place, my friend,” Mikhailov whispered.
 

“Yeah,” Jack said, shaking off the chill that went deeper than the cold muck as he watched the cars leave. “That was pretty damn creepy. It’s strange, though: I would have thought they would have acted more normal.”

“Perhaps they have not yet learned?” Mikhailov mused. “Or perhaps they did not feel the need to, if all four of them were harvesters.”

“Something else for Naomi to figure out, I guess.”

Mikhailov shook his head. “What you observe and tell her will be just as important as anything she learns in the lab, and perhaps more. It is like with weapons: seeing how they perform at a test facility is one thing. How effective they are on the battlefield in the hands of a soldier is something else.”

They were silent for a time, the only sound the crackling of the burning helicopter.
 

Then Jack asked, “How many harvesters do you think there were back at Ulan-Erg?”

“There must have been a few hundred, maybe more. Not including the ghastly little ones.”

“That’s about what I figured. And how many more do you think must be loose in Elista to cause that kind of panic?” He nodded toward the flames rising from the town.

“I cannot even guess. Where is this leading?”

“Naomi said that she believed they could reproduce, that they weren’t limited to a host ingesting the engineered corn and transforming into a harvester. But if what she said is true, how fast do they reproduce? How long was it since that facility hereabouts was overrun?”

“Perhaps a week,” Mikhailov said, uncertain, “maybe a few days more.”

“And in that short time there are hundreds of the damn things.”

“There is worse.” Mikhailov turned to look at him. “There is still at least one in Stavropol, the one masquerading as Putin.”

“Who’s now probably spawned a lot more, plus any that might have come from here. Shit.” Jack blew out his breath, forming a fog in the air that drifted upward until it vanished. “You still haven’t answered my question about what we’re going to do.”

“When we came out on our mission to the facility where the harvesters here originated, I had some time to study maps of this area. Elista has a small airport that should be roughly five kilometers northwest of us. There should be little between here and there, a few scattered farm houses, perhaps, and several bridges that cross a small river, the same that ran north of Ulan-Erg.”
 

“Do you know how to fly?”

Mikhailov winced. “I make no claim to being a pilot, but I spent several summers with one of my uncles, who owned a plane he used for spraying crops. It had two sets of controls. He let me fly with him many times, and let me take the controls when he thought it was safe to do so.” He grinned. “That was not so often as I would have liked.”

“Okay, let’s assume you can get us off the ground without flying into the control tower. But why the airport? Why not try one of the other towns, or even here in Elista, and steal a car?”