After an agonizingly long wait that, according to Jack’s watch, was no more than a minute, the forward ramp lowered and a squad of Marines took up defensive positions around the craft.
“Come on!” The lieutenant led them forward, where the senior Marine, a staff sergeant, greeted them.
“Sir,” he said to Jack, “We have orders to secure you and your precious cargo.” He looked at Melissa. “If you’ll just stand over there, sir,” he pointed to the deck, lined with a tubular guard rail, just ahead of the control cabin, “we’ll try to get as many folks aboard as we can before we clear out. We don’t have much time.”
They stood by while the Marines began to herd people onto the cargo deck. The LCAC could carry an M1 tank weighing nearly seventy tons, and the Marines were clearly intent on making the most of the craft’s capacity.
In just a few minutes they were loaded up, and the Marines were shooing away the people on the shore, shouting that there were other hovercraft waiting to retrieve them. As the forward ramp closed and the LCAC’s engines came back to life, one of the Marines came to get Jack and the others, moving them from the exposed deck ahead of the control cabin back to the forward corner of the main cargo area.
In another minute, the big craft rose up from the ground as the skirt inflated. With the engines running at a deafening roar, it began to back its way off the shore into the water, where it turned and quickly accelerated into deeper water.
“Why aren’t the other landing craft heading in?” Terje pointed to the other three LCACs, which were no longer circling, but were falling into formation behind their own vessel.
“Dammit!” Jack cursed. “They’re leaving all those people behind!” He spied the Marine staff sergeant near the center of the forward ramp. Making his way through the crowd, Jack got in the man’s face. “Why the hell are we leaving those other people behind?” Major Baird’s face flashed through his mind. Except for the lieutenant and the men with him, she and the rest of her soldiers hadn’t even made it to the beach. “Those other LCACs could have picked up every single one of them!”
The Marine looked at him with a grim expression. “We ran out of time, sir. We were originally sent in to pick people up at Evanston, up north a bit, then got called back to come get you. And I mean you personally, and whoever was with you. The ship’s CO sent the other LCACs along, hoping to get more people off, but it took us a bit longer to get here than we’d hoped, and he ordered us back as soon as we confirmed you were aboard.”
“They’re nuking the city,” Jack said just loud enough that the Marine could hear him over the noise of the engines and the water thrown up by the skirts. “I knew it was going to happen, but not so soon. Jesus.”
The staff sergeant nodded. “USS Ashland, our ship, is already bugging out, heading east at flank speed. It’ll take us a while to catch up.” He looked at Jack for a moment. “You’re on the inside of all this, aren’t you, sir? I mean, you know things that grunts like us don’t, right?”
With a frown, Jack nodded.
“Do you think we’re going to beat the harvesters?”
Looking back toward Melissa, Jack told him, “I honestly don’t know, staff sergeant. But if we do, it’s probably going to be because of her.”
CHANGE OF LUCK
“Holy mother of God.” Ferris looked on in horrified amazement as the people in the crowd on the Iranian side lunged away from something in their midst like a school of fish responding to a threat. Even at this distance, he could see the glistening black exoskeleton of a harvester.
The panic set off a chain reaction that sent the people at the front of the checkpoint through and over the barriers the Turks had put up. The Turks opened fire, and in turn were taken under fire by the Iranian border guards, some of whom stormed across along with the civilians. Hundreds of people were trampled or went down under the hail of bullets, but thousands more flooded across. The Turkish border guards disappeared, driven under by the human tide.
“Tell me we haven’t made a pact with the devil,” he told Naomi, whose eyes remained riveted on the crowd.
He kept the helicopter hovering just west of the checkpoint. Glancing to his right at the Turkish military border post sitting on the hillside, he was relieved to see that they were holding their fire. The bastards are close enough to hit us with slingshots. “Now what? We’d better get this done and be gone before the real army pukes show up. On either side.”
“Put us down there.” Kiran leaned forward between the pilot and copilot seats, pointing to a large patch of rough but open ground on the south side of the checkpoint complex. “They’ll have to come to us.”
Ferris snorted. “How the hell are you going to know it’s them and not some of the other bazillion people who want to get out of here?”
“Take Koshka with you,” Naomi said. “She’ll help.” With a hard look at Ferris, she said, “Do it.”
Muttering curses under his breath, Ferris worked the controls, taking the executive helicopter into a tight descending turn, dodging a set of power lines running right next to the landing zone. As the landing gear wheels kissed the ground, he shouted, “Go!”
Kiran and his men popped the passenger doors open and leaped out.
***
The Vijay thing and its companions were swept along with the mob as it poured through the checkpoint. It heard gunshots somewhere behind, and sensed the ending of the one that had sacrificed itself.
Their challenge now was to separate themselves from the stream of humanity and get to the safety of the helicopter, which had landed on the Turkish side of the checkpoint.
One of the thing’s companions went down, shoved off balance by a large man pushing his way forward. The thing screeched as more people trampled it, then there were screams from the humans as it began to lash out at with the stinger, which plunged into the back of the man who’d knocked it to the ground. The humans around the spectacle tried to lunge away, but there was nowhere for them to go. A dozen or more were stabbed, clawed, or slashed before the thing finally succumbed.
