Bitter Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 2) (50 page)

The frustrating thing was that this sector had been entirely quiet. The hours had crept by as they watched their screens for any unauthorized aircraft, but there had been nothing. While the southern part of his country had fallen into chaos, literally overnight, and the Air Force was called to action, he and his fellows in the north could do nothing but bore holes through the frigid skies.
 

The only excitement, such as it was, was the barrier patrols put up by the Finns and the Norwegians on their respective sides of the border. They would pose no real threat to the Russian Air Force if battle were joined, but it would have been something to focus on to help pass the time. Unfortunately, that task was assigned to another group of controllers on the plane, leaving him and the two other controllers of his section to look for phantom planes.

His only entertainment had been a possible contact that had first appeared roughly one hundred and sixty kilometers south of the Mainstay’s patrol station. He had initially filtered it out as most likely being a fast-moving automobile or a bogus return. But he saw a similar return over an hour later, fifty kilometers northwest of the Mainstay’s position.
 

With a frown, he assigned the initial contact a target number, then associated the second contact with it, forming a track on his display. Looking at the plot, his frown deepened. If it was indeed an aircraft (although he could not imagine how low the pilot must be flying to avoid being classified as an aircraft by the Mainstay’s radar), it was heading on a northerly course that would take it straight to Norway near Melkefoss. Looking at the estimated airspeed, he saw that it was just shy of one hundred knots. Checking his aircraft guide, a shiver of excitement ran up his spine as he saw that it closely matched the economical cruise speed of an An-2, precisely the type of aircraft they were hunting.

* * *

“God, I think we might actually pull this off” Jack was looking over Mikhailov’s shoulder as the Russian captain held open the map, trying to figure out their location.
 

“I think,” Mikhailov said uncertainly, glancing out his window to the right, “that is Lake Alla-Akkayarvi.” It was a long, narrow patch of ice, maybe two kilometers wide, that stretched off to the northeast. But it was very difficult to make out: the longer night of late winter was coming, the sky was filled with low, leaden clouds, and snow had begun to fall. “If so, then we are within fifty kilometers of the Norwegian border.”

Khatuna said nothing. Jack worried about her, although there was really nothing he could do. Her eyes flicked across the instruments, to the outside, then back again, never still for more than a few seconds. He knew she must have been exhausted from so many hours of low-level flying and the constant fear of attack by Russian fighters. And now the weather was turning sour.
 

“We will have to fly higher,” she told them. “There are no large mountains here, but with snow, we will hit trees before I can pull up.”

Both men nodded. They knew that it would increase their chances of being detected, but the game would be over if they slammed into a tree or one of the low hills.

“Just do the best you can,” Jack told her with a gentle squeeze on her shoulder. “You’re doing great so far.”

“Thank you.” She stiffened. “Sergei! Switch to my frequency!”

Grimacing as he leaned forward to reach the radio console, Mikhailov switched over to the civilian guard channel and listened.

In Russian, a male voice said, “Unidentified aircraft proceeding on bearing three four nine, position six-nine zero-five North, three-zero two-four East, altitude five zero meters, this is a Russian Air Force controller. You are ordered to identify yourself immediately or you will be fired upon. Over.”

Mikhailov did a quick translation for Jack.
 

“Dammit!” Jack cursed.
 

“He is repeating,” Mikhailov said in a tight voice. “I do not think he will ask again.”

* * *

Polkovnik
Dmitri Andropov, the Mainstay’s mission commander, looked at the track of their quarry on Ignatiev’s scope.
 

“Give them a warning shot and order them to Kilpyavr Air Base,” the
polkovnik
said. “If they do not comply, shoot them down.”

“Yes, sir.” Ignatiev switched from the intercom to the control frequency for the aircraft assigned to him, two MiG-29s. “
Tigr
flight, you are cleared to fire a warning shot past the target’s nose.”

“
Tigr
lead, understood.”

