Season of the Harvest

by Michael R. Hicks

  It wasn’t long after the Falcon, flying low over the ocean, faded from view that they heard the sound of jet engines overhead.

  “Fighters,” Halvorsen sighed, knowing the sound well from his time in Afghanistan. He had been hoping that transports would get here first and put troops on the ground, someone they might be able to talk to face to face and show the other form of sentient life that they now knew inhabited the Earth. That hope had been incredibly naïve, of course: both Russia and Norway knew that something had happened here, something that had caused the C-130 to send out a mayday and the Russian transport to stop responding. The gunslingers would be sent in to investigate first, not more defenseless troop transports.

  “Da,” Mikhailov said, looking up as two Norwegian F-16 fighters streaked low over the airport, pumping out flares and chaff behind them to help draw away any SAMs that might be fired at them. Much higher in the sky, he could see the contrails of six more F-16s. Their Russian counterparts, he was certain, would not be far behind.

  He handed the portable radio Naomi had given them to Halvorsen. It was a stroke of genius on the Americans’ part that they had brought it, for all the communications equipment at the airport had been destroyed. He and Halvorsen would have had no way to try and talk sense into their comrades in the air. “I hope you are very convincing, my friend,” Mikhailov said as he watched the F-16s bank sharply around the side of the plateau, disappearing from view. “For all our sakes.”

  “Me, too,” Halvorsen muttered as he keyed the microphone, hoping his words could avert war in the Arctic.

  ***

  “What is it?” Naomi asked Jack as soon as they were strapped in. Ferris was already accelerating down the runway, loudly complaining to himself about fools and idiots. “What did Renee tell you?”

  “She figured out the pass phrase to Sheldon’s file,” he told her as they were pressed back into their seats as the Falcon left the ground. Jack expected Ferris to climb, but he didn’t: he gained enough altitude to bring up the gear and then flew straight out over the waves beyond the runway. They were flying so close to the ocean that Jack could swear some of the wind-whipped whitecaps almost reached his window in the fuselage. The ride with the winds still trailing the storm was rougher than the worst rutted road Jack had ever driven on, and it was difficult to speak without cracking his teeth together as the plane battered its way through the rough air. “Jesus!” he exclaimed as the plane suddenly dropped what must have been a dozen feet and everyone cried out. “Ferris!” he shouted to the pilot. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Trying to keep us from getting shot down,” Ferris growled over the intercom as he wrestled with the plane’s controls, keeping it as low as he dared. Unlike many modern military aircraft, the Falcon wasn’t equipped or designed for low altitude flight at high speed, and he had forgotten how physically and mentally taxing it was to fly low and fast in a stock civilian aircraft. “If the Norwegians or Russians are sending fighters to Spitsbergen, the only thing that might save us is to fly low and stay in the ground clutter. Otherwise we’ll stand out like a sore thumb and get our asses blown off. So shut up and let me fly.”

  “God,” Jack hissed as the plane lurched again. Turning back to Naomi, he continued his tale from Renee. “So, there’s good news and bad news.”

  “Just spill it, Jack,” she said. “I’m a big girl, I can handle it.”

  Jack smiled and said, “I know. That’s one of the things I like about you.”

  She grinned back, reflecting his own happiness at simply being alive after what they’d gone through. Both of them keenly felt the losses they’d suffered during the battle, and they both knew it had been a victory for the harvesters. But they had managed to kill six of the creatures, which had to be a devastating blow in return.

  “There’s a list of names,” he explained, “just like Ellen Bienkowski said there would be. All the people who have connections to New Horizons that you told me about, from the Vice President on down, are on there, along with a lot more, in the U.S. and other countries. New Horizons was just the tip of the iceberg.”

  “We suspected that,” she told him. “But aside from trying to track senior executives in the GMO industry moving into key government positions, it wasn’t much more than guesswork.”