The others did not stop. They would stop for nothing until they had reached safety, one way or another.
Trying to leave the mob streaming down the road on the Turkish side was like trying to swim across a fast-moving river. They were carried nearly a hundred meters beyond the checkpoint before they were able to force their way clear, using their superior strength to shove humans out of the way, but without revealing their true identities.
They turned back toward where the helicopter had landed, but discovered they weren’t the first to look at the aircraft as a possible means of escape. Hundreds of people, including a number of the border guards, were already running toward it.
Knocking two women aside, the thing hastened its pace through the terrified crowd, its kin following right behind.
***
Kiran was beset with a dreadful sense of déjà vu, remembering the terrifying journey through Hyderabad when he was trying to get Vijay to the airport. Only now he had only three men, rather than his company of elite Black Cats, to protect the aircraft and the irreplaceable Naomi Perrault. He had wanted to bring more men, but Naomi had decided to take as few as possible to maximize the room available for the harvesters. If there were more than a dozen, some would be left behind.
“Steady!” He had to shout over the noise of the helicopter’s engines and the pitiful cries of the approaching people. His real worry was the border guards, who were armed with assault rifles.
With the nearest people only a dozen meters away, he pointed his rifle into the air and fired off a short burst. That brought them to a stop, although those in the front rank had to push and shove against those who slammed into them from behind. “Stay back!” He bellowed before firing off a few more rounds.
One of the border guards raised his weapon, aiming it at Kiran. The crowd flinched as a single shot rang out from the rifle held by one of Kiran’s men, and the guard fell to the ground like a marionette who
se strings had been snipped, a small red hole in the middle of his forehead. Two other guards leveled their weapons, ready to fire from the hip. Kiran shot one, while another man of his team dropped the remaining guard with a three round burst.
The crowd began to recede as the people in front fought to get away.
One of his men called out, “Our guests had better get here soon!”
Just then, Kiran’s blood turned to ice as he saw an all too familiar face emerge from the mass of people that was beginning to encircle the helicopter like a giant amoeba.
It was Vijay.
To his men, he said, “Stay here!” Swallowing his fear and hate, he picked up the carrier containing Koshka and ran to where his dead cousin’s doppelgänger, dressed like an Azerbaijani tribesman, stood waiting. Koshka’s reaction left no doubt as to the nature of the thing in human clothing before him. She was snarling like an angry lion. “How many are with you?”
“Seven remain.”
“Come on, then. Hurry!”
As one, the harvesters moved away from the crowd, while two of Kiran’s men made sure that no one else approached the helicopter.
As the harvesters approached the open door, Kiran blocked their way with his rifle.
“What is this?” The Vijay-thing demanded.
“If you want to come with us, you have to come on our terms,” Kiran shouted over the roar of the rotors. One of his men produced a box from a cargo pocket in his pants and opened it while Kiran kept his weapon aimed at the Vijay-thing’s chest. Inside the case were large hypodermic syringes containing a clear liquid. Each was tipped with a needle as long as Kiran’s hand was wide. “This acts as a paralytic. That way we know we will be safe.” His hand tensed on the trigger.
“Do what you must,” the thing said, “and do it quickly.”
Kiran nodded, slightly relaxing his grip on his weapon. The man with the syringes stepped forward. Taking the first from the case, he plunged it into the Vijay-thing’s chest with a quick, hard jab before pressing down on the plunger.
The harvester shuddered, then collapsed to the ground. Before their eyes, its features began to soften and run like hot wax, the skin and flesh transforming into the bruised-looking amorphous mass of malleable flesh of the harvesters in their native form. The dark, glistening skeleton emerged as the flesh gathered around the thorax, the mandibles of the insectile head twitching a few times before the creature was completely paralyzed.
Even with the downdraft from the helicopter’s rotors, Kiran still caught a whiff of the awful reek the creatures gave off in their native form. “Load it into the helicopter!” He gestured at a pair of the creature’s companions, who did as he commanded, placing their paralyzed comrade into one of the passenger seats.
In just a few minutes, they had all seven loaded aboard, Kiran’s two men hefting the last one into its seat. He had to fire one last burst from his rifle to ward off the crowd before he joined his men in the helicopter, slamming the door closed. He gave a thumbs-up to Ferris, and the helicopter rose from the ground. Kiran and his men strapped the harvesters into their seats, then took their own.
“Jesus Christ,” he heard Ferris complaining to Naomi as Kiran donned his headset. “Those things smell like shit!”
Kiran stared at the harvester that had impersonated Vijay, his finger twitching on the trigger of his rifle.
***
“Most of you haven’t heard this yet, but President Miller is dead.”
Carl and Howard were the only ones sitting in the secure conference room at the SEAL-2 facility, staring at the main screen at the front of the room. Carl felt his mouth drop open, and with a conscious effort he snapped it shut. While there were many people across the globe tied into this particular teleconference, the only person who really mattered was the one who had been speaking, Vice President Andrew Lynch.
Except he wasn’t the vice president anymore. With Miller’s death, he was now the president, or would be as soon as he’d been sworn in by a judge. At the table to his left and right sat the surviving members of the cabinet.
