Season of the Harvest

by Michael R. Hicks

  “Naomi, Jack, I hate to be a spoilsport, but trying to ferret this thing, whatever it is, out of that tunnel isn’t going to be a piece of cake. Because it’s not just a simple tunnel, it’s a three story-high air filtration complex. There are nooks and crannies in there big enough to hide a Volkswagen.”

  “Could it have already gotten outside?” Torres asked worriedly.

  Naomi shook her head. “No, all the blast valves are kept closed except when the generators are running,” she said. “And there aren’t any rubber seals on them for this thing to eat so it could escape to the outside: it’s all hardened steel. They were designed to hold back the heat and overpressure from a nuclear blast, remember?”

  “The other minor detail,” Jack said heavily, “is how do we kill it? It’s not a harvester, at least not like the ones we know, or the cats would be going berserk more than they already are with the one cooling its slimy jets in the antenna silo. If it’s some sort of oozing thing, would our weapons have any effect on it?”

  “Fire?” Hathcock suggested.

  “Maybe,” Naomi answered, frustrated, “but we just don’t know. And using fire in here isn’t the greatest idea, anyway.”

  Hathcock frowned, but said nothing. From the look on his face, it was clear that he’d be happy to take his chances using a flamethrower against whatever new threat they were facing, and damn-all to the risks.

  “So what do we do?” Naomi asked as she peered down the dozen or so meters of tunnel that led to the air intake complex. It was well-lit, but the intake and exhaust tunnels had always made her feel uneasy, even under normal circumstances.

  “Seal up this tunnel,” Jack told her. “I assume we’ve got some spare metal plating in storage somewhere in the complex that can be used for repairs?” Hathcock nodded. “Get a team together and weld some plates over the mouth of the intake tunnel here. That’ll at least contain whatever-it-is for now until we can figure out a better solution.”

  “What if we have to start the generators?” Naomi asked. “If we need anything more than battery power, we’ll have to open the lab dome’s blast door so they can have access to the air in the rest of the complex. But running them would asphyxiate us in minutes.”

  Turning to her, he said, “Then let’s just hope we don’t need to run them.”

  ***

  Naomi sat back and rubbed her eyes. She’d been staring at the screen for what seemed like days, and she was only upright because of the evil brew of coffee that she had ordered Renee to keep shoving in front of her. She wanted desperately to rest, but she had to know what had happened since they’d left for Spitsbergen, and the only thing that might tell them was what was in the residue samples she’d taken from the lab.

  “How’s it going?” she heard Jack’s voice from behind her.

  “It’s...strange, Jack,” she said, turning to look up at him. “Very strange. Let me show you what I’ve been looking at.

  “This is a chromatogram of the sample of the liquid from the biohazard chamber where the monkey was kept, telling us how much of which elements are present in the sample.” She pointed to the screen, which showed what looked like a chart of vertical spikes of varying height along the horizontal axis. Jack looked at her blankly. She punched a few commands into the workstation’s keyboard, and the graph was replaced by a list of elements: hydrogen, oxygen, and a long list of others, arranged in alphabetical order, with a number next to each. “Not that it came as a surprise, but this isn’t a homogeneous sample: it’s a mish-mash of different compounds, so the readings here are only telling us what elements are present. But do you notice anything missing?”

  Jack looked down the list, frowning. “I never claimed to be a chemistry whiz, but I would assume that carbon should probably be in there somewhere.”

  “Bingo,” she said. “There’s no carbon in this liquid, Jack. None. I’ve run this test several times already, and there’s not a single carbon atom that I can find in a liquid that’s otherwise a witch’s brew of nearly everything else, including traces of several heavy metals that were probably in the electronics the thing...consumed.”

  She hit more keys, and a new graph appeared, this time with the list of compounds displayed next to it. A few more keystrokes, and the original list of elements she’d shown him appeared alongside the new list. “This sample is from the animal storage area. See anything different?”

