Reaping The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 3) Read Online Free PDF Page A

and other infested towns. The towns were leveled and the cities were swept with firestorms that hearkened back to the devastation wrought on Hamburg and Dresden in Germany by the Anglo-Americans during the Great Patriotic War. The flight crews had done their duty, but had been sickened by what they had wrought on their own countrymen. Several had killed themselves afterward, unable to face the burden of guilt.
    But even that had not been enough. At the cost of much of the Air Force’s ready munitions reserve, thousands of flight hours, and seven precious aircraft lost through mishaps, the torched rubble of the cities could not be reclaimed. The harvesters, while extremely vulnerable to fire, had fled at the first sign of the bombs raining down from the skies. All that Russia’s military might had accomplished was to incinerate the few surviving humans and drive the harvesters into the surrounding countryside, accelerating their spread.  
    No one, including the president and prime minister, had believed the estimates provided by the Federal'naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti , or FSB, modern Russia’s incarnation of the old KGB intelligence service, which indicated that there were several million harvesters loose in Russia, and millions more across the globe. The numbers were unreal, mere statistics on paper, no more believable than the tens of millions murdered by Josef Stalin during the purges.  
    And yet there was no denying the thousands of dead soldiers, burning tanks and troop carriers, and the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of dead civilians in Russia’s heartland.  
    How could this have happened , Krylov wondered, and so quickly ?  
    The turning point had come when Voronezh, less than five hundred kilometers south of Moscow, was overwhelmed by the creatures in less than forty-eight hours. That shock was quickly followed by the first outbreaks in Moscow’s suburbs. The president wasted no time in ordering the cabinet and senior officials of the government’s key agencies to the underground complex at Yamantau, which had already been put on a wartime footing.  
    The president had made The Decision, the Resheniye, after an agonizing cabinet session the night before. Krylov suspected that historians would place the president in the same hell-bound company as Stalin and Hitler, but if the government did not do what was necessary now, there might not be any historians left to record the deed at all.
    The president stood beside him at the console, his icy gray eyes fixed on the map. Every major city south of the line defined by Kursk, Voronezh, and Saratov, all the way south to the borders with Turkey and Iran, had been targeted. Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia would soon cease to exist. Over a dozen cities in the Ukrainian salient from Kharkiv south to Mariupol on the Sea of Azov would also be destroyed. The president was willing to accept any wrath the Ukrainians might care to unleash; it would be a small price to pay if the infection could be stopped. Some consideration had been given to sterilizing western Kazakhstan, but no outbreaks had yet been reported. That arid wasteland of a country would be spared. For now.
    The target on the map display that had caused the most controversy in the cabinet meeting was Moscow. The southern suburbs of the city, where even now harvesters were quickly gaining ground against the troops of the 20 th Guards Army and the 106 th Guards Airborne Division, would soon be flaming rubble. Krylov wanted to weep for those brave men and the civilians they were trying to defend. None of them had any idea that they were about to be sacrificed for what everyone hoped would be the greater good.
    The president turned to him. “It is time, Krylov.”  
    “ Da, gospodin prezident .”  
    Before them stood a polkovnik , a colonel, of the Strategic Rocket Forces. In a monotone voice, he led them through the nuclear weapons authorization procedures. While Krylov could have recited the steps