Season of the Harvest

by Michael R. Hicks

  Frowning, he tried the building’s front door: locked. He hammered on the glass of the door, but wasn’t about to waste time if no one answered immediately.

  No one did.

  With a nod to one of his men, Halvorsen stepped back as the soldier smashed the upper pane of glass in the door with the butt of his rifle, then reached in and unlocked the door. He pulled it open and Halvorsen stepped inside, followed by his men. They all held their weapons at the ready: he wasn’t taking any chances, not after what had happened so far on this disastrous expedition.

  “Hallo?” he called as he moved through the hallway toward the main control room, from where the satellite operations were managed. “Is anyone here?”

  There was no answer but the moaning of the wind outside, and Halvorsen could feel the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.

  “Kaptein!” one of his men called softly from up ahead, in what looked like the station’s cafeteria.

  Halvorsen quickly joined him, and visibly recoiled from what his soldier had found.

  “What happened to him?” the soldier asked, his eyes wide as he stared down at one of the six people who normally manned the station during each shift.

  The body, still in its clothing, looked like it had been bruised over every square centimeter of skin, which had then begun to...rot away. He had seen bodies in Afghanistan, some of which had been exposed to the elements for a time and had begun to decompose. But this wasn’t like that. There was no bloating, and the tissue from the skin down to the bone seemed to be disintegrating.

  “Could it be a virus?” the pilot, who’d hobbled in with Halvorsen, whispered.

  “If it is,” Halvorsen told him, “it’s a bit late for us. We’ve already inhaled the air, and we don’t have NBC suits.” NBC was short for Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical, and the suits were designed to protect soldiers from coming in contact with or inhaling anything that could harm them. Unfortunately, they were bulky and heavy, and there had been no reason to expect to have to use them on a mission like this. Of course, there had never before been a mission like this, Halvorsen thought bleakly.

  “Look, kaptein,” another soldier said, pointing to the table. Food and coffee had been laid out at three places. Halvorsen took off one of his heavy gloves and felt one of the coffee mugs. It was still warm.

  “There’s no sign of a struggle,” he murmured. “What the devil could have happened to him?”

  “There’s a body in here, too, kaptein,” a soldier called quietly from the women’s bathroom farther down the hall before he turned away and retched onto the floor.

  Halvorsen checked on the woman who lay dead in the bathroom, and saw that she was in the same condition as the first body. “That’s two,” he said grimly. “There should be six people here, plus the helicopter pilot. Let’s find the rest.” He turned to his senior surviving NCO, who was next in the chain of command. “Get some men upstairs and check things out. Remember that these are our countrymen. Check your targets.”

  The man nodded sharply before leading six soldiers up the stairway to the second story, their boots thumping quietly on the floor in the otherwise silent control building.

  Halvorsen was faced with a difficult decision: the rest of his men, including the wounded, were still outside in the wind and cold. He wanted to get them into the shelter of the building, but the gruesome discovery of the bodies gave him pause.

  You don’t have a choice, he realized. Help would have to come from the town of Longyearbyen, which was only six kilometers away as the crow flies. Unfortunately, there was only one road leading up to SvalSat, and it was impassable from the snow left by the storm. Plus, he thought grimly, the Russians no doubt had control of the road where it branched off near the airport. The only other ground access was by snowmobile, and there was no way of telling how long it might be before help might arrive, assuming anyone from town could slip past the Russians. No, he thought. Regardless of what had happened here at the station, he had to get his men inside before they began to suffer from hypothermia.

  Turning to one of the other soldiers, a korporal, he said, “Find something to wrap the bodies in and put them in the garage, then get the rest of the men inside and make them as comfortable as you can. You three,” he said to the soldiers behind the korporal, “check out the garage. The rest of you, follow me to the control room.”