  “Well, you don’t have to guess anymore: there are three hundred and twenty-seven names on that list, minus Ellen. Renee checked the names against EDS personnel: Ellen was the only one. So it looks like we don’t have any more traitors in our midst. For the moment, at least.”

  Naomi breathed a sigh of relief. That’s what she’d been most afraid of.

  “There’s also another list,” he told her, leaning forward, and Naomi looked at him expectantly. “Rachel Kempf and Lynette Sansone were on it, along with Martin Kilburn, who worked at the FBI lab and was probably the one who blew it up.” I’m going to find you, Kilburn, Jack promised himself, and I’m going to roast your smashed-cockroach body for what you did to Jerri and the others.

  Naomi gasped as another gust of wind slammed into the plane, knocking them all sideways. “There’s a list of the harvesters?” she said, incredulous. “But why would they keep a list of themselves?” Naomi wondered. “That would...”

  “...leave them potentially vulnerable to what we’re going to do to them,” Jack finished for her as the Falcon at last began to climb. The other members of the team cheered Ferris, who grumbled back at them. “It makes sense, in a way,” he went on. “How the hell are they supposed to know who’s a harvester and who’s not except when they can physically meet? There have to be times when they communicate remotely. And if they change identities, they have to let all the other bugs know, and that’s not a who’s-who list that you want to make a mistake with.” He shrugged.

  “What sort of people were on it?” Naomi asked. “Did she have time to say?”

  “No details, really, aside from those few that we recognized. What they don’t seem to do is masquerade as people with a lot of public visibility. They let their human lapdogs do that.”

  “How many?” Naomi asked, afraid of what the answer might be. “How many are left?”

  “If that list is all of them, there are thirteen more, including the one we’re bringing back with us, whichever one that is.”

  “My God,” Naomi breathed. “We’re that close. Thirteen away from wiping them off the planet.” She looked at him, her eyes narrowing. “You said there was good news and bad news. I take it that was all the good news, such as it is. What’s the bad?”

  Jack’s expression turned grim. “The corn samples that Sheldon found were prototypes, all right, but they weren’t the only ones,” he told her. “Kempf was a busy bug after you left: she perfected strains for rice, wheat, and soy, as well.”

  “But with the LRU lab under quarantine by the FBI, they won’t be able to put the prototypes into the field,” she said.

  He shook his head slowly. “They never quarantined it. Once they gathered the crime scene data, the FBI was ordered out and the lab was reopened for business. Renee found out from digging through the FDA’s network that they quietly cleared the new grains for production and sale yesterday. New Horizons is gearing up for production on a massive scale, and all the international distributors are companies with a lot of people on the list of humans in the harvesters’ employ.”

  “Sweet Jesus,” Naomi whispered as she turned to look out the window at the bright green of the Arctic Ocean, far below. She felt as if she were in a movie, watching herself and those around her from afar. It was a strange, uncomfortable feeling, her inner self seemingly detached from her body. She and Gregg had hoped beyond hope that they might be able to catch the genie before he escaped from the bottle. But there wasn’t just a single genie: there were millions, if not billions of them in the form of every single grain New Horizons would be shipping.

  “There’s worse,” Jack went on. “Just a couple hours ago, the news networks announced that an extremely vir
ulent strain of influenza has broken out in the U.S., India, and China. The CDC in Atlanta is still trying to firm up the threat, but the talking head experts are claiming that this strain may be similar to the one that drove the flu pandemic in 1918 that killed somewhere between fifty and a hundred million people. The term biological warfare came up more than once from the news commentators. Between the attacks on the genebanks, the resulting international tensions, and this flu outbreak, people are running scared.”

  Naomi found she was holding her breath. She knew from the look on Jack’s face there was more. And even worse. “What else?”