  His eyes darting from one list to the other, he said, “The second list is definitely longer, with more elements listed. And...carbon is there now, along with some elements that weren’t in the first sample. There’s also a ton of hydrogen and oxygen. Water, maybe?”

  “I’d have to run more tests, but that’s my first guess,” Naomi told him.

  “So, what does all that mean?”

  “I think that whatever we’re dealing with used up almost everything it came in contact with at the start, when it was in the biohazard room,” she said slowly. “And the liquid residues that we found were the things it didn’t need. It simply flushed them out. In the monkey’s biosafety chamber, the residue was very viscous and had a limited number of elements, because the thing needed almost everything it consumed.”

  “And by the time it got to the animals,” Jack interjected, “or after it finished with them, it had most of what it needed, and flushed out a lot more. It was becoming saturated?”

  Naomi nodded. “I think so. Everything in the residue it left behind was simply elements and compounds it didn’t need or couldn’t use.” She sat back. “And all the missing plastic and rubber makes sense now: those materials have a very high carbon content. It absorbed all of it, every single bit, when it first escaped, and by the time it finished with the animals, it didn’t need any more and flushed out the excess.”

  “But what would it need so much carbon for?”

  She turned to him, looking grim. “What makes a harvester so hard to kill without fire?”

  Jack’s face turned ashen. “Jesus,” he said quietly. “The thing’s growing a reinforced carbon skeleton, isn’t it?”

  Naomi nodded silently, her eyes reflecting the glow of the unwelcome revelation shown in the workstation’s displays.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  “According to the information I’ve been able to dig up,” Renee told the people gathered in the command center’s conference room, “the seed is being produced and prepared for shipment at a newly-constructed building complex about twenty miles northwest of Lincoln.” An image of the facility appeared, showing a large central building that looked like a warehouse, and several smaller support buildings. “They located it here,” the picture shifted to an overhead image of the area, a patchwork quilt of green and brown Nebraska farm land, “right between the towns of Ulysses and Staplehurst. The location is fairly isolated, for what that may be worth.” She looked around the table, her eyes lingering on Naomi and Jack. “That’s the good news, such as it is. The bad news is that they’ve already prepared nearly ten thousand tons, and it’s going to start shipping tomorrow.”

  “What?” Naomi gasped. “How could they have done that so quickly?”

  “I don’t think they did it quickly, Naomi,” Renee told her. “I couldn’t get past some of the company’s network firewalls – they’ve really tightened up on that, by the way – to the information I wanted, but based on the shipping manifests I was able to find, I think they’ve been preparing this stuff for at least the last six months. That corresponds with the time they opened this facility.”

  “We just happened to catch them at LRU as they were about to fold up shop there,” Jack surmised. “They were already getting the seed ready for production.”

  Renee nodded.

  There was silence around the table. Ten thousand tons, Jack thought, with every single seed representing a potential ecological disaster.

  “How can we deal with that?” Dr. Chidambaram interjected. “All of our planning was based on interrupting the harvesters before they got to this stage, of
destroying the threat before it materialized. Now...ten thousand tons...”

  “Can’t we just burn it?” Jack asked.

  Chidambaram shook his head. “It’s very difficult to burn closely packed seeds, as these will be, in bags or in bulk trucks or rail cars,” he said. “Not enough oxygen can get in to assist in the burning process. Much of the seed would go untouched.”

  “What about a fuel-air explosive,” Jack asked, “like the harvesters used on the genebanks? That seemed to work pretty well on them.”

  “It is a different situation, Jack,” Chidambaram explained. “Seeds in the genebanks are generally stored in small quantities, in separate sealed packets and boxes. There may be many samples, but they are not closely packed together. With seeds tightly packed in bags, and thousands of bags stacked together, a bomb such as you describe would disperse many of the seeds they have stored in that facility out into the surrounding fields where they might take root.”

  “And we have no idea if any of the retrovirus particles would be carried away in the smoke,” said one of the other women in the room, a biologist who had come after Renee sent out the emergency recall. The woman looked at Naomi. “We would have to assume at least some of those particles might remain viable.”

