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

  Miller slammed a hand down on the mahogany conference table, making everyone in the room flinch. “To hell with the polls! Have you seen the latest news reports from New York City? How about Chicago? Or maybe right here in D.C.?” He leaned forward, his face a mask of fury. “Our constituents are being eaten alive!”

  After letting that sink in, Miller sat back. “Okay, so the Russian gambit looks like a failure.” He pointed to the Secretary of State. “Find out what the Russians are doing. Tell their president that we’ll render whatever aid we can, and make it clear that we’re their allies. Got it?”

  The Secretary of State nodded. “Yes, Mr. President.”

  “So,” Miller said, turning back to the DNI, “what other disasters do I need to know about overseas?”

  “Brazil has effectively collapsed,” the DNI told him. “Brasilia has been totally overrun and has been set ablaze by the Army and Air Force. The Brazilian government still exists in name if not much else. The president and his cabinet have relocated several times, but São Paulo, Rio, and the other major cities are as bad as Brasilia. They finally decided to plant their flag on a cruise ship and are sitting in the harbor at Rio.”

  The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs grunted. “That’s not a bad idea. It would be a hell of a lot easier to secure from harvester attack or infiltration, although resupply might be a problem.”

  “Do we have anything like that in the works?” Miller asked.

  The Chairman offered a grim smile. “You’ve got every ship in the Navy at your beck and call, Mr. President.”

  “I appreciate that, but warships aren’t exactly suitable for running a government, especially taking Congress into account. Too many people are involved. I know we have several large underground bunkers other than Cheyenne Mountain that are being prepared, but I want some alternatives to all of us living like moles. Maybe it’s a latent sense of claustrophobia, but I don’t like the idea of all of us being trapped underground while the harvesters run rampant over top of us.”

  “I’ll get someone on it right away, sir.”

  “Speaking of bunkers,” the Secretary of State interjected, “the British Government and the Royal Family are in the process of moving into a bunker complex at Corsham, about ninety miles west of London.”

  “What, the old Site 3 bunker?” The DNI frowned. “That was decommissioned back in the early 1990s.”

  The Secretary of State nodded. “It was, but they’ve reactivated it. They must have every construction contractor that’s still in business working on the place.”

  “What in blazes is Site 3?” Miller asked.

  “Sorry, Mr. President,” the Secretary of State said. “It’s an old Cold War bunker complex in an underground quarry that they built as a leadership relocation facility. The existing facility has enough room to house four thousand people, and they’re expanding into some of the available space in the underground caverns to house even more.”

  “We’ve had unconfirmed reports that most or all of China’s leaders have gone to ground, too, at the Shanghai Complex,” the DNI added. “Unfortunately, we don’t have much on that one, other than it’s huge. It can supposedly house two hundred thousand people.”

  “Well,” Curtis said in a wry voice, “the Chinese have always thought big. But what about the situation with the harvesters?”

  “From what we can tell from intelligence collected by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, the Chinese military is fighting the harvesters tooth and nail, but they’re running into the same problem everyone else is facing: once the harvesters get loose in a heavily populated area, they multiply like mad and quickly overwhelm the local security forces. In the meantime, the harvesters have spread like a plague through China’s most fertile crop growing regions.” The DNI paused a moment to rub his jaw. “It’s the same everywhere, Mr. President. India is swarming with the bloody things. They’ve spread across the border into Pakistan, which is now threatening to drop nukes on India. Southern France is an abattoir and Paris is being evacuated. The harvesters are everywhere. We’ve even had reports of harvester outbreaks in Iceland and Guam.” The man licked his lips and looked down at his clasped hands. “They’re everywhere.”

