Reaping The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 3) Read online

  “Okay, okay.” With a weary sigh, she hit the send button on the email to the White House. “I’ll be right there.”

  ***

  “Hang on, kid,” Renee said, and Jack’s pulse quickened.

  “Jack?” Naomi said a moment later in a soft, husky voice.

  “Yeah, baby, it’s me. Listen, I’m sorry about what happened…”

  “Just shut up, you idiot,” she told him, half laughing, half crying. “When the President told us you’d been killed…that nearly killed me, too. Oh, God, Jack. Don’t you ever do something that stupid again.”

  “Well, you weren’t exactly just sitting on your tuffet in Los Angeles, if I remember right,” he told her, grinning from ear to ear. “The last word I’d had from Carl when we were trying to get out of Russia was that you were trapped there. So you can’t give me too hard of a time, you know?”

  “I’ll give you the hardest time of your life the instant I get my hands on you,” she promised. “But you’re okay, you’re not hurt?”

  “I was a little banged up, but not too bad.” He paused, the smile evaporating. “It was a tough mission. Mikhailov and Rudenko didn’t make it.”

  “God, I’m so sorry. It looks like Vijay Chidambaram and his cousin Kiran didn’t make it, either.”

  “Why, what happened?” India had been the first stop on Jack’s long, ill-fated journey to see what had happened to Dr. Vijay Chidambaram, a former colleague from the EDS. Vijay had discovered that harvesters had been unleashed in India, and Jack and Vijay’s cousin Kiran, an officer of the Indian Army, had barely survived an encounter with the monsters in a remote Indian village.

  “The Indian government was flying them over to us on one of their Air Force transport planes, but it disappeared three days ago. The Indians think it went down over Iran or Turkey, but no one has reported finding it.”

  “Shit.” Jack lifted his eyes to the ceiling. “Naomi…”

  One of the soldiers on the communications team stiffened, then stood and shouted something in Norwegian. Morgensen, Nesvold, and the other senior officers whirled around, expressions of total disbelief on their faces. The quiet buzz in the ops center died. Nesvold barked a command, and the map display shifted, zooming out to show the northern hemisphere from Norway east to the Sea of Okhotsk. Red rings appeared around four locations deep in Siberia.

  A klaxon blared, shattering the silence as red arcs began to rise from each of the rings. All at once, the soldiers at the workstations were talking in urgent tones into their headsets or were typing madly at their consoles. One of the watch officers shouted something, and a moment later Jack sensed a slight change of pressure in his ears.

  They’ve closed the blast doors, he thought, a cold trickle of fear running down the back of his neck. “Hang on,” he told Naomi. “Something’s happening.”

  CLEANSING FIRE

  General-Polkovnik Nikolai Krylov stood at a special console at the center of the operations center that was the heart of the massive complex buried deep beneath Mount Yamantau in the Ural Mountains some thirteen hundred kilometers east of Moscow. All eyes were fixed on the main map display’s depiction of the harvester infestations that had consumed southern Russia and had swept into southeastern Ukraine. Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan were also afflicted, but Krylov knew that few of the handful of men gathered around the console, the vlasti who held the power in Russia, gave much thought to the fate of those nations. They were intent on trying to save what they could of their own.

  Krylov had devoted his life to the service of his country. True, such service had paid off with its own rewards over time (perks, as the Americans might say), but he had not spent thirty years working his way up through the ranks to command the Strategic Rocket Forces for nice living quarters and a Mercedes SUV. He had done it because he was a patriot whose grandfather had perished in the Battle of Kursk at the hands of the Germans, and whose father had lived in fear and distrust of the West during the Cold War. Defending his country, defending Russia, was in his blood. And now his blood ran cold at what he must do to save the Motherland.

  “All regiments report full readiness, general-polkovnik.” He nodded at his second in command, who verbalized for the sake of posterity what Krylov could see on the status board to the right of the map display.