  “A New Horizons affiliate, a pharmaceutical company, is claiming they’ve come up with a genetic shield from all strains of influenza, delivered by retrovirus. They claim it’s been kept under tight wraps to prevent industrial espionage, but jointly announced it with the New Horizons line of crops engineered to deliver just such a cure. It won’t cost much more than regular grain seed, and a lot less than traditional inoculations. And the cure will be permanent.” His stomach churned at the thought. It’ll be permanent, all right, he thought. “The President is going to Congress to request a special subsidy to lower the price to make it available as widely as possible, and Congress is ready to sign.”

  “My God,” Naomi groaned. “Everyone will want the New Horizons wonder seeds, driven by fear that the world is going to hell. The company won’t be able to ship them fast enough.”

  “They won’t be able to ship them at all,” Jack promised her, “because we’re going to blow them to hell first.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “What a load of horse hockey,” Special Agent Carl Richards muttered between mouthfuls of a thick pastrami sandwich, followed by a long swig of dark, bitter ale as he watched the news on the television. He was sitting in his prized leather armchair, alone in his apartment as was his habit on the few hours each day he wasn’t at work. He had no social life, nor did he want one. He lived for his work, and had never questioned the value it gave to his existence. The things that many considered sacrifices he had made – a wife, children, family, friends – were things that had never really mattered to him. Work was his life, his fellow agents were his family, and the men and women he brought to justice helped to ease the cries of the ghosts of his brutal childhood.

  He was still bitterly annoyed at the Lincoln Research University crime scene being reopened without a more thorough on-site forensic analysis. Even with the disaster at the FBI lab that followed on the heels of Sheldon Crane’s murder in Nebraska, Richards knew that more should have been done before the lab was cleared for operation again. But the word had come straight from the Director of the FBI herself, and that was that.

  As he sat there, his mind steadily churned through the information he had absorbed. He made no claim to being an analytic genius like he believed Jack Dawson to be, but no one would ever mistake him for a fool, either. Looking back, now that he had a little time to really focus, the wrap-up at the New Horizons lab had seemed rushed, and even the investigation at the FBI lab scene had been disturbingly half-assed.

  No, he thought suddenly. Things had been directed, orchestrated. There was something artificial about the investigation there. What stuck out in his mind the most was the strange treatment of Dr. Martin Kilburn, one of the lab survivors, the one who had fingered Dawson’s former girlfriend as the bomber and Dawson as an accomplice. Richards had wanted to interview him about Dawson’s visit there that night. But he hadn’t been allowed access to Kilburn, or even been permitted to submit questions for him to answer later. After a very public interview (if you considered a few hundred FBI agents the public, Richards thought sourly), Kilburn was whisked away. As Richards discovered by using his main gift of being a relentless pain in the ass, it was again on the director’s orders.

  Then there was the whole thing with Dawson. Richards would do his duty to his very last breath and hunt Dawson down without a shred of mercy, but he couldn’t deny that everything about the man being associated with terrorists felt wrong. Richards knew he wasn’t a people person, but he knew people, understood them, extremely well. Dawson simply didn’t strike him as someone who’d blow up a lab full of his colleagues and a former lover with whom he was still close friends, then run away to join a terrorist group that had sprung up out of nowhere. It didn’t make sense.

  On the boob tube, which he alternately relished and reviled, President Fowler, accompanied by a smiling Secretary of Defense, was glad-handing a bunch of high school kids and parents at a political rally in Madison, Wisconsin. It was an election year, and even with the world going to hell in a hand-basket, the politicos had to be on the stump, kissing babies and pimping votes. Richards thought the whole thing was ridiculous: democracy for him meant voting Republican, and that was that. But he enjoyed the speeches and the mudslinging the same way that people enjoyed football games.

  The news commentators, who simply couldn’t shut up long enough to leave a single second of silence in the broadcast, revealed the obvious: that Fowler’s speech had been rewritten to focus on recent world events, and the attacks that had wrought destruction on American soil. The Secretary of Defense wasn’t expected to say anything, but his presence alone was intended to help reinforce the President’s message.

  There won’t be any good backbiting in this speech, Richards thought, disappointed.