  It was then, in that moment, that Miller felt the cold hand of despair tighten around his heart. We’re losing this fight, he thought. Even our most powerful weapons are useless, because they kill us just as easily as they kill the enemy, and even well-armed troops can’t stop them. With unwelcome clarity, he recalled a video from Manhattan they had watched at the morning briefing the day before. Hundreds of civilians, defended by a company of National Guardsmen, had taken refuge aboard the floating museum of the aircraft carrier USS Intrepid. Helicopters had been called in to ferry the civilians to safety and a Black Hawk had just set down on the stern of the carrier’s flight deck when all hell broke loose. There was no telling exactly what happened, but somehow the harvesters had overwhelmed the troops holding one of the visitor access points and flooded like a swarm of angry insects onto the flight deck. Men, women, and children went down in a flurry of slashing claws and venomous stingers. People near the edge of the flight deck jumped into the water. But the most terrifying sight was the harvesters leaping off the deck after them. The view from the camera showed the water turning red with blood, churned into a froth by the screaming survivors of the hundred foot fall and the things that had swarmed over the carrier’s side to kill them. The video, which had been taken by one of the civilians and was streamed live to the web, had ended with a drawn out scream as the owner of the cell phone leaped into the water, after which the transmission mercifully ended.

  That had been one of the last civilian communications out of Manhattan. Every bridge and tunnel to the island had been destroyed in an effort to contain the harvesters, with heavily armed Coast Guard and police boats blasting the creatures caught swimming across the surrounding rivers.

  He looked up at the sound of a muffled boom. Washington, D.C. itself was under attack, and Miller knew it wouldn’t be long before he would have no choice but to abandon the White House for Air Force One. The entire block occupied by the White House and the nearby executive office buildings had been barricaded and fortified by the Army’s 1st Battalion, 3rd US Infantry Regiment, which had traded its dress uniforms and ceremonial duties for combat uniforms and perimeter defense. The regiment’s other units stationed in the Washington area had been divided up into platoon sized combat teams to defend the most critical infrastructure points in the city. Apache gunships and armed Black Hawks attacked targets called in by the local police or National Guard quick reaction teams.

  Miller looked at one of the map displays. It looked much like the images of Earth’s night side taken by astronauts in low orbit, showing the glow of lights that marked human civilization. This map looked much the same, but the lights were red, marking the spread of the harvesters.

  A quote came to him from Winston Churchill, about whom Miller had written the thesis for his master’s degree in political science many years before. Victory at all costs, Churchill had said, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.

  Looking up at the others, at the faces now wearing expressions of doom, he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, right now, today, we’re getting our butts kicked. It’s not the first time that we’ve lost the opening battles of a war. But we’re going to do what we’ve always done. We’re going to dig in, fight like hell, and figure out how to win this fight. Do you understand me?” He looked pointedly at the DNI, who nodded. “For now, let’s keep the focus on protecting vital infrastructure and continuing to get the word out to citizens about how they can kill these things. I don’t want any helpless civilians out there. I want them armed with all the knowledge and any weapons, manufactured or makeshift, that we can give them while we come up with something that’ll kick the harvesters in the balls. Is that understood?”

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p; “Yes, Mr. President.” The chorus around the table was still downcast, but heartfelt.

  That will have to do for now, Miller thought. “Okay, you all have a lot of work to do. Get to it. I’d like the Secretary of Defense, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Secretary of Homeland Security, the National Security Advisor, and Mr. Richards to stay behind.”

  The other members of the cabinet quickly got up and filed out past the four heavily armed members of the Secret Service detail who stood guard outside. Miller caught a glimpse of the bushy black tail of one of the cats who also stood guard. The feline, a Maine Coon, he recalled, was as big as some smaller dogs. The cat peered in at him. Or, rather, it looked in at the cat of unknown heritage that was busy entertaining itself under one of the chairs along the back wall of the conference room. Everywhere Miller went, even to the bathroom to shower or relieve himself, a cat went with him. Even when riding in the limousine, a Secret Service agent would toss in a cat like a furry hand grenade before closing the door.

  Who’d have ever thought that the life of the President of the United States might depend on a cat? It’s a damn good thing I’m not allergic to the little beasts. Miller broke out into a grin.