  They had evacuated what military forces they could from the Southern Military District after a series of desperate and utterly disastrous attempts to regain control of the major cities in the south. The 49th and 58th Armies had been annihilated at Krasnodar and Stavropol. The 7th Air Assault Division had not had to deploy to find the enemy. The unit’s garrison at Stavropol, from where the initial ill-fated mission by the airborne troops against Ulan-Erg nearly a week before had been launched, had been overrun that same day, with the garrison at Novorossiysk falling two days later.

  No one among the high command or the government had been able to credit the reports, either through military channels or the media, coming out of the affected zones. Video sites on the internet were awash with horrific scenes of creatures massacring civilians and troops alike. It was like watching out-takes from a bad Hollywood science fiction film, except the casualties were real. The Army was sent reeling back from the cities, and many troops had been left behind after the reality had sunken in that the creatures could mimic human form.

  The Air Force had been given its turn at the monsters. Attack jets dropped napalm and the strategic bombers of the 37th Air Army dropped thousands of tons of munitions on Stavropol, Novorossiysk, and other infested towns. The towns were leveled and the cities were swept with firestorms that hearkened back to the devastation wrought on Hamburg and Dresden in Germany by the Anglo-Americans during the Great Patriotic War. The flight crews had done their duty, but had been sickened by what they had wrought on their own countrymen. Several had killed themselves afterward, unable to face the burden of guilt.

  But even that had not been enough. At the cost of much of the Air Force’s ready munitions reserve, thousands of flight hours, and seven precious aircraft lost through mishaps, the torched rubble of the cities could not be reclaimed. The harvesters, while extremely vulnerable to fire, had fled at the first sign of the bombs raining down from the skies. All that Russia’s military might had accomplished was to incinerate the few surviving humans and drive the harvesters into the surrounding countryside, accelerating their spread.

  No one, including the president and prime minister, had believed the estimates provided by the Federal'naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, or FSB, modern Russia’s incarnation of the old KGB intelligence service, which indicated that there were several million harvesters loose in Russia, and millions more across the globe. The numbers were unreal, mere statistics on paper, no more believable than the tens of millions murdered by Josef Stalin during the purges.

  And yet there was no denying the thousands of dead soldiers, burning tanks and troop carriers, and the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of dead civilians in Russia’s heartland.

  How could this have happened, Krylov wondered, and so quickly?

  The turning point had come when Voronezh, less than five hundred kilometers south of Moscow, was overwhelmed by the creatures in less than forty-eight hours. That shock was quickly followed by the first outbreaks in Moscow’s suburbs. The president wasted no time in ordering the cabinet and senior officials of the government’s key agencies to the underground complex at Yamantau, which had already been put on a wartime footing.

  The president had made The Decision, the Resheniye, after an agonizing cabinet session the night before. Krylov suspected that historians would place the president in the same hell-bound company as Stalin and Hitler, but if the government did not do what was necessary now, there might not be any historians left to record the deed at all.

  The president stood beside him at the console, his icy gray eyes fixed on the map. Every major city south of the line defined by Kursk, Voronezh, and Saratov, all the way south to the borders with Turkey and
Iran, had been targeted. Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia would soon cease to exist. Over a dozen cities in the Ukrainian salient from Kharkiv south to Mariupol on the Sea of Azov would also be destroyed. The president was willing to accept any wrath the Ukrainians might care to unleash; it would be a small price to pay if the infection could be stopped. Some consideration had been given to sterilizing western Kazakhstan, but no outbreaks had yet been reported. That arid wasteland of a country would be spared. For now.

  The target on the map display that had caused the most controversy in the cabinet meeting was Moscow. The southern suburbs of the city, where even now harvesters were quickly gaining ground against the troops of the 20th Guards Army and the 106th Guards Airborne Division, would soon be flaming rubble. Krylov wanted to weep for those brave men and the civilians they were trying to defend. None of them had any idea that they were about to be sacrificed for what everyone hoped would be the greater good.