  “Then I guess we’ll have to go in and neutralize it bag by bag,” Naomi said firmly.

  “Naomi,” Jack told her, shaking his head, “that’s impossible. You’re talking, what, a few hundred thousand bags, figuring a hundred pounds a bag?”

  “Four hundred thousand,” Renee corrected quietly. “Give or take a few.”

  “That would take us forever,” Jack went on, “and the harvesters aren’t going to give us that sort of time. Look at that,” he pointed to a lighter colored strip surrounding the facility, and small, squat buildings at the entrances. “Those are security fences and guard posts. They moved their operation here because they think it’s secure. We’ll be lucky if we have an hour before we’ve got a cage dropping around us, assuming we can force our way in there in the first place.”

  “There’s no other way, Jack,” Naomi told him stubbornly. “There’s just no other way to be sure that they’re destroyed.”

  “Yes, there is,” Jack said after a long pause. He was looking down at the table now, careful to avoid Naomi’s gaze.

  Everyone, including Naomi, stared at him.

  “Spill it, Jack,” Renee said bluntly.

  He looked over at Chidambaram and said, “A nuke would do it, wouldn’t it?”

  “For God’s sake, Jack!” Naomi blurted. “You can’t be serious!”

  “Would a nuke work?” Jack pressed, staring now at Chidambaram, who was distinctly uncomfortable.

  “Yes,” the group’s leading agricultural expert admitted. “The heat and radiation would come as close as we humanly could to completely destroying even that quantity of seed, and the retrovirus particles, even with a small explosive yield, but...” He held out his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Jack, you cannot set off a nuclear weapon in the middle of the country!”

  “Jack–” Naomi began angrily.

  “Listen!” Jack shouted, silencing her and shocking the others. “The only way we have of stopping this is to destroy those seeds, right? Right?” Heads slowly nodded around the table. “Looking at Renee’s research and our discussion here, we’ve already eliminated just about every other means we have that might work, either because we can’t be sure the seeds will be completely destroyed or because we just won’t have time. Right?” More grudging nods, except from Naomi. She stared fixedly at the wall on the opposite side of the room. “People, we’re running out of options.” He looked again at Chidambaram. “Doctor, I’ve fought for and bled for this country,” he told him, “and the last thing I would ever do is put any of its people in harm’s way. But if that’s the only option we have, then that’s the one we have to take.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting one minor detail?” Naomi said, turning to glare at him. “This may be an old missile base, but they didn’t happen to leave any nukes lying around here when they closed it up. Where do you think you’re going to find a nuclear weapon? The local hardware store?”

  “No,” Jack told her, “but...”

  “We’re thinking about this all wrong,” Renee suddenly said, a sly look on her face.

  “What do you mean?” Naomi asked her.

  “We’re focused on trying to destroy the seed before it gets shipped, right?” she told the others, and everyone nodded. That much was obvious. “But we can’t.” Jack opened his mouth to argue, but Renee held up her hand to him. “We can’t, Jack. We can’t burn it or even blow it up safely, and we can’t wave a magic wand and miraculously come up with a nuke to vaporize it, even if it didn’t kill a bunch of people. Besides, the seeds are going to start shipping tomorrow, remember? Does anybody have a clue how to get a nuke delivered by overnight express?” She shook her head. “No. None of that’s going to happen, at least not between today and tomorrow.”

  “So what are you proposing that we do, Renee?” Jack asked, sharing a questioning glance with Naomi.

  Renee smiled. “We steal the seed right out from under their noses.”

  ***

  “We’ve got something.” A special agent hurried over to where Richards sat at his desk, trying to look busy while actually doing nothing but worrying. The young woman handed him a printout, and his stomach fell away as he saw what was typed there.