  Upstairs, Sersjant Lars Solheim uneasily led his men along the corridor of the second story of the control building. The sound of the wind was louder here, and the footfalls of his men, careful as they were trying to be, seemed deafening in the otherwise silent building. He was relieved when he heard the kaptein order the rest of the men brought inside: if the company commander had thought there was any serious threat here, he would never have done that.

  They carefully checked the few rooms, which were mostly used for storage, on this level, until they came to the last one at the end of the hall. It looked like a utility closet. Solheim and the others covered the door with their rifles. One of the men gripped the doorknob gently, then suddenly twisted it and kicked in the door, ducking out of the line of fire.

  As the door flew open, Solheim was presented with the totally unexpected scene of a young blond woman, staring up at them with terrified eyes from behind stacked-up boxes of bathroom supplies.

  Blowing out his pent-up breath in relief, Solheim lowered his weapon, gesturing for his men to do the same. “Miss,” he called. “It’s all right. We’re here to protect you. You can come out of there now. Please.” He shouldered his rifle and extended a hand toward her.

  “Are you all there are?” she said quietly as she stood up, her terrified demeanor fading away. She was completely nude and quite generously endowed, and the seven soldiers gawked.

  “No, miss,” Solheim managed, trying to keep his gaze fixed on her deep brown eyes, “there are more of our men downstairs.”

  “Good,” she said. She stepped around the boxes, her hips swaying suggestively. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

  Solheim was thinking of how to respond when he saw the flesh of her stomach ripple as something emerged, rapidly snaking out of her abdomen. Too late, he recognized what it was just before it struck him in the throat: a stinger.

  Downstairs, Halvorsen and his men had swept the control room and found four more bodies. Three of them were in similar condition to the two others they’d found.

  The fourth was different. In addition to the awful appearance of the others, its left leg was gone. It hadn’t been amputated, but had been dissolved below the hip joint.

  “Good God,” he murmured. To his men, he said, “Cover them up and put them with the others in the garage.”

  All hell suddenly broke loose on the second floor above, with men shouting and a flurry of shots being fired. There were muffled screams, several heavy thumps, and then silence.

  “Upstairs, now!” Halvorsen ordered as he led his men back down the main corridor, carefully jumping over the wounded who were crammed everywhere on the first floor.

  He had just run up the first half dozen steps to the second floor when he came face to face with Solheim, his face a mask of terror.

  “Get out!” he screamed. “It’s a trap! One of the rooms was booby-trapped – there’s a bomb!”

  “What–” Halvorsen began, and then froze. He suddenly smelled the tell-tale odor of gas. The facility used propane for heating, and if the lines had been severed to let the gas into the air-filled spaces of the control building, even the smallest spark would blow the building and everyone in it to pieces. “Get the men out!” He shouted as he turned and ran back down the stairs, past the pilot, who flattened himself against the wall to stay out of the way. “Now!”

  While his heart was hammering with fright, both for himself and his men, Halvorsen couldn’t help but be proud as he watched his soldiers grab their wounded comrades and drag or carry them out, even as the stench of the gas grew stronger. Unless the enemy – it had to be the Russians,
he thought bitterly – had badly miscalculated, only a few would get out before the building exploded. He had already given himself up for dead: he would not leave before the last of his men was out.

  He didn’t notice that the pilot, a frown on his face, had hobbled up the stairs, ignoring the offers of assistance from one of the soldiers to help get him out of the building.

  Solheim, Halvorsen saw, had already made it outside, and was dragging two of the wounded to safety in the snow. He was glad: Solheim was a happily married man with three children, and had always been a fine soldier. If any of them deserved to live through this, he did.

  The pilot suddenly rushed down the stairs, ignoring his injured leg. Without a word, he charged directly at Halvorsen, driving him backwards through one of the large glass windows along the west side of the building.

  The last thing Halvorsen remembered was the sound of shattering glass and the disorienting sense of falling, weightless, to the snow-covered ground before the world exploded around him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Jack heard the thunder of an explosion somewhere on the plateau above them, but he couldn’t see anything. He paused for a moment, giving the others a chance to catch their breath. The climb up the slope toward the vault hadn’t looked very daunting from the airport. They had made good progress for the first two hundred meters, even slogging through the snow.