  As the television showed President Fowler mounting the podium, he let the campaigning politician’s smile fade and put on a suitably grim and determined expression. “My fellow Americans,” he began.

  Then the transmission from the high school suddenly terminated, the view cutting over to one of the cameras in the news room.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” one of the commentators said smoothly, “we seem to be having technical difficulties. We’re trying to get another video feed in from a local affiliate. Ah, here we go...Oh, my God!”

  The beer bottle and what was left of Richards’ sandwich hit the floor as he leaped out of the chair, snatched up his holster and coat, and dashed out the front door, not even bothering to lock it behind him.

  On the television screen the camera showed a billowing cloud of black smoke and flaming debris where the high school auditorium had been.

  ***

  “You guys need to hear what just came up over the satellite radio broadcast,” Ferris suddenly called over the cabin speakers in a trembling voice.

  Naomi, Jack, and the others turned to look up toward the speakers on the ceiling, as if they could see the words coming out.

  “...repeat, just moments ago there was a massive explosion at the high school where President Fowler, accompanied by the Secretary of Defense, was giving a campaign speech today. We don’t have any confirmation from the Secret Service, but eyewitness reports indicate that the auditorium where the President was giving his speech was leveled in the blast, and hundreds are feared dead. We’re looking at the video footage here in our studio, and there’s literally nothing left but rubble and bodies. My God, this is terrible! We don’t know–”

  “Turn it off,” Jack called hoarsely.

  With a grunt, Ferris switched off the audio. Everyone sat still for a moment, stunned.

  “It shouldn’t come as a surprise,” Jack said after a few moments.

  “Why do you say that?” one of the other members of the team asked.

  “Because the Vice President is one heartbeat away from the Presidency,” Jack told him. “And we know who controls him. If there were any major obstacles to whatever they’re trying to do before, they’re gone now.”

  “It’s just us now,” Naomi whispered as she looked up at Jack, her blue and brown eyes glistening.

  “Maybe not,” Jack said. “Ferris!” he called. “I need to make a call over the plane’s satellite phone...”

  ***

  The carnage at the FBI lab had been bad enough, Richards thought grimly, but it didn’t hold a candle to the high school where the President had been speaking. It l
ooked worse than the devastation at the Colorado State University campus. The Secret Service hadn’t made it official yet, but Richards knew there was no way the President or anyone else in the auditorium could have survived.

  “Goddamn them,” he hissed at whoever had done this. “Goddamn them!”

  He was speeding at almost one hundred miles per hour down I-95 toward Washington, the red bubble stuck to the top of his black Impala flashing as he headed toward Ronald Reagan International Airport where a chartered airliner was being loaded with every agent within an hour’s drive of D.C. More, many more, would be following behind on other planes, and every field office east of the Mississippi would be emptied out within the next few hours, all converging on the latest disaster to strike the nation.

  His cell phone rang, and he immediately reached out and punched the hands-free talk button on his stereo. “Richards,” he barked.

  “Guess who this is,” a familiar voice said from the speakers around him.

  Richards, totally surprised, almost lost control of his car. “Dawson,” he grated, “when I find you, I’m going to skin you alive. The other things you and your whacko friends did were horrific enough. But killing the President? We’ll never stop hunting you. Never.”

  “Listen to me, Richards,” Dawson told him evenly. “I couldn’t have killed the President, because I’m on a plane a few thousand miles away. My ‘whacko friends’ and I just had a firefight with the real bad guys, the ones who are behind all this. We’ve been trying to stop them. So was Sheldon Crane. That’s why he was killed: because he found out things no one was supposed to know.”

  Richards had a sharp retort on his tongue, but paused. His gut instinct about Dawson was warring with his sense of duty, and it was one of the very few times in his life that he’d been so deeply conflicted that he couldn’t even speak.

  “I can prove it,” Jack pressed, sensing that the other man was at least giving some thought to his words. “But we need your help. Things are going to get worse, much worse, if we don’t stop them soon.”