  “Our Legat in Moscow got this from the FSB,” the woman said, barely able to restrain the excitement in her voice. Richards automatically translated the alphabet soup in his head: the Legat was the Bureau’s Legal Attaché office in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, which had gotten the information from the Russian Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, the modern-day successor to the infamous KGB. “It’s a report by one of the Russian soldiers involved in the incident on Spitsbergen. Apparently, there was a civilian aircraft there–”

  “I can read, Special Agent Dobbs,” Richards snapped as he again scanned the damning information. It’s a lead, all right, he thought numbly. The Russians had eyeballed the tail number on the Falcon jet that Dawson and the others had taken to Spitsbergen, and had obviously tracked down its country of origin, which would have been easy enough. And with that, not only did the FBI, which was led by a collaborator, have the next best thing to a glowing neon arrow pointing to where the EDS was located, but they’d also find out that Richards himself had been conspiring with them. He’d managed to keep secret his little stunt of getting Dawson clearance to fly back into the States, but he’d known it would catch up with him sooner or later. He just hadn’t expected it to be quite this soon. Once his agents began to dig into the information on the plane, it wouldn’t take them long to discover the link back to him. He knew most of them considered him an asshole, but he had trained them well. “Take this up to Assistant Director Clement right now,” he told Dobbs, shoving the paper back at her.

  “Me?” she gulped.

  Richards fixed her with an astonished glare. “Did I stutter? Yes, you! Personally.” Dobbs, who had graduated from the Academy only two months before, just stood there. “Now, Dobbs!”

  She nodded and hurried from the room, clutching the printout in her hands.

  Richards waited until she’d gone before he stood up from his desk. He felt his eyes tearing up as he took one last look around the place that he’d dedicated his life to, knowing he could never come back.

  Blinking his eyes clear and cursing himself for a sentimental fool, he slipped on his coat and left.

  ***

  “We’ll have them soon,” Monica Ridley told the President over the secure phone. “We have a trace on a plane that was in Spitsbergen where the Norwegians and Russians nearly came to blows.”

  “Those idiots,” Curtis told her. “We gave both of them information that EDS was targeting Spitsbergen, and they made a complete fiasco out of it when we could have had the bastards in our hands.”

&n
bsp; “At least one good thing came of it,” she reassured him. “We’ve already pinned down the plane’s flight activity, and where it went after it returned from Spitsbergen.” She paused. “It first landed at Baltimore Washington International.”

  Curtis sat forward in his chair in the Oval Office, nearly spilling his coffee. “What? How the devil did they get clearance to reenter our airspace?”

  “One of my most senior and trusted agents,” she said, trying to mask her frustration, “decided to go rogue on us. I found out that he made arrangements for the Air Force to pass the plane through, without clearing it with anyone higher up in the Bureau or Homeland Security.”

  “Are any of your agents reliable, Monica?” Curtis said acidly.

  “Yes, Mr. President,” she replied, carefully forcing out the words, “but this man was one of my best. He was conducting the investigation at Lincoln, and would’ve been my first pick to send in after the EDS when we find them.”

  “If we find them, you mean.”

  “No, Mr. President,” she said, allowing a measure of pride and certainty back into her voice. “When. Because we know where that plane went to after it left BWI, and after analyzing its flight plans for the last six months, we know where its primary airport is.”

  “Where?” Curtis asked, a flare of excitement washing away some of the aggravation.

  “Oroville Municipal Airport in California,” she told him. “We have agents on the way there as we speak, and it’s only a matter of time – a short time, I believe – before we find our EDS friends.”

  “Good,” Curtis said, nodding to himself. “That’s good. Just don’t screw it up, Monica.”

  “I won’t,” she reassured him, then hung up.

  ***

  Monica Ridley pulled up to an expensive condo in downtown Alexandria that wasn’t too far from Jack Dawson’s house, and parked her black BMW Z4 in its designated space in the basement garage. It was nearly ten o’clock at night, and aside from the security attendant at the entrance, the garage was deserted. She walked across the concrete to the elevator, the clicking of her heels echoing from the white-painted walls. The fact that she was a woman walking alone in a deserted garage may have caused some to cast a worried glance around them. But Ridley was unconcerned. Like her field agents, she was well-armed, and had survived her own trials by fire earlier in her meteoric career. She wasn’t afraid, only weary.