  Beyond that, the incline had steepened and the snow had given way to ice-covered rocks that were torturous to climb.

  “Jack,” Naomi choked. The smoke from the fires at the airport was noxious, and made their struggle that much more difficult.

  He turned to face her, relieved to have even a momentary break himself. He had set a brutal pace, but there was no choice: the Russians had farther to go, but only had to deal with the snow on the road that would take them straight to the vault. “What is it?”

  “We need to go left,” she told him. “There’s a cut through the rocks there,” she pointed to a barely-visible cleft at Jack’s ten o’clock position that looked like nothing more than snow, probably covering some ice. “That should take us up.” She shook her head. “We can’t keep climbing like this...or we’ll be exhausted.” Or fall, she didn’t add.

  “Okay,” he told her. “Come on.” He changed course, stomping through the snow into the cut. The going was still difficult, but not as treacherous as on the rocks.

  “I knew...” he heard Naomi mutter behind him, “I should have...done more...aerobics...”

  Jack grinned, then coughed. His throat was raw and his eyes were burning from the smoke, and he knew it could be an ugly, close-quarters fight at the top, with visibility under a few dozen yards, if that. Assuming they could beat the Russians, who were no doubt double-timing it up the road.

  Sucking in another lungful of smoky air, he pressed forward, hoping they could make it in time.

  ***

  “Are you crazy?” Mikhailov asked. He was gaping at Rudenko, who sat in the driver’s seat of a fuel truck that had been parked behind the airport’s hangar building. The hangar itself hadn’t been damaged, and the truck had miraculously escaped the earlier fireworks that had destroyed the rest of the airport. “Haven’t we had enough burning things to deal with?”

  “Moi kapitan,” the NCO told him, “it has the keys in it, it runs, it will carry all of us, and it’s big enough to get through the snow on that road. Unless you want to chase those Spetsnaz fuckers on foot, this is the best way to go.”

  Mikhailov would have agreed to all of Rudenko’s claims except that the truck would carry them all: the cab would fit three, but the remaining men would have to cling to the vehicle’s exterior. Then again, he told himself, it wasn’t that far different from riding on the back of an infantry combat vehicle. And those, too, were highly flammable.

  “Bozhe moi,” he muttered as he climbed into the cab next to Rudenko, who seemed to be enjoying himself tremendously. Another soldier got in next to Mikhailov, and the rest of the squad clambered onto the rear and held on as best they could.

  “Here we go!” Rudenko cried as he put the truck into gear and pulled away from the hangar. Once clear of the debris of the airport terminal and the destroyed airliner, he floored the accelerator and raced across the runway toward the road the Spetsnaz men had taken up the slope toward the seed vault.

  Beside him, with nothing to hold onto but the dashboard, Mikhailov gritted his teeth, praying that no one would shoot at them.

  “Look at it this way, kapitan,” Rudenko told him, reading his mind. “If we get hit now, we’ll probably never even feel it when this big bastard explodes.”

  “Thanks for the reassurance,” Mikhailov replied sarcastically. He grimaced as the truck bounced and jolted over the snow as Rudenko turned onto the Vei 600 road that would take them to the access road leading to the vault.

  Beside Mikhailov, the starshiy serzhant smiled. But his mind was on the Spetsnaz soldiers somewhere up ahead, and the pleasure he would take in blowing their fucking heads off for what they’d done.

  ***

  Halvorsen snapped awake to the sound of flames crackling nearby and the stench of smoke. He sat up, and saw the pilot lying next to him. Halvorsen thought he was dead, but the man’s eyes suddenly flickered open. His lips moved, but Halvorsen couldn’t hear what he was trying to say. He leaned closer, bringing his ear to the man’s lips.

  “Not...Solheim,” the pilot rasped.