  “Mr. President?” The National Security Advisor was eyeing him with a worried expression.

  “Nothing, just an inside joke.” Then Miller turned to Carl Richards, who had left one of the seats against the wall where he had been sitting for the open cabinet meeting to take a place at the table next to the Secretary of Homeland Security. “Please tell me we have some good news from Dragonfire.”

  Dragonfire was the code name that had been given to the huge, desperate effort to find a solution to the harvester epidemic, and President Miller had put Carl in charge of the project. While Carl technically answered to the Secretary of Homeland Security, in reality the President himself held his leash. The billionaire Howard Morgan, head of Morgan Pharmaceuticals, who had unwittingly played a role in the harvester outbreak in Los Angeles, was his technical advisor. Truth be told, Morgan was the brains behind the operation. The man was both an organizational genius and had the necessary science background to sort out the bullshit that, as Carl saw it, was flung by every scientist who thought his or her piece of the pie was the most important thing in the universe. Carl would have preferred to shoot them all, but Morgan was able to smooth ruffled feathers or break out the brass knuckles, as needed, and keep things moving.

  “As I’m sure you’re aware, sir,” Carl began, “the genetics team has finished mapping the harvester genome. That’s the big news, and I don’t think I can adequately convey just what an incredible accomplishment that is.”

  “Yes,” Miller said, nodding. “My scientific advisor briefed me on that. Please convey my personal thanks to everyone on the team. So what now? When can we expect progress on a bioweapon?”

  “And what about chemical weapons?” That from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “Is there any hope on that front?”

  “If I can, Mr. President, let me answer that question first, as it’s a bit more straightforward.” Miller nodded for him to continue. “General, the chemical weapons division has run into a brick wall. Every compound they’ve come up with seems to have little to no effect on the harvesters. The things are like scorpions. We haven’t found any toxins that affect them. The only way to kill them is to light them on fire or blast them to bits.”

  The old Marine hissed air out through his teeth. “So there’s nothing we could use?”

  “No, sir,” Carl said, shaking his head. “The chemical team is still hard at work, but they don’t have any rabbits in the hat at this point.”

  “Damn,” the general said quietly.

  “On the genetics side of the house, the teams are moving forward, taking advantage of the genome map. But as I’ve cautioned before, progress comes in fits and starts. The harvester DNA is hellishly complex, far more so than ours is. The goal now is to figure out which of the genes are important, and how we can disrupt them.” He slowly spun his pen around on the table. “Naomi Perrault likened it to walking down a long dark hallway, then suddenly finding a door. Once you wrestle it open, you’re in another dark hallway, with another door and hopefully another breakthrough somewhere at the end.” Looking back up at Miller, he said, “She refuses to put a number on it, but from what I’ve gathered from Howard, we’re looking at no less than six months before we have a chance of producing a weapon.”

  “Six months?” The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs pointed at the map. “We may not have six weeks!”

  “General, six months would be nothing short of a miracle,” Carl told him. “Remember what we’re facing here. Matching up the genes with the traits they control isn’t going to happen overnight.”

  “Then you need to get your candy-ass scientists to stop fucking around,” Lynch said. “People are dying out there.”

  Carl glared at him. “In the last two weeks, I’ve had three people die of heart attacks and one from a stroke while they were at their desks. Over a dozen have been hospitalized for exhaustion or malnutrition, and none of them are taking more than a couple hours a day for sleep. My candy-ass scientists are working themselves to death, Mr. Vice President. I’d appreciate it if you’d kindly remember that.”

  Vice President Lynch held Carl’s gaze for a moment, then looked away.

  “What are the harvester population projections at the six month mark?” Miller asked. “How many will we be facing?”

  Carl swallowed hard. “Just short of two billion worldwide, excluding casualties.”

  The president’s face paled. “Sweet Jesus.”

  MORGELLONS

  After the communications team had been unable to reestablish contact with Jack, Naomi went to her quarters. After closing the door, she crawled into bed and alternately wept and laughed. For the first time since she’d been told Jack was dead, she felt alive.