* * *

Jack cringed as a stream of cannon shells blazed past the canopy, followed by a pair of fighters that thundered by, insanely close. They quickly disappeared into the slate gray clouds like great white sharks sinking into dark water.

“Jack!” Mikhailov had to shout over the An-2’s straining engine. Khatuna had pushed the throttle forward to keep the old biplane from falling out of the sky as it flew through the slipstreams of the two fighters. “They say they will shoot us down if we do not land at a nearby air base.”

Mikhailov’s face bore an agonized look, but it was not of physical pain. It was the anguish of failure.
 

They had reached the end of the line, only spitting distance from their objective. But there wasn’t any point in fighting the inevitable. Jack had thought earlier that it would be worth any sacrifice to get out of Russia, but now that the time had come, he couldn’t bear to sacrifice his friends. Had it only been himself, it might have been different. He knew that, if he asked, Sergei would gladly go on and perish in the fireball of the missile that one of the fighters must even now have locked on this antiquated plane. Perhaps even Khatuna would.
 

But he wouldn’t ask them to. “Do as they say,” he said. “Getting ourselves killed isn’t going to help anyone.”

Mikhailov nodded wearily, then spoke to the Air Force controller, informing him that they were turning toward Kilpyavr. “Khatuna,” he said, “bring us around to the east. Khatuna?”

She was staring straight ahead, a slack expression on her face. “I will not go back.”

The voice was hers, but something in how she said the words sent a chill down Jack’s spine.
 

“We must turn about, or they will fire!” Mikhailov tried to turn the copilot’s wheel, but Khatuna’s grip was like iron and the controls didn’t budge.

Twisting in her seat, she turned toward Mikhailov. Jack let out a shout of horrified surprise when a stinger burst from her chest and shot across the cockpit to stab Mikhailov in the stomach.
 

The Russian screamed, but it was as much in pain as it was in rage. His combat knife was suddenly in his hand, and with a savage slash he severed the stinger from the undulating tentacle connecting it to the Khatuna-thing. She/It, in turn, screamed, the shrill call of a wounded harvester.

Jack drew his own knife and drove it up to the hilt into the thing’s neck.
 

With an ear-shattering shriek, it elongated one of its arms, then slammed a fist against his head, then again. Reeling from the blows, Jack lost his grip on the knife and fell against the bulkhead at the rear of the cockpit.

Mikhailov, the stinger still embedded in his gut, managed to release his harness and hurled himself at the creature, driving his knife into its head again and again.
 

With a hiss, the harvester slammed Mikhailov backward against the instrument panel, one of its clawed appendages latched around his throat. In his struggles, he shoved the throttle to the idle position, and the plane shuddered as it lost airspeed.

Getting back to his feet, Jack yanked his knife from the thing’s neck and jammed it in again, twisting it savagely.
 

It released its grip on Mikhailov, then slammed him back against the bulkhead with an elbow that hit him like inch-thick steel rebar.
 

Jack sank to his knees, stunned.

“Get out, Jack!”
 

He looked up at Mikhailov, who was still wrestling with the creature. The Russian was bleeding in a dozen places from where the harvester’s claws had savaged him, but he refused to give in. It tried to drive a claw into his chest, but he managed to deflect it with one hand while pinning the thing’s other claw against its chest with his knife.

Beyond the two struggling figures, Jack could see snow-covered trees through the windscreen.

Mikhailov screamed as the thing wrestled its claws free, then shoved one of them into his chest, deep into his rib cage.

There was nothing else Jack could do. He ran back toward the rear of the plane. As the thing in the pilot’s seat flung Mikhailov’s body aside and regained control, Jack swung the door open to the bitterly cold air outside.

“Jesus,” he whispered as he watched the ground flash by, maybe fifty feet below. Even shuddering in the air on the verge of a stall, moving just fast enough to stay airborne above the trees, the An-2 seemed to be moving as fast as a rocket sled.

He caught a glare out of the corner of his eye, and saw something streaking out of the darkness toward him.