  “What?” Halvorsen said, confused. Pulling away for a moment, he took a closer look at the pilot, and his heart sank. A bright crimson stain was spreading rapidly through the snow beneath him: he was losing blood, and fast. “Be still, let me see if I can–”

  “No...time!” the pilot said, weakly batting Halvorsen’s hands away. “It wasn’t Solheim,” he repeated. “The man who came down the stairs was...an imposter. Found Solheim and the others...dead upstairs. Torn apart.”

  Halvorsen shook his head, sure the pilot was hallucinating. “You’re imagining things, my friend.”

  “Solheim had a long gash down the back...of his left leg,” the pilot wheezed. “Saw it when he went up the stairs. Man who came back down...didn’t.” He gulped for air. “That’s why...I went up. To see. Made no sense.”

  And it still doesn’t, Halvorsen told himself, but what the pilot was saying began to churn around in his mind. He had seen Solheim dragging two of the other men to safety, but couldn’t remember the details. He’d been a bit worried about other things at the time.

  “Come on,” Halvorsen said, getting unsteadily to his knees. He and the pilot had fallen into the snow that lay alongside the control building, escaping the worst of the blast that had swept over them. The building itself was little more than smoking wreckage, with debris blown as far away as the big antenna domes a hundred and fifty meters away. “I’ve got to get you out of here.

  “Too late,” the pilot whispered, shaking his head. “Watch...your back.”

  The man’s eyes turned away to stare into the sky. He was gone.

  Halvorsen looked at the name tag on the pilot’s uniform. BREKK, it read. After their brief introduction when Halvorsen had boarded the plane, he had forgotten the pilot’s name. “Thank you for saving my life,” he whispered as he took his glove off and closed Brekk’s eyes.

  Getting to his feet, Halvorsen waded through the snow and debris to what used to be the front of the building. The bodies of his men were strewn everywhere like burned and bloody rag dolls. A fierce rage was growing in him as he reached down and picked up a rifle that one of his soldiers no longer needed. He looked to the northeast, in the direction of the seed vault, and saw a figure moving through the snow. He couldn’t make out any details, but he knew it must be Solheim. He was alone.

  Halvorsen found proof of what the pilot had told him as he followed Solheim’s trail: eight soldiers lay dead in the snow, several of them starting to show the same rotting skin condition as the bodies they’d found in the control station.

&nb
sp; “This is impossible,” he whispered. Whatever the hell was going on, Solheim – or someone masquerading as Solheim – was right in the middle of it.

  Putting the rifle, a Heckler & Koch HK416, to his shoulder, he centered the gun’s red-dot sight on the imposter.

  He didn’t pull the trigger, because even without the magnification of a telescopic sight he could tell that it clearly wasn’t Solheim. It didn’t even look human.

  Halvorsen lowered the rifle, sure that he was hallucinating. He rubbed his eyes, then squinted against the glare of the snow at the figure roughly two hundred meters away.

  His eyes weren’t deceiving him. Whoever, or whatever, it was, it clearly wasn’t human. It was too far away to make out details, but whatever it was moved on more than two legs, low to the ground, much as an insect might. A huge insect.

  Halvorsen was tempted for a moment to try and take a shot from this range, but didn’t. The men around him had fired their weapons before they died: he could see a few of the expended cartridge cases where they had sunk into the snow. They could not all have missed at what must have been point blank range. Whatever it was that had killed them was either extraordinarily resilient or heavily armored. Plucking a pair of grenades from the web belt of one of the soldiers and attaching them to his own, he decided that he would have to get closer. Much closer.

  Absolutely sure that he had lost his mind, Halvorsen gripped the rifle tightly and set off as fast as he could after the thing.

  ***

  By Jack’s estimation, they had made good time, and he was sure they must have beaten the three Russians to the vault.

  He was wrong.

  “Down!” Naomi cried as she grabbed Jack by his web belt and hurled him into the snow just as an assault rifle sent a spray of bullets right where Jack would have been.