  As the tears subsided, Koshka, her cat, hopped up and butted her furry head against Naomi’s side. Propping herself up, Naomi lavished some attention on the Turkish Angora, her fingers brushing against the long scar along the cat’s side.

  Alexander, Jack’s cat, hopped up on the bed, took one look at Koshka, then jumped back off.

  “Jack will be home soon to take care of you,” she told the big Siberian, who curled up in a corner and stared at her.

  Knowing that she should be using the time for some badly needed sleep, Naomi felt restless. Reaching for the binder on her nightstand, she opened it to find a copy of the latest Red Team assessment of the harvester infestation by the Central Intelligence Agency. It was a top secret document produced in hardcopy only, with every copy numbered and addressed to a specific individual and hand delivered by government couriers. The first copy of seventeen went to the President of the United States, and she held a photocopy of it in her hands.

  In the upper right was a sticky note. “Thought you’d want to see this,” was written in Howard Morgan’s neat script.

  “How the devil did you get this?” She wondered aloud as she opened it to the first page and began to read.

  She soon wished she hadn’t. The ten pages of blunt prose and charts predicted the collapse of the modern world in less than two months. Even if humanity stopped the harvesters much sooner, the report stated, so much damage had already been done to the world’s largest food producing regions that widespread famine on a global scale was inevitable.

  And all of it stemmed from the one bag of New Horizons seed that we couldn’t find, she thought bitterly.

  She threw the document across the room, startling the cats.

  Someone knocked on the door.

  “What is it?”

  “Naomi? Are you okay, hon?” It was Renee

  “I’m fine,” she lied. “Come on in.”

  Renee opened the door and stepped inside. “Listen, we just got confirmation that the Norwegian command post where Jack’s hanging out is fine,” Renee said. “The problem wasn’t EMP, it was some End-of-the-W
orld idiots blowing up a comms center at NATO Headquarters. I wish we could come up with a genetic weapon to make the harvesters just eat morons, but I suppose there wouldn’t be many of us left. Come on, get your skinny ass up.”

  Naomi tried to smile.

  Renee came to stand beside the bed and put her hands on her hips. “Look at you. You’re white as a sheet and those rings under your eyes are worse than Carl’s. Keep this up and you’ll wind up as bald as he is, too. What would Jack think? He’ll probably dump you so he can shack up with me, and you can have Carl the Sourpuss. You’ll be two bald peas in a pod.”

  Unable to help herself, Naomi giggled. “Renee, shut up.”

  “I’ll shut up the day hell freezes over, and probably not even then. Now get your ass out of bed. One of your queries hit on something, and Harmony is going to pee her pants with excitement if you don’t get down there this instant.”

  ***

  With a heavy sigh, Howard Morgan sat back in the black leather executive chair in his corner office on the second floor of the lab building. He turned away from the computer to look out the windows. It had never been much of a view, as the facility had been located in the middle of a rather desolate spot in the expanse of Nebraska’s farm country, and it hadn’t changed for the better as his facility had been transformed from a cutting edge genetics laboratory to a heavily defended fortress. What he saw now more closely resembled the pictures he’d seen of firebases in Afghanistan. He was trying to enjoy the sight while he could, as the Army engineers planned to cover up the few remaining glass windows with sheet metal.

  He turned around to look again at the report summary on the computer screen. All the labs were on line and functioning, an accomplishment about which he would have felt extremely proud had it really mattered. It wasn’t that all the people in the sixteen labs weren’t working as hard as they could. They were, and they had accomplished miracles, like completing the map of the harvester genome. It wasn’t a question of the intelligence or resources of the people working for him, for he had the brightest people in the country, arguably on the planet, with all the resources the United States Government could provide. More than he could actually put to good use, in fact. He had been told to waste anything but time, for time was the one commodity that was the most precious. Time meant lives lost. Time meant more harvesters to kill.