  The president turned to him. “It is time, Krylov.”

  “Da, gospodin prezident.”

  Before them stood a polkovnik, a colonel, of the Strategic Rocket Forces. In a monotone voice, he led them through the nuclear weapons authorization procedures. While Krylov could have recited the steps from memory, he dutifully followed along, for the sake of formality, if nothing else. The millions of people, his people, he was about to kill deserved at least that much.

  Out of habit, he glanced up at the corner of the main display to check on the status of the Perimetr command and control system. At a cost of millions of rubles, the so-called “Dead Hand” Cold War-era system could be set to automatically launch a retaliatory strike should it detect a nuclear attack against his country through a set of seismic, light, radioactivity, and overpressure sensors emplaced in control nodes in key locations. It had been a stroke of genius never matched by the West, and Krylov envied his predecessors. He wished he could put a machine in charge of what must be done now, so that he could pretend to be a mere observer and absolve himself of responsibility. The system had been deactivated for this strike, of course. It had never occurred to its designers that the Strategic Rocket Forces would launch a massive strike against the Motherland they were sworn to defend.

  “On my mark, turn the keys,” the polkovnik intoned. “Three…two…”

  Krylov took one last look at the president, and was shocked at what he saw. While he respected the former KGB officer who had risen to become the most powerful man in Russia, Krylov had never liked him. The president had ice in his veins and steel in his heart, with a soul entirely devoid of compassion. And yet now, in this most dire hour, Krylov saw tears glistening in the president’s eyes.

  “…one. Turn!”

  In perfect synchrony, Krylov and the President of the Russian Federation turned the special keys in the launch console.

  ***

  In the Siberian forests near Barnaul, Irkutsk, and Novosibirsk, sixty-two SS-25 Sickle ICBMs of the 33rd Guards Rocket Army rose on pillars of fire from their enormous mobile launchers. Each of the missiles carried a single warhead with the explosive equivalent of eight hundred kilotons of TNT, over fifty times more powerful than the nuclear bomb dropped by the United States over Hiroshima at the end of World War Two.

  They were joined by twenty-six SS-18 Satan missiles from the same unit’s silo complexes around Uzhur. Like the SS-25s, these missiles carried a single warhead apiece. But these were far more powerful, each with a yield of twenty-five megatons, over sixteen hundred times the power of the Hiroshima bomb.

  The rocket plumes were visible from dozens of kilometers in every direction. People looked up at the display of deadly beauty as the missiles accelerated into the atmosphere. Most of those who saw the sight were too young to remember the Cold War, and regarded the bright streaks in the sky with the same curiosity as they might a particularly bright meteor shower. Those who were older, who had lived with the specter of nuclear annihilation for over forty years as East faced off against West, were gripped with heart-wrenching terror.

  ***

  “Jack? What’s happening?”

  “Hang on,” he told her as he watched the drama unfold. Barnaul, Irkutsk, Novosibirsk, and Uzhur were the names tagged to the red rings in Siberia. “Terje, what the hell is going on?”

  Beside him, the Norwegian captain stared at the screen, his expression one of complete and utter shock. “It’s…it’s a nuclear strike warning with tracking data from the United States, passed through NATO.” He turned to face Jack. “The Russians have launched ICBMs.”

  “Naomi,” Jack said. “Did you hear that?”

  “A nuclear strike? Have they gone mad? Where are the missiles heading? Are you safe?”

  “The only thing I’m pretty sure of,” Jack told her as the tracks quickly lengthened, “is that they don’t seem to be aimed at the States. If they were, they should be heading north, over the Pole, and they don’t seem to be heading this way, either. It looks like they’re angling west, maybe a bit to the south.”

  As if on cue, yellow ovals began to appear on the map, most of them clustered in southern Russia, west of the Ural Mountains.

  Terje spoke with one of the soldiers on the communications team, then said to Jack as he pointed at the glaring yellow icons, “Those are projected impact areas.”

