Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (39 page)

None of them noticed the white-clad
figure following about a hundred meters behind the
first.

***

Jack had expected another booby-trap
at the double door through the bulkhead that separated the main
tunnel from the vault area, but there was nothing.

Well, there
was
something, Jack grimly acknowledged:
four bodies, some of the civilians who’d worked here at the vault.
All of them were riddled with bullets.

“Keep moving,” he ordered, and the
surviving team members, minus Hathcock and his spotter who had been
left behind to cover the entrance, carefully moved forward along
the remaining fifteen meters of the main tunnel before reaching a
T-junction.

“Which way,” he softly asked
Naomi.

“There are three vaults,” she
whispered. “Vaults One and Two are there,” she pointed down the
tunnel toward the left. “That one,” she pointed to the right, where
about ten meters away was a bulkhead and double door, “is Vault
Three.”

“We’ll take number three first,”
Jack said.

Quickly moving down the tunnel
toward Vault Three, Higgins and Preston gripped the door handles,
while Jack and Naomi held their rifles ready.

“Now!” Jack said.

They flung the doors open. There was
nothing but a space like an airlock, about two meters long, leading
to a set of inner doors.

“Shit,” Jack muttered. “Let’s do it
again.”

They did, and when the doors opened,
Jack and Naomi quickly moved inside, followed by the other two
men.

They were in a massive ice-rimmed
cavern that had been carved from the rock, nearly ten meters across
and almost the same high, and roughly thirty meters long. Before
them stood large, extremely sturdy open-frame metal shelves, more
like what one might expect to find in a warehouse for heavy
equipment than a place where seeds would be stored. And on the
shelves were hundreds, thousands, of equally sturdy-looking boxes
of various sizes.

Good news and bad
news
, Jack thought. The bad news was that
the vault was a maze that gave their enemy plenty of hiding spots.
The good news was that the harvesters would stand out like a sore
thumb in the thermal imager. He switched the imager’s polarity, so
that instead of being darker, warmer objects would appear lighter
in his display. A human being or a harvester would show as nearly
white.

“Spread out,” Jack ordered, “but
stay abreast of one another as we move down the aisles. I don’t
want them slipping by us.”

They were halfway through when Naomi
suddenly said, “Stop!”

“What is it?” Jack said, dropping to
one knee and aiming in her direction across the tops of the boxes
on the lowest shelf.

“Just a minute,” she whispered. He
heard her scoop up something from the floor. “They look sort of
like shell casings, but they’re not. They look familiar, but I
can’t see well enough with the thermal imager.”

“Let’s finish clearing the room,
then,” he told her.

A few moments later, the four of
them emerged at the back of the vault.

“Nobody here,” one of the others
said.

“One down,” Jack said. “Let’s hit
number two.”

They went back out and quickly moved
down the tunnel to the second vault.

Things went fine until they opened
the inner door. A flurry of automatic weapons fire erupted from
near the back of the vault, the shots appearing as brief white
streaks in Jack’s imager as the bullets slammed into the rock walls
near the door.

Jack’s team returned fire, driving
the harvester behind one of the shelves.

“Go!” Jack shouted as he dashed down
the center aisle. Naomi moved down the one to his left, while the
two other men took two of the other aisles.

“Taser it if you can!” Naomi shouted
back at him.

Jack snorted. That would be a mean
trick while the harvester was armed with a rifle.

A man-sized white blob suddenly
darted out in front of him, and his finger was already pulling the
trigger of his G36C, sending a stream of 5.56 millimeter rounds
slamming into the creature. While every member of the team carried
extra magazines with incendiary ammunition, none of them was using
it: they were hoping to capture at least one of the harvesters
alive.

“Taser out!” Naomi cried as she
fired at the harvester, which had been driven back against the rear
wall by Jack’s bullets.

He saw the thing tense into
paralysis and then fall, rigid, to the floor. Higgins was instantly
astride it, driving a huge hypodermic into its thorax.

“Behind you!” Preston cried, firing
at another harvester in an adjacent aisle. His bullets went over
Naomi’s head as she dove to the floor.

Jack instinctively fired in the same
direction as he moved to cover Naomi, blasting seed-filled boxes
from the heavy shelves and scattering their contents across the
floor. The two streams of bullets converged on the wildly dodging
creature, which shrieked in rage and pain.

“Taser out!” Higgins shouted. He was
on the far side of the creature from where Jack and Preston were
firing.

Unfortunately, he was also within
striking range of the harvester’s stinger, and he went down with a
gurgling cry as it rammed the spike into his chest, pumping the
deadly venom into his heart.

“Fuck this,” Jack muttered. He hit
the magazine release on his weapon, then slammed one of the
magazines loaded with incendiary bullets home. He caught sight of
the harvester darting further down the aisle and fired.

The thing burst into flame, burning
so hot that his thermal imager was rendered useless. But his left
eye, staring out into what had been darkness, could see just fine
in the shimmering light of the creature’s burning flesh. He pumped
some more rounds into it, just for good measure.

Finally, satisfied that it was dead,
he knelt beside Higgins to check on him, but he was gone. With a
weary sigh, Jack made his way back to Naomi and Preston.

“At least we have something to show
for our troubles,” Preston said as he knelt beside the harvester
while it shuddered under the influence of the formaldehyde he had
injected into its system.

“I’m sorry about Higgins,” Naomi
said quietly. Preston only nodded. Naomi was about to say something
more when she saw something on the floor down the aisle the
harvester had been in. “Oh, my God,” she breathed as she stood up
and went to look closer.

“Naomi?” Jack called, following
behind her.

