Reaping The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 3) (20 page)

The cat struggled for a few more seconds, growling and snapping, then went limp in Jack’s arms.

“No, no,” Jack whispered as he got to his knees, cradling Alexander to his chest. “You stupid, stupid cat.”

Melissa was standing beside Terje, tears streaming from her eyes.
 

Alexander twitched, and Jack wanted to shout with joy as he felt the cat’s rib cage move. He was still breathing, still alive.
 

“Come on, Jack,” Terje said, hauling him to his feet. He was carrying Jack’s weapon. Jack didn’t remember dropping it. “We’ve got to get to the beach!”

With Alexander’s limp body in his arms, Jack let Terje lead him. Melissa ran alongside, her fingers holding Jack’s combat harness and her eyes darting up to look at Alexander, while Hathcock covered them from behind.
 

They could see nothing beyond the wall of flames that Baird had engineered. The flames shot up fifteen to twenty feet high, arcing out into the streets near the pumping station, and onto the trees and manicured lawns of the South Shore Golf Course that led to the rocky shoreline. A quarter mile long from Oglesby Avenue to the beach, and a tenth of a mile across, this new safe zone now protected thousands of civilians who were crowding along the shore.

“The fire can’t last long before the tanker runs out of fuel,” Terje said.

They came to an abrupt stop just short of the tree line that bounded the eastern edge of the second hole fairway, almost three hundred feet from the shore. Ahead of them, stretching to both sides of Baird’s fire wall, were thousands of people, packed in shoulder to shoulder. Jack couldn’t tell what was happening at the shoreline; all he could see was people and more people.

“What do we do now?” Melissa looked up at him with wide, frightened eyes. She gently ran a finger over the singed fur of one of Alexander’s feet, careful to avoid the bleeding pads.

“I don’t know, honey,” he told her.
 

Alexander struggled for a moment, then gave up with a mournful mewling sound. Jack looked down at his feline friend, hoping that he wasn’t as badly hurt as he looked. One ear had a chunk missing from a harvester Alexander had fought over a year ago, but now both ears were charred and bleeding. The whiskers on his muzzle and over his eyes were burned off, his black nose was blistered, and every inch of his tuxedo coat was singed, in some places down to the skin. His tail, normally long and fluffy, looked more like a cooked rat tail. Despite all that, the cat’s thick coat had saved him from burning to death. Most of the gasoline that had sprayed over him had just run off.
 

“Thanks, Terje,” Jack said, remembering that he’d never thanked his friend.

“For what?”

“For saving this big lug’s life. I should’ve thought of grabbing an extinguisher, but…”

The rest of his apology was lost as he heard a familiar voice call his name. “Major Dawson!”

They turned to find the lieutenant from the pumping station and four soldiers running toward them.
 

“Come with me, sir. We’re going to get you out of here.”
 

Standing shoulder to shoulder, the soldiers formed a wedge and began to push into the crowd, working their way toward the southeast end of the temporary safe zone. The closer they came to the front, to the shoreline, the angrier people became. They cursed at the soldiers, who had to resort to using the butts of their rifles to convince people to make way.

They were about halfway to the shore when a roaring noise arose from the direction of the water and steadily grew in volume.
 

The crowd began to surge backward as a cry went up from those nearest the water, and Jack grabbed Melissa’s hand as she stumbled and nearly fell. Terje picked her up and carried her while Jack adjusted his hold on Alexander, whose limp bulk was making his arms burn with exertion.

“Keep going!” The lieutenant shouted at his men. “Push forward!”

The four soldiers shoved and pushed, fighting to move ahead against the crush of the people in front of them, who were now trying to get
away
from the lake.
 

“What the hell’s going on?” Jack had to shout above the noise around them.

The lieutenant turned to him and managed a smile. “It’s the fucking Navy!”
 

At last, with one last heaving push, the group burst through the leading edge of the crowd onto the grass at the edge of the shoreline.
 

“Watch out!” One of the soldiers shouted a warning before firing his weapon at a dark shape undulating in the water around the edge of the flaming wall. The other soldiers joined in, chopping the harvester to pieces before it sank out of sight. The malleable flesh sparked and tried to ignite from the tracer rounds, but the water extinguished the flames.

The noise was coming from an enormous hovercraft racing toward them across the water. Three others were circling farther out in the lake.

“What is that thing?” Terje asked.

“It’s an LCAC,” the lieutenant told him. “Landing Craft Air Cushion. The Navy uses them to get the Marines ashore for amphibious assaults.”

“I hope they’re not bringing Marines here,” Jack said as the big craft, which was almost a hundred feet long and fifty feet wide, slowed as it approached the shore. It had a control cabin on its right side in a blocky, rectangular superstructure that ran down the side of the craft, ending in a massive shrouded propeller at the stern. The left side was similar, except for the lack of the control cabin, and between the two superstructures was an enormous open cargo area with ramps at the bow and stern. A flexible black skirt bulged out around it, making it appear that the dark gray craft was sitting on top of a huge inner tube. Two large vent nozzles on the superstructures swiveled to and fro, keeping the craft on course as it slid over the rocks and onto the grass, where it quickly settled to the ground as the engines spun down.
 

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 whose 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.