A moment later, the warhead of the R-73 air-to-air missile launched by one of the MiG-29s detonated, blotting the old biplane from the sky in a fiery cloud of smoke and debris.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Naomi stared at the monitors, watching the crippled harvester drag itself around the containment cell. It was obviously keeping its distance from the larva that mindlessly pursued its parent, which the larva viewed as nothing more than food.

Morgan had made his call to Richards, who had been stunned into momentary silence by the numbers Renee had come up with. Her projections had been checked by an analyst at FBI Headquarters and a team at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. All of them had come up with similar numbers. All of them had been scared out of their wits.

Richards had bumped the information up the line, and now they were waiting for a secure video teleconference call with the President. Morgan had wanted Naomi to come up and wait in the conference room, but she had preferred to stay in the monitoring room, focusing her thoughts and her hate on the harvester. Alexander and Koshka were with her. Koshka was in her lap, purring, while Alexander lay in a Sphinx position, his attention riveted on the thing in the monitor. She knew that normally he didn’t watch television, even when she turned on a nature program with birds or small rodents that fascinated Koshka. But here, the big cat somehow sensed that the thing on the screen, while not right there with them, was real. Every now and then a low growl escaped from his throat.

She knew that, as a scientist, it was wrong to hate the harvester and the others of its kind. Scientists were supposed to be objective, to make dispassionate observations of their subjects. These creatures weren’t inherently evil, nor did they bear any particular ill will toward humankind for what it was, any more than the average person despised a steer. The steer, however, did not realize its lot in life. Naomi and the others who now understood the full scope of the harvester threat, however, did. And she hated them for what they were, what they were now doing to her world.

Renee hadn’t helped lift her mood with what she’d told Naomi about what was happening in Russia. There had still been no word from Jack, and intelligence information that Naomi normally wouldn’t have been privy to indicated that the Russians were trying to find him because they believed he was the source of the harvester outbreak there. Naomi only hoped that Mikhailov and Rudenko could keep him safe.
 

The rest of the world where the other harvester outbreaks had occurred were mirror images of what was happening in Russia and, in a smaller microcosm, Los Angeles. Very little news was coming out of China after the government had severed most of the connections to the internet and telephone communications, but it was clear from what the Intelligence Community was reporting that southern China was a massive battleground, far worse than in Russia because China’s outbreak had occurred earlier. Martial law had been declared in several states in India, where a massive military mobilization was taking place. In South America, Brazil was quickly falling into anarchy, and French Army troops were fighting for their lives in southwestern France from the Bay of Biscay to the Mediterranean.

In the United States, unconfirmed reports of harvesters had already come in from Seattle, Dallas, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, and New York City, and people across the country were starting to panic.
 

Giving in to a sudden impulse, she reached out and activated the Taser in the instrument cluster at the top of the containment cell. It automatically tracked the adult harvester, and with a single press of her finger on the control it fired.

The weapon coughed as it spat its electrodes into the harvester’s flesh before hitting the creature with thousands of volts.

The harvester spasmed and went rigid. The features of the woman that it mimicked melted away to reveal its natural form.
 

The larva reached its prize, and Naomi leaned forward, aroused by morbid curiosity as the amoebic creature flowed onto one of the adult harvester’s shattered legs.

Sooner than should have been possible, the adult harvester began to gain control of its body. It twitched, then began to thrash, and a high keening issued from its throat as the larva moved farther up its leg.
 

Naomi watched as the limb began to disappear, dissolved and consumed by the larva. “The consumption rate is so fast,” she whispered, double checking that the system recorder was capturing the scene.
 

The harvester was in a frenzy now. Unable to shake the larva from its leg, it swung out its cutting appendage and began to hack away at the damaged limb. But the wave-edged blade must have touched the larva, for a tiny part of it stretched away from the oozing mass and clung to the blade.

Pitching and twisting, the harvester did everything it could to dislodge its cannibal offspring, all to no avail. Its legs, then the rest of its body, disappeared under the cover of the mottled blue and yellow of its child.