  “Jesus Christ.” The yellow ovals, which had begun to contract as the trajectory data of the missiles and the resulting computed target areas were refined, blanketed southern Russia and western Ukraine. Farther north, a single yellow target marker was contracting around Moscow. “I can’t believe they’re doing this.”

  “Weren’t you the one who said the Russians weren’t crazy for thinking about a nuke strike?”

  That came from Cullen. “I did say that,” Jack said through gritted teeth as he clenched his fists, “but I never thought they’d do it on this scale.”

  “How could you?” Terje asked. “How could anyone?”

  “Jack?” Naomi’s worried voice called to him again through the headset.

  “I’m here, babe. The targets are definitely inside Russia, although it looks like they decided to nuke some targets in Ukraine, too.”

  “There may not be any alternative,” she said quietly. “For any of us.”

  That got Jack’s attention. “What do you mean?”

  “Just that…I’m not sure if we’re going to succeed. Not in the time we may have.”

  Jack forced himself to turn away from the display so he could focus his full attention on her. “Listen to me,” he said. “I’m not going to say I understand the pressure you’re under, because I can’t. None of us can know what it’s like to carry the whole world on our shoulders like you are now. But I know you. You’re determined and you’re brilliant, and you and the other big brains working on this are going to figure things out and kick the harvesters in the ass.”

  She didn’t say anything for a moment. “I want you home, Jack,” she said at last in a husky voice. “I want you here with me now.”

  “Me, too. I’d give anything to be with you.”

  “Jack.” Terje tugged on his arm and pointed at the display.

  The missiles were nearing their targets. The Russians had made a time on target launch, which would put all the warheads over their respective targets at the same time.

  “Even if this kills tons of harvesters,” Jack said, “the Russians are going to be in for a really tough time.”

  “What, aside from killing millions of their own people?” Cullen shot him disgusted look.

  “They’re nuking their grain belt, you jackass,” Jack spat. “Even if they’re able to kill enough of the harvesters to buy the survivors some time, they’re destroying their main source of food and killing the people who grow it. The rest of the country’s going to be facing a famine.”

  “We may have to do the same thing,” Naomi whispered into his ear through the headset. “Every major city here has suffered outbreaks, and we’re not doing any better at containing them th
an the Russians. The difference is that here, nobody wants to admit it.”

  “God help us,” Jack said as the missile trajectories intersected the predicted target icons. “I just wish…”

  An electronic squeal came through his headset, followed by silence. The line to Naomi had gone dead.

  “What happened?” Jack asked the communications technician.

  “I am not sure, sir,” she said in a shaking voice. “Most likely an electromagnetic pulse.” She nodded toward the map, and Jack turned to see orange icons bloom, depicting nuclear detonations over Russia.

  ***

  In a single instant, southern Russia and western Ukraine were bathed in the light of eighty-seven artificial suns. Every major city that had been infested with harvesters died under the blast, heat, and radiation of a nuclear explosion. Some cities only had a handful of survivors left, while others still held hundreds of thousands who had not yet been able to flee through the choked roads.

  While the harvesters had a greater chance of surviving the blast effects that leveled buildings out to a radius of nearly seven kilometers, those that were exposed to the thermal radiation out to a radius of over ten kilometers died in brilliant pyres as their malleable flesh burst into flame. The massive doses of direct radiation from the blasts, coupled with secondary radiation effects from the fallout, would leave even more harvesters dead, and make the bombed areas untenable for them until the radiation fell to near-normal background levels.

  As the cities were reduced to ash by the eight hundred kiloton warheads, the missiles carrying the massive twenty-five megaton weapons stitched a line of titanic mushroom clouds in an arc that ran from Kharkiv in Ukraine to Voronezh, then to Saratov on the Volga River, and finally to Uralsk. The Russian targeting planners hoped that, beyond the immediate kills the weapons would inflict, the radiation effects would form a barrier to harvesters trying to move north and contain them, even if only temporarily, in the south.