“Oh, no,” she muttered. “Oh,
no!”

“What, dammit?” Jack
demanded.

“This,” she said, picking up from
the floor what looked like a ridiculous toy ray gun that would have
been a perfect movie prop for any of the “B” science fiction movies
from the nineteen-fifties. The only difference was that this one
was connected by a hose to a cylinder about a foot and a half long
and six inches in diameter.

“What the hell is that?”

“It’s an SJ-500 gene gun,” she told
him, nearly in tears. “Those cartridge-like things I picked up in
the first vault? They were cartridges, all right: for this.” She
looked up at the storage boxes, the hundreds, thousands, of boxes
around them. “They’ve been in here, infecting some of the seeds
with whatever’s in these cartridges.”

“The retrovirus?” he
asked.

She shook her head. “No, not with
this. This is used to inject genetic material into cells. The
retrovirus is handled differently. The tank holds highly
pressurized helium that shoots the gene material into the target
animal or plant. We’ll have to take the cartridges back to the lab
and analyze them, but if I had to guess, I’d say that it’s either a
kill gene, a gene that will cause the next generation of plants to
spontaneously die, or maybe will create some sort of flora that’s
native to them, like a food source beyond the...protein we know
they consume.” She took a tool out of her pocket and disconnected
the gun from the hose.

“They haven’t been in here very
long,” Jack observed. “They couldn’t have infected very
many.”

“That may not be true,” Preston
said. “Look at this.”

Jack and Naomi came back over to
look at their captive harvester.

“It’s wearing civilian clothes under
its uniform,” Preston said, pulling up the camouflage shirt to
reveal a thick gray sweater. Undoing the belt and fly, he pulled
the thing’s uniform pants down to expose insulated blue
pants.

“Oh, my God,” Naomi whispered. “It’s
been masquerading as one of the workers in here.”

“Then it must’ve put on a Russian
uniform, maybe to escape with the other harvesters after they
finished with the vault,” Jack surmised.

Naomi looked up at Jack. “There’s no
telling how long it’s been contaminating the vaults. It could have
been here for weeks, months. Or longer.” Leaning back against one
of the tall shelves, she said, “Every seed packet in these boxes is
now suspect. We can’t let any of them be used. Ever.”

Jack had a sinking
feeling in his stomach. “So their plan wasn’t really to destroy
this place,” he said. “They
wanted
the world to need the seeds that are stored here.
Seeds that were contaminated, and that nobody would have known
about.” He paused, the ramifications hitting home. “And now we have
to destroy it. All of it.”

Naomi nodded as she angrily stuffed
the gene gun in her backpack. “And that leaves the little question
of how we do that, doesn’t it?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Jack sighed. “But first
things first: we have to clear the last vault. You stay here and
watch our little buddy. Preston,” he called to the other man,
“you’re with me.”

“Jack,” Naomi called after
him.

He turned to look at her, her face
flickering in the dying light of the still-burning
harvester.

“Be careful.”

***

Claret had turned around briefly at
the sound of gunfire echoing down the tunnel from far behind them,
but Hathcock never took his eyes off the closed door at the
entrance.

As if on cue, the door flew open and
a man stumbled inside. He wore a tattered uniform that both of them
recognized as Norwegian from their time in Afghanistan.

“
Hallo?
”
the man called hoarsely as he collapsed against the side of the
entrance, the door standing open behind him, his rifle clattering
to the floor. “Is anyone here?”

“Stay where you are,” Claret called.
“Keep your hands where we can see them!”

“There are
Russians, coming behind me!” he shouted. With a sob, he added,
“Those fuckers shot down our plane. I am the only one left.
The only survivor!
”

“Check him out,” Hathcock said
quietly as he centered his aim on the man’s chest. “Stand up!” he
ordered the Norwegian.

The man, his uniform literally in
rags and covered in blood, managed to get to his feet as Claret
moved closer. He was within a couple meters of the Norwegian when
Hathcock suddenly remembered.

“Use your imager!” he called, but it
was too late.

The “Norwegian”
dodged to the side as Hathcock pulled the Barrett’s trigger,
blasting a huge divot out of the concrete wall where the thing had
been just an instant before. With his other eye, the one not glued
to the big weapon’s scope, Hathcock saw the stinger suddenly uncoil
from the
faux
soldier and strike out at Claret.

Claret was incredibly lucky, as the
sharp biological dagger slammed into the stock of his rifle, the
point sticking in the hard plastic. The harvester wrenched the
weapon away from him, and Claret was reaching for his sidearm when
the tunnel suddenly boomed with the sound of a weapon on full
automatic.

Hathcock watched in fascination as
the harvester, caught between its human and natural forms, did a
dance of death as it was shot from behind by another figure that
stood silhouetted in the doorway. The creature was slammed against
the wall, not far from where it had originally fallen, and Hathcock
stroked the Barrett’s trigger. The tunnel entrance lit up briefly
from the muzzle flash as the .50 caliber round blasted the
harvester into flaming pieces that spattered to the floor around
them.

The silhouette in the doorway
resolved into a Norwegian soldier who looked like he’d been
recycled through Hell half a dozen times. Claret, his thermal sight
over his right eye now, turned and nodded to Hathcock. The man was
human.

“
Kaptein
Terje Halvorsen,” the man said as he stared at the creature’s
shattered exoskeleton and burning, fatty flesh, an unmistakable
look of hatred in his eyes, “at your service.”

***

Several minutes later, Jack, Naomi,
and Preston came back out of the tunnel, dragging the harvester
they’d captured. They were surprised to see yet another harvester
corpse awaiting them.