“I know that Dan had the best of intentions and wanted to set an example of courage for his countrymen,” Lynch went on, “but he waited too long to leave Washington. Marine One was shot down by automatic weapons fire as it was taking off from the south lawn of the White House, and was lost with all hands. We can only assume harvesters were responsible, but we may never know. An official investigation won’t be launched until after the war is over, and by then it probably won’t matter.” He looked down at a sheet of paper on the table, then returned his eyes to the camera. “We’ve evacuated as many people as we could from the downtown area of D.C., but as you can see,” he ran his eyes around the table, where several familiar faces in the cabinet were missing, “not everyone got out. The members of Congress, with three exceptions, whose loss will be mourned later, along with the Vice President Lynch, were evacuated earlier, and are divided between here at NORAD and the reactivated Greenbrier underground bunker in West Virginia. The Speaker of the House, who will shortly be sworn in as vice president, will remain at Greenbrier while I remain here at NORAD to help ensure the government’s survivability. At this point, much as it pains me to say it, our great nation’s capital has fallen. I’ll now turn things over to General Laramie, CINCNORAD and acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”
“Thank you, sir,” Laramie, a four star general of the US Air Force, said in his tenor voice. “I’m not going to candy coat things. In one of his last orders before he died, President Miller ordered nuclear strikes against the metropolitan areas of Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, and the island of Manhattan, all of which have been completely overrun.”
“I’m officially adding Washington, D.C. to that list,” Lynch said as he scrawled his signature at the bottom of the piece of paper that had been sitting in front of him before sliding it over to the acting Secretary of Defense, who visibly blanched.
“Sir.” Laramie swallowed. “Yes, sir.” He took a deep breath before going on. “As some of you no doubt saw in what remains of the news feeds, B-2 bombers already carried out their strikes against Los Angeles, and bombers are on their way as we speak to attack the other planned targets. We’ll generate a mission plan for the District of Columbia as soon as we’re through here.”
“He looks like he’s about to cry,” Howard commented after making sure the microphone in their conference room was muted.
“I don’t blame him,” Carl choked before gesturing for Howard to be quiet.
“The situation across the globe isn’t much better. The Russians are still kicking, and their government is still functional inside the Yamantau Mountain complex. The British and the French are both considering using nuclear weapons, but neither have done so yet.”
“I expect that’s going to change shortly,” the new Secretary of State interjected. “After seeing that we are, uh, sanitizing our fallen cities, I’ve received back-channel indications that they’ll probably follow suit.”
Laramie nodded, then went on. “Three of the UK’s four Vanguard-class ballistic missile submarines have put to sea, with the fourth, which was undergoing a major overhaul, manned and secured in the Clyde. Two of the French Triomphant-class boomers were already at sea. The other two are at Brest, manned and launch capable, but unable to deploy due to being in the middle of their refit cycles. All three of their nuclear-capable Mirage 2000N squadrons are on alert…”
Carl listened as Laramie went on, detailing the postures of the world’s nuclear powers. What Laramie didn’t mention in his litany of doom was that conventional ammunition stocks were being depleted at a phenomenal rate. The nation’s remaining munitions factories were working around the clock and were now some of the most heavily guarded facilities in the world, but the production rate was far behind the rate of consumption. Unlike wars between humans, which ebbed and flowed as battles were fought and won or lost, this war was more akin to fighting a fire that refused to die out, using
ammunition instead of water. He’d read the logistics estimates prepared before President Miller’s death, and at the current rate, the reserve stocks for many of the basic munitions, from small arms to high explosive bombs, would be depleted in a matter of a few weeks, at most.
The same was true for the weapons themselves. Armaments companies were churning out everything from high-power pistols to makeshift flamethrower kits for both the military and civilian militias that had sprung up all over the country. But the Achilles heel of the manufacturers wasn’t their production capacity, it was their supply of raw materials, which was rapidly drying up. You couldn’t produce a gun without steel, and you couldn’t get steel or make it if you couldn’t transport the materials over the railroad system, which had already lost several critical hubs and had several major transnational lines cut. Then there was fuel, especially the diesel the trains and the tractor trailer rigs needed, not to mention what the military was consuming. And at the head of those many production chains, at the mines and well heads, panic reigned in many places, cutting off critical materials at the source. Demand for everything had exploded, while the ability to supply even the most basic strategic necessities was quickly dwindling. Everything Laramie was saying about the military situation was true and frightening enough, but their greatest peril was the failure of their logistics chain. In the end, humanity was going to be wiped out because they didn’t have enough bullets.
“Mr. Richards.”
Lynch’s voice snapped him out of his melancholy reverie. Carl hit the button to unmute the microphone. “Yes, Mr. Vice…Mr. President?”
“I’ve read this morning’s update from Mr. Morgan, so I’m not going to ask you to rehash that. It’s clear to me that your efforts to produce a biological weapon have stalled. Is that a fair statement?”
Glancing at Howard, who gave a slight nod, Carl said, “Yes, sir, I’m afraid it is.”
Reaping The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 3) Page 16