Bitter Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

ever known, was worried.
    Mikhailov keyed his microphone to talk to the pilots. “How long until we reach the target?”
    “Ten minutes.”
    Holding up both hands for Rudenko, Mikhailov extended all ten fingers. With a quick nod, the big NCO released his harness and began a final check of the other twenty-three men, a platoon of Mikhailov’s company, in the helicopter. The rest of the company had been left on standby back at Novorossiysk.  
    While Rudenko checked that the men were ready, Mikhailov pulled a battered canvas map case from one of his uniform’s cargo pockets and took a final look at the operations map, reviewing the situation in his head.
    His company was part of the 23 rd Airborne Regiment of the 76 th Airborne Division at Pskov, in northern Russia. Under normal circumstances, the 7 th Airborne Division, headquartered at Novorossiysk, would have handled any operations this far south.  
    But, as Mikhailov had learned the previous afternoon when his unit had been deployed, the circumstances were far from normal. Three days ago, all the researchers at an agricultural research facility about thirty kilometers east of Elista had disappeared. Fifty-three men and women had simply vanished into thin air overnight. After a round of frantic calls from their families to the authorities, police units were dispatched to the remote facility. They, too, disappeared. The senior police officer had reported arriving at the facility, but that was all. There had been no calls for help from anyone.
    Family members had then gone to the facility. They had seen many cars, including those of the police, parked at the facility, but there had been no sign of anyone. Those who had gone through the gates, which were normally guarded day and night, and entered the building had disappeared. Others, fearful of entering, had returned home and contacted the police.
    The surviving family members finally raised enough of an uproar that the local authorities were able to get the Army involved. A squad from the 247 th Airborne Regiment of the 7 th Airborne Division had been sent in to investigate. The helicopter carrying them had landed outside the facility gates. Once the paratroopers were on the ground, the helo took off and circled the facility, the pilots watching as the men below entered the complex of buildings.
    The paratroopers never came out. The pilots circled as long as they could, trying to regain contact with the ground team, but they were gone. Vanished. Shaken and deeply disturbed, the helicopter crew returned to Novorossiysk, where they reported what had happened.
    That had taken place yesterday morning. Before noon, Mikhailov was in front of his division and regimental commanders, receiving his deployment orders. He was disturbed not so much by the nature of the deployment, but by the revelation from the division commander that the former President of the Republic of Kalmykia had very publicly claimed to have been contacted by aliens in 1997. The general had not mentioned it as a joke. While most had dismissed the claim as the raving of a rich and eccentric man, others had expressed more concern over the possibility that the republic’s former president had revealed state secrets to the alleged aliens. The general had thought the detail was relevant, considering the strange nature of the situation for which the airborne troops had been called in. And Mikhailov had been the clear choice to lead the mission in light of his experience on the island of Spitsbergen the year before.
    If Mikhailov’s suspicions were correct and Kalmykia’s eccentric former president had been contacted by harvesters as far back as 1997, there seemed only one likely scenario for what was now happening at the research facility outside Elista. The researchers had likely been trying to duplicate the work there that Jack Dawson and Naomi Perrault had told him had happened in the United States. The major difference was that Jack and Naomi could combat the